Jacobsen, Dennis A. Doing Justice: Congregations and Community Organizing.
Minneapolis: Fortress, 2nd ed., 2017. xxx + 155 pp.
Doing Justice is a challenging book. Aimed principally at practicing Christians, it uses the words
of Jesus, prophets, apostles, and the author of the Book of Revelation to attack the status quo
as ungodly and to provoke the readers into working to transform it in the direction of God’s
justice. An epigram to chapter 1 concludes with Revelation 18:4: Then I heard another voice
from heaven saying, “Come out of her, my people, so that you do not take part in her sins.”
The test of this book is not so much how well it reads as much as how well it leads to
constructive, collective social action. Its audience is rather niche: actively religious people who
both are concerned about injustice and have a group with which they can join in acts of justice.
For people who fit that description, Doing Justice is profoundly challenging (because my heart's
in the right place but there are things I'd rather be doing), sympathetic (I'm also the quiet type at
least in public), and encouraging (because wins are frustratingly few and far between).
Jacobsen, a pastor in the (mainline) Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, who spent many
years serving an inner-city Milwaukee, sees justice as a broad context in which people have
access to the goods of life, both material (e.g. enough to eat) and intangible (e.g. dignity,
freedom).
The world as it should be is in direct opposition to the world as it is. The world as
it should be is rooted in truth, love, and community…. People are able to trust
each other sufficiently to be transparent and exposed…. In a world where forty-
thousand children die of hunger-related causes every day, the world as it should
be has an abiding concern for children and their right to have a playful present
and a human future…. The world as it should be is God’s dream engaging the
nightmare that the world has become. (2017: 11, 12, 15)
Those of us who live in a middle-class milieu may have little awareness of the nightmare that
people outside of that milieu live on a daily basis. Some of Jacobsen’s parishioners’ personal
nightmares are mentioned in the opening chapter. Vulnerable people are easily derailed when
their lives’ loads get one brick too many, and then the bricks just keep on coming. We are
admonished to be aware of others’ struggles, and not to get too comfortable or too
accommodated to the world as it is (what he calls “pseudo-innocence” (p. 16), citing Martin
Luther King’s statement that love without power is sentimentality).
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| Encampment, Greene Square, 2024 |
We know we are not the egregious bullies Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, sneering and
mocking as Rev. Marianne Edgar Budde asked the administration to show mercy to gays
and Lesbians in all families, and to vulnerable immigrant farmworkers. Yet we know we
are not King, or Fr. Daniel Berrigan, or the Detroit pastor (Rev. Bill Wylie-Kellerman) who
wrote the foreword to Doing Justice, ministering to the outcasts, and risking freedom and
their very lives in the quest for justice. If working within the system is so accommodating
as to give away the store, what then must we do?
Jacobsen argues churches and their members need to engage with the “harsh realities outside
its walls” (p. 20). That requires more from the church than creating a peaceful sanctuary, or
even engaging in charitable works if they don’t get at the people’s underlying (human) misery.
“The Christians who are so generous with food baskets at Thanksgiving or with presents for
the poor at Christmas often vote into office politicians whose policies ignore or crush those
living in poverty. A kind of pseudo-innocence permeates this behavior” (p. 29). He turns to
the example of Saul Alinksy (1909-1972), whose concept of community organizing sought to empower residents of impoverished neighborhoods to influence decisions that were being
made elsewhere, like in company boardrooms and city governments. Congregation-based
community organizing began in the Roman Catholic Church, but has spread throughout
Christianity and even non-Christian faith communities. Six broad networks, profiled in
chapter 4, provide leadership training as well as engagement in public action. Engaging in
such action requires comfort with political power–Jacobsen notes dozens of references to
“power” in both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament–but also a willingness to share it
(p. 67).
“Some fear the added responsibility that comes with power” (p. 61). Well, yeah.
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| Homeland Security Investigations office, southwest Cedar Rapids |
As such, the first challenge, both for individuals contemplating their part in social justice
and community organizers recruiting and challenging them (“agitation”), is to recognize their
self-interest. This concept is at the core of modern social science, and a strong influence on
the worldview of pretty much everyone. Yet “[k]nowledge of one’s own self-interest interest also
cannot be presumed” (p. 75). Jacobsen argues in chapter 6 that for all manner of reasons, we
need an understanding of self-interest that lies between pure selfishness and utter self-abnegation (“selflessness”). The first leads us to “nearly soulless” (p. 78) transactional
relationships with others, such as President Trump is supposed to have; the latter leads to
getting taken advantage of, as in the cases of Christian women who stay in abusive
marriages because they believe it's their duty.
The process of articulation might also involve distinguishing between short-term and long-
term interests (p. 75ff.). On any given day, I might prefer to relax and/or get things done around
the house, and certainly to avoid confrontations. People like Jacobsen’s ex-con parishioner
Jesse are so different from me that any contact is bound to be awkward. But over the long term
I am better off living in “a liberative community in which people can live out their values, be
connected to a network of significant relationships, and be agitated to summon forth their God-
given power and potential,” so it is in my self-interest actively to participate in the “weaving
together” of such a community (p. 78). (If it sounds like urbanism, loyal reader–that’s because
it is!)
Once committed to action, doers of justice are further confronted with defining and reading
the field of play. In chapter 9, Jacobsen articulates a metropolitan conception, adding declining
first-ring suburbs and well-heeled exurbs to the mission field of inner city-based organizing.
Citing law professor Myron Orfield (Metropolitics [Brookings, 1997]), he argues:
To counter the ghettoization of poverty, Orfield proposes regional strategies such as tax-
based revenue sharing, fair distribution of low-income housing, convergence of school
districts, and equitable spread of transportation dollars to create access to jobs (p. 105).
Opposition to metro-wide approaches is likely to be “entrenched” (p. 106), but the strength of
the opposition should not be exaggerated, nor should wealthy and powerful opponents be
considered permanent enemies: Metropolitan organizing offers a chance to end the warfare
against the poor and to heal the divisions of class and race that separate this sick society
(p. 114, emphasis mine). It’s like Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton (The Regional City:
Planning for the End of Sprawl [Island, 2001]) meet the authors of Numbers and Luke!
Succeeding at this level has a promising payoff but requires “meticulous organization, militant
mass action, and, above all, the willingness to suffer and sacrifice” (p. 115, quoting Nelson
Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom [Little Brown, 1994], p. 104). “There’s drudgery in social
change, and glory for the few,” sings Billy Bragg. The mess is huge, and that can be
discouraging: Death claims urban America for itself…. The death of decaying neighborhoods.
The death of decimated families. The death of joblessness. The death of dreams. (p. 133)
No wonder I quail at the struggle! Now, to “take part in her sins” may seem an attractive
alternative. But many hands make light work, or at least make the workload lighter: Into
the courtyard of such death, congregation-based community organizing proclaims the
resurrection of Christ, the unbending hope in the power of life, the unyielding belief that
God, not death, has the last word (still on p. 133). It is the "holy catholic church," discussed in chapter 11, that impacts the mess, not lone toilers. It is group action that not only says
“‘no’ to social injustice… but a prophetic ‘yes’ to life” (p. 139). In the face of oppression
and misery, the church not only engages the community with patches but with affirmation
and joy as well. And dancing–towards the end of the book he quotes Emma Goldman: If
I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution (p. 141).
In the same song quoted above, Billy Bragg also sings, “A poet with all the answers has never
yet been built.” Apparently that goes for bloggers as well. My posts this year have been, I
recognize, teeming with frustration and anger. All the MAGA pillaging (cf. Wilson 2025,
Zipper 2025, or any day's post by the indefatigable Heather Cox Richardson) has certainly
served to highlight the fragility of progress, and how much easier it is to break things than to
build them. But there are people out there who carry on building, and they have room for me,
and you. As long as they don’t mind that I dance like an arthritic cow.
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