I always thought that Brotha David was a fascinating and righteous dude. Now I know why.
— Rahkii “Hyp” Holman, musician, music producer, restorative justice practitioner at the Atunse Justice League.
For a piece I wrote about him, see How We Respond to Harm.
In The World Remakers’ Child, Dave Belden’s writing mirrors his soul: searching, loving, earnest, and driven toward the good. By pointing out each hopeful vista and heartbreaking pitfall in his lifelong search for a spiritual/ political/moral/movement home, his memoir is equal parts honoring and questioning the revolutionary paths Dave's walked.
There’s immense generosity in his transparency. Where he is exacting—more often of himself than others—it's borne of Dave's relentless quest for ways which might actually improve the individual and collective human experience.
I was riveted by Dave's historical tour-de-force stories, and heartened to learn of myriad people strategizing and working, if imperfectly, to bend MLK Jr.’s long arc toward justice, to build beloved community. I hope that you, too, will be buoyed by Dave’s loving, discerning faith that we will someday find our way there.
— sujatha baliga, Buddhist practitioner, restorative justice innovator, 2019 Macarthur Fellow, author of the forthcoming Angry Long Enough.
Dave Belden’s memoir is in the confessional tradition of St Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. With unflinching honesty and beguiling humour he unfolds the map of his life and loves, his spiritual and political longings. His story draws us irresistibly into a relentless quest for the integration of inner healing with social justice and liberation. It might just leave us a little wiser about how we could make a difference to our world and a little braver about doing it. A must-read for our times.
— Denis Nowlan, Executive Director, Initiatives of Change UK. See his “podcast for changemakers,” including his interview with me.
Belden’s verdicts might not always be shared, but the involvements of this California-based Brit with an Oxford PhD have been remarkable. His unusual life-story reveals a readiness to throw himself into challenging undertakings; an eye, right from childhood years, for detail; an apparent discipline, also it seems from early on, of entering difficult conversations and experiences into a journal; a lasting dislike of haughtiness; steady candor, tinged with humor, about himself; and a thirst for a less harsh, more loving, and fairer world.
— Rajmohan Gandhi, Indian historian and academic, biographer and grandson of Mahatma Gandhi. See his commentary on current affairs at We Are One Humanity.
Most of us likely aren’t aware that we are living through history as we eat cornflakes at the breakfast table. That can’t be said for Dave Belden. From an early age he felt the exhilaration and pressure of being part of movement history. Through his eyes, we get a front row seat to several eras of social change work. It’s not the history so much that drew me in, though, but the presence of a fully recognizable human being full of contradictions, foibles, self-consciousness mixed with self-awareness, desires, and longings. This is the story of someone who yearns for a better world, has some sense that he is supposed to contribute to that, and sets out to find a truly effective way to do so. It gripped me from start to finish; it also awakened my own longings even more deeply.
— Nichola Torbett, radical queer Christian activist, preacher, podcaster.
How can one remake or save the world from war and hunger and the people from themselves? It’s a tall order, but Dave Belden tried. A British scholar, he recounted stories of growing up in a religious (cultic) movement called the Moral Rearmament (MRA) which shaped much of his adult life. Belden recounted family life, the adolescence years and discovery of love, the intellectual world of Oxford, exposure to world issues in India and Ethiopia, and events that led him to America. His lifework spanned from the MRA, the Oxford Group which gave birth to AA, his work as a carpenter and editor for Tikkun, to his current involvement in the Restorative Justice and Trauma Healing movement.
This book is a wonderful blend or memoir and history, as well as his view of sexuality, in the voice of an intellectual storyteller. It’s an amazing story about an extraordinary life.
— Hao C. Tran, Tai Chi teacher, birder, Viet Kieu memoirist, author of Skinny Woman in a Straw Hat
and the forthcoming The Old Village Road.
In The World Remakers’ Child, Dave Belden takes the same ethical inquisitiveness and burning sense of social urgency that drove him to write feminist science fiction novels over three decades ago and this time turns the lens back on the simultaneously idealistic and rigid experiential Christian movement in which he was raised. This political autobiography is brimming with an earnest generosity of spirit toward all while also being unsparing in its honesty. In an age when many attempts at candid self-reflection, course correction, and repair are poisoned by social media-fueled pressures to prioritize the curation of one’s self-image and the defense of one’s political righteousness, Belden’s book offers a jolting antidote: an autobiography that stubbornly refuses to downplay any incident of interpersonal or structural violence, confessing all in search of insights for social transformation, not absolution. This book is a must-read for anyone who has ever wondered where Alcoholics Anonymous came from or who has wondered what it’s like to grow up as a child within a cult-like social movement and make sense of the experience after leaving it.
— Alana Yu-lan Price, co-editor of Who Do You Serve? Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States.
David Belden’s memoir is one of coming to terms with the shortcomings of the religious-political tradition he was born into, while still honoring the meaningful intent of his forebears: to build a social movement able to confront suffering at its roots and offer people a profound sense of shared belonging. His story shows us how we can embrace what is life-giving in our inheritance, heal what is wounded, and reach for truths greater than those passed down to us. May this book be a guiding light to us all as we work to find wholeness and a meaningful place for ourselves in the work of social change.
— David Dean, author of the forthcoming Roots Deeper than Whiteness.
David Belden’s autobiography takes us on a roller-coaster life journey, from Moral Re-Armament to Californian prisons and the restorative justice movement. “A new project to re-shape society,” he calls it. A rich full circle. Feeding the world, politics, feminism, social movements, class, anti-imperialism, sex and divorce, therapy, carpentry and woodwork. Late-learning to cry, to show emotion, even to come to terms with what he’s feeling. There’s a chapter headed “Burned out on movements”, but there’s the endless urge to work for a better world, a better future for all. David finds “a connection with the human race.” “We are descended from the survivors… It’s in the DNA they gave us to have faith against the odds,” he writes. His brief history of Moral Re-Armament and its initiator, Frank Buchman, conclude the book, with balanced judgements and the question that I personally share: why isn’t this movement better known, more talked about, studied?
— Andrew Stallybrass, lifelong full-time worker and amateur
historian of MRA/Initiatives of Change