Faith as an Organizing Anchor

Well 2024 is past and 2025 is off to a deeply ominous beginning. Into this new year I tossed out a couple thoughts about how to approach this world of ours in a way where one can try to have a meaningful effect, and now I want to attempt to flesh out my thoughts a bit more.

It’s been about a decade since I finally got my ass in gear and moved from someone who largely just consumed politics and news of the problems in this world, and instead grew into someone who actually goes out most days of the year and tries to move the needle of justice a micrometer in a better direction. By far my biggest arena of success in this regard has been my labor organizing; I can proudly count the hundreds of workers I have played some notable role in getting organized into a union structure so that they can both improve their lives and be active participants in improving their lives.

Union organizing is mostly a slog that then gets punctuated by bursts of action where you have either properly prepared and you win big, or you find out you didn't and then you don’t. It’s an arena where the deck is absolutely stacked against you. The bosses always have more resources and levers to pull, the law at best only prevents the most egregious of actions, and after decades of union membership decline there is a broad social amnesia that one must also address when organizing. For these reasons and more, not a lot of people seek out union organizing as a way to address problems at work, fewer people get into union work as a paid profession, and many of those who do only last a few years.

So what the hell keeps someone like me going? And what advice do I have more generally about how to push forward with day-to-day efforts towards a better world when the horrors accumulate faster than our current capabilities can handle?

As I said in my social media posts, I truly do find that it is something called Faith which keeps me moving. I enter into my efforts with a deep abiding belief that all I and my comrades are doing not only has a near term worth, these efforts will also accumulate with other factors towards some larger positive change, most likely after most of us have moved on from this life.

Now it would be extremely reasonable to call my approach completely unreasonable. The problems of this world are immense. There is no guarantee anything we do will have any sort of long term effect. Some might even say that this sort of belief is dishonest and deceiving myself and others. All of these are sentiments that I have encountered in various forms and if I step outside my own mindset for a second, these are views that are completely understandable considering the overall trajectories of many things these days.

The goal of this piece isn’t to refute these criticisms. Instead what I want to get across is that in order to actually be long term functional in a role where you must constantly press against the myriad problems of the moment, you have to possess some ability to muster up expectant hope for a better future that you likely won’t see fulfilled.

Over the years I have met a massive number of people who possess the passion, the knowledge, and the skills to be amazing agents for positive change. Yet many who fit that description I see ensnared by a completely understandable focus on all the reasons why the good things we try to do are likely to not add up to much. This is a shame because as I listed out, they have many things to offer that are not just welcome, but desperately needed within the unions, organizations, community groups, and so forth that are trying to be the green shoots of a better world emerging from the fractures of the current one.

Faith, or whatever term you wish to substitute is necessary for action because the world needs us (You!) to act. If I am right and there is a plausible horizon ahead with a better world on the other side, then certainly it’s not going to just pop into existence. Some force or forces will twist the current trajectories and generate positive feedback loops more powerful than the negative feedback loops. If the source of this force or forces is external to humanity, then we are talking in the realm of straightforward religion*. If however we are talking politics then the source of the force(s) must be constructed from human action, choice, and practices.

So if human action is what ultimately generates the better tomorrow, then we must keep ourselves in a mental and spiritual position that allows us to persist in that work over the long term. This in turn means we must cultivate a view of the horizon that gives us hope despite immediate sensory inputs telling us the exact opposite message. To be clear this isn’t intended as encouragement towards a pollyannaish view of the horizon; I find belief that a fundamentally better society in the future as being inevitable is just as poor of a view as outright doom and gloom.

At this point you might be saying “Hey isn’t this just Pascal’s Wager applied to politics?” And I would respond with: Sure! Why not?! I wouldn’t use Pascal’s Wager to help explain my religious views, however I have no problem applying it to organizing and political or community work. And just like with Pascal’s Wager, if I’m wrong and we are all truly fucked, well then at least you did some good things in the short term and maybe it helped you be in a better head space to savor a few more joys in life before whatever happens.

Finally, there’s the question of what to do if you find value in my argument yet just cannot muster up the mental framework that I labeled as Faith. That is something which I want to spend more time and maybe write a longer follow up. For now, I think the best advice I can offer is to actively surround yourself with people who do seem to possess this Faith to some degree or another. Anyone facing the problems of the world needs reminders that they aren’t at it alone. And who knows, maybe all the hopeful vibes will radiate and spark something in yourself.

Hope you and yours are safe during these times. We have a lot of work to do.

* I do have religious eschatological thoughts, but that’s another time!