Rhetoric Race and Religion
Like the authors of Occupy Religion: Theology of the Multitude, I find in many of my encounters with U.S. Christian communities the assumption that Christianity is clean, comforting, friendly, moderately well-off, and capable of making the world a better place by giving some aid to people in need. Like the authors, I find the vitality of faith in communities where the gospel has led people into a more costly, less certain, more joyous form of life together. I sympathize with the authors’ work to call attention to God’s presence with people in their struggle and to a church that is a diverse community of people engaged in that struggle. Like them, I see in the Occupy movement an invitation and challenge to Christian communities. And like them, I work to understand “the ways religious sentiments and concepts have been used to reinforce . . . domination” (62). My own work on the history of Christian “stewardship” attempts to address this very problem.1
But for all that, I disagree with the authors’ analysis of what has gone wrong and with their agenda for addressing it. Though I share their conviction that theology matters, I hold that its crucial task—for the good of all—is quite other than what the authors propose.
The authors of Occupy Religion argue that “theology is not a luxury, but finds itself at the heart of efforts to present alternative ways and solutions” (58). Theology’s role is two-fold: first, to address “the ways that religious sentiments and concepts have been used to reinforce . . . domination” (62); second, to promote understandings of power as bottom-up and of the Other as honored collaborator, by giving accounts of God that support those values so that social life may be organized around such a vision. They engage certain questions of Christian theology, but their focus is on promoting among all people an understanding of power and difference that will support the struggle of the multitude. “Our project is not reconciling different notions of divinity, whatever they may be, but reimagining divinity in all religions” (90). While they expect their account of God to be new to most people, they also hold that for the Occupy movement’s 99 percent, religion matters as “a multiplicity of popular traditions that preach not only concern for the least of these but also a reversal and broadening of power, which moves from the bottom up, so that all can participate in the production of life” (28).
Theology, then, matters because different accounts of God’s power are at work in the world, some that perpetuate oppression and some that recognize and encourage pluralistic, widely-distributed, creative power for the multitude. Theology that is faithful to the best of what humans have learned about God will speak of a God who is present in the struggle. The authors focus on Christianity, presumably because it is their tradition and the faith most commonly appealed to in the US. It is a major part of the problem; it could be a major part of better solutions. Their concern is not doctrine set in the past, particularly when that past has included many examples of God’s name being used to justify oppression. What matters is a practical, diverse, open-ended, shared struggle for a new society.
Rieger and Kwok identify their theological enemy as “status quo” or “mainline” theologies. “The deepest problem of our most common images of God, supported by conservatives and liberals alike, is that images of the divine as omnipotent, impassible, and immutable tend to mirror the dominant power that be, from ancient emperors to modern CEOs” (88). This belief in and adoration of top-down power is a key to an oppressive symbol system, as they see it. They do not cite any specific present-day authors who are responsible for promoting this view, perhaps because they take it to be “virtually omnipresent” (96). But the generality of the claim leaves me wondering: who is promoting this view and how? Who accepts it and why?
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