A piece of mine entitled “If Millennials Leave Religion, then What?” was published by the Religion News Service and picked up by the Washington Post yesterday. In it, I acknowledge the drawbacks of religion (viewed from a secular, political perspective), but I also catalog its advantages and argue that we don’t yet have a secular alternative that fills the traditional civic and political functions of churches and other religious congregations.

The piece had to be cut for length, which is fine (and I was able to select the cuts). But here, I would like to share one section that was deleted for length. In the published version, I alluded to the “depth” of religion. This is what I meant:

Mark Warren’s wonderful book about faith-based organizing, Dry Bones Rattling, begins with a vignette of Father Al Jost reading from the Book of Ezekiel to a group of Latina parishioners from poor neighborhoods in San Antonio. He chooses the version by African-American songwriter James Weldon Johnson: “Ezekiel connected dem dry bones.” Those lyrics derive from the Shakespearean poetry of the King James Version: “Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.” Father Jost’s listeners might hear those resonances, or some might recall the Spanish (“¡Huesos secos!”) or the Latin of the Church in which they were raised.

In any case, the effects are palpable. The women are nervous before Father Jost speaks, but they respond “with a resounding ‘Amen’ and [stride] onto the stage to the sounds of a mariachi band … exuding confidence and collective determination.”

I propose that the original quality and the long history of Ezekiel’s poetry explain its political power. Secular equivalents must match this depth of resonance.

The post the political advantages of organized religion appeared first on Peter Levine.

(Urbana/Champaign, IL) I am here to talk to a public audience about the arguments of We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America. Meanwhile, I’d recommend Michael McQuarrie’s new review of my book (along with Ben Barber’s If Mayors Ran the World). It’s a good, thoughtful article. I appreciate his summary of my book and his partially critical response.

In the final chapter, I say that a movement for civic renewal should expect and welcome vibrant debate, and three likely topics of debate will be: whether economic reforms must precede political empowerment; the role of anger and conflict versus civility and consensus; and the ideological placement of the civic renewal movement (on the left, at the center, aiming for neutrality, or very broad). McQuarrie meets my hopes by staking out strong positions on exactly those issues.

He also reads me as taking the opposite position from him on some of these questions, when I was trying to be more neutral–considering both the pros and the cons and letting readers end where they like. Thus I would like to respond to certain portions of his review, not because they’re necessarily unfair, but as an opportunity to clarify my own views and engage the debate. For example:

The title of Levine’s book—We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For—is an inspiring call to action, and in this sense, at least, is similar to Alinsky’s Reveille for Radicals (1946). However, rather than arguing for the possibilities of popular power, Levine is more interested in establishing the potential of citizen engagement for policy. Much of the book seems oriented around questions like “What are the measurable effects of community engagement on school effectiveness?” Levine’s form betrays a shift within the civic renewal movement, as it gains a foothold in foundations, academia, and even the White House. In the process it is becoming more communitarian in its celebration of the values and morality of citizens, while de-emphasizing popular authority and political sense. In terms of practice, contemporary advocates of the civic renewal movement emphasize correct deliberative communication among citizens as a solvent for all manner of political differences. In contrast, many in this tradition from Tocqueville on argued that civic virtue could only thrive in settings of relative socioeconomic equality. Challenging elites with popular power and cries that they are economic parasites, once central to populist activism and discourse, have been trimmed away in Levine’s account to make room for the idea that inequality can be overcome through a more virtuous and deliberative politics.

I do collect evidence that civic engagement boosts social outcomes. That’s because I don’t believe that many citizens, let alone powerful institutional actors, are ready to support active citizenship unless they believe it pays off in terms of better schools, safer streets, or a healthier environment.

I am a hard-headed researcher, so I will only claim that civic engagement has such benefits if it really does. In fact, instrumental arguments will carry us only so far. Civic engagement may not always improve communities. It may generate desirable outcomes, but less cheaply and reliably than other strategies would. It may boost outcomes (like “school effectiveness”) that we trivialize when we try to quantify them, thereby erasing deeply contested value questions. And it may degenerate into mere social hygiene if it is viewed as a tool for social improvement rather than a right of democratic citizens and an aspect of the good life.

On the other hand, arguing for civic engagement as a right will not obtain funding, education, media coverage, or legal authorization for civic engagement. Instrumental arguments, if handled right, can be helpful. They are ammunition for a peaceful army of engaged citizens.

I would like to think that I am not a communitarian (celebrating “the values and morality of citizens, while de-emphasizing popular authority and political sense”) or merely a deliberative democrat (viewing “correct deliberative communication among citizens as a solvent for all manner of political differences”). I am certainly not a technocrat, and I offer a pretty sharp critique of expertise in chapter 4. With McQuarrie, I believe in power and conflict. Activist social movements must hold governments accountable. They will be–and should be–angry at the powers that be and at their fellow citizens who stand in their way. The strategies I recommend at the end of the book are aimed at bolstering their efforts. I do not for a moment count on policymakers to open doors willingly.

I do, however, reject the argument that “civic virtue [can] only thrive in settings of relative socioeconomic equality.” Effective activism is more common in Tanzania and India than in the US. It has often arisen from the poorest strata of American society, starting with slaves in the antebellum era.

The problem with putting economic equality first and expecting civic renewal to follow is that someone must then pursue economic equality without a popular following. Who will that be, why will the succeed, and why should we trust them if they do? Saul Alinsky was a great theorist, but his popular movements ended in disaster. I denounce the political influence of economic elites, because that is a valid critique and because political reform is required for civic empowerment. I would not personally denounce economic elites as economic parasites because I am not sure that is true, and I know it will divide a potentially broader coalition.

I wrote a book in the late 1990s about the Progressive Era (and actually discarded some detailed historical research I had done for reasons of length and coherence). Reflecting on that history, I would now say that some Progressive Era reforms were elitist and downright damaging. Others were populist and “civic,” in my terms (deliberative, collaborative, and relational). Robert M. La Follette, Jane Addams, and John Dewey were their paragons.

To the extent that these valuable reforms flourished, it was partly because economic radicals (Socialists and agrarian populists) challenged the government and capital. That made elites amenable to sharing some power. But the actual reforms enacted from 1900-1914 did not challenge economic inequality. Progressive reforms were indeed about reducing the political influence of money and increasing deliberative popular influence over government. Typically, the inventors and proponents of these civic reforms were not Socialists or populists. They had broader and more centrist coalitions, including many people who would have bristled at a depiction of the wealthy as parasites. The left movements may have won space for civic reforms, but the civic reforms had different origins and motivations.

Coming back to our present day: I would welcome more effective left-populist grassroots mobilizing on economic issues. I think it would change the balance of power in ways that would help civic reformers. But I think we also need a civic blueprint: a vision of how our democracy should look if we had the power to demand it. That’s what I hope to offer in We Are the Ones–along with strategies for civic reform and topics for the movement to debate. McQuarrie has joined the debate in a most welcome way.

The post Review of We Are the Ones appeared first on Peter Levine.

Please join the Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service, the Democracy Imperative, and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium for:

Frontiers of Democracy: July 16-18, 2014
At Tufts University’s Boston, MA campus

Register  |   Preliminary Agenda

Who’s on the bus, and where is it going? The state of the civic field

Civic work is proliferating: many different kinds of people, working in different contexts and issue areas, are expanding the ways in which citizens engage with government, community, and each other. It is increasingly clear that growing inequality, social and political fragmentation, and lack of democratic opportunities are undermining our efforts to address public priorities such as health, education, poverty, the environment, and government reform.

But attempts to label the responses – as “civic engagement,” “collaborative governance,” “deliberative democracy,” or “public work” – or to articulate them as one movement or policy agenda under a heading like “civic renewal” or “stronger democracy” – immediately spark debates about substance, strategy, and language.

Though it is clear we have many principles and practices in common, we differ on what we should call this work and where it is headed. In order for “overlapping civic coalitions”* to form, the potential  partners would have to work through goals, assumptions, and differences. Register now and join us July 16-18 for an invigorating, argumentative, civil discussion on the state and future of the civic field.

Visit the Frontiers of Democracy website for more information and a preliminary agenda.

* Peter Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, chapter 7 (“Strategies”)

The post Frontiers of Democracy Conference, Boston, July 16-18, 2014 appeared first on Peter Levine.

(Detroit) James Holston’s “current research examines the worldwide insurgence of democratic urban citizenships.” In this post, I’ll share what I took away from his excellent keynote talk about the recent uprisings in Sao Paolo and Istanbul. (I think he would tie the evidence together in a different way to support a somewhat different argument.)

Various cities are issuing formal identity cards to residents–regardless of national citizenship–that entitle the residents to services. Holston said that New Haven was the first US city to do this, and San Francisco now offers free preventative medical care to all its residents. I would add that Takoma Park, MD allows all residents (age 16+) to vote in municipal elections even if they are not US citizens.

Meanwhile, a whole series of great cities around the world have seen mass uprisings in which hundreds of thousands of people take over the central squares. They raise diverse issues (global, national/political, ethnic, religious), but often they talk specifically about their city. Thus the Istanbul protests started in response to a redevelopment plan for Taksim Square; and in Sao Paolo, the impetus was a bus fare increase.

The repertoire of protest acts (mechanisms and processes) used in these cities has not been particularly original. But one could imagine that a new form of politics and citizenship is arising. After all, the vast cities of the world have these features:

They are big enough that their policies really count. Their populations are larger than those of many nation-states, and they are global economic hot spots. At the same time, they are small enough that everyone can get to a central spot within a day, and you can visualize the city as a whole.

They have not traditionally had border-controls. Residents come and go at will. (I acknowledge exceptions, as in China; but even there, I think the border controls are pretty porous.) San Francisco’s citizenship is defined by the city’s residency card, but the city does not decide who has a right to it; people decide by moving in. That is a different kind of citizenship. And in the case of cities that are magnets for global migration, from Johannesburg to LA, many residents are not legal citizens of the surrounding nation-state.

Because of its density, the city’s population is interdependent. Maybe the top one percent can fly over the city’s crime and congestion in helicopters, but the middle class suffers in (loose) tandem with the poor. That is less true at the level of the nation-state.

The city is simply a locus of power that can change its policies and governing philosophy even if the nation-state is sclerotic or corrupt.

We conspicuously make the city with our labor and our bodies.  The physical evidence of our effort is all around us, taking the concrete form of buildings, cars, signs, crowds. Thus the right to citizenship can be grounded on people’s creation of the city (and workers can have pride of place as citizens). In contrast, we didn’t literally make the United States, so it’s hard to claim that our labor gives us the right to it. God made Brazil; people make Sao Paolo.

Those were the unique features of cities that occurred to me while Holston was speaking. From the floor, I asked him what made big cities special, and he added:

• The sheer “density of opportunity” for political action.
• The fact that poverty, isolation, and anonymity sometimes spur urbanites to act politically, whereas the same factors suppress action in rural areas and small towns. (This sounded to me like the reverse of Mao’s doctrine that the revolution would begin in the countryside.)
• The city is a seat of power. Traditionally, the city houses the cathedral, the parliament building, the castle, the university–all the concrete locations of power over the larger polity.

The post the rise of urban citizenship appeared first on Peter Levine.

(Detroit) I’m delighted to be at Wayne State University for my second visit to the Center for the Study of Citizenship’s annual national conference. I have just arrived, but the titles and abstracts reinforce my view that there are really two discussions about citizenship.

In the first discussion, citizenship basically means membership in some kind of political entity or regime. The opposite of a citizen is an alien or outsider, but there are various possible conditions between belonging and being fully alien–states that Elizabeth Cohen calls “semi-citizenship.”  Questions arise about who does or should belong to which kind of regime, what rights and obligations membership brings or should bring, and what members feel or should feel (subjectively) about themselves and their fellow members.

In the second discussion, citizenship means civic engagement, or taking action of some kind in the public sphere. One opposite of a citizen, in this sense, is a bystander or a consumer. Another opposite is a policymaker or officeholder, if we choose to divide the state from civil society. (In Harry Boyte’s view, it’s important that policymakers are citizens.) In this second discussion, the issues that arise include: who engages, what makes them engage, whether civic engagement is good, and what active people achieve.

The two conversations do relate to each other. For instance, you cannot engage as an active citizen by voting if the state deems you ineligible to vote by virtue of age, a felony conviction, or immigration status. But even then, you can act in many other ways. Overall, I would say that the two discourses of citizenship are pretty separate.

The post two conversations about citizenship appeared first on Peter Levine.