God Dissolves into the Occupy Movement

[rug]

A Revealing Roundtable on the Role of Religion in the Occupy Movement

October 16, 2011
By Anthea Butler, Elizabeth Drescher, Peter Laarman, Sarah Posner and Nathan Schneider

Saturday’s surge of Occupy actions around the globe could be a turning point, a hinge moment, as occupiers in over a hundred American cities feel the power of worldwide welcome and affirmation. There is obviously more to be felt and said about this than any journalistic treatment could hope to engage; one senses in many recent commentaries the strain of needing to say more and not quite having the words. Over the course of a couple of days, four senior RD contributors, moderated by RD Senior Editor Sarah Posner, shared their own thoughts about a movement that remains fluid and thrilling—and quite literally indescribable.

Anthea, Last week you published a wonderful remembrance of the life of the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, in which you wrote, “his wasn’t a weak, wimpy faith, but a fiery righteousness that seared all untruths in its path.” That seems to capture the subversive fervor that so far has been the image of OWS.

But video footage from Occupy Atlanta, in which the group is shown rejecting an offer from civil rights legend and Congressman John Lewis to speak, depicts instead a sacralizing of process over just about everything else—history, respect, political savvy, common decency—a kind of blasphemy, if you will. Sure, this is one Occupy group, and doesn’t represent all of them, but do you think the devotion to the process of decision-making by consensus can undermine the spontaneity and potency of spiritual inspiration?

AB: I happened to see the clip of the #Occupy Atlanta Incident over the weekend, and I spent a considerable hour in my Twitter timeline ranting about how John Lewis had been treated. Since then, someone on Twitter tried to engage me about how it was all a “mistake” and that Lewis had been invited back. Joan Walsh wrote a piece in Salon explaining why it was, despite appearances, appropriate.

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/5268/god_dissolves_into_the_occupy_movement/

[ret5hd]

1. If god was interested, he could fix this mess today.

By his inaction, i have to assume at least a disinterest in the situation.

[rug]

3. Assumptions are unreliable.

[Kennah]

10. I find faith equally unreliable, if not moreso.

[rug]

12. Doesn't make assumptions any more reliable.

Thanks for the non sequitur.

[Kennah]

19. There's usually some sort of empirical observation behind an assumption

[Thats my opinion]

20. Ask your religion teacher to return your tuition

No thoughtful religious person has held that view for a long time. God is not a tinkerer who fixes things we have broken..

[cleanhippie]

24. Wow. For someone who compains that R&T is nothing but insults, you sure do insult a lot.

Blatant hypocrisy.

[trotsky]

27. You are amazingly out of touch with what the typical American Christian believes.

Or perhaps just in denial?

[David Sky]

2. I DO start getting a bit frustrated when positive advances in the course of

human events, when actions take on a worldwide significance, the religious thinkers and writers show up and try to interpret the events as being all about THEIR religious beliefs, and all about THEM!

I don't recall religious leaders, writers and folks by the hundreds of thousands protesting the bank bailouts nor the economic injustices worldwide either. Few if any of the occupy movement, dozens, not tens ofthousands, are identifying with their religion on those streets. Sort of like how silent most churches were about slavery or segregation way back when.

Now it's a "religious" event? And GOD, himself is involved?> Come on!

[rug]

5. You haven't been paying attention.

"Social justice generally refers to the idea of creating a society or institution that is based on the principles of equality and solidarity, that understands and values human rights, and that recognizes the dignity of every human being.<1><2><3> The term and modern concept of "social justice" was coined by the Jesuit Luigi Taparelli in 1840 based on the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas and given further exposure in 1848 by Antonio Rosmini-Serbati.<1><2><4><5><6> The idea was elaborated by the moral theologian John A. Ryan, who initiated the concept of a living wage. Father Coughlin also used the term in his publications in the 1930s and the 1940s. It is a part of Catholic social teaching, Social Gospel from Episcopalians, and is one of the Four Pillars of the Green Party upheld by green parties worldwide. Social justice as a secular concept, distinct from religious teachings, emerged mainly in the late twentieth century, influenced primarily by philosopher John Rawls. Some tenets of social justice have been adopted by those on the left of the political spectrum."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justice

(If you want to derail discussion, focus on Coughlin.)

[Kennah]

11. I will agree that the Reich Wing faithful hate Social Justice--Commonistic Stuff

[David Sky]

17. Social Justice, FOX NEWS preaches... just another form of Socialism, and very

anti-American!

[trotsky]

28. It took Christianity ~1800 years to invent social justice?

Dang, it only took them a couple of centuries to make breakthroughs in torture and murder!

[rug]

29. Aquinas didn't hit his stride until the 19th century.

[Thats my opinion]

40. You seem so bitter

i have decided to longer reply to you or even see your posts.So go attack someone else.

[trotsky]

44. You don't get to take credit for the good...

without accepting responsibility for the bad.

[laconicsax]

45. God hadn't revealed it to them yet.

Funny how "God" only reveals things after they're already out there, isn't it?

[trotsky]

46. Oh, I'm sure it's just a coincidence.

That happens every single time.

[laconicsax]

4. And what do you know...none of the roundtable participants see OWS as a religious movement. n/t

[rug]

6. No one said it is.

It would be dishonest though to say it is not complementary.

"NS: Actually, the very first thing I noticed when I arrived at Wall Street on September 17 was the Protest Chaplains, in white robes, singing across the street from Trinity Church. (I had been in touch with them the previous week over Twitter.) Performance artist Reverend Billy helped convene the first big crowd that day with a sermon. they had a strong and visible presence the first day, but by that night they were gone, and—aside from a few colorful anecdotes, like when an organizer named Ted announced he was going to drive a nail through his hand in solidarity with Jesus and Troy Davis—the first couple of weeks of the occupation were ostensibly pretty religion-less.

Of course, in the rupture of the ordinary that characterized that period, everything felt in some sense religious. The trappings of ordinary religion (rituals, structured prayers, etc.) felt pretty unnecessary, since every moment seemed already so charged with a secret extremity and transcendence—secret, because the rest of the world hadn’t yet become aware of what powerful stuff was happening down there.

Now, as the Occupy phenomenon grows and spreads, I think there is more space and place for these trappings. It needs structure, it needs regular practice, it needs to consciously recover its endemic transcendence. As if heeding the call, religious groups are starting to take note and offer their services. Like the unions, and like the political groups, it seems like religious organizations are now starting to take their cue from OWS about where political activism is headed. But, like those others, traditional religious institutions will probably only be able to go so far in joining the bandwagon of a movement that is self-consciously non-hierarchical, revolutionary, and disruptive. Unless they succeed in co-opting it."

I think the verb dissolves was deliberate.

[laconicsax]

7. There's another thread on R/T making that claim. n/t

[David Sky]

9. Religions so often co-opt the good in the world, claiming it as their own, while...

ignoring all the bad events in human history which can be so directly and squarely linked to religious extremism.

9/11 comes to mind, as does "Got mit uns" of the German Nazi party! And that's just in the last 75 years or so.

[rug]

13. Despite mighty strivings to the contrary, it's not.

[David Sky]

16. Another half thought-out reply! WHAT is not? 9/11 and Hitler's Nazi party are

BOTH directly linked in a most fundamental way to religious extremist thought!

NO, not too many American religious folks are extremists, and want to fly airplanes into buildings or assert the supremacy of some small branch of Caucasian ethnicity. But SOME do! We have evidence of that. We have neo-Nazi's and we have extreme Islamists who are hell-bent on destroying one group or another.

Those folks are NOT atheists !!! They are people who follow a religion!!

[rug]

18. How much thought went into your Godwin?

An eighth?

[David Sky]

21. I"m sorry I am inclined to block posts from people that insult, and who

don't stay on topic.

If commenting and staying on topic is too difficult for you, and you must resort to strange forms of personal insults, (against the terms of service here, as I understand them). I would suggest you NOT try to participate in an adult forum having to do with religion.

So far, three of your posts this afternoon have failed to inform, persuade, and only succeeded in showing an attempt to insult.

Good luck on a less controversial forum !

[rug]

23. Please do.

I've had my monthly quota of Godwin, exclamation points and capital letters.

[David Sky]

26. Quota? Now religionists are free to free-associate Communisim with Atheism, but

any actual historical facts about Christians' who so many times in history sided with the wrong side, (Godwin's law taken to the ultimate) is somehow OVER YOUR QUOTA?

Hmm.

I would so miss your defensive attempts at personal insults. I need to be reminded every day of how shallow and fragile and unprincipled and hypocritical folks who claim a religion as their winning argument can be. Too many facts runs over their "quota".

[rug]

30. You promised to block my posts.

Get on with it.

Reading your responses is worse than reading Thackeray.

[David Sky]

32. I "promised" no such thing, I considered it, and you invited me to do so...

which was like raising a red flag in front of a bull.

Sorry, you could have been a nice person, if only you had not let your ego get so mixed up with your religious fanaticism in front of everyone to see.

No way I want to miss your self-serving posts! Such a tribute to how people with religious beliefs are so poor at argumentation and factual logical thinking. They are priceless.

You seem to have totally ignored my suggestion to you, but that's fine, you ignore so much to make you feel good about being religious, ignoring my suggestion that you make less of a fool of yourself by leaving a religious forum behind, something which would solve your problems with atheists like me, that's fine with me.

[rug]

34. Sigh.

[Thats my opinion]

22. Again

NOBODY says it is a religious movement. it is a social justice movement that includes many diverse groups and people--including religiously motivated ones.

Make up your mind. First you condemn religion for getting out of its orbit and being a part of these things. Then you complain that it hasn't taken them over and turned them or created them into a religious movement.
So we are damned if we do and damned if we don't.

[cleanhippie]

25. Blah blah blah. You are posting the same tripe you constantly deride others for doing.

Blatant hypocrisy.

[laconicsax]

38. So now I want OWS to be a religious movement?

:crazy:

[Thats my opinion]

41. Of course you are correct

While these are religious people, none of them calls he movement a religious movement, but a wide-spread movement that has religion as just one of the structural arms. Quit trying to say that we think that this is all just religious. NOBODY has said that. Neither is it all atheistic. But if we both are part of it, good for everybody.

[laconicsax]

42. I accept your apology. n/t

[PassingFair]

8. Should be titled "God Wants To Muscle His Way Into The Occupy Movement"

From the essay:

"What worries me now is how forces that are quite clearly dead, morally speaking (the Democratic Party comes to mind), want desperately to steal the life from the nascent movement. Ditto for some other forces (e.g., the labor movement) that remain morally alive but that will face some difficulty in avoiding a degree of vampirism in relation to OWS."

[rug]

14. I didn't know the Democratic Party was God.

I better check on GDP.

[PassingFair]

15. This snippet was just to show where the writer was coming from....

Every organization wants a piece of this action.

[PETRUS]

31. Why zero recommendations?

Has anyone followed the link and read the full text? It's a serious and thoughtful conversation and there are several real gems in there:

"So back to “shaking the establishment”: What shakes the establishment already, what gets Majority Leader Cantor and others muttering about mob rule, is the big delegitimation factor operating within OWS. This is the kind of thing Jonathan Schell wrote about in The Unconquerable World some years back; it’s the nonviolent withdrawal of popular consent, something that unjust rulers will always dread. OWS is saying to the captains of industry and titans of finance (and to their political enablers) that the house they have built is just not fit to live in.

That's powerful stuff. Another way of saying it: very few people in American voted for, or would have voted for, the rapid financialization of the U.S. economy or the related de-industrialization of the country; no one voted for productivity gains that are purchased at the price of extreme overwork and stress; no one voted to give corporate elites a hugely oversized say in what our government is and does."

[David Sky]

33. OH, I don't know, maybe if they had left the word "GOD" out of the whole thing and had..

tried to act as adults discussing a serious world-wide economic phenomena of injustice.

GOD has nothing to do with this, and this movement has NOTHING AT ALL to do with any and all religions.

Co-opting social movements, and injecting mythology into it, kind of cheapens the "gems" you see.. to mere rocks being thrown at some very serious dedicated people, who are NOT there to talk about religion!

Try to put things into factual context and keep any religious rose-colored glasses OFF your head.

[PETRUS]

35. Did you read the article?

The round-table participants acknowledge exactly that. They are theologians who have devoted much of their lives to spiritual reflection and are talking about the movement seen through their own eyes. You don't have to agree with their belief system to read the transcript and find things of value.

[Thats my opinion]

43. That is quite a universal statement

But even as your are entitled to your opinion, your ignorance of what is really happening on the ground is just a matter of intolerance bordering on bigotry. i don't want your religious rose-colored glasses on your head, but do you mind if they are on mine--or should your determine that by the sheer absolute fiat of your statement?

[David Sky]

48. I look at the facts, not your mythology or what you WANT to have

other people believe. This series of events is NOT a religious series of events, no matter how much some religious people want to make it so!

If you're not comfortable with the facts, please refrain from insulting others who are looking at them.

[rug]

36. I think you just learned why.

Welcome to DU.

:hi:

[PETRUS]

37. Yeah, sure enough. :) nt

[laconicsax]

39. Because I hadn't rec'd it yet.

It's at +1 now. Happy?

[snot]

47. True spirituality resides in the hearts of the people.