By Yolanda Pierce, Ph.D.,
On Tuesday morning, Dave Ramsey, financial guru and evangelical Christian, provided the world with a definition he coined: “Activist: Bitterness that desperately needs a hobby.”
It’s difficult to know to which activists Ramsey is referring, but his all-encompassing definition of the word gives me pause. Was not Jesus an activist? Did he not dare to defy political and religious authority to feed the hungry, heal the sick, honor the marginalized and restore honor to women? Is not the very work of Jesus on the cross the greatest form of activism and advocacy which Christians celebrate? Isn’t Jesus the One who was willing to be bruised, beaten, and crucified – an activist on behalf of all humanity, even for those who reject him? And was not the Apostle Paul an activist, perhaps the greatest missionary of Christendom?
It reveals a deep historical amnesia to call activists “bitter.” Those who worked tirelessly to bring us child labor laws or voting rights or a minimum wage were all activists whose lives and efforts have changed our world for the good. Surely a Martin Luther King, Jr. or Dorothy Day or Eleanor Roosevelt or Thurgood Marshall were activists whose social and political agitation changed the course of human history?
But, of course, I don’t believe that Ramsey was referring to these types of activists, the ones which so many Christian evangelicals love to quote – the “good” activists. In his definition, “activist” is a dirty word – bitter folks in need of a hobby. Does he mean the activists of Ferguson or Baltimore or Cleveland? Does he mean the activists who launched #BlackLivesMatter or those fighting on behalf of their civil rights? Does he mean the activists who are rallying against police violence or the activists who are protesting the cradle-to-prison pipeline? Does he mean the activists who are routinely disrupting traffic, shutting down public buildings, and rallying in the streets? You know, the activists that are making life inconvenient for the privileged – those activists you want to ignore and dismiss as “outside agitators?”
And here is where so many evangelical Christians display their willful ignorance. The men and women who are even at this very moment are protesting police brutality are doing so in a longstanding tradition that connects with the biblical witness. If you serve a Jesus that disrupted the powerful and shifted paradigms, then you must bear witness to the men and women who today are speaking truth to power, making the comfortable uncomfortable, and turning the world upside down. When black women activists went topless and blocked Market Street in the Financial District of San Francisco to draw attention to black women and girls killed by police, they stood in a long line of biblical wailing women who tore their garments as a sign of mourning and protest. If you are a Christian and you have a problem with activists, you may need to discard the very scripture upon which your faith is built.
It is far too easy to dismiss the activism for basic human rights as “bitterness” when your privilege takes those basic human rights for granted. Too many of the privileged cannot imagine a world in which one has to become an activist, a protestor, and a dissenter in order to demand rights that only some have been automatically given. It is the height of privilege and arrogance to think that the disenfranchised and the dispossessed are activists because they are bored and in need of a hobby. Activism is a matter of life or death for those whose lives seem not to matter in this country; for those whose deaths cannot even be grieved.
It is far too easy to shame activists with words like “bitter,” instead of acknowledging that their activism is fueled by protests against inequity, racism, and systemic injustice. It is far too easy to call an activist “bitter” instead of acknowledging your culpability in unjust systems. I pray that the activists from Ferguson to San Francisco keep exposing the bitter truth of America’s broken and unjust systems – and from these bitter truths may we repent and restore.
Dr. Yolanda Pierce is the Elmer G. Homrighausen Associate Professor of African American Religion and Literature at Princeton Theological Seminary, and Liaison with the Princeton University Center for African American Studies. She blogs @ Reflections of an Afro-Christian Scholar
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