Waiting for a Glacier to Move

Practicing Social Witness

Ayres

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781621891048
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

When asked about his work for social change, one Presbyterian elder and activist sighed, You always have the feeling that you're attacking an iceberg with an ice pick.... But still, some people do listen, and it does some good. As they say, even glaciers move every now and then. The work for social change is long, arduous, and yields only the smallest of results. What sustains religious social activists while they chip away at social change? This book examines the practice of social activism from the inside out, exploring how activists are affected by their participation in the public sphere. Drawing on the fields of practice theory, social movement theory, and theologies of sin and hope, this book presents an interdisciplinary look at a complex phenomenon, and concludes with proposals for the nourishment of social activism within the church.

1

Introduction: Waiting for a Glacier to Move

On the second Tuesday of each month, 90-year-old Presbyter-ian elder Thurston Griggs gathers with a small group from Baltimore Presbytery and takes the 8:21 a.m. train from Baltimore’s Halethorpe station to the nation’s capital. The small band makes its way to the Presbyterian Office in the Methodist Building, right next to the Supreme Court. There, they are briefed on current legislative issues by denominational staff members before visiting the office of one of their legislators. The group, while small, is dedicated, some of them having attended these “Second Tuesday” briefing sessions and subsequent lobbying visits for more than a decade. Despite their commitment to these visits, members of the group do not have grandiose expectations. As Nelson Tharp, a regular Second Tuesday participant, describes it, “You’ve got a small group of dedicated people who are in there pitching, and a few people around the side that pay attention, and a lot of people who don’t even know there’s something going on. And so you always have the feeling that you’re attacking an iceberg with an ice pick . . . But still, some people do listen, and it does some good. As they say, even glaciers move every now and then.”

Waiting for a glacier to move, ice pick in hand, can be a frustrating experience. In light of these challenges, one might ask, what sustains religious social action in the absence of large-scale support or success? What keeps religious activists going? These same questions occurred to me on multiple occasions over the course of several years of working among Christian activists in peace and justice movements.

As a young seminarian, I was inspired and challenged by the stories of lifelong activists who never gave up on human rights, peace or justice. Some of them, like me, were Presbyterian. But as I tried to walk in the footsteps of these mentors in Christian faith and action, I regularly found myself feeling like something was missing. For a long time, I could not put my finger on it. To me, social activism felt a natural and right dimension of the Christian life; furthermore, these mentors, these inspiring leaders and grassroots workers, continually strengthened my conviction that this was so. The call to Christian social action seemed quite clear. What seemed less clear was how practices of social action are woven into the whole fabric of the Christian life. While I was intellectually convinced that social action is an essential component of the Christian life, in practice the relationship between social activism and Christian faith felt a bit strained. Sometimes, when we were deciding whether or how to act in response to broad categories of social injustice and suffering, we engaged in forms of theological discernment, seeking after God’s leading for the group. It seemed, though, as if theological reflection of any sort, whether it be seeking God’s guidance or reflecting upon the impact of social action upon theological knowledge, stopped once action began.

Another way to describe this phenomenon might be to say that, in most cases, theology appeared to operate as a mandate. It was as if God said, “Do it,” and it was up to us humans to determine how, for how long, using what resources, and by what standards we were to measure its success. Construed this way, social action is less a theological practice than a humanistic one with a theological mandate. As such, social action becomes disconnected from other religious practices. In some contexts, the disconnect between social action and other forms of Christian practice is so sharply felt that social action is all but absent from some Christian communities. In some cases, it is completely absent. Even among those communities who sustain practices of social action over long periods of time, the practice is marked by a high degree of fragility. That is, practices of social action sometimes falter or die out, or they are sustained only in small, dedicated groups.1

The aforementioned challenges faced in practices of Christian social action point to two issues: (1) social action, whether it be political, cultural or economic, is often considered to be only marginally related to the whole fabric of Christian life and practice; and (2) the very component that gives the practice much of its religious character, theological reflection, is regularly missing or else relegated to a particular chronological moment in the life of the practice. These two issues are interrelated, and the whole tapestry of the Christian life as well as the thread of social action can be mutually strengthened by concentrated attention to the relationship between them. The relationship can be deepened and made more explicit through an intentional and sustained process of theological reflection within the context of Christian practices of social action. As the practice stands now, such theological reflection is rare. Stated more directly, the thesis of this project is: since explicit theological reflection is a central component in Christian social witness practice, the strengthening of that component can equip practitioners to flourish in the face of fatigue, disappointment, and even perceived irrelevance. When the standards of excellence by which practitioners measure the benefit of social witness practice are informed by intentional theological reflection, characterized by a consciousness of sin and hope, participants can enter more deeply into the practice.

Above, readers will notice a shift in my language, from describing the practice as “social action” to describing it as “social witness.” This choice of terminology again points to the theological questions at the root of the project. Insofar as this book is an exercise in Reformed practical theology, one important theological assumption guiding its direction must be laid bare. In pursuing the theological character of social witness, on the whole, and the role of theological reflection within the practice of social witness, in particular, I mean to speak of the ways in which practitioners understand social witness to be practiced within the context of the divine-human relationship. Particularly in the modes of theological reflection that I propose at the end of this book, a Reformed and feminist practical theology of social witness always keeps before us the deeply embedded desire to know the heart of God and seek after it.

To call the practice a “witness” in relation to biblical literature further makes explicit its theological dimension. In New Testament Greek, μαρτυρεω means “to bear witness,” particularly with regard to “the truth.”2 Witness relates to “testimony” in the judicial sense, in that those bearing witness testify to that which they have seen. Especially in the gospels, we find repeated commands to the earliest followers of Jesus that they “bear witness” to what they had seen and come to know through their relationship with Jesus. In contemporary American religious discourse, “witness” often is associated with one-on-one evangelism, insofar as believers may personally testify to their experience of faith, bearing witness to their personal encounters with God. We might describe this kind of testimony as “personal witness.” But Christian testimony is not only personal: it also has public and political dimensions. When Christians are called to bear witness to God’s activity in the world, they are called to testify to a radical alternative vision of human community, based in theological conceptions of hope, justice, and peace. The social theological implications of this alternative vision of human community form the core of what can be described as “social witness.” Social witness is practiced in response to, and in light of, the eudaimonia intended by God for the world and the new life promised to us in baptism.

Eudaimonia, or human flourishing, is constituted not only by physical health, but also by moral agency, education, religious freedom, and cultural development. Eudaimonia can be characterized as the state in which all persons participate fully in all aspects of society: educational, economic, cultural, vocational, political, familial, and spiritual. Finally, eudaimonia bears within it an inherently social telos, in that it entails cooperation for the common good.3 Eudaimonia is the well-being of the whole person, in relationship to others and to the earth. John deGruchy has written about human well-being:

Becoming more human has to do with the development of our capacity to love, to trust, to forgive, and to be angry when it is right to be so, even if these are expressed in ways that are different. Alongside these is the deepening of the capacity to imagine, to experience awe, to sense injustice, to recognize beauty, to distinguish wisdom from knowledge, to discover joy, to laugh, to live responsibly, and to risk vulnerability. Human well-being has to do with the development of such human capacities in each person in ways that are appropriate to that person, ways that enrich life, enable self-worth, health, restore and promote mental and bodily health, and develop a sense of connectedness to the earth.4

DeGruchy’s description of becoming more human helps us to imagine an alternative future in which persons can flourish, both personally and corporately, and in which all can contribute to the building of the common good.

Simultaneous to this witness to God’s intention for human community is a witness to all that is wrong in the world: the reality of social dynamics of sin and injustice which serve both to cause suffering and to restrain Christian action in the face of such suffering. What is to be done in response to this chasm between hope and sin? Social witness is the prophetic practice that expresses the hope of new life and just community as well as the rejection of sin and evil. Social witness requires vision to see clearly the good and impediments to the good. It also requires voice to articulate what one has seen, just as judicial witness requires an accurate recollection of events as well as a willingness to articulate clearly those recollections. Christians stand in two realities: the world as it is and the alternative world God intends. In relation to this context, we might define social witness as the prophetic practice in which persons or communities explicitly and intentionally confront social and political systems that inhibit eudaimonia, with a stated goal of changing these systems, in the interest of forming a more just and empowering context for human living.5

This definition is descriptive, in that it helps us to name social witness when we see it. As I have defined it, social witness bears an explicitly theological, collective, structural, and political character. In this project, social witness practice is distinguished from acts of charity in its intentionality in confronting the political and economic structures that issue in the suffering addressed in service ministries. Clearly, the distinction should not be made too sharply, as there is much overlap and a symbiotic relationship between practices like serving the homeless and confronting the systems that perpetuate homelessness. While this distinction is somewhat artificial, it does serve to specify exactly what kind of practice we are talking about: explicit and intentional confrontations of harmful social and economic structures.6

We find examples of social witness being practiced in a number of communities, with varying degrees of vitality. Such witness is sometimes practiced with theological intentionality and commitment and is sustained over a long period of time. In some other cases, the practice is more fragile and less sustainable. In order to understand how social witness “works,” and what might enable it to flourish, the argument that follows is inherently interdisciplinary in character and method, consulting a range of theoretical, theological, and empirical sources. The study of any Christian practice, when done thoroughly, involves consulting a wide range of sociological and philosophical theories, theologies, and lived experience. Within contemporary practical theological discourse, this kind of interdisciplinary research is increasingly common, evidence of a growing recognition that philosophical, sociological, ethical, and ethnographic insights contribute to more complex and vibrant understandings of Christian practices. This complexity stands in marked contrast to more simplistic methods of studying practice...