If you missed part 1 of this discussion yesterday you can click here to watch the two brief videos I am discussing now in Part 2.
My primary interest yesterday was offering a critique of a typical, conservative Christian discussion of America’s problem with gun violence and mass shootings. A recent editorial on the Christian Broadcasting Network provides the standard bromides of personal piety, individual reformation, and godly parenting as the redemptive trifecta for cultural transformation in this country.
However, my second analysis is provided by Amy Spitalnick on Democracy Now. Ms. Spitalnick offers a different perspective on changing society by tackling the systemic issues that perpetuate the status quo.
For example, she began an organization which sued the leaders of the various
white supremacist organizations that participated in the 2017 “Unite the Right” in Charlottesville, VA which resulted in the murder of Heather Heyer, who was deliberately run over by a car.
Ms. Spitalnick’s organization won over $26 million in damages and succeeded in bankrupting the Nazi organizations involved. Her focus was not on changing people’s hearts or minds, though that may have happened too, but on crippling or eliminating the power blocks — groups, organizations, clubs, networks of people — who were carrying the banners of white replacement theory and chanting “Jews will not replace us.”
Her goal was to put the organizations responsible for fomenting Ms. Heyer’s
murder out of commission, and she succeeded.
Christians need to engage in these types of organizational efforts aimed at crippling the seats of power which perpetuate the social evils we believe are in need of correction.
The insistence of the Religious Right in making every social problem an exclusively individualistic issue that can only be addressed through evangelism and personal repentance has never made sense to me.
Folks, it IS possible to walk and chew gum at the same time. The proposed solutions need not be reduced to either/or alternatives. Christian can share
their faith, address the individual needs of broken, corrupted people, while also organizing to disrupt the power structures in our fallen society that harbor racism and white supremacy, simultaneously.
In fact, the conservative evangelical caricature of all social ills as exclusively individualistic diseases does not even describe their own work in these areas. For example, the imminent reversal of Roe vs. Wade is the direct result of evangelicals apply the same structural strategies as Ms. Spitalnick.
Anti-abortion protests are not what grabbed the Supreme Court’s attention. Rather, it was the long-term organizational work of coordinated fund raising and nation-wide litigation efforts, all aiming for the goal of getting anti-abortion cases before the Supreme Court on appeal.
And now that organizational and lobbying and prosecutorial work all appears to have paid off for the anti-abortion movement.
In his important book To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford, 2010), author James Davison Hunter convincingly argues that:
Without a fundamental restructuring of the institutions of culture formation and transmission in our society — the market, government-sponsored cultural institutions, education at all levels, advertising, entertainment, publishing, and the news media, not to mention church — revival would have a negligible long-term effect on the reconstitution of the culture. (46)
I believe that professor Hunter is absolutely correct.
So, why do evangelical activists continue to speak out of both sides of their mouths, organizing collectively on the one hand, while insisting that only individual transformations, one person at a time, will ever change the world, on the other?
In part, this schizophrenia reveals the long-term effects of fundamentalist revivalism in the American church. I recently wrote about the paradigmatic role of Dwight L. Moody in steering nineteenth century evangelicals away from political activism while focusing exclusively on personal piety.
That anti-systemic nihilism remains deeply embedded in the conservative, evangelical psyche.
Yet, at the same time, the Republican party turned evangelicals into the anti-abortion movement long ago, knowing that their alliance guaranteed the Republicans millions of guaranteed votes for the foreseeable future.
Beyond this dichotomy, I suspect that evangelical, big-business powerbrokers insist on offering old-fashioned, narrowly pietistic, reductionist solutions to every social ill because maintaining the capitalistic status quo is, finally, far more important to them than effectively reducing gun violence or marginalizing white supremacy.
Everyone has an agenda.
Sadly, for too many “Christians” that agenda does not prioritize the collective love of neighbor as much as it does keeping the powerful in power and the marginalized on the margins.
Waving magical Bible wands while repeatedly mumbling “prayer in public schools, prayer in public schools” is a sufficiently religious sop to keep the collective mind dulled and unthinking.
Enquiring minds won’t want to know because truly enquiring minds are made few and far between. Welcome to the world of the Christian Broadcasting Network.
May I suggest that you change stations and begin watching Democracy Now.
