Inclusive Populism: Creating Citizens in the Global Age

INCLUSIVE POPULISM

CONTENDING MODERNITIES

Series editors: Ebrahim Moosa, Atalia Omer, and Scott Appleby

As a collaboration between the Contending Modernities initiative and the University of Notre Dame Press, the Contending Modernities series seeks, through publications engaging multiple disciplines, to generate new knowledge and greater understanding of the ways in which religious traditions and secular actors encounter and engage each other in the modern world. Books in this series may include monographs, co-authored volumes, and tightly themed edited collections.

The series will include works that frame such encounters through the lens of modernity. The range of themes treated in the series might include war, peace, human rights, nationalism, refugees and migrants, development practice, pluralism, religious literacy, political theology, ethics, multi- and intercultural dynamics, sexual politics, gender justice, and postcolonial and decolonial studies.

INCLUSIVE POPULISM

Creating Citizens in the Global Age

ANGUS RITCHIE

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2019 by University of Notre Dame

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019021580

ISBN: 978-0-268-10577-8 (hardback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-10578-5 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-10580-8 (WebPDF)

ISBN: 978-0-268-10579-2 (Epub)

∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at ebooks@nd.edu

For Jennifer

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

ONEA Populist Moment

TWOCommunity Organizing as Inclusive Populism

THREEEngaging the Theoretical Debate I: A Critique of Liberalism

FOURCommunity Organizing: Six Challenges

FIVEIntegration, Islam, and Immigration

SIXEngaging the Theoretical Debate II: Traditions, Pluralism, and Populism

SEVENInclusive Populism and the Renewal of Politics

Notes

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

Authors are usually delighted when the course of events makes their work more salient. But it is impossible to delight in the fact that, even as I have been writing this book, our democratic crisis has become more intense.

Inclusive Populism: Creating Citizens in the Global Age not only describes and diagnoses the current crisis; it charts a path to democratic renewal. The book offers an up-close account of how community organizing helps strangers to become fellow citizens, both through and for the tending of public life. This empirical study is interwoven with an engagement (particularly in chapters 3 and 6) with the relevant theoretical debates. By these means it argues that the rise of fake populisms on right and left alike is a symptom of more fundamental weaknesses in secularizing liberalism and that community organizing is a practical example of a constructive alternative that I have called inclusive populism. A striking feature of this alternative is that it draws on the diverse religious and ethical traditions in Western democracies and the institutions that embody and promote them. Indeed, it understands these institutions to be vital to the formation of democratic citizens.

The work has its origins in the University of Notre Dame’s multidisciplinary Contending Modernities initiative, which aims to increase understanding of the ways in which religious and secular forces interact in the contemporary postsecular world. By engaging political theorists, theologians, ethicists, and social scientists in sustained conversation and deliberation, Contending Modernities explores two distinct narratives of the postsecular. One narrative holds that a process of secularization has occurred but that religion in our admittedly secular age is proving more resilient than many theorists had expected and is becoming interwoven with the secular in sometimes hidden, always creative, ways. The alternative narrative challenges the very idea of a process of secularization, in part by pointing to the enduring influence of organized religion but also by noting the persistent and near-comprehensive sacralization of so-called ordinary spheres of life, from the economy and the state to personal identity and its burgeoning accoutrements. Contending Modernities sets these sometimes competing, sometimes overlapping, narratives within the overarching discourse of modernity.

Narratives of both the secular and the religious inform the argument of this book, which addresses and attempts to interpret a context in which religion looms considerably larger in politics than secularists would have hoped or expected only a few decades ago.

While the Inclusive Populism project is rooted in these theoretical debates, it seeks to inform public discourse and action. It also seeks to engage with voices that are usually marginalized from such conversations. To that end, this book draws on three main sources of material about community organizing, alongside the extant scholarly literature.

First, David Barclay (at the time a colleague at the Centre for Theology and Community) conducted twenty semistructured interviews with individuals from a wide variety of religious, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. All of the interviewees have been involved in grassroots engagement across different religions and beliefs, most of them through work with Citizens UK, the national community organizing movement (and a sister organization to the Industrial Areas Foundation in the United States). The interviews lasted, on average, 45 minutes and explored, among other topics, the reasons interviewees were involved in their projects, whether and how their work enabled them to build meaningful relationships, and the ways their projects handled faith and other fundamental motivations. A small number of additional interviews were also conducted with academics who specialize in the areas of multiculturalism and faith in public life.

Second, three of my colleagues conducted a further forty interviews that explored the experiences and motivations of those involved in Citizens UK in London’s most deprived neighborhoods and communities. Ruhana Ali and Caitlin Burbridge conducted interviews as part of their day-to-day work as community organizers in, respectively, the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and among London’s Congolese Diaspora. In addition, theologian Arabella Milbank interviewed Christians from a range of denominations involved in The East London Citizens Organisation (TELCO), the local chapter of Citizens UK.

Third, I drew on two accounts written by religious leaders and community organizers in the United Kingdom and the United States of their experiences of and motivations for engagement in the practice. These accounts are published in two collections, Effective Organising for Congregational Renewal and A New Covenant of Virtue.¹

The purpose of the various first-person accounts collected through these interviews and written accounts is to enable those involved in the practice of community organizing to speak in their own words and on their own terms. Alongside this range of interviews and testimonies, I have added insights from my own experience of two decades of ministry in East London parishes involved in Citizens UK.

Inclusive Populism was written in and for the present moment, which is the product of a unique confluence of factors. Alongside the rise in the fake populisms of right and left and the increasing interest in the practice of community organizing as an authentic alternative, the year 2013 saw the election of a pope whose theology and practice are rooted in the experience of the poorest. One of the most admired public figures in the world, Pope Francis has spoken powerfully about the damage done to the common good when billions of people are systematically marginalized. The most authentic Christian theology, he insists, emerges from and informs the experience of struggle. Pope Francis’s vision of a theology and politics rooted in the lives of the poorest citizens is an important inspiration for this book.

The present political and religious moment will eventually pass. The deep-seated flaws in our liberal political order, however, are structural, and we will be living with their debilitating effects for some time to come. It is my hope that the political and social vision embraced by Inclusive Populism will be of enduring relevance.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to begin by thanking R. Scott Appleby and Vincent D. Rougeau for their oversight of the research project that generated this book. I am grateful to Scott for his combination of patience, wisdom, and encouragement and to Vincent for over a decade of friendship and collaboration as we have explored (in this and other projects) the ways community organizing helps diverse communities to build a common life.

The research project is described in more detail in the preface, and I want to thank Ruhana Ali, David Barclay, Caitlin Burbridge, and Arabella Milbank for carrying out and writing up their interviews and for the earlier papers and reports of our project on which this book draws.

I am grateful to colleagues and friends who have read part or all of the text, among them Matthew Bolton, Ernesto Cortés, Simon Cuff, Hugo Foxwood, Joshua Harris, Neil Jameson, Jonathan Lange, Simon Mason, Claire Moll, Dan Rhodes, Dunstan Rodrigues, Richard Springer, Selina Stone, Tim Thorlby, Ralph Walker, and Andy Walton. In particular, the advice of Philip Krinks has (on this, as on many other occasions) proved invaluable.

The book describes a particular, embodied practice of inclusive populism—and so I want to recognize and thank the people and institutions that are part of the community organizing movement. I am deeply grateful to the members of the congregations in which I have ministered in East London (the Parish of the Divine Compassion, Plaistow and North Canning Town in Newham, and St. Peter’s Bethnal Green and St. George-in-the-East in Tower Hamlets); the trustees and staff of the Centre for Theology and Community (in particular our Chaplain Sister Josephine Canny); and the community organizers with whom I have worked in Citizens UK (in particular Neil Jameson as he retires from an extraordinarily fruitful thirty years as its founding director) and its sister alliances around the world.

I also want to offer heartfelt thanks to Stephen Little, Marilyn Martin, and all those at the University of Notre Dame Press who have contributed to the production of the book.

While the weaknesses in this work remain my own, I owe each of the people I have mentioned a debt of gratitude for making it possible.

This book is dedicated to my wife, Jennifer. The process of researching and writing Inclusive Populism began a month after our wedding and has included the first five years of our son Callum’s life—and the first four months of Euan’s. I am hugely grateful for all the love that is given and received in our life together and for the patience and support Jennifer has provided during the researching and writing of this book.

CHAPTER 1

A Populist Moment

The first day of May 2017 was a poignant anniversary. Twenty years earlier, Tony Blair had swept to power as prime minister of Britain in a landslide victory, proclaiming a new dawn in UK politics. His sense of optimism reflected the wider temper of the times. Bill Clinton had just been inaugurated for a second term as US president, and Boris Yeltsin was serving as the first democratically elected leader of the Russian Federation.

These memories stood in painful contrast with the political scene two decades later. In Britain, Blair’s vision of a modern, multicultural nation anchored in the European Union buckled under the weight of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and successive social and economic convulsions. It was finally put to rest on 23 June 2016, when a narrow majority of Britons voted to leave the European Union after a campaign dominated by the fear of immigration and the perceived need to take back control from foreigners.

Across the Atlantic, the change in political mood has been even starker. The angry nativism of Donald Trump’s campaign for president represented a departure from the hopeful and inclusive optimism of Barack Obama’s Yes, We Can campaign eight years earlier. On the day of his inauguration, the new president declared that his predecessors of both parties had presided over an American carnage.¹ The divisive tone of Trump’s rhetoric—and policies— has shaped his presidency thus far.

Perhaps the one thing that unifies an otherwise deeply fractured America is this mood of anger and anxiety. As the new president was delivering his inauguration address, a wave of women’s marches two million strong protested his election. Marking the first anniversary of the inauguration and the protest, an equal or larger number of outraged citizens again took to the streets calling for resistance to the administration.²

While Trump proclaimed America First, he understood that his rise was part of a new political reality sweeping across many nations. In his campaign he repeatedly invoked the Brexit vote in Britain and argued for a more positive relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the early days of his administration, he endorsed the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in her contest with Emmanuel Macron for the French presidency. While the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Russia are very different contexts, the rise of right-wing populism seemed an international phenomenon. Across a range of contexts, it manifested striking commonalities: a hostility to liberal elites and democratic norms, the proclamation of a clash of civilizations between Christianity and Islam, and a deep hostility to immigration, which is blamed for the dilution of each country’s Christian heritage. Increasingly, across these different contexts, fellow citizens are being turned into strangers.

Three factors help to explain this rise in far-right populism: the increasing flows of global migration, the resultant increase in religious diversity, and a period of intense economic upheaval whose cost has been distributed unevenly.

Across the world, twenty cities include among their residents more than one million migrants. Together, these cities, which are the epicenters of global wealth and power, contain one in five of the world’s migrants, as well as standing at the heart of the flows of global migration.³

The majority of these cities lie in historically Christian countries. With the exception of Russia (where the Soviet regime sought for many decades to impose atheism on the populace), all of these countries are undergoing a decline in religious belief and practice. Now, however, global migration is bringing religiously committed new citizens into these nations—many of them adherents of Christianity and Islam. The reason is simple: While these two faiths make up around half of the world’s total population, it is estimated that they account for three-quarters of the world’s migrants.⁴ Ironically, in 1966, just as Harvey Cox was writing The Secular City, which called attention to patterns of urbanization that seemed at the time postreligious, these flows of global migration began to increase dramatically. They have helped put religion back on the agenda of western political debate and rendered Cox’s narrative of secularization problematic.⁵

As for pressures exerted by failing economies, Russia entered a period of economic crisis in the final years of the 20th century. The welfare and employment protections of the former Soviet Union were dismantled at a time when a new capitalist elite was engaged in conspicuous consumption. In the West, the financial crash of 2008 generated a similar dissonance, with the restaurants and boutiques of the wealthiest areas recovering quickly while the majority of citizens endured a sustained period of stagnant wages and reduced public services. Putin’s rise to power, Britain’s Brexit vote, and Trump’s election came on the heels of their nations’ respective economic upheavals.

SECULARIZING LIBERALISM AND INCLUSIVE POPULISM

The failure of political leaders across the spectrum to respond effectively to these demographic, religious, and economic shifts has exposed the underlying inadequacies of an approach to politics I term secularizing liberalism. In this book I explore these inadequacies and explain why the current populisms of right and left are flawed responses. Notwithstanding their ideological differences, these two so-called populisms share a common weakness. Neither the liberal activism of the left nor the authoritarian nationalism of the right is rooted in the lives of the people it claims to represent. This book proposes a humane and effective alternative—a truly inclusive populism that unites diverse citizens in action for the common good.

It is important to begin by characterizing this diversity accurately. Following the Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life (CoRAB), I use the French term convictions for these citizens’ different religions and beliefs. As the Commission explains:

In international legal documentation the equivalent of the English phrase religion and belief is in French la religion et les convictions. The French word convictions has connotations of firmness, weight, intensity and commitment and refers to something which is fundamental in someone’s sense of values, self-worth and identity. To count as a belief so far as the law is concerned, a point of view or une conviction must attain a certain level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance, be worthy of respect in a democratic society and . . . not incompatible with human dignity.

Belief in the sense of les convictions has close similarities with religion. It . . . can be a way of feeling connected to others, can give a sense of meaning and significance, can be a source of narratives, stories, symbols and teachings which impart moral guidance and inspiration, can build courage and resilience in times of trouble, can be a place of ceremony at times of celebration or grief, and can motivate acts of kindness, compassion and generosity.⁶

As an empirical observation, citizens’ diverse convictions evidently influence the political choices many of them make—thus shaping the laws and the behavior of governments. What I am calling a pluralist vision of politics is comfortable with these convictions being articulated in political debate. In one sense, a pluralist polity may or may not be secular (for it may or may not identify the state with any particular set of religious symbols), but it will not be secularizing (for it will allow citizens to bring their substantive convictions—including their diverse conceptions of the good life for individuals and communities—into the public square).

I use the term secularizing liberalism in contrast with such a pluralism. Whenever the text of the book refers to liberalism it means a vision of political discourse in which arguments must be made, and policies justified, in language that does not appeal to any specific convictions of this kind.

In place of secularizing liberalism, this book makes the case for an inclusive populism. This is an approach to politics rooted in the agency and the diverse convictions of citizens experiencing social injustice, from recent migrants to people in long-established working-class communities. I will argue that such a populist vision is embodied in the practice of broad-based community organizing.

As Pope Francis has observed, populism has very different meanings in different contexts: In Latin America, it means that the people—for instance, people’s movements—are the protagonists. They are self-organized. When I started to hear about populism in Europe I didn’t know what to make of it, until I realized that it had different meanings. In Francis’s words, 1930s Germany represented a disordered form of populism in which people did not talk among themselves but rather sought refuge from their fears in a charismatic leader.⁷ This dynamic is replicated in what might with justice be called the fake populism of our own times. It is fake because (unlike the people’s movements praised by Pope Francis) it does not grow out of the experience or agency of ordinary citizens.

The contrast between the fake populism that is focused on a charismatic leader and the populism of self-organized citizens has some parallels with a distinction made by Luke Bretherton. In Resurrecting Democracy he distinguishes anti-political populism, in which citizens withdraw from public life to pursue private interests, from political populism, which embodies a conception of politics that works to reinstate plurality and inhibit totalizing monopolies (whether of the state or market) through common action and deliberation, premised on personal participation in and responsibility for tending public life.⁸

This book does not just argue for inclusive populism as an idea but claims that it is exemplified by the practice of community organizing.⁹ It traces its development from the work of its founder, Saul Alinsky, in the slums of 1930s Chicago to the present-day work of the Industrial Areas Foundation (which Alinsky founded to spread the work across the United States) and its British sister organization, Citizens UK.

Drawing on the existing literature on community organizing and presenting new research on its impact in the deprived and diverse communities of inner-city London, I will show how the practice is an expression of inclusive populism and, in particular,