Is the Language of Business Enough?

I’M PRIVILEGED to be part of a program called the Prime Movers Fellowship, a circle of mainly younger-generation social change agents launched by Ambassador Swanee Hunt and her late husband, Charles Ansbacher. In December, the Prime Movers had a retreat with the Council of Elders, an inspiring group of civil rights era activists. Those two days contained some of the most profound conversations I’ve been part of in 10 years.

Rev. Joyce Johnson facilitated masterfully, opening sessions with prayer and sacred song. Rev. John Fife spoke about launching the Sanctuary movement through churches. Rabbi Art Waskow connected the theme of the Eric Garner killing (“I can’t breathe”) with the climate challenge (“We can’t breathe”).

Rev. Nelson Johnson of the Beloved Community Center told a story about driving into the North Carolina mountains to try to convince a white supremacist to cancel a Ku Klux Klan rally in Greensboro. “I was driving alone,” he explained, “and halfway up the mountain I started to get a little scared. So I stopped my car and got down on my knees to pray. I felt God tell me I was doing something necessary, and I felt my courage return.” He got back into his car and drove on to the meeting.

AFTER THAT STORY, Rea Carey, a Prime Movers fellow, made an observation: When a civil rights era activist speaks, it is almost always infused with a deep religious commitment. When a younger-generation civic leader speaks, words such as “strategic plan,” “long-term objective,” and “metric” are far more common.

It was a striking enough insight that about 20 of us gathered in a breakout session to discuss it.

The conversation took me back two decades to my early days as an activist, when I was a student at the University of Illinois. The language that first brought me into social change was critical theory, which was big in the early 1990s when I was coming up. But after about two years, that ethos left me simultaneously too hot and too cold—burned up with anger and frozen with analysis. It was Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, with its explicit faith language and deep belief in cosmic love, that set me on the path that I walk today.

There is much to be gained from the business language of social change. Setting goals, designing plans, and executing well are good things, for sure. But there is something lost when that ethos dominates. I loved the retreat with the Council of Elders precisely because the connection to the cosmic that they carried lifted us all. I went back to my work (writing a strategic plan with objectives and metrics, ironically enough) refreshed and joyous, feeling as if I could keep pushing my boulder up the mountain for many more years.

In the breakout session, a younger-generation activist made a stark confession: She was a deeply committed Christian, but rarely shared this in the younger-generation social entrepreneur circles in which she ran. Such circles were open to all forms of identity expression, except for faith.

This is a sadness and a problem. My generation of civic leaders is no doubt building impressive organizations, helped in large part by business thinking. But if we are building spaces that are closed to the faith language that sustained the courage and conviction of prior generations, we may well find ourselves both burned up and frozen out.