Power on the hill – and on the ground

In early March a small delegation from CBF traveled to Washington, DC to learn how to put our faith into action and advocate for others in the public sphere. Throughout the week, I kept thinking about power: who has it, who wants it, what reasons they want it for, what they plan to do with it or are doing with it, how they go about obtaining it.

Nowhere did I notice it more than on Capitol Hill on a weekday afternoon, as bustling crowds walked up and down, left and right and zig zagged, whether to simply get a glimpse of the symbol of power itself and snap their picture with it or to get their foot in the door of someone more powerful than them. And, of course, there were those who walked to take their place in the highest seats of power.

I felt my lack of power as a new generation of lofty professionals power-walked past me toward their destination in their fashion sneakers paired with blazers and slacks, while I sluggishly slumped up the hill one foot after another, regretting my choice of heels, wondering if I was going to make it without crumpling. They knew the game. I did not. They might get through a door into a “room where it happens.” I would get 15 minutes in the hallway with a 28-year-old executive assistant like me. Old power met new power in a generational conglomerate designed to keep the tradition going. Father met son and passed the torch on. The scene was like a Ferris Wheel endlessly turning, but not just anyone can get on. How do you hitch a permanent ride on the wheel of power? That’s Washington’s secret.

But it’s really not a secret, is it? While the landscape of Washington continues to diversify into 2023, it remains majority White, male, heteronormative, upper-middle class, and Protestant. According to the Pew Center of Research, as of January 9^th, 2023, 75% of Congress is White, even though only 59% of the US population is White (Pew Research). Similarly, women still only make up 28% of this 118^th Congress, even though women have had presence in Congress since 1916.  These are history-making statistics, yet they still fall short.  These large discrepancies between our nation’s highest seats of power and the people they purport to represent might just account for the inequality that still runs rampant in our land of the free.

As our group sat in on a Senate Democratic caucus, Democrats presented a new bill—the Women’s Health Protection Act of 2023. We listened to perhaps 10 or so senatorial speeches before they all started to sound the same, and we left. From what we saw, it was mostly 50+ year old White men and women (with the exception of one non-White woman) making arguments for why American women and those with uteruses need access to abortions and reproductive rights. It dawned on us that most of these people will likely never, themselves, have to struggle with the issues they were fighting so passionately for, due to their gender, socio-economic status, or something else. Isn’t that an interesting paradigm? But, as easy as it would be, I’m not here to gripe about the inequalities in our political system.  

These reflections on power come with a significant caveat, because while I was merely an ant on that hill, I do not take it lightly that I do, in fact, have a lot of power compared to the rest of the world’s population. I am an upper-middle class, highly educated, straight, White woman living in the United States. That automatically comes with power that people without those titles are not offered. In my daily life that power is exemplified in more subtle, but no less pervasive ways than Washington power—in the loans I don’t have to take, in the bills I still don’t have to pay at 28 years old, in the health insurance that my employer pays, in the racist and homophobic microaggressions I don’t face, in the breaks I am cut over and over again due to my generational wealth. And I’m hardly the only one who benefits from an insidious mesh of power like this.

Power of any kind can never be taken lightly, and I must turn my own question onto myself: how am I using the power I have? One element of the many privileges I’m afforded is the choice to walk away from issues of social and economic inequality that don’t concern me. When the work of racial or other kinds of justice gets “too hard” or too exhausting, I can tune it out and pretend like it’s not happening, which I’ve done more often than I can explain away. But as a colleague painfully reminded me that week, that is not the Christian calling. The path that Jesus tread was not one of avoidance or escapism. It was one of advocating for individuals and groups of people who society did not allow to stand in his place and speak for themselves.

Change will be slow on Capitol Hill, but there is a different kind of power on the ground—the power of the urgent, of the intimate, of the face-to-face—a Jesus kind of power. Jesus did not effect change from the top down, but from the ground up. His was a grassroots power. He spent his days meeting with and listening to the needs of the most underrepresented people in society, often those of differing religions, races and social class, as well as those that society deemed unclean and impaired. He had little interest in bureaucracy. While he could see the bigger picture—the societal ills that caused poverty and violence—he addressed these issues by encountering the everyday people that make society turn—the tax collector whose heart he changed, the 5,000 hungry people that he fed through little means, the people on the margins he brought to the foreground by healing their ills or simply befriending them when no one else would, his friends that he taught daily through his words and actions about love, compassion, and justice, through the small groups of people around him that he inspired and mobilized to join his cause.

I felt powerless on Capitol Hill. Nobody knew my name, and nobody really cared. But they know my name at church. They know my name at work. They know my name at the local coffee shop. They know my name in the choirs I sing in. Many of them listen when I speak. They tune in to the things I write. They pay attention to my actions. That’s power.

Think about the places in your own community where they know your name and value your voice. Those are the places, amongst your own people, to strengthen relationships and build trust, partnerships, and alliances, so that together you can organize and assemble around common causes that are affecting your community and its people. This is the power of the personal and immediate—of seeing struggle in your own backyard and being led by empathy and conviction to advocate for change at the local level. Often the most immediate and visible change happens through local and state governments and nongovernmental organizations. And change at the local level creates momentum for change on a larger scale.

This is an opportunity to involve people on the margins of your community in the political process so that Washington will continue to look more like the American populace. Mobilize a group of people—diverse people. Go together to visit the offices of your local and state officials, or even the district office for your US representative, and speak about the issues that are most affecting the people of your community. Advocacy is fruitless if we are not actively involving those we are advocating for in the process. We must be in direct collaboration with people who are struggling from the issues we are fighting for, working with them so their voices are heard, and allowing their experiences to shape our actions. Think how Jesus befriended those others would not go near, went into areas considered “off-limits” or taboo to Jews, and crossed social boundaries, blurring the lines between hierarchies and social divisions. When you meet with government officials, don’t shy away from sharing with them how your faith in Jesus informs your advocacy.

In today’s firestorm political and social climate, it’s easy to feel powerless. When we are bombarded daily with strangers arguing to no avail on social media and politicians who say and do inconceivable, inhumane things, it’s easy to resign to believing that there is no point to our efforts, and to check out entirely. I’m guilty of this. If I can drown out the noise and go about my day, it’s almost like none of it is happening. But doing that keeps me protected and leaves others defenseless. I imagine that Jesus has watched me cower safely in the corner for years while his people suffer, and he is begging me to come out and look alive, to see the people and be with them, to fight with them. This engagement in the world that Jesus is calling for is not doomscrolling through Twitter and Facebook and picking fights to make myself feel better. He is calling me to think strategically, plan collaboratively, and act accordingly with empathy, consistency, and conviction.

For many of us Christians who walk through the world with an abundance of power that we didn’t ask for, the call to follow the footsteps of Jesus is pressing, and the responsibility to advocate for the oppressed and suffering, urgent. Our power can be wielded for justice like swords are forged into plowshares.