Undercover Christians
The most violent element in society is ignorance Credit: Mike Gifford, https://www.flickr.com/photos/mgifford/14828294477/
Something I realized after the People’s Social Forum is that there were all these Christian activists but it was as if they were all in hiding. Trying to find another Christian activist can be difficult. A lot of the time you only find other Christian activists when you happen to run into them at church or you have a mutual Christian friend. A friend recently expressed to me how challenging it was to be a Christian activist because of the number of negative comments you constantly hear about faith. I personally had a pretty good experience of being open about my faith in the activist community until last spring, when the topic came up at a training session. I said that I went to church and was given an earful about how terrible “the evangelicals” were, and the fact that I attended an Anglo-Catholic Evensong once a month was followed with accusations that they must be anti-choice. All of this without even going beyond a small mention of where I might go on Sundays.
These reactions aren’t surprising. The institutional church has a history of collaborating with the systems that caused many of the problems activists are now trying to solve. In Canada we are still dealing with the legacy of colonialism, a system in which the institutional church participated by setting up residential schools. As much as Canadians are currently trying to work towards reconciliation with First Nations peoples, we still need to remove ourselves from the system that fostered these crimes in the first place if we want to move forward.
Christian activists of all ages have to recognize this history and learn from our past to create a new story. We need to push the institutional church to remove itself from the comfort of destructive systems like capitalism. We also need to set the example of what being a Christian actually looks like through our actions. If we commit to doing this and being honest about how activism can connect to Christian faith, we may find that the negative comments will fade away.
Caitlin Armstrong lives in Ottawa, Ontario.
Sorry, comments are closed.