In The Atlantic, John McWhorter suggests analogies between current movements against racism and religious revivals:

Third-wave antiracism is a profoundly religious movement in everything but terminology. The idea that whites are permanently stained by their white privilege, gaining moral absolution only by eternally attesting to it, is the third wave’s version of original sin. The idea of a someday when America will “come to terms with race” is as vaguely specified a guidepost as Judgment Day. Explorations as to whether an opinion is “problematic” are equivalent to explorations of that which may be blasphemous. The social mauling of the person with “problematic” thoughts parallels the excommunication of the heretic. What is called “virtue signaling,” then, channels the impulse that might lead a Christian to an aggressive display of her faith in Jesus.

… The new religion, as a matter of faith, entails that one suspends disbelief at certain points out of respect to the larger narrative. ….

When someone attests to his white privilege with his hand up in the air, palm outward—which I have observed more than once—the resemblance to testifying in church need not surprise. Here, the agnostic or atheist American who sees fundamentalists and Mormons as quaint reveals himself as, of all things, a parishioner.

McWhorter presents this analogy as a critique. He advises: “Social concern and activism must not cease, but proceed minus the religious aspect they have taken on.”

One obvious question is whether McWhorter is right that the anti-racist left is losing because of its rhetorical style. Jeffrey Sachs, for example, thinks it is winning.

But I am interested in a different question: why does political ideology often resemble religion? After all, anti-racist politics is not unusual in this respect.

• Environmentalism offers an account of original sin (human exploitation of nature), an eschatology (the planet will be wrecked by greed and waste), authorities (climate scientists) whose conclusions must be trusted even though we can’t see or replicate what they see, heretics (climate skeptics), a moral critique of everyday behavior, and a path to salvation through sacrifice.

• Libertarians define original sin as the influence of the state, which relies on violent force. Its tentacles reach into everyday life through taxation and regulation, corrupting the free condition of voluntary exchange. The state has a satanic tendency to expand, preying on human weakness. Until freedom is restored, libertarians should gather to read scripture (Hayek, von Mises) and convert wavering souls.

• Marxism offers the whole package: scripture, prophets, martyrs, hymns, icons, metaphysics, eschatology, multiple denominations and sectarian schisms, heretics and excommunications, revival movements, fundamentalist and revisionist strands …

This list could probably be extended to include New Deal liberalism, various forms of nationalism, third-wave feminism, Bonapartist populism, etc.

A resemblance to religion does not invalidate a political movement. I am an environmentalist and I am not shaken by the fact that environmentalism bears a point-by-point similarity to Protestant Christianity. Faith in climate science is a necessary step to saving the planet. Maybe confessing white privilege is a necessary step to racial justice.

But we might ask: do these political movements so closely resemble religions because we have mental habits that we lazily or uncritically apply to new domains? Could we be more effective if we were more original?

Alternatively, are these excellent ways for human beings to organize our thoughts, and that is why they have reappeared in secular contexts after first flourishing in religions?

Also, are these forms of thought characteristic of religion, or only of Abrahamic religions? Some aspects of environmentalism and libertarianism (original sin, individual responsibility as part of voluntary groups) remind me specifically of Lutheran Christianity. They don’t sound at all like Buddhism, for example. Does that mean that these movements are problematically “Western”? Or did the Reformation give us tools for understanding and improving the world that we should be glad to use for other purposes?

See also: is everyone religious?; are religions comprehensive doctrines?; the political advantages of organized religion; the I and the we: civic insights from Christian theology; and avoiding the labels of East and West.

These are examples of social theories that emphasize inevitability:

• Classical Marxism: “[The bourgeoisie’s] fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” — Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto
• Rational choice theory: What defines the tragedy of the commons is the “solemnity of the relentless working of things,” “the inevitableness of destiny,” and “the futility of escape” — Garret Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons” (quoting Alfred North Whitehead about tragedy)
• Skepticism about Great Men: “But the mysterious forces that move humanity (mysterious because the laws of their motion are unknown to us) continued to operate. Though the surface of the sea of history seemed motionless, the movement of humanity went on as unceasingly as the flow of time. Various groups of people formed and dissolved, the coming formation and dissolution of kingdoms and displacement of peoples was in course of preparation.” –Tolstoy, War and Peace
• Progressivism: “The current has set steadily in one direction: toward democratic forms” — John Dewey, The Public and its Problems
• A small-d democratic version: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”–Margaret Mead (attributed)

One thing that unites the disparate authors in our canon of Civic Studies authors is a refusal to accept any of these forms of inevitability.

Elinor Ostrom was part of the rational choice tradition, but she argued that whether we succumb to collective action problems–including today’s peril of climate change–depends on how we organize ourselves. It is neither a tragedy nor a comedy but a “drama.” She found that bottom-up solutions sometimes worked, and their chances of working depending on whether the participants used smart practices.

Jürgen Habermas came out of the Frankfurt School, which had assumed that capitalism inevitably blocks free inquiry and emancipatory reason. He also read theorists like Dewey, for whom (at least in my interpretation) emancipation is inevitable. Habermas holds, instead, that how well we reason and deliberate depends on how we organize our public life, and we have a chance to improve it if we work hard and wisely.

Gandhi and Martin Luther King confronted people who were deeply skeptical of nonviolent resistance, as well as quietist religious believers who preferred to wait for providence to sort things out. Their constant refrain was that we have a chance to improve the world if we try. Social science confirms that civil resistance sometimes works–and more often than violence does–although it depends on how the resistance is organized. During the century after Gandhi’s youth, the record of civil resistance improved, as activists learned better tactics, but lately, its record has gotten worse due to the autocrats’ ability to learn from their experience.

A major 20th century debate was about the relative importance of structure versus agency. Is history driven by inevitable processes or by intentional human action? The answer to that empirical question is: Some of both. But a much better question is: How can we enhance the better forms of human agency? The role of theory is not to weigh the past impact of structure and agency but to make agency more important in the future.

See also: beyond civic piety; Ostrom, Habermas, and Gandhi are all we need and Habermas, Ostrom, Gandhi (II).

(Fishkill, NY) In an American Sociological Review article, Patrick Sharkey, Gerard Torrats-Espinosa, and Delaram Takyar find that “every 10 additional organizations focusing on crime and community life in a city with 100,000 residents leads to a 9 percent reduction in the murder rate, a 6 percent reduction in the violent crime rate, and a 4 percent reduction in the property crime rate.” This is not an iron law or conclusive finding, but it’s an impressive piece of social science. The authors use several methodological approaches to triangulate on the same basic finding: civic associations cut crime.

Incidentally, crime rates fell in major US cities just as the number of anti-crime civic groups rose. That doesn’t prove causality, any more than the decline of the European stork population is responsible for declining birth rates in Europe. But along with the causal evidence assembled by Sharkey et al., there really is a plausible case that a bottom-up, voluntary movement to make cities safer worked in the 1990s.

The evidence also suggests that it wasn’t mainly the explicit anti-crime groups that had the biggest effect. Substance-abuse and workforce-training organizations seem to be more important, although that finding is less secure than the general relationship between voluntary groups and safety.

The question is how to get more citizens involved in the kinds of civic work that can make neighborhoods safer and otherwise better places to live. One opportunity is presented by all the citizens who step forward to give hours of service. Instead of being satisfied with low-impact volunteering efforts, we could help these citizens to organize themselves into powerful groups. And instead of letting them work in isolation, we could coordinate their efforts with those of city officials and agencies and local businesses to address common goals together.

That is the model of Cities of Service, about which Myung Lee and I wrote a Stanford Social Innovation Review article. One specific project of Cities of Service is Love Your Block, in which cities and neighborhood residents get resources to identify and work together to address local needs–the residents contributing free labor, and the city offering its support.

Last year, Mary Bogle, Leiha Edmonds, and Ruth Gourevitch of the Urban Institute wrote a qualitative evaluation of three Love Your Block projects–in Phoenix, Lansing, and Boston. Here are my Google Streetview pictures of the Phoenix and Boston projects, both of which are park renovations.

Bogle, Edmonds, and Gourevitch talked to active grassroots leaders involved in these projects and to other people in the same neighborhoods. They produced social network maps of old and new relationships among the people involved (as a way of measuring changes in social capital). They asked interviewees whether the projects had affected relationships, collective efficacy (the ability of a community to control its own environment), public ownership of public spaces, and safety.

Overall, the results were positive. Participants generally reported more and stronger working relationships. Everyone perceived that crime had declined, although they understandably cited many causes for that trend, not just Love Your Block. Relatively few of the interviewees who were not directly involved in the project saw evidence of stronger community ties, but they were more likely to see such value in Lansing than in the other two cities.

The contexts differ a lot. In Boston, the neighborhood is changing fast–pressures of gentrification are powerful. Some of the Boston participants are well connected to local elected officials and took advantage of that form of social capital. But horizontal ties in the Boston neighborhood are weaker. “A few participants thought community cohesion had gotten worse.” That would not be an effect of the park restoration but rather a consequence of rapid demographic shifts in the neighborhood.

In contrast, Lansing seems more stable, and more residents perceive more impact of Love Your Block on the community as a whole. Horizontal relationships are more important there.

In Boston and Phoenix, gentrification is a concern, and residents involved in improving their communities worry that their good work will displace residents. One Phoenix interviewee said, “I do have this anxiety about being so involved in the organizational side of things and also recognizing that any positive impact we have is veiled privilege.” That is not a problem in Lansing, where capital and population is at risk of flight. The Lansing team worked to restore a garden immediately adjacent to a public school that is vacant due to population-loss–not a problem in Boston.

Although local community work against a problem like crime is not likely to stop gentrification, it can mitigate some of its disruptive effects and empower residents so that they are able to negotiate somewhat better policies. In a 2016 report, HUD argued,

Although residential displacement is a primary concern of many changing neighborhoods, communities should also act to ensure that residents are not left alienated from neighborhood changes. … In order for low-income residents to garner the benefits of neighborhood change, communities should also pursue policy objectives further than affordable housing by supporting neighborhood organizations that foster greater connections between newcomers and long-time residents and that encourage civic engagement among all groups.

Similarly, my colleagues and I are studying the potential of an arts center in Boston’s Chinatown not to stop gentrification but to mitigate its damaging effects.

In the network diagrams of Love Your Block, local businesses emerge as important nodes, and “anchor institutions” (notably ASU in Phoenix and MSU in Lansing) are important assets. In Boston, these institutions are less important, and City Hall is more so. Interestingly, in Boston “the park is falling into modest disrepair already,” whereas Lansing’s park is “self-sustaining” thanks to active volunteer gardeners. That suggests that truly community-based networks are more valuable than ones that rely on official power. But it’s also easier to build horizontal networks in smaller places where the population is more stable and gentrification is much slower or nonexistent.

In July 2018, Cities of Service launched a new 10-city program focused on Legacy Cities (“older, industrial cities that have faced substantial population loss”). It will be evaluated by the Urban Institute.

Overall, the evidence seems strong that how communities organize themselves matters for reducing crime. Cities of Service Love Your Block program is one of the most ambitious and well-designed national efforts to engage communities. Early returns suggests that it may help cut crime. Although additional research and evaluation is appropriate (as always), the evidence already suggests that cities should use this approach to boosting public safety.

See also: can the arts mitigate the harms of gentrification? A project in Boston’s Chinatown; organizing is renewable energy; civic responses to Newtown and “the rise of urban citizenship