These Things Give Me Hope

It was less than two years ago that I wrote plaintively from this same website, mourning the lack of prophetic leadership from the religious left. Since that time, the Sojourners movement has produced a best-selling book; the Christian Science Monitor has published an in depth series on ethical investing; and my own denomination has made headlines for our commitment to inclusive language, socially responsible fiscal policies, and even supporting medical marijuana. It seems that my anguish was paralleled in my brothers and sisters throughout the country, who are speaking up and out. Or, maybe, I simply became more aware of what was already going on.

Now, our immediate past moderator and my hero, Rick Ufford-Chase, was arrested for protesting against the Iraq war, along with 4 Presbyterian ministers and 70 others, on Tuesday Sept 27 in the Senate Building in DC. To those who know of him, this comes as no surprise. Since June, when his term as moderator expired, Ufford-Chase has been serving as the Executive Director of Presbyterian Peace Fellowship (who co-sponsors the Colombia Accompaniment Project which sent me to Barranquilla.) However, as my dear friend Kelsey noted last night, the act of a former moderator carries weight. It demands respect. It gives this act of communal civil disobedience a validity that keeps the common congregant from writing this action off as simply the act of wide-eyed idealism and ex-hippies.

That same day, before the press releases had arrived in our mailboxes about the protest, nearly concurrent with Declaration for Peace's spontaneous die-in there in the Senate office building, as their strains were being lifted for peace, I discovered a previously unknown bard of the faith-based anti-war movement.

A few years ago, as I was starting to leave behind the Contemporary Christian subculture I adopted in my teens, one of the musicians whose work stayed with me in my consciousness, and that I continued to admire, was Caedmon's Call, a highly literary Christian folk pop band. Most of all, I listened to them for the lyrics of Derek Webb, one of the few songwriters on Christian radio whose work respected and delved into a faith more intricate and deep than most modern praise choruses would suggest.

Concurrent with my final year and graduation from Whitworth College, and with it my increasing awareness about the interrelationship of faith and social action, Derek Webb was also undergoing a career change. He left Caedmon's Call, in order to pursue a solo career. His first album put him in a testy relationship with his previous audiences, as he drew parallels to the situation in Hosea and compared the modern church to a whore. A conflict over the appropriate use of the word "damned" in a Christian context (in a song where it took on it's literal, original menaing) led to the expulsion of his work from many Christian bookstores. Since then, Webb has continued writing and publishing as an independent artist, creating music that continues to challenge Christian preconceptions.

In December, Webb released an album called "Mockingbird," a collection of what could be referred to as "faith-based protest music." It's titles include lines like "Love is Not Against the Law," "My Enemies are Men Like Me," and lines such as "There are two great lies I've heard; The day you eat of the tree you'll not surely die, and Jesus Christ was a white, middle class, Republican, and if you wanna be saved you have to learn to be like Him." (From A King and a Kingdom). In an effort to reach a greater public, get his music heard, and make known that there are Christian songwriters providing an alternative to the monolithich conservatism of Dobson's favorite radio stations, Derek Webb is now offering his entire album (intentionally, I might add ;) ) as a free download. At this point, one month into the campaign, 40,000 people have downloaded it.

These are both signs of resistance. Ufford-Chase offers the standard vision of social change; He is the non-violent revolutionary like Amos or Martin Luther King Jr, standing in the city square and preaching repentance to the public officials. Webb demonstrates a different approach; in a church context where we learn our theology through hymns like "A Mighty Fortress is Our God," Webb provides alternative language and music for a faith that values peace and justice. These are the keys to education and mobilization; the understanding that there are others out there expressing the same truth, and that voice is slowly but surely reaching the public.

May their work continue.