In a New Book, Young Faith Leader Preaches ‘Radical Hope’ for Social-Change Movements

The contours of the Rev. Jennifer Bailey’s life — ordained minister, justice leader, and 34-year-old new mother — began to take shape in the Black church she attended as a little girl. As she faced bullying and racism in her predominantly white hometown of Quincy, Ill., Bailey drew strength from those she calls her “church mothers.”

They were women, including her mother, who had suffered “the plagues of Jim and Jane Crow” yet worked tirelessly to forge progress when none seemed possible. They embodied what she calls “radical hope.”

“They had lived through trauma and pain and still, on the other end of it all, had this deep and abiding faith in the idea that change would come,” Bailey says. “And they had the practice of believing that the material world could be better and that we had the capacity to bring about that change in the here and now.”

Radical hope is the theme that runs through Bailey’s new book, To My Beloveds, a collection of what she describes as “love letters” to people in her life who embody the values and fortitude of those women. Hers are deeply personal essays about social-change movements past and present, her childhood, her mother’s death from cancer when Bailey was 28. They are written to, among others, children who’ve lost their mothers; MarShawn McCarrell II, a 23-year-old poet and Black Lives Matter activist who committed suicide in 2016; her son before he was born in 2020; and her “little cousins,” the members of Generation Z.

“Her book glows with truth, beauty, and wisdom,” says Eboo Patel, founder of Interfaith Youth Core and a friend of Bailey’s since she was a high schooler in one of the organization’s early programs. “It contains stories that expand hearts and nurture souls.”

Publishers Weekly in its review said Bailey’s “call to action to build bridges and heal communities will resonate widely.”

An Ashoka Fellow who was named a “Faith Leader to Watch” in 2015 by the Center for American Progress, Bailey founded Faith Matters Network, a nonprofit that aims to “heal the healers” — leaders, organizers, and activists in social-change movements — through spiritual support and building connections with others. The seven-year-old organization has trained more than 500 “movement chaplains” who tend to the emotional and spiritual needs of those on the front lines. Faith Matters has also hosted potluck dinners called the People’s Supper in more than 100 cities and towns, bringing together people from all walks of life, backgrounds, and political views to see the humanity in those who are different.

Bailey, who’s also an associate minister at Greater Bethel A.M.E. Church in Nashville, Tenn., says she was compelled to write the book when she felt the depth of the loss and grief surrounding her during the pandemic. In this dark time, she wanted to share what she had learned about radical hope from mentors, her mother, and those church mothers.

While “radical” is often used to convey extremes, she researched the word’s etymology and discovered its origins in the Latin “radicalis,” meaning “of or having roots.”

“The hope of my foremothers is indeed rooted,” she writes. “Its tendrils reach deep into a history riddled with stories of trauma and triumph, grief and glee, drama and delight.”

‘It’s OK to Take a Break’

Looking back on her childhood, Bailey can see the sacrifices her mother and her friends made in the name of justice. “They exhausted themselves in their labor for their community,” she says. “It took an enormous toll.”

Those working in justice movements today, she says, experience similar fatigue from their all-out commitment to a difficult battle often waged in isolation — something she first saw while working in food-justice campaigns after college at Tufts University and during her divinity training at Vanderbilt.

To strengthen movements, an increasing number of organizations are coming alongside the advocates to sustain them. She points to Healing by Choice, which works in Detroit; the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective; and Rise Up, a Jewish justice organization.

“The problems that we’re facing are generational in nature. They’re not going to be solved overnight because it took generations to get here,” she says. “So how do we embed in our movements for equity and justice a sense that it’s OK to take a break?”

Bailey says many of her fellow millennials and members of Generation Z join social-justice movements searching for meaning and morality outside institutions of religion whose worldviews they find stifling. Millennials, she writes in her book, created a blueprint for what our ideal communal life might be.

“You are the builders,” she writes to Generation Z. “You are the ones who will take the blueprint, revise it as necessary, and create the new structures that will sustain us into the future.”