Why I Am Still a Christian

I grew up in a semi-rural, lower-class area of mid-Michigan called Bay County, where no one talked about going to col­lege or hav­ing a “career.” My par­ents had moved to Bay County from a poor region of the Upper Penin­sula, where my father was taught that being Native Amer­i­can made him an infe­rior being. My fam­ily was not reli­gious, but I have always had a mys­ti­cal impulse; we owned a Catholic Fam­ily Bible; and some­times we got to mass. That was just enough to get my atten­tion. Actu­ally read­ing the Bible seemed impos­si­ble to me—How were you sup­posed to assim­i­late such a sprawl­ing mass of what­ever it was? And I had no idea of Chris­t­ian doctrine.

But I was drawn to Christ by the image of the suf­fer­ing God in Catholic iconog­ra­phy. Jesus cru­ci­fied, the God-figure who responded to evil and oppres­sion with self-sacrificing love, gave me a reli­gious ideal—a sign of tran­scen­dence that broke through my every­day hori­zon of lower-class cul­ture and the next game. This ideal took on a sear­ing eth­i­cal and spir­i­tual mean­ing in the stun­ning wit­ness of the Civil Rights movement.

I came of age in the cli­mac­tic years of the Civil Rights move­ment. Long before I under­stood much of any­thing about pol­i­tics or reli­gion, the for­ma­tive fig­ure for me was Mar­tin Luther King Jr. He was the exem­plar of the peace­mak­ing and justice-making way of Jesus; the Christ-figure of our time; the one who lived in the Spirit of Jesus and died for us. That was the sum total of my reli­gious world­view when I squeaked into col­lege, mostly to play sports. Forty years later, it is still my bedrock, which sus­tained me through ten years of watch­ing my young beloved spouse die to cancer.

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On the lec­ture cir­cuit I meet peo­ple every week for whom Chris­tian­ity is a ruined word. They ask me nicely, or with puz­zle­ment, or with hos­til­ity, why I am still a Chris­t­ian. I try to explain that I was drawn… by the expe­ri­ence of sub­ver­sive peace and grace of Christ.
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On the lec­ture cir­cuit I meet peo­ple every week for whom Chris­tian­ity is a ruined word. They ask me nicely, or with puz­zle­ment, or with hos­til­ity, why I am still a Chris­t­ian. I try to explain that I was drawn long ago into the spirit and way of Jesus, which draws me like a mag­net into its grav­i­ta­tional force. I am held by the gospel pic­ture of the divine Word enter­ing the world, and by the expe­ri­ence of the sub­ver­sive peace and grace of Christ, the mean­ing of suf­fer­ing, the chal­lenge to oppose every form of exploita­tion and vio­lence in the world, the will­ing­ness to give my life to oth­ers and the promise of new life that it brings. These expe­ri­ences shape my under­stand­ing of how I should live.

Good the­ol­ogy does not say that unearned suf­fer­ing as such is redemp­tive. We are indebted to fem­i­nist and wom­an­ist the­ol­ogy for stress­ing this point, and I believe that Dr. King got this right. Hav­ing suf­fered much, King sought to make his suf­fer­ing a virtue to save him­self from bit­ter­ness and to call white racists to repen­tance. In his expe­ri­ence, unearned suf­fer­ing offered the oppor­tu­nity to turn suf­fer­ing into some­thing redemp­tive. Suf­fer­ing itself was not redemp­tive, but suf­fer­ing could be made redemp­tive when oppressed peo­ple strug­gled against it in the name, and way, and spirit of Jesus.

Sev­eral of my books have made a case for devel­op­ing decen­tral­ized forms of eco­nomic democ­racy: pub­lic banks, com­mu­nity finance cor­po­ra­tions, com­mu­nity land trusts, worker and com­mu­nity owned enter­prises, coop­er­a­tive net­works, and most impor­tantly, mutual-funded hold­ing com­pany mod­els that are more entre­pre­neur­ial than coop­er­a­tives and are bet­ter able to scale up. I do not believe that the fac­tors of pro­duc­tion trump every­thing else. But I do believe that those who con­trol the terms, amounts, and direc­tion of credit have a huge say in deter­min­ing the kind of soci­ety that the rest of us live in. Any­thing that democ­ra­tizes the process of invest­ment is a gain for the com­mon good.

Dr. King was devoted to three inter­lock­ing social jus­tice causes: racial jus­tice, eco­nomic jus­tice, espe­cially anti-poverty activism; and anti-militarism. That is still a com­pelling list of pri­or­i­ties to me, except that all of these com­mit­ments have to be con­ceived as insep­a­ra­bly related to strug­gles for gen­der and sex­ual jus­tice, and eco­log­i­cal flourishing.

Watch Gary Dorrien’s “Wall Street Dia­logues: What is a just dis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth and power?” at Trin­ity Wall Street Church!

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