E-Book, Englisch, 238 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-8308-6802-5
Verlag: InterVarsity Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)
Adam Russell Taylor is vice president of advocacy at World Vision, USA. He recently completed a yearlong fellowship at the White House, and he formerly served as the Senior Political Director at Sojourners, where he was responsible for leading the organization's advocacy, coalition building and constituency outreach. He has also served as the executive director of Global Justice, an organization that educates and mobilizes students around global human rights and economic justice. Before cofounding Global Justice, he worked as an associate at the Harvard University Carr Center for Human Rights and as an urban fellow in the Department of Housing Preservation and Development in New York City. Taylor is a graduate of Emory University, the Kennedy School of Government and the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology. He is also an ordained associate minister at First Baptist Church in Washington, D.C..
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Introduction
THE TRANSFORMED CONFORMIST
Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around, turn me around,
turn me around. . . . I’m gonna keep on walkin’, keep on talkin’,
marching up the freedom lane.
Freedom Singers
In my favorite sermon by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “The Transformed Nonconformist,” the civil rights leader offers a penetrating diagnosis of the culture of his time along with an equally compelling prescription:
This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists. Our planet teeters on the brink of atomic annihilation; dangerous passions of pride, hatred, and selfishness are enthroned in our lives; truth lies prostrate on the rugged hills of nameless cavalries; and men do reverence before false gods of nationalism and materialism. The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.[1]
Dr. King is preaching from the apostle Paul’s epistle to the Romans in which he offers a forewarning about the ensnaring influence of societal patterns upon our lives. Instead of living out the countercultural patterns of Christ, we find ourselves conforming to the patterns of this world. Paul writes:
Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Romans 12:1-2)
Patterns of this world often become so normalized that we barely question their validity and often fail to comprehend the degree to which they circumscribe so much of our existence, keeping us from living our lives with a kingdom-like purpose and meaning. Patterns die hard, particularly when they become camouflaged as tradition or concealed as an immutable status quo. Patterns of this world can deceive and distract us, clouding our sense of calling.
Patterns are modes of thinking and acting that often become ingrained in our lives. According to sociologists, patterns are learned behaviors that become internalized and socialized. Anthropologists contend that patterns are culturally mediated and acquired. Psychologists posit that patterns represent cognitive records that shape our behavior. Theologians argue that patterns are the consequence of free will and that life-negating patterns are the result of separation from God’s will.
According to Paul, as long as we accommodate to the cultural norms and paradigms of the world, we will be unable to fully experience God’s perfect will in our lives. The path of least resistance is to complacently adjust to what the conforming majority says and does. This is true both in and outside the church, as our religious institutions have too often become just as conformed to the patterns of this world as the rest of society. To paraphrase Dr. King, too often the church has become a thermometer that measures the temperature of society rather than a thermostat that works to change it. This is not to say that all civic and religious culture has gone astray and needs adjusting. But patterns that reinforce selfishness, greed, nativism and violence are antithetical to biblical values and should offend our moral compass.
While many patterns make us feel good, they often provide a false sense of security or freedom. When we see others doing the same thing we feel justified to continue with an attitude or action that we know is of the world and not of the Spirit. While some patterns are innocuous, others, particularly those that lead us to perpetuate or ignore injustice, are pernicious. In contrast, God’s patterns are by design life giving and life affirming. Vigilance is required to distinguish between God’s ordained patterns and the patterns of the world.
A younger generation is growing increasingly thirsty for new patterns that reflect a renewed commitment to social justice. They are responding to the ever-present gravitational pull toward justice that has moved their predecessors to action. These tremors of activism necessitate new fountains of action and reflection anchored in hope.
In the face of seemingly intractable and often overwhelming crises we must become what Archbishop Desmond Tutu calls “prisoners of hope.” Hope provides the inspirational and motivational bridge from our presently broken reality to a preferred future. Mobilizing hope requires breaking out of and replacing some patterns that have limited the in-breaking of God’s kingdom. Instead, we must internalize Paul’s call to become creatively maladjusted.
Activism for a Post–Civil Rights Generation
When Dr. King delivered this sermon in 1963, the arc of the civil rights movement was in full swing. The movement was forcing America to face up to the contradictions and evils of Jim Crow segregation. This movement epitomized creative maladjustment fueled by the transformative power of nonviolent social change. Through sit-ins at lunch counters, voter-registration drives, marches and grueling door-to-door education, people of all ages worked to dismantle an unjust and oppressive system of racial subordination and transform people’s hearts and minds. Acting out of a deep-seated faith from which they drew moral courage, movement leaders possessed the moral imagination to see an alternative reality in spite of the odds. While it can be counterproductive to overly romanticize previous movements, subsequent generations are slowly losing touch with a sense of what social movements can accomplish and the innovations that are necessary to expose and combat injustice today.
In high school I became addicted to the history of the civil rights movement. To this day I still pop in one of my prized tapes of the award-winning series Eyes on the Prize in order to get an extra dose of inspiration. Yet to many young people today, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and even the Southern Christian Leadership Congress (SCLC) represent obscure and antiquated acronyms. SNCC was a multiracial movement led and driven by young people that often pushed the envelope, dramatizing the brutality and inhumanity of segregation. It is as though the reverence and awe that I feel toward SNCC is fading among a younger generation, like music deemed “old school.”
Every generation can take for granted the struggles that came before them. However, in my generation’s case, there is more going on than simply amnesia or lack of concern. Part of what is making us feel disconnected from civic activism is the degree to which the challenges and injustices of our current age have morphed into much more covert and institutionalized forms. Injustice continues to adapt to its new environment.
Yet we can’t be held hostage to history, simply memorializing activism from the past. Instead, we must reinvent activism in ways that meet the challenges of our present reality. Many of the challenges from the 1960s such as economic injustice and inequality persist, even if they are harder to detect. Meanwhile, new challenges such as global climate change, terrorism and the prison industrial complex have emerged that test our resolve to God’s
kingdom-building project.
Social and political activism needs a better public relations manager. Activism is all too often associated with derelicts, rabble-rousers, radicals and extremists. This is in part because activists often defy authority, go against the grain and spark controversy. But they also plant seeds of change in society and surface issues that would otherwise go ignored. Almost unconsciously we celebrate a long legacy of activism. America’s founding fathers were activists against oppressive British rule. Gandhi was an activist against the imperial British occupation of India. Rosa Parks was an activist in refusing to give up her seat on numerous occasions in Montgomery, Alabama, before being arrested and kick-starting a bus boycott that ignited a movement. Harriet Tubman was an activist who guided slaves to their freedom through the Underground Railroad. Archbishop Desmond Tutu was an activist fighting to dismantle the system of apartheid. Many of our most admired American and global leaders were activists. Most importantly, Christ was an activist who turned upside down the patterns of his world, ushering in a new kingdom that often stands in direct opposition to our earthly kingdom.
No one wants to be on the wrong side of God’s movement of justice in history. When we look back, we often falsely believe that certain reforms in politics and transformations in society were inevitable, such as the end of the slave trade, Jim Crow segregation or apartheid in South Africa; however, these systems of injustice fell because of the tireless will and relentless sacrifice of a cadre of transformed nonconformists. If we are asked by our children, “Were you a part of the campaigns during the turn of the millennium that halted the global AIDS crisis, ended extreme poverty around the world, dramatically reduced domestic poverty in the United States, reversed global climate change, halted modern day forms of slavery, etc.?” what will be your answer? This book seeks to make that answer an emphatic yes.
What I love about Paul’s message is that he goes on to emphasize that there is a unique role for every person who is willing to allow their life to become a living sacrifice. Paul goes on to write, “For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so...
