The Problem of Faith in a Violent World

Summer Reveries

"So are you going to do something?"

It was August 13, 2014, and I had just gotten back to St. Louis from New York City, and there I stood in a hair salon catching up with Martha, a colleague and friend, for a few minutes between her appointment and mine. I had no idea what her question meant.

"You know, there's talk of activities being organized around what happened over the weekend. Are you going to participate?" my friend continued with patience, as if she knew too well what it takes to recalibrate one's frame of mind after sabbatical exploits.

"You know, the shooting in Ferguson ...," Martha helped out.

It was breaking news, and I had not yet caught on to the names "Michael Brown" and "Darren Wilson." Martha clued me in: a White police officer fatally shot an unarmed Black teenager in a suburb less than fifteen miles north of where I live and teach. The fact that I remained oblivious to the news is egregious only in hindsight. After all, doesn't our social imaginary consider violent shootings involving Black youth "normal," especially for an urban metropolis like St. Louis?

Three days later, I found myself on the sidewalk of Canfield Drive, staring at a makeshift roadside memorial in the middle of the street, at the spot where a teenager's body was left lifeless and exposed for over four hours before grief-stricken, bewildered, indifferent, vulturous eyes. People were just beginning to gather for what was to be the first vigil for the fatal shooting by local law enforcement of yet another African American youth — but something was different in the air that day. Vigil keepers positioned themselves quietly. A woman evangelist with a bullhorn was proclaiming muffled words about salvation. It began to rain. Someone nearby muttered, "Rain cleanses ..."

August 9 means different things to different people — and perhaps nothing at all to some — but it disrupted my world. I was in New York City when Eric Garner died under the chokehold of a police officer, and I had just left the San Francisco Bay Area when Oscar Grant was shot by a BART officer who mistook his own gun for a Taser. So why does the body of Michael Brown lifeless on the ground disrupt and disturb me so? Why did the moment at which I nervously sat on the public "mourning bench" become for me the ominous zero-hundred-hours that marked both an ending and a beginning of something — of what I knew not at that moment?

For one, it disrupted my professional world because as soon as news broke out, members of the seminary community at which I teach as well as religious professionals and faith groups in all of greater St. Louis knew that we were going to have to snap to attention and spring into action. As facts remained muddied with stories and counter-testimonies, feet took to the streets; vigils and forums were improvised everywhere; teach-ins, preach-ins, and eat-ins were organized by local leaders, in concert with experts and partners from all over the country. In the following months, what seemed to be dramaturgical performances of religious ritual (from ecumenical Christian worship to interfaith prayer services), faith-based action, and intentional consciousness-raising efforts gave evidence of a social collective being spiritually reconfigured by tragedy. The activities tested the capacity of faith communities to engage in disciplined improvisation: after all, we are in the business of "making disciples for the transformation of the world" — can we walk the faith talk at such a violent time as this?

As the context-specific actions of Ferguson merged with the larger #BlackLivesMatter protest movement, local lay and clergy leaders learned anew what it takes to "put some feet to their prayers." However, as improvisational efforts continued to rally and organize churches toward the enduring work of confronting the insidious violence of systemic social injustices in their own backyard, these leaders ran head-on into a familiar yet perplexing wall: the incapacity and unwillingness of their faith communities to respond with some form of faith-driven action. In many cases, the resistance was (and still is) fierce, eerily reminiscent of the stand-offs that divided racialized religious communities and civic leadership in the 1960s civil rights era. If the church's teaching, learning, and practice of faith is purportedly transformative, then where is that faith when it is needed most? If "good" religious formation had been happening all along — or had it? — then why the indifference, paralysis, apathy, exasperation, and even downright resistance when a calamity occurred that could have used a faithful response? Why does it appear as if collective moral consciousness has once again been anesthetized, and the hope for which church folk love to sing and pray suddenly debilitated in the face of actual struggle? The problem is perplexing. Anemic prayers for peace seem impotent, and steady obedience to the long haul of faithful action seems dissatisfying when the very foundations of faith seems to be quaking due to human tantrums.

The killing of Michael Brown disrupted my professional world, but it also disturbed my very psyche, triggering a crisis of faith if you will — albeit a variety suffered by those who can afford to call existential certitude into question and not have to worry about what to eat, where to live, whom to love, or whether or not we would survive the next day. Nonetheless, it was a crisis of faithful meaning-making: What does it mean to be a person of faith in a violent world? What does it even mean to "have faith" in this world that is so violent? What does it mean for vulnerable bodies — victims of systemic and systematic abuse, neglect, and indifference — to continue believing that this world exists for them, for their future, for their flourishing? What does it mean for any of us to continue about our daily business of eating, praying, and loving, when the world continues to be punctured and ruptured by violence? If faith is a verb, then how do we "do it" in such a world that we have today?

Resetting the Heart

The above questions and the larger-than-life issues they convey are vexing for me as a person of faith, an ordained minister in a church that proclaims commitment to transformative work in the world, and a scholar of religious educational praxis. Unfolding world events reflect both the fertility and fragility of our everyday chronos time. Religions teach love of neighbor, but reality reminds us repeatedly that it is hard to know who is neighbor and who is enemy. After all, in many times and places, we are both neighbor and enemy to one another. Despite forecasts about rising secularism and post-religious, post-Christian movements in North America, we have empirical descriptions of exploding charismatic spiritualities and groundswells of new "Christendoms" in the global south. The...