“This feels a lot like church,” I thought. ... It was my first time experiencing collective singing outside of church, and it felt familiar, from the loudly exuberant singers to the masses of people awkwardly fumbling with a new tune. At the end, discussion groups were announced: DSA wanted people to gather in apartments to read foundational texts and histories of people around the world whom we were supposed to feel connected to as one global proletariat.
I’ve been in church all my life, growing up in a conservative Pentecostal church network in Malaysia, hopping around Thai immigrant churches in California, and now working at a multi-racial, progressive church in Brooklyn. I’ve spent countless hours studying the Bible—our foundational text—with others in people’s apartments, and learning historical stories of saints with whom we felt connected to as the collective body of Christ. Church made me feel connected to something much larger and older than myself. For the first time in that DSA meeting, I saw that what church did for me, radical politics might do for others.
American Christianity has often had a decidedly capitalist bent, but there is a long history between Christianity and socialist movements. Over the past three years, some American Christians have rediscovered this tradition and found themselves gravitating to socialism—in all its varieties, from democratic socialism to full-fledged communism. ...
A FEW MONTHS AGO, I WAS in Queens with 26,000 other people to hear Senator Bernie Sanders speak at a rally. ... It felt, to my Pentecostal-raised ears, like an altar call, the kind in which the pastor gets on stage and rallies the crowd to give up their lives up to God and for something greater than themselves. During the altar calls of my youth, the band would play while people raised their hands, crying and surrendering themselves as if in a blissful trance, sometimes holding each other while intimately praying together. Sanders’ rally brought me back to what those moments in church felt like: As if I was letting go and losing myself in a larger sea of being.
I’ve been in church all my life, growing up in a conservative Pentecostal church network in Malaysia, hopping around Thai immigrant churches in California, and now working at a multi-racial, progressive church in Brooklyn. I’ve spent countless hours studying the Bible—our foundational text—with others in people’s apartments, and learning historical stories of saints with whom we felt connected to as the collective body of Christ. Church made me feel connected to something much larger and older than myself. For the first time in that DSA meeting, I saw that what church did for me, radical politics might do for others.
American Christianity has often had a decidedly capitalist bent, but there is a long history between Christianity and socialist movements. Over the past three years, some American Christians have rediscovered this tradition and found themselves gravitating to socialism—in all its varieties, from democratic socialism to full-fledged communism. ...
A FEW MONTHS AGO, I WAS in Queens with 26,000 other people to hear Senator Bernie Sanders speak at a rally. ... It felt, to my Pentecostal-raised ears, like an altar call, the kind in which the pastor gets on stage and rallies the crowd to give up their lives up to God and for something greater than themselves. During the altar calls of my youth, the band would play while people raised their hands, crying and surrendering themselves as if in a blissful trance, sometimes holding each other while intimately praying together. Sanders’ rally brought me back to what those moments in church felt like: As if I was letting go and losing myself in a larger sea of being.
