Problems of Organization: Organizing Mana

Anthony Mansueto

Some twenty years ago, I play a leading role in building the sponsoring committee for Dallas Area Interfaith, at the time the largest organization, in terms of congregational membership, in the Industrial Areas Foundation network. That success was followed almost immediately by a break with the Industrial Areas Foundation. The causes of that break were numerous. Some were philosophical. I was increasingly troubled by the Nietzschean elements in the IAF’s ideology, which seemed to contradict their claims (themselves contradictory) to be nonideological and to represent the shared meanings and values of the congregations they organized. I had always known that the IAF lacked a deeper structural critique of the market order, but they proved more resistant to my efforts to build this element into the organizing process than I had hoped. Some of the differences were strategic: too much focus on mobilizing a state network, not enough on developing the congregations they organized, a promise on the basis of which so many of them had been recruited. And some of them had to do with the IAF falling short of the very sound norms it advocates for public relationships. I had been told never to criticize the organization in public, and was all but purged when I criticized the organization for failing to keep its contractual training commitments.

These criticisms notwithstanding, I have continued over the years to regard interfaith organizing as an important element of any credible strategy for engaging our deepening civilizational crisis. It is the only strategy which even attempts to actually create the “social capital,” to use the currently fashionable term, necessary to build power and transform structures. I conducted an in-depth interview study of interfaith organizing in Chicago as part of the Lilly Endowment Funded Religion in Urban America Project at the University of Illinois Chicago in 1993-1994 and have followed the movement closely ever since, attempting at various points, to build relationships with the IAF’s most important competitors, the Gamaliel Foundation and People Improving Communities through Organizing (PICO). Both proved disappointing. Gamaliel offered me a job if I would use my knowledge of the IAF to try to “take them down.” PICO seemed more interested in 20 year old intelligence on the IAF’s Chicago metropolitan organizing efforts than in anything I had to contribute in the area of strategy analysis or clergy recruitment, two core strengths.

Over the course of the past 20 years, my own vision and strategy have, of course, continued to develop ---though I remain a confirmed critic of NNietzschean irrationalism and of the market order. And I have spent a great deal of time thinking about how to recast interfaith organizing as a movement and a strategy in a way that conserves its strengths and overcomes its limitations. One result of this work was the work on Dialectics in Practice, which explored the relationships between Socratic dialogue, in-depth interviewing, and the individual relational meeting or “one on one” which is the movement’s principle organizing tactic. Understanding these relationships allowed me to develop an approach to individual relational meetings which engages meanings and values as well as networks and relationships, and which lays the groundwork for a more transformative organizing relationship. This work, for those who would like to consult it, is summarized in the conclusion to The Death of Secular Messianism.

This spring, however, my thinking on this question took a major step forward. I was working with a group of students in Southern Methodist University’s graduate liberal studies program. After a semester exploring the role of religion in the human civilizational project, historically and in the present period, I wanted to share with them some practical skills which would allow them to bring the knowledge we had shared into the public arena. And of course I turned to the principle organizing modality with which I am familiar, and the one most appropriate to the issues we had been discussing: interfaith organizing. This past spring was, of course, also a period devoted to analyzing the catastrophic Tea Party victory in the 2010 general election, a development which focused our attention on the question of the role of leadership and especially authority in the political process. Finally, I was reading Giorgio Agamben’s work on auctoritas.

The insight was simple. As I was explaining the interfaith organizing movement’s foundational claim that power comes in two forms --organized money and organized people—I realized that something very important was missing from this formulation, both as a description of what the movement actually does, and as an analysis of what is actually involved in building power and leading social transformation. When interfaith organizers begin their efforts, what they do is not so much to organize people in general, as to organize pastors. I say pastors, even though the term may be inappropriate when referring to some traditions, rather than clergy, because they are not interested in just anyone with clerical status. They want people who exercise real religious authority in relationship to an organized community. It is these pastors who form the core of the sponsoring committee, the function of which is to raise money to support and, more importantly, to legitimate, the organizing effort.

It was here that I discovered another Nietzschean nook in the IAF’s vision and strategy. Or perhaps it is, rather, an Agambenian cranny, though I don’t know for sure that any of the IAF’s leaders have read Agamben (though I expect Ernie Cortes, a serious public intellectual whatever his other limitations, has). Agamben points out that under Roman law every action required two legal actors: the person initiating or carrying out the action, and one to augment it, bestowing on it the legal validity it lacked by itself. This was, ultimately, a sacral function, and belonged ultimately to the Senate in its function as custodian of Rome’s religion. And of course this is what sponsoring committees do. In addition to levying a tax on their own congregations, and providing organized networks of emerging leaders, they make what might otherwise seem like an intervention by outside organizers (which it always, actually, is) into a legitimate effort on the part of the most established of established institutions, the Church, to affect the public arena in a way which reflects its most deeply held meanings and values.

The problem, however, is twofold. First, all that the IAF wants is the legitimation or, as anthropologists and sociologists would call it, the mana. They don’t want the pastors’ mana or auctoritas to trump their “organized people.” And so religious leaders who raise troublesome questions, unless they are extremely powerful, are purged rather than cultivated. And even if they are not, because “organized mana” is not included in this list of the forms and elements of power along with “organized money” and “organized people” the process is corrupted at the outset.

Second, and perhaps more important, mana these days is actually in short supply. Let us be clear what we mean here. There is certainly no shortage of charismatic religious leaders capable of moving people with promises of cheap grace. Nor is there a shortage of religious leaders who inspire millions on the basis of an authentic spirituality, but in whom people see only what they find easy and appealing. Real mana is the ability to challenge people to grow in ways that are difficult and challenging, whether intellectually or morally, politically, or spiritually. While I was engaging my students around just precisely this question, the Dalai Lama gave a talk on campus. Many complained that they could not get tickets to see him, even after waiting up all night, as they might for a visiting rock star. None, however, could explain to me the basic characteristics of Gelugpa School Vajrayana Buddhism, or his role in that tradition, much less what specifically his teachings had added to it. Mana these days lacks much of a magisterial (teaching) dimension. A more mundane example of this problem appears to be affecting the Tea Party itself. Apparently one right wing think tank borrowed some organizing techniques from the interfaith organizing movement, something which helped transform diffuse petty bourgeois discontent into an actual electoral victory. But now the organized won’t listen to their organizers and have begun to target conservative Republicans who advocate things like school choice for the poor, on the grounds that vouchers involve transferring property from one individual to another …

Where does this leave us? First, we need to be clear that organized mana is an integral part of the organizing process. Leading change is not just about organizing people to do what they already realize they want to do. It is about leading people into a deeper understanding of what it means to be human and what it means to have a just society. It also means helping them become more developed human beings. It is on the basis of these functions that we can then lead them to act in the public arena in order to effect change. So we don’t just want pastors to legitimate our efforts. We want them to be pastors –outstanding pastors in fact—doing in an extraordinary way what only pastors do. And we need to be telling them that.

Second, we need to learn how to create mana ourselves, both because we will sometimes want to challenge people in the way pastors of established religious communities will not want to (this is a civilizational crisis after all!) and because even very good pastors are having a hard time doing it themselves. And this of course means having something new to teach, living those teachings ourselves, and learning how to create communities which cultivate the new meanings and values we discover.

What does this involve? That will be the next in this series on the problems of organization.