Articles : Page 19 : mackenzian

February 15, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

We only make it together

This is the era of solidarity. The plucky independent soul might have had their heyday two or three centuries ago; that’s debatable. But their heyday is not today: every social group finds its fortunes tied to the fortunes of others and much more overtly so than previous movements had to demonstrate.

Part of my early political education was reading about the backstage disagreements of the mid-20th Century civil rights movement. I learned how activists spoke and wrote about one another and framed each other’s interests in comparison to their own. Today, Muslim Americans, Latinx immigrants, Black city residents, Yemeni shopkeepers, North African taxi-drivers, and migrants of every ethnicity and natal country find themselves tested by the new policy climate.

As each new executive order and sponsored bill inspires action and counter-response, I recall Bayard Rustin’s statement, “The only weapon we have is our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn.” Disabled activists complicate that thought somewhat: “In order to successfully throw sand in the gears,” Carrie Wade writes, “we need as many people out there throwing it as possible — and that means a movement that includes all kinds of bodies and minds.”

So many frameworks could lead us toward such a movement. Jesus envisions a tree with enough branches for all the earth’s birds to eat from; Paul interprets community as the members of a body (not as the parts of a cadaver). Kimberle Crenshaw’s intersectionality model inspires cross-category cooperation as well as closer looks at particular experiences with social oppression. The women’s movements’ has offered open, embracing group circles. And the imaginations of our science fiction and speculative writers hold us together.

adrienne marie brown, co-editor of Octavia’s Brood, is one of these writers. And I want to envision with her a “radical, global love” that leaves no one missing. That’s what deep change will take: all of us.

February 15, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Backstory on the right to discriminate

Why are White evangelical Protestants in the United States so likely to justify discrimination based on religious or moral conviction? Because they’ve done it before.

Christians using our religion to shield ourselves from the consequences of our social prejudice isn’t new. It’s also not a personal attack, though that’s little assurance for Muslims, LGBTQ people, single parents, or anyone else marginalized in mainstream evangelical culture. It’s part of the community’s history, and it goes back more than fifty years.

As Randall Balmer explains, the 1969-1970 case Green v. Kennedy inspired White Evangelicals to abandon rapidly desegregating public schools for schools and colleges where they could be sure their children would only learn with and date other White children. When President Nixon’s administration argued that the Civil Rights Act required non-profit organizations not to discriminate or risk their federal tax exemption, evangelical people mobilized to protect their “right to discriminate.”

Clear into the year 2000, Bob Jones University discouraged students from multi-racial dating. Its policy, like its restrictions on the enrollment of Black students through the 1970s, rested on the “sincere moral convictions” of the university’s board and constituencies. Today, the university website includes statements that repudiate that era. “Scripture is our final authority for faith and practice,” the university wrote in 2008, “and it is our intent to have it govern all of our policies.”

For almost two centuries American Christianity, including BJU in its early stages, was characterized by the segregationist ethos of American culture. Consequently, for far too long, we allowed institutional policies regarding race to be shaped more directly by that ethos than by the principles and precepts of the Scriptures.” —Bob Jones University, Statement about Race at BJU

Today it seems obvious that Christianity should be incompatible with racism and prejudice, but it wasn’t always obvious, and the evangelical community hasn’t always argued that it should be. Some members of the community still don’t.

David W. Congdon tracks these patterns not just fifty years back but four centuries back. Congdon is a systematic theologian and staff member at the InterVarsity Press, and developed two Twitter threads that outline historical and philosophical influences on evangelical culture’s custom of pulling up the drawbridge behind it and leaving the riffraff outside the walls.

Allowing theological differences, esp. on touchy issues, threatens the unity and financial future of an organization. Whether it’s a ban, physical wall, firing, church split, or statement of faith, it’s all the same fear of the other [and] pursuit of purity.” —David W. Congdon, February 9, 2017

Congdon may be alluding to a 2016 controversy about InterVarsity enforcing constraints on what its staff members can believe about marriage, all in the name of faithfulness to Biblical convictions. Staff members who wouldn’t or couldn’t sign an IVP statement of belief faced job losses.

Given this context, when PRRI finds that 42% of White evangelical Protestants oppose refusing Others service on the basis of religion, it’s not surprising that there are so few. It’s surprising that there are so many! The Church needs to generate more.

As new policies about denials of service emerge over the next several months, one of the biblical parables that you can expect to hear a lot about is the story of the Good Samaritan. In this story, the outsider is the most moral character in a narrative usually set up to praise ordinary Israelites not from the families of Aaron (priests) or Levi (Levites or temple staff). Christian communities are beginning to use this story to challenge the poor habit of using our beliefs to raise walls between “us” and those “not like us.” It’s tempting, for non-evangelicals too, to leave someone out, to deny, repel, and reject, and to credit (or blame) God or other authorities for our choices to do so.

As Jesus tells this parable, his audience asks, “Who is my neighbor?” The more I hear about religious freedom, especially from the constituencies that elected the current federal administration, the more I sense that Jesus’ original audience didn’t like his answer any more than we do.

But that doesn’t make his answer wrong.

February 13, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Timely research: Who are our neighbors?

Street shot of Regent Street, London: small clusters of people of different genders walk along the edges of the street. — Photo credit: David Marcu

Learning to share the public space with those with whom we disagree; learning to overcome humanity’s abysmal record of religious wars, religious ethnic cleansing, and genocide-fueled religious bigotry—these have become some of the most urgent challenges of our time.” —Ganoune Diop, October 2016

Our friends at PRRI, the Public Religion Research Institute, have published a research summary on more than 100,000 interviews of US adults.

Of these interviews, 40,000 focused on respondents’ values and political views, and included questions about legalized discrimination against LGBT people. PRRI’s research summary also breaks down responses based on religious affiliation.

Take this chart, for example. It addresses support for or opposition to denials of service based on religion or “sincerely held morals”:

Findings for PRRI's question on support for or opposition to religiously based service refusals: Most likely to support are Jehovah's Witnesses and White evangelical Protestants. Least likely to do so are Buddhists and Unitarian Universalists. — Chart credit: PRRI

The only group more likely than Latter-day Saints to support denials of service in the name of religion are White evangelical Protestants.¹ The groups least likely to support religiously or morally justified service denials are Buddhists and Unitarian Universalists.

Even among religious groups without majority support for same-sex marriage, nearly all oppose religiously based service refusals of gay and lesbian people.” —PRRI, February 3, 2017

And a strong majority of respondents recognize in society “a lot of discrimination” against “gay and lesbian” and “transgender” people. (PRRI’s questions did not address bisexual people.)

In tomorrow’s post, I’ll share some of the history behind these responses. For now, take a look at PRRI’s report, and imagine for yourself how your local faith community might be represented on charts like these.

Denial of service laws don’t just affect small businesses and street vendors. They also impact schools, hospitals, and public social services like clinics, childcare centers, and foster care homes. How, if at all, do you think members of your community might justify social discrimination in these spaces?

Whatever your group’s official position statements on race, sexuality, or care for the foreigner and other vulnerable people, how do group members actually treat Others? Who are your neighbors and how do you show it?

Seventh-day Adventists aren’t among the groups named in PRRI’s report, but can be classified as evangelical Protestants. I know of no recent survey of Seventh-day Adventists that addresses these questions. [Back to text: ◄]

February 13, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

The strategy of visibility

About two years ago I wrote about how the “monsters” of Halloween give people a way to explore their own shadows. I’ve also written several times about various forms of demonization and dehumanization: how some people with power chip away at other people’s humanity by rendering them malevolent and monstrous.

But there are other ways to become monstrous than masked play and projection. Cultural invisibility is one of them. Though I had a nourishing community around me during my first two decades, I experienced cultural invisibility and later had to actively counter it for my own health.

Writer Junot Diaz once shared how not seeing people like him in literature or mass media affected how he saw himself:

‘You guys know about vampires?’ Diaz asked. ‘You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, ‘Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist?’ And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might seem themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.”

It can feel good to open up a news magazine and see your people there. But if that representation is based on malicious stereotypes, it can do more damage than good.

Riz Ahmed is a British Asian actor who has traversed the Atlantic for work for about a decade. In that time, he’s discovered that being part of a hyper-visible demographic in post-9/11 UK and US border control processing rooms and auditions means that “you are a type, whose face says things before your mouth opens; you are a signifier before you are a person; you are back at stage one.” Ahmed nevertheless hopes that his art can change how the security state perceives him and others like him.

According to Cherrie Moraga, visibility is “the most effective strategy to quell the rising tide of discrimination.” Social activists from 19th Century abolitionists to the contemporary disability justice movement have used it as an effective, humanizing strategy.

People seem to need to know Others’ stories before they’ll grant them “neighbor” status and offer compassionate care or impartial service. I used to imagine that being invisible could be a superpower, but it turns out it’s more of an Achilles’ heel. Poor representation costs minoritized people dearly, and that’s why good stories told well matter so much, especially for people who rarely see the social spotlight.

Read Ahmed’s reflection in the London Guardian. It’s well worth the read.

February 12, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

David Newman was right

During the lead-up to the 2015 Adventist General Conference session in San Antonio, TX, several preachers, teachers, and scholars discussed the Adventist community’s approach to ordination.

The Theology of Ordination Study Committee (TOSC) and its regional subcommittees met over two years to thresh the questions. Their hope was that they would get to San Antonio with at least some consensus theology for the global collective to build on.

The North America Division’s report, for example, drew on the research of contributors across the US church and university network. It runs 240 pages long and includes articles from moderate Adventists like Dwight Nelson and Kendra Haloviak on leadership, authority, the priesthood, creation, and gender.

What it doesn’t include is a plain acknowledgement that contemporary denominational ordination isn’t “biblical”—neither modeled in the Bible nor mandated by the ethics of the early church. The international consensus statement conflates the ordination system with “public endorsement [from the Church] for persons who meet the biblical qualifications” or “[the Church] publicly recognizing those whom the Lord has called and equipped for local and global Church ministry.” It also buries the statement that “Over the course of Christian history the term ordination has acquired meanings beyond what these words originally implied.”

That acknowledgement was an outlier among the arguments that emerged during 2013 and 2014, often dropped in conversations and then run past. But J. David Newman made the most direct case for it.

Newman has argued that it’s inappropriate to debate ordaining pastors when modern pastoral ministry is discontinuous with the church roles described in the Christian scriptures, and the church has already allowed for the ordination of women deacons and women elders, two roles that are described in the Bible.¹

Though Newman’s position never found vocal advocates within the NAD, it seems to have persuaded some of his peers in Europe. Since the General Conference meetings denying world regions the autonomy to determine ordination policy for their own contexts, conferences in the Netherlands and Germany have continued to “lay hands” on ministers regardless of gender, and Sweden has abandoned the “ordination” category altogether.

Just a few weeks ago, however, while most of the US focused on the inauguration of No. 45, North American Division church officials met with the General Conference president to assure him of their continuing loyalty to the Adventist denomination. Other ministers have released their “ordination” credentials and sought “commissioned” credentials instead, the only kind the global church recognizes for its 3,500 women ministers.

“Non-doctrinal issues on which we have no consensus are not a basis for splitting the church,” church leaders reportedly told the General Conference.

Yet describing disparate treatment of employees on the basis of gender as a “non-doctrinal issue” is no way to end the disparate treatment. That description instead lowers the stakes and makes it less likely that Adventist community members will learn to see this as a problem that needs resolving.

This Bridge Called My Back was first published in 1981, a decade after the 20th Century Adventist church started reclassifying its women ministers. Co-editor Cherrie Monaga explains in the 2015 foreword that women are still marginal in US and global culture. Granting a few individual women exceptional treatment in this system doesn’t change the system’s nature because the underlying philosophy, ideology, and logic are still at work. All surface inclusion does is change the kinds of faces that enact and speak for the system.

The denominational discussion about ordination has been limited because discussants have preemptively committed themselves to saving the current structure. Regions of the world that have made the most emphatic progress despite this have been those that have worked around or replaced the category of ordained pastor entirely. We’d be much better off imagining a structure that’s just and doesn’t compel workarounds. For the sake of the employees still graduating into a two-tier workforce and members still acceding into a two-tier church, we’d be best off imagining differently.

^[1]Newman closed his site early in 2018. Some of his work from 2014 remains on Adventist independent media sites like Adventist Today. ↩

February 11, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Participating in the change

In the last few pages of Confronting Injustice, Umair Muhammad writes that deep social change doesn’t just require mass action. It also requires mass participation in sociopolitical institutions and the social movements that must see old institutions replaced.

It’s not enough, Muhammad argues, for scholars and critics to make radical claims without connecting them to concrete actions. It’s not enough for us to merely trim the edges of a consumptive economic system. The system itself has to go, along with all the structures and assumptions that prop it up. Apathy, which inhibits deep change, is the product of structures that preceded us and that we take for granted, and possibilities we assume are too “idealistic” to act on.

Muhammad ends this book by affirming popular participation—literally “democracy.” Ordinary people’s energy and lived commitment to a new, just world will allow that world to emerge. Justice won’t be imposed on us from above or without, and only through the process of working for it can we become the kinds of people worthy of living in it, the kinds of people we can trust with the only Planet Home we have, the kinds of people we can trust with one another.

Rather than continuing to just rely on sporadic flare-ups to create change, we are called on to work with institutional forms that can deliver protracted challenges to the status quo in pushing for progressive change… Protests, marches, and direct actions need not to be put on hold but they do need to be supplemented with organization building.” —Umair Muhammad

I’ve argued that beautiful things take time to grow. I still believe that’s true. It has taken time and all our energy over generations to threaten that flourishing and it will take as much time and energy to secure it.

I just worry about the people who are too vulnerable to be able to wait for the rest of us.