Helene Slessarev-Jamir Gives "Last Lecture"
Thursday, November 29, 6-7 p.m.
Haddon Conference Room

Read the Lecture

"If you knew you had one final opportunity to give a lecture, what would you say?"

Dr. Helene Slessarev-Jamir, the Mildred M. Hutchinson Professor of Urban Ministries at Claremont, will have just that opportunity. The title of her "last lecture" is "Prophetic Social Justice in an Age of Empire," which draws on work she is doing for a new book project.

Each month, the Last Lecture Series will ask a different Claremont faculty person to answer this question. The series is a great opportunity to get to know Claremont faculty more personally and hear their current intellectual and personal interests.

Slessarev-Jamir holds the Ph.D. in political science from University of Chicago, as well as degrees in economics and public policy analysis from University of California, Berkeley, and University of Illinois, respectively. She teaches and researches on issues related to faith-based social engagement, including community organizing, ministry among immigrant communities, and urban poverty in a global economy.

Her books include Job Training under the New Federalism and The Betrayal of the Urban Poor. She also has authored two reports for the Annie E. Casey Foundation on the role of faith-based institutions in strengthening the families of poor and disadvantaged Asian and Hispanic immigrants.

She currently serves on the Board of Directors for Sojourners Magazine and the National Hispanic/Latino Ministry Plan committee of the UMC, and is a member of First United Methodist and Grand Avenue United Methodist in Santa Ana, CA.

My Last Lecture
Helene Slessarev-Jamir
Claremont School of Theology
Delivered on November 27, 2007

I see myself as an activist/scholar, which is hopefully how I will be remembered. I have worked as a labor organizer, a community organizer and in political campaigns, including Jesse Jackson's 1988 Presidential campaign and two subsequent mayoral campaigns of African-Americans who ran against Chicago's Mayor Daley. I have worked for the Chicago Urban League and countless other grassroots, community-based organizations doing research, program development, and training.

I am interested in the creation of a new political coalition to will bring about social justice for those who are marginalized in American society - those who themselves lack a democratic voice. Half a century after the Civil Rights Movement ushered in profound social change, finally establishing the U.S. as a full-fledged democracy, we again find ourselves in a country where millions of people lack either legal or substantive rights. This includes immigrants who are here illegally, or to some extent, even those who are here legally, but are not yet citizens, African-Americans, especially men who have been convicted of felonies and therefore have lost their right to vote, gays and lesbians who are being denied the basic right to enter into a marriage sanctioned by the state. Many others have lost substantive rights.

Today we live in a period in which conservatism is politically dominant, having in part gotten there by vilifying those on the margins - welfare moms, gays and lesbians, and undocumented immigrants. The political coalition that successfully enacted the last round of progressive social legislation in the mid 1960's has lost much of its political vibrancy. Organized labor, once the dominant member of the Democratic Party's political coalition has seen its numbers decimated. The Civil Rights Movement has splintered, unable to remain unified in the face of new challenges such as urban poverty and affirmative action. And the mainline denominations whose support was crucial in rallying moderate Republicans, are in decline as well, their activist voices stifled by conservatives within these denominations who have blamed the churches' new found commitment to social justice for their membership decline.

If we look carefully at the membership of this old progressive coalition we see that it was largely constituted of organizations and individuals motivated by religiously grounded understandings of social justice. The Civil Rights Movement was grounded in the black church, with its main allies being Jewish and Christians supporters who worked within the movement, plus of course, the hierarchies of the mainline denominations themselves.

If we look at the decades since the mid 1960's we have to recognize that a substantial part of the shift to conservatism has been the shift that has taken place within the national religious landscape where I would suggest that some time in the mid- to late 1980's the balance of political influence shifted towards conservative Christian organizations. In fact, 1988 may be the watershed year in which we had two religiously grounded Presidential candidates - Jesse Jackson and Pat Robertson - who represented opposite ends of the political spectrum. Jesse Jackson did open up new possibilities for African-American politicians, including Barack Obama.

Robertson's campaign on the other hand, established the Republican Party as the party of the Christian right. Today hard core conservative Christians make up the most solid voting block within the Republican Party. They have championed a narrow social agenda that has attacked the rights of women, especially poor women who were vilified leading up to the 1996 welfare reforms. At present, it is illegal immigrants who are being blamed for much of what is wrong in the U.S. The conservatives' rhetoric is wrapped in a reassertion of the U.S.' choseness, a Manichean construction of good and evil in which anything the U.S. does is good. This means that any who are poor or who suffer must do so as a result of their own faults and therefore the solution is faith-based social services that lead them to Jesus and teach them personal responsibility. This Christian triumphalism reached its apex with Bush's invasion of Iraq and presently appears to be experiencing a decline in its political resonance.

In this context, my central question is how can a progressive political coalition be rebuilt that will speak to the interests of the marginalized and voiceless? To be successful, it will have to be a broad coalition that gives voice to the least of these - they must have a seat at the table - but also includes large numbers of other people of good will who are willing to act in ways that are not necessarily in their own direct self-interest. They have come to see that care for the least of these is ethically and morally right. These two groups will of course be joined by others who are acting based on their self-interest, as is always the case in politics.

As was the case in the past, I believe that those religious people who are at the center of what I characterize as a counter narrative to the Christian right are interpreting their religious texts in ways that lead them to engage in the work of prophetic social justice. One of ironies of the current hegemony of the Christian right is that 20th century witnessed the success of important social movements rooted in fresh theological interpretations of ancient texts that pointed to God's concern for the weak and marginalized. These include Gandhi's reading from Gita, and Dr. King's reading of the Hebrew Bible and the Sermon on the Mount.

Religion can never be divorced from social location. For example, in the antebellum South, slaves and their masters read Scripture very differently. The text is contingent, with stories of victims and victors, exploitation and benevolence, enslavement and emancipation As a religion that emerged at interstices of Roman Empire, Christianity has always been well suited to reinterpretations. Today, the emergence of new religiously grounded movements for social justice are occurring in two distinct but also overlapping social locations.

One I am calling the "borderlands" or los intersticios -spaces created by the extensive cross border movement of people in the era of globalization. Large scale immigration from Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa has created regions in U.S. especially along two coasts, in Texas and Illinois that are characterized by very heterogeneous populations, many of whom have multiple identities. Borderlands are places of displacement and marginality but are also very dynamic. They are forming in the great cosmopolitan centers of the global economy, which are characterized by enormous differentials between wealth and poverty. These cities are contested places.

Many of these borderlands are in urban centers where new immigrants come in contact with other people who have experienced marginalization. Increasingly, these common forms of marginalization are rooted in limited citizenship rights or economic and political disenfranchisement - African Americans and gays also experience restrictions of basic rights. They all are regarded as requiring regulation by the state. Given today's nation state-centered world; to exist as a non-citizen, is to be a non person. The social and economic dislocation in the borderlands often leaves places of worship as the singularly most stable institutions in a community. They are also the places where encounters with God and a community affirm the humanness of people whose very humanity is being called into question. It is out these contexts that new community, workplace and immigrant rights organizing are emerging that collectively challenge the inequalities of the global city with its disparities and lack of voice for the poor and marginalized. These become forms of insurgent citizenship- movements for substantive and formal citizenship rights. The context of prophetic insurgent citizenship differs in various communities - in pre Katrina New Orleans it was focused on education, while in Los Angeles mid sized African American churches have focused on reforming the criminal justice system that have sucked so many of their young men and women out of their communities.

There is a second social location in which other people and faith communities are also engaged in the work of justice from positions of greater power and privilege. I am calling these people "cosmopolitans" - world citizens who rather than being too deeply attached in any one country, have abandoned any hegemonic notions of the superiority of the west and do not expect all persons and every society to converge on a single mode of life. In many cases, they are sojourners who have spent time living in the global south or within the borderlands of the US. They draw on Scripture that affirms the sacredness of every person and God's call for justice for the least of these.

All the work I am currently researching is broadly inclusive, willing to collaborate with other faith traditions and secular organizations who share common commitments. Frequently, these organizations understand themselves to be the inheritors of earlier social movements. This work is post denominational although it draws on people from traditional mainline, Catholics, African American, and peace churches. They are not tightly wedded to any one theological perspective; however the thread that runs through all of them is a commitment to live out the ethic of love. It is the commitment to this ethic that distinguishes them from secular justice organizations.