Faith Forward: Interfaith Dissent for Progressive Racial and Economic Justice in Dallas

• In Event: Faithwork, Fieldwork, Network

Abstract

This paper critically examines recent instances of interfaith activism in Dallas as formational events fostering religiously-based dissent. I argue that interfaith activism in Dallas – an economically-powerful, diverse, and understudied major American city ensconced in deep Red, Bible-Belt territory yet whose international competition for business requires a minimum of dissent disrupting capital flow – holds particular interest for understanding the possibilities and limits of religiously-inspired struggle for social and political transformation.

I will focus in particular on the “Faith Forward” movement formed in 2015 with stated goals of “relationship building, community education, and solidarity.” The movement was launched in response to a religiously-motivated terror attack in the Dallas suburb of Garland and continues to respond to religious violence through interfaith outreach, progressively building networks of religious, non-profit and governmental cooperation . Two young religious leaders in particular – AME pastor Rev. Dr. Michael Waters and Sheikh Omar Suleiman – have emerged as the faces of an interfaith coalition inclusive of and intersectional with other morality-based movements for economic, environmental, gender, racial, and criminal justice. The effort they spearhead appears a movement capable of shifting attitudes and political behaviors, a movement forcing reevaluation of citizenship in the face of legislative agendas that would codify religiously-based political repression and that potentially challenges racialized class power in controversy-averse Dallas.

Dallas is famous for its image of unabrogated white elite dominance – a façade it unwaveringly projects to America and the world. It is an identity long reinforced by fundamentalist theology – another gift of Dallas to the modern world, as the home of dispensationalist Cyrus Scofield whose mantle is now born by Robert Jeffress – Baptist pastor of renown for giving enthusiastic blessing to the anti-Muslim Trump agenda. This theology has lent eschatological significance to powers historically enjoyed by white Christian and Jewish business leaders, making Dallas an epicenter for the manufacture of the myth of the goodness of Anglo-Saxon civilization, and the apocalyptic threat of darker-skinned “dependent” races who would challenge social Darwinist capitalist meritocracies.

Yet with the Faith Forward movement, sharing context (and sometimes inspiration) with the #blacklivesmatter movement , the possibility for consequential critique emerged . The coalition calls upon theologies rooted in the social gospel, Islamic “compassionate orthodoxy,” and Jewish Holocaust memory – theologies coordinate with nonviolent resistance for defense of human rights and social justice. Furthermore, Dallas’ staggeringly high poverty rates and sizable segments of undereducated citizens mean not only that Dallas is ripe for social unrest but that it also requires a flow of immigrants to fill skilled jobs. This puts the white capitalist ruling class in an historic bind – facing continued challenge by an increasingly large and restless racialized underclass and as well as the need to import specialized workers for its high-tech economy – largely Asian and targets of nativist violence.

Spearheaded by leaders representing disenfranchised racial and religious groups, Dallas’ interfaith movement shines a light on deeper obstacles miring Dallas in its shadow side; its religiously-based moral critique cultivates visions of and movement toward more trenchant structural change even as it strives to keep the peace.

Author

• Jennifer Hancock, Independent Scholar