On Mutual Aid and Christian Ministry
“And to the extent that any of the disciples had means, each of them determined to send a contribution for the relief of the brothers and sisters living in Judea.” Acts 11:29
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Karl Marx
On January 12, 2023, a tornado tore through central Alabama with a track of about 76 miles killing 7. The day after, my shop foreman, Joe Fontine, told me that he had to help out with tornado relief at a church members’ house, which had a tree on it. I asked if I could go with him to help out.
When we got there, after circituitously navigating emergency vehicles and roadblocks, there were already about 20 people there. The men were working on the trees with chainsaws and the women were cooking in the single wide mobile home. I was given the task of piling up tree limbs in the brisk cold, which I gladly did. While the details don’t matter, we did get the tree off the house so that the power company could reconnect the electricity.
I’ve spent a lot of time on the left side of the political spectrum and while I don’t know the specific politics of the people from the church ministry, I would assume that most of them are right or right leaning. The left talks a lot about mutual aid and mutual aid networks, but most of this is manifest in swapping cash or handing out grant money among low income and working people. Nothing wrong with this, but it doesn’t have an institutional character - it’s just an informal network of trade.
The men and women of Safe Harbor’s (the church) outreach ministry represent an institutional response to a natural disaster and are more exemplary of the spirit of mutual aid in the sense that they are more organized, more disciplined, and have more skill than most left wing mutual aid networks. While I believe the network approach to institution building is the correct path, the lack of organizational discipline, planning, and skill of left wing mutual aid networks is a huge barrier to institutionalization, of which right wing ministries are well ahead.
In essence, right wing ministry and left wing mutual aid networks have the same aim and, in fact, use some of the same exact language. Marx argues for the way the Christian disciples lived. I would go further to argue that the organizational discipline of the right and the network approach of the left are indeed complimentary.
Apocalyptic narratives abound on the right and the left, which are rooted in anxieties about climate change, collapsing social and economic institutions, unhinged identity politics which are being institutionalized, and either the retrenchment of the state (in rural communities) or the extension of neoliberal state, particularly in policing, into urban communities. The response from both sides is strikingly similar in material practices, while the two sides can’t possibly work together because of the rigid adherence to polar opposite social mores or identitarian-based morality.
It is probably imperative that we put aside our rigid moralities for the time being. It’s likely that these can be eventually worked out and there is more diversity in thought on the right than is commonly believed. But, frankly, there is entirely too much material work to do on a day-to-day basis to worry too much about whether someone is gay or whether someone has “interrogated their whiteness.” These are tertiary issues compared to the need for diverse and robust mutual aid networks with high levels of organizational discipline.