Image Courtesy of Jim Burklo
Special to United Methodist Insight | Aug. 24, 2026
Utopia for Our Century: A Manifesto of Hope (Yale University Press, 2026), by David Albertson and Jason Blakely
“Where there is no vision, the people perish…” Proverbs 29:18, KJV
In the 1970s, a couple of my pals in Santa Cruz, California, decided to set forth on an adventure. With their backpacks they stood at the onramp to Highway 17 north and stuck out their thumbs, holding up a cardboard sign that read “Seattle”. After a long time, as the day was waning into evening, one of them took the cardboard and turned it around and wrote “Alaska” on it, and held it up. Shortly after that, a guy stopped his car and said, “You’re going to Alaska! Cool! I’m only going to San Francisco, but would that help?” From then on, they used the Alaska sign as they hitchhiked to Seattle.
In the early 16th century, the English statesman and thinker Thomas More invented the word Utopia, and wrote a novel about it. More was a man of enormous erudition, deep faith, and moral fortitude who was beheaded for resisting Henry VIII’s march toward absolute tyranny. “Topia” meant place, and with the “u” could mean two things – no place, a good place, or both! More’s imagined Utopia was an island in the New World where people lived communally in beautiful cities without hunger or homelessness. More wrote in the era of the “closing of the commons,” when British peasants were starving as they were driven off land carved up as private property for the gentry. As a spoof on the rampant greed of his time, he wrote that the Utopians had so little regard for wealth that they pooped on it – in golden thunderpots! More was a practical politician who was guided by a vision of a society guaranteeing freedom and justice for all.
Utopia didn’t exist as a place in the early 1500s. It does not exist as a place now. Utopia exists in the imagination, and in the lives of those who imagine it. Utopia is the lodestar aiming us toward a better world, infusing in us the inspiration and energy to build a world that approximates it. Utopia is the Alaska for my friends’ Seattle… it is the unreachable goal that drives us forward toward greater social and economic justice.
But utopia isn’t just about imagining a world of abundance and fairness for all. A utopia worth imagining and pursuing must include a revolution of values, a spiritual transformation.
Utopia is ubiquitous. All of us are in the thrall of such visions, whether or not they are life-affirming. Even self-proclaimed “realists” are captive to a form of utopian thinking in which “how things are” is imagined as “how things should be”. This is the argument of a new book, Utopia for Our Century: A Manifesto of Hope, by David Albertson, professor of religion at the University of Southern California, and Jason Blakely, professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University. (I’ve known David since he was an undergraduate at Stanford, where I served as the progressive Christian campus minister.) This short book is a rousing call to rise above sectarian divisions, and envision and pursue spiritually-grounded utopias.
The authors pull no punches in their scathing critique of laissez-faire capitalism. We are led not just to accept it but to celebrate it as TINA - “There Is No Alternative” – the natural order of things. But “if a given politics is so 'natural”'and 'real,' why all the effort to enact it?” the authors ask (p 33). Capitalism’s boosters will deny it, but in fact it is just another utopia – one in which the soul has no place, and humans are reduced to cogs in a machine of production and consumption. It is what the authors call a “closed utopia:” “They are closed because they seem to picture the good life as purely a matter of economics. They cut their imagination short and confine their dreams to material prizes. They ask nothing of human beings; indeed, they seem to forget that moral transformations might be required to improve the human future” (p 38). The authors remind us that this critique applies to capitalist and communist utopias alike.
By contrast, open, positive utopias are founded on the spiritual values of love, freedom, and unpredictable creativity. In the book, Martin Luther King is described as a utopian in his vision of the “beloved community.” King advocated, of course, for very specific public policy changes to establish racial and economic justice. But that was not the limit of his utopian vision. “He aimed at nothing less than the ‘reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values’” (p 100). “To truly transform politics will take a utopianism that works from the inside out.” (p 79)
The authors invoke the example of Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement in the 1930s that established communal houses in low-income neighborhoods of cities around the country that exist to this day. These houses offered food and shelter to anybody who came to them. They didn’t practice charity: Dorothy Day and her community members modeled a vision of a common life that made no distinction between rich and poor, those served and those serving. “Charity assumes a stable economic surplus strategically targeted at temporarily alleviating the deficit of a ‘needy’ other… Jesus is not the volunteer setting out to feed the hungry and heal the sick; Jesus is already waiting among the poor.”
The book celebrates the contemporary example of Father Greg Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries, the famous gang-intervention program in Los Angeles. What Homeboy offers is not charity for gang members, but belonging with peers in a beloved community that breaks down the walls of allegiance to gangs. The authors compare violence between gangs to the antagonism between our political parties. “’What are kingdoms but great bands of robbers?’ asked St. Augustine. ‘What are bands of robbers but little kingdoms?’ The L.A. rapper Kendrick Lamar astutely draws the analogy in his song ‘Hood Politics’, when he mocks our partisan gang warfare with the biting wordplay ‘Re-blood-licans’ and “Demo-crips’, waving their ominous red and blue. Homeboy’s interventions may be something we all need” (p 94).
Dorothy Day and Father Boyle integrated simple spiritual practices into the lives of their communities. In my career as a pastor and community organizer, I have witnessed that the social justice activists who maintain a spiritual practice are the ones who stick it out for the long term. They have an aim of spiritual transformation that goes beyond any social change they are trying to achieve. They are aiming for Alaska, and that helps get them to Seattle: “…new social realities require new selves” (p 77). Spiritual practice de-centers our selfish, small-s selves and re-centers us with the divine Self we share with all others.
“Nationalism is a peculiar kind of failed utopia" (p 115). “The nation is a manufactured dream, a veritable nowhere” (p 116). The authors point out that nation-states are a relatively recent historical phenomenon, and that all of them have been cobbled together from disparate linguistic and cultural elements. The current leaders of the US government claim that the country is founded on “blood and soil,” that the United States is “a people,” and that we must defend our “culture” as a Christian nation. This is twisted utopian thinking, imagining a social homogeneity that will not, does not, and never did exist.
“Christian utopianism proceeds with experimentation, boldness, and even a little folly… first lift the ceiling on what is possible, then start with something impossible” (p 59). Churches can be real mini-utopias where we begin to approximate the communal ideal of Acts chapter 2: “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.”
This biblical example spills over beyond the church itself, as the book’s authors suggest: “Christian utopianism is designed… to be given away, even in the face of resistance.” When we share food together after worship and in potlucks, when we make meals for our shut-ins and for our unhoused neighbors, when we swap clothes and share tools with each other, when we drive each other to the doctor or to the airport, when we help each other without expectation of reward, when on Sundays we chat amiably with folks of different political persuasions, we’re practicing utopia, and we’re modeling a vision to share with those around us.
“Love your neighbor as yourself. ‘Utopia’ also means love your neighbor’s future” (p 140). Let us set our rudders and sails toward that glorious nowhere that will draw us closer to the kin-dom of heaven on earth!
The Rev. Jim Burklo is pastor of United Church of Christ of Simi Valley, Calif. This post is republished from his Substack blog.
Jim Burklo 2022
The Rev. Jim Burklo