Numerous women of color scholars, especially Black womanists and Chicana feminists, have developed and written about spiritual activism in their work as a way of creating positive social change.
The Jewish rabbi Avraham Weiss describes spiritual activism in similar terms, as a fundamental teaching from Torah,[3] and the Christian scholar Robert Macafee Brown says it's necessary to "overcome the great fallacy"[4] to bring about real change.
[1][7][5] According to those who engage in the work of spiritual activism, the practice involves developing one's internal capacities in order to create and inspire change in the material world or society at large.
Chicana feminist Gloria E. Anzaldúa explains the call to spiritual activism as originating out of a love for all things and a desire to create harmony and balance in the world:With awe and wonder you look around, recognizing the preciousness of earth, the sanctity of every human being on the planet, the ultimate unity and interdependence of all beings–somos todos un país.
Love swells in your chest and shoots out of your heart chakra, linking you to everyone/everything... You share a category of identity wider than any social position or racial label.
For Castillo, Chicana/os and other colonized people must seek to understand oneself, integrate their own fragmentation, and embrace ancestral or Indigenous knowledge to create conditions of social justice for their communities, humanity, and the universe.
Sacred is the appropriate adjective for whole things that cannot be taken apart and put back together again, and therefore cannot be valued in material terms (quoting Hafiz’ tale of robbers of a large diamond): healthy forests, snow leopards, clean rivers, starry nights, daughters and brothers and lovers and friends.
M. Jacqui Alexander states that "there is a tacit understanding that no self-respecting postmodernist would want to align herself (at least in public) with a category such as the spiritual, which appears [to them] so fixed, so unchanging, so redolent of tradition.
Pérez notes that spirituality is generally dismissed in the West as:superstition, folk belief, or New Age delusion, when not relegated to the socially controlled spaces of the orientalist study of 'primitive animism' or of 'respectable' religion within dominant culture.
[14] Irene Lara notes that women of color and "all 'others' who have been similarly other-ized and fragmented" are at the center of spiritual activist work and must fight against being dismissed and silenced in the Western world.
As Lara states, "though we aim to transform our selves and our worlds, the reality is that we are part of a society still largely organized around racist and sexist binary ways of knowing.