Is anything sacred anymore? What does it mean to have faith in our times? Is a politics of good faith a losing game? Are we collectively losing faith? When does faith turn into obedience or complicity? Do you have a confession? Even more questions?
You’ve come to the right place…
This year, Skin Deep explores “faith”. Our inquiry stretches beyond the obvious religious connotations – we want to think creatively about what we see as multiple crises of faith in our communities. We’ve lost faith in our economic system, our political systems, in media institutions, in celebrities and influencers, in the social contract and in our shared ethical codes. Even within movement spaces, we are increasingly suspicious of one another, alert to the risk of bad faith actors. This takes a psychic toll on our imaginations. In the context of genocide and war, many of us have lost faith in the idea that a different kind of future is possible. So what is to be done?
In Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, he talks about how capitalism is presented as “the only viable political economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” We are materialists, but also believe there is a world not limited to the material. Perhaps spirituality might aid our thinking beyond our physical conditions, and help us imagine towards liberation (or might we call it nirvana, heaven, utopia)? In the demand that we “trust the process”, we must learn how to take a leap of faith.
Author Robert Harris speaks to this in his book Conclave, which was adapted into an Oscar-winning 2024 papal drama. Cardinal Lawrence, also known as Lomeli, points out that faith “walks hand in hand with doubt” – we do not need to have “faith” in things that are considered certain. Nothing in the coming year is inevitable, we have seen how the ground can quickly shift under our feet. How it can feel like a higher power has forsaken us, and then sudden victories can feel heaven-sent.
Still, faith is often presented as a moral imperative, particularly after large political losses. Comrades might tell us that our causes are too urgent for crises of confidence, and that we should beware of bourgeois liberal apathy. Who gets to lose faith, and who doesn’t? What might emerge when faith collapses – and then rises again? This season is a space for people of all faiths and none, to think creatively and critically about how faith shows up in how we produce culture and how we build our movements. We are working with artists, writers, organisers, scholars and movement builders to probe the topic of faith, through an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist lens. We hope you’ll come to us, as you are, on this spiritual and political journey.
