Is #OccupyWallStreet a "Church of Dissent"?

Janine Giordano Drake

Last week, political blogger Matt Stroller penned an article about #OccupyWallStreet that I can't get off my mind. First, he introduced the movement as a groundswell of frustration. Said he,

...it’s obvious that this isn’t just about Wall Street, nor is it really a battle of any sort. There are political signs there attacking Fox News, expressing anger about Troy Davis, supporting the Iranian revolution, urging the Federal Reserve be reigned in, and demanding rich people pay their taxes. There are personal signs about debt, war, and medical problems. And people are dressed in costume, carrying lightsabers, and some guys are driving around a truck with a “Top Secret Wikileaks” sign on the side. I asked if they were affiliated with the site, and one of them responded with “That’s what the Secret Service asked”. Most of all, people there are having fun.

However--that, of course, sounded just like the reports I have been getting from friends involved in the movement in New York City. The provoking part was the sentence that followed. He went on,

What these people are doing is building, for lack of a better word, a church of dissent. It’s not a march, though marches are spinning off of the campground. It’s not even a protest, really. It is a group of people, gathered together, to create a public space seeking meaning in their culture. They are asserting, together, to each other and to themselves, “we matter”. (emphasis mine)

Stroller explained, quite eloquently, "the act of politicization" and the way that such public protests build the cultural infrastructure of social movements. However, he said that this movement "is a somewhat different animal than other politicized gatherings," because many protesters participated and carried on not because of a common political goal, but "because it feels meaningful." I gather what he means is that "the 99%," as the protesters call themselves, find meaning in the act of gathering; together, they recognize that regular people without much money or relative power are ubiquitous, and together can gain the attention that they cannot as individuals. The movement's website, "We are the 99 percent," certainly affirms this claim.

"Meaning is a fundamental human need," the author went on, and #OccupyWallStreet is beginning to provide a moral community for people in search of one. In the call and response character of chants, the "consensus-based 'general assemblies,'" the fear of official spokespeople, and the high importance of caring for and appreciating one another, he said, this movement is quite similar to a dissenting religious body. He invited readers, too, to understand the movement not as a success or failure, but as an attempt of frustrated people to find meaning through community.

I would argue that this characteristic makes #OccupyWallStreet not unique among American political movements, but absolutely commonplace. What political movement has ever been accomplished in this country (or any country) without a groundswell of moral (or so-called moral) indignation to get its name on the map? I find Stroller's boldness in dignifying this protest as a "church" both unusual and refreshing.

All week long I have been asking myself, What does it do for historians and journalists to label such a movement moral, or religious? Why have so many historians been hesitant to recognize/ identify the moral/religious characteristics of "people's movements" to date? And, of course, Is #OccupyWallStreet a "religious" movement, even if it is a moral movement?

Perhaps part of what happens when we label this a "Church of Dissent" is dignify the movement for what it is not. It is *not* a rioting group of people bent on destruction for its own sake. A moral community has a goal and cares as much about process as it does about outcomes. But, what do you think-- does the term "church" have too much baggage to be used here?

We Don't Have to Call it "Holy War": Historicizing Michelle Bachmann

Janine Giordano Drake

Is it just me, or does coverage these days of Michelle Bachmann these days sound like it was ripped right out of the journals of H.L Mencken in the hot Tennessee summer of 1925? Writes Rolling Stone Magazine this week in an article entitled, "Michelle Bachmann's Holy War,"

"Bachmann is a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions. She believes that the Chinese are plotting to replace the dollar bill, that light bulbs are killing our dogs and cats, and that God personally chose her to become both an IRS attorney who would spend years hounding taxpayers and a raging anti-tax Tea Party crusader against big government. She kicked off her unofficial presidential campaign in New Hampshire, by mistakenly declaring it the birthplace of the American Revolution. "It's your state that fired the shot that was heard around the world!" she gushed. "You are the state of Lexington and Concord, you started the battle for liberty right here in your backyard.... And later,

Bachmann's entire political career has followed this exact same pattern of God-speaks-directly-to-me fundamentalism mixed with pathological, relentless, conscienceless lying. She's not a liar in the traditional way of politicians, who tend to lie dully, usefully and (they hope) believably, often with the aim of courting competing demographics at the same time. That's not what Bachmann's thing is. Bachmann lies because she can't help it, because it's a built-in component of both her genetics and her ideology. She is at once the most entertaining and the most dangerous kind of liar, a turbocharged cross between a born bullshit artist and a religious fanatic, for whom lying to the infidel is a kind of holy duty."

Now, I know one could argue that it is Bachmann herself who is channeling William Jennings Bryan. She is not only bold, audacious, and self-assured, but she is right when she says that she is not alone in her cultural gripes. Sure- she participated in the homeschooling and "Christian school" movement, an odd practice for the moderns of the East Coast. However, this is not such an unusual circumstance in America's heartland. She fights an unspokenly regional and religious culture war, a war about principles, a war driven by nostalgia for a world gone by. Outwardly, though, she yearns for power in Washington. Even though she doesn't make a good impression on the media, she draws crowds. She talks about God openly and confidently, maintaining an audience I'm quite sure is divided between political supporters and lovers of spectacle. We could go on and on here, especially in discussing the Third Party Politics, the struggle for Bryan's nomination to the Democratic Party in 1896, and the way jeremiads figure in American political rhetoric.

However, I am not really surprised at Bachmann for taking this approach to politics. She has learned from history that icons in the Bryan mold may not win presidencies but do have the power to reconstruct party platforms. Bryan may have spelled the end of the Populist Party, but he brought many key points of Populism to the Democratic Party, and many of those eventually came to pass.

Who I am surprised at is the contemporary, secular humanist media that has not found a way to move beyond its 1920s predecessors. H. L Mencken reported in 1925,

The Scopes trial, from the start, has been carried on in a manner exactly fitted to the anti- evolution law and the simian imbecility under it.... The rustic judge, a candidate for re-election, has postured the yokels like a clown in a ten-cent side show, and almost every word he has uttered has been an undisguised appeal to their prejudices and superstitions. The chief prosecuting attorney, beginning like a competent lawyer and a man of self-respect, ended like a convert at a Billy Sunday revival. It fell to him, finally, to make a clear and astounding statement of theory of justice prevailing under fundamentalism.

In 2011, Rolling Stone, calls Bachmann a "zealot," "pathological," and a fundamentalist. We are told that Bachmann is

crazy — crazy in the sense that she's living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she's built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.

There is no mention of the history of Protestant Fundamentalism and its overlap with politics. No mention of the cultural and political shoulders she stands on. We are simply told to have fear. If this is all that the triumph of liberal, secular, scientific and widespread public education can show for us after 90 years of Clarence Darrows in our midst, the problem is not Michelle Bachmann.

I'd like to make Rolling Stone and other media outlets some recommendations for their news commentary. For some background on the religious and political history of Populism, perhaps starting with the works of Robert McMath, Joe Creech and Michael Kazin. Consider the history of Fundamentalism and its role in politics, perhaps starting with Joel Carpenter, George Nash, Leo Ribuffo, Darren Dochuk, and Preston Shires. For more on the politics of family within conservative Christian circles, start with Betty DeBerg, Bethany Moreton and Natasha Zaretsky.

And, I invite others to join me in naming more good books that help define the shoulders that Bachmann stands upon. Rolling Stone, has the news not reached you yet?: Even if evolution is not the law of the land in every public school in America, Science eventually won in twentieth century America. And not just the hard sciences, but the social sciences. We don't have to think of the next presidential election as a Holy War unless we want to. In fact, to call it holy war-- to accept the fight on those terms--is, if you ask me, to lose the war that is actually being waged.

Deconstructing the Tension in the Room: Disciplinary Taboo

Janine Giordano Drake

Thank you, Elesha for your excellent post on debates regarding the importance of Scripture at the Religion and American Culture Colloquium. This post is intended as a continuation of that discussion.:


Academic conferences are a bit like first dates. We look forward to them in the abstract so much, and try hard to absorb and recall all the details of the important moments, but our long term memories often emphasize the visceral feelings, smells and impressions over supporting details of the content. One impression from this weekend's Religious Studies conference that I will probably never forget was the look on a fellow scholar's face when she tried to convey to me that my question to her was absolutely out-of-bounds. We were alone in a hallway, and she didn't know what to say, so she just looked at me, mouth agape, and speechless. "I'm so sorry for asking," I fumbled after a few seconds. "You really don't have to answer that question--in fact, please accept my apologies," I continued. But the silence persisted, probably because the other scholar honestly did not know what to say. Then I changed the subject, said a few words about my project, and tried to transition to a subject my new acquaintance felt more comfortable discussing. But the deed was done, and I had learned my lesson. I learned that it is not generally appropriate to inquire about the personal religious background of a scholar of Religious Studies.

As things happened, I would learn by the end of the conference that this was a real, live taboo among many in the field of Religious Studies. For, what struck me most in the tension-filled discussion about whether or not conference attendees had read the Bible thoroughly was the fact that several scholars felt personally attacked by such a question. What stirred the room was not just the insistence that it is unnecessary for all scholars to study the Scriptures. Many made the great points that Elisha's commenters have put forth: some traditions do not emphasize personal interactions with Scriptures; many believers do not study the Scriptures themselves; the Bible is a compilation and not meant to be studied "cover to cover;" and Scripture is only one small window into the challenge of understanding a living religion. All these points were very apt, and if I recall correctly, they were well-taken by all sides.

The real provocation was whether or not it was academically out-of-bounds to ask a question that draws lines between those with "Sunday School educations" and/or personal Scriptural devotional practices, and those whose personal faith does not emphasize the Scriptures. As one prominent scholar, put it (my paraphrase), "Well, I'm a liberal protestant, and we don't read the Bible like that." Another added, "Catholics don't read the Bible." Each of these comments revealed something in what they did not reveal. That is, they covered a large territory between implying "Therefore, why should Religious Studies scholars read the Bible, if we are merely shadowing the world of a-scriptural religious subjects?" and "That is not my devotional tradition, so please do not ask me to follow your devotional practices in my Christian tradition," at the same time. The debate was not really about whether reading the Scriptures may be a worthwhile cause. What was in tension in this interdisciplinary gathering was whether scholars of religion should be required to out themselves about their personal encounters with these holy books.

If we take social theoreticians at their word, taboos help define and cohere a particular group of seekers. The live taboo all weekend, as I understood it at least, was the question, "How do your personal experiences with faith and faith formation education inform how you study--and what you study--about religion?" My impression was that Professor Flake knew how provocative her question would be, for she never ended up taking the poll but instead making an argument that such a poll would be worthwhile. It seemed like she was intentionally encouraging us to examine this taboo, even if she was not entirely comfortable violating it. To the extent Professor Flake was challenging us to empathy for believing subjects who revere and know Scripture very well, I really admired--and really saw the value in--this provocation.

I suppose this taboo was more visible to me because I come from a field (US social history) where talking about personal identity politics at conferences is much more welcome. I study Christian Socialism, and have been asked about every time I present my work if I attend church, and if so where. One older scholar came up to me after a presentation in April, saying, "I get the feeling Christian nonviolence is very important to you... It's very important to me, too; your work is heartening--keep up the good fight." At this particular conference, the Midwest Labor and Working Class Colloquium, we ended our day of panels with a discussion on the future of organizing and then by holding hands and singing labor/ freedom songs together. This seemed like the perfect end to a weekend that had highlighted the venerable Staughton and Alice Lynd, whose keynote address shared reflections of what they had learned from a lifetime of engagement in the Black Freedom Movement and liberation movements more generally. Staughton talked about how the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, of which he was part, had the goal of organizing to make themselves irrelevant, but he has since learned from Catholic liberation theologians that a life of struggle means coming alongside the poor and oppressed for something more like a lifetime. Discussing his (Quaker) personal faith was permissible at this terrific academic conference because labor historians are always discussing our faith and the faith of our subjects--usually not faith in the terms of religion, but faith in different strategies for social and political change alongside the faith of the historical subjects whose life projects we study.

I get the sense that in the field of labor/social history, we assume each other's academic projects are an extension of our personal politics and that the scholar is happy to discuss how the two relate. My faith--in politics, religion, and churches--has been fruitfully challenged by scholars many times. One professor I met at an archive last summer boldly tried to convince me that Rerum Novarum was right--socialism is a Christian heresy. Though his critique challenged the very heart of my project, it also forced me to examine so many of my assumptions about class and its importance within the Christian faith. Because it sharpens me, my project, and (dare I say?) my faith, I am so grateful that taboos on discussing "Truth" and one's personal beliefs were broken. We in social history learn from the discipline of anthropology that it is important for personal biases to be visible, legitimate grounds for discussion and critique, and essential to keep us humble before any analysis of others peoples' lives. It fascinates me how the interdisciplinary field of Religious Studies, apparently more rooted in the Social Sciences than the Humanities, comes at many of these questions of religious devotion and belief so differently from that of my home discipline.

I left the conference thinking that interdisciplinarity is hard, but it is still worthwhile. The act of putting together in one room Religious Studies folks, sociologists, historians, political scientists, scholar clerics, and scholars of literature is in itself a bold statement on the need for one another's help to understand the function and practice of religion within American culture. In this sense, the fact that we managed to maintain these taboos despite very different backgrounds meant we were reading from the same holy book more than we might have realized. Without our common culture of taboos, we might not know where or how to begin meaningful discussions on the subjects we each hold so dear.

A Theological Crisis at the Heart of State Budget Crises

by Janine Giordano Drake

In the old days, states would balance their budgets by carefully managing their wealth held in property. Their means of acquiring more wealth was the state militia, and wealth, of course was, control over Indian territory. Indian land seizure could either result in fast money from speculators (usually represented by banks), or a slow, long term income stream garnered by renting to municipalities and land developers. When that was no longer easy, states sold exclusive government contracts to companies that traded with and in the state. What I want to argue here is that raising funds for state projects has never relied very much on taxed assets of the people. Today, however, we all have to decide whether it ought to be.

Only a tiny portion of state spending in this country comes from income taxes. Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington and Wyoming do not levy any state income taxes. New Hampshire and Tennessee tax only tax dividend and interest income. To me, the problem in budget-starving agricultural-heavy states like Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, New York and California is that states have never established the principle that effective ownership of land and other income-deriving assets requires services of a state to keep the assets in operation. These services include public servants from police forces and firefighters to teachers and municipal workers.

Cash-poor farmers have essentially been contending against urban service workers since the last Gilded Age over who ought to carry the heavier burden for public services. Henry George, who argued that poor people should not be fighting with one another but recognize the common adversary of those who own large amounts of natural resources, would turn over in his grave at the prospect of undermining organized workers' wages without taxing property owners. Together with Eugene Debs and many other land reformers, George worked hard to get poor farmers and farm workers to agree to hold their property in common in order to simulate the First Century Church (or some other equivalent utopia of peace through cooperation) and together reap the fruits of their labor. However, as Randall's recent post reminds us, pretty much all of these experimental communities failed.

Even though many Christian Socialists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century believed very strongly in George's concept of a single tax on the ownership of natural resources, Christian landowners put up just as big a fight, often by repositioning their theology of God's grace. Land provided to them through Indian conquest was often understood as a gift from God for the sake of Christian stewardship for one's family, not something borrowed from the state for the sake of the public, or, of course, stolen from Indians for the sake of power and hegemony. Landless and socialist Christians often fought back, criticizing landowners time and again for owning something that was ultimately not theirs but everyone's, and really God's. So, in the 1890s, landowning Populists began to talk about the main assets of their occupation as not land at all. Rather than engage in a business that exploited land and labor, these populists argued that they earned their living through the work of rain and sunshine--their bounty, therefore, was a gift from God.

Many farmers today still point to rain and sunshine (rather than land and labor) as the essential raw materials to their financial prosperity. International trade conditions still keep many farmers cash poor and therefore starved by higher state and municipal taxes on land. Farmers' comparatively low incomes (compared to their net worth if they own land) means that they bring in little income tax revenue to the state, compared to the federal and state subsidies that they use.

In many ways carrying out the Populist agenda, farmers and agribusiness have united to call themselves "growers," a maneuverer that accomplishes at least two political goals. First, it constructs the money-making asset of agricultural capitalists as the weather-cooperating-with-fertilizers, rather than ownership of the land in the first place. Secondly, it renders the agricultural labor required to harvest the crop as something apart from the act of farming. Therefore, "growers" have since the Depression received subsidies and tax breaks for providing food for the masses, but the migrant workers and other agricultural farm hands who do the grunt labor of harvest and farm maintenance are not even required to be paid a minimum wage, let alone a living wage with benefits or the dignity of calling oneself a farmer.

Starving states today rely primarily on revenue streams in sales taxes and a la carte fees for use of services (registrations and licenses, court filing fees, college tuition, tobacco taxes, gas taxes, etc)--in addition, of course, to large loans from banks--loans that bankers rarely complain about because states' inability to go bankrupt means banks' loans are virtually no risk.

Tying state revenue streams to general consumption and fees-for-use rather than pooled fruits of production is not only paralyzing state budgets in this new Gilded Age of poverty, wealth, and high unemployment (especially with tax laws to conserve the wealthy). Even more debilitating, it has established a myth that the state can operate independently of taxes on the production of its residents. Wisconsin never, of course, actually had a budget problem until Walker gave away so many tax breaks and contracts to his corporate sponsors. Wisconsin was in that respect an exception to the rule of starving state budgets over the last decade. However, we must admit that in handing out tax breaks and special contracts to growers and businesses, Walker was only doing what most state governors do.

I think Paul Grant is absolutely right when he talks about cooperation and consensus-building as essential cultural heritages of many working class Wisconsinites. This is not only confirmed in my research on Wisconsin socialists but helps me understand something I had been trying to figure out--why the Milwaukee atheist socialists and Christian Socialists I study feuded so terribly but still got along so well. Why, for example, Eugene Debs was not kicked out of leadership in the Social Democratic Party in 1897 when he was clearly in the minority in his belief in the possibility of establishing those Christian cooperative communes. Wisconsin socialists fought with Debs but, remarkably, kept him in charge. As Grant suggests, Scandinavian and German immigrants brought to Wisconsin not only a working class consciousness but a dense network of cultural institutions (gymnasiums, cultural clubs, churches, unions, freethinker clubs, political parties, etc) that served as schools for consensus building that would make such political and economic cooperation comfortable. I think Grant is also absolutely right that the national, conservative trend toward "brinksmanship" that Walker has recently employed in Wisconsin is to a large degree in tension with the cultural fabric of his state.

We all hate to admit it, though, but there are still many Wisconsinites who may believe in consensus building in rhetoric and demeanor but do not believe that public services should be paid for through their own pooled economic resources. Rural landowners around the country still resist tax hikes. This, I would argue, is the legacy of Populist rhetoric from the era of Indian landgrabbing: a belief that one's land is all one's own and not really a wealth-producing asset. It is a gift from God for oneself and one's family. State services, too, should be plentiful, but to Populists these should come from public revenue streams contributed to through fees-per-use and state provision, not state tithes on assets like land and income.

I find especially among evangelical Christians in the midwest a surprising combination of "Christian cooperativeness" in demeanor and rhetoric but real resistance to understanding one's income as anything but entirely one's own (and perhaps the Church's). Bethany Moreton's To Serve God and Walmart articulates and historicizes this tension so well.

To me, the referendum in all these state budget crises today is about where state revenue should come from when seizure and sale of state-contraband-territory is no longer as viable an option. Will we continue to find assets in the state's possession to exploit anew--like mines, quarries, aquifers and, err, government buildings, public parks, and guilds of municipal employees--or will we agree to issue higher state income taxes and property taxes, especially on those who can afford to pay more?

Furthermore, Madison is one of the hippest places for left-wing evangelical Christians to find each other. Will our present moment's resurgence of the virtues of communalism, the dangers of environmental destruction, and the violent legacy of settler colonialism stir a rebirth of nineteenth century Christian Socialist theologies? I think this Wisconsin battle may serve as a laboratory for American Christians reconsidering the difference between gifts provided to them and gifts provided in common.