Mennonite Weekly Review

After an important election year, how do we think about political engagement? Do I have to wait for another election so I can fill that gnawing political void?

Not according to Romand Coles and Stanley Hauerwas in their new book, Christianity, Democracy and the Radical Ordinary (Cascade, 2008).

Politics involves all the ways we tend to the common good. This happens in our neighborhoods, not just in Washington. For Coles and Hauerwas, democracy is everyday politics that turns us to the importance of “concrete practices of tending to one another.”

Coles describes the civil rights movement as a story of this kind of everyday democracy. He focuses our attention on the ordinary African-American churchwomen who gave Martin Luther King Jr. a movement to talk about. Ella Baker is the protagonist of this story. She was a political organizer who spread the civil rights movement among everyday folk. According to Coles, Baker’s politics displayed “the arts and the techniques of ‘sitting at the feet’ of the least of these.” These relationships turned into political networks that birthed life in the midst of suffering.

Baker’s democratic politics started at the kitchen table and community meals. For Coles, with whom we eat is as politically significant as what we do in the voting booth. Meals of communion fuel political imagination.

Coles also examines the political significance of footwashing. He draws on the work of Jean Vanier to show that footwashing involves power, not just servanthood.

“Power, even the power of ‘servant-leaders,’ can quickly corrupt,” writes Coles. We are always tempted, as Vanier puts it, “to exercise authority and help the poor from ‘on top,’ as someone superior, out of pity or even a certain disdain.”

The greatest danger, according to Coles, is to think that we have everything to give and nothing to receive. Thus Vanier emphasizes our need to have someone wash our feet — to endure the exposure of someone taking our feet into her hands.

The practice of footwashing displays the profound giving and receiving that is at the heart of Mennonite Central Committee and “other exemplary Mennonite organizations,” Coles writes.

Coles lauds the ability of Mennonites to enter into relationships without wielding power over another. Instead, Mennonite organizations learn from people who are rich in local knowledge. Although Coles is not a Christian, he is attracted to how Mennonites embody receptivity, which is tied to the virtue of patience and the conviction of nonviolence. He asks, “Could it be that such receptivity is among the most vital liturgical practices in Mennonite communities?”