Prophets of Resistance: Social Justice Activists Contesting Comfortable Church Culture

Abstract

Religious social justice activist groups strive to develop cultural commitments for sustained activism within congregations. Existing research explains the political and organizational challenges they encounter and hints at corresponding struggles over church culture, but these cultural conflicts have not been fully explained. This paper shows that in attempts to build cultural commitments to activism, faith-based community organizing (FBCO) leaders consciously contest congregational cultures rooted in individualistic orientations to religious commitment. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I demonstrate that clergy and lay leaders in FBCO coalitions seek to problematize and displace a comfortable church culture, which extends individualistic religious commitments and individualistic orientations to social problems and thus hinders the cultural appeal of social justice activism in many religious communities. I analyze efforts to replace this comfortable church culture with a culture that encourages activism, and I argue that this struggle reveals a discursive conflict between competing visions of religious life.