The liberal protest that would shock the right: Moral Monday

[teko]

It might surprise you to know that Jesus is frequently and unabashedly invoked in a protest movement that includes support for LGBT and abortion rights, but such is a simple fact of life in North Carolina. The Moral Monday protests here seek to reclaim the rhetoric of morality and – often explicitly Christian – spirituality in ways that are confounding to the Tea Party.

The twelfth consecutive week of Moral Monday protests took place on Monday, July 22, outside the North Carolina General Assembly building at 5 p.m. as usual. Thousands of people were there, this time focusing on proposed state voter restrictions and attacks on public education. It hasn’t received much attention in national media outlets, but there’s a growing popular uprising in North Carolina against the extremist policies of the Republicans who currently control state government.

Every week prayers and gospel songs infuse the air and participants offer blessings to the latest batch of 100 or so activists entering the Raleigh General Assembly building to commit civil disobedience. If you’re not from here, it may all seem a little counter-intuitive: A movement for inclusive and just secular governance that is deeply inflected with Christian ethics and arguments.

Each Monday we stand in a courtyard near a paved walkway that boasts a large representation of the North Carolina state seal which reads “Esse quam videri.” We learned the state motto in fourth grade, state history: “To be rather than to seem.” Nothing plays worse to North Carolinians than disingenuousness. Many things have changed in the decades since our founding, but this one stuck. And this is who we are as a culture, for better or worse. It’s hard to grow up in this place without becoming at least a little bit Christian in a cultural sense – moved and motivated by the same spiritual imagery that drove the people who came before us.

It’s not that there aren’t plenty of atheists, agnostics and members of other faiths in attendance every week. The Moral Monday movement is supported by a 150-organization coalition spearheaded by the NC-NAACP that includes everything from Occupy Raleigh to Planned Parenthood-NC to the NC Association of Educators. But outsiders have to understand what it means to be an activist in the South. Even as regressive conservative forces have cloaked themselves in Biblical rhetoric throughout our history, so have social justice movements in this historic site of Civil Rights Movement activism. Jesus has been a central figure in virtually every mass social movement in North Carolina history, and that doesn’t change in the context of this intersectional movement encompassing everything from LGBT rights to reproductive justice. So the NC Council of Churches is involved too, as are local United Church of Christ and Quaker congregations.

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/23/moral_mondays_the_liberal_protest_that_would_shock_the_right/

[Vance2335]

Remember people will use other religious idols in the same way, so don't just put Jesus in a box by himself.

[orphanedhawk]

Interesting~ it has often been hard for me to understand the zealousness of those who hate others for being different, invoking the name of Jesus, who probably would feel more at home feeding the poor at a soup kitchen than invoking hate.

[Vance2335]

I am so tired of salon articles, it's hard to read them because they start out decent (sometimes) and then have to get the bias in, then go back to decent and then bias again.