The Relational Meeting as a Political and Religious Practice

ABSTRACT

Broad-based community organizing (BBCO) is about organizing the relationships and values of working people for greater democratic power in their communities. The best organizers that I've known and witnessed ground their power building in their own and their fellow leaders' sacred values. It is the relational meeting—and specifically when organizers seek to agitate others—where a tension between values and power building can erupt, and where the practice can be melded to ends of domination over others. The relational meeting and agitation need to be grounded in sacred values or else the practice becomes deformed and myopic. Couched in a democratic culture and grounded in sacred values, the practice of the relational meeting can be seen as a Christian practice wherein individual Christians narrate their own experience of suffering and loss together with others as they organize for greater democratic power.

KEYWORDS:

• Community organizing
• political theology
• religion and practice
• protests

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Sacred value, in the way I use the term, is a sort of evaluative attitude that might be most simply defined by a collection of qualities: We accord sacred value to those goods we take to be inviolable, objective, and intrinsically valuable.

2 In the literature on BBCO, those who have devoted chapters or stand-alone articles to the relational meeting include Chambers and Cowan. Roots for Radicals, chapter 2; Jacobsen, Doing Justice, chapter 7; Stout, Blessed Are the Organized, chapter 12; and Coles, “Moving Democracy”; others have mentioned the importance of one-on-ones but not extrapolated its practical role in the entire organizing process, those include Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy, see esp. 122–3; Hart, Cultural Dilemmas of Progressive Politics, 105–7; Osterman, Gathering Power, 44–6; Snarr, All You That Labor, esp. chapter 3; Warren, Dry Bones Rattling.

3 In the literature on BBCO by political theorists, Romand Coles is the best on “listening,” see his Coles, Visionary Pragmatism, esp. “Introduction.”

4 For more on the role of narrative identity construction in the BBCO organizing, see Oyakawa,“‘Turning Private Pain Into Public Action.’”

5 For more on the styles of organizing see, Braunstein, Prophets and Patriots.

6 On mastery, domination, and anti-blackness in the U.S., see Lloyd, “Human Dignity Is Black Dignity.”

7 For more on this sense of urgency in organizing, see Ganz, “Leading Change.”

8 Jordan, “Bearing Witness to Testimonies of Antiblackness.”

9 cf. McAlevey, No Shortcuts.

10 For more on this sense of counter-publics see Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere.”

11 Mary McClintock Fulkerson’s writing on the relations between church and organizing is helpful here. See, Fulkerson, “Receiving from the Other”: “Church, at its best, then, is about practices of community-in-process, offering opportunities for mutual honouring of one another as imago dei, of covenant, confession and forgiveness, and continued opportunities for change founded in ongoing hope,” 424.

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Aaron Stauffer

Aaron Stauffer is the Louisville Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at Vanderbilt University Divinity School, working primarily with the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School.