This debate came to mind when I reencountered this quote from Dorothy Day:
The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us. When we begin to take the lowest place, to wash the feet of others, to love our brothers and sisters with that burning love, that passion, which led to the cross, then we can truly say, "Now I have begun."
I go back to Dorothy Day so often because she had a lovely habit of cutting across so many of our tired and false binaries. For example, Day was no stranger to the reality of systemic oppression, what she called our "filthy rotten system." Day remained a political activist her entire life, fighting for a world, in the words of Peter Maurin, where it is easier to be good. And yet, Day never stopped calling for a "revolution of the heart." For Dorothy Day, along with Martin Luther King, Jr., social change was a deeply moral issue.
It has to be in a democracy. Which is something I've never understood about thinkers and activists who preach the power of the political and systemic over the moral, personal, and spiritual. Take Ibram X. Kendi as an example. Kendi's thoughts about antiracist policies, with their focus on equity of outcome over equality of opportunity, are an example of privileging the systemic over the moral. And yet, I've never understood how Kendi thinks such policies can become enacted without a "revolution of the heart" in the American electorate. Antiracism floundered because it reduced to virtue signaling among the already converted. And by ignoring conversion, the moral and spiritual struggle at the heart of racism, Kendi's project wasn't going to go anywhere beyond the lecture circuits of the coastal elites.
To be clear, I'm not offering an evaluation of Kendi's work. You might be a fan or a critic. Nor am I trolling Wokeness. I think Jesus would get tagged as "woke" if he were alive today. My concern in this post is how, for a season, during peak Woke, Twitter became convinced that oppression and injustice wasn't a moral or spiritual issue. This was, and remains, a serious diagnostic error. An error that, I think, stems from social justice activism sliding more deeply into post-Christianity, losing touch with its spiritual roots. Post-Christian social justice activism doesn't have a category for Day's "revolution of the heart" or the activities that stoke such moral and spiritual transformation, activities like "evangelism" and "conversion." The word "love", so ubiquitous in the sermons and speeches of MLK, is homeless in activist circles. Which is why social justice activism today--Wokeness--has devolved into grievance-based virtue signaling in stark contrast to the revivalism of the Civil Rights movement.
Dorothy Day and MLK knew that the political was the moral, and that the engine of social transformation was a revolution of the heart.
That last sentence is where this post ended three months ago when I wrote it. And the post speaks to my main audience, progressive Christians. I don't write much about evangelicals since evangelicals don't follow me. Why would they care, or even know, if I had some thoughts? I don't like ranting into echo chambers. Still, publishing this post today, at this political moment, nudged me to add some reflections to say something about Trump and evangelicals. Love has gone missing from evangelicalism as well. Christians on the right have given up on the revolution of the heart. No longer interested in evangelism or conversion, Christians are opting for a revenge-driven exercise of power and coercion. Gospel proclamation has been replaced with a politics of ressentiment aimed at compelling compliance. In this, Trump is the mirror image of Kendi. Not in their ends, but in their preferred means. The revolution of the heart is skipped in favor of coercive political power.
This isn't going to end well. I expect Democrats will exact their own revenge when they regain political power. A retaliatory, tit-for-tat, revenge-driven politics will become our new normal. Both left and right are being reduced to the will to power. Our democracy has entered a cold civil war.