Article

Comment

Politics

2 May 2023

7 min read

What’s up with activism and what it is missing

As local elections occur in England, Councillor Elizabeth Wainwright is stepping down. Finding herself increasingly distant from activism, she asks if there’s any room for love.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

A protestor hold a megaphone up at a demonstration outside a building

A 2017 protest against London Fashion Week.

During my term as a Green Party District Councillor, I was once publicly congratulated by the local Extinction Rebellion (XR) group for taking on the new role of ‘Cabinet Member for Climate Change’.

A week or two later, I was questioned at a Council meeting about whether I was part of XR – opposition Councillors wanted to know if I’d be using their “extreme rent-a-mob tactics” in my role.

The local XR group are kind and knowledgeable and are making things happen. But to my Council questioners, this seemed to matter less than the fear of the ‘other’ – in this case, what they perceived to be a mob of environmental extremists that might do harm to the Council. It works both ways – I’ve also seen activist groups paint all elected Councillors with the same brush, assuming none of us care. It feels like there is little grace and a lot of judgement going round.

I’ve been curious why local non-activist residents and Councillors might not be keen to engage with activist groups (the term ‘activist’ is a broad one, and this article isn’t long enough to analyse it, but activist groups are generally engaged in activities to bring about social, environmental or political change).

Some tell me that they’re put off by what they perceive to be self-righteousness, judgement, anger, and the ‘hippy’ identity. I am put off by some of these things too, however much the media might falsely amplify these qualities – but still, perceptions close down relationship and possibility, and this is one of the things that keeps me at arm’s length from the ‘activist’ label, particularly when it gets caught up in group identity and expectation too. At a time when we need to see change in so many things – the state of the environment, politics, social equality – I’ve been wondering why I feel a distance from the ‘activist’ identity.

As well as getting elected, I’ve taken part in marches, signed petitions, joined social and environmental action groups. I want to walk alongside others who are doing something about the things that matter. But I have struggled to find the in-between of ‘slacktivism’ on the one hand (supporting causes largely online with little commitment), and intense commitment to a particular group or tribe on the other. And I am tired, because despite the protests, volunteering, and organising, the challenges seem bigger than ever. These efforts are important, but protesting the status quo isn’t enough.

I look at the NGOs, political groups, roles, funding proposals, slogans, meetings and glossy branding that are often part of activism and civil society more broadly – and are tools I’ve used myself – and I find myself doubting that these things can really bring about the change we need in our relationship with each other and the planet. We need more than better branding, or more funding, or more campaigns. As Audre Lorde said, the “master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” I find myself distancing from the urgency of activism, volunteerism, and campaigning in their current forms.

I’ve felt public discourse and action become less patient, more certain, more fragmented, with little room for curiosity and open conversations.

As well as form, I also feel a disconnection from engagement with and discussion of the issues of our time. In my involvement in social and environmental action over 20 years, I’ve sensed the shift brought about by rapidly evolving technology and media, which mean social and moral norms are evolving too. I’ve felt public discourse and action become less patient, more certain, more fragmented, with little room for curiosity and open conversations – sometimes explicitly through cancel culture or more subtly through othering and unintentional judgement. I think of a song by Sam Fender called White Privilege which includes the lines

“Everybody's offended… I'm not entirely sure the nitpicking can count as progression… Nobody talks to each other for fear of different opinions…”

Perhaps that closing down of conversation is in part down to social media and its algorithms which respond well to noise, performance, and oversimplification – it is not a space designed to help us relate across difference and understand each other, yet this is vital if we are to create the change needed in ourselves and in the world.

I want to be part of meaningfully and wisely addressing the world’s sickness, not desperately and loudly treating its symptoms. I have been wondering if there’s another way I might think about creating change.

Author, educator and social critic bell hooks (who prefers her name written in lowercase) wrote her book All About Love because she was

“thinking about how we love and what is needed for ours to become a culture where love’s sacred presence can be felt everywhere”.

She laments the lovelessness that is pervasive in our society. She goes on to say,

“profound changes in the way we think and act must take place if we are to create a loving culture”.

Sometimes, the issues at stake demand that we weep, raise our voices, get angry. Jesus turned over trading tables in the temple when he saw the sacred space had been turned into a marketplace – he got angry. But ultimately, he asks that we love our neighbours, including our enemies.

And yet sometimes I wonder whether we know how to love in the world as it is today. hooks says,

“In the realm of the political, amongst the religious, in our families, and in our romantic lives, we see little indication that love informs decisions, strengthens our understanding of community, or keeps us together.”

In her lectures on ending racism and sexism, she notices that her audiences, especially the young,

“become agitated when I speak about the place of love in any movement for social justice”

despite the great movements for social justice having emphasised love. Her listeners seem

“reluctant to embrace the idea of love as a transformative force.”

We need to see love as a transformative force though. We say we believe in it; we make films and write poetry about it, we see it guide communities during collective experiences like global pandemics, we turn our faces towards it, we seem to want it. Perhaps this is where the hope is – that we want love in its various forms, even if we are embarrassed to say so. Love is not naïve, it does not ask us to be nice and polite, or eternally optimistic. Its presence does not remove negativity, disagreement, people who let us down. But I think it gives us the eyes and tools to work together, and to stand in compassion before judgement.

If we take love and affection for our neighbour and places seriously, understanding what it looks like in practice, then movements for change can begin right where we are – in our language, in our community, in relationships that ripple out. In a placeless and disconnected age, perhaps this is the kind of activism that would help us heal ourselves as well as the world. Author Simone Weil said that

“the gospel makes no distinction between the love of neighbour and justice.”

I am becoming drawn to a love-led activism, an activism that is made from the hard day-to-day work of listening, and patience, and loving what’s sometimes hard to love. It might mean taking time to build relationships with people who aren’t like us. It might mean breaking out of our institutions and tribal groups, hearing each other across difference, and imagining new possibilities together rather than form ever-tighter clubs. It might mean getting soil not screens between our fingers, rooting in relationship, slowing down, paying attention. Whatever it looks like, it must appeal to both activists and non-activists, because we must all be involved in calling forth new worlds.

The Bible is full of calls to love justice, to defend the weak, to provide for the poor and hungry, to defy the authorities when we need to – but to do all this, as Paul says, “rooted and grounded in love”. Micah says,

“what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

As bell hooks knew, justice goes hand-in-hand with love. It is hard for one to exist without the other.

We can choose to open up conversations or shut them down, to walk with others or retreat behind ideological lines, to stand in judgement or relationship, fear or love.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter whether we’re catalysed by anger, indignation, love, or care – but it matters what we go on to do with that spark. We can choose to open up conversations or shut them down, to walk with others or retreat behind ideological lines, to stand in judgement or relationship, fear or love. I think about what might come next when I stand down as a District Councillor at the next election, following a pull to do justice, and to love kindness more than belong to a political tribe. If we choose, we could build a loving culture, weaving a social fabric where activists and non-activists can see past current paradigms and feel able to work together, holding each other up as neighbours whilst nurturing beauty, hope and the becoming world. It may have no clear identity, it may not suit the noise of social media, but this is work that I want to be a part of.

Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.