Religious Communities, Deep Solidarity, and the Work of Building Alternatives
This article is the final part of a series. You can find the first two parts here and here.
Gab Lisi
If data center expansion reveals the costs of an economy organized around extraction and accumulation, what institutions can help communities respond? What institutions can not only resist harmful development but also cultivate alternatives capable of producing more democratic and equitable outcomes?
The Wendland-Cook Program believes religious communities occupy a unique position in answering these questions. Religious institutions can function as community infrastructure possessing physical gathering spaces, building relationships across generations, and creating networks of trust and mutual support. In communities where civic institutions have weakened or disappeared, religious communities can provide continuity and bring together people whose lives and interests do not neatly align. In these places, deep solidarity can develop.
Deep solidarity emerges anywhere people recognize that their different struggles are connected through larger systems that concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few. As Pope Leo XIV warned in his recent encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, “opaque algorithms” controlled by a handful of powerful companies can bring “new forms of dehumanization.” The same dynamic applies to data centers, which have produced an infrastructure controlled by a few corporations, extracting value from many communities while those communities bear the costs.
Across the United States, faith leaders and congregations are already participating in resistance to data center expansion, building solidarity with the community at large. In Indianapolis, Black Church Coalition leaders joined residents in opposing a proposed Metrobloks data center in the Martindale-Brightwood neighborhood. Community members cited concerns about utility costs, environmental impacts, and lack of meaningful community benefit. Rev. Fitzhugh Lyons Jr. described a community already carrying burdens of environmental harm, disinvestment, and broken promises. Rev. Jarrod Hubbard emphasized that faith communities have long been called to support neighborhood flourishing.
Similarly, congregations within the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York organized opposition to a proposed data center near the Tonawanda Seneca Nation and the Iroquois National Wildlife Refuge. Their concerns included environmental stewardship, Indigenous sovereignty, public accountability, energy consumption, and long-term economic implications of public subsidies for private development.
Interesting here is not simply that religious communities oppose particular projects. What matters most is that they help connect concerns often treated as separate issues because when separated, it is easier for “the few” to divide and conquer. Economic democracy becomes connected to environmental sustainability, energy use to Indigenous rights, jobs to long-term community autonomy. Religious communities help people see these connections because they already exist at the intersection of community life.
And so, religious communities can challenge developments that undermine democratic participation, environmental sustainability, or community well-being. But the Wendland-Cook Program remains focused on what these communities can build. Deep solidarity is a foundation for creating new forms of social, economic, and political life. The goal is not simply to say “no” to extraction but to cultivate relationships, leadership, and collective power necessary to build alternatives.
The notion of the solidarity economy describes efforts to organize economic life around democratic participation, cooperation, community ownership, and ecological sustainability rather than endless profit and growth. As Pope Leo XIV emphasized in Magnifica Humanitas, technology is “never neutral” as it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it. The same is true of economic infrastructure. Conflicts over data centers are opportunities for political and economic education: Who owns community resources? Who benefits from development? Who bears its costs? How should key decisions be made? What forms of economic activity genuinely contribute to collective flourishing?
Importantly, these questions do not disappear when a particular project is approved or defeated. The relationships forged in resistance can become the foundation for longer-term work: community land trusts, cooperative enterprises, mutual aid networks, democratic ownership models, and other experiments in economic democracy. The struggle over data centers places religious communities in a unique position. They are called to resist forms of extraction that undermine communities and ecosystems. But they are also called to help imagine and construct alternatives. This dual vocation may be one of the most important contributions religion can make in our time. If data centers reveal the contradictions of our present economic system, they also create opportunities. That is, moments when people begin asking deeper questions about power, ownership, democracy, and the common good. They create opportunities for deep solidarity to emerge and for communities to experiment with more democratic alternatives.
So then, the challenge is not simply whether communities can stop a particular data center. The challenge is whether the deep solidarity forged through these struggles can become durable enough to support new forms of social, economic, and political life. Religious communities are uniquely positioned to help make that transformation possible. Ultimately, the most important question is not what we are resisting. It is what we are building together.
For people seeking to align their religious community or group with the vision of deep solidarity, the Wendland-Cook Program’s Solidarity Circles offer a practical pathway. These leadership development cohort and peer networks create spaces of encounter and mutual support, where people come together across differences to challenge systemic injustice and to learn the skills needed to build the solidarity economy in their own communities.
Gab (she/they/he) is the Assistant Director of the Wendland-Cook Program at Vanderbilt University and Vanderbilt Divinity School. Gab resides in Columbus, OH and their dog, Franklin (or Frank). They hold an M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary, an MSL from The Ohio State University, and a B.A. in Theology and Criminal Justice from Xavier University (Cincinnati, OH). They are curious about power analysis, class analysis, and Catholicism. In their spare time, you can find them at home reading, camping with their dog Frank, or hanging out with friends.