religious solidarity

“Almost all the peasants [Paul Farmer] was meeting shared a belief that seemed like a distillation of liberation theology: 'Everybody else hates us,' they’d tell him, 'but God loves the poor more. And our cause is just.' The Marxists Farmer had read, and many of the intellectuals he knew, distained religion, and it was true that some versions of Christianity, and more than a few missionaries, invited impoverished Haitians into what Pere Lafontant called 'the cult of resignation,' into accepting their lot patiently, anticipating the afterlife. But the Christianity of the peasants Farmer talked to had a different flavor: 'the shared conviction that the rest of the world was wrong for screwing them over, and that someone, someone just and perhaps even omniscient, was keeping score.' He felt drawn back toward Catholicism now, not by his own belief but in sympathy with theirs, as an act of what he’d call 'solidarity.' He told me, 'it was really the experience of seeing people up there in Cange, or in some awful hospital, or at a funeral, or knowing that people were awaking in their huts to two rooms full of hungry kids and still going on. Religion was the one thing they still had.'

How could a just God permit great misery? The Haitian peasants answered with a proverb: ...'God gives but he doesn’t share.' This meant, as Farmer would later explain it, “God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he’s not the one who’s supposed to divvy up the loot. That charge was laid upon us.' Liberation theologians had a similar answer: 'You wants to see where Christ crucified abides today? Go to where the poor are suffering and fighting back, and that’s where He is.'
- Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World

Solidarity – the perfect term for what I believe. I remember talking to a man in Africa, telling me of his religion and love for God, about ubuntu and how were are all connected through God. One could call him ignorant, I call him simple. He believed it, so purely, surely and happily; there was no agenda, it was an exchange -- that it caused me to believe.