Tag Archives: division

Christian leaders gather across from the U.S. Capitol for a sunrise vigil organized by the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and Faithful America, marking the second anniversary of the January 6 insurrection.

Relational Politics

Relational Politics

Democracy’s Future Depends on Fostering Community

Mary J. Novak
April 12, 2023
Christian leaders gather across from the U.S. Capitol for asunrise vigil organized by the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and Faithful America, marking the second anniversary of the January 6 insurrection.

Christian leaders gather across from the U.S. Capitol for a sunrise vigil organized by the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and Faithful America, marking the second anniversary of the January 6 insurrection.

 

Early in the morning on Jan. 6 of this year, a diverse group of faith leaders from different Christian denominations gathered across from the U.S. Capitol for a sunrise prayer vigil. I spoke at this event, representing NETWORK and the concerns that many Catholics have for the future of the United States. We prayed together for our democracy, and it felt like a glimpse of the Beloved Community that our system of government is capable of fostering.

The challenge that faces all of us is that this group was not representative of the rhetoric and political movement currently claiming the mantle of “Christian” in U.S. politics. One of the results of the 2022 midterm elections has been the ascendancy of extremists in Congress who assert a nationalist brand of politics that is corrosive to our system of government. If anything is clear from the January 6 Committee hearings and other current signs, our democracy is not yet out of the woods.

Democracy is the container for all the social and political issues that our Catholic tradition so richly informs — the dignity of the human person, economic equity, the rights of workers. We work for them in a pluralistic context, always seeking to build up the common good. Democracy offers protections that policy alone cannot cover and which other systems and philosophies, like Christian nationalism and Catholic integralism, openly reject. These seek to ascribe some uniquely dominating role to Christianity in society and invariably end in oppression and violence. The protections of democracy have remarkably held us through these past years, and the midterm elections played out without violence, despite coming a year after the insurrection of January 2021. I believe this was possible precisely because people got involved, especially at the local level.

At NETWORK, our field is very engaged and active among the countless justice-seekers who have been awakened in the past six years. I see in them an opportunity to recapture a certain relationality in our politics that has been lost in recent decades, and some NETWORK Advocates Teams are already embracing this in moving ways. We cannot achieve lasting change without authentic investment in the human relationships that run through our government and our society. The Catholic Sisters who founded NETWORK believed in this model, and we have seen it start to re-emerge with a new generation of political activists, as was evident in the awe-inspiring turnout of Gen Z in the last election.

But what we need for the long haul is a true political movement that breaks through the polarization and moves us into a space where we can creatively imagine what our democracy needs to look like to meet people’s needs and truly respond to the signs of our times.

One of the real hazards of our politics, as pointed out by Rachel Kleinfeld and others, is that the very polarization and obstructionism that creates gridlock in our politics wears down people’s faith in our system of democracy over time, because they do not see it delivering for them. People need clean air, clean water, affordable housing, pathways to home ownership,  protections against discrimination — things that the government can and has delivered for people in the past! And we have been fortunate that the Biden administration has been able to deliver in areas like infrastructure and pushing back a bit against trickle-down economic policy.

But so much remains to be done. Part of our democracy work is addressing spiraling wealth inequality, the stratospheric inequity in our society that keeps wealth out of reach for so many and concentrated in the hands of the few. The wealth divide works to severely undercut people’s belief in this democratic system, because they do not see it as fair, they see that it can be corrupted, and again, they do not think it can deliver for them.

Despite the peril of the present moment, so many people of goodwill are responding to the challenge. Are enough people unsettled? No, frankly. But in our frustration with the polarization and stagnation brought about by a small number of ideological extremists with access to way too much funding and power, we can look around and see that we are not alone. We even find community in that space. And as we continue to organize and unify our vision and work for lasting change, we find something to be hopeful about, which can ground us for the long haul.

Mary J. Novak is NETWORK’s Executive Director.

This column was originally published in the 2nd Quarter issue of Connection. Download the full issue here.
Christian leaders gather across from the U.S. Capitol Building for a sunrise vigil marking the second anniversary of the January 6 insurrection. Photo courtesy of Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.

Healing Our Politics

Healing Our Politics

We Can Build a Better World by Participating in the Systems That Shape Our Destiny

Joan Neal
Jan 11, 2023
Christian leaders gather across from the U.S. Capitol Building for a sunrise vigil marking the second anniversary of the January 6 insurrection. Photo courtesy of Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.

Christian leaders gather across from the U.S. Capitol Building for a sunrise vigil marking the second anniversary of the January 6 insurrection. Photo courtesy of Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.

With the 2022 midterms behind us and a new Congress coming into session, it’s fitting for people of faith to survey the “Signs of the Times.” Where is God speaking to us and trying to lead us as a people as we enter a new year, with a new Congress, in one of the oldest democracies on earth? The answer that NETWORK has discerned in the face of an increasingly volatile political landscape is that we must work to heal our politics.

Our political life has suffered a wound, a laceration that has exposed us to further injury and infection. This wound is reflected in the divisions in our society today that allow hateful, dehumanizing rhetoric to become normalized, and violent, resentful action to become a part of everyday life. The Signs of the Times are clear: We are a divided country. Even the composition of the new Congress – with the narrowest of majorities in both houses – suggests a body politic that has been torn asunder.

This situation has been building for a long time. The fact is, we are witnessing the ugly final acts of a power struggle in the U.S. that began half a century ago as an effort to strip away the gains made toward equity and justice for anyone who is not white, male, and socioeconomically privileged.

This struggle has played out in every aspect of our politics and now, most concerning, in our judiciary. For the first time in our history, we are seeing recent rulings that take rights away from Americans instead of expanding them, rulings that seem wholly untethered from any sense of the common good and even reflect bias toward a particular political ideology. Sadly, we also see allegations of corrupt dealings between justices and right-wing groups. Even the objectivity of our judicial system seems caught up in this fight.

The repercussions of this power struggle have been as painful as they have been predictable: stratospheric economic inequality; the dismantling of the power of organized labor; the rise of Christian nationalism with its view that America is only for white Christians; increasing threats to our planet and our public health; rising homelessness, and so much more. These are signs that our politics and our society are in desperate need of healing and repair.

As we look back on 2022 and the legislation passed in the second session of the 117th Congress, we can imagine each bill as a tiny swatch of material trying to patch the frayed social fabric of our current reality. The field hospital imagery of Pope Francis is apt language as we try to bind societal wounds while also addressing their root causes.

This is where we see our mission. At our core, NETWORK is a political ministry, which calls us to respond first with empathy and then with truth-telling and concrete actions that lead to economic and racial justice.  We decry the divisions and seek to be a prophetic voice for peace, reparatory justice and reconciliation in order to reshape our politics and center the voices of those whose voices are not heard – those who are not privileged; those who lack the money and power to wield influence; and those who are most impacted by the evils of unfettered capitalism, white supremacy and extreme individualism in our politics and in our society.

At NETWORK, we have endeavored to do this by first listening to and seeking out other justice-seekers, such as the National Black Sisters’ Conference, to partner with us in raising an authentic witness for the common good. We have also sought to amplify the call for justice through our new podcast. “Just Politics,” a collaboration of NETWORK and U.S. Catholic magazine, launched in September 2022 and will have its season 2 premiere in February. We have used this new platform to center the voices of women religious, impacted communities, and other justice-seekers.

In his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis argues for “a better kind of politics” and makes a key distinction between political movements that are populist – the forces that weaponized people’s anger for personal gain – and those that are truly reflective of “the people’s voice”. Our work seeks to put the Pope’s words into action, to insure that our politics includes the needs and voices of all people in order to build a more inclusive and equitable community. Through healing our politics, we can all play a part in shaping our common destiny and building a better country, a better society, a better world for everyone.

Joan F. Neal is NETWORK’s Deputy Executive Director and Chief Equity Officer.

This story was originally published in the 1st Quarter issue of Connection. Download the full issue here.