Listening to the Spirit
People organize to protect and fight for what they hold sacred. Organizing works by building relational power grounded in values and relationships. Issue wins are vital - building radically democratic power is at the heart of organizing, but the first step to building political and economic power is building radically democratic relationships. Because of the crucial role of sacred value in organizing, some organizing practices are religious practices. These are the central claims of Aaron Stauffer’s new book, Listening to the Spirit: The Radical Social Gospel, Sacred Values, and Broad-based Community Organizing.
This forum presents five different engagements with Stauffer’s new book, exploring what changes in organizing once relational power and sacred values are foregrounded in the practice. At the end, Stauffer offers a final reflection on the book and the work of organizing and theology in the Capitalocene.
Contributors: Gary Dorrien, C. Melissa Snarr, Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty, Stephanie Mota Thurston, Joerg Rieger, and Aaron Stauffer
The Radical Social Gospel as Broad-Based Community Organizing
Gary Dorrien
26 March 2024
In 2010, Aaron Stauffer served as an organizer in San Antonio, Texas with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) affiliate that legendary IAF organizer Ernesto Cortes cofounded in the 1970s, Communities Organized for Public Service. COPS was the first IAF affiliate to enlist religious congregations as dues-paying members, and it played a vital role in developing the strategy of Broad-Based Community Organizing (BBCO). Cortes remarked to Stauffer that organizing is about values, not issues. Issues fade, he explained, but values don’t fade. Listening to the Spirit is a rich synthesis of social ethics, theology, political history, philosophy, and social theory written in the spirit of Cortes’s maxim and expanding theologically upon it, luminously arguing that that BBCO works best by embracing the sacred values it engenders and runs upon, not by marginalizing faith.
Aaron was a doctoral student in social ethics at Union Theological Seminary and the Executive Director of Religions for Peace USA when he wrote the dissertation version of this book in 2020. In Religions for Peace, he developed a national anti-Islamophobia program based in the southeast USA. In the dissertation, he cooked a robust stew of radical social gospel theology and ethics, community organizing strategy, post-Hegelian social philosophy, radical-democracy political theory, and Pierre Bourdieu-style social theory. The book version contains updated discussions of all these topics and a new response to the critiques of BBCO by social ethicist organizer Charlene Sinclair and political theologian Vincent Lloyd.
Stauffer can imagine a better form of community organizing than the classic model pioneered by Saul Alinsky and longtime IAF executive director Edward Chambers. BBCO-as-usual carefully selects winnable issues, focuses relentlessly on material interests and building power, avoids polarizing issues such as racial and sexual identity, abortion, and the death penalty, and usually revolves around White-male-cisgender individual organizers. Power is built, on this view, by winning winnable issues, while divisive religious values are best left at the door along with other identity claims and markers. Stauffer pushes back that good organizing builds relational power grounded in values that individuals and communities hold dear. He provides generous accounts of recent attempts to rethink the assumptions of Alinsky organizing and correct its shortcomings. He begins most chapters with winsome anecdotes that illustrate best practices in contemporary organizing. We are long past the generations, Stauffer observes, in which the only books written about community organizing are by guardians of Alinsky’s legacy. But amid the present heyday of literature about organizing, we need someone besides Anglican theologian Luke Bretherton to make a theological argument for the spiritual significance of organizing.
Stauffer makes a compelling case that organizing on the basis of sacred values is central to BBCO. At its best, BBCO develops practices that instill cooperative relationships and values; it is not merely a venue for organizing issue campaigns. Like Bretherton, Stauffer conceives BBCO communities as alternative communities of interpretation, opposes assimilationist and accommodationist strategies that aim merely for a place at the table, and believes that BBCO organizing should aim to achieve a common life. Unlike Bretherton, Stauffer is not allergic to Marxist theory, does not claim that Christianity has its own social theory, and is deeply rooted in the social gospel traditions that enlisted churches in struggles for social justice, created the ecumenical movement, and founded the field of social ethics. In Black Protestant churches, the social gospel was predominantly a new abolition movement opposing the Jim Crow caste system and a mania of racist lynching. In White Protestant churches, the social gospel campaigned for political democracy, a living wage, and economic democracy. In both movements, the social gospel had mainstreams of progressive reformers and left-flanks of socialists. Stauffer favors the Black socialists, especially George Washington Woodbey, the brilliant California organizer for the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World. Unlike Bretherton, Stauffer accepts the counter-public concept of organizing, contending that BBCO communities must be in solidarity with those suffering exploitation, expropriation, and domination. Bretherton conceives community organizing as middle-ground mediation between various groups pursuing a common life. Stauffer is closer to Woodbey and Cornel West, arguing that the most important kind of organizing sides with dominated and exploited people in resisting oppression.
The relational meetings and listening campaigns of BBCO, Stauffer contends, are social practices—repertoires of activity grounded in ethical relationships that define institutions. As such they are religious practices that instill, and are guided by, sacred values of cooperation, relationality, and solidarity and normative principles of behavior. This part of his argument draws upon two camps of contemporary Hegel scholarship that emphasize Hegel’s theory of social subjectivity and its contribution to theories of justice as mutual recognition. Hegel scholars Robert Brandom and Terry Pinkard are prominent in the interpretive school that plays up Hegel’s social philosophy and the struggle for recognition while lopping off his theological beliefs, ontology, and metaphysics. Another camp that includes Molly Farneth, Thomas A. Lewis, Peter Hodgson, Robert R. Williams, and myself is equally taken with Hegel’s phenomenology of social subjectivity, but contends that Hegel’s religious commitments were fundamental to the intersubjective concept of Spirit that he developed: The “I” exists concretely as self-recognition in others, not as the “I am I” that Fichte derived from Kant. Spirit, for Hegel, was the intersubjective Gestalt of the world, not merely Hegel’s solution to the problem of the dualistic Kantian ego within Kant’s transcendental frame. Those of us who link Hegel’s philosophy of love and the Spirit to his theory of social subjectivity do not interpret Hegel in the fashion of the old Right-Hegelian theological school as the theorist of a closed pan-logical system. But we do say that Hegel’s religious undergirding was indispensable to his discovery of social subjectivity. Stauffer steers clear of debates over Hegel himself, self-identifies as a post-Hegelian on this count, appropriates Hegel’s ethical, social pragmatic, political, and intersubjective conception of Spirit, and stresses that mutual recognition is a social practice that—like BBCO—is also a religious practice bearing sacred value.
Listening to the Spirit thus makes a rich argument for cultivating relationships of liberation and love in the work of organizing. The genealogical undergirding is the radical social gospel that produced theologies of Christian socialism, the real backstory to contemporary political theology. In historical terms, Stauffer affirms that four broad religious traditions have sustained BBCO since the 1960s: the Protestant social gospel, Catholic social teaching, Black liberation theology, and Latin American liberation theology. The social-theory undergirding is Stauffer’s blend of Christian socialism and post-Hegelian recognition, tempered by an astute chapter steeped in Bourdieu and critiques of Bourdieu on organizing as a practice. The book version wonderfully adds to the dissertation case for a better BBCO a chapter on Black organizing that responds sympathetically to critiques of BBCO by Sinclair and Lloyd.
Sinclair criticizes the outright lack of a critique of racial capitalism in Alinsky organizing, a failing she experienced as a longtime Alinsky organizer. The Alinsky model cannot build democratic power, she argues, because it screens out the racial, sexual, and systemic economic injustices underlying the social harms that BBCO does address. Lloyd similarly charges that BBCO is too assimilationist in dealing with racial difference to disrupt White supremacy. Stauffer observes that one could hear these critiques as dismissive condemnations of BBCO, but he hears an invitation to create a BBCO that does disrupt White supremacy and actualize radical democracy.
Listening to the Spirit drives to a conclusion presenting Woodbey as an exemplar of Stauffer’s argument. Woodbey did not expect the Baptist Church to advocate revolutionary socialism nor expect to find salvation in the Socialist Party. These two sites of his commitment had their own integrity, including their distinct claims upon him. But he emphatically did see radical organizing as a Christian activity: The Spirit calls us to practice the golden rule in a spirit of love and community to build a cooperative commonwealth. This sermonic aspiration, to Stauffer as for Woodbey, acquires real-life force when religious communities bind together on interfaith terms to counter the despair and oppression and nihilism of the dominant order. Listening to the Spirit is an eloquent case for counter-public faith that doesn’t shy away from theology or democratic socialism.
Gary Dorrien teaches social ethics, theology, and philosophy of religion as the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. He was previously the Parfet Distinguished Professor at Kalamazoo College, where he taught for 18 years and also served as Dean of Stetson Chapel and Director of the Liberal Arts Colloquium. Professor Dorrien is the author of 21 books and more than 300 articles that range across the fields of social ethics, philosophy, theology, political economics, social and political theory, religious history, cultural criticism, and intellectual history.
Sustaining and Scaling Sacred Values for Democracy
C. Melissa Snarr
26 March 2024
In a time where democracy is eroding, or at least its absence is being readily exposed, in profound ways in the United States, the felt need to think about organizing for radical democracy is acute. Although Broad Based Community Organizing (BBCO) networks take on various issues and campaigns concerning things like affordable housing, wages, criminal justice reform, and education, the core focus of BBCOs is building the practices, ethos, and leaders necessary for grassroots democracy. In tension with the technocratic state, think tank mobilization efforts, and non-profit accommodationism, BBCOs understand themselves as the backbone of radical democracy and they build out practices to cultivate the everyday leadership required for vitalizing the polis.
In Aaron Stauffer’s excellent book, he takes us right into this project of radical democracy with a dance of wise experience and wide-ranging theoretical engagement to understand and elevate the particular “counter-public” of BBCO organizing. He does this not as a hagiographer of Saul Alinsky’s or even Ernie Cortes’ organizing forms, but rather as someone who knows the contributions, deformations, and potential of relational organizing for “liberation and love.” In what follows, I offer appreciation on two fronts and close with a couple of questions that Dr. Stauffer prompts for those seeking to discern the Spirit in organizing.
First, Listening to the Spirit offers an excellent disruption of the supposed binary of religion and secular. With a focus on lived religion, the prophetic counter-publics of not only BBCOs, but various ecclesial settings, surface a richer telling and broader vocabulary of how we live our lives and our faith. By understanding “sacred value” as that which “people hold most dear and organize to protect and fight for,” Stauffer narrates us into the everyday ethics that intertwine politics, economics, and faith. I particularly appreciate his concretizing vignettes amid much theory that brings his points home. For example, he describes a local NOAH meeting where various participants argued about whether affordable housing was a “moral issue,” “no! it’s a political issue,” and then “this is a political issue with a moral imperative.”
Stauffer uses this disruption of binaries to not only help us notice the religious practice that organizing can be but also to encourage BBCOs to pay more attention to sacred values, or to go to the root of what people are willing to build power for. Through his deep dive into the importance of one-on-ones and listening campaigns in relational organizing, he invites readers to see religion not just as a resource to plug and play or simply motivate a campaign, but to see the practices themselves as religious. Yes, Ernie Cortes reminded a young Stauffer that organizing needed to be “driven by values, not issues”…but Stauffer extends this by understanding the social practice itself as religious and a sacred value.
This emphasis on naming and wrestling with theological and sacred commitments has been an ongoing concern of mine in interfaith engagement spaces where three dominant strains exist. One, interfaith dialogue often focuses on ideas/values but often without the hard challenges of enacting those values in political action. Two, interfaith service often brings folks together for care and charity but with little attention to structural change and power work. Three, in contrast, interfaith organizing focus on issues can become so dominant that the sacred value work is seen as too time and labor-intensive, or perhaps even irrelevant except as initial motivation. Even then, sacred value work is often seen as primarily the purviews of the sending institutions in the coalition.
What Stauffer has put forward is a deeper challenge for BBCOs and also much of social justice organizing where the slower work of relational trust, dialogue, and values navigation is the foundation of agitation. This is a challenge not only for forms of secularist liberalism but also for liberation movements that become focused on mobilization (based primarily on agitation) rather than in-depth organizing. So often, when movements avoid the ongoing sacred value negotiation, they siphon off or cap the wellspring that sustains power over the long haul and transforms webs of relationships. Stauffer returns us to the importance of this relation work for sustained commitment and grounds it historically in the work of faith-filled counter-publics.
I also appreciate how Listening to the Spirit fairly and insightfully challenges the dominant approaches in the field of religion and social ethics to the study of BBCO organizing. Stauffer adeptly counters functionalist accounts of individual religious motivations, church attendance, and denominational influence on styles of organizing. Instead, he focuses on the religious nature of the practices themselves; even, at times, seeing them as a form of liturgy. Although he is deeply indebted to Jeff Stout’s focus on democratic traditions and virtue formation, Stauffer brings a keener eye to how deformation of practices that can also occur in BBCO and the necessity of practical reasoning, with attention to dynamics of power, intersectionality, and the goals of liberation and love. He is one of the few academics, drawing on Lauren Winner, who focuses acutely on the kinds of domination that can arise in, for example, the work of relational agitation and thus helps us see organizing practices, even religious/political ones, as fallible, socially constructed practices that require ongoing accountability.
Finally, although the book is in close conversation with Luke Bretherton’s theo-political account of organizing, Stauffer also shifts our attention away from a primarily Alinsky genealogical tradition and instead foregrounds the history of Christian social ethics and its indebtedness and collaboration with movements, particularly within particularly black social gospel traditions. While not abandoning “place” as a primary foci of common life organizing work, this focus enables a history and religious analysis and resistance to racial capitalism that isn’t skittish about identitarian politics…because there’s a process for deep sacred value work and navigation across difference.
I appreciate this book so much that I end really with two primary queries to continue the conversation. The first is ecclesial and the second is related to relational scale. First:
Stauffer’s challenge to Bretherton and others on their ecclesiology (or the distinction between the church and secular politics) is strong and he questions well whether historically and sociologically we can demarcate a differentiated formation in spheres, sectors, and/or institutions. But I do wonder, at times, if Stauffer’s ecclesiology from below comes close to reducing ecclesiology to organizing. As he notes, “God’s spirit calls churches to build relations of love and liberation—and to do this Christians need to engage in certain social practices of mutual recognition under conditions of democracy like the relational meeting and the listening campaign. This is why ecclesiology needs to focus as much on the congregations and Christian social practice and social practical reasoning as on general ecclesiologies, Scripture, and doctrine.” But I wonder if organizing can be sustained without simultaneous emphasis on non-explicitly political practices and goods…such as the worship of God, beauty, awe, wonder, and pastoral care. While I laud the elevation of cooperation, dialogue, and agitation as social religious practices, I do wonder if so much leadership and organizing turnover should also be addressed by stillness, worship, comfort, and healing arts. While I understand the need to refashion our limited ecclesiologies, and have argued so elsewhere, I still wonder if we need a fuller account of ecclesiology to sustain religious practices of organizing and the organizers and leaders themselves.
Finally, as we approach another polarized Presidential election, navigate international wars, and resist brutal national and state legislative drives, I also wonder: Does the scale of this kind of Spirit work enough for the evil of our times? Stauffer and so many academics writing on BBCOs are excellent on more localized political accounts with myriad examples of power building. But with democracy trembling here and abroad, what lessons can be learned for the building of power at national and transnational scales? If change happens at the speed of trust (and relational work that takes seriously sacred values), how do we scale the Spirit for times such as these?
C. Melissa Snarr is the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Chair of Ethics and Society
and Associate Professor of Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt University Divinity School. Dr. Snarr’s research focuses on the intersection of religion, social change, and political ethics. She teaches courses ranging from "Modern Christian Political Thought" and "Religion and Social Movements" to "Religion and War in an Age of Terror" (comparative Muslim/Christian). Her current book project, tentatively titled Interfaith Poverty in the United States, builds from fieldwork that asks how the interfaith movement attends to class issues, particularly the vulnerabilities of low-wage workers who are non-Christian. Her previous book, All You That Labor: Religion and Ethics in the Living Wage Movement (NYU 2011), drew on extensive participant observation to analyze and evaluate the contributions of religious activists in the living wage movement. She is also the author of Social Selves and Political Reforms (Continuum, 2007) as well as several articles in feminist ethics.
Reflections on Counterpublic Political Ecclesiology
Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty
April 12, 2024
These days, two narratives shape discussions about the identity and mission of the church in mainline denominations. One focuses on the impact of mainline decline and the other underscores changes that will occur as a result of the transformation of theological education and institutions.
The story about mainline decline and the loss of influence within the public sphere is a cautionary tale. Robert P. Jones, President and Founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, introduces in The End of White Christian America (Simon and Schuster, 2017) the decline in influence of both Progressive mainline and Evangelical churches. Differing positions taken on social, political, and economic issues by white mainline Protestants and Evangelicals defined U.S. politics throughout the twentieth century. But, today, both groups recognize their loss of influence, mainly due to the changing nature of the U.S. religious landscape and the rise of the religious "nones" and "dones."
The transformation of traditional forms of residential theological education and their impact on theological institutions is the second story that heavily influences discussions about the identity and mission of churches in the U.S. at this time. Ted A. Smith, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Divinity at Candler School of Theology, describes in The End of Theological Education (Eerdmans, 2023) the challenges facing theological institutions—achieving financial sustainability, the forces of individualization, the decline of voluntary associations, epoch-defining struggles for racial and economic justice, etc. The transformation of the current model of theological education, along with the widespread disinvestment in humanities programs happening in colleges and universities across the nation, means significant changes are ahead for the education of pastors and members of congregations that will impact the way churches understand their mission in the world.
Both of these narratives focus on what churches are losing. These stories shape a conversation about the church’s identity and mission that can leave congregations and denominations in a sort of identity crisis centering their mission on strategies for survival.
Aaron Stauffer's book Listening to the Spirit: The Radical Social Gospel, Sacred Value, and Broad-Based Community Organizing (BBCO) is timely as he reminds religious leaders to tell an alternative story about the identity and mission of churches. The third option that Stauffer provides shares good news about the ways churches build relational power and organize for social and economic justice and the impact they can make in our society by working collaboratively with others. Drawing upon his experience as a community organizer and rich traditions of social ethics and political theology, Stauffer explores church participation in BBCO, the history of the radical social gospel, and the political role of sacred value in organizing.
Gary Dorrien observes that Listening to the Spirit significantly contributes to community organizing literature as Stauffer imagines a model that is better than the one pioneered by Saul Alinsky. Instead of focusing primarily on winnable issues, power is built by developing practices that instill cooperative relationships and values. Contemporary churches can learn from the history of the radical social gospel and organizing work done in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Radical social gospelers worked alongside union organizers, established mutual aid societies, created sabbath schools, and built strategic alliances that helped to give birth to the civil rights movement.
It is worth noting that some readers may initially be reluctant to embrace the idea that churches should pick up the work of the social gospel in light of mistakes made by and the theological limitations of some of the most well-known leaders of the historic movement. For example, Walter Rauschenbusch has been criticized for failing to incorporate race into his critique of capitalism and never fully embracing socialism. Rauschenbusch also likened some advocates for women's suffrage, such as Emmeline Pankhurst, to "panthers." Additionally, many social gospelers either failed to critique or embraced the popular and deadly eugenics crusade as a means to improve society and eliminate poverty. Stauffer, however, emphasizes the distinctive nature of the radical social gospel and specifically black church traditions and freedom movements as resources. He "connects the argument into an ethical and theological history of communities organizing and struggling for democratic transformations in the social, economic, and political realms" (7).
The ministry and legacy of Rev. George Washington Woodbey is central to the story Stauffer tells. Woodbey was born into slavery in Mountain City, Tennessee. Woodbey's life experiences taught him that "the evils of slavery and those of capitalism have a common root of capitalist exploitation and expropriation" (191). As a Baptist pastor and Socialist organizer, Woodbey was called to build economic power for Black U.S. Americans and believed that "being a Christian required enactment of the biblical principles of the cooperative economy through practicable socialist policies" (193). Woodbey expressed his religious identity in actions that pushed back on racial capitalism and assumed that the Christian faith informed an alternative social, moral, and economic imaginary. Three key principles informed Woodbey's understanding of the mission and identity of the church: cooperation, dialogue, and agitation (187).
Building upon this legacy, Stauffer articulates a counterpublic political ecclesiology that invites churches to pick up the work of the radical social gospel movement. Counterpublics are dialogical spaces in which new stories can be told from the experiences of subjugated peoples and provide the context to build relational economic and political power to change the conditions of racial capitalism. Churches are called to embody God's liberating love in the world, and "people organize to fight for what they hold sacred" (205).
Some theologians and religious leaders will want Stauffer to expand his exploration of the radical social gospel and deepen his appeal to the larger Christian theological tradition as he continues to build his counterpublic political ecclesiology. The distinctive identity and mission of the church can’t just be reduced to organizing and political action. Space must be maintained within political ecclesiology for the Mystery of God and the inevitable what if that lies beyond human understanding that first claims us and draws us into community. Other radical social gospelers like Vida Dutton Scudder will offer good resources. Like Woodbey, Scudder was a committed Christian socialist. Her political commitments emerged from her religious beliefs. As an Anglican and member of the Society of Companions of the Holy Cross, a group of women who banded together to pray for social concerns, Scudder practiced contemplation and appealed to the mystics and trinitarian doctrine as sources for understanding sacred value. The Trinity was more than a concept defining divine society; it was, for her, a model for human relationships and the Cooperative Commonwealth. Ultimately, she concluded that social action itself was sacramental because it was not an end in and of itself.
Melissa Snarr wisely prompts us to think more about the role of faith communities in a democracy that is eroding, particularly as another contentious political election looms. The way that Stauffer shapes the narrative of the identity and mission of the church in Listening for the Spirit provides a welcome opportunity to reflect on what our society may lose if Progressive churches fail to grasp the critical role they have played in the past and can continue to play in the present in organizing to build relational power for social and economic justice. Recent research suggests that despite mainline decline, "Protestants remain one of the country's largest religious groupings, comprising approximately 14% of the United States population" (“Clergy and Congregations in a Time of Transformation,” PRRI (September 2023)). Thus, Progressive churches can continue to have considerable influence. Stauffer argues that "the church … is more properly defined by its task and its work rather than by beliefs or doctrines" (xx). The church's identity and mission or task in the world are intertwined. Perhaps, most importantly for contemporary discussions of the churches' identity, mission, and influence, Stauffer suggests that "radical democracy would be weaker without churches" (186) and participating in BBCO can strengthen the life of congregations and local communities.
Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty is Professor of Theology and Ethics at Union Presbyterian Seminary, teaching primarily on the Charlotte campus, and a Minister of Word and Sacrament in the Presbyterian Church USA. She is long time contributor to Presbyterian, ecumenical and interfaith efforts to organize for social and economic justice. Among other publications, she is the author of Dutiful Love: Empowering Individuals and Families Affected by Serious Mental Illness (Fortress 2022), The Problem of Wealth: A Christian Response to a Culture of Affluence (Orbis 2017), Dorothy Day for Armchair Theologians (WJKP 2014), and Beyond the Social Maze: Vida Dutton Scudder’s Theological Ethics (T & T Clark, 2007). Her latest book project focuses Christian Freedom for the Present Moment and should be published in the coming year.
Stephanie Mota Thurston
12 April 2024
I teach an undergraduate course in religion and philosophy where the central question is: What does it mean to live well, to live a good or meaningful life? About a third of the way through the course, we read the first two chapters of Harry Frankfurt’s The Reasons of Love. Frankfurt introduces the topics of the book as those that have to do with “the ordinary conduct of life” and pertain “to a question that is both ultimate and preliminary: how should a person live?” (5). Frankfurt’s argument is that the question of how one should live is not fundamentally a question for morality.
To help make sense of this claim, I often provide a relevant example to my students. In their current context, some of their most significant decisions concern what school to attend, what major(s) to declare, and what courses to enroll in. Students don’t often, if ever, turn to moral precepts, moral obligations, or moral prohibitions to deliberate about these questions. Rather, the normative practical reasoning that concerns the everyday or “ordinary conduct of life” most often appeals to other authoritative ideals or values.
More specifically, Frankfurt’s text focuses on what it means to care about, and ultimately love, someone or something.
“It is by caring about things that we infuse the world with importance. This provides us with stable ambitions and concerns. A person who cares about something is guided, as his attitudes and his actions are shaped, by his continued interest in it… [and] this determines how he thinks it important for him to conduct his life. The totality of the various things that a person cares about—together with his ordering of how important to him they are—effectively specifies his answer to the question of how to live” (23).
In other words, to answer the question: how should a person live? it is Frankfurt’s contention that our cares and loves are often more authoritative than moral precepts, even as these remain important for how we conduct our lives.
Part of why I value this text for undergraduates is because it allows us to move beyond an Ethics 101 approach to this question, whereby competing moral theories vie for their loyalty as frameworks for how to live. Further, Frankfurt’s argument helps draw their attention to the specific people, ideas, and practices that they care deeply about as guiding sources for their practical reasoning.
What’s more, Frankfurt discuses care (and love) as a specific, willful form of desire. Importantly, in my course this functions as a bridge as we move into two units that, in part, consider how desire functions in the economic and political spheres of our lives.
It was exciting to see that several insights from Aaron Stauffer’s new book, Listening to the Sprit: The Radical Social Gospel, Sacred Value, and Broad-based Community Organizing, would enrich key themes in my course. One theme is the centrality of sacred values in Stauffer’s account and another is his analysis of the shared practical reasoning that emerges within counterpublics through practices like the relational meeting and listening campaigns characteristic of BBCO.
While many organizers and scholars of democratic politics are wary of how polarizing sacred values might be, Stauffer argues that the political role of sacred values ought to be centered. Importantly, for Stauffer, the concept of sacred value “refutes clear divides between religion and secularism,” meaning it is not purely a “religious” phenomenon to ascribe sacred value to the material world (19).
On several occasions, Stauffer uses the phrase “what we hold most dear” to elaborate on how the concept of sacred value functions in a person’s life. Stauffer offers an example to illustrate how BBCO practices aim to organize around values, rather than issues. At a Nashville Organized for Action and Hope [NOAH] meeting, Stauffer describes sitting in with the affordable housing task force. A leader invites introductions after which she asks why those in the task force “care about the issue.” As Stauffer recounts, “most in the group share a similar story: people either know someone who has or have themselves experienced the squeeze of rising home costs” (20). The NOAH leader, here, is not asking for moral precepts or moral theories related to affordable housing, rather, she is asking the group why they care about the issue. This elicits stories of struggle for those they care about, thus generating their care for the socio-political issue.
Through this example, I see resonances with Frankfurt’s claim that what we care about and love more often informs the normative practical reasoning we need for considering how we should live. However, Stauffer’s text, precisely because it traces sacred value, into the realm of the political, illustrates that concepts of care, love, and sacred value are not merely private or idiosyncratic. Rather, Listening to the Sprit offers a vision of what it means to move from the intimate sacred values that shape an individual’s life and practical reasoning to a communal vision of shared sacred values and shared practical reasoning. In this way, a book like this could help my students more easily connect the individual to the communal as they explore the question of what it means to live a good and meaningful life.
One of the strengths of the book is Stauffer’s attention to the practices of the relational meeting and listening campaign. As he argues, “when we are clear about what we hold most dear, we can personalize abstract political issues. Personalizing the issue places it in a narrative, which helps us get a sense for how it is that things came to be the way they are and what we might do to change them” (xix). As these practices are based in deep listening and mutual recognition, collective narratives emerge within community.
“When a Christian church,” explains Stauffer, “engages in a listening campaign, they are discerning the movement of the Spirit in their midst and what the Spirit is calling them to do in their public life” (xix). Stauffer offers a useful example of this from his time with NOAH when the congregation invited a Metropolitan Council candidate to the Sunday worship service and a subsequent forum. The aim was to report on the “issues and values identified during the listening campaign” in order to make clear to the candidate “what the congregation cares about… [and] holds most dear” (57). The discernment, as a communal discernment, directs and motivates the public, political action. Sacred values then, are both personal and political.
Listening to the Spirit surely makes a meaningful contribution to the scholarship in Christian social ethics, BBCO, and religion and politics. It also makes an important argument for how the things we hold most dear are not merely guides to our personal lives. These things, in fact, should also guide our common life together. And as Stauffer so compellingly argues, the BBCO practices of relational meetings and listening campaigns aim at that end.
Dr. Stephanie Mota Thurston is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Thurston’s research and teaching interests include social ethics, religion & politics in the US, political theory, and political theology. She is especially interested in moral and political questions concerning school segregation, policing and prisons, and migration and borders. Dr. Thurston received her B.A. in Religious Studies and Politics/International Relations from Scripps College and earned her M.A.R in Ethics from Yale University’s Divinity School. She completed her Ph.D. in the Religion and Society program at Princeton Seminary. She is currently working on several projects that focus on schools, including her current book project titled Complicity and Moral Responsibility: Case Studies in School Segregation. Dr. Thurston serves on the Advisory Committee for the Education Justice Project, a college in prison program at the University of Illinois.
Nuclear Fusions: Connecting Community Organizing and Theology
Joerg Rieger
The great accomplishment of Aaron Stauffer’s book Listening to the Spirit is not only that it is bringing community organizing and faith together but that, in the process, it is reshaping both sides and creating new energy. This matches the work we’re doing at the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt. Among the prime examples are our Solidarity Circles, of which Aaron is the principal architect.
To be sure, connecting community organizing and faith is not an easy proposition and raises eyebrows on both sides. Community organizers are afraid that matters of theology are divisive and therefore impede the building of communal power. People of faith, by contrast, are afraid that organizing is divisive because it deals with politics. Both sides have a point, even though their concerns are somewhat misplaced, as divisions may not always be the problem people think they are (see Matt. 10:34).
Given the understandable hesitancy to engage from each side, the key questions for both organizers and people of faith are, Why should we engage each other? and, What brings us together? Or, in the language of the Wendland-Cook Program at Vanderbilt, What might help us create deep solidarity that is sustainable and moves us forward together?
It seems there are several options. The first connection of community organizing and faith is via specific issues and concerns, like potholes in the streets or a lack of playgrounds or basketball courts in the neighborhood. The solidarity that is created here is often successful in addressing the issues, but it usually ends when the issues are resolved, unless other issues are identified, when the cycle starts all over again. In the end, this solidarity is not for the long term, and it usually stays on the surface, failing to get us to the root causes of particular issues and concerns.
The second connection of community organizing and faith is produced by values, a key concept in Stauffer’s book. While this may sound a little esoteric at first sight, the book tells us that values are simply “another way of talking about what people hold most dear” (xii). While the conversation about values is important, I would argue that it can be developed further. In contrast to issue politics, values call for being deepened. Take, for example, Jesus’s commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31), which is a central value in Christianity and many other religions. When it is understood that loving the neighbor as oneself is not merely a moral exhortation (“you must love your neighbor”) but a matter of realizing that self and other are always connected, for good or for ill, this value can play an even more significant role. And while there are various values that might connect us, the central value may well be the value of relationships and the realization that (and how) we are always already connected.
This brings me to my final point. While issues and values have their place and importance, I would argue that that solidarity is formed most profoundly when we recognize common struggles. As the labor unions have it: “An injury to one is an injury to all,” echoing the apostle Paul’s famous claim about the body of Christ that “if one member suffers, all suffer together with it” (1 Cor 12:26). This insight underscores once more the central importance of relationship, which is often overlooked in a culture that promotes individualism. But it overcomes individualism not by making a moral argument against selfishness; rather, it overcomes individualism by pointing out that it is a dangerous illusion because we are always already related. Individualism, which affects even community organizing and faith communities, is the illusion of the ruling elites who need to cover up the fact that their success, their wealth, and their power is built on the backs of many others. In a global economy, this fact is true for all of us to some degree: even the lives of the 99 percent are built on the lives of others, for good and for ill. Solidarity simply means recognizing the illusion of individualism and making the best of it. When community organizers and people of faith begin to realize what welds them together—namely the distinct pressures of our times that pose serious threats to human flourishing everywhere—religion, politics, and even economics can work together for the common good. What is truly divisive, therefore, are the dominant interests that seek to divide and conquer, not religion, politics, and economics in service of the lives of people and the planet.
None of what I have said up to this point gets us very far without a solid analysis of power, which is often missing not only in faith communities but even in community organizing efforts that tend to address the powers at work on the surface. This is why I have argued in my most recent book that we need to talk about the Capitalocene, the age when capital reigns supreme everywhere; not just in finance and politics but also in the worlds of ideas, religion, etc. Stauffer’s text talks about racial capitalism, which captures some of the intersectionality of the Capitalocene, and one could also talk about gendered capitalism, ethnic capitalism, ableist capitalism, etc. Nevertheless, talking about the “age of capital,” the Capitalocene, is not only pushing the analysis to the next step but also the solutions. It is here, I would argue, where solidarity is ultimately grounded and where it might make sense again to talk about the divine, which somehow joins us in the struggle, as many of our ancient religious traditions seem to affirm. This is certainly true in the Abrahamic traditions, but also in many other religious traditions that need to be at the table if we are serious about organizing and faith. All this is part of “Listening of the Spirit,” it seems to me.
Joerg Rieger is the Distinguished Professor of Theology, Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion, Affiliate Faculty, Turner Family Center for Social Ventures, Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, and the Founder and Director of the Wendland-Cook Program.