Religious Socialism Podcast · DSA Religion and Socialism Commission

Broad-Based Organizing & Sacred Values | Aaron Stauffer

·50 min·3 clips

Stauffer argues people organize when something they hold sacred is threatened.

Ralph starts with Marx. He welcomes Aaron Stouffer, Associate Director of the Wendland Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt, and, as a friend, a good person, then asks him to wrestle with religion as both an opiate and a source of human flourishing. Aaron agrees the split is real. He traces that tension to a small-town Kansas childhood where the church sat at the center of community life and where getting things done meant understanding how churches worked together. The discussion keeps circling back to religion as a social force. Aaron treats faith as something that can hold people together, shape action, and also shut life down when it serves domination. Organizing comes next. He describes organizing as a process built around what people already hold sacred, because those commitments are what bring people into the fight in the first place. Sacred values are not abstract. Aaron defines them as evaluative attitudes toward the world and the goods and people in it, then names children, the environment, and human dignity as examples that can drive collective struggle. The frame is strategic. He argues that organizers too often assume the most provocative values will divide a constituency, when those same values are often what pull people into the fight. Ralph follows the strategy closely. Aaron explains the familiar move of getting people into the fight by starting with a sacred concern, then redirecting them toward narrower issues that are easier to win once momentum exists. Wins matter early. He says people need to feel that the first steps can succeed, because defeat from the outset can drain the energy that organizing depends on. Abolition enters the frame. Aaron uses mass incarceration as an example of human dignity being violated and desecrated, showing how moral language and political analysis can reinforce one another. The episode ends pedagogically. Ralph and Aaron land on organizing as a laboratory for economic and political change, where knowledge is made together rather than handed down by experts.

As heard by us

A serious look at how sacred values can become organizing power.

Aaron Stauffer treats religion as both a center of community and a source of tension, shaped by a small town in Kansas where the church was where people got things done.

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If you want religion, justice, and organizing in the same conversation, start here.

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