When communion is solidarity:  post-election reflections on faith as politics

by Gary Hall.

Back in 2016, inspired by the radical political evensong led by Dorothee Soelle and others in the 1960s and 70s, and galvanized by the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump, we created Political Night Prayer in Birmingham. We were responding to a perceived need ‘to work continually at real solidarity, when the political agenda is to divide and to annexe resources for the already privileged who imagine themselves entitled’. I’m quoting from a PNP email exchange of the time. 

In 2016 it was Donald Eadie and Renate Wilkinson who brought to us a vivid sense of how, in late-1960s Cologne, Dorothee Soelle held together ‘the burning actualities of political situations’ with biblical encounters, meditation, discussion and faith-motivated action. We pondered why, in our experiences of then and now, this was not more of an everyday ecclesial reality. The many who turned up for each Political Night Prayer demonstrated a hunger for this kind of work and worship, and for this kind of gathering which was itself an instance of the reflective practice we were trying to articulate: communion, connexion, ekklesia, solidarity, different ways of naming something we were feeling about our human (and more-than-human) interdependence, and about how we wanted to live together into the future.

Since then, the Methodist Church in Britain adopted a Strategy for Justice, Dignity and Solidarity and fostered invaluable solidarity circles. The priority has been, rightly, to get on with good practice across the connexion; but it goes hand in hand with the ongoing work of delving into what solidarity can actually mean in Christian, theological understanding. To this end I turned to several recent presentations by Rowan Williams, for whom the theme of solidarity has become increasingly prominent.[1]

He sets his own work in the context of twentieth-century Catholic social teaching, especially the 1987 encyclical of Pope John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (Concern for Social Affairs). This is the encyclical which defines solidarity as a virtue revolving around truly recognizing one another as persons, and recognizing interdependence ‘as a system determining relationships in the contemporary world, in its economic, cultural, political and religious elements’. The solidarity evoked ‘is not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people, both near and far. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all.’[2] Solidarity is when feelings get grounded, when you and I live out the implications of the realization that our flourishing is always bound up with that of the other person; never over against the other. Solidarity is an essential characteristic of deep peace, and a mark of a healthy democratic society, a conviction enfleshed as, for instance, the trade union founded by Lech Walesa and others at the Lenin / Gdansk Shipyards in Pope John Paul II’s Polish homeland.

In Christian theological perspective it is also more than that. This ‘more than’ is vital. Following a trail laid by his late friend and mentor, Kenneth Leech, Rowan Williams evokes the richness of solidarity by describing several things it is more than. For instance, it is more than a commitment to the common good. It is also more than communitarianism, and more than empathy.

It is more than commitment to the common good because that good must remain relatively undefined whilst we learn to live the inevitable conflicts and tensions of our clashing ideas of what is good for us. How even do we face these conflicts constructively and intelligently, then navigate them to a better place together?

Solidarity is more than communitarianism, a love of the community which gives me identity, because community-bound affinity can flip into the kind of romantic nationalism which grows out of harmful forms of nostalgia. Dare I say that whilst Flower of Scotland and La Marseillaise are spine-tingling football anthems, they are potentially lethal battle hymns in the wrong hands or circumstances. When we are too closely defined by comforting and truncated expressions of our particular social/tribal belonging, then it is all the harder to see the potentially better values, habits and power structures of people who are not like us.

Solidarity is also more than empathy, because empathy can always morph into acquisition or occupation of the other person’s experience. When ‘I know how you feel’, then I cannot be properly attentive to how your experience of the world may be utterly other than I can know or imagine. Solidarity includes the art and habit of standing with strangers whose struggles and hopes and pains are not mine.

In fragile times, when ‘many of the structures of relationship in our epoch have been eroded, leading to a sense of lostness, of fragmentation, of exile’,[3] faith involves discerning together how the tough realities of political life might more closely approximate to the human and more-than-human solidarity which, for us, is expression and extension of communion, koinonia, connexion – and a little echo of that redemptive solidarity enacted by our incarnating God.

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[1] See for instance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_k-EHVFxzo, ‘Ethics and Solidarity by Rowan Williams’ – a lecture recorded on Saturday 25 February 2023; or the Bampton lecture 2024 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5H9vz0QqFCY&list=PLWCAltzb4KrORSI9r8KLs8AIlWEPNyryI&index=2 or https://baptistnews.com/article/politics-faith-and-mission-a-conversation-with-rowan-williams/

[2] https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_30121987_sollicitudo-rei-socialis.html, 38 & 39.

[3] Kenneth Leech, The Sky is Red, DLT 2003, page 10. For more on this theme see especially Chapter 1, ‘Solitude and Solidarity’.