Solidarity Circles Seek to Build New Kinds of Economy, Community

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At a time when protest often seems to be the last recourse for those longing for a better world and a more sustainable faith, the Solidarity Circles of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt University are designed to expand horizons by constructing and building alternatives. Our approach is wholistic from the outset. Putting together faith communities and solidarity economies—we are also talking about developing religious and economic democracies in addition to political democracy—leads to deeper engagements of all of life and feeds back into the deepening of faith. To be sure, the alternatives that are built here address not only inequalities along the lines of economics and class but also along the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, and even age. In a nutshell, we are finding that faith communities cannot be built from within because God cannot be confined to one space or another.

Each Solidarity Circle is a virtual peer network that brings together about a dozen representatives from faith communities to “investigate, educate, and organize.” Each individual faith community engages in a specific project of the solidarity economy in consultation with seasoned organizers, including worker coop developers and labor leaders, all in conversation with theologians and religious ethicists. Solidarity Circles harness the profound synergies of economic and religious developments, broadening common fixations on policy and politics. In a world where all of life, including religion, tends to be dominated by the forces of what is sometimes called the “Capitalocene,” developing alternative economic relationships creates freedom and empowerment, which are typically lacking today. We suffer from electoralitis, where our political imaginations are dominated by capital and the never-ending elections they govern. What the solidarity and cooperative economy offer is a new way of living democratically — political democracy, yes; but economic and religious democracy are needed to develop it. These democratic relationships, in turn, inspire alternative religious relations determined by mutuality of people and the divine rather than by hierarchical structures that increasingly resemble the structures of corporations. 

Religious inspiration and theological study thrive when it becomes clear that God is often at work most penetratingly where the pressure is greatest. Many participants in Solidarity Circles are finding that this is the context in which studies of biblical and other traditional sources of faith traditions are most fruitful. All of these components are processed over nine months in conversation with the best insights of broad-based community organizing, aided by educational resources and monthly group meetings facilitated by leading theologians, ethicists, and some of their affiliates.

A fundamental question underlying these efforts is how to build and construct the kinds of projects that present real alternatives to the dominant status quo. Such alternatives, we have learned, require certain forms of solidarity. Solidarity economies are places where solidarity becomes most real and can be practiced. What we call “deep solidarity” brings together people from all walks of life. Unlike right-wing solidarity, which is based on sameness and identities (such as race, gender, and nationality), the paradox of deep solidarity is that it is does not require sameness but becomes stronger the more diverse those who collaborate are. This is true not only for racial, ethnic, gendered, or sexual identities, but for different religions as well. 

The goal of Solidarity Circles, therefore, is not to erase difference, to become more alike, or merely to “see” and “hear” others—the goal is to work together to build a different world, paying attention to the places where the powers that be are often most severe and damaging and shape us most deeply, even as faith communities: in relationships at work, where most people spend the largest part of their waking hours (or, if they are excluded from work as an many people are, in informal economic relationships that are often even more dehumanizing and destructive).

Deep solidarity as cultivated by Solidarity Circles requires the distinction of privilege and power. Privilege is real and can be observed in many places: residing in the Global North carries privilege, as does being white, male, heterosexual, and so on. Privilege also accrues to certain national, professional, and religious identities. However, privilege does not necessarily translate into power, especially the power to change things. The confusion of privilege and power is promoted by those who seek to preserve dominant power. White supremacy may serve as an example: the privilege of whiteness is used to suggest to white employees that they have more in common with their white employers than nonwhite fellow employees. This leads to the commonly noted phenomenon that large numbers of white people vote against their own interests. The result is frustration all around, because solidarity is undercut while even most white people are not benefiting from this confusion of privilege and power. 

Distinguishing privilege and power can lead to alternatives both in church and world when it is seen that dominant power is shared by relatively few people—the proverbial 1 percent. Those who assume prematurely that their privilege translates into power—professionals, pastors, professors, middle managers, politicians, and many mainline churchgoers—need to take another look at what is going on. Solidarity emerges when people realize that they are not benefiting from the dominant powers as much as they think, which includes an increasing number of members of the middle class, whose fortunes are dwindling. As this becomes clearer, whatever privilege people have can be put to use for the building of alternatives, resulting in the ability to employ privilege for the benefit of the many rather than the few.

In sum, Solidarity Circles provide places where entangled relationships in faith communities and the economy can be reinvisioned and reenergized from the bottom up. The foundation is not moral appeals to do better but the realization how everything is always already connected. The suffering of some is connected to the suffering of all, as the apostle Paul famously argued in 1 Cor. 12:26. As a result, the lives of those who experience various interlocking forms of exploitation and oppression in their own bodies, via the intersections of class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and ability, can inform the alternatives that are being developed. Those who are more privileged need to pay attention to those with less privilege, not in order to launch yet another Olympics of oppression, but to understand what we are up against and what it takes to build a new world and transformed faith communities together. 

The extraordinary theological weight of this process has to do with a growing understanding that this is where God is found—core traditions of Christianity and many other religions testify to it—and where relationships with the divine can be deepened in such a way that neither the world nor faith communities will ever be the same.

If you’re interested in learning more about Solidarity Circles, sign up here for an interview with Dr. Aaron Stauffer (aaron.k.stauffer@vanderbilt.edu), associate director of the Wendland-Cook Program. He’ll walk you through the ins and outs of the program. We’d love to have you join our Solidarity Circles community!

The Rev. Dr. Joerg Rieger, a United Methodist pastor, directs the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, Tenn.