[Presented at the 2021 annual conference of the Society for Christian Ethics.]
Many religious ethicists have, for some time, turned their attention to matters of social and structural sin. Their efforts illuminate the ways that an individualist account of sin fails to address several pressing contemporary problems, including climate change, economic injustice, and white supremacy. Some draw on various resources in the Christian tradition, including the doctrine of original sin and liberation theologians’ attention to structures and systems, to make clear that Christians should be mindful of the way we participate in social sin. In the proposed paper, I aspire to supplement these scholars’ admirable efforts. I do so by integrating with those conversations recent economic and social psychological work on collective action problems: situations wherein collective action, which would benefit all parties, is difficult or impossible to accomplish because of incentives that deter individuals’ cooperation.
As the proposed paper argues, the problem with much of the extant literature on social sin is its failure to acknowledge that these collective action problems cannot be solved by begging individuals to merely willingly take on the risks associated with such problems. We cannot simply say to agents, at least as a pragmatic matter: bear the risk that you might get taken advantage of. Even if that might be a justifiable appeal, it is not likely to bear fruit.
The solution to collective action problems, as Elinor Ostrom showed, is collective action.
That is to say: individuals might not be fairly expected to solve the problem singlehandedly. Instead, we might say that individuals have an obligation to be a part of the organizing collective action that addresses the problem. Rather than reflecting on what might constitute an individual’s participation in social sin—which occupies so much of the literature today—we might want to consider the potential sinfulness of an individual’s duty to participate in collective, ameliorative projects.
Religious ethicists have reason to focus on such collective action. Not only does the foregrounding of collective action deserve the consideration of religious ethicists, but religious ethicists have a unique resource for motivating and maintaining collective action: religion.
We can see this in the social psychological research that leads some scholars of religion, like Ara Norenzayan, to conclude that it was religious practices that first enabled the widescale cooperation that makes advanced human civilization possible. Religion, Norenzayan writes in Big Gods, provides resources for overcoming the kind of collective action problems that hunter-gatherer societies may have faced. But we also can witness it in American history. In the second half of the proposed paper, I turn to two examples of historic collective action in the United States, to show how religious resources might be drawn on for ameliorative collective action projects.
The first is the case of unionizing coal miners in Appalachia in the early twentieth century. Because strikes require widespread (or total) support in order to be effective, Appalachian coal mine strikers sought to persuade others in the face of cruel corporate repression to join their movement. Their most significant tools for making the case were drawn from the Old and New Testaments, and their cases were regularly made in houses of worship. The stakes were high. In fact, in the little known “Battle of Blair Mountain,” the climax of the Coal Wars and the largest armed conflict on American soil since the Civil War, a hundred of the ten thousand armed miners lost their lives. Some of these lives were lost at the hands of the U.S. Army, who had been dispatched to quell their armed resistance. While the Coal Wars did not end in the miners’ favor, historians tend to think that it was the striking miners’ resistance that led to the development of the AFL and CIO and other successful collective bargaining organizations. It was so-called “miner preachers” that fueled this crucial movement.
The second focuses on the African American women who, in the early stage of the Civil Rights Movement, organized a bus boycott, which they arranged to be galvanized by the public maltreatment of one Rosa Parks. The day of Parks’ arrest, the Women’s Political Council in Montgomery organized a day-long boycott of the city bus system, which local leaders resolved to turn into a long-term campaign. This boycott was organized in the basement of a church. As many as 50,000 African American locals boycotted the city bus system for thirteen long months. Their collective action required extensive coordination: Black cab drivers lowered their fare to ten cents a ride for Black riders; those who owned cars arranged carpools. Boycotters received donations from beyond Alabama of shoes for those who walked miles daily to avoid riding the bus. Much of this organizing was done in and by churches. While most public recollections of the Montgomery campaign center on Parks, it was the sustained cooperation of tens of thousands of Montgomery residents for over a year that ultimately overcame the unjust system of public segregation in Montgomery in 1956. (Our concentration on Parks, I suspect, reveals an underlying individualism that lingers in our ethical imaginations and undermines collective action projects.) It is remarkable—venerable—that the boycotters were able to maintain this mutual cooperation for such a long time.
In both cases, as I show, the trust and steadfastness that is required in any collective action undertaking is facilitated by the shared religious commitments of the communities engaged in the movement.
The collective action problems discussed above (and discussed by other presenters in the panel) are pressing and perilous. As such, we have reasons to eagerly look for resources to motivate and maintain the collective action that can overcome such problems. The religious and theological resources—including the texts preached and hymns sung by coal mine strikers and boycott-organizing church leaders—are ripe for harvesting. We would be amiss to neglect them.