I can’t say my affiliation with Christianity was very strong, but I did develop a positive association with the idea of moral community—the idea that we could get together, support each other, and try to do something good for one another and for the world. That seemed like an important thing for us to be doing.
When did you start thinking about the role of religion in your animal-rights activism? I ask because the organization you started, Direct Action Everywhere, feels explicitly secular.
I remember having a conversation around 2015 with Doug McAdam, a sociologist at Stanford who studies political movements. For the most part, he thought that DxE was a fascinating demonstration of grassroots mobilization and community-building. But he said one thing that really hit me hard, and made me think we might be on the wrong path: “You’re not really harnessing any particular identity. And movements that don’t have identities behind them just don’t succeed, because they can’t sustain themselves over the long term.”
Fundamentally, what moves people is when they believe they’re fighting for something that’s part of them. If it’s purely about ideology, not about identity, it’s just not going to create sustained mobilization. The example he gave me was the Black church. He told me to read “The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement,” by Aldon Morris.
I already knew a lot about Martin Luther King, Jr., and how the movement collapsed in the late sixties partly because of the loss of faith. There wasn’t the same sense of community and commitment. Doug shared this acronym with me, WUNC, coined by the sociologist Charles Tilly. It stands for “worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment.” When you have those four attributes, you have a successful movement.
I realized there wasn’t a sense of worthiness in our movement, partly because there wasn’t a commitment to some greater moral purpose. In the late stage of the civil-rights movement, it became nihilistic—the Weather Underground, the Vietnam War tearing at the fabric of people’s commitment to nation, to community, to church. Our movement just never had that deep sense of moral purpose that made people feel like, O.K., these people are praiseworthy people.
You don’t think “Don’t kill animals” is a worthy cause?
I think it’s a worthy cause. I don’t think people see us as worthy people. There’s a big difference. It’s not enough to have a good cause. You have to have people believe you’re good people. If anything, it’s almost the opposite—even though people think we’re a good cause, they find us annoying and pedantic.
I remember when Ta-Nehisi Coates went on Ezra Klein’s show after he read “Why We’re Polarized.” He called it a “cold, atheist book.” I think, even when animal rights is at our best, people see us as a cold, hard-atheist movement. There’s sentimentality and emotion about suffering in animal-confinement facilities, but there isn’t this sense that we’re a morally meaningful, upstanding contingent of the broader human community.
I agree that the public thinks you guys are freaks or agents provocateurs trying to advance a marginal cause. How does affiliation with the church change that?
I think it’s a complete antidote to that “freak” allegation. It’s hard to say whether this is a cultural artifact of the past ten thousand years or whether there’s something inherent in humanity—the desire for divine purpose. But, regardless of whether it’s socialization or something inherent, most humans on Earth see the divine as the most morally praiseworthy thing in our communities. This is even true of the cold, hard atheists—the effective altruists. They don’t call the divine God. Their divinity is some form of very strict utilitarianism.
A shared narrative has to involve a story that doesn’t just matter to me. We all have stories about ourselves that are funny or interesting or inspiring, but a lot of times they only matter to us. And there are some stories that affect all of us—the nation-state, universities, sports teams.
The other thing that’s important is a sense of power beyond our comprehension and control. I think that might be inherent to human beings—there’s something about that we almost want to worship.