The hardcover third edition of A Course in Miracles is bound in navy blue rexine with embossed gold lettering. No author is listed on the front cover or the spine, no compilers, no editors. Instead, under the title are simply listed the contents that make up the Combined Volume—Preface, Text, Workbook for Students, Manual for Teachers, Clarification of Terms and Supplements—and centered at the bottom of the cover, the publisher: the Foundation for Inner Peace. This text, ‘scribed’ by Columbia psychologist Helen Schucman from a channeled inner voice that she attributed to Jesus and published in 1975, resembles nothing so much as a combination of college textbook and Gideon’s Bible, works whose authority is often materially inscribed in their packaging and presentation: leather binding, pages with gold trim, distinctive typography. A yellow sticker is affixed to the front proclaiming this volume as “The only COMPLETE Course ad authorized by its scribe & published by its original publisher.”

But there are other versions of A Course in Miracles: an ‘urtext’ that consists mostly of unedited transcriptions of the divine messages dictated to Schucman, a version of the Course given to the son of Edgar Cayce and deposited in the archives of the Association for Research and Enlightenment, and another, curious version typed and bound in six black thesis binders that was photocopied and circulated in the summer of 1975. This latter version was described in testimony given by co-founder of the Foundation for Inner Peace Judith Skutch Whitson during a case involving copyright infringement on the Course. Skutch Whitson stated that she permitted the xeroxing, “and it seemed very right that people would pass it along, copy it over and copy it over, until finally people’s copies were getting so light that they couldn’t see them anymore.” This promiscuous sharing did seem appropriate for a book that encouraged its readers to experience the plenary nature of existence by giving in the name of the Holy Spirit, by recognizing that, “to spirit getting is meaningless and giving is all,” and that in giving, “all of it is still yours although all of it has been given away.” This expansive and emphatically optimistic understanding of the world is a guiding idea throughout the text, underpinning a spiritual process by which the individual ego is overcome and a complete and fulfilling union with God can be accomplished.

This unofficial photocopied version was circulated before publication as a means to generate interest in a project that had theretofore been kept secret by Schucman and her co-editor William Thetford. On a trip to San Francisco, Skutch Whitson put copies in the hands of a number of people interested in new methods and modes of spiritual practice, including Dr. Edgar Mitchell, founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, researchers at the Stanford Research Institute who were working on parapsychological research and the limits of human potentiality, and others across the Bay area. These figures represented nodes in a distributed network of spiritual practitioners, people who could potentially turn A Course in Miracles from a tentative experiment in channeled authorship into a canonical text of contemporary spirituality.

Separated by roughly thirty years, these two contrasting versions of A Course in Miracles—one professionally bound, elegant in design, authenticated by the original publisher and the other incomplete, passed from hand-to-hand, repeatedly copied—indicate two alternate visions of spirituality and the nature of contemporary religious organization. The first vouchsafes its religious legitimacy through rigorously controlled and highly centralized publication practices; the other generates its own organic authority by circulating in a non-centralized and informal network of readers, its movement constituting the very relationships that make up an interconnected spiritual community. The tension between these two visions—a tension between dissemination and control—has played out in the recent history of A Course in Miracles. Indeed, copyright litigation over different versions of the text has not only circumscribed the horizon of spiritual practices but also shaped the contours of the communities in which those practices take place.

In 1999, the Foundation for Inner Peace filed a copyright complaint against the New Christian Church of Full Endeavor whose Endeavor Academy was printing an adapted version of the Course as part of their core curriculum. Endeavor’s defense during the ensuing trial asserted that the Foundation’s copyright was invalid and the text had entered the public domain. They argued that the work was ineligible for copyright protection due to its divine authorship, as Schucman had been specifically instructed by Jesus to keep her name as author off public records. They also claimed the plaintiffs’ assertion of copyright constituted an infringement on their freedom of religion and that the publication and use of the text was permissible as fair use. All of the aforementioned defenses along with eight other arguments were dismissed save one: prior publication. Endeavor Academy successfully determined that un-copyrighted manuscripts—the ones circulated by Skutch Whitson in San Francisco in 1975—had been generally distributed before publication, thus nullifying the later filing for copyright. Had the Foundation for Inner Peace demonstrated that they distributed the book to a limited and select group of people, then distribution would not have qualified as prior publication and the copyright would still have been legitimate. Instead, in the summary decision on the case the presiding judge wrote, “The Court is unable to see in this picture any definitely selected individuals or any limited, ascertained group or class to whom the communication was restricted…An interest in spiritual experience fails to define a class adequately.”

The question the court raised was a serious one and one that carries repercussions for the ways in which we conceive of organizations that arise around the self-conscious practice of spirituality. At what point does a distributed network of interested individuals cohere into an apprehensible group of like-minded followers, a united community of believers? For the many Americans who claim to be spiritual but not religious, how do they imagine their spiritual allegiances, their relationship to religious experience, their consumption of sacred texts? Are their actions simply tactics deployed in the service of individual self-improvement, self-exploration and therapy, or are they understood as being part of a shared set of practices among a community of like-minded seekers? The issue with A Course in Miracles was that the early version of the text was not distributed to a predetermined group precisely because its circulation in the early stages of its existence was serving to constitute the group itself. The movement of the text between hands constituted the very mechanism by which a network of individuals could be linked together, who could then become visible to themselves as a unified community of followers.

Ironically, both the assertion of property rights used to prohibit infringement and the free distribution of copies of an earlier manuscript were practiced by the Foundation for Inner Peace at different times in its publication history. What the courts saw as mutually exclusive and self-negating modes of distribution, the Foundation may have seen as mutually enforcing and supplementary methods of dissemination. The Foundation claimed that they copyrighted the work only so that it might be distributed more broadly and they could more effectively satisfy growing demand in the text. But the later recourse to intellectual property law by the Foundation in order to assert control over a revelation came across as disingenuous to many, including the court. The presiding judge wrote, “The decision to copyright and thereby to control and profit by the distribution of the Course was made after the distribution of the xerox copies described above…The mystical experience reported by Wapnick and Skutch Whitson [co-founders of the Foundation and stewards of A Course in Miracles appointed by Schucman and Thetford] was converted by Skutch Whitson into a property right.”

In response to their subsequent loss of copyright, many at the Foundation felt the need to explain their failed legal maneuvers. Joseph Jesseph, member of the Foundation for A Course in Miracles, wrote in his publishing history of the text, “There are some who still feel that true spiritual works such as A Course in Miracles hardly need the mundane protection of copyright,” a right that he described as being associated with and affirming precisely the same ‘ego framework’ that the text was working so hard to undo as the cause of many personal problems. But he provided the following apologia:

The Foundation—with regard to the fiduciary responsibility given to it—trusts in the fact that when Jesus directed Helen [Schucman] to perfect the copyright in A Course in Miracles, he intended that the Course be protected by copyright limitations within the ego framework. In effect, this ensures that the Course will remain intact and exactly as it was given, so that it will never be diluted, distorted, or changed.

Jesseph thus presented a rationale that described the use of copyright as a necessary compromise with human law put in the service of divine warrant. Instead of explaining the foundation’s use of intellectual property rights as simply being in the service of economic and distributional efficiencies, Jesseph instead described it as a mechanism for the maintenance of a divinely sanctioned message. The content of A Course in Miracles was susceptible to distortion, alteration and misinterpretation by the corrupting practices of those outside the Foundation’s networks of circulation, thus legal recourse to prevent such distortion was an entirely appropriate, even spiritually motivated strategy.

Jesseph’s justification does not conform to dominant understandings of copyright in the United States that usually depend either on a rationale grounded in the protection of the moral rights of [ostensibly human] authors or economic incentives designed to promote the production of creative goods. Nevertheless, he resurrected a sublimated theme within the law regarding intellectual property as intimately tied to questions of propriety. Foundation co-founder Kenneth Wapnick extended this logic even further in his statements after the case, describing the reading of current public domain versions of the Course (the urtext or the Cayce version) as a moral violation of the privacy of Schucman and Thetford, akin to listening in on a private conversation conducted between the scribes and Jesus and not yet reshaped into an official document destined for public consumption.

So what are we to make of the role of intellectual property as a determinant of the nature and role of a spiritual text within a religious organization? For those who inhabit non-traditional, unchurched types of spiritual community, communities whose coherence lies not in a centralized space like the church but instead in the realm of literary works and other forms of shared religious media, intellectual property law may provide a uniquely effective means to reestablish a measure of control. By providing legal tools capable of administering the texts by which intrinsically ephemeral beliefs and practices are mediated, intellectual property law can help to establish official works and stabilize their religiously approved meaning while also permitting the patrol of the very channels of distribution that move those beliefs and practices between members of a newly articulated community. For those organizations that still market spirituality but distance themselves from traditional forms of religion, they may look to new mechanisms to assert a measure of authority and control over their product. And as the physical, sacred property of the church becomes less central to contemporary practice, so may the intangible and ephemeral, yet equally sacred intellectual property move to take its place.

In all places and all epochs human beings have used some such word as “Spirit,” to designate the animating, world-moving force within them; the relations with ancestors, demons, totems, ghosts and other “spirit-beings”; and the Supreme Being, the godhead that permeates the universe and creates the world and is bound together in our religions. In sum, what has been known as spirit relates the human self to the universe and all its beings and forms of being. Spirit is no residual category, then, but an ontological potential of humanity, a vital part of being human. It is as essential for human nature as building a web is for “spider nature.” For all creatures are inserted into nature at a certain point and with a certain internally articulated set of relationships. These frame the possible arrangements that creature has with the rest of nature. Spirit belongs to the relationships of human nature, then, along with phenomena such as childhood, language, the capacity for rational thought as well as speculative thought, a peculiar emphasis on the role of sex, the making and chronicling of history, and above all for humans, the power to produce, that is, to consciously transform nature to meet needs that are both universal and yet also peculiarly human, one of which is the spiritual. From this angle, spirituality is the production of spirit, and like all forms of production, is a function of history. Thus there is no spirit as such, there is only spirit in various historical contexts, arising from historically prepared ground and transforming that ground.

The present epoch is historically unique in that the spirit-side of life can no longer be taken for granted. It appears both in innumerable fragmentary shapes and as massive blocs of fundamentalist and totalizing conviction, and quite often it seems to not exist at all, as though there were some kind of systematic power at work to drive it out of our lives.

Albert Einstein wrote that humans are born connected with the cosmos. We become separated from this ground of being as we develop and we therefore have the choice of whether to rejoin this universal ground—not, of course, in the original manner attendant upon birth, but consciously, according to personal history and what we have done with our life. We all rejoin the universe when biological life is over and our substance re-enters the great natural cycles of material exchange. But this need not occur blindly. We are endowed with human consciousness and thus the option also exists for us to live and be conscious of our path from universal being and back to universal being. This path is of spirit and traverses the self—and it is the self and its relation to the world that can both shape and impede the path of spirit.

As an internal representation of the person, the self exists between the person and the world, and is a kind of boundary between the person and the universe. If the boundary is relatively rigid and impermeable, we would call this the ego-form of the self; and if the boundary is relatively fluid, permeable and differentiated, we would call this the soul-form of the self. Thus the ego-form is hostile to the emergence of spirit. It posits the person as a fixed and discrete individual, and prioritizes the forms of reasoning that reinforce this, including the Cartesian splitting between mind and body and the various technical and bureaucratic practices that naturalize this.

Soul-consciousness overcomes this splitting and differentiates the human being and nature, that is, sees each as part of the other. This openness allowed by infusion of spirit—manifest in far too many forms to be even summarized here—is therefore an overcoming of ego, an overcoming of separation of self from universe, and a transfiguration of the flesh, or body under the name of spirit. The language of death and resurrection is apposite here:

So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable.
It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power.
It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body.
If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. (I Cor: 15, 42-44)

My reading of Paul is that he insists on the resurrection of the death-in-life inherent to normal egoic existence. The spiritual moment overcomes the separation from the deadly splitting from nature which sees us alone in the universe of dead matter, and opens upon the perspective of universal being. This may be tied to the saying of Jesus: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). And it presupposes the faith in a living God.

The emergence of Jesus Christ as the intermediary between the human and divine, and hence as the essential configuration of spirit opening upon a radically new path of human existence needs to be evoked here. I do not claim that Jesus is the only authentic path of spirit: that sort of sectarian splitting and chauvinism is precisely the anti-spiritual way. I do claim that his emergence was the sort of thing that could only have happened at a certain moment in history—and that such a moment has most definitely not gone away, although the forces that would hold it back—dare we call them Satanic?—are presently in the ascendant.

The Jesus phenomenon occurred as the expansion of Rome’s empire into Palestine destabilized the existing Abrahamic religion and introduced new class configurations into traditional Judaic society. The quisling King Herod and the quisling elite-priesthood of the Sanhedrin represented the infiltration of a foreign body into the command structure of Judaism. This was accompanied by severe dislocation and dispossession in the countryside and it reached its grim apogee in the introduction of money exchange into the Great Temple. I see Jesus as a peasant revolutionary who emerged in dialectical reaction to this and conceived of a transformation in the spiritual sphere that could also nonviolently transform the secular sphere. The key passages bearing witness to this in the Gospels are Jesus’ magnificent and soulful imprecations against the money power. Non-violent to living beings, he actively throws over the money-changing tables in the Temple, and thereby seals his fate on the Cross.

From another angle, this core spiritual event is also a critique of idolatry: that abiding propensity of humanity to make false gods out of its own productions and submit to them. Without this insight we fall victim to the shallow view of spirituality which sees it as something missing in contemporary materialist life—which is by and large, true—and concludes that what we need is more spirituality—which is both stupid and dangerous. How can we forget that some of the most malignant features of modern history—Nazism, for example, or the various fundamentalisms that blight our landscape—have many of the essential hallmarks of spiritual experience, in particular, the breaking down of ego boundaries and the sense of reunion with some larger whole? In fact it may be said that right-wing movements energized by pseudo-spiritual power are much more dangerous than the stodgy and prudent secular right.

No, we do not need more spirituality as such; indeed there is no such thing but only spiritualities mediated by their social vision and relations. We need more authentic spirituality: not just a simple breaking of egoic chains but also an overcoming of the corruptions of idolatry. This occurs in context of a righteous striving toward justice and universality, beyond the strictures of racism and gender oppression. In respect to this we should bear in mind that money power is the pure form of idolatry: money power, that is: not the simple form of monetary exchange but the endless expanding of value, dissolving the integrity of nature and human being. The word for self-expanding value is capital, of course; and the struggles of Jesus against the money-changers initiate not only a new moment in religious history, but were the first, anticipatory, instances of an anti-capitalist campaign, when capital was only lying nascent in its cradle. Today, capital has become hegemonic and world-destroying at the same time. Its society of rampant egoism—because the ego-form is the only model of self suitable for capitalist relations of production—along with the astounding panoply of idolatry known as consumerism, poses the greatest threat of all history to the survival of our species and innumerable others. It is this massive weight that burdens spiritual existence today—and demands that we find new ways of spiritual realization.

Jesus and the first Christians have been called the first communists—that is, in class society, in contrast to the primitive communism that graces original, pre-class and pre-state society. We are now in another context requiring a spiritual revolution. Will a renewed power of soul resurrect us from the abyss?

If there is meaning to the term “visual culture,” it is the webs of connection organized by images. Some images are special—they stand like mountaintops in a society, managing the flow of thought and feeling that constitutes the body of a culture. The word for this class of imagery is icon. You know an icon when you see one because of the auratic sensation it provokes: gazing at it, you are in the presence of something or someone widely revered or reviled. It’s not merely an image, a visual sign, but more. What you see in an icon is archetypal, totemic, paradigmatic, universally recognized. What you see are the edges of a life-world because whoever does not recognize the image as an icon must be an outsider or a foreigner or an unbeliever. The proof of an image’s iconicity is the aura it radiates—the sensation of the image grasping and holding your attention. I’d like to reflect on iconic aura because I believe it can tell us something important about the visual culture of spirituality.

Images of John Lennon, Marilyn Monroe, Che Guevara, Jesus, and the most familiar pictures by Norman Rockwell all command attention because viewers recognize in them something that they and many others want to see. These are icons, the images everyone talks about, images that seem to be everywhere and always have been. Take Rockwell’s undisputed “popular culture icon,” as it is so commonly tagged, “Freedom from Want,” painted in 1943 as one of a series of four images inspired by a war-time speech of Franklin Roosevelt. Why is it an icon?

Norman Rockwell's Freedom from Want

Several reasons come to mind. First, we have seen it so many times. “We”—it’s not a private image, but one shared by millions of people who experience something common in their recognition of this image. The image bestows on people an imagined sense of their Americanness, as do many of Rockwell’s pictures. Second, its ubiquity: we see it every Thanksgiving in magazines and newspapers, on television and the Internet. When Rockwell created the picture it was not an icon of Thanksgiving, but a propagandistic hymn to the way things ought to be and would be once again when Totalitarianism was defeated on the global stage. Roosevelt defined the “freedom from want” in terms of economic relations that “will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.” After the war, in the heyday of American plenty, Rockwell’s image was recoded and became closely associated with Thanksgiving, the American high holy day of Abundance, the feast day of American civil religion. We see no religious subject per se. Rather than Puritans or Pilgrims, we witness something more generic: the meal that all Americans celebrate. This points to the third feature of Rockwell’s icon—content and style. The image presents to people what they want to see—Thanksgiving as it ought to be, grounded in warmth and sentiment, in fellowship, in good cheer, in a ritual meal served up by two pillars of benevolence: grandmother and grandfather. And the scene is limned with the skill of an illustrator’s descriptive line and a composition that lures the eye and rewards it with balance and order, all packaged with the tidiness of a fine story. In his most fondly received works, Rockwell portrays the American past with a narrative gaze that interweaves humor, wit, nostalgia, and storytelling. Or maybe it’s not the past so much as a folkloric invocation of America as it should have been.

Ironically, what you see in “Freedom from Want” is what you want, which is to say, what you don’t have, which the picture promises to deliver. Aura is the substance of iconicity, the promise that beholding offers. Like a fragrance, it tantalizes. An icon exerts allure by revealing something of what viewers seek, but not everything. Icons open the door to the person or quality we want to hold. They modulate desire, direct the traffic of yearning. We see the picture of John Lennon and recognize him as the guy on whom the eyes of millions reside, in whom an age found its leader, spokesman, prophet, the hero we adore, the writer of songs that changed your life and the lives of millions. Or we look at a picture of Hitler and recognize with a shudder the maniacal evil that is uneasily, demonically fascinating. Icons bring us into the presence of the one and only, what we take to be the bedrock, the Real. In contrast to Plato’s insistence that images could not bear the Real, the icon does precisely that, indeed, it is only in the icon that the Real becomes accessible. The Real is not the actual. It is what seems to become actual in the icon, and only there. Something streams or radiates from icons. They hemorrhage uniqueness, leak the fluid of absoluteness, which is what I mean by aura.

But we need to say more about what aura is and how it constitutes the spiritual power of icons. An image has aura when we can’t ignore it, when it commands our attention. We say “That is Che Guevara” or “There is Marilyn Monroe.” The image captures the idea of the person, or the ideal, one might say. We behold the moment that changed history, as in the photograph of the raising of the flag over Iwo Jima. We behold the face of the ideal of feminine beauty in Marilyn or the face of the hero adored throughout Latin America in Che. Note in each example that it is not the ordinary we look for in the icon. We want the extraordinary. Icons are a visual strategy for securing the really real. We do not want Norma Jeane Mortenson, but Marilyn the goddess. We do not want Che the impatient and naïve ideologue, but the Latin Apollo and Romantic visionary. We want the Idea that animated the individual, that indwelled in her or him. In effect, we want an embodiment of what is otherwise invisible and inaccessible—we want something mythical or archetypal. Seeing icons is a visual practice of producing the Real as visible. The power of images consists of their ability to show the Real. In fact, rather than a Platonic gaze on eternal forms, the icon is a construction of the Real. After all, the photo at Iwo Jima was posed. Che Guevara practiced the execution of political opponents. Norma Jeane was a deeply unhappy, drug-addicted woman. An icon distills a singular idea of the subject from the complexity and accident of an individual person. More than the actual person it pictures, an icon is about the desire that its viewers bring to it. In some cases, the person may be virtually eclipsed by his icon. Is the particularity of a man named Jesus of Nazareth visible in pictures of Jesus the Christ featuring the authorized conceptions of his messianic mission and divine nature? Historians argue over his participles while believers seek the salvator mundi. Most of my Thanksgiving dinners aren’t as gleeful as the family feast in Rockwell’s icon.

Desire for what we do not have distinguishes the icon as a way of seeing. Beholding an icon without the desire that animates the devotee’s experience results in seeing a stereotype or a truism. Other people’s icons are just that to us, as alien as other people’s religions. If you don’t want what the icon offers, you see a cliché, not the truth. Your icon, by contrast, captures the essence of someone or something that you want. The aura of that elusive reality may be called spiritual, that is, the evocation of the Real. This truth is not discerned as the validity of a proposition, but is experienced as a sensation—the feeling of seeing the real thing. Radiated by an icon, aura is the sensation of the revelation of the authentic. Spirituality and desire are inseparable. “That’s it!” or “That’s her!” people say when they see an icon, and in the recognition wonder if they might have glimpsed her—the real her.

Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.

1 Corinthians 9:19-22

A few Sundays ago I was in what I suppose passes for my church: an activist space in an old warehouse on the edge of the city. I was there with my partner to train a group of veteran organizers on how to employ creativity and the arts in their activism in order to become more effective political players in our media-saturated, culture-rich world. Standing in front of the organizers, I got to a point in my stock presentation where I introduce Jesus as an example of a creative activist. My proselytizing was of a secular rather than religious nature: it wasn’t the spiritual figure of Christ I was interested in but the purely historical Jesus, a radical Mediterranean Jewish peasant building a revolutionary movement two millennia ago. Jesus, I explained, understood the fundamentals of using story and spectacle, signs and symbols as means to criticize the status quo and offer up an alternative vision. When, for example, he entered the main temple of Jerusalem and overturned the tables of the money changers and sellers of ritual objects he was staging an effective political performance. He could have stood outside and harangued the passerby with his opinions, the ancient equivalent of the activist on the soapbox, but instead he demonstrated his politics though a spectacular act of civil disobedience. Through such an action he not only demonstrated visually and bodily his political ideals, but did it in such a provocative way that news of his deed, and therefore his message, was sure to travel. In modern parlance: Jesus went viral.

I then spoke of Jesus’ use of parables and how, by employing these often oblique stories, he created an opening for his audience to make the message their own. Unlike a list of grievances or demands, easily understood and just as easily ignored, the parables asked listeners to puzzle through the mystery of the stories and their meanings. It was an “invitational form of speech” to quote the Bible scholar Marcus Borg, which does not command, but instead works in its “ability to involve and affect the imagination.” One can almost imagine the scene following an impromptu teaching by Jesus: people walking away, debating amongst themselves exactly what this crazy holy man meant by comparing the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed. But with every argument and counter-argument, Jesus’ words ceased to be his alone and became the common property of his audience.

Finally, I discussed how Jesus was able to prefigure his vision of a better world tomorrow though creative actions situated in the present day. By sitting down to dinner—a deeply meaningful ritual in Biblical times—with women, tax collectors, sinners and the ill, he enacted in the here and now the egalitarian community he prophesized for the future. Similarly, by entering Jerusalem on a donkey, the titular “Son of God” seated upon a lowly ass, he acted out his ideal of a world turned upside down in which “the last shall be first, and the first last.” Jesus, I concluded, took the ideal of a political “demonstration” quite literally… and thus employed it very effectively.

I was done with this lesson and ready to move on to a discussion concerning the use of creative tactics in the American Revolution when one of the participants raised their hand and asked me if I was a Christian. The question threw me, and I had to think for a moment. I was raised Christian and I know my Bible, my father and grandfather were both ministers and, most other Sundays, I attend a “real” Church with my family. But am I a Christian?

By way of an answer I explained that a large majority of Americans—anywhere from 76 to 83 percent, in fact—identify themselves as Christian and that many of the guiding myths, symbols and ideals of the United States have their roots in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. I argued that religion, as a compendium of stories, a system of ethics, and a model of behavior could be drawn upon as a popular alternative to norms and ideals of competitive consumer capitalism. I admitted that there’s much to condemn in religion, its bigotry and intolerance for starters, but also pointed out that most religions also extol such virtues as love, community and responsibility for others. Good material for an astute organizer to work with.

I also reminded the activists in the room of the first rule of guerilla warfare: know your terrain and use it to your advantage. Whether we approve of it or not Christianity forms the contours of much of American life and consciousness; it is a, if not the, lingua franca. If you want to be an effective activist in the this country you need to be able to talk the talk, even if you are uneasy walking the walk. We might profit, I concluded, from the words of the Apostle Paul, the crackerjack community organizer of the early Church, who wrote: “Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible… I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.”

By the end of my jeremiad I realized I had my answer. I am a Christian, but only because I believe it makes me a more effective political activist. In a word, I am an opportunistic Christian. (A public admission made more awkward by the fact that the minister of my—albeit activist—Church was participating in the workshop). So much for the authenticity of my faith. But sitting down to retell this story now I realize something else. I do have faith in Jesus, but a particular and perhaps peculiar faith. Do I believe that Jesus walked on water? No. Do I believe in the divinity of Christ? No. Do I believe in God? No. But do I believe that Jesus cared about those who are used, abused or forgotten by society? Do I believe that Jesus wanted to radically transform the world? Do I believe that Jesus can teach me something about how to be an effective political organizer? The answer is Yes, yes and, again, yes.

I believe. I believe that all history, to paraphrase Marx and Engels, is the history of social struggle. It is a bloody and brutal history of those who use their power and privilege to kill, oppress, demean and regulate others in order to maintain and increase their own power and privilege. But there is another history too: a long tradition of people who have stood up to those in power and teached and preached and organized and demanded the redistribution of power and privilege. And there is an even more radical history of those who have envisioned and demanded a world in which power and privilege are abolished altogether.

Jesus is part of this history, as is Moses and Buddha and the Prophet Mohammed; Karl Marx, Emma Goldman and Martin Luther King too. This is my community of faith. I may be opportunistic in the material I draw upon for inspiration and lessons. I will readily become a Christian amongst the Christians, a Jew amongst Jews, and a Muslim amongst Muslims, not to mention a Communist or Anarchist amongst Communists or Anarchists—“I have become all things to all people.” And while this sounds coldly instrumental, I can assure you it is not; it’s something deeply spiritual. I feel impossibly yet intimately connected to those who have fought, and continue to fight, to radically transform the world. Their history is my history and mine theirs. Together we share a faith that we can make heaven here on earth.