By Neil Elliott
Reflecting on Donald Trump’s first administration, M. Gessen observed in Surviving Autocracy that nations “look to their political leaders to articulate who they are as a people, what future they are building, what hopes, dreams, and ideals unite them and make them a political community.” None of that could happen, however, in a moment when there was “no past and no future, no history and no vision—only the anxious present.”
Only a few years later, Trump and his coterie of weak and sadistic men and women seek their own profit by stripping the state for parts, attacking civil society, and weaponizing military and security forces to compel obedience and suppress dissent. Prominent law firms, news corporations, and top-tier universities have already rolled over in anticipatory obedience. Observing abductions of legal residents from their homes and the streets of U.S. cities—and Trump’s brazen defiance of court orders—Gessen writes that “the United States has become a secret-police state.”
In response, thousands upon thousands of ordinary citizens have taken to opposition rallies, Congressional town halls, and the streets of hundreds of cities in massive protests, such as the April 5 “Hands Off!”/50501 protest, the follow-up protests on April 19, and the May Day rallies.
Being part of a big, noisy crowd, united and resolute in purpose, is exhilarating (the DSA’s own Barbara Ehrenreich famously called it “political ecstasy”). But we know it’s not enough.That energy must be channeled into long-term strategic action. And we need organized institutions—labor unions, political parties, and pre-eminently in a democracy, the organs of our elected government—to translate that energy into real and lasting effects.
Paul Engler and Mark Engler address the conundrum head-on in This Is an Uprising (2017). At their most effective, momentum-driven movements (like the Arab Spring protests, Occupy, or Hands Off!) build popular energy and focus it in dramatic ways, capturing the imaginations and the hearts of the public. However, those powerful moments can fade if they fail to produce palpable, lasting results. Established institutions are built for long-term continuity and real-world effects. But they can end up risk-averse, focused on perpetuating their own power, and complicit in the status quo. (Insert your own post-mortem of the 2024 election here.)
Engler and Engler argue that a third social sector—what they call “counter-cultural communities”—are another necessary element in the “ecology of social change.” Such communities articulate and nourish values of human dignity and thriving, form leaders infused with those values, transmit memories of past struggles, and hold open the horizon of a different future.
It is here, I believe, that progressive faith communities have a vital and necessary role to play. But they must be resolutely intentional and strategic in playing it.
Those of us in progressive faith communities must cultivate a “critical literacy” regarding our sacred writings and symbols. It’s not that we want to impose a particular reading of our scriptures on everyone else—that’s the stuff of Christian nationalism and the racist, misogynistic, queer-phobic religious Right. But we can and should explain, consistently and clearly, how different themes in our scriptures came to appear there, and how they speak—or fail to speak—to the common good in our democratic society.
Taking our proper place in an “ecology of social change” requires a certain humility, too: not imagining we have all the answers, or even the most important ones, or that we somehow embody the highest ideal of human life together (a temptation to which the aspirational language of being “the beloved community” too easily leads us). It means offering the gifts of our various traditions—those connections to past and future—as we take a respectful stand alongside our neighbors in the present.
That last point will make some faith leaders nervous. “Taking a stand”—especially in a situation as existentially precarious as ours today—means getting political, and (to speak just for my own part of the religious world) even “liberal” clergy tend to police themselves never to come close to doing that! Surely, we imagine, it’s our proper work to be “uniting, not dividing.” I disagree. Our traditions describe decisive occasions when men and women have realized that being faithful requires taking a side. In times as terrifying and divisive as these, focusing our energy on the “comfort” and “unity” of a congregation can be a mistake. Sure, it might help us keep enough people in the pews to maintain what a fellow Episcopal priest described, years ago, as the “three Ps” of church life: “personnel, program, and property.” But my colleague was not being prescriptive. He was dolefully answering the question our bishop had addressed to a clergy workshop: “What prevents your congregation from fulfilling its mission?”
Within the forcefield of capitalist ideology, the goal of keeping the lights on and congregants comfortable comes perilously close to perpetuating the complacency of the already self-satisfied.
Just here I see a particular place for religious socialists.
Given what Engler and Engler show us regarding an ecology of social change, it’s important for us to show up among other progressives as socialists of faith. We can remind our comrades that being socialist means taking our part in a much broader, deeper human story that extends centuries into the past and presses into the future, the striving to live together in dignity.
Just as important, we need to show up as religious socialists in religious settings, to remind our communities that our shared faith practices move us into the public square, standing for the welfare of our neighbors. We can’t let those commitments be reduced to personal whim or voluntary do-goodism, as capitalist ideology insists. If our religious symbols have any lasting value, they speak to human flourishing in our common life, to the sustenance of the Earth: to the restoration of the world, tikkun ‘olam, and to justice (qisṭ).
Part of the work of religious socialists is to remind our faith communities—consistently and firmly—of the depth of that commitment.
Of course, we don’t all belong to faith communities. Over the years, I’ve met plenty of people whose hearts had been set on fire for the cause of justice by the values instilled in them in a faith community but who were told, when they began to put those values into practice, that they’d have to take their “politics” elsewhere. There’s real pain there, and it can last a lifetime.
I’ve come to think of such survivors as a diaspora of justice; in Christian terms, as a genuinely “apostolic” church—one “sent out” into the broader world. We need the vision and empowerment that faith communities, at their best, can provide; we need the courage that connection with other committed justice-seekers gives us. And if we show up and speak up enough, our presence may provide just the right leverage at just the right moment.
Neil Elliott is an Episcopal priest, a biblical scholar, and the author of several academic books in biblical studies.
Image credit: Seth Harrison/The Journal News