A reading from the Gospel:
“In Florida during the 1940s there was a school principal and NAACP officer named Harry T. Moore, who helped lead the fight to get equal pay for Black teachers in his area. He was fired and then, on Christmas Eve 1951, his home was bombed and he and his wife killed. Black people in the area did not soon forget the work he had done. According to Ella Baker: ‘You could go into that area of Florida, and you could talk about the virtue of the NAACP, because they knew Harry T. Moore. They hadn’t discussed a whole lot of theory. But there was a man who served their interests and who identified with them.’”
Thus sayeth the Lord.
. . .
About seven years ago, I came across the language of systems thinking in a book by Paul Hiebert. It led me down a road into a form of theory that continuously aids me in my work and thinking.
I often repeat a line from Donella Meadows, the matron saint of systems thinking, that goes like this: “Stop asking who’s to blame and start asking ‘What’s the system?’”
She’s right. Particularly in politics—but it’s often true of any conflict we encounter in life—a knee-jerk response to problems is pinning blame on an individual. Doing so, we offer ourselves a quick and shallow explanation for why things are happening the way they’re happening. That narrowed view of the problem causes us to invariably miss the deeper dynamics, patterns, structures, and stories at work. If you just try to understand what happened in America over the past five or six years by blaming it all on a guy named Donald, you’re going to miss it dramatically—and you’re going to be sorely disappointed when history doesn’t adequately change course once he’s gone.
I wrote about how these system dynamics play out through structural racism—and the kinds of response this discovery should lead us to adopt here.
Effective movements whose goal is to shift public imagination and political will around a major issue have a certain brilliance for helping people see systems, shift mental models, and make revolutionary changes. I plan to write more about this, but for those interested I commend the books This is An Uprising and The Purpose of Power, along with the theories of change used by training groups Momentum and the Ayni Institute.
But Meadows’s critique can be turned back around.
Trump was successful because he incarnated something. His way of life embodied a story and an ethics that resonated deeply with a set of theories and worldviews held in the minds of a community. And that community was mobilized into a movement around the body of Trump to reshape social systems. They didn’t need to be able to articulate theory. They saw it in Trump and followed suit.
Most important, no abstract thing called the Presidency or White Nationalism signed bad ideas into law—Trump did.
In Roots for Radicals, Ed Chambers (the late Executive Director of the Industrial Areas Foundation) explains how organizers in their tradition, involved in the work of getting powerful systems to change, have to think and act within this tension:
Broad-based organizations understand better than most people that what’s wrong is rarely one person’s fault. The drama of an action, however, requires that a person—not a nameless, faceless bureaucracy like ‘city hall’ or ‘the administration [much less, I might add, ‘capitalism’ or ‘racism’]—be put on the public hot seat, to be held accountable and urged to make a commitment to change something. It’s not possible to confront the anonymous ‘system,’ which is an abstraction, and then hold it accountable for its response. That’s why names and faces must be put to targets in plotting and effective action.
Now I have all sorts of quibbles with how Ed and the IAF frame elements of this (plenty more on this someday, but for one small example, I appreciate how Salvatierra and Heltzel reject the language of “targets” for faith-rooted organizers), but I also increasingly respect his point.
The tide flows both ways.
Meadows was right to offer her systems thinking corrective. And movements are an incredible tool for helping a society shift its mental models so that broader system change can take place. The progressive and academic turn to the structural and to theory is immensely beneficial. Systems matter. A theory can peel back the veil. But so do people. Systems are represented by and led by individuals who have the power to make decisions over how they operate. And a different set of tactics has to be integrated into our overarching theory of change to be successful at that level. At the end of the day, it’s always both.
The Racial Equity Institute offers some language here that’s helpful for considering how theory and incarnation, systems and individuals, cohere through another negative example.
“Racial inequity cannot be explained by behavioral or cultural differences between racial groups. On the contrary, systems and systems representatives treat people differently based on race regardless of their culture and regardless of how people behave.” (Emphasis mine)
Systems behave how people behave. People’s behavior is closely shaped by systems.
A more hopeful (and tragic) vision of this both/and-ness jumps out from the “Gospel reading” at the top of this post. The ideals of the NAACP were meaningful and manifest for that group of Black Floridians because in Harry T. Moore they were lived out beautifully among, with, and for those people.
I want to land my point here and keep the emphasize around what Moore’s life uncovers.
Theory is a joy for those of us who spend our days intellectualizing the world. We seek to theorize the socio-historical situation and comprehend the grand structural and philosophical architectures driving and driven by our realities. We seek a theoretical vision of how the world ought to be, an “alternative system.” We painstakingly craft theories of change. Theory lets us see the system. And I think we get some sense of comfort and power from “seeing” all that.
Yet among a people, theories and systems always, and must always, become personified.
“The Word became flesh and dwelt among them.”
The idea must become incarnate.
Ella Baker knew it didn’t matter that those folks “hadn’t discussed a whole lot of theory.” They new theory in their bones because they knew the story of Moore’s life.
In this way Moore is a type of Christ. His life offers a retelling of the Gospel of Jesus alive and with us, Immanuel, today. He is a model of what all Christians are invited and ordained to be: Christ’s very life acting for life in the world of history and flesh.
Only when theory is performed in the life of one of our own does it really become manifest across a collective imagination—only then can it become a transforming force. Only when the life of an individual is caught up in the life of a community can it generate the structural changes we so desperately need. We are called to be little Christs who together are a movement that transforms big systems.
This is the gospel. The one we’re invited to retell through our living.