A year ago around this time, Occupy Wall Street was celebrating Advent — the season when Christians anticipate the birth of Jesus at Christmas. In front of Trinity Church, right at the top of Wall Street along Broadway, Occupiers set up a little model tent with the statuettes of a nativity scene inside: Mary, Joseph and the Christ child in a manger, surrounded by animals. In the back, an angel held a tiny cardboard sign with a verse from Luke’s Gospel: “There was no room for them in the inn.” The reason for these activists’ interest in the liturgical calendar, of course, was the movement’s ongoing effort to convince Trinity to start acting less like a real estate corporation and more like a church, and to let the movement use a vacant property that Trinity owns.
A year later, even as a resilient few continue their 24-hour vigil on the sidewalk outside Trinity, churches and Occupiers are having a very different kind of Advent season together. Finding room in churches is no longer a problem for the movement.
The day after Hurricane Sandy struck New York in late October, Occupiers hustled to organize a massive popular relief effort, and Occupy Sandy came into being. By circumstance and necessity, it has mostly taken place in churches; they are the large public spaces available in affected areas, and they were the people willing to open their doors. Two churches on high ground in Brooklyn became organizing hubs, and others in the Rockaways, Coney Island, Staten Island and Red Hook became depots for getting supplies and support to devastated neighborhoods. To make this possible, Occupiers have had to win the locals’ trust — by helping clean up the damaged churches and by showing their determination to help those whom the state-sponsored relief effort was leaving behind. When the time for worship services came around, they’d cleared the supplies off the pews.
“Occupy Sandy has been miraculous for us, really,” said Bob Dennis, parish manager at St. Margaret Mary, a Catholic church in Staten Island. “They are doing exactly what Christ preached.” Before this, the police and firemen living in his neighborhood hadn’t had much good to say about Occupy Wall Street, but that has changed completely.
Religious leaders are organizing tours to show off the Occupy Sandy relief efforts of which they’ve been a part, and they’re speaking out against the failures of city, state and federal government. Congregations are getting to know Occupiers one on one by working together in a relief effort that every day — as the profiteering developers draw nearer — is growing into an act of resistance.
And that’s only one part of it. Months before Sandy, organizers with the Occupy Wall Street group Strike Debt made a concerted effort to reach out to religious allies for help on a new project they were calling the Rolling Jubilee; by buying up defaulted loans for pennies on the dollar, and then abolishing them, organizers hoped to spread the spirit of jubilee — an ancient biblical practice of debt forgiveness.
The religious groups jumped at the chance to help. Occupy Faith organized an event in New York to celebrate the Rolling Jubilee’s launch. Occupy Catholics (of which I am a part) took the opportunity to reclaim the Catholic concepts of jubilee and usury for the present economic crisis and released a statement in support of the Rolling Jubilee that has been signed by Catholics across the country.
The Rolling Jubilee idea has been hugely successful, raising more money more quickly than anyone anticipated — around $10 million in debt is poised to be abolished. But now Strike Debt, too, has turned its attention to working with those affected by the hurricane. On Dec. 2, the group published “Shouldering the Costs,” a report on the proliferation of debt in the aftermath of Sandy. The document was released with an event at — where else? — a church in Staten Island.
This newfound access to religious real estate is not merely a convenience for this movement; it has implications that a lot of people probably aren’t even thinking about yet. Occupy Wall Street has learned from the Egyptian Revolution before, and now, even if by accident, it is doing so again.
While Tahrir Square was still full of tents and tanks, and Hosni Mubarak was still in power, the editors of Adbusters magazine were already imagining a “Million Man March on Wall Street,” the idea that led to what would become their July 13, 2011, call to #occupywallstreet. More than a year after the occupation at Zuccotti Park began, though, and nearly two years after crowds first filled Tahrir, neither revolt very much resembles its origins. The Egyptian Revolution, first provoked by tech-savvy young activists, has now been hijacked as a coup for the Muslim Brotherhood, a conservative religious party; its only viable challenger is none other than Mubarak’s ancien regime, minus only Mubarak himself. Occupy, meanwhile, has lost its encampments and, despite whatever evidence there is to the contrary, most of its enemies in power deem it no longer a threat.
Among many U.S. activists even today, the dream of creating a Tahrir-sized rupture in this country persists — of finally drawing enough people into the streets and causing enough trouble to make Wall Street cower. But what if something on the scale of Tahrir really were to happen in the United States? What would be the outcome?
I was thinking of this question recently while on an unrelated reporting mission at a massive evangelical Christian megachurch near the Rocky Mountains. Several thousand (mostly white, upper-middle-class) people were there that day, of all ages. They had come back after Sunday morning services for an afternoon series of talks on philosophy — far more people than attend your average Occupy action.
Every time I step foot in one of these places, it strikes me how they put radicals in the United States to shame. These churches organize real, life-giving mutual aid as the basis of an independent political discourse and power base. Church membership is far larger, for instance, than that of unions in this country.
If there were a sudden, Tahrir-like popular uprising right now, with riots in all the cities and so forth, I can’t help but think that it would be organizations like the church I went to that would come out taking power in the end, even more so than they already do — just as the Islamists have in Egypt.
If the idea of occupying symbolic public space was the Egyptians’ first lesson for Occupy Wall Street, this is the second: Win religion over before it beats you out.
Through religion, again and again, people in the United States have organized for power. Religion is also the means by which many imagine and work for a world more just than this one. Just about every successful popular movement in U.S. history has had to recognize this, from the American Revolution to labor, and from civil rights to today’s campaigners for marriage equality — and now Occupy.
When I stop by the Occupy Sandy hub near my house — the Episcopal church of St. Luke and St. Matthew — and join the mayhem of volunteers carrying boxes this way and that, and poke my head into the upper room full of laptops and organizers around a long table, and see Occupiers in line for communion at Sunday services, I keep thinking of how Alcoholics Anonymous’ 12-step program ends. The 12th step is where you cap off all the self-involved inner work you’ve been doing, and get over yourself for a bit, and heal yourself by helping someone else.
Anyone who has been around Occupy Wall Street during the year since its eviction from Zuccotti Park knows it has been in need of healing. Whether through flood-soaked churches, or on the debt market, this is how the Occupy movement has always been at its best, and its most exciting, and its most necessary: When it shows people how to build their own power, and to strengthen their own communities, this movement finds itself.
This article also appeared at The Indypendent.
And in the rest of this vast country?
“…the dream of creating a Tahrir-sized rupture in this country…” and this is why there’s a lack of interest and cohesion here, it’s the wrong dream unless there’s the focusing structure already in place. Many people might join in and fight against certain issues, but overall, I don’t consider the ‘Activist model image’ as a good one for most people. Many still mention “hippy” when referring to occupiers.
Activists, most I think, don’t have the skills and temperament to plan and organize, train and care for, the numbers and scope of what is required if action nationwide is to be undertaken.
Activists, I strongly say, reject those people who don’t act like them or don’t think like them, thus reject or ignore those people who may have enough shared goals and the required skills to enrich future collaborations.
Then there’s myself – An Independent who shares common causes with many groups, but is ignored by all – unless I follow a specific set of rules, dogma to prove something or another.
In other words, to join a group a person must submit to an unchangeable authority, and this is the wrong way of operating, because of the inherent error of looking to the past which involves the very issues of exclusion and hate, which I know, keeps people fragmented and apart, which leads to anger and violence, then murder and wholesale killing.
Thanks for your comment. I think what I’m talking about is easier than it sounds. Basically, I’m just pointing out that churches and other religious organizations are groups that people in this country already join a lot, and so activists would benefit and are benefiting from building relationships with them. This doesn’t require actually joining the churches if one doesn’t want to. Consider, for instance, these two comments on this article by very active Occupy activists:
We’re talking about constructive working relationships, not necessarily joining.
In general, people join groups all the time, of all kinds, based on all kinds of interests. What I’m suggesting here is that activists working for change should not necessarily put all their energy trying to bring masses of people into their social change groups; they can reach out to find people in the groups they’ve already voluntarily (or involuntarily) joined and create common cause with those groups.
“To join a group a person must submit to an unchangeable authority” — I’m not sure that’s an accurate depiction of human sociality. Groups always require compromise, but submission is only part of the story!
Yes, I realize my imperfections all to well.
I did catch the emphasis about the solidarity religion can provide. It’s a ‘loci of power’ Sharp mentions in ‘Social Power and Political Freedom.’ I’ve noticed in that book, he comes across somewhat as an ideal Independent I’ve been formulating during this past decade.
Compromising or adjusting to people is a given. Some do it easily and naturally. The “To join a group a person must submit to an unchangeable authority” is from how my efforts with a couple of occupy groups have been. That opinion is more from my insights, which deserved to be discussed, but never were.
A person lives a life, takes in volumes of information, studies various topics over decades, gathers even more knowledge than one would normally acquire, experiences checkered outcomes from certain choices, then goes to college to fill in the blank spots. A usually quiet and reserved person thus ‘educated’ may finally have something worthwhile to say to, share with, and be considered by, others.
“…activists working for change should not necessarily put all their energy trying to bring masses of people into their social change groups; they can reach out to find people in the groups they’ve already voluntarily (or involuntarily) joined and create common cause with those groups.”
“This doesn’t require actually joining the churches if one doesn’t want to.”
Thanks for pointing these statements of mine out; they certainly seem relevant to addressing the concerns Daniel has posed below.
“We’re talking about constructive working relationships, not necessarily joining.” That sounds good, but that’s not quite the same as what the title of this article and the following article at least imply, if not declare : http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/damnation/no-revolution-without-religion/
Lovely article! Thank you
It’s worth comparing this piece with two others I’ve done about religion in the movement, which point to other very different moments in that relationship. Take this discussion at Religion Dispatches, from the very first days:
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/5268/
And then this from Killing the Buddha, pointing out the potential that religion holds for the movement:
http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/damnation/no-revolution-without-religion/
I suggest love is the key ingredient for successful social movements, not religion, per se. http://lovecause.org/love-is-the-key-ingredient-for-successful-social-movements-not-religion-per-se/
Further, I suggest love is the core issue, not nonviolence, per se. http://lovecause.org/love-is-the-core-issue-not-nonviolence-per-se/
http://lovecause.org/the-key-issue-is-agape-love-not-non-violence-per-se-p2/
Thank you for this piece, Nathan. The key quote for me is Bob Dennis’s comment: “Occupy Sandy has been miraculous for us, really. They are doing exactly what Christ preached.” I’m coming to believe more and more that if our society is to be transformed, the church will have to be one of the primary sites of that transformation. The seeds are already right there in the life of Jesus. But what should be the most radical of all social institutions, the church, has too often become complacent, even among liberal Protestants who should be most likely to support Occupy for instance. My question is: how can activists help believers (of all faiths, but specifically Christian, at least in the U.S. context) make the connection between the Occupy ethos and their own faith? It looks like Occupy Sandy is offering us some exciting possible answers. But I think you’ve put your finger on one of the great enduring challenges – and opportunities – that face any movement for social justice.
Thanks for this. I couldn’t agree more. I think the most important thing is what the Occupy Sandy folks are doing: simply being present to these communities and helping them meet their needs. Second, I think, is creating frameworks by which religious communities can take radical action to help their own members. In the Strike Debt Organizing Kit, I contributed a few paragraphs on this count:
And in my “No Revolution Without Religion” essay, I quote Saul Alinsky’s less sunny view:
It makes sense that social movements include churches. As an agnostic, I’m seeking respectful and productive working relations with people of all faiths and people who aren’t religious.
But I suggest social justice activism expand beyond humanism, and that ecology movements, which include animal liberation, may lead to new forms of spirituality–ones that involve greater harmony with science and reason than what we find in Christianity, Islam, and other major religions.
If the key issue is love for our fellow humans (and other sentient beings), why then is it necessary to be a Christian, when all the other faiths include a focus on love ?
Why not just focus on love and dispense with doctrine and the extraordinary claims about virgin births, Christ dying for our sins, and Christ being resurrected ?
Further, Christianity, and some other major religions may not be suitable for future societies because of its inherent anthropocentrism. The survival of the human species, if not also civilization, may depend on us transcending our speciesist ways of looking at the ecosystem.
In the future, living in harmony with the ecosystem may be the basis of a form of spirituality which renders obsolete ideas of a deity who takes a personal interest in our individual, daily lives.
One reason that Occupy Catholics is interested in helping Catholics engage with the Occupy movement is that we believe that our church has something to learn from the movement. For instance, many of us find that the focus on a multiplicity of voices, rather than strict and archaic hierarchy, is something our church needs to learn from. (Two important Protestant theologians recently published a book, Occupy Theology, which means to present a way of doing theology in the context of the movement’s notion of “the multitude.”)
I think that there are many ways in which contemporary social justice movements can help religious communities deepen and strengthen their own ideas, just as has happened many times in the past. At the same time, I think that there is much religious communities can teach (and are teaching) these movements.
I am, however, more doubtful that the spiritual side of human nature will be lost in this process. If there is one thing that religious communities and radical political movements have in common, it is “extraordinary claims.”
“…social justice activism expand beyond humanism,…”
I find it easy to see a single topic to engage and extend my will into the expanse of the Universe. Dividing the Universe into parts to understand them must not lead to forgetting that there’s only the Universe.
Or, simply put, each grievance group does the same things as each other group, and the answers and goals they seek follow the same sets of steps to reach their goal. Change the name?, it’s still the same.
Where an Activist’s ‘struggle’ enters this view is much like the different religions in the World. They each say the same things, the same way, however, they use different “languages,” and so they can’t understand each other. But, I don’t refer to spoken languages.
Or, in my working language, each machine is fixed the same way, follow the steps and it works again.
If members of the Occupy movement tie their collective horse to modern organized faith then it is only those who have faith in a particular religion and who support the Occupy movement who will see the value of such a connection. This, because linking the two means that one believes he or she can only be good with god – an extension of one’s ego – where there isn’t any proof of god in the first place.
I support the Occupy movement but not if it in-part or collectively moves towards faith-based initiatives. After all, the Catholic Church has billions and you don’t see them re-distributing their wealth. But they will fight against condom use, work to take away a woman’s right to choose and also damn the LGBT to “hell.” When will anyone “Occupy the Vatican” To give all religion a pass as it presumed to be a moral good is just fantasy and wrong.
In all cases, not a modicum of evidence nor factual tidbit of reliable information is necessary for religious people to share their views about a creator and their imagined creator’s infinite love, acceptance and wisdom. These messages can come from someone who is recognized by others as a religiously holy person, from a family member or another tangential person who attempts to pull you into a discussion.
And to boot, these faith-based conversations are intellectually uninteresting and typically low-energy (not always) confrontations that do not bring peace, joy and love. But foster ignorance, dissonance and in the extreme a disliking which moves us further away from forming common human bonds.
This is central paradox of religion. Faith divides more than it will ever heal. Because if religious faith did work we’d have had peace for thousands of years now and we do not. Instead organized faith is used as a political weapon of unconscionable historical and current destruction.
Keep helping the poor for whatever reason and motivation you wish (to be like Jesus?) but keep your faith where it belongs in your home, otherwise the movement is just as vapid as the ultra-right.
The best answer to this is just a cursory look at the role that religion has played in social movements in the past, both in the U.S. and around the world. The role that is, has been highly ambivalent — bringing both great benefit and great challenges — but nearly without exception, the role has been a decisive one. Who can imagine the fight for the Civil Rights Act without black churches? Or the American Revolution without the Great Awakening? Or the contemporary fight for immigrant rights without the Catholic Church? Even putting aside questions about faith and the existence of a God or gods (which is, incidentally, the subject of my forthcoming book), religious communities are in large part how people in the United States tend to organize themselves on a grassroots level, and therefore any grassroots movement will benefit enormously from learning how to mobilize these communities. By mobilizing them, too, movements draw religious communities out of their usual complacency and conformity with the status quo and into the fray of transformation.
In order to do so, however, activists have to recognize that religious communities are not merely static and simplistic, as this comment presupposes, but complex, multifaceted, dynamic institutions capable of playing a variety of overlapping roles in local communities and world history.
Hi Nathan,
We can be of good will and disagree. I actually don’t think faith-based organizations are static. That is not implied or expressed in my response to your post.
In fact, I see them as dynamic and sadly dynamically bad. Everything that a faith-based organization can do, a secular one can do as equally well. Adding faith is unneeded or necessary. Thus, the only people who will feel taking the movement towards faith are those who have religious faith and are in the movement.
Those other of us who see organized religion as part of the problem will reject such initiatives for various reasons and on various grounds.
Now, let’s be honest here. This site and many who write for it are part of the Christian-left. I’ve been to the “House of Berrigan” so I know. To deny the bias and slant in reporting and perspective is par for the course. But that’s ok, since this is part of our freedom to write and think as we will and wish.
Sadly, organized faith does not allow much room for that freedom and so it, like many bad human ideas, really needs to become vestigial as many ideas from the Iron and Bronze age have become. That is if we are to ever share in a common secular humanity.
Heck, even Marx* saw that and I’m not a big fan of his either.
*Karl not Groucho.
“Adding faith is unneeded or necessary.”
What faith does is unite people by the message from their higher authority figure.
Faith is very strong once learned, and will remain ever ready to reassert itself even after it’s been abandoned. I’ve seen this in others.
However, existence of a creator or manager looking over the Earth, guiding a path, inspiring people in some beneficial manner or not, giving of laws to follow or to attain an afterlife,
is immaterial to my way of living, because my actions aim to promote in others their qualities, which will promote in others their qualities, which likewise, continues the promotion yet further. This process operates in the now of today, and for the future – this way of mine requires acceptance of its worth / benefit For Life.
So, you write books, and this is a somewhat religious based web site?
The issue of God, defined by those who have God defined within their associated religious texts, is held very strongly by the believers, as their faith allows them to.
Is proof or not have any importance? If so, how?
Hi Eric,
Let’s measure your cognitive dissonance.
Answer the following:
How old is the Earth?
Are fossils real?
Is evolution true?
Is the Earth flat or round?
Is the Earth or Sun the center of the universe?
How old is the universe?
As a non-believer, I do not have to prove god doesn’t exist. You can’t prove a negative.
But you as a believer should be able to show god does tangibly exist, right? OK, so show us.
Remember that what can be said without evidence can be dismissed just as equally without evidence.
Religious faith is a lie. A self-delusion. Just because lots of people believe a lie doesn’t make it true.
On who’s authority do you believe? A priest? Pope? Some other holy man? How do you know they know? Are you the least bit curious or skeptical? Or does fear of sin keep you docile and in check?
Just once I’d love to see someone really show evidence of god. Just once. Not a feeling or spirit, a passage in a holy book (written by humans) or a statement belief or the warm fuzzies people get when they pray together. You can get that same high from chocolate and sex, both my personal preferences.
How sure are you that you’re even praying to the right god if there is one? What happened to the gods of other cultures and retired gods? They’re just mythology right? So how do you know you god is not mythology, too?
I am as sure there isn’t an invisible god as I am sure there isn’t an invisible dragon in my garage.
You’ve misunderstood my words.
I have no faith in any religion making claims to unseen entities, past, current, or future. Mysteries are for the realm of good fiction. People, humans, need not invent what is not, nor be excluded from what is.
My faith is in what I do, being someone learning and teaching until I die. What happens after I die, will not be of my making other than how my body is disposed of.
Eric, just to clarify: the book I linked to doesn’t really have anything to do with Waging Nonviolence. In addition to editing this site, I’m a freelance journalist, as well as a co-editor of Killing the Buddha, an online literary magazine about critical engagements with religion. This book has emerged mainly from my non-WNV work.
WNV does not have any religious affiliation or orientation. Some editors and contributors practice some faith or other, and others do not. As I make perfectly clear in the article above, I’m involved with the group Occupy Catholics and am a Catholic myself. I don’t try to hide these, nor do I think the story told above stands or falls based on the circumstance of my affiliations.
Hi Nathan,
You’re thinking in absolutes. The story neither stands or falls by your religious affiliation. The story just exists because of your religious affiliation, point-of-view and the value you place in your faith.
That is my point all along. If you are religious, you’ll seek out “truth” based on faith. So “How Occupy Got Religion” makes sense to you because it is what you see and perhaps hope for. But I won’t get into those motivations.
But just as you created the WNV story and add it to the religious dialog, so too do humans create their gods, spirits and theology and add them to our human story. Unless you have proof of god I see no reason to assume (or hope for) one or any to exist.
The problem is religious subjectivity isn’t everyone’s reality. It is just one’s own reality. And of course those who may share the magically subjective ideas which are then used to create religious ethics and morality based on culture and the formal authority of one’s leaders regardless if they’re parents, Berrigan or the Pope. Don’t get me stated…..
But I’m getting a little bored here so I’ll stop.
Happy New Year to everyone at WNV.
OK.
I’ve got Catholic relatives, and Mormons too. They’re similar in some of their structural elements.
I’ve chosen what I’ve chosen and live with the choice freely from the faith I have in the choice. Words don’t exist to explain further that can be comprehended to satisfaction.
Do movement-building alliances result when we constructively grapple with our differences; or do they result from ignoring our differences for the sake of a phony and fragile unified front ?
I suggest the former. So, let’s continue to hash out our differences, but let’s do so respectfully.
Of course! But we should also be careful to engage in those differences constructively. Do we have to agree about the Virgin Birth in order to build a coalition to protect a storm-battered community from developers? No. We might, however, need to begin by coming to some agreement about leadership and governance in that coalition. And about our respective ideas of what rights a local community should have to govern and protect itself. That would be a good place to start. We can argue about the Virgin Birth on breaks from the picket lines as we get to know one another better, but it doesn’t need to be agreed upon before fighting the power that threatens us all.
Hi Nathan, I’m glad to be engaging with you.
In what ways do Catholicism and organized religion in general pertain to, as you say, “coming to some agreement about leadership…in that coalition” ?
I don’t plan to “argue about the Virgin Birth” ever. There is no argument. No offense, but it’s an absurdity I won’t waste time on, just as I won’t seriously engage with someone about whether Earth is flat.
I suggest a genuine sense of mystery and wonder doesn’t come from religion. It comes from exhausting our capacity for reason in our attempts at understanding the universe, not from setting reason aside nor from compartmentalizing reason and faith.
Also, I suggest science and human knowledge in general would less destructive if we had a type of spirituality that did not involve unprovable, extraordinary claims. That way, science and reason would mesh better with our sense of wonder and mystery and with our intuitive and emotional faculties.
Maybe the ecology movement will give rise to non-deity-based and non-dualist forms of spirituality that don’t involve unprovable, extraordinary claims, though not likely in our life-time.
But in the meantime, no Christian nor believer in other major religions has convinced me regarding how the doctrines of their faith are anything other than extraneous to the process of striving to love. That principle seems applicable to most, if not all, moral philosophies, whether religious, agnostic, or atheist.
I repeat I’ve asked you before, via email if not on this site. If loving our fellow sentient beings is what matters, why are you a Catholic, instead of, maybe, a Protestant or a Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Jew, or Agnostic ?
No offense, but I consider fear of going to hell and being motivated to do good in order to get to heaven as perversions of morality.
And if you base your good work in the world on your love for God, not your fear of going to hell or your hope of getting to heaven, that would seem to contradict Catholic doctrine. Christ talks about heaven and the wailing and gnashing of teeth for those in hell. Let’s face facts, sir.
Perhaps morality should be based on an intrinsically rewarding regard for others, and we should do away with concerns about an afterlife and attempts at loving with all our heart someone who died 2,000 years ago.
I suggest God is a concept human minds have rendered and that a ‘relationship with God’ is actually a ‘relationship’ with dissociated parts of our own personalities.
To deem that religion, per se, is the basis of positive social change, is to confuse correlation with causation. Religion correlates with communal and societal expressions of love, but it doesn’t cause it. In fact, in many cases religion correlates with indifference and hatred, as the historical record of religiously conceived atrocities indicates
What, then, are we left with? It’s love. Fallible, often conditional and otherwise imperfect human love.
We agree about more than you think, but I don’t think this is the place for a protracted discussion about theology and metaphysics. (Given our comment policy, I might have to delete my own comment!) But thank you for this.
Just one relevant point: I am not claiming that organized religion is the sole basis of social change, or that its involvement is absolutely necessary for such change to take place. I’m only pointing out that, in U.S. history and the U.S. present, it is a very important one, often more so than many activists are aware. In my experience, and as this whole discussion reminds us, they’re often so freaked out by how they perceive certain theological claims that they overlook the secular, political capacity and potential and dynamism of religious communities.