%20-%20https://sketch.com%20--%3e%3ctitle%3e3ECBBF50-FD08-412A-943D-2CFC5E025A16%3c/title%3e%3cdesc%3eCreated%20with%20sketchtool.%3c/desc%3e%3cg%20id='Stylesheet'%20stroke='none'%20stroke-width='1'%20fill='none'%20fill-rule='evenodd'%3e%3cg%20transform='translate(-926.000000,%20-668.000000)'%20id='BUTTONS'%3e%3cg%20transform='translate(100.000000,%20597.000000)'%3e%3cg%20id='BTN-/-RIGHTS'%20transform='translate(816.000000,%2065.000000)'%3e%3cg%20id='ICON-/-Rights'%20transform='translate(10.000000,%206.000000)'%3e%3cpath%20d='M13.5752841,0%20L1.34943182,0%20C0.59375,0%200,0.586666667%200,1.33333333%20L0,22.6666667%20C0,23.4133333%200.620738636,24%201.34943182,24%20L17.6505682,24%20C18.40625,24%2019,23.3866667%2019,22.6666667%20L19,5.36%20L13.5752841,0%20Z%20M13.5752841,1.89333333%20L17.0838068,5.36%20L13.5752841,5.36%20L13.5752841,1.89333333%20Z%20M1.34943182,22.6666667%20L1.34943182,1.33333333%20L12.1988636,1.33333333%20L12.1988636,5.36%20C12.1988636,6.10666667%2012.7926136,6.69333333%2013.5482955,6.69333333%20L17.6235795,6.69333333%20L17.6505682,22.6666667%20L1.34943182,22.6666667%20Z'%20id='Shape'%20fill='%23595959'%20fill-rule='nonzero'%3e%3c/path%3e%3ccircle%20id='Oval'%20stroke='%23595959'%20stroke-width='1.5'%20fill='%23595959'%20cx='9.5'%20cy='13.5355339'%20r='5.5'%3e%3c/circle%3e%3cpolyline%20id='Path-2'%20stroke='%23FFFFFF'%20stroke-width='1.5'%20transform='translate(9.500000,%2013.035534)%20rotate(45.000000)%20translate(-9.500000,%20-13.035534)%20'%20points='8%2016.0355339%2011%2016.0355339%2011%2010.0355339'%3e%3c/polyline%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/svg%3e)
INTRODUCTION
The United States is typically presented as having a bifurcated political field with secular progressives at one pole and religious conservatives at the other (Hackworth Reference Hackworth2012; Hunter Reference Hunter1991; Hart Reference Hart2001; Kniss Reference Kniss and Dillon2003; Putnam and Campbell Reference Putnam and Campbell2010). This bifurcation, Hart (Reference Hart2001) argues, represents more than the ideologies of the two poles, also extending to their discursive styles, as well. Secular progressives possess a robust language for analyzing and critiquing social structure, but are short on “expansive” discourses that connect politics to transcendent values. Instead, progressives tend to focus on instrumental concerns, producing “constrained” discourses, which fail to capture people's imaginations. Conservatives, on the other hand, draw on transcendent religio-moral rhetoric to construct expansive discourses on social issues, yet scholars have found that conservatives often avoid discussing social structure, limiting their ability to thoroughly deal with inequity (Bean Reference Bean2014; Emerson, Smith, and Sikkink Reference Emerson, Smith and Sikkink1999; Gutterman Reference Gutterman2005; Hackworth Reference Hackworth2012; Moon Reference Moon2004).
While this dichotomy can be analytically useful, many groups blend elements of different ideological concerns and rhetorical styles in their discursive production (Calhoun Reference Calhoun2012). As such, despite the traditional focus in both scholarship and public discourse on secular liberals and conservative religious people, examining groups off this stereo-typical axis can provide us with insight into the cultural work that goes into political meaning making among groups who blend various rhetorical styles. Toward this end, this article analyzes the talk of members of progressive religious communities to examine how they integrate religious and political languages often assumed to pull in opposite ideological directions. These communities complicate the bifurcated view of the discursive field by bridging language on personal morality with critiques of structural inequality. I argue that, by integrating political and religious ideas, progressive religious talk constructs pathways to action for groups and individuals seeking ways to actualize their beliefs and identities in practice.
TALK, RELIGION, POLITICS, AND SOCIAL ACTION
Religious talk emerges from specific social groups such as denominations and social movements, and is used by such communities as a tool that “expresses the group's identity and explains and justifies the group and its existence both to itself and to others” (Williams Reference Williams2007, 43). When such language is used widely, it may become publicly held and social actors in different settings may draw on it in a variety of ways, creating unique rhetorical styles. As Williams (Reference Williams2007, 43) states, “Religious language and meanings become entwined with culturally approved ways of thinking, acting, and being. Religion helps legitimate cultural forms and, in turn, becomes a legitimate mode of expression within a culture.” In other words, religious talk represents a public way of speaking about the world that may integrate with other languages, shaping the ideologies, identities, and actions of social actors.
While this would suggest that talk is an important area of study, research on talk has often been minimized in scholarship (Wuthnow Reference Wuthnow2011). This follows colloquial understandings that there is a line between talk and action, with sayings like “talk is cheap” or “you talk the talk but you can't walk the walk” common in everyday parlance. Yet, I suggest that it is fruitful to understand talk as a form of social action in that it delineates what practices are thinkable and unthinkable, constructs how elements of the world fit together, creates or destabilizes collective identities, and helps communities and individuals arrive at and solidify their beliefs (see, Djupe and Calfano Reference Djupe and Calfano2013; Eliasoph Reference Eliasoph1998; Flores and Hondagneu-Sotelo Reference Flores and Hondagneu-Sotelo2013; Harris-Lacewell Reference Harris-Lacewell2004; Moon Reference Moon2004; Perrin Reference Perrin2006; Polletta Reference Polletta2002).
Conceptualizing talk in this way is consistent with contemporary theorizing on culture, cognition, and social action (Vaisey Reference Vaisey2008; Reference Vaisey2009; Swidler Reference Swidler2001; Reference Swidler2008). This work sees culture both as widely shared meaning that can be drawn on by social actors in particular circumstances and as internalized schema that guide a person's sense of who they are (Vaisey Reference Vaisey2009). Individuals' culturally learned identities, emerging from the groups they belong to and the kind of person they feel they are, provide them with shared viewpoints on how the world works and how someone like them should behave (Achen and Bartels Reference Achen and Bartels2016; Moon Reference Moon2012; Vaisey Reference Vaisey2009). Talk serves as a bridge between wider cultural ideas and individual and group identities because, as Eliasoph (Reference Eliasoph1998) points out, people must often be “talked into” their own beliefs through deliberation and discussion with others (see also, Perrin Reference Perrin2006).
Applying these insights to the realm of politics, talk can be both restrictive and constitutive of political action because it has a powerful role in shaping what we understand as real, feasible, and desirable, as well as binding us together in webs of shared meaning that make collective action possible (Djupe and Calfano Reference Djupe and Calfano2013; Eliasoph Reference Eliasoph1998; Harris-Lacewell Reference Harris-Lacewell2004; Wuthnow Reference Wuthnow2011). Politicized talk can be restrictive of action and engagement because social settings provide rules about talk, including who can speak, what can be said, and how they can say it, rendering particular things outside the realm of acceptable discourse or certain persons unable to contribute to conversations (Eliasoph Reference Eliasoph1998; Lichterman Reference Lichterman2012; Moon Reference Moon2004; Polletta Reference Polletta2002). Talk can, conversely, be constitutive of social action, instead of restrictive. Skillful activists are able to construct resonant discourses that allow them to reach and mobilize diverse audiences (Braunstein Reference Braunstein2012; Lichterman Reference Lichterman2005; Polletta Reference Polletta2006; Wood Reference Wood2002). As discussed above, talk thus helps bridge identity and wider meaning, constructing the pathways through which people who identify with particular groups or categories understand how someone such as them is expected to behave in the social world.
Religious discourse, in specific, has often aided in both these processes. For example, religious language has fomented social action by providing cultural material to build efficacious identities that create feelings of empowerment and agency in the face of inequality (Flores and Hondagneu-Sotelo Reference Flores and Hondagneu-Sotelo2013), canonical “stories” about how the political world works (Gutterman Reference Gutterman2005), and a “moral vocabulary” to talk about how upstanding people behave in society (Lichterman Reference Lichterman2008, 13; Wood Reference Wood2002). Religion has also acted as a source of constraint and oppression, both by presenting languages of exclusion (Barrett-Fox Reference Barrett-Fox2016) as well as through individualizing and depoliticizing understandings of inequality (Moon Reference Moon2004). Edwards (Reference Edwards2008), for example, demonstrated that even well-intentioned multi-racial churches can undermine their own perceived inclusivity through talk and practices that privilege white worship styles over black. Ultimately, religious language and culture provide multi-vocal and often contradictory discursive resources for making sense of the social world (Platt and Williams Reference Platt and Williams2002). It is therefore important to examine the content of discourse to understand how talk that blends languages may resonate with different identities and move participants toward social action.
Returning to Hart's (Reference Hart2001) observation that progressives lack “expansive” discourses, I suggest that progressive religious language represents a key area where social actors craft “transcendent talk” that helps them move beyond the instrumental. Progressive religious talk draws on both wider languages of progressivism that focus on structural inequality as well as religious understandings of personal morality. Additionally, the combination of these two languages in progressive religious talk resonates with the research subjects in this article because they belong to progressive religious communities and personally understand themselves as both people of faith and left-wing. As such, their discourses on how these identities connect provide them with templates for social action. Following this, the present analysis focuses on a number of inter-related questions about discursive production among religious progressives. First, what patterns can be discerned in how faith and a concern for structural inequality and social justice are integrated in talk? Second, how do these patterns serve to provide the necessary “transcendent talk” (Hart Reference Hart2001) to craft progressive discourses that move beyond the instrumental? What separates these discourses from the more individualistic, depoliticized discourses that many researchers have found in religious settings? Finally, what can this tell us about the relationship between talk and socio-political engagement more broadly?
METHODS
This article draws on a study of progressive religious groups in Chicago, Illinois and Seattle, Washington. I recruited groups with an eye toward diversity of faith tradition, demographics, and polity structure to capture a wide range of theological beliefs, practices, and experiences. The groups include six congregations, two nonprofit organizations, and two communes. The appendix at the end of this article provides descriptions of the groups referenced in the text. I conducted 86 interviews with participants across these organizations, along with ethno-graphic observations at each site.
What I observed varied as the different organizations participate in a wide range of activities. For the congregations, I attended services and social gatherings, along with participating in activist and volunteer work. With the non-profit organizations, I volunteered with projects and shadowed employees as they worked. I lived with one commune for three days, and went on two retreats with the other commune, along with participating in meetings and day-to-day activities with each of them. Depending on how frequently a group met, my ethnographic observations ranged in time from about 40 hours to several hundred hours per group. The observations aimed at assessing how the members of each group talked about the connections between faith and politics and actualized the meaning produced through these conversations in the social action. In an effort to broadly understand the groups' use of religious and political language, I compared how groups talked about these topics, as captured by my ethno-graphic research, with how they spoke in interviews. Additionally, I examined written documents from each group including newsletters and written histories to further assess the way they talked about religion and politics.
To analyze the data for this article, I performed an initial round of open coding on my interview and field notes, focusing on instances that specifically involved talk about faith and politics; typically talk about social justice given the progressive inclination of the observed groups. Next, I coded these sections for how participants talked about the connection between religion and their justice-oriented political beliefs. Two key patterns emerged: (1) talk that presented faith and justice as everyday behavior, simply the “living out” of one's beliefs; and (2) talk that presented faith and justice as radical, representing a spiritual call to deconstruct systems of oppression or live in a counter-cultural way. In the data below, I draw on quotes that are broadly representative of what participants said in my conversations with them, as well as illustrative ethnographic examples to explain and analyze these patterns.
INTEGRATING FAITH AND SOCIAL JUSTICE THROUGH TALK
By integrating talk about religion and social justice, what I will call “faith/justice talk,” participants sacralized their socio-political understandings of the world in ways that resonated with both their progressive and religious identities. The faith/justice talk among the groups I studied are clustered around two poles that represent the ends of a continuum organizing how talk about faith and justice were integrated among the groups and individuals I examined. At one pole is talk that focused on personal morality, integrating religion and politics by stressing that one must “live out” one's justice-oriented beliefs through everyday practice. This manifested as talk about treating people fairly, serving your community, and embodying the beliefs of your faith tradition in daily practice.
The other pole represented structural critiques of society. Talk at this pole integrated faith and justice in ways that were radical, counter-cultural, or critical. When speaking in these terms, participants drew on their faith traditions to critique social structures and arrangements, envision alternative forms of social organization, and make connections between theory and practice. These understandings often pulled from wider discourses about social justice and radical politics, interrogating power and inequality in the process (see, Edles Reference Edles2013).
These two poles do not signify a typology of groups or individuals, but rather characterize the primary ways that people I observed talked about the integration of faith and politics. In actuality, groups and individuals often moved back and forth between these two poles with relative ease, talking in ways that promoted both personal morality and structural critique. Participants understood the interplay of the two poles as generative of faith-based, politico-moral action, connected by a belief that being a person of faith represented both a call to be personally righteous and to challenge to systemic inequality. Below, I will first discuss talk about personal morality then turn to examining talk that presented a more radical, faith-based critique of society. Finally, I will show how these two forms of talk bridged in conversations at the groups, providing them with faith-based understandings of how progressive people of faith were to live out their religion.
Talk About Personal Morality
When I was young, I was wounded by not seeing my body represented on the altar, by not hearing my voice resounding from the pulpit. As a woman and a Roman Catholic priest, I've encountered my share of disappointments, and sometimes it's easy to give in to fear. But then I think of Mary. Mary was just an ordinary woman who said “yes” when called by God to serve. And as a Roman Catholic woman priest, Mary's “yes” fills me with hope (Elaine, a woman priest giving a sermon at Dignity/Chicago).
Many religions provide guidelines for proper conduct which, when combined with understandings of social justice, delineate everyday politico-moral behavior for adherents. In faith/justice talk focused on personal morality, participants used religion to discuss correct behavior, stressing being a “good person” by treating people fairly and equally. In the sermon quoted above, Reverend Elaine of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT)-identified Catholic community Dignity/Chicago (D/C) presents Mary as a role model for women answering God's call. This was one of the three ways that faith and justice were integrated through talk about personal morality. The three ways I observed are: (1) using religious figures as role-models, (2) drawing on particular religious concepts and languages to sacralize behavior, and (3) presenting understandings of God as fair and equitable.
Religious Figures as Progressive Role-Models
Participants across the observed groups discussed a variety of religious figures as role-models for proper socio-moral behavior. For example, Jen, a member of the Mennonite commune and peace-church Reba Place Fellowship (RPF), said that part of what attracted her to the group was the idea living communally would push her toward being more “Christ-like,” adding “I think Jesus lived out a life of being very compassionate towards the poor and I wanted to live like Jesus did … To me, if you really love people you share with them and you want to be equal with them.” Likewise, Maria, who works at the Christian homeless shelter Cornerstone Community Outreach (CCO), similarly presented Christ as an example of how to love people in one's daily life.
You can't look at people like they this dirty thing, let me try to care about you from a distance … Like, Jesus, when he realized that things were messed up, when somebody had this bad lifestyle, or whatever, that's when he was, like … hanging out with them all the time. Teaching them stuff and lovin’ on them … and that's the reason that Cornerstone is different from the other shelters, because we are Christian.
In both of these examples, Jesus is invoked as a model of right behavior. Jen's understanding of herself as someone who wants to live like Jesus did provides her with a language to connect her Christianity and her justice-oriented beliefs with her communal practices in a peace-oriented commune, while Maria's work at her Christian homeless shelter is explained through presenting Christ as someone who would treat marginalized people with kindness. As such, both women integrate faith and justice in their talk through discussing Christ as an exemplar of righteous behavior who acts as a moral standard for Christians seeking to promote social equality in day-to-day interactions with others.
Participants would also evoke particular religious exemplars that they personally knew (or knew of) as models for moral behavior. For example, Rabbi Elliot of the LGBT-identified Jewish congregation Welcome and Shalom Synagogue (WSS) couched his understanding of faith and justice in observing other clergy, including the clergy he grew up with as a young man. While we were talking about his progressive political beliefs he said
[my beliefs come from] seeing other clergy, Rabbis and others, for whom this was just part of what you do … I mean, at least 36 times the Torah says “You must not oppress the stranger” … So how can you read that and just say, well, you know, I've got mine, so that's all I care about. That doesn't seem left-wing, that just seems, like, human to me.
Carl, a member of D/C, made a statement similar to Rabbi Elliot's, saying that the women religious who taught him inspired him, especially in the context of wider political struggles.
It was the beginning of the civil rights era, things were starting to become very different in our society and [Catholics] were taught to live purposeful lives. We had women religious who taught us and I was very influenced by a couple of them who were very much about serving the poor, you should be out serving causes that had need.
In these examples, Carl and Elliot suggest that, through being in settings where they learned from religious role-models, they were able to make discursive connections between their faith and justice-oriented concerns. Notably, both men talk about these activities as “just what you do” to live a “purposeful life.” Neither interviewee uses these examples to make structural critiques, although they are both capable of such analyses and did use that language elsewhere in my conversations with them. Rather, in these examples, Carl and Elliot both talk about role-models for whom everyday, justice-oriented behavior is a normal part of living a moral life, something that resonates with their understanding of themselves as Jewish and Catholic, respectively.
Religious Languages and Concepts Used to Sacralize Behavior
Many participants drew on religious concepts to sacralize particular moral behaviors. The most common example of this was the use of the phrase tikkun olam by Jewish respondents (see, Putnam and Campbell Reference Putnam and Campbell2010, 344). Tikkun olam means repairing the world, and many of the Jewish participants I interviewed specifically referenced this phrase and interpreted as a sacred call to social action and volunteer work. Here is Sandra, a member of WSS, discussing the concept:
For a Jew, if anything exists in the world that is unjust, you're supposed to do something about it … That concept is called tikkun olam, which means repair of the world … I think, for instance, for a concrete goal, it would be very nice to get to full equal rights for gays and lesbians, because I don't see why that should not be. I can't help but feel that if I talk to enough people for long enough and if other people talk to enough people for long enough, eventually, everyone will come around to seeing that it will not be the end of the world if the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or questioning folks down the street or across the hall from you have the same rights.
In a similar vein, one member of multi-racial congregation Neighborhood Church (NC) cited the “great commission,” which admonishes Christians to make followers of the people of “all nations,” as the impetus behind the congregation's commitment to multi-cultural and multi-racial worship. While acknowledging that many Christians see it as a call for conversion, she argued the commission was more productively understood as promoting diverse in faith communities. In both of these examples, a specific religious phrase or concept is interpreted as sacralizing particular kinds of politico-moral behavior. To use the tikkun olam example, Sandra suggests that, as a Jew, she must follow the command to repair the world. As a progressive, she interprets this as a call for greater equality and talks about the concept as the reason she speaks to others about LGBT rights. This interpretation suggests a faith-based understanding of how to act and speak in the world, embedding ideas about justice in everyday language.
Understanding God as Fair and Equitable
The third way that participants integrated faith with personal morality in their talk was through discussing God as fair and equitable. Participants discussed God as viewing all people as equal, sacralizing nondiscriminatory and just behavior. For example, while talking about her belief that same-sex marriage should be legal, RPF member Kimberly said
If you are gay … you are as much a child of God as I [am]. I am allowed to have a loving marriage, why should you be denied of that, and why are we partaking in that? Like, I don't know, it's unfair.
Here, Kimberly presents an “everyday theology” (Moon Reference Moon2004) that discursively connects the idea that all people are equally “children of God” with the notion that it is unfair for her to have a marriage while others cannot. Similarly, Alice, of D/C, described God by saying
I think God's spirit of intention is good, inclusive … if we had a circle of somebody from [the] Islamic faith and a Buddhist and a Jew and a Christian, I don't think God would be more or less for any one of those four people.
Both Kimberly and Alice suggest that all people are equal before God, delineating, through their talk, proper understandings for how people should think and act with regard to how they view and treat other people if they want to act as a Christian.
Understanding God as desiring a just world led several of my participants to discuss proper behaviors with regard to communicating with others, especially those who are unlike you. For example, here is Tom, from NC, talking about how the congregation brings members together after services to talk about their ideological differences:
That is a good model for living in a world where there are different people with different points of view. There is the conservative Christian and the liberal Christian and the non-Christian. And people, God calls us to live together and love each other, and so doing that, like someone who is pro-life sitting down and loving someone who is pro-choice, or vice versa, is a good practice.
In this example, Tom suggests that to identify as a Christian means living with and loving others, embodied through the everyday practice of creating pluralistic spaces where people with different points of view can openly communicate. Tom both sacralizes an understanding of pluralism and equity in this statement as well as denotes a particular practice that embeds this belief in everyday Christian talk.
In all of these examples, we see faith and justice integrated in talk about everyday morality. Participants spoke in ways that drew lines of connection between everyday commitments to fairness, equity, and pluralism to their identification with their faith traditions. Typical ways this manifested involved discussing religious figures as role-models, drawing on religious beliefs to sacralize particular moral viewpoints and actions, and presenting God as equitable and fair, calling us to “love each other,” as Tom suggests. Yet, a progressive politics that focuses exclusively on the everyday lacks a key, structural component that allows for wider social critique (Hart Reference Hart2001). While religious individuals and groups have often been understood as lacking a language to discuss structural inequality because of their focus on personal morality, the progressive religious groups and individuals I examined were often comfortable shifting back and forth between languages of personal morality and more critical discourses.
Talk Focused on a Critique of Structural Inequality
Christ's triumphant entrance was on a donkey, not a warhorse, because he came to bring peace. When Christ centers the foreigner and the eunuch, he makes us in the Church think about who we leave out. Christ centered those on the margins … but the Church wants to kill the illegal immigrant, to kill the gender nonconformist, and to kill the feminist … Christ came on a donkey, but empire, and the Church, too often come on a warhorse. (Gary, a member of Neighborhood Church, giving a sermon on Palm Sunday.)
Despite casual assertions that “talk is cheap,” language can be disruptive, challenging, and destabilizing. By linking religion to counter-cultural, radical, or anti-systemic discourses, talk serves to create faith-based understandings of how to interrogate power in the name of social justice. In the sermon above, Gary uses the story of Palm Sunday to present a radical critique of inequality, the Church (writ-large), and U.S. hegemony (“empire”). This sermon represents both of the ways that faith/justice talk critiquing structural inequality manifested in interviews and observations: (1) using religious language to interrogate power and inequality, and (2) stressing the radical, counter-cultural elements of religion.
Using Religious Language to Interrogate Power and Inequality
Many of the participants used language that emerges from critical, left-wing discourses to talk about structural inequality. Participants discussed “white racism” and the “white power structure,” discrimination in the justice system, “empire” and “hegemony,” “misogyny” and “homophobia,” and a host of other inequities, suggesting critical takes on power and oppression. Also, like Gary, participants integrated these critiques with religious language. As an example of how religious narratives can serve as systemic critiques, here is Cliff, an employee at CCO, using the story of Christ to discuss contemporary inequality.
Jesus, today, would be concerned about … the whole prison structure [and] the whole war on drugs … They are going to lock up young black men, not lock up young white men [for] marijuana, or even crack, or whatever, because the [laws today] have been made just like the laws in New Testament. They suit some people, and they don't suit others … When [Jesus] would be, like, healing people on the Sabbath, they'd say “you can't heal people on the Sabbath,” you know? It's, like, here are these laws which they can make to bring about their form of justice or law or finance or whatever they want to do.
In this example, Cliff discusses Christ as an oppressed figure, subject to unjust laws and standing in opposition to the power brokers of his day, to suggest that Jesus would be critical of contemporary inequities in the prison system and war on drugs. This telling envisions the story of Christ as a sacred narrative of justice, directly applicable to contemporary struggles for social justice.
As another example, members of WSS often used the Purim spiel to critically comment on contemporary politics. Purim is a Jewish holiday that celebrates the story of Queen Esther, who rescued the Jews of the province of Shushan from genocide. The spiel is a comedic play presented in synagogues at the Purim celebration, written by a member of the community and performed by the congregants, that typically retells the story of Esther as a satire of current events. At one Purim spiel I attended at WSS, the villain of the story was recast as libertarian icon Ayn Rand (played by the synagogue's Rabbi Elliot in drag). Rand's goal was to relocate all of Shushan's poor to a tower she would then demolish in what she claimed was an “Objectivist solution to the problem of poverty.” When Esther uncovers Rand's plot, she instigates an “Occupy Shushan” movement to counter her. When this climactic moment in the spiel arrived, the stage was filled with WSS members holding protest signs and chanting “we are the 99%,” foiling Rand's plan. The spiel represents the public stating of an understanding that members of WSS shared: that being LGBT and Jewish are marginal positions, meaning that they had an obligation to support other stigmatized groups. For example, one member, Alan, commented
because we have been through so much hatred and so much anti-Semitism from almost the day that Moses came off the mountain … I think that there is almost, like, an inbred empathy within our DNA that says … you need to, kind of, look at that underdog … and I just don't think that you can divorce that from Judaism. I really think that we were commanded from day one.
In both this example and the example of Cliff from CCO above, faith-based narratives are integrated with rhetoric about structural inequality and the fight for social justice, bringing those inequities into the sacred cosmos of the participants.
Stressing the Radical and Counter-cultural Elements of Religion
For many I spoke with, faith was a call to live outside the boundaries of society, following a higher, sacred set of norms and values that often stood in contradiction to the norms and values of a corrupt culture. While this is a common narrative among conservative U.S. Christians, who assert that the nation is awash in a sea of permissive morality, the progressive religious groups I observed understood our culture as debased in different ways. They proposed, instead, that U.S. culture generates rampant greed, rapacious environmental degradation, and paranoid individuality. Religion, at its best, promotes “radical hospitality” and “the beloved community” against these sins. For example, here is Alana, who works at CCO, talking about Christ as a radical and Christianity as a counter-cultural movement:
Jesus is so incredibly perfect for counterculture people, because his whole ministry was to … outcasts of society. So when you look at him you can really sort of see him as the most punk rock of any person to ever walk the face of the earth … I think in conservative Christianity and in mainstream America it is more about individualism … American society has set up this world of perfect people who go to college and do everything right and play sports and all these things that we praise in our society, and then there is this other group of underlings [and] all they want in their life is community.
Alana presents a typical understanding of how Christ connects to faith communities for many of my respondents. Jesus is understood as someone who stood against the authority figures of his society. This is presented as a corollary to standing against the individuality of current “conservative Christianity” and “mainstream America” in Alana's interpretation of Christ.
Members of Emerald City Metropolitan Community Church (ECMCC), an LGBT-identified congregation in Seattle, Washington, often presented a similar articulation of radical and counter-cultural faith. At ECMCC, the community typically has a member of the group bless the Eucharist and lets them say a few words as they do so. At one service, Billy, a transgender member of ECMCC, performed this ritual by telling the story of the first communion as follows, recreated from my fieldnotes:
Billy said that blood and flesh, the symbols of the Eucharist, mean something specific to LGBT people. To LGBT people, blood is dirty. It is contaminated. It means AIDS. It means death. Flesh, meanwhile, is sinful. What conservative Christians use to stigmatize them — the “sins of the flesh.” But Christ was being transgressive and radical when he said “take this flesh” and “take this blood” to his disciples, because in Christ's day, blood and flesh were thought of as unclean. Christ symbolically subverting blood and flesh into something sacred, just as LGBT people can now take the symbols of blood and flesh and make them into something beautiful by participating together in the Eucharist, something many would deny them of.
Billy creatively draws on the idea of “blood and flesh” in this blessing, presenting Christ as a dissident figure in his time through his subverting of symbols. This retelling provides the space for a radical and queered understanding of contemporary Christianity. Billy's rhetoric asserts that when LGBT Christians, such as the members of ECMCC, participate in the Eucharist they are being Christ-like by challenging oppressive, contemporary understandings of “flesh and blood,” just as Jesus did at the last supper.
In the above examples, participants presented faith/justice talk that critiques structural power and challenges the prevailing norms and systems of society, suggesting that religious people are tasked with answering to a higher call to follow the tenets of their faith, not the values of society. These examples, however, are not exclusively structural critiques. Rather, they represent assertions that religious persons must live in specific ways to challenge the current system. This included talking about living counter-culturally or challenging injustice through one's actions. In fact, participants tended to move back and forth between both structural critique and personal calls for moral behavior in their faith/justice talk with relative ease, and through this use of both everyday and radical faith/justice talk, constructed understandings of how they are their communities could collectively act as progressives of faith.
Bridging Structural Critique and Personal Morality to Create Pathways to Action
For the participants of this study, integrating faith-based language with discourses about social justice served as a bridge to connect the personal morality of everyday life they felt called to enact as people of faith and the structural critique of radical politics that resonated with them as progressives. They typically arrived at these ideas through participating in social spaces where these connections were made and actualized in both public and private talk. Learning these integrated discourses tended to resonate with their various identities, both as people of faith and as people with specific identities or political points of view, thus giving them an understanding of how someone like them should behave.
As an example, Diana, the pastor of African Methodist Episcopal (AME) congregation Mind, Body, Soul Church (MBSC), suggested that learning about the history and theology of the Black Church as a student gave her a deeper understanding of the struggle for civil rights. In Diana's words, hearing the story of how Richard Allen, the founder of AME, faced racism in white churches “resonates in her spirit” as an African-American. This experience led her to become a pastor because she “wanted to be a part of the movement where [she can say] ‘you are welcome here no matter who you are.’” Drawing on the Black Church tradition, she explicitly brings a concern with connecting languages of prophetic critique and everyday morality into her preaching, saying
My task [is] to bring that Word alive in meaningful ways, so you see … how we're supposed to apply it to our daily lives. I consider my witness prophetic in the sense that it is one that challenges and pushes people to really think about how you're living your life … because there are consequences for those of us who know what's right and don't do right.
When I asked Diana to elaborate on how she personally puts these connections into practice, she gave two examples: going to local school board meetings to “fight for our members who are suffering” due to “institutional racism … in the school systems” and going to a hospital to sit with a member of the church who was dying. In these examples, Diana draws on language from both poles of faith/justice talk. She references emulating Richard Allen, a foundational figure of her denomination, while also sacralizing the fight against institutional racism and presenting a prophetic critique of inequality. These narratives appeal to her both as a person of faith as well as an African-American concerned with issues of social justice. For Diana, typical of my participants, there was no fine line between prophetic critiques of society and the everyday morality that a person of faith is expected to embody. Rather, through participation in religious spaces where progressive and faith-based languages were integrated, participants developed understandings that being religious requires a personal morality that stands in noncompliance with oppressive systems and created pathways to action that focused on what they could do in their everyday life to promote social justice.
The sermons I saw Pastor Diana preach reflected this viewpoint. For example, at one service, she evocatively suggested that the rich are climbing a slippery hill where they must step on others to ascend, and called the people of the church to put aside a concern for wealth and comfort so that they are not participating in these violent acts. These statements suggested proper ways of behaving to participants of the congregation. As an example of how such talk resonated with congregants, one Thursday morning I was volunteering with the congregation's soup kitchen and we had locked the door and began to pack up the food to close the kitchen. A few homeless men who occasionally came to eat at the kitchen knocked on the door and asked to be let in. The women who ran the kitchen initially declined, saying we were done for the day. Then, with visible unease at refusing the men, they discussed a recent sermon Pastor Diana gave about how the church should always, quite literally, open its doors to those who face oppression and changed their minds, inviting the men in and preparing some fresh food for them. We see, in this example, members of a church community understanding the discursive production of their faith community as motivating specific behavior towards those in need.
Similarly, Lizzie, who works at CCO, said that when she first came to the shelter she was more “judgmental” of the poor, but through talking to co-workers there and learning that “there is a tremendous amount of scriptural backing to take care of impoverished people,” she has concluded that justice can't be “a nice little theory in your mind but [must be] practically applied” in one's surroundings if you want to “live out your faith.” When I asked her what this meant in practice, she said it was important that shelter staff live in the same neighborhood as the shelter. “It's not like I work in this neighborhood and then I go to my nice, you know, ritzy apartment,” she said. “I live here too. So, it's like you recognize the people on the streets and you really have, like, a vested interest in it.” In this example, you see the importance of finding languages that allowed Lizzie to make connections between beliefs and action. Lizzie came to her understanding that she must actively serve the marginalized as well as live in community with them through conversation with her co-workers. Additionally, for this logic to resonate with her it required “scriptural backing,” allowing her to understand the actions as a Christian.
Members of NC also talked about learning languages that connected progressive politics to faith-based understandings, providing them with concrete pathways to action. NC's pastor, Wendy, told me that the experience of planting the church with a group of older Christians was formative on her because “there [were] all these conversations that we were having then that were … wonderful to be a part of because we were talking about what it means to be a church.” From these conversations, she learned that “their faith, it wasn't [just] a ‘belief’ thing, but was also a ‘living out’ thing.” Additionally, from participating in multi-racial worship at NC she has learned “a lot more about power dynamics … [from] those conversations around the dinner table.” She called the concentration of power in the hands of white people a “sin” and said “it's very important for white Americans to have that conversation [about power dynamics] with African Americans [and] Latinos and Native Peoples as well. That's where the injustice has happened.” Wendy and others at the church regularly spoke this way publicly during services and meetings. Recall Gary's sermon about Christ coming on a donkey, not a warhorse. One member of the church even told me she had begun reading left-wing economists even though she found them boring so she could better understand the sermons at NC. When I asked Wendy how the church puts these beliefs into practice, she told me a story about the murder of a young, African-American man immediately outside their church building. She contrasted the response from the local alderman to the response of NC to highlight their differences.
[The alderman] had this “positive loitering” thing … It was really important for the events that we organized as a church congregation that it be well represented in terms of black leaders and white leaders, that the crowd include the youth that were friends of one of the victims, the mother of the boy who was shot was present, because it was really important to us to say that … we stand against violence and we stand against the systems that lead to the violence, whether that's gangs or poverty … In order to do that, it's a pretty powerful signal who you have standing at the microphone to speak. The positive loitering event was very white. It was very much about getting rid of the people that we're afraid of … and that feels wrong to me.
In Wendy's statements we see that participation in NC provided her with concepts for connecting Christianity to left-wing politics that she has then used, along with her faith community, to construct collective action around violence and racism. Because her participation at NC has provided her with languages to understand inequality as a sin, she has led her church to be a part of organizing community activism that elevates black voices.
As a final example, members of RPF have traditionally “lived in solidarity with the poor” by intentionally subsisting at the poverty line. At one meeting of the community, however, several members asked if this was the most effective way to live their faith. Two members, Natasha and Pedro, took turns at the meeting giving a shared sermon about how the poor live under “Pharaoh's economy,” an economy where capitalism and violence bind and enslave the marginalized. To build “God's economy” on earth is not to spend little money, but to spend money ethically. Buying local and organic food, then sharing this food with their neighbors, they suggested, were ways for the community to enact God's economy. The community then debated these ideas, drawing on passages from scripture and concepts from the Mennonite tradition to discuss how to best combat food scarcity in their community. Once again, this example shows how power, stratification, and privilege are prophetically challenged through conversation that proposes that living outside of an oppressive system as a religious calling, sacralizing food justice and communal sharing by collectively talking about how progressive beliefs and everyday Christian practices are connected.
In the above understandings, the integration of left-wing structural critique with faith-based languages of personal morality creates a progressive religious discourse. The members discussed learning concepts, narratives, and interpretations through participation in their faith communities that connected their perceptions of what it means to be a person of faith and/or a progressive with how to act in the world in a moral way. This rhetoric suggests that one's personal behavior renders them either against oppressive systems or complicit with oppressive systems. In other words, power and inequality are not abstract structural forces but, rather, are either disrupted or recreated through our everyday behavior. As such, through their faith/justice talk, participants construct religious incentives to act in noncompliance with systems of power and inequality by presenting the issue as one of personal morality for people of faith. This provides them with concrete actions to take, both individually and collectively, which allow them to participate in specific kinds of progressive activism and civic engagement.
CONCLUSIONS
This article analyzed how progressive religious individuals and groups talked about their understanding of the connection between faith and politics. Returning to the questions posed above, I found a number of patterns in how faith and justice were integrated in talk. When focusing on personal morality, participants emulated religious role-models, drew on religious concepts, and presented God as fair and equitable, all in an effort to promote righteous moral behavior. When using faith/justice talk for structural critique, participants used religious narratives to challenge inequality and stressed the radical and counter-cultural elements of religion. While researchers have often found a distinction between liberals whose discourse tends to be instrumental yet lacking in moral transcendence and conservatives whose discourse contains the moral dimension yet is problematically individualized, this may be because research has often looked at groups that exist on the main ideological axis in our country. The progressive religious groups I examined for this work actively merged the moral and structural in their rhetoric. This is because progressive religious rhetoric provides a useful repertoire of discursive resources for talking about the connections between personal morality and structural inequality. The faith/justice talk presented above drew on both radical/counter-cultural discourses from both left-wing politics as well as from a variety of faith traditions as well as calls to personal morality, such as “repairing the world” and “living a purposeful life,” to weave together rich languages to talk about equality, rights, and power in both everyday practice and the wider arrangement of society. Participants suggested that these discourses shaped their understanding of what it means to be a person of faith, ultimately creating pathways to action focused on social justice.
Yet progressive religion is not wholly unique in its power to connect personal morality and structural critique. A key example of a discourse that has functioned in a similar way is feminism. Through consciousness raising groups and the suggestion that “the personal is political,” feminism has invited those who identify with it to examine their everyday experiences and behavior in light of wider structural inequality and transcendent ideals. Similarly, through talk, groups designate certain actions or behaviors “feminist,” bringing them into the realm of possible practice. The lesson, then, may be that the kind of “transcendent talk” that Hart (Reference Hart2001) suggests creates expansive discourses hinges on an ability to talk about the connections between personal experience and social structure. Through placing everyday behavior in the context of a wider system, transcendent talk both renders the systemic forces visible as well as provides pathways to action for individuals seeking to interrogate the inequality of the system. As Eliasoph (Reference Eliasoph1998) found, people often need to be “talked into” their beliefs. Our beliefs do not spring, fully formed, from our psyches, only then entering into our discourses. Rather, our discourses give form and weight to our beliefs, making them real. As such, while we often discuss religion and other ideologies as beliefs, it may be equally useful to think of them as discourses that allow users to make sense of the world through their production.
What can these findings tell us about the relationship between talk and socio-political engagement more broadly? As discussed above, contemporary work on culture, cognition, and social action stresses that culture represents both as widely shared meaning as well as internalized understandings of who we are, what we typically call identity in sociology (Vaisey Reference Vaisey2009). This work demonstrates how talk connects culture at the level of schemas and identities. Participants used discourses to make sense of how someone who identifies as they do (progressive, Christian, Jewish, queer, etc.) to wider understandings of politics and religion in our society, constructing pathways to action. To be a pastor of a Black Church is to embrace the tradition of the civil rights in the U.S. and both fight against structural inequality in the community as well as provide moral support for members of your congregation. To be a queer Christian is to act as Christ, subverting powerful symbols. To be a progressive Jew is to repair the world by speaking out about LGBT rights, and so on. While we often draw sharp lines of distinction between talk and action, the findings here blur that boundary. Talk creates the collective identities, categories of thought, and pathways to action that allow for socio-political engagement. In the above examples, we see how conversations that drew on theological ideas about the nature of faith sacralized particular behaviors, such as specific kinds of protest or community life. Through this, the participants rendered ideas and practices “religious” and, therefore potential courses of action for themselves and their faith communities. In other words, both individual and collective actions are not possible without discourses that render them sensible and meaningful to those undertaking them.
APPENDIX: COMMUNITIES REFERENCED IN THIS PAPER
Below, I detail the faith communities I reference in this paper. An asterisk next to the name of a community means that it is a pseudonym. While I had permission to use all groups' real names, I chose not to do so for groups that were less public or unconnected to national organizations to provide respondents with greater confidentiality.
-
• Cornerstone Community Outreach (CCO) is a Christian homeless shelter in Chicago, Illinois that houses both individuals and families. Initially founded in 1989, CCO houses over 400 individuals on site, not counting children, with an administrative staff of approximately 20 people.
-
• Dignity/Chicago (D/C) is an LGBT-identified Catholic organization that promotes LGBT inclusion and rights in both the Catholic Church and society. D/C was originally founded in 1972 and, today, conducts mass for about 20 worshipers each week, as well as organizes social events and protest actions.
-
• Emerald City Metropolitan Community Church (ECMCC) is an LGBT-identified non-denominational Christian congregation in Seattle, Washington that promotes civil rights for LGBT persons. They have been a member of the larger Metropolitan Community Church denomination for 40 years. ECMCC holds services for approximately 20–30 worshipers each week as well as organizes social and activist events.
-
• Neighborhood Church (NC) is a multi-racial and multi-cultural Christian congregation in Chicago averaging over 100 worshipers per service. They also perform neighborhood outreach and service, particularly in regard to immigrant and refugee communities.
-
• Mind, Body, and Soul Church (MBSC) is a Black Church in the African Methodist Episcopal tradition in Chicago. They conduct a weekly service for about 100 members and organize volunteer activities including a weekly soup kitchen.
-
• Reba Place Fellowship (RPF) is a communal Christian group of approximately 75 members, initially founded in 1957 near Chicago. The commune is involved in peace and anti-poverty work. Members of the community are also active in a number of non-profit and activist groups working on topics ranging from homeless to racism to environmentalism.
-
• Welcome and Shalom Synagogue (WSS) is an LGBT-identified Jewish congregation in Chicago. They have their own rabbi and perform a weekly Shabbat service for an average of about 25–30 members as well as organize social events, political action, and educational programs.
