Spiritual activism

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Spiritual activism is a practice that brings together the otherworldly and inward-focused work of spirituality and the outwardly-focused work of activism (which focuses on the conditions of the material or physical world). Spiritual activism asserts that these two practices are inseparable and calls for a recognition that the binaries of inward/outward, spiritual/material, and personal/political all form part of a larger interconnected whole between and among all living things. In an essay on queer Chicana feminist and theorist Gloria E. Anzaldúa's reflections on spiritual activist practice, AnaLouise Keating states that "spiritual activism is spirituality for social change, spirituality that posits a relational worldview and uses this holistic worldview to transform one's self and one's worlds."^[1][2]

Spiritual activism is most often described as being separate from organized religion or dogma, but rather as activism that is generally egalitarian, particularly in service for people who are oppressed or marginalized, as well as for the Earth and all living things. Numerous women of color scholars, especially Black womanists and Chicana feminists, have developed and written about spiritual activism in their work as a way of creating positive social change. The Jewish rabbi Avraham Weiss describes spiritual activism in similar terms, as a fundamental teaching from Torah,^[3] and the Christian scholar Robert Macafee Brown says it's necessary to "overcome the great fallacy"^[4] to bring about real change.

In an article on yoga practice and spiritual activism, Womanist scholar Jillian Carter Ford states that "spiritual notions of oneness, such as the oneness of mind/body and the oneness of all people, sets in motion a spiritual activism wherein spirituality is engaged to create social and ecological uplift." For beginners, this often means unlearning or deconstructing "a host of harmful messages we have been socialized to believe."^[5] Ecowomanist Layli Maparyan describes spiritual activism as "putting spirituality to work for positive social and ecological change."^[6]

The concept emerged in late 20th and early 21st century scholarship in the fields of womanism and Chicana feminism, to describe the spiritual practice of creating a more socially just world through developing the capacities of the internal spiritual self in order to create social change that ends oppression and is generally egalitarian (separate from organized religion or any form of dogma).^[1][5]

The writers and scholars describing it have noted how spiritual activism is generally dismissed in academia and the Western world because spirituality cannot be controlled or measured within the confines of rational thought, along with the assumption that it is otherwise primitive, backward, based on superstition or delusion.^[1][7][5]