By Allen Johnson

My life dramatically changed one balmy April night in 1968, when a dozen or so candle-holding college students walked through our small town protesting the Vietnam War.

I was a 19-yr. old sophomore at Manchester College that was tucked away in the cornfields of northeast Indiana in small-town North Manchester. At the time, student enrollment was about 1400. I was staunchly conservative. In February, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at our college convocation (twice-weekly convocations were required of students). While most student gave King a standing ovation at the conclusion of his speech, I sat arms folded and face glowering. To my mind, King was not only stirring up black folks, but he was agitating against American policy on Vietnam. Thankfully, a few weeks later, I was thrilled that our convocation speaker was former presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. His book, “Conscience of a Conservative” had almost been my political bible for me as a high school student. As I understood it, the Vietnam War was much needed to stop atheist Communism from spreading like a pandemic virus throughout Asia and then to our own nation’s doorstep.

My roommate and I were in our dorm room that spring evening when several male students breathlessly charged into our room exclaiming, “The peaceniks are marching through town tonight. We’ve gotta mess with them!” They had come to us because they knew we were fearless, tough, and not afraid to jeer the peaceniks. Both of us were stars on our college wrestling team. My girlfriend (later to be my wife) was pretty and popular. In other words, I was cocky and full of myself and up to any dare.

As I protest injustice or wrong, with others, done in a spirit of love and truth, I pray that this be a witness to move a skeptical onlooker to a conversion to justice and peace.

Allen Johnson

We rushed the mile to downtown where the marchers were just beginning. Townspeople were already hooting, mocking, and cursing the walkers. One woman turned on her garden hose and sprayed the walkers. As darkness settled in, the walkers lit candles to hold as they silently walked. Maybe they also carried a sign, I do not remember. It was clear the walkers’ message was in opposition to the Vietnam War that at the time was popular with the American citizenry. Opposition to that war was roundly deemed un-American and traitorous.

As the walkers got closer to the campus, more students gathered about them to mock, curse, threaten them, and throw stuff at them. My freshman-year roommate, a 240-pound lineman on the football team, burst onto the street and accosted one of the walkers, a short, slightly-built young man whose wooly whitish hair reminded me of a lamb. “You shame our hometown!” the big guy spit and screamed as he threw the little guy onto the pavement.

The walkers paused for a time while their fellow walker got up. They relit his candle, then slowly proceeded forward. It was dark outside, only some streetlight and their candles. In the darkness I saw fellow students shouting hate at the walkers. I recognized a couple of the walkers, students I knew through class and a few informal conversations. I thought to myself, “I know Hope. She is friendly, kind, a very nice girl of good character.” I began to compare the mob in the darkness with the flickering lights of the walkers. Their lights began to reveal to me that I was in the darkness, a darkness of spirit and violence.

By the time the witnesses for peace and justice finished their walk, my heart was in the process of a metamorphosis. Perhaps if they had walked another half-mile I might have physically joined their walk, as my heart by now was joining theirs. Looking back, I clearly see God pulling off a miracle of change in my heart through their witness.

Transformation can take time. I still had some violence in my spirit that burst out episodically throughout my college years. Two years later during my senior year a neighborhood woman screamed and sobbed as she saw me repeatedly thumping onto the sidewalk the head of one of my best college friends who had misused my beat-up old car. Yet also that same year I crowded together with others at a message ticker as numbers were drawn for the newly instituted draft lottery, pondering if I might be headed for jail or Canada. I was now a Conscientious Objector to war, a CO like the protest marchers I had mocked two years earlier.

That spring, my senior year, I was one of two white students who joined seven or eight black students, by then good friends, to lock ourselves in the college chapel for 20 hours, as they demanded a black faculty advocate. This action, my first, was a recognized spark that soon after led to the development of an AFRO House and advocate, and then several decades later the establishment of an office of Multi-cultural Affairs with an accompanying student center.

900 years ago Bishop Anselm defined theology as “faith seeking understanding.” That is, when God reveals a truth to the heart, theology is an attempt of the mind to understand what has been going on. Over the years, I have intensively studied theology that has confirmed to me to follow the way of Jesus is intrinsically a journey of sacrificial reconciliation, peacemaking, and justice.

I have been an active participant in many dozens of public marches, rallies, demonstrations, protests, direct actions, witnesses, and vigils. Climate justice, anti-mountaintop removal, anti-Iraq War, opposition to local neo-Nazis, and more. I trained as a Christian Peacemaker Team reservist, serving in Haiti and Palestine in the maelstrom of risky, high-tension conflicts. I have spent much of my time and some of my career in justice advocacy issues.

Often when I participate in a public protest demonstration, I reflect back on those dozen courageous, candle-holding students silently walking along a darkened street while being jeered, harassed, and threatened them. God used their witness to change my life. So as I protest injustice or wrong, with others, done in a spirit of love and truth, I pray that this be a witness to move a skeptical onlooker to a conversion to justice and peace.

© Allen Johnson, 2025. Johnson is the coordinator and co-founder of Christians for the Mountains. Photo by Brett Whartonon Unsplash