Why an Agnostic Animal-Rights Activist Went to Seminary

Last week, I asked if modern political movements, especially on the left, could survive without the church. Social media serves as an outrage machine that can fuel big street demonstrations, but, without any real-world infrastructure, it cannot sustain the momentum needed to make actual social change. Can religious leaders help rectify this? Or does the decades-long decline of religious attendance mean that the church can no longer provide either a shared vision of how to treat people or the actual people to show up at a protest?

Two years ago, I wrote about Wayne Hsiung, the founder of the animal-liberation group Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE. Hsiung is among the most interesting activists I’ve encountered, in part because he faces a nearly impossible task: the public does not like animal-rights activists, and, even if people don’t want beagles to be tortured in testing facilities, it’s relatively easy for them to turn a blind eye to such things. That challenge of advancing a cause that not many people will get behind forced Hsiung and DxE to come up with increasingly novel ways to further their aims. Most famously, they engaged in so-called open rescues, breaking into breeding facilities and factory farms, basically kidnapping distressed animals, and then giving them new homes. Hsiung’s mission, outside of saving animals, was to get arrested and charged with various felonies so that he could then represent himself in court and argue that helping an animal in distress is legally justified.

But, last year, Hsiung made a surprising announcement: he was enrolling in a seminary. In a blog post about the decision, he wrote, “I have spent most of the last 2src years of my life understanding the power of disruption. But one cannot disrupt, effectively or sustainably, when one stands alone. The next chapter of my life will be exploring how to create the scaffolding that helps people stand as a community. And for that purpose, you may see me soon in a surprising place. My journey is taking me across the country into the ministry.” He began studying at Union Theological Seminary, in New York, that August.

It struck me at the time that Hsiung had only arrived at the church after exhausting nearly every other option for pursuing social change, including running for mayor of Berkeley. But, in our many talks across the years, I have always found him to be a deeply serious and intelligent man, and I wanted to know more about why he ultimately decided upon the church. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

Did you grow up going to church?

When I was born, in central Indiana, there were barely any Chinese people. There wasn’t a Buddhist temple within a hundred miles. The only place Chinese people could gather was at a Chinese church in my neighborhood. I don’t think I even coded it as a church, to be honest. I thought it was the place where I could talk to people in Chinese and have Chinese food and have friends. One of the biggest draws was the Chinese school—my mom was the founder and principal.

I can’t say my affiliation with Christianity was very strong, but I did develop a positive association with the idea of moral community—the idea that we could get together, support each other, and try to do something good for one another and for the world. That seemed like an important thing for us to be doing.

When did you start thinking about the role of religion in your animal-rights activism? I ask because the organization you started, Direct Action Everywhere, feels explicitly secular.

I remember having a conversation around 2src15 with Doug McAdam, a sociologist at Stanford who studies political movements. For the most part, he thought that DxE was a fascinating demonstration of grassroots mobilization and community-building. But he said one thing that really hit me hard, and made me think we might be on the wrong path: “You’re not really harnessing any particular identity. And movements that don’t have identities behind them just don’t succeed, because they can’t sustain themselves over the long term.”

Fundamentally, what moves people is when they believe they’re fighting for something that’s part of them. If it’s purely about ideology, not about identity, it’s just not going to create sustained mobilization. The example he gave me was the Black church. He told me to read “The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement,” by Aldon Morris.

I already knew a lot about Martin Luther King, Jr., and how the movement collapsed in the late sixties partly because of the loss of faith. There wasn’t the same sense of community and commitment. Doug shared this acronym with me, WUNC, coined by the sociologist Charles Tilly. It stands for “worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment.” When you have those four attributes, you have a successful movement.

I realized there wasn’t a sense of worthiness in our movement, partly because there wasn’t a commitment to some greater moral purpose. In the late stage of the civil-rights movement, it became nihilistic—the Weather Underground, the Vietnam War tearing at the fabric of people’s commitment to nation, to community, to church. Our movement just never had that deep sense of moral purpose that made people feel like, O.K., these people are praiseworthy people.

You don’t think “Don’t kill animals” is a worthy cause?

I think it’s a worthy cause. I don’t think people see us as worthy people. There’s a big difference. It’s not enough to have a good cause. You have to have people believe you’re good people. If anything, it’s almost the opposite—even though people think we’re a good cause, they find us annoying and pedantic.

I remember when Ta-Nehisi Coates went on Ezra Klein’s show after he read “Why We’re Polarized.” He called it a “cold, atheist book.” I think, even when animal rights is at our best, people see us as a cold, hard-atheist movement. There’s sentimentality and emotion about suffering in animal-confinement facilities, but there isn’t this sense that we’re a morally meaningful, upstanding contingent of the broader human community.

I agree that the public thinks you guys are freaks or agents provocateurs trying to advance a marginal cause. How does affiliation with the church change that?

I think it’s a complete antidote to that “freak” allegation. It’s hard to say whether this is a cultural artifact of the past ten thousand years or whether there’s something inherent in humanity—the desire for divine purpose. But, regardless of whether it’s socialization or something inherent, most humans on Earth see the divine as the most morally praiseworthy thing in our communities. This is even true of the cold, hard atheists—the effective altruists. They don’t call the divine God. Their divinity is some form of very strict utilitarianism.

A shared narrative has to involve a story that doesn’t just matter to me. We all have stories about ourselves that are funny or interesting or inspiring, but a lot of times they only matter to us. And there are some stories that affect all of us—the nation-state, universities, sports teams.

The other thing that’s important is a sense of power beyond our comprehension and control. I think that might be inherent to human beings—there’s something about that we almost want to worship.

In the early stages of your movement, how did you think about your identity as a moral, political movement?

We tried to create an identity, and instead everyone just saw us as a cult. That identity was basically veganism.

Looking back at the last fifteen years of organizing, a lot of what we were doing was independently creating practices you see in religion. The blog post I wrote that resonated more than any other was called “The Roadmap to Animal Liberation.” I envisioned a world where authorities and ordinary citizens—everyone who saw an animal suffering—just intervened to help.

It sounds, at the start, like a typical open-rescue scenario: we’re being sneaky; we break into a factory farm; we see these distressed animals; we get them out. But the catalyst for the narrative shift is when we see some farm employees and, instead of us running away—which is what typically happens when we’re caught—they run away, because they realize we’ve caught them. We call 911, the hospitals come, and we start taking all the sick animals out one by one with the entire community supporting us.

So we had this almost utopian vision of the way the world could be. In Christianity, it’s the Second Coming of Christ. In Buddhism, it’s some sort of karmic liberation, Nirvana.

We also had practices that you could describe as rituals. We asked our volunteers to go through nonviolence training, and one of the rituals was practicing getting harassed and responding positively. They’re standing there getting shoved, having people screaming right in their face—basically spitting in their face—saying, “Get the fuck out of here.” And everyone’s all in, committed to nonviolence, and they feel so proud afterward.

We independently came to a lot of the things that religious institutions already do in terms of ritual and vision. But I think the great mistake was, I just don’t think you can actually create identities like animal rights out of thin air. At most, you can remix ones that already exist and are powerful.

Why couldn’t veganism work as an identity? There’s a lot of famous vegans.

Veganism means too many things to too many people. Some people are health nuts. Some are doing it for environmental reasons. Some for ethical reasons. And even the ethical people have differing perspectives—hard-core utilitarians focus on suffering—and then there are people like me who have more ambitious visions. I would like to see a world where every animal has legal rights, where they’re seen as persons and included in our democracy.

But the other thing is, even if we have the same shared commitment, I don’t think you can build a moral community and a moral identity for the future unless you have a shared past as well.

When J. D. Vance said why he chose Catholicism, people mocked him. But I actually thought it was pretty wise. He said, “I really liked that the Catholic Church was just really old.” It goes back two thousand years. It’s the original church.

If you have a group of buddies from some basketball group, there’s something about the people you have shared stories with for twenty years that’s stronger than the people who’ve only been around a year. The O.G. crew really matters.

Veganism doesn’t even have stories. We have Peter Singer and Donald Watson, but they’re terrible stories. Peter Singer sitting in a cafeteria in Oxford getting into a philosophical argument about utilitarianism—that’s just not a very good story.

In the past, you’ve been quite critical about how progressive activism functions today, especially the ways in which it can be self-defeating and constricting. How did those concerns inform your decision to go to seminary?

In our corner of animal rights, we saw massive growth from 2src12 all the way through 2src18. The number of people coming both to protests and to community events was basically increasing by a hundred per cent every year. By 2src18, we had about five hundred highly committed, highly engaged people every month. And then you hit a certain size, and it all starts falling apart because there’s no scaffolding to hold it all together.

You see it get torn apart by infighting. Some people will blame excessive wokeness, but the critiques of wokeness are missing the point—wokeness was not inherent to the problem. The problem was there were no mechanisms for addressing wokeness within the left. We lacked a political immune system to handle disagreements, to elicit truthful opinions from people. A lot of people nodded and went along with even the craziest aspects because there was no mechanism to get feedback from our own people. Everyone just nodded along in fear, thinking, I don’t want to get cancelled.

There are all sorts of threats that can cause communities to fall apart. Having a shared vision inspires everyone to focus on that vision, but it also encourages people to set aside their differences and work things out because they see there’s a bigger purpose. We just never had that sort of shared vision that a religion has—notwithstanding the people who accused us of being a cult.

What is the scaffolding that the church provides?

Some of it is kind of silly, logistical, practical things that are actually quite important. One is just literal scaffolding—a literal building. Physical spaces where people gather are much more important than is commonly understood in movements. Everyone thinks it’s just Twitter and online mobilization, but one of the things that made us powerful when we were most powerful is that people were gathering in person a lot.

Another is institutional scaffolding. Basic things like, Do we have a conflict-resolution process? Do we have a membership process? What are the decisions about how the e-mail list is used? There are all these institutional insights and social technologies that religion has invented over the past ten thousand years that we can just use off the shelf. We don’t have to reinvent everything—like, How do we handle sexual harassment? Not that the church has handled sexual misconduct particularly well, but still.

There are also subtle institutional things that good moral communities do. People have always sought community for romantic relationships—they want to find people who are a good match, who are going to be good people. There’s no place to find that anymore. It used to be through the church. There are subtle ways people can identify good matches through the institutional scaffolding, such as choir and Sunday school. You find mutual inspiration through your love of song or teaching. Hinge and Tinder aren’t doing it.

Two other things in scaffolding are important. One is narrative—some sort of shared narrative, especially older narratives. Old stories are important. And the last one is ritual. The scholar Joseph Henrich, who I’m kind of obsessed with right now, has this paper about the importance of credibility-enhancing displays. One of the ways communities develop group cohesion is by asking all participants to engage in some sort of costly public display. There are terrible examples—fraternities with hazing—but also good ones. Effective altruism has one I think is good: give ten per cent of your income and do it publicly. There are critiques of E.A. that I’m sympathetic to, but that’s a good practice. It demonstrates something about someone when they put their money where their mouth is.

Is this a genuine embrace of the church, or is this a clever activist trying out different theories to get to the same end? I ask because I first heard of you when you ran for mayor of Berkeley, and I can’t help but wonder if you’re just a smart and curious guy who is trying every avenue for his cause.

I don’t think I would have done this if it was just an activist ploy. Even ten years ago, when we started doing direct action and rescuing animals out of factory farms, I said, “The only thing better than being a lawyer doing direct action would be to be a minister.”

But honestly there’s another experience that was quite powerful. I’ve been in and out of jail for our open-rescue campaign—not super long stays, but I’ve been in a lot of different jails all over the country now, and I’ve met a lot of people, and I’ve seen a lot of people in crisis.

It’s really hard to be in jail if you’re an empathetic person, because there’s so much suffering. I’m healthy of body, healthy of mind. I’ve got people writing me letters. Books are being sent to me while I’m in jail. And then you get your Vietnamese cellmate who has no teeth, barely speaks the language, can’t find a Vietnamese book, and no one even knows he’s there. His public defender doesn’t return his calls. He sits there staring at the walls, getting angrier every day, suffering more and more to the point that you can almost see the psychosis developing.

The one thing I saw consistently across many different jails that helped people was faith. People would get together and have a prayer circle, and they’re allowed to hold hands. Men in jail don’t hold hands, but when you’re having a prayer you’re allowed to. That matters to people—the idea that there’s a man in the world who doesn’t hate you so much that he isn’t willing to take your hand and show you some love.

Faith was a route for them to get there. No matter what racial differences, political differences, no matter what macho attitude you have about strength and power and domination, if there’s a supreme being out there—or something akin to a supreme being, maybe a supreme philosophy, maybe a supreme social commitment we’ve made to each other—that allows you to break bread with people you otherwise wouldn’t . . . that’s an amazing fucking thing.

I remember this guy—upper-middle-class dude in Sonoma County, insurance salesman. Meth just ruined his life. He got addicted, ended up in drug dens, started stealing, got sent to jail, got sent back for breaking probation. Everyone in his life had abandoned him. Everything was fucked. But he was a happy person because he found God. He was a leader in the jail, trying to get other inmates to come to prayer, because he realized, This thing I found is so special. It protects me from all the insanity of the world.

That was the first time someone prayed for me. I have a pretty regular prayer practice now, even though I don’t even believe in God, per se, but I pray for people anyway. It was partly because of that experience. I realized how powerful it is to pray for someone, and for someone to know you’re praying for them.

You don’t believe in God? That seems odd for somebody in seminary.

I don’t believe in God in the traditional Christian sense, or the traditional Buddhist or Hindu sense. I think the universe can be explained by the physical laws of science, probably. Science has a better claim to truth than any other paradigm we’ve discovered.

But what Einstein said about God is probably roughly what I believe: there’s great mystery in the universe and great marvel, especially around sentient beings, that might as well be God.

So what’s the vision you have for all this? You’re a well-known activist in seminary and you’re interested in religion for both personal and political reasons. What does all this eventually look like?

To reverse the decline in religious participation in the United States and throughout the developed world through some form of more modern moral community. We desperately need this. It’s funny—we all understand why our kids need this. We just don’t understand it about ourselves.

I see the attempt to merge movements with the church as existential—not just for social movements but for churches, too. Churches have fallen apart largely because they don’t adapt quickly enough. There are beautiful stories and traditions they have to offer, but if they hold on to everything they’ll lose everything, because everyone’s going to run away.

The idea of a muscular form of compassion has been lost since the civil-rights movement. Gandhi and King both said that nonviolence is not for the weak; it’s for the brave. But the left became afraid of strength. Because being strong in your compassion means actually having a position on something, and that’s terrifying if you’re trying to please everybody.

O.K., but how does animal rights, in particular, fit into the vision of the resurgent moral community?

The most powerful part of every religious tradition I’ve studied is its defense of the vulnerable. That’s why people become committed to religious communities—they understand that when they are vulnerable they will be protected, and when they are strong they will protect the vulnerable. That’s the trade.

I’ve made a bet with my life and my resources, and in some cases a bit of my freedom, that one of the most powerful iterations of that core human narrative is our treatment of animals.

When so much of what’s wrong in the world is the narrowing and shrinking of our moral circles, a movement that effectively challenges that has to do the opposite. It can’t just say, “Let’s not throw immigrants out of the country.” We have to have an affirmative vision: “We love immigrants. Immigrants are amazing because we’re all human beings, and God commanded us to love even the Samaritans, to see the beauty even in the Canaanites and the tax collectors and the lepers.”

I think the most powerful and most obvious next iteration for this expansion of our moral boundaries is other sentient beings. We’ve seen rights gradually expand for all different classes of humans throughout the past two hundred years, since the Enlightenment, and animals are, as Martha Nussbaum has written, the next frontier.

There’s also something unique about our interactions with animals. It has to do with more than ten thousand years of domestication. For most people, the only creature who will truly unconditionally love you is your dog. I’ve seen dogs who are horribly abused who are still desperate for the love of their guardians. It’s horrible how attached they are to the person who’s hurting them. But it happens all the time—it’s because we’ve raised them for thousands of years and selected them for that attribute. But it’s created this intensely vulnerable and loving being that can teach us something about the nature of compassion and love, if we’re able to embrace that lesson.

I think animal rights has something to offer the world.

So there are two parts here. Religion can provide the stories you need for animal rights, but animal rights—this form of compassion at its most pure—can also be used by the church to reverse its decline. But the church is so diminished—it seems like you’re buying into a distressed asset. Can it actually be the vanguard of a movement again?

You call it a distressed asset. I see that as an asset that has opportunities. You’re buying low.

If the church were flourishing, it would be unlikely to be open to change. But, when I walk into churches and I’m the youngest person by decades, everyone wants to talk to me. It’s like a sci-fi movie where all the young have died and someone is born and everyone freaks out.

That presents opportunities. But it’s not just strategic or tactical—it’s theological. Part of the reason the church has declined is that it hasn’t theologically evolved. If there’s a genuine, committed, energetic movement to evolve these theologies, there are huge opportunities.

I’ll ask you plain what I’m trying to figure out myself: Can progressive movements survive without some new grounding in religion?

No. I think left civilization, not just left movements, will die unless there is some form of moral community to organize it all. ♦