the political advantages of organized religion

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A piece of mine entitled “If Millennials Leave Religion, then What?” was published by the Religion News Service and picked up by the Washington Post yesterday. In it, I acknowledge the drawbacks of religion (viewed from a secular, political perspective), but I also catalog its advantages and argue that we don’t yet have a secular alternative that fills the traditional civic and political functions of churches and other religious congregations.

The piece had to be cut for length, which is fine (and I was able to select the cuts). But here, I would like to share one section that was deleted for length. In the published version, I alluded to the “depth” of religion. This is what I meant:

Mark Warren’s wonderful book about faith-based organizing, Dry Bones Rattling, begins with a vignette of Father Al Jost reading from the Book of Ezekiel to a group of Latina parishioners from poor neighborhoods in San Antonio. He chooses the version by African-American songwriter James Weldon Johnson: “Ezekiel connected dem dry bones.” Those lyrics derive from the Shakespearean poetry of the King James Version: “Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.” Father Jost’s listeners might hear those resonances, or some might recall the Spanish (“¡Huesos secos!”) or the Latin of the Church in which they were raised.

In any case, the effects are palpable. The women are nervous before Father Jost speaks, but they respond “with a resounding ‘Amen’ and [stride] onto the stage to the sounds of a mariachi band … exuding confidence and collective determination.”

I propose that the original quality and the long history of Ezekiel’s poetry explain its political power. Secular equivalents must match this depth of resonance.

the Midwestern public universities

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(Madison, WI) I am here very briefly for a meeting, having come from this morning from Urbana/Champaign. My calendar for this six month period also shows days in Ann Arbor, Indianapolis, Bloomington, Chicago, and Detroit.

I don’t think the full glory of our Midwestern state universities is sufficiently appreciated. As an academic myself, I am prone to overestimate the importance of higher education. But in my mind, this region is a prairie studded with fine research institutions, like Greek city states or walled Renaissance towns, each boasting its famous thinkers and its cosmopolitan reach, each tied to the state that sustains it (and each, unfortunately, ready to send a mercenary army into symbolic battle with the others). Champaign, IL–just for example–houses the second biggest university library in America, whose 13 million volumes put it behind only Harvard. I am reminded of what the late Tony Judt once wrote:

By far the best thing about America is its universities. Not Harvard, Yale, e tutti quanti: though marvelous, they are not distinctively American—their roots reach across the ocean to Oxford, Heidelberg, and beyond. Nowhere else in the world, however, can boast such public universities. You drive for miles across a godforsaken midwestern scrubscape, pockmarked by billboards, Motel 6s, and a military parade of food chains, when—like some pedagogical mirage dreamed up by nineteenth-century English gentlemen—there appears…a library! And not just any library: at Bloomington, the University of Indiana boasts a 7.8-million-volume collection in more than nine hundred languages, housed in a magnificent double-towered mausoleum of Indiana limestone.

I am not as critical as Judt of the “scrubscape” and its people. But I agree that there’s something miraculous about these huge intellectual conglomerates rising from the fruited plain at the command of their state legislatures. Hopping around the region on commuter planes, you see professorial types with the New York Review spread on their knees and kids in college hoodies. I know that the universities’ funding is now mostly private and their students come increasingly from a global elite. I know they can be ivory towers or tools of Monsanto or the NSA. And yet, when people assess our era centuries from now, I think the great Midwestern public universities will warrant respect.

Review of We Are the Ones

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(Urbana/Champaign, IL) I am here to talk to a public audience about the arguments of We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America. Meanwhile, I’d recommend Michael McQuarrie’s new review of my book (along with Ben Barber’s If Mayors Ran the World). It’s a good, thoughtful article. I appreciate his summary of my book and his partially critical response.

In the final chapter, I say that a movement for civic renewal should expect and welcome vibrant debate, and three likely topics of debate will be: whether economic reforms must precede political empowerment; the role of anger and conflict versus civility and consensus; and the ideological placement of the civic renewal movement (on the left, at the center, aiming for neutrality, or very broad). McQuarrie meets my hopes by staking out strong positions on exactly those issues.

He also reads me as taking the opposite position from him on some of these questions, when I was trying to be more neutral–considering both the pros and the cons and letting readers end where they like. Thus I would like to respond to certain portions of his review, not because they’re necessarily unfair, but as an opportunity to clarify my own views and engage the debate. For example:

The title of Levine’s book—We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For—is an inspiring call to action, and in this sense, at least, is similar to Alinsky’s Reveille for Radicals (1946). However, rather than arguing for the possibilities of popular power, Levine is more interested in establishing the potential of citizen engagement for policy. Much of the book seems oriented around questions like “What are the measurable effects of community engagement on school effectiveness?” Levine’s form betrays a shift within the civic renewal movement, as it gains a foothold in foundations, academia, and even the White House. In the process it is becoming more communitarian in its celebration of the values and morality of citizens, while de-emphasizing popular authority and political sense. In terms of practice, contemporary advocates of the civic renewal movement emphasize correct deliberative communication among citizens as a solvent for all manner of political differences. In contrast, many in this tradition from Tocqueville on argued that civic virtue could only thrive in settings of relative socioeconomic equality. Challenging elites with popular power and cries that they are economic parasites, once central to populist activism and discourse, have been trimmed away in Levine’s account to make room for the idea that inequality can be overcome through a more virtuous and deliberative politics.

I do collect evidence that civic engagement boosts social outcomes. That’s because I don’t believe that many citizens, let alone powerful institutional actors, are ready to support active citizenship unless they believe it pays off in terms of better schools, safer streets, or a healthier environment.

I am a hard-headed researcher, so I will only claim that civic engagement has such benefits if it really does. In fact, instrumental arguments will carry us only so far. Civic engagement may not always improve communities. It may generate desirable outcomes, but less cheaply and reliably than other strategies would. It may boost outcomes (like “school effectiveness”) that we trivialize when we try to quantify them, thereby erasing deeply contested value questions. And it may degenerate into mere social hygiene if it is viewed as a tool for social improvement rather than a right of democratic citizens and an aspect of the good life.

On the other hand, arguing for civic engagement as a right will not obtain funding, education, media coverage, or legal authorization for civic engagement. Instrumental arguments, if handled right, can be helpful. They are ammunition for a peaceful army of engaged citizens.

I would like to think that I am not a communitarian (celebrating “the values and morality of citizens, while de-emphasizing popular authority and political sense”) or merely a deliberative democrat (viewing “correct deliberative communication among citizens as a solvent for all manner of political differences”). I am certainly not a technocrat, and I offer a pretty sharp critique of expertise in chapter 4. With McQuarrie, I believe in power and conflict. Activist social movements must hold governments accountable. They will be–and should be–angry at the powers that be and at their fellow citizens who stand in their way. The strategies I recommend at the end of the book are aimed at bolstering their efforts. I do not for a moment count on policymakers to open doors willingly.

I do, however, reject the argument that “civic virtue [can] only thrive in settings of relative socioeconomic equality.” Effective activism is more common in Tanzania and India than in the US. It has often arisen from the poorest strata of American society, starting with slaves in the antebellum era.

The problem with putting economic equality first and expecting civic renewal to follow is that someone must then pursue economic equality without a popular following. Who will that be, why will the succeed, and why should we trust them if they do? Saul Alinsky was a great theorist, but his popular movements ended in disaster. I denounce the political influence of economic elites, because that is a valid critique and because political reform is required for civic empowerment. I would not personally denounce economic elites as economic parasites because I am not sure that is true, and I know it will divide a potentially broader coalition.

I wrote a book in the late 1990s about the Progressive Era (and actually discarded some detailed historical research I had done for reasons of length and coherence). Reflecting on that history, I would now say that some Progressive Era reforms were elitist and downright damaging. Others were populist and “civic,” in my terms (deliberative, collaborative, and relational). Robert M. La Follette, Jane Addams, and John Dewey were their paragons.

To the extent that these valuable reforms flourished, it was partly because economic radicals (Socialists and agrarian populists) challenged the government and capital. That made elites amenable to sharing some power. But the actual reforms enacted from 1900-1914 did not challenge economic inequality. Progressive reforms were indeed about reducing the political influence of money and increasing deliberative popular influence over government. Typically, the inventors and proponents of these civic reforms were not Socialists or populists. They had broader and more centrist coalitions, including many people who would have bristled at a depiction of the wealthy as parasites. The left movements may have won space for civic reforms, but the civic reforms had different origins and motivations.

Coming back to our present day: I would welcome more effective left-populist grassroots mobilizing on economic issues. I think it would change the balance of power in ways that would help civic reformers. But I think we also need a civic blueprint: a vision of how our democracy should look if we had the power to demand it. That’s what I hope to offer in We Are the Ones–along with strategies for civic reform and topics for the movement to debate. McQuarrie has joined the debate in a most welcome way.

talking about We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For on WFPW

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Here is the audio of David Whetstone and me talking this morning on WPFW’s “Community Watch & Comment” show in Washington, DC. The topic was my book, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For. The segment begins about 9:40 on this clip, after the morning news.

youth Participatory Budgeting in Boston

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On Friday, I had the opportunity to observe about 50 Boston young people at work on the city’s youth Participatory Budgeting initiative. I will write the whole story for GOOD Magazine, so this is just a teaser. In essence, volunteer young people (ages 12-25) have brainstormed more than 400 projects that the city could support out of its capital budget. I watched committees of youth come together to study, refine, and screen these proposals. In June, as many youth as possible will be recruited to vote for their favorite proposals at meetings across the city. The city will then allocate $1 million of its capital budget to fund the top-scoring projects.

This is an example of Participatory Budgeting, a process that began in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1989 and has since spread to 1,500 locations in many countries, according to the Participatory Budgeting Project. It bears some resemblance to other processes, including the New England town meetings that began in the 1600s and still survive in some towns in our region, not to mention the 265,000 village councils of India and other participatory government mechanisms around the world. It is nevertheless an innovation. The three-step process (brainstorming, project-development, voting); the application to big cities; and the allocation of capital budgets are all distinctive features of Participatory Budgeting. Boston’s process is not the first to restrict the franchise to young residents (regardless of US citizenship status, by the way), but that remains unusual.

I will have more to say about the details as the process unfolds. See also: “the rise of urban citizenship“; “participatory budgeting in Recife, Brazil wins the Reinhard Mohn Prize“; “participatory budgeting in the US“; and my chapter entitled “’Social Accountability’ as Public Work.”