A Course in Miracles and the Refusal to Take Sides

One of the most confusing tensions for students of A Course in Miracles arises around politics and social issues. Many sincere students feel torn between the Course’s teaching on peace and the cultural pressure to take sides, oppose injustice, or fight for change. It can feel as though choosing peace means disengaging from the world, while caring about the world requires conflict. A Course in Miracles challenges this assumption at its root.

ACIM is not a path of reform. It is a path of undoing. It does not aim to improve the world, but to question the belief that the world is the cause of our distress. This distinction matters, because the moment we believe the problem is external, we inevitably begin to search for external solutions.

Politics, activism, and social movements all operate at the level of form. They require problems to be real, sides to be chosen, and opponents to be clearly defined. Even when motivated by compassion, they depend on opposition to function. There must be something wrong that needs to be fixed and someone responsible for it.

A Course in Miracles takes a radically different position.

The Course teaches that the world is an effect, not a cause. What we see is the result of a prior decision in the mind. Because of this, it states plainly that trying to change the world is futile. Effects cannot correct themselves. Only the mind that made them can be healed.

This is why ACIM does not teach neutrality as a moral position, but non-opposition as a metaphysical necessity. Opposition strengthens what it resists. To fight against something is to make it real, to grant it power, and to bind our identity to it.

This is where misunderstandings often arise.

According to A Course in Miracles, taking sides does not lead to peace because conflict can only be undone through a change in perception, not external reform.

There are interpretations of the Course that attempt to blend its language with political or social agendas. Love is invoked as a motivating force for activism. Spiritual principles are applied to worldly systems with the hope that they can be purified or redeemed. While this may sound aligned on the surface, it quietly reverses the Course’s teaching. ACIM does not say we bring love into conflict to make it holy. It says that conflict itself is the mistake.

When love is used to justify attack, even subtle or socially approved attack, it is no longer love as the Course defines it. It becomes a refined form of the ego, dressed in spiritual language but still dependent on enemies and outcomes.

The Course never asks us to make anyone wrong in order to be right. It never asks us to diagnose the world’s problems or assign guilt. It does not call us to correct systems, governments, or collective behaviour. It calls us to correct perception.

This does not mean that ACIM students withdraw from life, become passive, or stop participating in the world. It means they stop believing that salvation lies in participation at the level of form. Action may still occur, but it is no longer driven by fear, urgency, or the need to win.

An ACIM student may vote, speak, work, or serve, but without making outcomes responsible for peace. Without needing a side to be right. Without believing that another must lose in order for healing to occur.

This is a quiet path. It does not lend itself well to platforms, movements, or campaigns. It offers no rallying cry, because it is not trying to gather forces. It is trying to dissolve the belief that forces are needed at all. The Course gently reminds us that peace does not come from fixing the illusion, but from seeing through it. Not by withdrawing love from the world, but by withdrawing belief from conflict as a means of salvation.

Peace has no opposite. And because of that, it cannot be defended, promoted, or enforced. It can only be remembered. That remembrance begins the moment we no longer need anyone to be wrong.