Vincent Lloyd

Many commentators have suggested that the US Civil Rights Movement was led by religious figures while the current movement for racial justice, organized around the slogan Black Lives Matter, is secular. This chapter complicates that narrative. It examines ways that religious ideas and practices continue to circulate among racial justice organizers today. While some organizers identify as secular, others as Christian, and still others as embracing African-inspired spirituality, the shared vocabulary of the movement has deep Christian resonances. Concepts like love, dignity, and faith circulate on social media and in activist meetings, and this language stands ambivalently between the secular and the religious.

Recent secular theorists of toleration have turned to Christian thought as a resource to overcome problems faced by secular-liberal accounts of toleration. This review essay examines three such projects, one in the tradition of Thomistic virtue ethics, another in the tradition of Frankfurt School critical theory, and another in political theory. While Christian ethics can learn from the methods and theoretical machinery deployed in these studies, each study assumes that the question of toleration is posed from a position of power and privilege. The essay asks what it might mean to consider toleration from the perspective of a marginalized community—like the early Christians.

While unionization rates have steadily declined in the United States, there has been a renewal of grassroots labor organizing—in many cases connected in some way with religious communities. Attending to such organizing efforts holds the potential to deepen religious-ethical reflection on questions of labor, and these religious-ethical reflections hold the potential to enrich on-the-ground organizing efforts. These opportunities have largely been overlooked. On the one hand, while scholars have recently explored connections between religious ideas and economic ideas, they have often neglected questions of labor. On the other hand, labor studies scholars have often ignored the role of religion, although this is beginning to change. In this introduction we limn the resources available for religious-ethical reflection on questions of labor and we propose a direction that the field could take, bringing together engagement with religious traditions and attunement to grassroots organizing.