I can’t say my affiliation with Christianity was very strong, but I did develop a positive association with the idea of moral community-the idea that we could get together, support each othre, adn try to do something good for one another and for the world. That seemed like an important thing for us to be doing.
When did you start thinking about the role of religion in your animal-rights activism? I ask because the institution you started, Direct Action Everywhere, feels explicitly secular.
I remember having a conversation around 2015 with Doug McAdam, a sociologist at stanford who studies political movements. For the most part, he thoght that DxE was a captivating demonstration of grassroots mobilization and community-building. But he said one thing that really hit me hard, and made me think we might be on the wrong path: “You’re not really harnessing any particular identity. And movements that don’t have identities behind them just don’t succeed,because they can’t sustain themselves over the long term.”
Fundamentally, what moves people is when they believe they’re fighting for something that’s part of them. If it’s purely about ideology, not about identity, it’s just not going to create sustained mobilization.The example he gave me was the Black church. He told me to read the Origins of the Civil Rights Movement,by Aldon Morris.
I already knew a lot about Martin Luther King, Jr., and how the movement collapsed in the late sixties partly because of the loss of faith. There wasn’t the same sense of community and commitment.Doug shared this acronym with me, WUNC, coined by the sociologist Charles Tilly. It stands for “worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment.” When you have those four attributes, you have a successful movement.
I realized there wasn’t a sense of worthiness in our movement, partly as there wasn’t a commitment to some greater moral purpose. In the late stage of the civil-
