Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis is the co-director of the Kairos Center and the co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. She has spent the last two decades with grassroots, community-led, anti-poverty organizations working to build the movement to end poverty. As a culmination of these efforts, the Poor People’s Campaign seeks to unite the poor and dispossessed into a broad social movement that will confront the forces that degrade and take life. It is inspired by the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign led by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In the last years of his life, King became convinced that a movement led by a united force of the “poor and dispossessed” was what was needed to confront the triplet evils of racism, poverty, and militarism. Like King, the leaders of today’s Poor People’s Campaign believe this is not only a struggle against specific laws and policies, but a struggle for our deepest moral and religious beliefs.
The following interview focuses on the religious and spiritual insights arising through this Campaign and through Rev. Dr. Theoharis’ many years working to build a social movement in this country. It is part of the Kairos Center’s ongoing effort to reflect upon the liberative theology and spirituality that is developing amidst the struggles of the poor and dispossessed today. It is also part of our broader effort to re-claim the language and power of religion, spirituality, and human rights from those who use these ideas to divide and degrade people, and empower the few over the lives of the many.
The following is a transcribed and lightly edited conversation between Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis and Dr. Adam Barnes, the coordinator of the Rights and Religions program at the Kairos Center. It was recorded at the Kairos Center office in August, 2017.
Reading the Bible with the Poor
Adam: In your experience, how does religion and the Bible enter into the struggle to end poverty in our times?
Liz: Recently, we led a Bible study with leaders from the Fight for $15 struggle. For various reasons people have suspicions and doubts about the value of Bible study as part of how to build a movement and develop leaders like these who are fighting for higher wages, but I would disagree. The Bible study was very well received and very powerful, and one of the reasons why is because the people who were there are some of the same kinds of people that are in the Bible. These are people who are down and out, hurt by the dominant social order that surrounds them, attacked because of their race or because nobody in the family has ever owned property. They are standing up and saying, “I want to do something about it.”
This is exactly what the Bible tells stories about. It tells stories of people who are oppressed and dispossessed, but who have come to the place where they want to move and change things. The people in the Bible are not just sad victims impacted by injustice. They are not simply telling their sad stories. They tell their stories of injustice, but they tell them because they know that they are sharing something that is wrong, that is unjust, that is against God’s will, and they are prepared to stake their life to change it. The stories and the people in the Bible resonate strongly with the workers we talked with.
Adam: How did you come to see Christianity as playing a role in the work you do?
Liz: I grew up Christian and when I think about a lot of the Christians that I have encountered in my life, either in my family or the people I grew up around, there are so many doctrines, sets of beliefs, that you are supposed to know and repeat and believe in. My early experience and understanding of these beliefs was that they were just things that Christian people repeated all the time: “Jesus is my Lord and savior,” “Jesus died for our sins,” or “you can only get to God through Jesus,” but the deeper content of what these beliefs mean was rarely debated or discussed.
It was the same with rituals, when people sung together, or came together for things like communion, or the different ceremonies when people died or got married, or even something like Sunday Bible study. Just like the statements of belief, the form of these actions was more important than the content. For example, with communion, people knew how to go through the motions where you eat the bread and drink the wine, or when someone dies we knew that we were supposed to gather at church, but I felt that there was always a depth, a potential, which was rarely accessed.
Adam: How did you come to better understand and access that depth?
Liz: It was the combination of my experience being part of a poor community of struggle in Philadelphia and going to seminary at Union Theological Seminary in New York. I was also blessed to be raised in a family that believed that faith must be linked to practicing social justice and was introduced to leaders from many different religious traditions that followed that path. So, when I first came to seminary, I was wary of some of these common Christian sayings. In my life and work I hadn’t found it to be true that if you do the right thing that you’ll be ok. I hadn’t found it to be true that if you constantly pray that things will just work out. I hadn’t had the experience that simply going to church and believing in God protected me and others from death, despair, and deep poverty. This wasn’t true in my life, it wasn’t true in the lives of a lot of the people around me. If the way you explain a child senselessly dying is that God is calling that child home, or justify it as somehow what was “meant to be,” (even if some meaning and commitment to larger values was gained through that needless death), there was a strong dissonance for me between these statements of belief and the reality I encountered.
[aesop_quote type=”block” background=”#406683″ text=”#ffffff” align=”left” size=”1″ quote=”There was a strong dissonance for me between these statements of belief and the reality I encountered.” parallax=”off” direction=”left” revealfx=”off”]
Adam: And so it was through your study that you were able to address your concerns about those statements of belief and those religious practices?
Liz: Yes, when I was at seminary I had a chance to study the Bible more closely and spend time thinking and praying about these Christian beliefs and practices in the context of the people and communities I worked with in Philadelphia, the National Union of the Homeless and the Kensington Welfare Rights Union.
One of the things that became clear and powerful was that we must not get rid of those religious statements that I had become wary of. From the perspective of the struggle of homeless families and welfare mothers, the stories in the Bible and the Christian statements of belief have a totally different and really full meaning. By thinking about them from within this context I feel very comfortable saying that, for example, “Jesus is my Lord and savior,” because it confronts and disputes the statement that “Caesar is my Lord and savior.” When I declare Jesus as my Lord, I am saying that a poor, brown-skinned Palestinian Jew who experienced homelessness while walking the earth setting up free health care clinics and preaching good news to the poor, is the one I follow.
I am convinced that groupings of poor people, inspired by and prodded on by the prophetic leadership of Jesus as well as the prophets, is the only way to save our society. I believe that to my core. Our savior will not be the political or military or business leader who claims they have power to oppress and kill. This is not the power that will redeem and liberate life. Poor and struggling communities resist because they know, they believe to their core, that this destructive power doesn’t have the last say, that God wants something better and bigger for all of us. That’s why Jesus was sent and was killed as an enemy of the state and urges us to follow in his footsteps.
The Leadership of the Poor
Adam: In order to realize the deeper meaning of religious ideas and practices we must understand them in a context of struggle. Is this part of how you understand the meaning and importance of the leadership of the poor?
Liz: I think part of this question is getting at the importance of what Paulo Freire might call praxis or what liberation theologians talk about as the process of reflection and action. There is something difficult to capture theoretically without experiencing and being connected to the struggle for freedom. William Sloane Coffin once said to me that it is our actions that produce new ideas; new ideas rarely produce new actions. He was not just talking about action as in protest, but the way one moves and responds to the world, particularly when that world is cruel and unjust. So, to me this is where the concept of the unity and leadership of the poor comes in. I think that sometimes the way that we talk about the leadership of the poor ends up being heard as something foreign, or just empty nice words, but there is much more to it.
[aesop_image img=”https://kairoscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/imageedit_1_7295806892.png” alt=”Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, Always with Us?” align=”left” lightbox=”on” caption=”Rev. Dr. Theoharis’ Always with Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor, out from Eerdmans in April 2017.” captionposition=”left” revealfx=”off” overlay_revealfx=”off”]
I intentionally began my book, Always with Us? with stories of tent cities and housing take-overs, with the action and insight of poor people. We continue to see these actions and insights today. For example, you can see it when Fight for $15 workers organize everyone in all three shifts to decide that they are going to walk out and strike together, even if they lose their jobs, even if standing up causes fear and hardship.
I don’t want to romanticize these experiences or say that they are the only important stories to tell, but by starting with these stories, you get a clear and powerful affirmation of humanity that is not only a demonstration of poor people’s leadership, but shows all of us, if we’re paying attention (and can overcome the forces that prevent us from seeing and hearing it), what we have become as a society and where we need to go. All of these experiences present a clear truth and show what is just and unjust. Not everyone involved with the struggle will fully articulate what they are doing in this way, but there is nevertheless a powerful message about what is just and unjust in their action. Furthermore, there are real risks in these actions. Oftentimes they are actions that could lead to one losing their job, or that puts them at risk of the police beating or killing them, or having your kids being taken away from you. These are all of the things that can happen when a person stands up and says, I am a person. With all of those risks weighing against a person, and still choosing to take action and resist, this is a clear assertion of human dignity. It is an assertion of what is right and just, and it is an assertion that even if I feel like I’m alone, I know that I am not alone.
There are different ways that people articulate these actions, but what is clear to me is that this is the leadership we must follow. It is the leader of individual people standing up to unjust conditions, but also the leadership that shows us what society has become, and finally a deep moral and spiritual leadership that reminds us all of what we want to be, of how we should treat human life, and points us in a different direction and against an enemy that is treating life in this way.
All of this action and insight of the poor is a fundamental challenge to what rules and dominates and oppresses life, to the status quo. It resists the forces that say that your labor is not worth much, or that you are estranged from something bigger — whether it is your family or God — and that changing things is not your role or not necessary or possible. So, in this way the resistance and leadership of the poor is a starting place, not an ending place. It helps us see the world from a different point of view and to encounter God and the Holy Spirit in a powerful and deeply meaningful way.
Adam: I think this gets at something much broader and central to the idea of religion — God. What God is and where and how God is encountered are really questions about what matters most in this life. To know God is not just to be able to convincingly argue with reason and logic what is right or wrong. To know God is to know, as the mystics say, “without why or wherefore.” It is this same kind of knowing that you talked about earlier, that even when one is faced with overwhelming hardship, sorrow, violence, and death, that this is not what wins. God is the source of that knowing.
[aesop_quote type=”block” background=”#31526f” text=”#ffffff” align=”left” size=”1″ quote=”The God I believe in and the God in the Bible is one of action, one who defends life and stands against injustice.” parallax=”off” direction=”left” revealfx=”off”]
Liz: Yes, I think that’s true. If you look closely at the Bible, the way that God tries to define Godself is always directly connected to justice. Genesis is the first book of the Bible, but many scholars think that Exodus is the true origin story of the Bible. Genesis, they believe, was written later because the community needed to explain the origins of their people before Pharaoh and the experience in Egypt. If these scholars are right and the Abrahamic religious tradition begins with Exodus, then our founding story is a story of liberation. In Exodus, when the people ask God what God’s name is, God responds, “I am the one that led you out of Egypt,” “I am the one who saw you suffering.” These existential statements from God are always connected to liberation and freedom. In this very specific story where people are being killed and enslaved, the way that God shows up and defines Godself, is in the midst of a people who have started to move, to resist. God says, “I’ve heard the crying of the people and I’m going to lead you out of Egypt.” This is where we encounter God, not in platitudes or the image of a big bearded guy in the sky. The God I believe in and the God in the Bible is one of action, one who defends life and stands against injustice.
Adam: The encounter with God in Exodus arises through the experience of suffering, of life being denied and degraded and then fighting back and always knowing — sometimes even seeing — but always knowing that even after great sadness, death, and violence, the forces that degrade life won’t win. How do you understand this role of suffering as a way to strength and truth and God?
Liz: Being alive means that death is there and suffering is possible, it is part of what life is. The clarity you speak of that comes through struggle is not a way to glorify suffering and say that those who are poor and suffer get to know God, because suffering just is, and people suffer and cope with it in different ways. So we know that people suffer, but the question is: when we suffer, do we let it get the best of us, especially when it appears that the suffering is so brutal and unjust it probably should get the best of us? Are we able to see that there is the possibility for life and hope and love out of this suffering and not because of it?
I think about this a lot when people talk about Jesus dying for our sins — the question of atonement. Is the story of Jesus’ crucifixion one where Jesus just decides that if he dies he can end the rest of the world’s suffering? I understand it differently. Jesus had to die, but he had to die because he was a threat to the system and the system couldn’t let him keep on living if it was going to stay intact. He had to die and he makes a choice. Jesus could have stopped being a threat to the system and he might not have been crucified. So, in one way I agree with this point about sins — that Jesus dies for our sins, but our sins, and I think the Bible is pretty clear about this, are not just personal failings or bad individual choices. Sins are mainly social sins. The Bible talks about sins as what your family and what your society does in response to the conditions we encounter in the world.
Jesus died for our sins, certainly, but what are our sins? Our sins are slavery, dispossession, greed — systemic greed where society is organized around greed. Sin is a system that leads to the mistreatment and marginalization of women, orphans, and others. These are our sins. Jesus dies for our sins because he stands up to those who are enforcing the system that normalizes and benefits from those sins. What’s more, Jesus also says to the rest of us, to those of us who aren’t the people in power, who aren’t the ones necessarily dispossessing people’s land and making people slaves, that “you are not standing up,” “you are not saying this is not ok,” and this is also a sin.
Worshiping God
Adam: Therefore, being Christian, following the prophetic leadership of Jesus, or doing God’s will, depends a great deal on how we address the sins of society.
Liz: Deuteronomy is very clear that the way you honor God, the way that you worship God is tied to how you treat your neighbor. This is not how most people think of worship or of “being” religious. Worship is more commonly understood as going to a church and singing some beautiful songs that hold God up. This isn’t to say that singing isn’t important, indeed we would probably be compelled to sing more and more beautifully if we knew we were treating our neighbor right. Again, a lot of the rituals that we have in the Church come out of struggles and out of people’s lived experience. This lived experience has meaning, which is connected to the struggle for justice, to standing up and saying that what this world often degrades and says is worth nothing is something. Over and over again this is what is said if you look at the Biblical texts.
Adam: One way to think of religion, then, is to see it as the knowledge and way of being that develops around the historical experiences of injustice and suffering and the related struggle to end that suffering.
Liz: Yes, to make sense and codify these lessons and pass it on so that we don’t just have to go through all of the same experiences again and not benefit from our ancestor’s experiences, and also not be able to pass it on to those who come after us.
Adam: This leads me to think about the founding story of Islam, which is rooted in the life of the Prophet Muhammad. It is also a story of liberation. Muhammad was born into a family that controlled the spiritual and material resources of the region. Yet, because Muhammad was an orphan he was marginalized from his family. Ultimately he, this outcast that wasn’t trained as a religious scholar, is chosen to receive God’s message, build and lead a movement of social outcasts against the oppressive forces of his time, defeat them, and set up a new community in Medina that is established on principles of mercy, love, and unity.
One of the principle ways that Islam becomes organized as a religious tradition is around a commitment to the so-called five pillars, which are all very socially directed. The obligation to prayer is really about people coming together, taking time out of the day to recognize and remember what is most important. There is also the obligation of zakat, which requires that one give regularly to those in need if one is able to. Ramadan is another obligation where an entire month is set aside for worship, disrupting commerce and constructing time for people to be with each other and reflect on God.
[aesop_quote type=”block” background=”#31526f” text=”#ffffff” align=”left” size=”1″ quote=”Idolatry is worshipping something that isn’t liberation, that is causing oppression.” parallax=”off” direction=”left” revealfx=”off”]
Liz: Yes, and one can see in these rituals and in many other kinds of religious rituals, including many Christian ones, that the central aim is to prevent idolatry. Observing these rituals warns and steers people away from our historically proven tendency to lose sight of what is important and to build societies that centralize the accumulation of wealth and endow certain individuals and groups of people with god-like power over life and death. These social, liberative principles are the origin of these religious rituals and beliefs, but it is often forgotten, diminished, or distorted because in this form they represent a threat to the dominant order. For example, with the requirement to stop periodically in your day and go pray, this reminds us who the day belongs to. Does it belong to you? Does it belong to your boss? Capitalism? Or is it God’s day?
Idolatry is worshipping something that isn’t liberation, that is causing oppression. Just as God defines Godself as “the one who led you out of Egypt” — the definition of idolatry starts in Exodus when people decide to melt all of their gold into a golden calf and start worshipping it because they don’t think that this raggedy God who has led them into the wilderness, under the leadership of a stutterer — Moses — and a bunch of other people who are far from perfect, who are just themselves, slaves and ex-slaves. When these people start to believe that something else is going to save them, this is idolatry. In the Exodus story there is no idolatry before the golden calf. The point isn’t simply that the calf is made of gold, nor that the calf represents Pharaoh and his culture, it is that they begin to lose sight of what’s really important and liberative and start to think that the very thing that was oppressing them is going to save them. And they’re wrong, and God gets so mad and starts to think, maybe it’s time to get rid of these people and start over.
We see something similar again in the Gospels. Jesus’ disciples just do not think they are the ones to fight this fight. They can’t think and believe big enough and that is where idolatry creeps in.
Adam: What leads people to such an experience? Taking leadership from within a situation of oppression, the leadership of the poor, may allow one to come to this understanding of God and not fall into idolatry, but on the other hand, the experience of poverty leads many to still think the oppressor has the solutions. So are there other ways to get to this understanding of God? Are there many ways of encountering God in life where you can see this bigness, this unity?
Liz: For me, and maybe this is just because I’m a person of words and I love the Bible, whoever wrote down a story like Exodus intentionally emphasizes and includes these elements. It is a story that is supposed to remind us of this truth that when we fight and are overwhelmed we often lose faith, but that won’t be the last word. It is not what wins in the end. In Exodus we are shown that when people move, when they are in movement against their suffering and oppression, when they stand up and fight, there is truth and power to overcome anything, but it won’t be easy.
That is one of the things I love about the Exodus, that it is a total contradiction. The whole time these folks are freeing themselves from Pharaoh, they are complaining. They’re saying how they had a better life in Egypt and maybe we should just go back to that, but at the same time they don’t stop moving. So, on the one hand they’re saying something conservative and backward, but they keep on. The profound truth this demonstrates is that when you’re really in the struggle you have those questions. Indeed, it is only if you’re not in the struggle that you are going to think that the path is going to be without question and clear and laid out for you and that there won’t be times when you fall back on everything you knew before.
Exodus is an amazing story, but if you only pay attention to words like, “we don’t want this person as our leader,” etc., you realize there would never be an Exodus. However, if you follow their words at the same time that you follow their actions, then you see how it works. And I think this is the same today. We can find truth in the words of the Bible and in other writings that came before us, but taken alone they won’t necessarily lead us to that deeper encounter with the divine we were talking about earlier. To get there, these stories must be read out of struggle and this is what makes the struggle that is written into it more visible and powerful.
Adam: In your book you write that, “although the Bible may be the product of the powerful trying to acculturate lessons, traditions, and practices of the poor, the fact that societies erupt when they read it and those in power try to control oppressed people’s access to it, sheds light on the reality that it is also a revolutionary document.”
Is this why you see the Bible as such an important and valuable resource for those in struggle?
Liz: Yes, definitely, but to be clear I do not believe new actions come from ideas. When people do this kind of “revolutionary” reading of the Bible they are reading about the actions of poor people from history. I don’t think it is an accident that this is what was written about in the Bible. Even if it has been modified and decontextualized by oppressive power throughout history, its revolutionary potential has persisted. For example, when the actual Gospel got into hands of poor peasants in South America at the end of the twentieth century, or when slaves in the US, who were prevented from reading, were brought to Church and heard the Gospel, in both cases a new revolutionary, liberative theology emerged.
Adam: I feel like most people, if they heard religion described in this way, would be like, “yeah, this sounds great! I want to be part of it!” But this is not where we are these days. There is a lot of fear and misunderstanding surrounding religion, perhaps most strongly with the Muslim faith, which is often portrayed — usually by non-Muslims — as an oppressive ideology that seeks to take over the world and impose a strict form of law over everyone. In general, religion is often seen as divisive, restrictive of freedom, and detached from reality. Basically, it is the opposite of the unifying, liberative force that is born through and sustained by real struggle, which we have been discussing.
Liz: Yes, and this is where our world’s leaders have taken religions and twisted them to serve their purposes. They have completely distorted where these traditions come from and what they represent. One of my favorite points to make about Christianity is that when Jesus was alive he was part of a resistance movement, not only spiritual but also political and economic. His teaching was not about creating a new religion called “Christianity,” it just wasn’t! Jesus was a Jew, that is very clear, and he was organizing people who were other kinds of Jews, so you might be able to label it a Jewish renewal movement. But then when it becomes a broader movement after Jesus’ death it is basically a international and interreligious movement, because Paul is talking to people who are not Jews.
Christianity was a way of being in the world, a spirituality, rooted in traditions of justice that came before it, the Jewish tradition in particular. As it spread, the Christian movement brought people, mostly those who were marginalized and oppressed by the dominant Roman system, to a new way of life and love. It later became codified in rituals and doctrines, which have since become part of what it means to identify as “Christian,” but in its origin, and I think in terms of what it means today, being Christian was never exclusive of, but always alongside and with, diverse peoples and their different rituals and practices.
The solution to making the world better is not for everyone to become “Christian.” We have already been there, done that historically. I am Christian and that is what I know, but what I think Jesus teaches and what I think other faith leaders and prophets and divine entities teach us in other religions, is to be committed to life and to protecting and helping it to flourish through actively helping to build and lead a social, political, economic, and spiritual movement toward this goal.
Adam: For the most part this is not how Christianity is portrayed or practiced. And it isn’t the form that the media fixates on. They seem way more interested in the so-called “religious right.” Yet, part of the reason is because the people that get grouped into this category aren’t afraid to loudly and clearly assert their moral views. While I may not agree with their views and in fact see them as a fundamental distortion of the Christian way, to the point of heresy, they are nevertheless clearly asserted. On the other hand, the progressive or liberal religious voice is often weak, eclectic, vague, and elitist with their moral assertions.
[aesop_quote type=”block” background=”#253f5b” text=”#ffffff” align=”left” size=”1″ quote=”I actually think that if you are going to say that you love human beings, then you have to hate the things that are killing them and demeaning them. ” parallax=”off” direction=”left” revealfx=”off”]
Liz: If we learned anything from the 2016 election, it is that a lot of people think there are a lot of things wrong with this country and the society we live in. And yet people are scared of saying things are wrong, they are! My belief is that real spiritual leadership is both an affirmation of what is right and a condemnation of what is wrong. So, where our society has gotten into trouble and especially people who call themselves “progressive,” or say that they are for “inclusion,” is that too often these folks just do not condemn what is wrong! Instead it becomes a little bit of a free for all — anything goes. I actually think that if you are going to say that you love human beings, then you have to hate the things that are killing them and demeaning them. This does not mean, as Dr. King often made clear, that you have to do violence against people. This hatred of what is wrong doesn’t have to lead to violence, but it most certainly must be a rage, or a hate, or a condemnation, that makes it very clear that this is not acceptable. This is what it means to lead on moral terms. There is a right and there is a wrong. And for people of faith and conscience, it is our duty to choose to do right.