The Activist Lifestyle: Changing the World, or Wanting?

Lately I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about “activism,” what it is, how it works, and why it appeals to people.

On some basic level, I can’t consider myself an activist. I believe in fighting injustice, and I admire figures like Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., and Ammon Hennacy. As a Christian, I can’t deny Jesus’s call to help the poor and marginalized (a call shared by many faiths) and, in some sense, I rejoice whenever I see anyone stand in solidarity with the oppressed. But at the same time, activism presents a problem. Christ says the contemplative life is higher than the active one and Christians recognize that there can be no true justice in this world, that crusades with lofty ideals quickly introduce new, even worse, injustices. So what is a 21 year old, white, privileged, Christian, conservative to do?

As with many things, I think the key is moderation. In the modern world, activism too quickly becomes a lifestyle. We have our preconceptions, we react based on them, and we reason backward, not forward. Our arguments beg the question, and that’s not right. In a twisted way, we seem to like being outraged. For the Christian, this makes no sense. There can be no true justice here on earth; our job is to care for and love the oppressed, to help them, not to try and produce utopia, to froth at the mouth at every sign of perceived “injustice.” We must teach others to find meaning in suffering, not lie to them and tell them that it can be escaped. Christians must stand between the propagators of oppression and those who would stoke the oppressed to unjust violence against, and unmitigated hatred for, their oppressors.

And here’s the kicker: I think that the structures and lifestyles endorsed by organized religion do the best job of that. I know that sounds insane to almost anyone who isn’t a believer, but hear me out. First of all, religious organizations call us to live actively, yet self-reflectively. The faithful are to remain unpartisan, considering their various options and seeking justice with their own faults in mind. Personally speaking as a Catholic, I know “Leftist” Catholics and I know archconservative monarchists who wouldn’t dare participate in the mass in any language besides Latin. They’re all sinners and they’re all welcome in God’s kingdom, at least theoretically. This extends to the lifestyles put forward by such institutions. In my tradition, we are commanded to pray for those who hate us; Christ says to forgive debts, to love enemies, and to be merciful to the point of seeming naive. I can see no better attitude for he who would stand between oppressor and oppressed, condemning the excesses of both, but never giving up on love.

The religious lifestyle does not, however end there; faith asks us to consider both the means and the end. Many  “activists” want to rush into change regardless of the consequences. They claim to know what is right. If we just do x, y, and z, then we can defeat injustice and rejoice.

The problem, of course, is that no human being is perfect, so all too often this leads to increased injustice: violence, new systems of oppression, and enlivened tensions. Conversely, religions tend to preach a kind of slow, ordered change. We must fight injustice and move “forward”, but not without foresight, and without contemplation before action. Does this mean that some people will suffer through the change? Will mistakes be made? Of course. And that’s tragic. But slow, ordered change beats rushing into Utopia. Again, drawing on my own tradition, the faults of the Church are myriad, but over two millennia they can’t even be weighed on the same scale of those of Communist Russia and China, even imperialist Britain and America. Slow to accept the historical-critical method and evolution, the Church now embraces them, after taking time to ensure their validity. Similar parallels can be found among Orthodox Christianity and some strains of Islam. On a related note, Pope Francis and those before him worked and are working to correct the horrific initial response by the Church to the molestation problem. While the response was shameful I’d prefer a somewhat slow one to a series of witch hunts, executing (even symbolically) innocent people. Mistakes will be made one way or another. That being the case, I prefer solidarity with the poor and slow, ordered change to “activism” as such, a lifestyle with faith only in itself.

On that note, I’d like once again to end with the words of Jacques Ellul:

If the disciples had wanted their preaching to be effective, to recruit good people, to move the crowds, to launch a movement, they would have made the message more material. They would have formulated material goals in the economic, social, and political spheres. This would have stirred people up; this would have been the easy way. To declare, however, that the kingdom is not of this world, that freedom is not achieved by revolt, that rebellion serves no purpose, that there neither is nor will be any paradise on earth, that there is no social justice, that the only justice resides in God and comes from him, that we are not to look for responsibility and culpability in others but first in ourselves, all this is to ask for defeat, for it is to say intolerable things.

As Ellul said on another occasion, “Jesus Christ has not come to establish social justice any more than he has come to establish the power of the state or the reign of money or art. Jesus Christ has come to save men, and all that matters is that men may come to know him.” And to quote Dom Mazzetti, “that’s justice.”