Interfaith community organizing is often understood as a form of religious practice and faithful citizenship (Stout, 2013, Bretherton, 2015, Snarr, 2011). Others such as Warren (2001), Wood and Fulton (2015) argue that this type of organizing has the potential to revitalize American democracy, while Katie Day (2013) asserts that faith-based community organizing is profoundly theological and politically effective. In this paper, I explore interfaith community organizing as it has developed in Philadelphia with POWER (People Organized to Witness, Empower, and Rebuild) Interfaith not only as religious practice, but as a form of public theology.
I also argue that, in a departure from traditional faith-based organizing practice in which clergy are primarily deployed to lend a moral voice to particular campaigns, POWER offers a model for what it means to be differently-religious together in highly-visible urban space not just as a means to the end of winning campaigns, but also as a form of public witness.
This paper is part of an observing-participant, co-produced ethnography of one race-centered, broad-based interfaith organizing effort in Philadelphia – POWER Interfaith – with a focus on the clergy involved. POWER Interfaith was founded in Philadelphia as a Faith in Action (formerly PICO) affiliate in 2011 at the intersection of the Multicultural and Black Lives Matter moments in America. This research suggests that POWER represents an organizing paradigm and practice which has shifted from managing race to centering race, and is a hybrid of Alinsky-style organizing and Black organizing in America. It puts race at the center, Black folks in leadership, and religiously-diverse clergy at the front. POWER fuses emerging ways of understanding organizing which also include mobilization, protest, education, nimble response to emerging issues, and values not only winning campaigns, but places a high value on “being religious together in public” not just a means to an end, but an end in itself.
POWER is more Jewish, Muslim, Black, Quaker, and non-Christian, while also less Latine and Catholic than national norms. It also has a significant number of openly queer clergy. Often referred to as “Killadelphia” because of its high murder rate, Philadelphia has been ranked the deadliest big city in America. It is also the poorest big city, and is the fourth most segregated big city. Forty percent of Philadelphians are Black and roughly one in six residents are Muslim. Philadelphia was the key city in William Penn’s “holy experiment” – a colony founded on principles of religious liberty that would welcome people of different faiths. On the one hand, the city was a place of refuge for religious minorities and the only place under British rule where Catholics could legally worship in public. On the other, it was a place where abolitionists were in conflict with slave owners, pacifists were defeated by those who wanted to raise a militia, and the colonizing project resulted in the Lenni-Lenape people being dispossessed of and driven off their ancestral lands.
Today more than one-quarter of all Philadelphians are immigrants or have immigrant parents. “The City of Brotherly Love” is the birthplace of religious denominations such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church and Reconstructionist Judaism, and home to many Quaker institutions.
Entrenched and complex social problems along with a religious culture of both diversity and parochialism create both challenges and opportunities for interfaith organizing. Limited resources, historic patterns of victimization and violence, and ineffective political systems make mobilization difficult. Yet, the strong presence of Jews, Muslims, Quakers, Unitarian Universalists, and Black churches in interfaith coalitions interrupts the white Christian hegemony often found in faith-based community organizing.
Over and over again, the clergy interviewed offered testimony about the importance of being shoulder-to-shoulder with one another in public ways in urban space. In a time of extreme partisan politics, repeated incidents of anti-Black, anti-Muslim, and anti-Jewish violence, the model of organizing engaged by POWER counters white Nationalist calls of “You will not replace us!” with “You will not divide us!” and models ways for families and communities to navigate difference. Unlike other organizing models which seek to subsume racial and religious difference in unity, POWER explicitly troubles and centers them. In this way, “being religious together in public” becomes part of the collective goal.
Through relationships formed in this work, the multiple identities held by most clergy create opportunities for transformation in their colleagues and lead to personal and professional transformation. While overlapping identities and dynamics around race, religion, and orientation create tension and conflict, deep engagement and relationship produce new practices and ways of navigating intersecting oppressions.
For POWER and for the clergy interviewed, public theology is interwoven with a theory of change, strategy, language, embodiment, and a vision for collective life. One rabbi put it this way: “Our theory of change is also our public theology. Another way of saying that is, ‘We will stand together across every line of difference to work for the common good. We will not be divided.’ That’s our public theology. That’s the big languaging of the moral framework.”
This paper explores not only the ways that diverse religious leaders in faith-based community organizing “show us what theology looks like,” but how they do it, how they understand it, and what it might suggest about interfaith organizing in this time.
At a rally in Ferguson, Missouri six months after the killing of Michael Brown, a seminarian took the bullhorn. Offering a twist on the then-popular chant, “Show me what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like!” she called out: “Show me what theology looks like.” And the crowd responded, “This is what theology looks like!”
This paper looks at the ways in which the public-facing work of one broad-based, interfaith community organizing project in Philadelphia, POWER Interfaith, functions to not only “show us what theology looks like,” but suggests two things. First, that race-centered, interfaith organizing can be seen not only as a religious practice, but as a form of public theology. Second, in a departure from traditional faith-based organizing practice, being differently-religious together in urban space is not just a means to the end of winning organizing campaigns, but can also be an end in itself.