Resistance Strategies

Would that it were true that, as Ryan said, “Catholic social teaching is indispensable for officeholders”; Mitt Romney’s description of Ryan’s budget as “marvelous” would no longer be ludicrous.

Recent analyses of religion in the 99% Movement tend to begin with a focus simply on pluralism, asking how diverse forms of religious transcendence—particularly in justice-minded congregations—have aligned themselves with the still-growing wave of Occupations. But the intimacy of life in a park or along a sidewalk is causing traditions to do something more than “coexist” plurally. Religions are colluding and combining.

Yes, your colleagues would laugh if you went out to protest. Marie Antoinette laughed too, until she found herself smiling up from the bottom of a wicker basket.

If I were CEO of Trinity Wall Street, I’d be alarmed at the idea of the “unspecified use” apparently demanded by the OWS protesters. But, of course, Trinity Wall Street does not have a CEO, it has ministers.

The Times managed to find a Gandhi scholar who would argue that the greatest hero of radical resistance would endorse the critics of Occupy Wall Street.

Thursday morning a dozen occupiers addressed forty or so clergy. We clergy were all somewhat skeptical of the demand for public space. You could hear the ministerial, rabbinical hrumph, hrumph in the room. (Most of us had never occupied Zucotti Park and a downward trend in temperature wasn’t going to improve on that.) But the occupiers edged toward the theological as they articulated a need for communal, inspirational, face-to-face contact in which they could “appear” to one another.

People love to stay immune from the connections between the sacred and the profane, holy space and “regular” space, tented space and the well-appointed space of a mansion. They try to tell us that politics and religion never meet. Or that money is “dirty” and therefore can get away with its meanness. Deliverance from these false dichotomies is our greatest need as a country. Money is holy and just and good when used for holy and just and good purposes. It is not “dirty” and therefore the property of those naughty boys of Wall Street.

Makana weighed, in an instant, the pros and cons of pissing off the president and possibly torpedoing a flourishing career. Sure, he’s unlikely to be invited to entertain Obama and friends anytime soon, but no one’s dragged him by the hair to the ground, “ nudged” him with a nightstick, or pepper sprayed him at close range. He’s certainly mindful of the difference between his stage and that of the protesters, but Makana sees the same spirit of aloha—a spirituality lost, like so many Hawai’ian protest songs, on many outsiders—as animating even angry dissent with love.

In order to restore meaning to the ideas of freedom and community, Rev. Billy exposes their current bankruptcy through a “religious” performance drawn from institutional, theatrical, and cultural realms. But make no mistake, it is real.

Author/activist Bill McKibben led this past weekend’s encirclement of the White House urging the the Obama Administration to block construction of a 1,700-mile pipeline to transport tar sands oil from Alberta to the Gulf. As McKibben savored a new protest-triggered State Department inquiry into a too-cozy environmental review process related to the pipeline, contributing editor Peter Laarman caught up with him on some religious dimensions of climate-change activism.