Anyone driving through Madison, Wisconsin in April and May would have recognized those nine beeps of car and truck horns, ubiquitous throughout the city: This is what democracy looks like!

Wisconsin State Capitol

The mainstream media focused on unions, of course, public and private, coming together in unexpected solidarity, but not everyone realized that spiritual and religious groups played a significant role as well. And here’s something that will challenge your prejudices: evangelical groups were among them. Together with the religious organizations that form the usual progressive “suspects,” they chanted their own variation on a theme: This is what religion looks like.

Bruno, Hawkings, Dowling at WCSA

Houses of Worship: the new “public” spaces for political action?

Churches, temples, synagogues, and mosques have an ambivalent history with social justice, but a panel at the Working Class Studies conference in Chicago this June offered evidence of deep and innovative support for justice movements, worker rights in particular, which really inspired me. Not everyone knows, for example, that during the Wisconsin Uprising, a Shabbat service was held in the Capitol with Hebrew songs in which Rabbi Renee Bauer played a key role. Or that four hundred clergy signed a statement of support, and one hundred fifty of them marched in the protests. Robert Bruno, author of Justified by Work, moderated an impressive panel consisting of Father Larry Dowling, a Catholic priest from a 50 percent unemployed, 55 percent ex-incarcerated parish, and Rev. C. J., . Hawking, Executive Director of Arise Chicago, and Minister of Social Justice at the Euclid Avenue Methodist Church. Unfortunately, Rabbi Brant Rosen, leader of an activist Jewish Reconstructionist congregation, and a Muslim Imam were not able to come.

Joy and Success Below the Radar

We don’t hear enough about joy in impoverished communities, but Father Dowling said that, even in the absence of positive movement, “I learn so much about joy from my parishioners.” One anecdote underlined the large effect of even a small amount of justice: Six parishioners who had earned jobs with the parish by banking sufficient volunteer hours, brought in six garbage bags full of guns for a weapons turn-in on Martin Luther King’s birthday. One said, “We don’t need them because we have jobs.” Some of his parishioners wore pins: Jesus, Others, You (in other words, JOY).

Moses sculpture Carl Rohl-Smith

“Moses was the first labor organizer,” Reverend Dowling said, and told of a grueling nine-week janitors’ strike at the University of Miami in 2006 during which the minister of an Episcopal church that bordered the campus invited workers to meet there, and a ceremony was held in which participants poured saltwater into a large vase to symbolically represent sweat and tears as well as the connection between the Israelites coming out of slavery and their current struggle. Despite the bitter saying, “there’s no social gospel in suburbia,” Reverend Dowling reflected that suburban churches, too, were hungry for meaning and described a Labor-in-the-Pulpit Sunday in which speakers from labor movements give guest sermons to connect “their story to the God story” and let congregations know about ongoing struggles.

Heaven is About Relationship

One fascinating topic that arose during this panel was What is Sin? Is paying sub-minimum wage a sin? Is closing a plant even when it’s making money a sin? Father Dowling suggested that no sin is purely personal. “Whatever we do affects others.” People of many faiths are expressing this belief. Rashid Dar, President of the UW Muslim Student Association, said recently, “I hesitate to tell people how to pick their politics, but in choosing our sides we would do well to consider who is working to bring the most overall benefit to society at large, and who is working to benefit a select, but influential, elite.”

Holocaust survivor + Muslim Student (Yossi Seliger)

Sometimes our prejudices keep us from recognizing and connecting to allies. Reverend Hawking asserted that without question, evangelicals played a role in supporting the Wisconsin uprising. They expressed the idea that, “My future is tied up with your future.” The fact that the fervently antireligious Ayn Rand (as evidenced by these interviews with Phil Donahue and Mike Wallace) is a favored Tea Party theorist does not sit at all well with believers.

Another inspiring example, very much in line with Tikkun, is the work of Rabbi Brant Rosen in support of the Jenin Freedom Theatre in Palestine, set up “to address Jenin’s children’ trauma, chronic fear and depression that resulted from the violence of the Intifada and the Occupation.” Rabbi Rosen’s blog describes the theatre as a form of Palestinian cultural resistance.” As one of the panelists noted, “Sin scatters, disrupts, and breaks apart.” Tikkun heals and unites. It’s great to know that all these examples come from Middle America, the heartland so often dismissed as benighted, backward, and conservative.

Are You a Deuteronomy Person or an Exodus Person?

The difference between religious groups (maybe political groups too?) with a sense of mission and those who merely preserve themselves as an institution was described in the following metaphor: Deuteronomy people are absorbed in rules and penalties; Exodus people set out for the Promised Land. That doesn’t mean Exodus people are perfect. It doesn’t mean they won’t wander in the wilderness for forty years. But it does mean they’re on the journey.