The Occupy London camp outside Saint Paul’s Cathedral is unique. No other protest in hundreds of cities across the world was so passionately engaged with the church. That gave the church a chance to learn from the movement. In an essay called “The Judgement of the World” Archbishop Rowan Williams writes about the way Christian identity has always been worked out in relation to what lies beyond its borders. The church may even find out what scripture itself is saying in its confrontations with the world. The Christian community may be enlarged in understanding and even in some sense evangelised in such encounters. Christians rediscover their own foundational story in the parables of the acts and deeds of others.
The Occupy movement seems to exemplify this “judgement of the world.” Christians could learn from the movement about the injustice and destructiveness of capitalism. We could discover our own complicity and complacency. We were reminded that we worship God or mammon, not God and mammon. But Christians who visited the camp could experience more than this kind of judgement. David Graeber, the anthropologist who was one of the initial organisers of the Occupy Wall Street protests, speaks of a prefigurative politics. It’s one thing to say “Another world is possible.” It’s another to experience it, however momentarily. People expecting lists of demands were missing the point of the movement. Prefigurative politics is not about demands. It’s about being the change you want to see in the world. And joy, festivity, laughter and desire are a revolutionary impetus that brings an alternative future into the present. The Occupy camp at St Paul’s could feel like an enclave of Friday night in the perpetual Monday morning of the City. It could feel like church on a good day. Perhaps its prefigurative politics could even enlarge Christian’s understanding of the realized eschatology of Jesus who brought the great banquet of the future kingdom into the present in the festivity of his meals with sinners?
So I hope that the church will not turn its attention away from this prefigurative politics after the eviction of the Occupy camp outside Saint Paul’s. I hope that it might even learn something also from the response of the Protestant churches in Communist East Germany to dissident groups.
Church leaders there had been taught by the martyr theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Nazi era that the words of the church lose their force when it is more concerned with self-preservation than with service to others such as the Jews. So they wanted their church to be a “church for others,” a church that stands up for more than just the faithful. In the 1970s groups began to be founded to oppose the injustice and destructiveness of communism not in the name of capitalism but of “Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation.” Some were of these groups were Christian. Many were not. They still found shelter in space controlled by the church, just as in London. The Stasi denounced the leaders of these groups as “fanatics who want to shine politically.” The churches of East Germany provided these groups with the use of its roofs and its rooms, and also with protection, inspiration, pastoral care, and help with networking and communications. Inside the church the seeds of a revolution were sown and tended. The church of St Nicholas in Leipzig still has a banner up that says “Open to All.” In October 1989 thousands of people lit candles and prayed there for peace at evening services organized by its pastor. They took their candles out onto the streets to demonstrate against the communist system. They had an incredible experience of power of a non-violent revolution by candlelight.
Could a church within capitalism imitate this church within socialism? Could a beautiful friendship develop out of this chance encounter at St Paul’s when the movement was unable to occupy the Stock Exchange as it originally intended? And could the crisis of capitalism and an intensifying fear of ecological catastrophe even provide “a last chance for Christianity” as the East German Green thinker Rudolf Bahro asked ironically? Although he was an atheist he argued that these are ultimately spiritual problems that demand spiritual solutions. “No order can save us which simply limits the excesses of our greed. Only spiritual mastery of greed itself can help us. It is perhaps only the Prophets and the Buddhas, whether or not their answers were perfect, who have at least put the questions radically enough.” Could occupying faith release a power that will change the world?
By Reverend James Lawson