My friend and 30 year union and community organizer and labor educator Victor Narro has just released a brand new book I can’t wait to read called,
Living Peace: Connecting Your Spirituality With Your Work for Justice.
Another great friend, Peter Olney, former organizing director for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, has written a great review of Victor’s book.
I’ve long thought that those of us who organize or who are active in progressive politics or movements should not hide our faith. For many of us our faith motivates our politics. And faith is an excellent way to connect with many we are working to organize or mobilize.
For those of us who organized in the South, the church was the only organizational model for so many workers and average people.
Famous, of course, Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference mobilized and organized through African-American churches and appealed to people of all faiths.
Many Latino civil rights, unions, and other worker organizations continue to appeal to people through their faith. Baldemar Velásquez is a great Protestant preacher and head of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee who appeals to the faith of workers.
I’ve seen the Coalition of Immokalee Workers include both indigenous religious leaders and Catholic Priests in their marches and demonstrations.
Part of the importance of our faith is cultural, allowing people unfamiliar with collective action to find familiarity in our work.
Also importantly, an ecumenical approach can provide a common set of values which people individually and collectively ground our work in.
Peter Olney writes, “Narro’s spiritual faith in a greater ‘Good’ is the product of his own amazing work as a labor and community organizer in Los Angeles for thirty years and his study of the teachings of St Francis of Assisi and a Vietnamese spiritualist and teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh.”