Jad Baaklini
Template:TOCnestleft Jad Baaklini
Socialist
For Jad Baaklini, 33, socialism brought him back to Christianity. He recently immigrated to Seattle, but he grew up in Lebanon. During university, he walked away from the Maronite Christianity of his youth, throwing himself into anarchist-socialist political movements. Years later, he eventually returned to his faith, and he partly credits his “anarcho-socialist leanings” for helping him truly see Christianity and the radical politics of Jesus for the first time.
Now an Episcopalian, he believes that the church has much to contribute to leftist spaces. When churches work well, he says that “people who fundamentally disagree must deal with each other, Sunday after Sunday, doing the same liturgy, singing the same hymns, praying the same prayers, taking the same bread and wine—and in this way, doing the work of ‘imaging’ a new society.” When churches do this, they create deeply “safe spaces for interpersonal transformation” and demonstrate that “withdrawal, call-outs, boycotts, and protests” are not the only tools in the social justice repertoire. For Baaklini, the church, with all its flaws, has the potential to live out the ideal of “solidarity” amid differences in a way that leftists dream about.[1]