Last week Zohran Mamdani strengthened his reputation as a political kingmaker. Congressional candidates he endorsed defeated more traditional opponents in New York City Democratic primaries. Mamdani’s influence is clearly growing.
Watching those results come in, I found myself thinking about a novel I published a few months ago, Against All Odds: How Zohran Mamdani Became President and Changed America Forever. My thoughts also turned to liberation theology and its promise to engage progressives in the current political conversation that depends so heavily on the fundamentalist religious talk that turns so many of us off.
So here I ask you to consider Mamdani’s increasing influence in terms of my novella, liberation theology and Rob Kall’s Arc of Justice Alliance (AJA).
The Arc of Justice Alliance
Start with Rob Kall’s Arc of Justice Alliance. Rob is the editor-in-chief of OpEdNews where I am a senior editor. He and his cohorts (myself included) are anxious to counter the Republican Project 2025 agenda that proposes to remake government by yet more privatization, deregulation, and tax breaks for the rich.
In resonse the AJA refuses to become just one more advocacy group. Instead it aspires to be an infrastructure connecting activists, researchers, educators, writers, faith leaders, organizers, and ordinary citizens into a learning ecosystem that inspires collective action.
The idea is both simple and ambitious. It asks what if organizations could learn from one another systematically? What if successful strategies could be shared, tested, refined, and remembered? What if social movements had a collective intelligence capable of accumulating wisdom rather than repeatedly reinventing the wheel?
It is a compelling vision. Yet infrastructures, however necessary, seldom inspire people by themselves. Roads are essential. Libraries are essential. The internet is essential. Yet no one devotes a lifetime to roads or servers. People devote themselves to purposes and hopes.
And this is where, I think, story enters the picture.
Against All Odds
As a specifically AJA novella, Against All Odds: how Zohran Mamdani became president and changed America forever was never intended as a prediction. It was an exercise in political imagination aimed at illustrating what the AJA might accomplish.
As such, it is increasingly proving to be strangely prescient. It asked what might happen if a young Muslim democratic socialist from New York City somehow became the focal point of a movement capable of transforming American political life. More to my point here, it imagined the emergence to prominence of the Arc of Justice Alliance (AJA), a network of organizations and ordinary citizens who discover their collective power and learn how to act together.
When first published, Against All Odds seemed like pure fantasy. Yet Mamdani’s continuing success suggests that the deeper questions raised by the novel may not be so far-fetched after all.
Why does this particular politician seem to inspire such enthusiasm? Why do so many people see in him possibilities that mainstream politicians cannot?
Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey suggests an answer. There Vogler draws on Joseph Campbell’s famous analysis of what Campbell called the Hero’s Journey. Across cultures and centuries, human beings have told remarkably similar stories. An unlikely hero leaves the familiar world, confronts powerful adversaries, overcomes fear, discovers hidden strengths, and returns bearing gifts for the community.
In Mamdani millions instinctively have recognized the pattern. They see an outsider confronting entrenched power. They see someone overcoming obstacles that conventional wisdom declared insurmountable. They see a figure who embodies possibilities larger than himself.
Moreover, In Against All Odds, the AJA becomes more than an infrastructure for Mamdani. It becomes a character in its own right. It becomes a collective hero. Mamdani serves as the visible protagonist, but the deeper story concerns ordinary people (AJA associates) discovering their capacity to act together.
Liberation Theology
That connection with ordinary people suggests something else that might enrich the presentation of AJA “philosophy.” I’m referring to liberation theology which I’ve come to describe as “critical faith theory.” More fully I describe it as “reflection on the following of Christ from the viewpoint of the poor and oppressed committed to changing their condition by replacing the structures that have caused it.”
In our present religion-obsessed political context, liberation theology potentially supplies a powerful corrective to the prevailing Christian nationalism.
I say this not because liberation theology is Christian, but because it addresses questions that every movement for justice must eventually confront. Liberation theology asks who benefits from present systems and who pays their costs. It insists that injustice is not simply the result of bad individuals making bad choices. More often it is embedded in institutions, economic systems, political structures, and cultural assumptions.
In that sense, liberation theology complements many of the traditions AJA already embraces. Like Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, it insists that liberation cannot be delivered from above. Like Asset-Based Community Development, it recognizes the wisdom already present in ordinary communities. Like Four Arrows‘ Kinship Worldview and Fritjof Capra‘s Living Systems Theory, it understands human beings as fundamentally interconnected.
But liberation theology contributes something distinctive as well. It offers a method for analyzing power.
Too much contemporary political discussion focuses on personalities. Too much religious discussion focuses on individual morality. Liberation theology directs attention toward structures. It asks why poverty persists in wealthy societies. It asks why war remains profitable. It asks why systems repeatedly generate inequality, exclusion, and environmental destruction. It reminds us that social transformation requires more than good intentions.
In today’s political climate, that insight seems especially important because it counters Christian nationalism, and forms of religion that function largely as chaplaincies to wealth and power. Too often religion blesses the status quo. Too often it directs attention away from structures of domination and toward the private lives of individuals.
The Jesus who emerges from liberation theology is very different.
He announces what he calls the Kingdom of God. He proclaims good news to the poor, release to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed. He blesses the hungry and warns the rich. He overturns tables in the Temple and repeatedly challenges religious and political authorities. The central question of his ministry is not, “How do I get to heaven?” It is, “What kind of world does God intend for God’s children, and how do we begin building it here and now?”
That question lies close to the heart of every authentic movement for justice.
Indeed, as I read through the philosophical foundations of AJA, I am struck by how often they converge on a common insight. Whether we approach the matter through the Kinship Worldview, Partnership Theory, the Evolved Nest, Freire’s pedagogy, Living Systems Theory, Asset-Based Community Development, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or liberation theology, we encounter the same broad conclusion. Human beings flourish not through domination but through relationship. Not through hierarchy but through participation. Not through fear but through solidarity.
Conclusion
Perhaps that is why Mamdani’s recent success (anticipated in Against All Odds) matters.
It is not simply that a politician has accumulated influence. It is that many people seem hungry for a story larger than cynicism and fear. They are searching for evidence that ordinary citizens can still shape history. They are looking for a way beyond the politics of resentment and despair.
Christopher Vogler would probably recognize what is happening. The hero’s journey is never finally about the hero. It is about the transformation of the community to which the hero returns.
If that is true, then the most important lesson of Mamdani’s story may be that the hero we have been waiting for is not a single person at all. It may be the emergence of a people who finally discover their collective power and begin using it to create a more just and compassionate world.
That ultimately is the goal of the Arc of Justice Alliance too.
About Things That Matter 