Aaron Stauffer’s Listening to the Spirit builds on a burgeoning interdisciplinary scholarship around Broad Based Community Organizing (BBCO) as well as on his own experiences working with BBCO in San Antonio Texas and Nashville Tennessee. Engaging with a wide array of scholarship in Christian ethics, political theology, philosophy, and sociology, he uses examples from his own experience to argue for the importance of attending to “sacred value” in BBCO. The book seems to have two central arguments for two main audiences. For Christians, Stauffer argues that listening to the Spirit is a social practice that can be facilitated by the central practices of BBCO, namely listening campaigns and relational meetings. These are religious practices, he argues, that enable Christian communities to attend to and act on their sacred values in keeping with traditions of the radical social gospel and radical democracy. For organizers and leaders within BBCO, he argues that sacred values should and often do play a vital role in organizing. Some organizers fear that sacred values such as abortion, capital punishment, or same sex marriage are too polarizing and cannot form the basis for winnable issues in broad coalitions. But Stauffer contends that sacred values should not be ignored; rather, they should be embraced as vital resources for BBCO.

Stauffer builds on the significant work of Gary Dorrien on the radical social gospel, Jeffrey Stout on BBCO and sacred value, Luke Bretherton on BBCO and Christian communities, Molly Farneth on Hegel’s social ethics, mutual recognition, and agonistic struggles for justice, and Vincent Lloyd on BBCO’s deficiencies in opposing racial capitalism, among others. His own contribution centers the role of sacred value in the work of organizing within Christian communities as well as the importance of BBCOs as counter publics. It’s hard to overstate the importance of these collective works and Stauffer’s unique contribution. In a time characterized by culture wars, polarization, and appeals to tradition or critique, Stauffer’s book suggests that sacred values play a constructive role in the social practices of BBCO and radical struggles for justice and social change. With enthusiasm for the book and the conversations it engages, I invite Stauffer to respond to three central questions.

Is Habitus enough? On the Virtues (and vicious semblances) of Patience and Urgency

Stauffer convincingly argues that BBCO is best understood as a communal social practice, rather than a skill or art form honed by an individual organizer. While many Christian social ethicists draw on Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of practice, Stauffer turns instead to Pierre Bourdieu. What MacIntyre’s neo-Thomistic Aristotelianism lacks—namely attention to power relationships and institutions—Bourdieu’s focus on habitus within a field of power relations supplies (152, 155). I share Stauffer’s concerns (and have others beside) about the deficiencies of MacIntyre’s account and any account of social practices that would heighten dichotomies between either the action and agency of individuals or power relations, structures, and systems (155). And I agree that there are important similarities between habitus and the notion of habit explored in conversation with John Dewey and Cornel West in Chapter 4 (163). Still, I wonder whether Bourdieu’s account of habitus, for all its value, lacks certain resources that would help us to name the “dispositions and actions” or virtues that are vital for BBCO.

Stauffer notes that one could “certainly make a case for the role of virtues in organizing” though that is not his own task in the book (152). I cannot fully make that case here. But I do want to suggest, in short order, the value of virtue discourse, using the virtues of patience and urgency as well as their semblances or false lookalikes as examples. I do so in conversation with Stauffer’s observations about the slow patient and yet urgent work of organizing (136, 163–165). And these reflections inform the questions that follow about the relation of BBCO to traditions of abolition and radical democracy, on the one hand, and about the vital role and limitations of BBCO in organizing for social, economic, and political justice, on the other.

The value of virtue discourse, in my view, is that it provides thick descriptions for evaluative judgments of human action and agency—including motivation, means, and ends—which ideally account for fields of action, power relationships, systems, historical context, or as Stauffer notes, the settings and scenes of social practices (154). Stauffer observes that practice is centrally a matter of embodied “time, urgency, and style” (163). Practices are embodied by individuals and groups in particular contexts, relations, settings, and scenes. In contrast to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, which does not specify normatively good or bad habits, their process of development, or their potential for radical transformation, the virtues are inherently normative (good habits), cultivated over time, through various practices, amid various power relations and systems, which (as I argue elsewhere) enable radical forms of individual and social transformation.

It seems worth considering whether patience is best understood as a virtue or vice in organizing. Julius Fleming analyzes the violent history of “black patience” as a “virtue-turned-tool of anti-blackness and white supremacy” as well as the “transformative potential of black patience” in the organizing, creative performances, and acts of “urgent patience” that energized the Civil Rights Movement.1 Likewise, Stauffer repeatedly notes, the work of radical democratic politics is “patient [and] slow-going” (136). The work and struggle are never over. The goal is not to arrive at some utopia where the work ceases. Each generation must take it up anew. But neither is it dystopic (138). And so, the work is at once patient and urgent (163). Given the violent histories and afterlives of slavery that form the context of struggles for justice, theorizing patience or urgency as virtues of organizing requires distinguishing each from their vicious semblances.

Patience might be understood as a virtue that enables organizers to continue the patient and slow-going work of organizing in the face of obstacles or when “wins” and results are not forthcoming. It might enable organizers to seek difficult goods of justice amid continual setbacks, or creatively disrupt white supremacist uses of time through sit-ins and jail-ins.2 We can also imagine vicious extremes or semblances of patience: excess, deficiency, and false lookalikes. On the one hand, one could be too patient, as Martin Luther King Jr. suggests of the “white moderate” who is too patient with injustice and unjustly demands patience from oppressed and exploited groups. On the other hand, impatience could lead organizers to prematurely abandon their work or hastily rush into activism uninformed by the recognitional practices of listening to the wider community.

Likewise, urgency might be understood as a virtue that enables organizers and communities to act with a due sense of exigency and resolve amid injustice, and with a keen sense of the violation of sacred values that demand redress (138). Again, organizers might have an excess or deficit of urgency, acting rashly and sacrificing the most important values to the seemingly urgent, or failing to act with the urgency demanded, but these would be vicious extremes and not the virtue itself. On this view, the practices of BBCO would be strengthened by both patience and urgency when each is fitting.

For his account of practice, Stauffer observes that he needs “to point to certain transposable dispositions and actions, combined with distinct uses of time that are characterized by an actor’s own style in a specific scene” (154). Bourdieu’s account of habitus helps him to theorize the settings and scenes of organizing practices. But it seems to lack a more nuanced moral vocabulary and conceptualization of the dispositions and actions, or virtues and vices, that would enable the forms of social and political transformation sought by BBCOs. Given that Stauffer is interested in overcoming prevalent dichotomies and binaries between actor and action, individuals and communities, agency and systems, specifying some of the virtues that strengthen organizing practices or the role of virtues in organizing might help to provide a robustly ethical discourse for human action and agency that takes seriously contexts, systems, structures, institutions, and power relations, or setting, scene, and style. Doing so might also help to conceptualize the sense in which patience or urgency can be seen as virtues and the liabilities of excess and deficiency associated with each.

BBCO and Traditions of Abolition and Radical Democracy:

A second set of questions pertains to the relation between BBCO and traditions of abolitionism and radical democracy that Stauffer draws out in the book. He makes a compelling case for certain continuities between U.S. traditions of the radical social gospel, Black and Latin American liberation theologies, abolitionist struggles and his own vision for BBCO today (172–173, 182–183). Like the vision of radical democracy at the heart of BBCOs, Vincent Lloyd’s and Joshua Dubler’s account of abolitionism involves organizing practices and a radical revivalist spirit in the struggle to dismantle the military and prison-industrial complex (182). Insofar as abolitionism and BBCO share a radically democratic ethos and prophetic commitment to oppose heteropatriarchal and racial capitalism, Stauffer observes that they “share a common ethical spirit” (183).

But Stauffer also names the historical and contemporary discontinuities between BBCO and abolitionist movements. Perhaps the most marked distinction, he suggests, is the sense of urgency or patience, revolution or reform, immediatism or gradualism: “it is certainly the case that BBCO is not abolitionist; it is gradualist, to use Lloyd’s terminology” (183). The division between immediatists and gradualists was perhaps the most significant division among antebellum abolitionists who agreed that slavery should be abolished but disagreed about when and how. Debates about how to demolish slavery and its foreseen afterlives were pervasive among immediate abolitionists, but they agreed that doing so was a matter of urgency.

I am interested in Stauffer’s reflections on this distinction between BBCO and abolitionist struggles today. Is BBCO necessarily gradualist? Are there contexts, situations, or communities in which BBCO would become abolitionist not only in the spirit of radical democracy but in a sense of immediatism and urgency? If the distinction is as marked as Stauffer suggests, between abolitionist and BBCO modes, practices, and relations to time, what is the significance of this difference for the shared work of dismantling hetero-patriarchal racial capitalism?

Vital Role and Limits of BBCO in Organizing for Social, Economic, and Political Justice?

Relatedly, I invite Stauffer’s reflections on the vital role and potential limits of BBCO amid other forms of movement, protest, and organizing for socio-political and economic justice. I agree with Stauffer that sacred values can, do, and should play a vital role in BBCO, and that relational meetings and listening campaigns enable various forms of recognition amid differences and disagreements (87–88, 96–97). At its best, BBCOs cultivate the practices and conversations that move communities beyond culture war conflicts and enable coalition building around shared values, aims, and projects. This is vital work and a major strength of BBCO in the quest for justice. So too, I agree that value pluralism need not end in the cul-de-sac of incommensurability. Daily practices of listening, conversing, and practical reasoning allow for certain forms of recognition amid deep differences as well as the possibility of persuasion or personal and social change (108).

Still, precisely because of these strengths, it seems that BBCO may not be as well-suited to help communities organize around the very sacred values that are most contested, those values that constitute the deepest differences and disagreements. Might BBCO’s greatest strength also be its point of greatest weakness? In faith communities, some of the deepest differences and disagreements about sacred values involve questions of gender, sexuality, and reproductive justice, from same-sex marriage and LGBTQAI+ rights to women’s ordination and abortion. I am not suggesting “the incommensurability argument,” which Stauffer rightly rejects, namely “that sacred values are incommensurable . . . and so they simply cannot be sources of group solidarity” (83). Rather I am suggesting that amid the plurality of values that may bring communities together in group solidarity around a number of issues and aims, those sacred values that form the deepest points of disagreement cannot be sources of solidarity or inform the central agenda or aims of BBCO. For this reason, it’s difficult to imagine BBCOs playing a vital role in local or national struggles for social justice around particular sacred values: same-sex marriage, LGBTQAI+ rights, or reproductive justice, including abortion. In other words, I share Lloyd’s concern that BBCO may tend to muzzle “unmanageable dimensions of difference,” and so avoid engaging struggles for justice around contested sacred values (171).

It seems that the problem of muzzling might take different forms in different social practices of BBCO. For instance, I wonder whether relational meetings and listening campaigns are the most effective social practices for enabling individuals in faith communities to voice sacred values and concerns that carry a significant stigma within their communities such as abortion, redressing sexual abuse and intimate partner violence, and LGBTQAI+ concerns. Even if or when such contested values and concerns are voiced, they might be muzzled in the sense that they would fail to garner widespread support and solidarity.

One of the two main examples that Stauffer draws on from his experience in organizing hints at this problem (81). A conversation between a rabbi and an imam on a panel during the Nashville Community Iftar revealed their disagreement about the sacred value of same sex marriage as well as the possibility for solidarity and mutual recognition amid such deep disagreements. While Stauffer uses this example to make several points, for him, “this conflict exemplifies the untidy and contested status of sacred value in democratic politics” as well as the possibility of solidarity amid such conflicts (81). I agree on both counts. In the example, the imam, rabbi, and Baptist minister share the sacred value of religious pluralism, interfaith solidarity, and combating anti-Muslim bigotry. Presumably, these shared values brought them together for this event. And yet, while the conflict does exemplify the untidy and contested status of sacred value, in this case of same sex marriage, it also seems to suggest the limits of inter-faith BBCO for solidarity around such contested values.

In the end, I agree that sacred values play an important role in BBCO amid differences and disagreements. But I wonder about the limitations of BBCO in movements for justice concerning the most contested values. The concern is not just the danger of muzzling unmanageable differences, but that even when voiced, the most contested values will not form the basis for BBCOs coalitional work; precisely those values that are a matter of urgency for some and contested by others, will not garner broad based support for coalitional action. Stauffer admits that BBCO has not always adequately attended to concerns about race and gender (185). But he insists that this problem is accidental rather than intrinsic to the methods and practices of BBCO; at its best, through practices of relational meetings, listening campaigns, and mutual recognition of confession and forgiveness, BBCO can play a vital role in dismantling hetero-patriarchal racial capitalism (185, 175–176). Still, I wonder whether one of BBCO’s greatest strengths—namely the ability to form coalitions amid deep differences—may also be a limitation of BBCO’s role in struggles for justice.

To Stauffer’s credit, the book provides fodder for much else that I do not have room to engage in this forum, from thinking of BBCOs as counterpublics and religious practices, to a political ecclesiology for church engagement with BBCO and the nature of BBCO’s connection to traditions of the radical social gospel. I look forward to continuing the conversation about these as they arise in the symposium and beyond.

The Center for Asian American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary, which I direct, has been invested in telling the stories of Asian American Christians as both a theological and political practice, essential for shaping communal identity and expressing sacred values.1 However, many Asian Americans, across various ethnicities, generations, and geographies, often lack familiarity with their own migration histories and racialization in the U.S. in part due to public school systems that inadequately address the complexities of Asian American experiences. This absence of historical knowledge leaves many Asian American Christians unable to fully narrate their stories, hindering their ability to engage in meaningful self-representation. This is not just a personal shortcoming—it influences how they exercise their faith and contribute to the moral and political life of their communities.

Aaron Stauffer’s Listening to the Spirit underscores the significance of storytelling in both theological reflection and ethical action. Through community organizing practices such as relational meetings and listening campaigns, Stauffer shows how storytelling blurs the sacred-secular divide, revealing what communities hold most dear. For Christians from racial-ethnic minority communities especially, storytelling becomes a way to historicize their Christian identity, making the broader category of “Christian” both legible and contestable within religious and political contexts. It is not just a personal recounting but an act of reclamation and resistance that shapes a communal consciousness rooted in their unique histories and values.

In this essay, I explore several key themes:

Stauffer presents Christian identity as dynamic and historically situated, not a fixed essence (188–204). By grounding Christian identity in the material realities of space and time, he emphasizes its political (and, by extension, racialized; see, for example, 24–27) nature, linking Christian identity to broader historical processes. This approach challenges the sacred-secular binary, showing that faith and theology are inseparable from the spatial-temporal (and political-economic) realities of God’s creation (chapter one). In this framework, sacred value disrupts conventional binaries between sacred and secular, private and public, or church and world.

Christian identity, when understood as historically contingent, becomes open to contestation. This allows for a democratic practice within the church, where assertions are continually reexamined, fostering accountability. Drawing from Robert Brandom’s theory of concept use, Stauffer argues that this democratic discourse involving mutual recognition and accountability is central to the formation and transformation of Christian identity (93–104, 109–116).

This discursive framework is situated within a moral psychology (or what Stauffer calls “evaluative attitudes”) that highlights the role of concepts, passions, virtues, and habits in shaping social action (32–33, 37–46). For counterpublic churches, storytelling becomes a vital religious and political act, enacting discursive traditions rooted in material histories.2 This perspective urges us to see Christian identity as a lived, contested, and historically grounded reality shaped by both theological and political dynamics.

Historicizing Christian Identity: Sacred Value and the Dissolution of the Sacred-Secular Binary

In Listening to the Spirit, Aaron Stauffer frames Christian identity as a task deeply rooted in the material realities of space and time (203–204). By historicizing Christian identity, he ties it not only to theological claims but also to the political and economic conditions that shape the church’s lived reality. This approach challenges the view of Christian identity as static or abstract, presenting it as a dynamic engagement with historical forces. I infer that because race is a product of these same political and economic histories, Christian identity is racialized. This would seem to align with Stauffer’s own views since the way religion functions in the sacred-secular binary is to divorce religious belief and practice from racial consideration. By rejecting this binary, Stauffer gives due attention to Black churches as counterpublics (27–31). Stauffer shows that Christian identity is both theological and racial, intertwined with the material conditions of the world.

Stauffer’s critique of the sacred-secular binary (the burden of chapter one) is central to his argument throughout the book. He contends that the distinction between religion and politics creates artificial separations, obscuring the power relations that operate across both spheres. Drawing upon an extensive body of scholarship that critiques “secularism” as deeply shaped by gendered and racial forces, he argues that such binaries blind us to what is held in common, especially what we hold most dear. In rejecting this binary, Stauffer offers a way to see Christian faith as thoroughly embedded in worldly realities rather than isolated within spiritual (disembodied) confines.

At the core of this reimagining is the concept of sacred value, which Stauffer defines as what people hold most dear (19). Sacred value, he argues, dissolves the divide between religion and secularism, reflecting the ultimate concerns that animate both religious and political life. Whether expressed in explicitly religious terms or not, sacred value motivates people’s actions and organizing practices. As Stauffer notes, “our political lives are deeply entangled with our religious lives” (49). This concept of sacred value replaces the sacred-secular distinction, offering a more coherent understanding of how deep commitments shape actions in both spheres.

Stauffer’s vision of Christian identity as a historically contingent task reshapes how we understand the church’s role in the world. Christian identity is no longer a purely spiritual (disembodied) concept but a task enacted in space and time, shaped by race, economics, and politics. He writes, “Christian identity, then, is best identified with a task, a life to be lived characterized by a certain ethical life of the Spirit” (204). Stauffer works with an implicit pneumatology that is historicized, challenges fixed binaries, and opens up new theological and political possibilities for the church.

Stauffer ultimately urges the church to rethink its identity in light of its entanglement with the world. He argues that community organizing practices, often considered secular, are, in fact, religious practices grounded in sacred values (50). This framework historicizes Christian identity and dissolves the sacred-secular binary, positioning the church as a community fully engaged with the material conditions of the world. Through this lens, the church is not a socially disembodied institution but a community tasked with living out its faith in concrete, historical, and racialized contexts.

Christian Identity as Democratic Discourse: Contestation, Accountability, and Discursive Action

By identifying Christian identity as a task, Stauffer presents Christian identity as historicized and contestable and not simply given, shaped through human action and discursive practices. Christian identity becomes open to interpretation and adaptation—no longer fixed or dogmatic. This democratic discourse is not merely theoretical but grounded in ethical responsibility, where Christians are called to take responsibility for their assertions and be accountable to their various communities. Stauffer closely aligns Christian identity with democratic political practice, emphasizing human action through discursive reasoning.

Drawing from Robert Brandom’s social pragmatism, Stauffer highlights “concept use” as central to negotiating and contesting social identities and norms (94–104). This practice requires participants to be accountable for their commitments and the ways these commitments shape the community’s collective life. He stresses that “contestation and revision go all the way down” (122), meaning that Christian norms and practices are always open to critical revision—within constraints. While Christian norms hold authority, they are not immutable. Contestation, driven by mutual recognition and social practical reasoning, involves reexamining existing norms and developing new discourses from within the community, reflecting the evolving nature of Christian identity.

Stauffer ties this process of contestation to moral virtues such as responsibility and accountability (120), arguing that Christians owe one another “justifiable reasons for our actions and concept use” (122). This reason-giving fosters democratic participation and helps resist domination within the church, shaping its ethical life. Contestation, then, is not just a theoretical principle but an ongoing process grounded in human action—and I would add, from my work in divine providence, human action in participation with divine action, especially through the work of the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ. Christian identity is continually redefined through ethical reasoning and mutual recognition, making it a dynamic and evolving practice within faith communities.

Storytelling and Moral Psychology: Lived Theology in Marginalized Communities

The democratic practices of mutual recognition and accountability presuppose something, a process or practice that is shared. Stauffer highlights storytelling in the relational meeting and listening campaign of the community organizer (93–104). Telling our stories of what we hold most dear facilitates mutual recognition. By telling our stories, we put them on the table and identify what binds us together for shared ends and what may separate us. According to Stauffer, storytelling in its optimal form is a self-conscious, disciplined, and vulnerable practice expressing sacred values (100). It is a collective practice deeply rooted in the social and theological life of these communities, formed in response to their historical and material conditions.

With the dissolution of the sacred-secular binary, the expression of sacred value through storytelling gives researchers access to something my colleague, Easten Law, and I (among others) have been calling lived theology. Through our <a href=”https://louisville-institute.org/our-impact/awards/project-grant-for-researchers/14311/”>Louisville Institute</a>-funded oral history research grant and my additional fieldwork, I have interviewed over 110 Asian American Christians (across ethnicities, generations, and geographies). I have heard their sacred stories of migration, racialization, and Christian faith. Their stories are lived theology.

Stauffer’s framework provides philosophical and theological grounding for viewing the oral histories of marginalized communities (for example) as central to theology. Often relegated to history, sociology, or anthropology, these narratives become essential for understanding how counterpublic communities make sense of their theological commitments amid social and political marginalization. As Stauffer explains, “[N]arrative work is political and religious because it asks people to critically and collectively reflect on experiences of power in their lives” (61). Christian identity, therefore, is shaped in relationship to power dynamics, historical experiences, and broader social contexts.

For researchers, understanding the interplay of concepts, passions, virtues, and habits is critical to grasping the lived theology of marginalized communities. Oral histories from these groups reveal not only cognitive aspects of faith but also the emotional and moral dimensions driving their religious and social commitments. Stauffer’s framework encourages scholars to see these narratives as theological, where the passions and values of a community are made visible, and their struggles for justice and recognition are taken as theological.

This has significant implications for understanding how counterpublic churches shape Christian identity. These churches are not passive recipients of theology but active participants in constructing and revising it. Their storytelling and discursive practices are forms of lived theology that challenge dominant narratives and offer alternative visions of Christian identity grounded in their specific histories and struggles.

Stauffer’s account of Christian identity as a discursive tradition embedded within a rich moral psychology offers a compelling framework for understanding storytelling’s theological and political significance within marginalized communities. Oral histories, in this view, are more than mere recollections—they are vital expressions of lived theology that reveal the sacred values and moral commitments of these communities. Stauffer’s framework presents a textured, democratic account of Christian identity, deeply rooted in the lived realities of those who practice it.

Conclusion: Strengths and Limitations of Stauffer’s Approach

A social-practical—and thus historicized—account of Christian identity as a task highlights the critical role that the politics of passion and storytelling play in doing Christian theology, especially for Asian American communities. Narrating these sacred values with skill helps frame Christian identity in historically contingent terms and connects theology to the lived experiences of communities. The result is a theology always in action, alive within peoples and communities, as they do things—in participation with the Holy Spirit—with Christian concepts to navigate their moral and political lives. This framework also ensures that theology remains open to continuous contestation within a shared discursive tradition, where norms of speech hold all participants accountable. In this sense, theology becomes not a static set of doctrines but a dynamic, democratic practice where Christian identity is being negotiated and reimagined.

Aaron Stauffer’s Listening to the Spirit is an ambitious and thought-provoking work, offering a compelling reframing of Christian identity through the lens of social pragmatism, moral psychology, and the role of storytelling in both theological and political life. His emphasis on integrating political and religious dimensions, coupled with a robust account of the discursive nature of Christian identity, adds significant value to both theological and sociological scholarship. However, as with any major work, some aspects of Stauffer’s arguments warrant further reflection and discussion.

One potential weakness of Stauffer’s framework is the tension between contestation and stability within faith communities. While Stauffer rightly emphasizes the importance of contestation and accountability in shaping Christian identity, his focus on constant revision (within constraints) risks undermining the need for coherence and continuity in religious life—especially for communities already marked by dislocation through migration along with exploitation and domination through racialization. Faith communities may struggle to navigate the tension between fostering democratic discourse and maintaining the theological and doctrinal stability that many see as essential to their identity and practice.

Another area for further discussion concerns the applicability of Stauffer’s framework across different Christian traditions and racial-ethnic contexts. Although his engagement with counterpublic churches offers a rich account of how marginalized communities contest and reimagine their Christian identity, it is unclear how universally applicable this framework is. For example, Christian communities operating outside of a North American or European context might not share the same relationship to democratic cultural norms or political contestation. Stauffer’s framework could benefit from more extensive engagement with global Christianities to explore how these ideas translate in diverse cultural and theological environments.

In summary, while Listening to the Spirit offers an innovative and deeply valuable contribution to the study of Christian identity, the text leaves open important questions about the limits of its core concepts. A more nuanced exploration of the balance between contestation and continuity and a broader engagement with global Christian contexts would further enrich Stauffer’s argument. Despite these limitations, Stauffer’s work remains a field-advancing contribution that challenges readers to rethink the nature of Christian identity and its role in both religious and political life.

Central to Aaron Stauffer’s Listening to the Spirit is the claim that politics isn’t primarily about reason, or principles, or even passions. Politics is, most importantly, about how people work together to protect what needs protecting, care about what’s worthy of care, and honor what deserves honor. Stauffer’s way of putting this is to say that politics is about sacred value.

By sacred value, Stauffer has in mind both a property of certain objects, ideals, and beings, and what he calls an evaluative attitude toward bearers of that property. The book is an account of the latter far more than the former. Stauffer wants to show how such attitudes are formed and transformed, as well as how they lead to political conflicts and how those conflicts can be navigated. He’s interested, in other words, in people’s values or valuations and their practices of valuing. Nevertheless, and despite his attention to many of the important questions in the neighborhood of value, values, and valuing, the distinctions among them sometimes get fuzzy. Early in the book, for instance, Stauffer writes:

When you ask religious people why they are involved in politics, the answers you get have to do with deeply held values and relationships of love and concern. One of the key contributions of this book is to offer an account of the political role of sacred value in broad-based organizing. When I say “sacred value,” I mean something separate from (because differently understood from) the “sacred.” Sacred values are evaluative attitudes people take up toward goods and people; the sacred is another way of talking about the divine. Values and relationships drive much of our political life. Many of these religious and political attitudes can be captured by what I call in this book “sacred value.” An evangelical opposes abortion because it violates the sacred value of life. An Indigenous activist holds a landmark or natural resource as sacred and therefore supports its legal protection because its current recreational use threatens to destroy it. The abolitionist argues that prisons attack the sacred dignity of the incarcerated. . . . The term “sacred value” is another way of talking about what people hold most dear. (xii)

Throughout the passage, Stauffer shifts between sacred value (singular, no article) and sacred values (plural) without accounting for the shift. Later on, he offers a more detailed account of what sacred value is, but the slippages remain. I don’t think that sacred value, as he uses the term, is simply one among many sacred values that people might embrace. I think he’s talking about two different things here, related but not identical. In what follows, I want to sympathetically reconstruct what sacred value, valuation, and valuing are, and why each matters for Stauffer’s project.

As I see it, sacred value is best understood as a property or feature of an object, person, or ideal. This is the value characterized by Robert Adams as resembling God, or by Jeffrey Stout as that which is worthy of reverence. Something with these characteristics has sacred value. But when Stauffer says that “sacred values are evaluative attitudes,” he’s naming the attitudes that a person has toward something judged to be sacred, attitudes that person holds or enacts. As Stauffer himself puts it, “evaluative attitudes are attitudes we take up toward objects, persons, and states of affairs in the world” (105). Sacred value, then, is not an evaluative attitude, though there’s a close relationship between the two. Following Adams and Stout, Stauffer argues that to perceive or recognize the sacred value of an object, person, or ideal is to license a particular attitude toward it: to value it as something deserving of protection and reverence. If something has sacred value, our attitude toward it ought to be one of valuing it (by caring for it, protecting it, honoring it, and so forth). But sacred value is not the evaluative attitude; recognition of sacred value calls forth an evaluative attitude toward the thing thus recognized. That means that Stauffer’s suggestion above, that “‘sacred value’ is another way of talking about what people hold most dear” isn’t quite right. Instead, it’s people’s judgments about and attitudes toward what has sacred value that indicate what people hold most dear. In fact, it turns out to be crucial to Stauffer’s argument that people can be wrong in their valuations about what has value.

Stauffer wants to direct our attention away from sacred value to evaluative judgments and evaluative attitudes toward such value because it is in these judgments, attitudes, and related practices of forming and arguing over such things that the work of politics takes place. Claims of the sort that Stauffer lists in the passage above are claims that people make—to other people—about what those others ought to recognize as having sacred value. These claims express the activists’ own evaluation of the value of the object, person, or ideal in question. The pro-life evangelical is making a claim about the sacred value of the fetus. The Indigenous activist is making a claim about the sacred value of the land. They are calling for others to recognize the truth of their claim by recognizing that value as well. There’s a second piece to their claims: the insistence that the recognition of sacred value (of the fetus, or the land) ought to move people to act to protect it from violation. Some of the most intractable conflicts in our politics have to do with disagreements about what has sacred value, while others have to do with people’s everyday failures to protect or revere that which is widely recognized as sacred.

Disagreements of the first sort, Stauffer shows, can go like this: I see X as having sacred value, but I see that you’re not valuing it as such, and therefore you’re not evaluating it appropriately—you’re not giving it what it is due. It is an error and an injustice to treat that which has sacred value as something that lacks that value. You, of course, disagree, arguing that X doesn’t have sacred value, that its value is merely instrumental, and therefore that our attitudes toward it need not include protection or reverence of the sort due to things with sacred value. The conflict concerns what has sacred value. Disagreements of the second sort often give rise to immanent critique: “You say you recognize the sacred value of every child, but you stand by while the children in your community attend schools where lead paint peels off the walls and the water in the water fountains isn’t safe to drink. Why aren’t you fired up about this?” Here, the conflict is about how we ought to treat the things or beings that we agree, in principle, have such value, and why valuing something as sacred hasn’t motivated resolute action to protect, care about, celebrate, honor, or revere it.

The distinctions among sacred value, the evaluative attitudes people have about bearers of sacred value, and how people then treat those bearers of sacred value, are worth drawing precisely because Stauffer wants to hold on to the idea that there’s something objective we’re trying to get at in our judgments about sacred value. That is, our evaluative attitudes aren’t free floating; they are responsive to the way things are in the world. At the same time, he wants to keep us focused on the social and political practices by which we make (and contest) judgments over what has sacred value and what ought to follow from that. To this end, one of the richest sections of the book is Stauffer’s discussion of the relational meeting, or one-on-one, as a religious or spiritual practice.

In broad-based community organizing, relational meetings are one place where claims about sacred value often arise and get worked out. Organizing efforts typically begin with dozens upon dozens of relational meetings, one-on-one conversations in which people listen to and learn from one another what their individual and shared values are. The idea is this: if you want to change the conditions of your community, wherever that might be, you first need to build relationships, and thereby build power, with the people who live in this community with you.

Relational meetings are intentional conversations, aimed at drawing out people’s emotional investments and what they value—their evaluative attitudes. Why do you care about this place? What are your hopes for it? What are your fears about it? A good organizer focuses the conversation to elicit stories, stories that reveal—often to both people involved in the conversation—something about who they are and what they care about. As Stauffer puts it, “leaders who initiate the relational meeting should ask probing questions in the hope of unearthing formative stories that help explain why a person cares and values certain things” (59). As he shows in several powerful examples from his own organizing work, these conversations can make explicit uncomfortable gaps in one’s own judgments, attitudes, and actions concerning what’s sacred, as well as conflicts and disagreements about what ought to be treated as such. But for skilled organizers, such gaps aren’t conversation-stoppers; they’re opportunities to ask more questions, challenge pat answers, and consider anew what people care about and why.

In relational meetings, people can come to a better understanding of what they and others value, why they value those things, the passions and emotions that those things—and threats to those things—evoke, and the motivations that they have for trying to protect them. Because these are relational practices that take place, ideally, under conditions of reciprocal recognition, they can be transformative. They can be transformative when people allow themselves to be challenged and changed in their own understandings of sacred value and in their response to others’ valuations. Stauffer argues that it’s through these meetings and related practices that we come to have a better sense of where sacred value lies. Then, our own evaluative attitudes may become better attuned to that which is worthy of care or reverence.

Distinguishing between sacred value and people’s valuations of the things they believe or understand to have such value matters. It matters, not least, because conflating these things makes it hard to say how people’s valuations—or the political views and activities they base on such valuations—are anything more than mere preference, whim, or power-play. What broad-based organizing is, on Stauffer’s account, is a complex social practice in which people work to build relationships, practices, and institutions in which such valuations can be expressed, contested, and transformed in order to come to better, truer, and more just ways of tending what’s sacred in our midst.

In Marxism and Form, Fredric Jameson writes,

For where in the older society (as in Marx’s class analysis) Utopian thought represented a diversion of revolutionary energy into idle wish-fulfillments and imaginary satisfactions, in our own time the very nature of the Utopian concept has undergone a dialectical reversal. Now it is practical thinking which everywhere represents a capitulation to the system itself, and stands as a testimony to the power of the system to transform even its adversaries into its own mirror image. The Utopian idea, on the contrary, keeps alive the possibility of a world qualitatively distinct from this one and takes the form of a stubborn negation of all that is.1

Lifting a move from Herbert Marcuse, his point is that changing times change the revolutionary possibilities of concepts and practices, as once otiose ideas like utopia become electric within a context of new conditions. Under the reign of a technocratic capitalism and its business pragmatism, he argues, utopian visions hold a renewed potential exactly because they resist the capture of such pragmatic thinking. They are completely useless political visions and, as such, they pose a threat to the regnant regime of what makes rational sense.

I could not help but think of this passage as I was reading Aaron Stauffer’s wonderful book because I was drawn to the prospect that only amid the eclipse of Mainline Protestantism and the withering of radical Catholicism along with the ascendance of only conservative forms of faith melded to capitalist order with its complete rejection of the idea of social welfare could there be revolutionary potential in the retrieval of the Social Gospel Movement; an inédit—as the French say—movement brought forth again with freshly renewed meanings experiencing a dialectic reversal. I mean this as both a theological and socio-political point. The irritation and controversy provoked by the notion of a religiously infused movement for social progress might serve, after all, to challenge the sway of a de-Spirited capitalism by posing a qualitatively distinct route from the economic and political options the system offers. Under the dystopic reign of racial capitalism, the religious notion of social progress becomes ignited with new potentialities. No longer embraced by those in the establishment, despised and rejected by authorities and operating instead from a complete minority position (always denigrated by conservatives but now abandoned by liberals as well), the true radical nature of the Social Gospel might be recovered, embracing at a deeper level maybe the vision of a cooperative commonwealth limned by George Washington Woodbey.

Drawing on experiences from his own organizing work, Stauffer brings forth wonderful riches to imbue our collective life, reaching into the storehouse of the Social Gospel, the practices of broad-based community organizing (BBCO), and counterpublics inspired by the Black church and Black radical tradition to provide timely resources for radically democratic and social renewal. Like hoary bread somehow revived in the microwave, he provides refreshed food for a society deep in need and lost to the despairing and disparate fates of racial capitalism. In a society where we are free to choose among the options offered by racial capitalism under a government that is, as Mark Twain once quipped, “the best that money can buy,” radically democratic counterpublics may be the best hope we have for seriously altering these conditions. And they just might also provide a new kind of capacity-building resource to BBCO.

In what follows, therefore, I will not provide a summary of Stauffer’s entire argument nor recap every chapter. I trust other reviews of the book to do this. Rather, I want to look at two themes within the book that I believe present significant treasures for us to consider in this political, ecclesial moment. Second, I will then discuss two enduring questions I have for his vision, each related to the contributions he brings forth from the storehouses of political theology.

Liturgies of Political Renewal

Stauffer’s book makes a wonderful contribution to a growing body of literature and thought relating theology to community organizing, a body of literature this commentator is excited to see expand. But “relating” here is likely not robust enough to describe Stauffer’s argument. Maybe better, is to state that he helps us articulate the theology in organizing, especially when understood and intentionally practiced as a way of “listening to the Spirit.” As Stauffer states from the beginning, the main objective of his book is “to offer an account of the political role of sacred value in broad-based organizing” (xii). What he hopes to challenge and move beyond are versions of political life that believe one must leave her religious convictions at the door to enter the space of public discussion and decision-making. As he rightfully notes, versions of the “secular” or “secularization” that present themselves as neutral and uninterested with respect to religion serve more so to exclude certain forms of religious expression and cultural practices from public life. Promoting itself as objective, conversely, this ideology only “baptizes certain expressions of religious and civic culture” as those normative for politics. Behind or within the secular, therefore, is an unarticulated bias for “a vague form of white heteropatriarchal Protestantism supporting racial capitalism” (xiv).

But this does not imply that political life need be subjected to religious fiat or that religious plurality need be an enemy of political engagement. Rather, Stauffer contends that there is a robust political role for “sacred values” in democracy, allowing him to make two interlocking substantial claims about the possibilities of broad-based community organizing (BBCO). First, he argues, that such organizing efforts are deeply enriched and even bolstered by including sacred values in their politics. This claim stands in stark contrast to prominent views and even the practice of many organizers who deem sacred values to be too divisive and incommensurate to engage because they inevitably fracture collective efforts. Second, by giving place to sacred values in the practice of BBCO, he proposes, “the role of theology in organizing becomes clearer and a potentially new political and ecclesiological terrain opens for Christians addressing injustice in a pluralistic world” (xv). From my perspective, what these two claims allow him to do is to render the basic organizing practice of attentive listening in one-to-ones and small group settings as a liturgy for political renewal within the tradition of the radical Social Gospel (xvi).

Stauffer’s focus in this book is the first moment of the organizing cycle, the relational meetings and listening sessions that make up the listening campaign. As already noted, he wants to goad a shift away from how, at least in his public persona, Saul Alinsky would have envisioned the community organizing tradition he helped spawn.2 And many professional organizers continue to hold this hard line that sets religious convictions in a separate sphere from the muddier work of politics. What Stauffer provides is a description of the listening campaign that renders it not merely as instrumental for a larger action or solely the information-gathering and credibility-building activity of the professional organizer, but as a deeply formational and reverent practices for generating a new kind of people. The difference is that he puts sacred values at the heart of this listening campaign, resisting any need to translate or recode it for some kind of universal, public discourse. As he puts it, “The politics of sacred value refuses neat distinctions between our religious and secular lives, in part because the social practices of sacred value are embedded in both” (37). And this allows Stauffer to define these core practices of organizing as religious practices.

Not simply a process of identifying issue around which to engage “politically”, Stauffer takes the relational dimension and intimacy of this work seriously. As he states, the listening campaign of BBCOs are “grounded in relationships and values” for building solidarity and belonging (xvi) within a radically democratic ethic. The relational fabric Stauffer identifies here is not one of superficial homogeneity or consumer preference but is constructed on attending closely to the sacred values we each hold. To speak of sacred values, as he tells us, is to reference “what people hold most dear” (17). As those familiar with the practice of BBCO know, when done well relational meetings are not passive activities. They are active dialogues where agitation, mutual exchange, and reciprocative sharing happens. One of the key markers of a good relational meeting, in fact, is to learn what is most dear to others, something we learn by careful and attentive listening and question asking. By sharing stories about ourselves and our lives, such intentional listening allow us to identify our deepest commitments and to weave trust with one another as we come to recognize these convictions. It also begins us, as Stauffer argues, in the practice of social practical reasoning (96). Some readers may already see here the post-Hegelian theoretical framework, and I will dwell on this more below, but what I want to emphasize here is that Stauffer provides a rendering of the listening campaign as a worthwhile practice on its own and not just as a necessary preliminary step to the “real” work of exercising political muscle to get what we want.

To dwell at this level and to weave life together in touch with what each of us holds most dear is no thin practice. Rather it is deeply formative, habituating us through the practice into an ethic and politics that involves the Spirit. While the Spirit remains wild, untamable, and ranging in its liberating and love-instilling mission, for Stauffer, it is possible to track its movement. We do this by listening and attending closely, particularly to the experiences and sites where such liberation and beloved community are being generated and pursued (207). This orientation is core to his social practical account. Moreover, he intentionally plays on the multi-valences of the notion of the Spirit as at least both the third person of the triune God and the ethical soul of a community. Tending to that Spirit and cultivating its flourishing is the task that both animates the church and transforms the structures of society to more closely resemble the kingdom of God (205). Radical democratic forms of life are neither accidental nor are they simply the result of an occasional congress of solitudes.3 Looking to Hegel, Stauffer envisions a politics of belonging and mutual recognition whose communion is not at the same time staunchly communitarian, hierarchically imposed, or xenophobically exclusive. This ethical life, the substantive life, or Sittlichkeit, takes form within and because of the social practices that pattern it. The social practices of BBCO, as Stauffer contends, give shape to a radically democratic ethic, a counter cultural form of life that contests the dominative order of racial capitalism. And because such an ethical life based in social practices remains open-ended, it need not avoid conflict or shun sacred values to continue to build and pursue common goods and unity. Rather, trust is created in its very practice.

Liturgies, religious practices, wherein sacred values are tended and mutual recognition is shared then are not propaedeutic to radical democracy. But they can be the actual practice of radical democracy, patterning in their enactment an ethical life together. Involving sacred values, such a practice of politics can draw us beyond parochialisms and into deeper relationships amid difference where trust, mutual accountability, and even love are fostered, even as it need not always achieve perfect unanimity. Like sacraments, such liturgies provide rituals that involve our deepest selves in an activity that both symbolizes and actualizes the substantive life of communion. Just as Christian liturgy is not the preparation for communion with the divine but is actually the performance of that communion, BBCO listening liturgy is not pre-work for kingdom of God but can be the beginning of the embodiment of it—however imperfectly. Viewing the relational meeting and listening campaign as liturgy helps us see how these rather simple acts and practices partake in something much deeper and bigger. They are the rites and rituals that compose the Spirit of radical democracy. This means they have a purpose of their own and are not merely instrumental to the real, external goal of getting political wins. Defining the relational meeting and listening campaign this way, Stauffer illustrates how it can be an every-person’s liturgy for community building across difference and profound activity of political renewal.

To bring forth the notion of Sittlichkeit, however, is to already speak of thick community, another treasure Stauffer’s book brings forth for the transformation of society.

Counterpublics and the Possibility for Transformation

As a liturgy of political renewal, the listening campaign does not simply reinforce the status quo. In its formation it also readies us for transformation. Thus, one-to-one relational meetings and the listening campaign are integral, for Stauffer, to the generation of counterpublics. As sites of intentional dialogue where discourse that contests the dominant political and economic order of racial capitalism is cultivated and fostered, the counterpublics Stauffer describes are social spaces of radically democratic challenge to the dominative and exploitative character of racial capitalism (18, 117). By rejecting the political-religious divides imposed by the dominant liberal order and building upon the liturgy of storytelling and deep listening discussed above, BBCOs forge counterpublics, in Stauffer’s view, by bringing people together in mutual recognition and the determinative negation of a deeply resonant and more egalitarian form of social practical reason. Not only does he, thus, provide a corrective for BBCO’s self-understanding, but he also suggests that when we grasp the radically democratic political culture capable of being cultivated there, we can find new potentialities as counterpublics for our churches too.

Following the understanding of radical democracy developed by John Dewey, Sheldon Wolin, and Cornel West, Stauffer sets out to describe the internal culture of counterpublics, shedding more light on the Sittlichkeit we named above while also positioning himself as someone who views BBCO as more antagonistic to the regnant order. For him, BBCO constructs a political culture of their own; they don’t simply participate in the culture of racial capitalism and the corresponding republican political structure. Thus, following Dewey, BBCO shapes and forms its members in habits consistent with its radically democratic ethic (123). Adding to this, he believes we can learn from Wolin better to see how corporate power distorts democracy (133) while West helps us develop a more intersectional approach for grasping how multiple forces—race, gender, sex, class, etc.—warp our politics. West’s “prophetic Christianity” provides a certain power to radical democracy, imbuing it with a more critical and liberative Spirit (141). Quoting West approvingly, Stauffer writes, “‘Democracy is more of a verb than a noun . . . it is more a dynamic striving and collective movement than a static order or stationary status quo'” (141). For Stauffer, then, to build relational power within the practice of BBCO is not merely to assemble a power-bloc to play the political game as it is laid out within the current structure, but it is to contest the form of the current structure by bringing sacred values to the fore and exposing where that structure violates them (143). The counterpublic seeks the transformation of society, not simply the rearrangement of its furniture.

Viewed this way, the practices of BBCO and the political culture it fosters offer new treasures for hackneyed and impotent churches. It is also here that Stauffer’s commitment to radical democracy and the radical Social Gospel coalesce. He returns us to the George Washington Woodbey’s Christian Socialist vision and the place of the church in this movement. As the capstone figure of his argument, the Woodbey Stauffer introduces us to draws from his own Black church roots to develop, what Stauffer describes as, his counterpublic political ecclesiology (191). Stressing the enactment of faith and its concrete expression above its conceptual coherence or systematic articulation, Woodbey’s Christianity blended economic and political cooperation with an emphasis on education and religious freedom (191). It was by nature resistant to the deformations of racial capitalism, invested instead in “an alternative political economy” (193). When oriented to the goal of the “cooperative commonwealth” and configured as “dialogical spaces” that foster cooperation and solidarity with the exploited and dominated even as they agitate and continually challenge one another across their differences, churches can function as power bases and counterpublics that push back on the abusive structures of racial capitalism (193). For Stauffer, in our own time, this vision can be extended in an ecclesial political theology that includes feminist insights on the extraction of social reproductive activities typically placed on women—child-bearing, home care, education, food preparation, care of elderly or sick family members, etc. as well as a wider ecological view of how capitalism destroys the very planetary basis of our life.

An exciting invitation then opens for congregations as counterpublics, exemplified in churches putting their properties to use as “incubators for worker cooperatives, spaces where workers organize and run their own democratically governed businesses” (194). From my own perspective, our ecclesiological visions are enriched by such examples, just as they are deepened, invigorated, and challenged to become counterpublics worthy of the name. Without sentimentalizing the hard work of continuing the dialogue and agitation it takes to build this kind of political and economic power, the prospect of recovering such a meaningful task for the church at a time when so many of them have no idea why they exist is heartening and energizing. It also opens to church to deep engagement with BBCO, allowing them to see at least some of these basic practices as religious practices, while also moving the church into wider kingdom-building engagements with others. Returning us to the original call of Christ for our time, Stauffer’s “counterpublic political ecclesiology” lifts up a vision of the church focused on the improvement of society and righting the social, economic, and political conditions that immiserate and alienate so many (208).

Can the Sacred be Valorized?

When rendering the old new, or when bringing forth new treasures from old storehouses, one continually encounters the possibility that such renewal will cross over into the territory of redefinition or complete alteration. But it is also the case that at times the old new carries distractive or unhelpful baggage. It is not uncommon in such circumstances for some confusion to arise, and in reading Stauffer’s book, I must admit, I continued to wrestle with the notion of “sacred value.” In part, it may be that some of my tetchiness with the term springs from being recently reminded that I teach at a university whose most recent (non)strategic planning process produced a list of six “enduring values,” all of which (like “operational excellence,” number five on the list) seem to communicate a lot and nothing at the same time. In a culture suffused with the language of values/value, one of the questions that arose for me was whether sacred values could ultimately play the role Stauffer wants it to play but not for reasons that might be most obvious at first.

In posing this question, I want to begin by clarifying then, what Stauffer is not saying. Sacred values, as he states, are not to be understood within a monistic or utilitarian framework of value. Defined, as mentioned above, as “what people hold most dear,” sacred values, for Stauffer, are qualitatively different and therefore not to be measured on some single scale of value (89). In this sense, they do not stand in relation to other values like fruit and shoes in a marketplace. And Stauffer is completely fine with the resulting conclusion that an equilibrium of commensurability is not always reached with respect to diverse and differing values (89). Moreover, Stauffer doesn’t agree with the notion that “moral horror” can alert us to a residual, but not always evident, objective sense of the sacred, as Robert Adams attempts to argue. For Stauffer, Adams’s account does not sufficiently acknowledge the social practical register of sacred values, and thereby both over-commits us to an ontologically objective basis for the sacred (even if we are led to this by working our way backwards from moral horror) while also under-establishing how the role of mutual accountability and social obligations play in shaping sacred value, especially in a plural society (92).

Rather, as noted above, Stauffer deploys a post-Hegelian view of social practical reasoning here to situate sacred values within a dialectic, relational, and open-ended sense of politics that allows for a “qualified realism” (94, 105). The advantage of a social practical account of political reasoning is that it allows for sacred values to inform our judgments and actions while also being able to acknowledge that we hold our sacred values in relationship to other commitments and people across our diverse communities in a way that makes sense of the tensions that come from living in a pluralistic society. For Stauffer, this means incommensurability need not be a dead end for politics, a welcome insight for a time of deep polarity. With a basis more in relationships, moreover, BBCO need not be afraid of sacred values such that it forces those involved to pretend to commit a political lobotomy on the religious or moral dimension of who we are in order to coalesce on a more limited, pragmatic issue (108). Such will only leave people feeling instrumentalized, and Stauffer’s view is a welcome corrective to more crass versions of organizing. Welcoming sacred values in the political work of organizing, thus, involves us in deeper modes of mutual recognition even when we continue to disagree on the substance of them (96). Doing so, for Stauffer, actually allows us to build a stronger kind of relational power, because such relationships are built on genuine care and trust across differences rather than mere temporary utility. Narratively connected, thicker relationships of intersubjectivity, of accountability and mutual recognition, characterize this formative Spirit-work (99–104), creating not just political alliances but, as pointed out above, a thicker community as Sittlichkeit.

While I follow his account of how sacred values may work for a political sphere envisioned as somewhat freestanding from the economic, however, I’m less certain about this prospect when the prior moment of economic relations and the cultural power of capitalism to valorize all of life is taken into consideration. Once we’ve been taught to value the commitments of our faiths have we not already subjected them to a structural framework and force-field that forces us to argue for their esteem in a way that also loosens them from reality and estranges them, to some extent, from the way they order our lives? Moreover, under the conditions of cultural capitalism and, as Marx claims, the omnipotence of money how can one know where the line is between what’s of sacred (untouchable) value and what can more easily be alienated or desacralized for the marketplace of ideas and brands? Values always ring to me as the potable bits of our traditions left over once they’ve been completely subsumed within what Herbert Marcuse describes as the one-dimensional life of capitalist commodification and financialization.

While this is certainly a point about language, it also goes further, I think. For instance, if we just start to historicize for a second when the language of value took shape in this way, we begin to find its interconnection with a fact/value distinction important for getting capitalism off the ground by helping to free wealth and goods from substantive commitments. Within Hegel, this is already present, as the reconciliation that allows for mutual recognition in its objective form (what Hegel describes in the Philosophy of Right) is not simply moral or ethical but is concretely enshrined in the institution of private property.4 What he calls civil society and its system of needs provides the basis for mutual recognition in modern society where Spirit actualizes itself, allowing for both freedom and unity. And yet, we can already see here that such a register for recognition may work exactly against the kind of solidarity Stauffer wishes to find and foster within BBCO and a renewed Social Gospel movement. For would this not mean that person and property become interlocked in a way that might confuse the sacrality of the two? In capitalism, the propertyless are violable while private property remains sacred and inviolable. And I wonder how Stauffer might seek to extricate sacred value from this playing field?

One way of saying this is to ask, while we can track with Stauffer’s social pragmatism in its method of listening and to begin to see the church from the ground up, is there not already interpretation within what we see to begin with? In other words, in order to see do we not already need to say? Or, is the language of value already suffused with meaning that it brings more than we might want to say with it? As a term derived more from the marketplace than from theology, does value smuggle something into our vision of these movements in a way that may distort them and may distort theology? I don’t here mean to imply that there is some pure form of Christianese that can be used, but to the extent that the market is the most powerful structure our world has ever seen, shouldn’t we be careful about deploying its terms and codes? While this concept may fit with where people are, does it slip in a competing and contrasting anthropology that needs to be challenged or altered if we are to break free from racial capitalism? While it may seem that the qualitative distinction of sacred value protects it from such distortion, it’s not clear to me that this entirely escapes the anthropological and social ramifications that come with such terms.

That Stauffer’s post-Hegelian account neglects to mention the role of civil society for Hegel’s understanding of recognition touches on another, parallel question I had. This question deals with the place of the state and its role in his politics.

Does the Spirit Still Move as the State?

Some readers may be familiar with Hegel’s, though not uncontested, statement that the state is the way of God in the world.5 As he argues, the state subsumes familial sentiment and the individual desire unbridled in civil society within a rational order embodied in the state which community accepts as its own. The state, thus, for Hegel is the objective sphere wherein “what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational.”6 I don’t intend to dwell over the specifics of Hegel’s philosophy or theory of the state here, except to note that for him the state remains the fullest, communal actuality of human existence, of objective Spirit. And politics therefore stands, ultimately, within the framework of the state because the modern state is the most rational manifestation of Spirit.

Given this framework and its place for the state, I remain unclear about how Stauffer views the state. For instance, is the state the main, if hidden, character for his account by which I mean it is the ultimate arbiter and register through which the elimination of domination and exploitation are enacted? In other words, are these counterpublics still subsidiaries of the state or does Stauffer envision something much more radical here? What would he make of accounts that take the modern state itself to be a primary locus of domination, extraction, and of the imperial eradication of other loyalties and cooperative ways of life? And this leads me to ask just how constructive is his sense of BBCO? Does it only resist incursions of racial capitalism through organized appeal to the state based upon leveraging its relational power or might it, as a much-needed corrective to my mind of past BBCO practice, need to involve not merely petitioning the state but creating alternative, semi-independent, economies and political communities? Does Stauffer envision counterpublics more as counter-societies contesting the dominion of the capitalist state?

I suspect he does have in mind a radically democratic commonwealth of people that cannot be equated with the regime of the state or its apparatuses, but I’d like to hear more from him about the role of the state and its place, especially because any attempt to recover the Social Gospel Movement will need to be clear about its relation to the nation state. After all, bringing out treasures that are both new and the old, as Christ teaches, requires us to be scribes of the law trained as disciples of the kingdom capable of discerning who we ultimately serve and where our allegiances lie.

Aaron Stauffer, a scholar of social ethics, has written the most important book of 2024 on broad-based community organizing connected to religious congregations and other institutions (hereafter “BBCO” or simply “organizing,” understood to refer to this broad model, which is also termed faith-based or faith-rooted community organizing). Drawing on his extensive prior background as a community organizer, Stauffer suggests that the BBCO sector has failed to deeply engage religion in ways that are adequate to its aspirations. He argues for a remedy rooted in deep engagement with “sacred values” as key to revitalizing BBCO’s democratic work; in the core organizing practices of relational meetings (1-1s) and listening campaigns as key religious practices for enacting those values; and that doing so in ways deeply informed by insights out of the Black radical theological tradition can be an important way of moving toward radical democracy in America.

That ambitious agenda suffuses the book with an intellectual density that will appeal well to smart practitioners of organizing, theological ethicists, and scholars of organizing and democracy more broadly. Stauffer draws on Pierre Bourdieu (especially) and Alasdair MacIntyre to portray the whole organizing sector as a “practice” in Bourdieu’s sense, and thus as not an “art” or a “craft” the way many scholars have presented it—by which he partly means that organizing is socially located and constructed rather than the work of the organizer as a single person (xvi, all of Chapter 5). This framing allows Stauffer to draw on recent cultural sociology and field theory to accurately portray organizing within a triangular scheme: Organizing sits at the intersection of “settings” (the socially located and socially constructed situatedness of organizing); scene styles (the boundaries delimiting appropriate/inappropriate action established collectively within an organizing effort, which structure that group’s actions), and the intersecting fields of economic, political, and religious power that structure the broader society.

That’s a lot of conceptual work and Stauffer walks the reader through it adroitly. He notes early on that when organizing is done well, all of the above occurs within “relationships of authority and accountability” that are fostered democratically through non-coercive dialogue within the organizing process. That’s exactly right—albeit a principle sometimes violated in the course of actual organizing work. It also represents one of the key contributions that organizing can make to strengthening the cultural underpinnings of real democracy. Because they go against the grain of libertarian and therapeutic culture that erode responsible democratic life, healthy authoritative relationships and processes of accountability within those relationships are cornerstones for building a democratic future.

Key to this account of organizing is the way that “cooperation, dialogue, and agitation” form the heart of relational organizing when well-practiced—and occur within a focus on self-interest used in a very particular sense, which Stauffer usefully distinguishes from everyday use of the term by characterizing it as a person’s “value-laden stake in the common good” (155). This definition marks the religious or secular ‘sacred values’ that imbue meaning into one’s sense of self and one’s life and relationships. It also marks the self-in-relationship-to-society that has long characterized careful thinking about what Stauffer calls “democratic individuality” (drawn from Dewey).

To be heretical for a moment, I hope that the concept of democratic individuality will supplant the misleading “self-interest” language from the practice of organizing. Admittedly this would lose the healthy countercultural and agitational challenge that emphasizing self-interest once presented to congregations involved in organizing. But organizing has so redefined (and re-redefined) self-interest that it has lost its meaning—and who would argue that pursuing self-interest is truly countercultural in any meaningful way in American society today?

Finally, a strength of the book lies in its placement of organizing and congregational life firmly within the real world: conceptually through the work of Sheldon Wolin on “the economic polity” that characterizes advanced capitalist economies under neoliberalism (132, 167); and theologically through Stauffer’s close affinity with the radical social gospel of the early 20th century and its ongoing link to Black theology. He does so via close attention in Chapter 7 to the life and writing of George Washington Woodbey, the Christian socialist and Baptist church leader. Woodbey’s life’s work offers Stauffer a paradigm in arguing for organizing spaces as the key site for constructing a “counterpublic political ecclesiology” that can theologically inform contemporary efforts to enable real democracy—and the urgent need for more such work.

All that is intellectually dense but satisfying reading, with the exception of Chapter 3’s hard-to-digest section on Hegel’s concept of Spirit as a route to Stauffer’s post-Hegelian “social practical account of the role sacred values play in our politics.” At least this theoretically-inclined but non-philosophical scholar needed clearer exposition of the political roles of things like “determinate negation.” Still, the book offers a conceptually grounded and cleanly analytic view into the internal dynamics of broad-based organizing, offering new insight into why it matters to think theologically about organizing, ground organizing in sacred values, and draw on the experience of organizing in marginalized communities as a key resource for doing ecclesiology, theology, social ethics, and democratic theory.

Also: Even better to see all that in a book of theological ethics that draws richly from participant-observation (here within listening campaigns, relational meetings, organizing trainings, and a tense exchange between adherents of differing faith traditions regarding the status of LGBTQ persons). This sociologist wanted more of that kind of ethnographic grounding throughout the argument, but it’s there and it’s good. Yet there were places that Stauffer’s argument ‘stuck’ for this reader—not ‘stuck in the throat,’ this book is too important and too tasty a morsel for that, but rather stuck analytically or rhetorically in my mind in ways that clouded Stauffer’s argument or led me to a divergent view.

The handling of the lived experience of faith struck me as overly abstracted in a few ways. First, the hard distinction between “sacred values” and “the sacred” that Stauffer makes central to his argument seems to me to elide the way people actually experience their encounters with the holy, however that might occur: I think people really do encounter the sacred/holy/spirit/transcendent in ways that matter and are hard to boil down (or up?) into sacred values. Perhaps that is the sociologist in me speaking: cultural sociology has long moved away from thinking about ‘values’ as a core category of analysis, in favor of much more grounded approaches. But this strong distinction misses something important, I think, and Stauffer is at pains to make it repeatedly (e.g. xii, 40). Stauffer’s focus on practices gets part way past this, and the ‘sacred values’ language allows him to parse interreligious conflict in an insightful way. But this reader kept wanting to hear more about the experience of the sacred that shapes people’s and groups’ sacred values—and to better understand what was at stake analytically in the distinction.

Second, despite Stauffer’s thematizing “liturgy” in organizing quite well in the sense of how congregations can incorporate real listening and relationality into their worship (xx), the book pays literally no attention to liturgy in the more typical sense: the regular worship life of typical congregations. Surely a movement for radical democracy might benefit from incorporating deep listening practices into liturgical settings, and perhaps so would much congregational worship. But, just as surely, a movement to radically refound democracy would benefit from organically connecting to extant worship practices that are already institutionalized in thousands of congregations nationwide. That’s especially so when some of those practices can be interpreted or utilized to advance deep democracy: the Eucharist or communion as a practice of communal solidarity; the preached Word as a practice of political interpretation, naming of the holy (and the unholy) in social life, and authoritative theologizing of democratic experience; deepening relationality via dialogue and agitation as an ongoing process of ever-deeper human conversion; and shared prayer (or dance, or singing, or chanting, or drumming, or silence) as ways of pulling all that good democratic individuality into social relationship and infusing it with sacred energy—all these come to mind as important ways to think about liturgy and organizing. I do not want to commit the cardinal sin of critiquing a colleague for not writing the book I wanted him to write, but I do think the theme of liturgy within a “political ecclesiology of organizing” calls out for at least a bit of attention to extant liturgical practices, not just to innovative ones. Might not Eucharist or the preached Word be (or become) precisely “Christian social practices of reciprocal recognition of liberation and love” (204)?

Third, the book rightly presents a case for the urgent work of multiplying congregations and broad-based organizing venues that truly function as counterpublics, culturally and politically contesting racial capitalism. But in urging that work the argument repeatedly invokes the notion that ‘Christian identity is a task’ (e.g. 187, 203–204). I am fully on board with the theological, civic, and political tasks of constructing such effective counterpublics. But I also affirm the deep Christian tradition’s witness to the works of the faith as primarily responsive to an encounter with God/Spirit/Christ/the faith, and encounter through which a person experiences love and thus seeks in gratitude to act in the world in ways reflective of God’s love. I am aware of the long abuse of the faith-versus-works distinction to marginalize social responsibility, but to equate Christian identity with a “task” strikes me as out of balance.

Another place that the argument stuck unproductively for me was the regular insistence, noted above, on organizing as not an art or a craft (xvii, all of Chapter 5). I understood the intellectual work being done by the focus on organizing as practice and found that quite fruitful. But I fail to see why that necessarily means that organizing cannot also be an art or craft—since these can also be done communally and thus require a focus on social process. “Art” also better signals the political and relational artistry of truly accomplished organizers. Why then the hard distinction?

I had a few additional quibbles: places where the argument unnecessarily circled back on itself repeatedly; a few places where better editing was needed to make the argument cohere [e.g. an extra “as” in a long sentence on page 199 that completely shrouds the logic of the sentence]; and—okay, crotchety old professor here with his usual gripe these days—an index that is just inadequate to the nuanced, complex, multilayered argument that Aaron Stauffer makes (no entries whatsoever on ‘liturgy’ or ‘Hegel’ or ‘post-Hegelian’ or ‘Charlene Sinclair’, etc.).

I conclude with three points regarding why Listening in the Spirit will be such an important book, my crotchety quibbles aside. The title itself gives away the first point, at least to a Catholic attuned to what is going on in global Catholicism: Pope Francis has led the church onto a journey he calls ‘synodality’ that seeks to permanently ground Catholicism in deep processes of dialogue and listening in the Spirit within and beyond the bounds of Christianity—vis-à-vis other Christians, Muslims and Jews, indigenous spiritualities, Buddhists, Hindus, Confucians and secular voices grounded in other ethical systems. Stauffer’s whole analysis of listening and dialogue throughout the book offers a powerful argument for the importance of that project, which takes place in partnership with organizing processes but also via other ecclesial, diplomatic, interreligious, and intellectual processes.

Likewise, Chapter 7 beautifully draws on Woodbey’s life story to portray the late 19th and early 20th century radical social gospelers, who argued that “Without the churches, democratic movements in the United States were not only weaker but theologically and ethically adrift” (190). We need only look around us today to see congregations, movements on both left and right, and indeed whole denominations “theologically and ethically adrift.” The insights toward a political ecclesiology of organizing that Stauffer draws from Black theology and the radical social gospel will serve us well as we confront that reality and strive to build what I and others have articulated as an “ethical democracy” for the future, grounded in economic and racial justice.

Finally, and despite my earlier discomfort with the language of sacred values, Stauffer’s account of the ways that explicit embeddedness in sacred values can ‘hold’ internal tensions and agitational processes stably enough to enable the hard, slow work of radical democracy is deeply relevant for our reality today. No electoral result and no generational passing will eliminate the tensions and fragmentation that beset American society (and other societies) today; those tensions will have to be worked through culturally and politically. As Stauffer argues, organizing demonstrates that “Disagreement cannot and should not always be avoided, especially regarding matters that people hold most dear” (74). We must all learn how to hold the resulting tensions, personally and communally, and use that tensive energy to construct ethical democracy along the lines of radical societal reform. Stauffer’s account of broad-based community organizing can help us do that.