Clicks over Community: The Theological Reasons Why Protest Movements Falter
Last Saturday was the second anniversary of the 2017 Women's March on Washington, an inspiring show of solidarity and resistance the day after President Trump's inauguration. The original march was the largest single-day protest in United States history, drawing over four million participants to rallies and marches across the country and around the world. Largely organized using social media and Facebook Events, the 2017 march was loosely organized by a small yet dedicated and talented leadership team.
As organizers planned an anniversary march for January 2019, fractures formed among march organizers. Perceptions towards first-wave feminists and allegations of a lack of diversity amongst march organizers were particularly divisive, as were allegations of anti-Semitism made against protest leaders. Thefailing New York Times published an insightful look at how divisions in the movement led to the emergence of rival marches and resulted in underwhelming rally attendance. In the end, approximately 60,000 attendees turned out for the 2019 march.
The Women's March thus joins the list of inspiring social movements that came in with a bang and went out with a whimper, a list of causes that exploded in initial internet-fueled popularity, only to be divided and diminished as the complex realities of organizational leadership and coalition building set in. I was personally saddened to learn of the divisions within the Women's March movement. The 2017 march marked, in my opinion, an unquestionable high point for American civic engagement, in what was a powerful display of hope and optimism for a remarkably divided time.
The fate of the Women's March, Occupy Wall Street, and other social movements reflects how technology has greatly enhanced our capacity to communicate - while doing little, if anything, for our capacity to build social capital. Twitter and Facebook are powerful platforms for sparking viral movements that quickly grab headlines and often inspire social change. The great challenge for movements like the Women's March lies in the transition from instantaneous success to sustained impact.
Sociologist Robert Putnam, author of the bestselling book "Bowling Alone," defines social capital as the factors that define effectively functioning groups - including "a shared sense of identity, a shared understanding, shared norms, shared values, trust, cooperation, and reciprocity." To me, social capital is the ability of a group to channel its relationships and prioritize its interests for the purposes of affecting positive social change. And this is what is lacking in the internet era.
Tweets, posts, and snaps can help us to rally supporters to a cause faster than ever before. Yet because we rally supporters so quickly, we simply have no time to the difficult work of trust building, vision planning, and prioritization that produces sustainable impact. In the era of the smartphone, it is inevitable that viral protest movements will struggle with social capital and succumb to the inevitabilities of competing priorities and rival personalities.
This is not to say the Women's March has been poorly led or executed - far from it. But it is to say that our culture currently values visibility over social capital, clicks over intentional community, and action over shared vision.
I doubt that organized religion, in all its faltering and contraction, offers a cure for our deficits in social capital and organizational trust. Yet the very-Christian idea that God creates, redeems, and liberates through community gives me hope that the American church might help to restore some of what has been lost. After all, the original Jesus movement was an intentional community that listened to a call to action, then stuck around through disputes and disagreements in order to realize a shared vision of a new way of being in the world.
Our protests may not need to re-discover God in order to achieve sustained success. But they certainly need to re-discover one another, in an attempt to build community alongside the clicks.
@ryanpanzer, a Lutheran blogger and political dissident, is still impressed by the 2017 Women's March on Washington.
As organizers planned an anniversary march for January 2019, fractures formed among march organizers. Perceptions towards first-wave feminists and allegations of a lack of diversity amongst march organizers were particularly divisive, as were allegations of anti-Semitism made against protest leaders. The
The Women's March thus joins the list of inspiring social movements that came in with a bang and went out with a whimper, a list of causes that exploded in initial internet-fueled popularity, only to be divided and diminished as the complex realities of organizational leadership and coalition building set in. I was personally saddened to learn of the divisions within the Women's March movement. The 2017 march marked, in my opinion, an unquestionable high point for American civic engagement, in what was a powerful display of hope and optimism for a remarkably divided time.
The fate of the Women's March, Occupy Wall Street, and other social movements reflects how technology has greatly enhanced our capacity to communicate - while doing little, if anything, for our capacity to build social capital. Twitter and Facebook are powerful platforms for sparking viral movements that quickly grab headlines and often inspire social change. The great challenge for movements like the Women's March lies in the transition from instantaneous success to sustained impact.
Sociologist Robert Putnam, author of the bestselling book "Bowling Alone," defines social capital as the factors that define effectively functioning groups - including "a shared sense of identity, a shared understanding, shared norms, shared values, trust, cooperation, and reciprocity." To me, social capital is the ability of a group to channel its relationships and prioritize its interests for the purposes of affecting positive social change. And this is what is lacking in the internet era.
Tweets, posts, and snaps can help us to rally supporters to a cause faster than ever before. Yet because we rally supporters so quickly, we simply have no time to the difficult work of trust building, vision planning, and prioritization that produces sustainable impact. In the era of the smartphone, it is inevitable that viral protest movements will struggle with social capital and succumb to the inevitabilities of competing priorities and rival personalities.
This is not to say the Women's March has been poorly led or executed - far from it. But it is to say that our culture currently values visibility over social capital, clicks over intentional community, and action over shared vision.
I doubt that organized religion, in all its faltering and contraction, offers a cure for our deficits in social capital and organizational trust. Yet the very-Christian idea that God creates, redeems, and liberates through community gives me hope that the American church might help to restore some of what has been lost. After all, the original Jesus movement was an intentional community that listened to a call to action, then stuck around through disputes and disagreements in order to realize a shared vision of a new way of being in the world.
Our protests may not need to re-discover God in order to achieve sustained success. But they certainly need to re-discover one another, in an attempt to build community alongside the clicks.
@ryanpanzer, a Lutheran blogger and political dissident, is still impressed by the 2017 Women's March on Washington.
It's hard to say how to overcome institutional trust deficit. Gathering, feeding, no strings attached?
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