Spiritual Defiance Quotes

“People are not fleeing churches today because they have lost their deep hunger for a spiritual connection and participation in authentic spiritual communities. Rather, they are fleeing because so many churches now seem bereft of the very spirit that birthed them in the first place. If clergy want to find their people, they might try looking in coffee shops, in homeless shelters, among the young who have pitched their tents in parks to dramatize economic injustice. While we shop, salute, and worship celebrities and athletes, the world is falling apart. What we need today is a move to Occupy Religion.”
― Robin Meyers, Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance

“To the best-selling atheists of our time, who have lumped us all together into one ridiculous religious cartoon and then proudly announce that they don’t believe in the God that most of us don’t believe in either, I say, for the love of God … RESIST!”
― Robin Meyers, Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance

“If there are rules against taking advantage of resident aliens, then why are so many Christians the first to call for deportation of migrants? It’s as if we expect these strangers to provide us with cheap manual labor, roofing our houses, landscaping our yards, pouring concrete, and caring for our children, but then we want them to disappear after sundown.”
― Robin Meyers, Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance

“It is a victory for the empire, but not for the kingdom of God, that if you are “too big to fail” it means that your rewards are privatized but your risks are socialized. You can gamble with other people’s money, and if you win, you win. But if you lose, we lose. I don’t know what economic model that is, but it’s not God’s economy, so I say, for the love of God … RESIST!”
― Robin Meyers, Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance

“If we allow ourselves to be intimidated in our search for truth by the gatekeepers of empire—the billionaires who are now buying up all our newspapers and television stations in order to report from the corporate mountaintop news that is so fake that a whole generation now gets its real news from fake news programs, then we are all wandering in the wilderness. By the way, would that more preachers of the gospel had the fearlessness of Jon Stewart.”
― Robin Meyers, Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance

“Thus the fundamental illusion from which we must be disentangled, or “undone,” is that the proper definition of the life of faith itself is first and foremost a belief system with behavioral consequences, rather than a way of being in the world whose behavior consequences make clear the things we believe. In other words, we are not acting upon beliefs so much as we are believing through action—we are not believers who act but actors who believe.”
― Robin Meyers, Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance

“As for gifted preachers, I like a smooth voice in the pulpit as much as anyone. But there are times when I would prefer some gravel, some red-faced stammering, even a little public anguish from a preacher who has tasted the bread of heaven and lifted the cup of kindness and now feels a little drunk for justice.”
― Robin Meyers, Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance

“Or that Ayn Rand and Jesus are truly strange bedfellows? Why can’t we say this? Because we are afraid. Why are we afraid? Because we care too much about what people think of us, and not enough about whether we say what needs to be said at a time like this.”
― Robin Meyers, Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance

“It seems to me that I have greater peace and am close to God when I am not “trying to be a contemplative,” or trying to be anything special, but simply orienting my life fully and completely towards what seems to be required of a man like me at a time like this. —THOMAS MERTON”
― Robin Meyers, Spiritual Defiance: Building a Beloved Community of Resistance