Here is my new light reading: Angels Davis collection of essays and interviews: Freedom Is Still a Struggle. One of the things and I am still looking for give our current state of affairs in this county is not confort but a systemic understanding of what is going on, how we got here, and why everything that is happening is not much different but a reflection of the same issues that are historic to this country and yet they are as urgent as ever. One of the best ways to reflect on our current difficulty perhaps is holding a mirror to ourselves, so I don’t take lightly to reflect on this chapter while calling our own struggles for progress in the Episcopal Church and how I see that our shortcomings and issues are a micro reflection of the same struggles and issues that plague our society.
Angela Davis reminds us that “freedom is a constant struggle” not a destination reached by incremental reforms, but a collective labor demanding radical transformation. Davis warns of the seductive illusion that symbolic victories or minor reforms can be mistaken for liberation. When societies celebrate milestones without dismantling the deeper systems of racism, violence, and oppression, the result is not freedom but accommodation. This analysis should unsettle the Episcopal Church, where visible signs of progress often coexist with unbroken power structures. I feel constantly like the real systemic issues are never addressed by our Church and its leadership. Perhaps the metaphor of an onion is fitting here….we unpacked a few layers, with our symbolic wins, but stop to continue to unpack it to reach the real middle. Angela Davis make this exact reference (not the onion) but that legalistic advancements (read our convention proclamations or motions, or cannon changes) have a capacity to pretend to reach change and yet they can address real change, but they do not confront the issues that brought us to need those legalistic changes, structures of white supremacy that continue to live there along side the public changes that make it look like progress was made.
Thus, Davis insists that progress measured in representation or surface reforms creates a dangerous false sense of closure. Racism, incarceration, and state violence are not isolated aberrations; they are woven into the very fabric of social systems. By focusing too narrowly on moments of advancement: electing a barrier-breaking leader, passing a resolution, adopting a new policy; we risk mistaking symbols for substance. Worse, we can deceive ourselves into thinking that the work is finished, when the machinery of oppression remains fully operational.
This is not only a political dynamic. The same temptation operates within the Church. Episcopalians rightly celebrate gains in representation: more diverse leadership at the altar, public statements on immigration or racial justice, a willingness to name systemic sins. Yet too often these achievements function like the historical milestones Davis critiques. They are celebrated as proof of progress while the underlying distribution of wealth, governance structures, and cultural dominance remain largely intact.
The Episcopal Church’s Token Progress
In recent years, the Episcopal Church has pointed to incremental steps as evidence of transformation: staff realignments, departmental restructuring, new language about inclusion. But, as Davis might put it, these adjustments leave untouched the deeper architecture of ecclesial power. Decisions about budgets and property continue to consolidate wealth in traditional centers. Governance remains largely inaccessible to the most marginalized voices. And efficiency is prioritized over redistribution, proximity to suffering, or imaginative solidarity with global struggles.
This pattern echoes the very critique Davis levels at the broader world: proximity to power has a corrosive effect. Those inside institutions, whether governments or churches, often find themselves more invested in stability, reputation, and survival than in the disruptive, destabilizing work of justice. When the church clings to incrementalism, it mistakes accommodation for liberation.
Davis cautions that closeness to institutional power can blunt the urgency for change. When leaders are absorbed into the very systems they once sought to challenge, they risk trading in radical commitments for incremental reforms. This corrosive effect is not limited to secular politics; it is deeply alive within ecclesial structures. We see leadership of color not directly address systemic change, or feel like the changes enacted are just falling into the same dynamics that other leadership of the past had come to adhere to.
In the Episcopal Church, bishops, clergy, and committees may start with a vision for justice but often settle for symbolic gestures when the demands of stability press in. Representation without redistribution, inclusion without structural change, preaching without risk, all of these serve as shields for the status quo. Davis’ words press on this wound: what we call progress may, in fact, be the very mechanism by which the system preserves itself. The best example of this is clergy to adhere to this ethos that calling their own members to real systemic change. I.e. clergy who silence the call to systemic change, fearing that to confront parishioners with their own racism would drive people away and diminish resources, as if preserving institutional comfort were more sacred than the gospel values themselves.
What, then, would it mean for the church to move beyond token progress? Davis points us toward collective struggle, intersectional solidarity, and the courage to imagine alternative futures. For the Episcopal Church, this might require redistributing wealth and power in ways that risk institutional security. It might even mean ceding decision-making authority to those on the margins, not merely including them in existing frameworks but changing the frameworks altogether. It might mean linking local struggles with global movements for justice, refusing to isolate the church’s work from the broader liberation of peoples worldwide, and ensuring that churches everywhere are mandated to mirror the communities their in, and provide concrete tangible services to the most needed of their members.
To embrace such a path is to accept disruption and instability as the price of faithfulness. The gospel, after all, does not promise comfort for institutions but freedom for the oppressed.
Angela Davis’ words remind us that symbolic progress is never enough. Representation without transformation, policy without redistribution, rhetoric without risk, Gospel without prophetic calls, these are not signs of liberation but symptoms of accommodation. The Episcopal Church cannot afford sleep in confort with its diversity or historic mantra when the deeper structure of wealth, whiteness, power, and exclusion remains intact.
The call is urgent: freedom is still a struggle. If the church is to be a vessel of God’s liberating love, it must risk its reputation, its stability, and even its institutional survival for the sake of justice. Anything less is not transformation but tokenism dressed in vestments.