Book Interview: Aaron K. Stauffer

I like to hold author interviews on my substack on recent book releases. Here is one with Rev. Dr. Aaron K. Stauffer who is currently the Director of Online Learning and Associate Director of The Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt University Divinity School.

Tell us a bit about yourself?

For me, growing up, the church was the center of community life and where I honed my passions for social justice and theology. After college, I moved to San Antonio, Tx to work with the Industrial Areas Foundation, which is where I really cut my teeth organizing. After my time in Texas, I went to Union Theological Seminary in New York for my M.Div. and Ph.D., and there I started working with Religions for Peace USA, where we launched a anti-Islamophobia campaign in the southeast.

When I was in Texas, I wanted to dig deeper into the theological roots of organizing. Once, I told a senior IAF organizer that I was leading a congregational core team through this work. “If you want to do theology,” the organizer said in response, “go get a theologian. Organizing is about building power.” This struck me as an odd thing for an organizer to say. Democratic organizing is certainly about power; but so is theology. Theology plays a fundamental role in our lived religious and political practices. People organize to protect and fight for what they hold most dear, what they hold sacred. That’s the heart of my book, Listening to the Spirit: The Radical Social Gospel, Sacred Value and Broad-based Community Organizing.

How did you get started writing this new book, “Listening to the Spirit” by Oxford University Press.

This book comes from my experiences in churches and organizing coalitions — working with people of faith across the country as they seek to ground their change-making work in their faith.

One of the key contributions of this book is to offer an account of the political role of sacred value in broad-based organizing. When I say sacred value, I mean something separate from (because differently understood than) the “sacred.” Sacred values are attitudes people take up towards goods and people; the sacred is another way of talking about the divine. Values and relationships drive much of our political life. An evangelical opposes abortion because it violates the sacred value of life. An indigenous activist holds a landmark or natural resource as sacred and therefore supports its legal protection because its current recreational use threatens to destroy it. The abolitionist argues that prisons attack the sacred dignity of the incarcerated.

The term sacred value is another way of talking about what people hold most dear. By focusing on the political role of sacred values we can pull back the curtain and expose the richly entangled reality of our political life, revealing aspects of our religious and political lives that have often been ignored or pushed aside.

Describe the Spirit for us?

Spirit is a notoriously elusive term, especially when you want to get concrete and practical about how people listen to it. For me, as a Christian, Spirit refers to the Holy Spirit and to our ethical life and the norms that sustain them. When a Christian church engages in organizing they are discerning the movement of the Spirit in their midst and what the Spirit is calling them to do in their public life. The church is more properly defined by its task and its work, rather than beliefs or doctrines. People do church by organizing. When they listen to the movement of the Spirit, it calls them into deeper reciprocal relationships. Spiraling outward, the Spirit weaves relationships within and through congregations, moving the church out into public life and into the work of building economic and political power.

How do we listen to the Spirit?

By organizing! At least that is one way you can listen to the Spirit. Listening to the Spirit is a Christian social practice. It is a normative and ethical affair. “Spirit” is an ethical, social pragmatic, idealist, political, and theological term. Reciprocal recognition is the aim, here. Unless we count as a fellow practitioner and mutually recognize others to count as such, the ethical shapes of Spirit are incomplete. Mutual recognition is an ethical achievement, but it can also be an experience of love, of grace, of God’s Spirit transforming how it is we are with each other and how we are in the world.

How does the Spirit help us in our broad-based community organizing?

For too long interfaith organizing has illustrated its religious, racial, and gender diversity by opening public actions with various religious leaders offering prayers. I am not against such public actions of prayer—they are fine and good in so far as they go. What I am calling for instead is a deeper honesty about the role of theology and religious diversity within the practice of organizing itself, and I want organizers to help faith-based participants articulate and enact that in all aspects of their organizing in a way that goes beyond recognition politics and such representationalist maneuvers. Center the organizing strategy around the relational meeting and values rather than the issue campaign, which only leads to electoralitis and voter fatigue. Hold public leaders accountable for their centering of white Christianity on theological and political grounds. Refuse to relegate religion and religious diversity to the opening 3-minute prayer and pay attention to how sacred values move your leaders in their religious and politics lives.

What are your next projects?

I am working now two projects: one is an edited volume on the connection between theological education, social ethics, and community organizing. That will be published by Orbis Books in 2025. The second project, which is my own, explores the vast and interconnected network of Social Gospel organizers and theologians and the social, racial, and economic justice organizations in the U.S. that supported the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in Arkansas and Missouri in the 1930s and 1940s.

++Please order Aaron’s book and get 30% off the book with discount code AAFLYG6 at OUP.com

Special Events:

1.I will be preaching at Eastwood Uniting Church followed by a book panel, When God Became White on July 14, 2024. Please join me for worship and book talk.

2.I will be at Forest Kirk Uniting Church to share “On Faith, Church and Spirit” on July 18th. Please join me.