A Time to Preach?
By Kevin Hargaden
(From the July - September 2020 issue of VOX)
Gil Scott Heron famously declared that the revolution would not be televised. It may well turn out to be live-streamed. None of us can escape the barrage of footage of American police responding to protests against criminal justice brutality with acts of blatant force. The latest round of Black Lives Matter protests, came in response to the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Watching these rallies, many of us are left marvelling at the patience and restraint of African American communities. Faced with a myriad of prejudices and obstacles, ranging from micro-aggressions to outright lethal state-sanctioned violence, black communities respond primarily with non-violent protest and grassroots political activism. Putting myself in their shoes, I would be tempted to go far beyond such peaceable means.
A striking feature of this movement, from its modern origins around the ministry of Dr Martin Luther King Jr and his companions, right up to the present day, has been the prominent role given to religious leaders. It is not just that the pastors and priests stand with the protestors but the protests are often informed explicitly by preaching.
Today we remember King’s “I have a dream” speech but we easily forget the speech was really a sermon on Isaiah 40. We see this legacy continued in the work of someone like Rev William Barber, whose activism with the NAACP and the Poor People’s Campaign rotates around his public reflection on the Scriptures.
But it is even present in those who are not ordained. A clip of the philosopher, Dr Cornel West, went viral as he explained the protests seeking justice for George Floyd on CNN. In sermonic cadences, he declared that it was his responsibility to “bear witness” to the “least of these” and that over the nine minutes when the full weight of a man rested on the neck of “Brother George” American society at large was “reaping what it had sown” through its failure to address its racist foundations.
None of us can fail to be moved by what Dr West called “the work in the soul” of those who habitually face racist violence without succumbing to violence or race-hatred themselves. It is wholly appropriate that Irish people stand in solidarity with those protesting across American cities. But this runs the risk of pious irrelevancy and sanctimonious triviality (to quote King in his Letter from Birmingham Jail) if we do not reflect on the ways in which our society displays similar dysfunctions.
“I am struck by how impossible it would be to conceive of an Irish social justice movement directly influenced by preaching.”
Standing within the Irish church, I am struck by how impossible it would be to conceive of an Irish social justice movement directly influenced by preaching. We read the same Scriptures as our African American neighbours but to a remarkably reduced response. The Bible is a sharp word with contemporary relevance on one side of the Atlantic, and a slight embarrassment, best acknowledged briefly and left aside, on the other.
Our literary culture is recognised around the world. But as a rule, our clergy do not appear to have the same grá for language as our authors. At times, the Irish church seems Scripturally illiterate. Some sermons amount to a trite bromide about private morality, laden with anecdote but lacking attention to the meaning of the Scriptures passages. When this is so often the norm, we can understand how people have come to equate a “good mass” with a short homily.
Many more direct comparisons can be drawn about the failure of Irish society – especially around the Direct Provision system and the disproportionate presence of Mincéirs in Irish prisons – but one lesson that the Irish church can draw from these protests is that our failure to value the potential potency of preaching has widespread consequences.
Perhaps we overdosed on pontification and there needed to be a spell when we remembered that practicing the faith is more important than merely propounding it. But the subversive message of Christianity is only unleashed – and people are only formed for the long, hard, slow struggle for justice – when the strange new world of the Bible is communicated with passion and learning, directed towards the pressing concerns of our lives.
The revolution will not be televised. But it can be preached.
Dr Kevin Hargaden leads the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice, where he works as a social theologian. He is an elder for the Presbyterian Church in Lucan. His most recent book is entitled Theological Ethics in a Neoliberal Age.
