Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition

Everyone needs a history, especially those who seek to change the fu­ture. When radical activists confront the entrenched legacy of racism and sexism in both our institutions and our textbooks, we are tempted to imagine that all history supports the status quo. In an era in which prominent representatives of American Christianity are outspoken in their support of reactionary politics, it is easy to imagine that the history of religion is doubly conservative. But there have always been Ameri­can radicals—and those radicals have always drawn strength from their diverse faiths, Christian and Jewish, pagan and Buddhist, orthodox and humanist. To forget our predecessors’ work is not only to risk repeat­ing their mistakes, it is to lose their wisdom and inspiration. And so, as we organize our neighborhoods or march on Washington, we must tell the stories of the cloud of witnesses who came before us. To encounter them is to discover the human sources of radical faith.

On August 11, 1841, Frederick Douglass made his first public speech at a convention in Nantucket. The prospect of addressing white people, Douglass would later recall, was “a severe cross” because he still “felt myself a slave.” Yet the act of speaking proved to be liberating for Doug-lass and revelatory for his audience. “I spoke but a few moments,” Douglass wrote in his autobiography, “when I felt a degree of freedom.” The antislavery editor William Lloyd Garrison, for his part, reported that “I think I never hated slavery so intensely as at that moment. Certainly, my perception of the enormous outrage which is inflicted by it, on the godlike nature of its victims, was rendered far more clear than ever.” For both men, their meeting was an encounter with the divine, and they retained a sense of its religious power long after their personal paths diverged. Thirty years later, Douglass mused that it was only through his encounters with other radicals that he could “get any glimpses of God anywhere.”1

Echoes of this sentiment can be heard in every American move­ment for social transformation. A century after Garrison met Douglass, a radical journalist named Dorothy Day found herself longing to en­counter the “poor and oppressed” immigrants, whom she regarded as “collectively the new Messiah.” Noticing that most immigrants were Roman Catholics, she joined the church, but soon missed the militant idealism of her socialist past. Why, she wondered, could not Catholi­cism also gather “bands of men and women together” for social change? Day launched a national network of farms and households where pious Catholics, committed radicals, and the desperately poor encountered one another as they fed the hungry, comforted the afflicted, and afflicted the comfortable.’

A similar hunger for encounter brought several feminists together in a California storefront in the 1970s. They had already had their con­sciousness raised, but they yearned to tap more deeply into the woman-power that, they believed, had inspired ancient worship of the goddess and the medieval healing practices that were stigmatized as witchcraft. Their conversation about magic became a ritual, as the women “took hands, and started breathing together.” Realizing that “a circle had been cast,” they anointed themselves, kissed, and began chanting the names of ancient goddesses, entreating them to “pour out your light and your ra­diance upon us. . . . Shine! Shine! Shine!” As the energy subsided, they chose a coven name, Compost, thus reassuring themselves that “what­ever magic brings, it will not take away our ability to laugh at ourselves.” They also realized that magic could empower them to change the world. Coven leader Starhawk introduced their Spiral Dance at a massive dem­onstration against a nuclear power plant, and soon pagan-inspired rituals were an integral part of direct action campaigns against war, environ­mental destruction, and globalization.3

The empowering encounters of William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Dorothy Day, and Starhawk stand in a tradition that has gone by many names. Some would call it the path of the prophets. Others speak of the “American radical tradition” or simply “the Left.” It is the tradition of abolitionists who called on their neighbors to immediately renounce the sin of slavery, of feminists who recognized patriarchy as itself a form of slavery, of socialists who labored to build a “cooperative commonwealth,” and of pacifists who saw war as the ultimate affront to humanity.

What holds this tradition together is the experience I have tried to encapsulate in my opening vignettes. When human beings encoun­ter one another deeply, in the midst of their struggles for freedom and equality and community, prophetic power is unleashed. This is power to denounce, to condemn those who would “grind the faces of the poor into the dust,” in the words of Isaiah. It is also power to announce—to proclaim God’s Kingdom that will be realized here on earth, the beloved community of black and white and brown together, the new society within the shell of the old. Prophetic power enables people to speak boldly in the face of brickbats and bludgeons and fire hoses. It empow­ers them to tell new stories and build new communities. Because in­terpersonal encounters are the source of this power, their place within radicalism is analogous to the role of divine revelation within traditional Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. For this reason, I describe them as pro­phetic encounters.

By placing prophetic encounters at the heart of my story, I hope to share three guiding insights about the American radical tradition. First of all, it is a tradition. Too often we remember abolitionism or feminism or socialism as self-contained “movements” that emerged in response to particular social problems and disappeared when those problems were overcome or changed form. Such memories obscure the way in which activists of each generation have built alliances and drawn inspiration, religious convictions, and strategies from those who have gone before. Garrison and Douglass were as eloquent in denouncing the sin of sexism as the sin of slavery, and they helped to inspire the pacifists and social­ists of their day. They also pioneered activist tactics that have lasted for centuries. Garrison used his imprisonment for libeling a slave trader to raise awareness of his cause, while Douglass repeatedly refused to leave segregated railway cars until he was expelled by force; Dorothy Day and Starhawk were among the thousands who followed in their footsteps, facing arrest for refusing to participate in civil defense drills or for dis­rupting the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. One scarcely needs seven degrees of separation to trace the personal con­nections among the four: Garrison’s grandson was among the founders of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, which worked with the Catholic Worker movement to sponsor the civil defense protests and Vietnam-era draft-card burnings; the first man to go to prison for draft-card burning would later marry Starhawk. Though the Left has not al­ways been one big happy family, even in its divisions and rancor it has been a family.

Second, religious ideas, institutions, and practices have always been intertwined with radical activism. American radicals drew inspiration from religious communities as diverse as Frederick Douglass’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, Dorothy Day’s Roman Catholicism, and Starhawk’s neopaganism. It is common...