Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's 2020 Campaign

Political campaigns in the United States typically approach religion in a standard way: they understand religious groups and people as constituencies. In this model, a person’s tendency to vote one way or another is tied to the various social and cultural identities they hold, including religion. Once establishing their religious demographic targets, candidates will then weave some sort of religious rhetoric into their public speaking when it seems appropriate, assert their religious views to the relevant media outlets, and construct outreach and engagement that largely takes the form of endorsements from high-ranking officials and clergy in various faith traditions and denominations.

Religion, though, is complex, and it shows up in the lives of people and communities in ways both anticipated and unanticipated, both obvious and surprising.  Religions are internally diverse, change and evolve over time, and are embedded in all aspects of culture beyond a person’s beliefs or values and how they might influence their vote. Operating under the assumptions of this framework reveals some of the limitations of more common organizing practices and creates opportunities for creative additions.

A campaign creatively engaging with religion is that of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14). Ocasio-Cortez has garnered attention for her organizing prowess, and her campaigning and legislating focus on intersections of identity and solidarity through overlap of mutual interest. Her campaign’s religious outreach is one example of Ocasio-Cortez’s understanding of the ways in which identities manifest in the lives and material needs of her constituents. Ocasio-Cortez’s outreach shows how one campaign considers and responds to the unanticipated and not-always-obvious ways religion shows up in the lives of communities and might provide an alternative path forward for campaigns and candidates on the left.

The Congresswoman’s work in NY-14 is particularly telling because more than 75% of her constituents are people of color. As the Democratic Party becomes increasingly racially diverse due to national demographic shifts, strategists and politicians will need to pay special attention to communities of color in their voter outreach, and because these communities are often deeply and actively rooted in religious traditions and practice, “doing religion” creatively will be vital.

Jonathan W. Soto is a constituent of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a political and field organizer on her reelection campaign. For Soto, engaging with religion in public life is a form of praxis, because “faith is inherently civic or engages with civic systems.” Soto believes that to organize with the working class necessarily means showing up in working class spaces, and that “the working class are in churches, houses of worship, mosques, temples, synagogues.”

Soto also noted the organizing power and potential of houses of worship, observing that “I've always thought of houses of worship: they, at a minimum, are organized to do some type of activity 52 times a year voluntarily.” Most of them have an internal organizing structure that enables them to run programming every week, and “those are just spaces that can continue to be activated.”

They are also places of what Soto calls “voluntary associations,” sites of social connection around which people tend to congregate and organize, especially in cities, as gentrification threatens vibrant, well-established communities. Crucially, for a district with a high immigrant population like NY-14, houses of worship are often the first place folks tend to go when arriving in America—they are familiar places where people can expect some level of shared values and cultural touchstones. They are where folks are accustomed to seeking out mutual aid—both material and spiritual. As Soto said, houses of worship are where the people are.

Soto points out that houses of worship are not simply places where people go to worship. They are community and resource hubs. Soto emphasized the role that houses of worship play in working class communities in his district: they serve as de facto community centers, clinics, social service sites. In NY-14, houses of worship have space that is at a premium in communities where development is pushing residents out and changing the face of a block, and so people gather there for arts programming, daycare, community meetings, and more. Programs like financial assistance and food distribution are often run out of these places, with religious leaders serving as a sort of caseworker substitute. As the social safety net in America continues to erode, religious communities are often what is left to support people.

According to Soto, the Congresswoman’s campaign has invested heavily in relationships with local congregations and worked to support them, especially in their direct assistance to constituents. During the COVID-19 pandemic (at one point in the spring, NY-14 was the most heavily impacted district in the country), the focus has been on material aid, distributing things like food and masks to community partners (including many houses of worship) so they, in turn, can distribute them to the community members who come through their doors. The campaign organically and consistently shows up in these places, acknowledging the role of religion in the lived experience of constituents without tokenizing or seeming to exploit it.

Soto expressed his skepticism for the constituency or identity approach to religion discussed earlier, making a point to call it “identitarian politics” instead of “identity politics.” In order to build a movement for justice, he argued, working class communities need to find solidarity across differences of race, gender, and religion, and siloing religious people and denominations might actively prevent that from happening. Soto said:

I always juxtapose the Tower of Babel with Pentecost. With the Tower of Babel, you have all these different folks that were united for a purpose, and then the way you destabilize them is changing all their languages and everyone goes along their way. But in Pentecost, everyone understood each other, even though they spoke their same language. So there was common understanding. So that's kind of my theological framework, that you're allowed to keep your own identity and expression of it, but there's a common understanding and awareness of interdependence. That's where real power is unleashed.

Soto asserts that a deeper understanding of religion can (and must) be integrated into campaign work as a uniting force, not one that divides. Soto and the work of Ocasio-Cortez's campaign demonstrate that by paying attention to religion’s diverse roles in community life, politicians and organizers can connect with communities and build power in continually creative ways.