learning over the whole course of my childhood. I was deeply distressed that my emerging beliefs seemed to contradict the version of Christianity that I was raised to believe. Reading the gospels, I found a front-and-center emphasis on social justice in the here and now, but at church I heard mostly about individual salvation for a select few in the hereafter. I experienced this as a profound break from the doxa of the only community I had ever known—a community that I loved. I wanted God to speak clearly and audibly to tell me that my new and nascent beliefs were, in fact, Truth. If I could have absolute certainty about my beliefs, then I would be willing to do anything for them—to be ostracized, even to die. I prayed and prayed, asking for this certainty. And finally one day, alone in the American wilderness, in the silence, a strong sense suddenly came over me—a feeling that God was about to answer my prayer.
There was no audible voice. There was only a thought, like a whisper:
“If I answer, you will stop asking.”
In that moment it suddenly dawned on me that one should never know for certain that their partial truth was God’s universal truth—or whether or not God was on their side. I thought of all the horrors that have been committed by people who entertained no doubts about the rightness of their actions, and I decided right then that I would always maintain a healthy measure of self-doubt. I would embrace a life in which questions were more important than definitive answers.
At the same time, however, I knew that a lack of certainty was no excuse for not taking decisive action on the moral issues of my time. I felt that I had to figure out a way to take bold action on the social justice issues that had captured my attention. I knew intuitively that there would be costs to speaking or acting upon my emerging convictions. I was quite familiar with the story of the righteous person who speaks truth to power. That story ended on a cross.
Like Carmen, I had come to the point where I did not need to believe that my efforts would achieve successful results in order to proceed. I returned home at the end of the summer in order to finish my last year of high school. This was the concession my parents had won from me when I left home, along with my promise to call twice a week—in exchange they had agreed not to report me as a runaway. Upon returning home, I knew what I had to do. At Lancaster Mennonite High School each day began with the approximately 800 students, plus faculty, gathering for chapel—a kind of mini-worship service. I signed up to lead one such service. I wrote myself a script. Half of it was scripture, the other half was information about the global economy: exploitation, sweatshops, union-busting, ecological destruction, death squads, imperialism, empire, and so on. We were all implicated, I argued, as complacent beneficiaries of an oppressive global order. I read verbatim the script I had written, my heart beating hard. Summarizing the Exodus story, a 17-year-old me, timid and shaking, said into the microphone to 800 fellow students: “A struggle is taking place; a struggle between the Egyptians and the Israelites; a struggle between oppressors and oppressed; a struggle between rich and poor. That’s right, it’s a class struggle. An economic class struggle is taking place. So it is no wonder that God sides with the Israelites. God always sides with the poor and oppressed, and is therefore against the rich oppressors.”6
I could feel the disapproval of the Vice Principal, Mr. King, who sat on the bench on the stage behind me. Anticipating the possible content of my chapel, he had stopped me in the hall the afternoon before to advise, “You know, Jesus said that the poor will always be among us.” As I read on, I kept wondering if he would interrupt me and put an end to my intervention. Silence in the auditorium. Except for my trembling voice. I looked up from my papers on the podium to see my dad at the back of the chapel, appearing to be following my words intently, deep in thought. He had come to see me speak, but he didn’t know what I was going to say.7 Then I saw Mike, who was both the student council president and my neighbor, rising from his seat and walking out defiantly. Several other students followed him. This was precisely the kind of thing I had been expecting. No normal classes would be held at LMH that day. Teachers had to facilitate heated discussions about my remarks the whole day long. In that sheltered environment, my message was the bombshell that I thought it would be. It was only a matter of time before I would be stoned to death or hanging on a cross, all alone.
What I had not anticipated was the number of students who would resonate with the message and who would want to find out more. They even wanted to do something about the situation I had spotlighted—to take some kind of action. Nor had I anticipated how many teachers and faculty members would agree with the social justice message. Teachers, it turned out, had to be careful to not appear too “liberal,” lest they become the next victim of the periodic witch-hunts that conservative parents were known to take up. My act had given teachers cover to open up space in their classroom to candidly discuss social and economic justice issues, as they could not be accused of initiating the conversation. Starting the conversation was my part to play.
At the end of the school day, I went promptly to Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), an organization whose headquarters are in Lancaster County. It was at MCC’s alternative resource library where I had first paged through publications like New Internationalist, Multinational Monitor, and The Catholic Worker—my initial sources for self-education about the global economy. This time I walked into the main office and I asked for help. I told the first folks I saw what I had done that morning. News travels fast in tight-knit Mennonite communities—they had already heard. I also told them about the response, especially the students who wanted to find out more. One of the two people I encountered there was Dave Schrock-Shenk, who just so happened to be working on a curriculum for a 30-day educational experiment for groups called World of Enough. It wasn’t ready yet, but we soon made plans to pilot the draft curriculum with 70 interested students at Lancaster Mennonite.
This was my first small taste of political hope. I had psyched myself up to play my part in a story of the righteous few. I had expected that by speaking my truth, I would be rejected by everyone. It’s not that there was nothing of value about the process I had gone through to psych myself up. After all, I had faced my deepest fears and overcome them. And I had found my voice—it was shaking, but it was audible and I could sense the power of saying aloud what I felt needed to be said. I wasn’t totally off base in my prediction of the reaction: the social justice message was, indeed, rejected by many in the audience—violently so by a few folks later on. However, for others, the message had resonated and served as a spark.
In telling myself a story of the righteous few, I had assumed that dominant beliefs were held more enthusiastically by more people than was actually the case. Because I didn’t see blatant, visible signs of a social justice paradigm, I assumed that meant that no one around me held these values. When I was a kid my mom was fond of saying, “It’s not going to jump out and bite you!” whenever I was looking for something (like a missing toy) in a half-assed manner. She was teasing me for the ridiculousness of how I would impatiently glance around a room, not see the thing I wanted, and immediately give up. What I came to realize from the positive responses to my chapel talk—and from the 70 students who participated in the World of Enough campaign that followed—is that social justice values are always all around me, even if I can’t see it at first glance, even if I have to dig around to uncover them. And my role isn’t to mope about how I can’t find what I’m looking for—let alone to condemn the whole scene, while fancying myself some kind of righteous prophet whom the world isn’t ready for. There’s nothing righteous about standing alone, impotently—at least not as long as I have other avenues to pursue. My role instead, I started to understand, was to dig in, to look under the surface, to find and to help cultivate and activate social justice values. I came to realize that dominant ideology is not believed by everyone—sometimes it is not even believed by the majority. Years later I came upon a passage by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire that nicely sums up my initial error: “Sometimes, in our uncritical understanding of the nature of the struggle, we can be led to believe that all the everyday life of the people is a mere reproduction of the dominant ideology. But it is not. There will always be something of the dominant ideology in the cultural expressions of the people, but there is also in contradiction to it the signs of resistance—in the language, in music, in food preferences, in popular
