David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

spectacularly for the British in Northern Ireland and for the Three Strikes campaign in California. The excessive use of force creates legitimacy problems, and force without legitimacy leads to defiance, not submission. You could kill André Trocmé. But in all likelihood, all that would mean is that another André Trocmé would rise in his place.
    When Trocmé was ten years old, his family drove one day to their house in the country. He was in the backseat with his two brothers and a cousin. His parents were in the front. His father grew angry at a car driving too slowly in front of them and pulled out to pass. “Paul, Paul, not so fast. There’s going to be an accident!” his mother cried out. The car spun out of control. The young André pushed himself away from the wreckage. His father and brothers and cousin were fine. His mother was not. He saw her lying lifeless thirty feet away. Confronting a Nazi officer paled in comparison with seeing your mother’s body by the side of the road. As Trocmé wrote to his deceased mother, many years later:
    If I have sinned so much, if I have been, since then, so solitary, if my soul has taken such a swirling and solitary movement, if I have doubted everything, if I have been a fatalist, and have been a pessimistic child who awaits death every day, and who almost seeks it out, if I have opened myself slowly and late to happiness, and if I am still a somber man, incapable of laughing whole-heartedly, it is because you left me that June 24th upon that road.
    But if I have believed in eternal realities…if I have thrust myself toward them, it is also because I was alone, because you were no longer there to be my God, to fill my heart with your abundant and dominating life.
    It was not the privileged and the fortunate who took in the Jews in France. It was the marginal and the damaged, which should remind us that there are real limits to what evil and misfortune can accomplish. If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening. If you bomb a city, you leave behind death and destruction. But you create a community of remote misses. If you take away a mother or a father, you cause suffering and despair. But one time in ten, out of that despair rises an indomitable force. You see the giant and the shepherd in the Valley of Elah and your eye is drawn to the man with the sword and shield and the glittering armor. But so much of what is beautiful and valuable in the world comes from the shepherd, who has more strength and purpose than we ever imagine.
    The eldest son of Magda and André Trocmé was Jean-Pierre. He was a sensitive and gifted adolescent. André Trocmé was devoted to him. One evening near the end of the war, the family went to see a recital of Villon’s poem “The Ballad of the Hanged Men.” The next night, they came home from dinner and found Jean-Pierre hanging from a noose in the bathroom. Trocmé stumbled into the woods, crying out, “Jean-Pierre! Jean-Pierre!” Later, he wrote:
    Even today I carry a death within myself, the death of my son, and I am like a decapitated pine. Pine trees do not regenerate their tops. They stay twisted, crippled.
    But surely he must have paused when he wrote those words, because everything that had happened in Le Chambon suggested that there was more to the story than that. Then he wrote:
    They grow in thickness, perhaps, and that is what I am doing.
    1  The historian Christine van der Zanden calls the area the Plateau of Hospitality. The region had a long history of taking in refugees. In 1790, the French Assembly declared that all Catholic clergy, under penalty of imprisonment, had to pledge an oath to the state, making the church subordinate to the government. Those who refused to sign the pledge fled for their lives. Where did many of them go? To the Vivarais Plateau, a community already well practiced in the arts of defiance. The number of dissenters grew. During the First World War, the people of the plateau took in refugees. During the Spanish Civil War, they took in people fleeing the fascist army of General Franco. They took in socialists and communists from Austria and Germany in the early days of the Nazi terror.

Introduction: Goliath
    The scholarly literature on the battle between David and Goliath is extensive. Here is one source: John A. Beck, “David and Goliath, a Story of Place: The Narrative-Geographical Shaping of 1 Samuel 17,” Westminster Theological Journal 68 (2006):