From 2017 to 2020 I co-created and led a program of the Interfaith Alliance of Colorado called the Congregational Land Campaign (CLC). We identified over 5000 acres of undeveloped land owned by religious organizations in the five county Denver-metro area, championed their use for affordable housing, and led congregational leadership teams through a process which allowed them to craft a feasible plan and bring it into existence. This program achieved several “successes” and many “failures.” In this paper I analyze the story of one congregation who participated in CLC as a case study to theorize what I call “iterative orthopraxy” and reflect on the political implications this praxis unveiled.
The paper progresses through three movements. First, I offer a brief summary of the case study illustrating the “action-reaction-reflection-recalibrated action” pattern. Second, I sketch a theory of praxis as a procedure of revelation: a solidaristic, process-based, critical-material means for unveiling and transforming the (co-evolving) real. Third, having detailed the action (case) and theorized action as an epistemological methodology and spiritual practice, I move into two reflections generated by the revelations generated over the life-cycle of the case. These final reflections are arranged under the categories of Relations and Contradictions. In the remainder of this proposal, I will briefly unpack my intention for each movement beginning with the case study.
Mountain View United Church is a small congregation located in a suburban neighborhood of Denver. The church owned a square two-acre lot adjacent to the church and ideal for development. They were motivated by the Leviticus text in which Yahweh says “The land is mine” and the theological conviction that possessions are God’s gifts to be stewarded for the common good. In the first phase of their dialectical progression, begun in 2018, they proposed developing a multi-family building to provide affordable assisted living to low-income seniors and people with disabilities (30 units) alongside of permanently affordable for-sale townhomes (24 units in a community land trust). Feedback from city planners on zoning restrictions (first dialectical reaction) quickly reduced this plan to 10 townhomes only. At the first required community feedback meeting (second dialectical reaction), around two-hundred neighborhood residents showed up with “NO SECTION 8” buttons and signs (note: housing-voucher funding was not proposed, nor is Section 8 still a government program). Political opposition, primarily from neighboring property owners, led to a multi-year political struggle. In 2021, Mountain View won the required rezone to allow them to develop the 10 affordable townhomes. Meanwhile, the congregation’s political consciousness of multiple overlapping drivers of the housing crisis led them to testify on a range of state legislative bills, not only directly related issues like adding funding to housing development but interrelated (though not immediately self-interested) issues like renters rights. They also became close allies with a group of immigrants who organized to cooperatively purchase their mobile home park from its slumlord owners. Today, their congregation (alongside other CLC participants and leaders) is a leading voice advocating a bill recently endorsed by the Colorado Governor popularly called “Yes in God’s Backyard” which would expedite rezoning requests by congregations seeking to use land for affordable housing development.
“Iterative orthopraxy” describes a Frerian action-reflection organizing/education cycle, here with a conscious nod to praxis as an expression of faith. Performed over time, Freirian action-reflection produces a repeating, spiraling pattern of (1) continuously refined portraits of a sup-/re-pressed, continuously evolving, hegemonic socio-political field and material life-world, and (2) insight for continuously refining action based on what has been learned, toward the consistent goal of liberation. As such, (liberatory, solidaristic) praxis is epistemological. Praxis reveals the real even as it seeks to transform it. Foregrounding the iterativity of orthopraxy underscores that actors cannot a priori know which concrete collective actions constitute “the good.” Each subsequent action made in solidarity toward liberation and life is a refined best approximation. The humility required and instilled by the space of unknowing (and the frequent “getting it wrong” inevitably produced by making the leaping act of faith into that space) demonstrates why iterative orthopraxy can rightly be deemed a spiritual practice. It is a mode of what Jon Sobrino termed the “spirituality of liberation” which requires fidelity to the real. I will expand on these themes with recourse to the work of the Argentine philosopher of liberation Enrique Dussel, in particular his thinking on the critical-material principle, the critical-democratic and strategic-transformation principles, and liberation and anti-hegemonic praxes (see Dussel, Twenty Theses on Politics).
Finally I offer early reflections derived from the “unveilings of the real” generated through the paper’s case study. In the first place, the heading “Relations” raises the question “Who is my neighbor?” within unveiled material, affective, and jurisprudential political fields. When proximate neighbors reveal themselves as enemies while people across distance and difference reveal themselves in common cause, congregation-based practitioners of iterative orthopraxy must rethink relations of solidarity and conflictual struggle both theologically and strategically. Interrelatedly, a plot of land that once was a parishioner’s mowing responsibility is now revealed to be governed by a diverse and repressive array of written and unwritten policies and subtle modes of power that interject themselves across property lines while reifying (always already racialized) property relations. Once “touched” by praxis, this web of invisible relations comes into view. In the second place, practitioners who begin with a model of right action (thesis: help create more affordable housing) when met by an opposition (antithesis: affordable housing harms my property values and corrodes the character of my community) may find themselves advocating solutions to their original goal (synthesis: expedited rezoning for congregational affordable housing projects) that reify the underlying systems of capitalist production generating housing injustice in the first place (libertarian carve-outs in property law for religious institutions that reinforce logics of property as sphere of dominion). Thus the question is raised if the iterative nature of such praxis has generated the moment for a deeper transformation in theoretical-strategic paradigms for achieving (a perhaps revised version) of the original goal.
This paper explores a case study of one congregation’s attempt to develop affordable housing on their land—their animating theological imagination and the widening web of political engagements and solidarities produced by their conscientization—as an example of “iterative orthopraxy” through which “the real” and “right action” are progressively revealed. Thinking with Freire, Sobrino, and Dussel, I develop a theory of action as a transformative-epistemological method. Foregrounding the iterativity of orthopraxy underscores that actors cannot a priori know which concrete collective actions constitute “the good.” Each subsequent action made in solidarity toward liberation and life is a refined best approximation. The humility required and instilled by the space of unknowing demonstrates the spirituality of such praxis. I proceed to reflect on the revised portrait of relations and contradictions generated by this case, particularly with respect to the political-economy of property, and the questions such revelations raise for practitioners.