God, part 2

While the Evangelist Jesus talk makes me feel uncomfortable, today I was reminded of the important role of religion in many social movements. I went to a conference/talk related to TB in which a pastor gave a galvanizing sermon about the grassroots movement he wants to start to eradicate TB in the DR. Although I felt frustrated by the social pressure to bow my head in prayer, I was inspired by the pastor's words and gave him my business card, telling him that if there are going to be any health-related grassroots social justice movements in the next few months to count me in. It also gave me some ideas about how to respond to the MDR-TB man's challenge (see my previous entry). It's one thing to write a report, even to get a paper published. Those are nice goals, but I want to change something. And I now have some ideas about how to do so.

Later, I began to reflect on the legacy of Gustavo Gutiérrez and other revolutionaries whose motivation to act springs from a religious base. Much of the community organizing for social justice in the U.S. began (and continues to begin) in religious contexts - from Martin Luther King's pulpit leadership in the Civil Rights Movement to Barack Obama's career as an organizer beginning in the church basements of southside Chicago. If you aren't familiar with Gutiérrez's framework of liberation theology, check this out:

"But the poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existence is not politically neutral, and it is not ethically innocent. The poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible. They are marginalized by our social and cultural world. They are the oppressed, exploited proletariat, robbed of the fruit of their labor and despoiled of their humanity. Hence the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order."

— Gustavo Gutiérrez

Sounds like revolution to me! So I am hope that I am not misunderstood in my lamentation about the hyper-Christianity of some Dominicans I've encountered. I don't wish to imply that there is something inherently wrong with being religious; I just balk at proselytizing and attempts at conversion of others. I think that when religions of the world can learn to respect each others' inherent similarities and the moral mandate of justice-seeking that nearly all possess, faith will be a powerful tool for social change. But only if such a movement is broad enough to include all faiths as well as secular civil society. True activism finds a way to promote the inclusion of all interested parties, since the point of activism, after all, is to rearrange the social orders that result in marginalization, exclusion, and other injustices.