Seminary Panel: Occupy Wall Street Legacy ‘Stained With Whiteness’

What is the theological and spiritual legacy, if there is one, of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement that began 10 years ago in 2011? This was the central question considered by a panel with Vanderbilt University’s Wedland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice.

Participants included Nathan Schneider, Professor of Media Studies, at University of Colorado Boulder, Kwok Pui Lan, Dean’s Professor of Systematic Theology at United Methodist-affiliated Candler School of Theology and Obery Hendricks, Visiting Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary. It was moderated by Jeorg Rieger, United Methodist minister and Professor of Theology at Vanderbilt.

Schneider began by discussing his time as a journalist participating in and documenting OWS in 2011. He described how early protests captured the attention of the “system” which in turn asked them “What do you want of the system, protesters? You’ve got our attention, now what do you want us to change?” Yet, answering this question was no simple matter.

In response, “over and over the [OWS] movement asserted, even against itself but also against that demand [for concrete demands], that we are here to create an autonomous space and create art, we have no one demand or view. Our very presence here is a challenge to your legitimacy.”

He continued, “the sense was that this was not just a political or economic movement but also a spiritual one. Of course when you enter into a space like that it becomes a spiritual challenge, you’re constructing a new imaginary. Very quickly I started to notice this as a spiritual or religious experience for many of the people involved.”

The Media Studies professor compared the situation at the OWS encampment to the early church in Acts chapters 2-4, saying he could understand “why the apostles might share all things in common in a moment of signs and wonders happening around them.”

Hendricks, for his part, compared OWS with the Old Testament: “The prophetic dimension of [OWS was] to expose corruption, economic exploitation in a systemic way. We see that kind of excoriation by Amos, for instance, and Micah and Biblical prophets.

The Union Theological Seminary professor added: “What really struck me is that [OWS] reminded me of the so-called Jesus cleansing of the temple, which was really a planned demonstration as we know, he went to the seat of power. But more than that, Mark tells us that Jesus occupied the temple in that he didn’t allow anyone to walk across the temple grounds… [OWS] really reminded me of this demonstration by Jesus at the temple… because… it cast the biblical narrative in a different and much more useful form that we could use as a basis for a movement, for people of Biblical faith.”

Kwok discussed the influences she and Rieger had used in their book Occupy Religion: Theology of the Multitude, which she said included liberation theology. The Hong Kong-born feminist theologian  emphasized that the OWS movement was bigger than just America, and that she had been inspired by the many Occupy style movements across the world. Oddly, she mentioned the Umbrella Movement in her own home of the “former British colony of Hong Kong” as one of these movements, but didn’t explain how a mass anti-Chinese Communist Party protest was comparable to OWS.

Overall, Kwok lamented, “the world is becoming more and more inhabitable for many people. We are talking about the Haitian people risking their lives to cross the border, and the Afghans and we are talking about the people in Africa. Many migrants and asylum seekers and refugees.”

Hendricks lauded OWS for presenting “an implicit critique to libertarianism and radical individualism because what we saw was a community form, it was a focus on community, the common good, much greater. And what that has in common with black religious traditions is this communitarian focus. Because the focus of the biblical tradition we know is on the common good… But the church seems to have lost sight of this in this late form of capitalism.”

The Union Theological Seminary professor said this communitarian spirit “should be brought up again and re-embraced, for the black church to become more concerned with systemic justice, institutional injustice, rather than just individual salvation, which is of course what black churches have in common with mainstream christianity. Occupy is an indictment of the lack of vision of churches writ large, recognizing the importance of us struggling for the common good.”

Surprisingly, Schneider concluded with an expression of approval of OWS’ ultimate demise. As he said, though it was a “global movement,” many “Americans have trouble seeing for ourselves because we like to think we invented everything.” Continuing to indict the movement, he said: “I want to touch on race here. Many of the participants who came in thinking of this as just about Wall Street and just about what was going on in the United States who came in with that stain of whiteness, did not see the connection between American capitalism and inequality and racial capitalism, racial inequality…. Occupy had to die, it worked itself into its own death, because people realized the limitations of the movement [in its] racial blindness.”