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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

community responsibility

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The Movement Moment: Change, Denial, and the Fall of Empire

A director at one of the organizations I support recently asked me what I thought “the movement moment” was.
What’s the spirit of this time? What’s rising up?

The movement, I said, is life.

The system demands we assimilate, and teaches us resistance is futile.
The movement is not about the right to assimilate.

The system calls us to worship the lone star. “Pull yourself up,” the system says. “Pull your pants up too.”
But the movement is not about rugged, respectable, individual survival.

The movement is far more expansive than the American Dream.
The movement is about justice.

It’s about quality of life in a diverse society.
Thriving as oneself in community.
The beauty of who you are. The richness of who we are.
Life beyond survival.

The movement is about race.
Poverty and wealth acquisition.
Freedom from violence and a criminal legal system.
Incarceration and voting access.

The movement is about housing.
Black lesbians with children in the South. Will not migrate. Shouldn’t have to.

The movement is about freedom.
Freedom of worship. Freedom of conscience. Freedom of conscience in houses of worship.
It’s freedom from abuse. And it’s freedom to find love and belonging in a place called home.

The movement is about meaningful work and meaningful wages.
Gender expression, access to education, and professional mobility.
Food justice. Humane business.
Innovation. Climate action.

The movement is about the diversity of family.
The healing of faith. The focus of reason.
It’s fidelity to the human nation. Integrity. Hope.

The movement is about life dimensions beyond subsistence.
It’s opening to the full spectrum of life and full presence in life.
The movement is thriving. The movement is whole.

This is the movement and energy that inspires me, that I’m aligned with, and that I co-build with my clients and colleagues. This is the world that I want to live in: space for all people to be and create and progress and transform.

I’d like faith communities to be part of this movement, engaged as co-laborers and not as bystanders, and certainly not as obstacles that laborers have to work around. I’d especially like the faith community I grew up in to be part of the team I’m yoked with: can we really not just pull together?

What social change takes: change.

“Hope” and “change” and “movement” all easily lose their gloss with time. It’s not because leadership teams necessarily adopt reserved or centrist approaches to their work. It’s not even because movements hatching into institutions naturally become cautious. Ultimately, it’s because “hope” requires little disturbance in the Force, but “change” destabilizes everything. And more want change than want to change.

Who wants change? Who wants to change? via ChangeActivation.com
Who wants change? Who wants to change? via ChangeActivation.com

Every deep change in the last 10,000 years has inspired a counter-campaign of folks sure that the change they resisted would usher in the end of the world. The mass adoption of writing prompted philosophers to fret that children would lose intelligence, memory, and oral delivery skills. In Phaedrus (275), a Socratic dialogue, Plato has Socrates insist that writing is “an elixir not of memory, but of reminding”: it’s an inferior tool that encourages writers to ape wisdom rather than practice it through dialogue, discussion, and feedback.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, UK slaveholders warned the country that abolition would irreparably harm the nation’s standing in global trade. “Our West-Indian and African Trades,” slave-holders wrote in 1749, “are the most nationally beneficial of any we carry on… the extensive Employment of our other Shipping in, to and from America, the great Brood of Seamen consequent thereupon, and the daily bread of the most considerable of our British Manufactures [sic], are owing primarily to the Labour of Negroes.”

And in the US, critics of the suffragettes accused the women’s movement of wrecking homes and undermining marriage. Campaign posters framed lobbyists as too ugly to be married, or man-eaters who dominated their husbands, or the kind of mothers who would abandon their toddlers to wash, clean, and fend for themselves.

The doomsday prophecies are valid in a way: the old worlds did fall. But that’s the whole point. We don’t promote change for Colossus to stay on his pedestal. We promote change to bring him and Rhodes down. So much labeled “innovation” is just dusting the pedestal of the status quo. If an initiative is genuinely innovative, it will summon the World’s Last Chance crowd and all the hand-wringing that humanity can drum up. And if it doesn’t, we’re doing it wrong.

Deep change means the end of the known world—and for the segment of mankind not nurtured by the present order, the end of the known world is way overdue! If we’re wise about what my colleague Peterson Toscano calls The Great Transition, we’ll survive it ready to rebuild. If we’re foolish about the opportunities we have, we’ll stop short, crying about the good old days and writing them into our revisions.

I may snark about this, but there’s a reasonable root under much fear around social change. Just this week, would-be presidential nominee Jeb Bush verbalized it when he told his base, “Thousands of years of culture and history is just being changed at warp speed.” Speaking specifically about civil marriage, Bush said he found it “hard to imagine” what society might look like when people’s civil standing no longer rests on their maintaining “traditional” lifestyles. Change changes things, and our imaginations don’t always keep pace.

It’s also true that the rational reluctance to change can express irrationally. If we’re no longer trading in superiority complexes, it’s irrational to trade humane inclusion for familiar exclusion, and it’s irrational to fret about the pace of change when the status quo harms. The impulse to encourage slow tweaks has showed up in every justice movement I can name. It’s incurred stony glares from change-makers for just as long.

Even from those as sanitized as Martin Luther King, Jr.

Line caricature of Cecil John Rhodes, in a victorious wide-stance on a tilted African continent. Rhodes has one foot near Egypt and the other near South Africa. The cartoon mocks the traditional myth that the ancient Colossus of Rhodes was so large it had a foot on either side of the Rhodes port.
Cecil John Rhodes, colonialist. Artist: Edward Linley Sambourne (1892) in Punch, a British satirical weekly magazine. (Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

To his White Christian and Jewish colleagues, King once wrote: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a ‘more convenient season.'”

Some of us feel called to walk alongside people as they press through their discomfort. We can’t do that work effectively by encouraging people to live in denial about what yielding to that discomfort would mean for others. Earlier this year, I and my co-panelists at Creating Change reframed denial as a sign that someone has accurately judged how much is at stake. As such, denial’s a completely appropriate stage to start a journey in. It’s just no foundation for a life.

As change-makers, we know the stakes are high. And that’s why we press for substantive change in this world. We have no assurances that results will come in our lifetimes and we acknowledge there’s no inevitability in play. Yet we still work for good.

We know this world pets some lives and consumes others. We know it will do so as long as we permit it. And we’re saying enough: the end is nigh. Mourn the old parasitic order if you must: it will pass. It must pass.

Then, when you have mourned, help to topple Colossus.

Topple Colossus in your home.
Topple Colossus in your labor.
Topple Colossus in your faith community.
Topple Colossus in the town square.
Topple Colossus in city hall.
Topple Colossus in the chamber of commerce.
Topple Colossus in every sphere of life.
And from the rubble, build.

The first line in my Twitter bio is “for public good, social change.” It’s a simple, intentional phrase that represents my contributions to social justice, communal good, and the third sector—the voluntary, not-for-profit realm of action that’s neither primarily governmental nor primarily commercial. Even limited work in this sphere and small, consistent action in our interpersonal relationships can contribute to the emergence of a more whole and more just world.

If you’d like to add my professional energy to the work you’re doing in this area, please email me and let’s talk.

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Philanthropy, Misanthropy, and Outrage

If there were a stock for outrage, conventional media, 501(c)3 and 501(c)4 non-profit and lobbying groups, and fundraising platforms would be mutual investors. Outrage is hot right now, and it’s making some people hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Earlier this month I shared an Indiegogo campaign that closed having raised over $17,000 for a Chicago youth homelessness project. The student-led campaign, still not matched or complemented by the students’ campus, generated a great deal of media attention and nearly 400 unique donors contributed before it closed.1

If you were one of these donors, thank you.

Screenshot of the AULL4One student fundraiser: "Raising Money for Project Fierce" above the student group logo. To the right, the funds raised, over $17,000 is printed over a bar, and a red Donate button and a blue Facebook button.
Screenshot of the Aull4One campaign as of midnight April 8, 2015.

Crowd-supported campaigns excite me.

I work with organizations as they raise funds, and I’m energized by the heart of philanthropy, the love of humankind. Grassroots activists have always thrown block parties and passed the hat at meetings or services to engage community supporters, but only in the last decade has internet-based crowdfunding mated with social media platforms, and this match scales far more rapidly than a neighborhood party or offering plate could.

The result: fundraising companies like Kickstarter, Razoo, CauseVox, Indiegogo, and GoFundMe, and payment services like Stripe, WePay, and PayPal that organizations and individuals can use to connect directly with audiences, post quick updates, and receive money online— all with not much more than the skills they’d use to build a common social networking page.

This technology puts the request in front of more and more people, and the social sharing uses social proofs to sell the cause, but the heart of the phenomenon is what it always was. Third parties like grant-making foundations, local and national government agencies, religious communities, and larger non-profit groups will always support public giving, but organizations’ trump card is still the ability to serve a community and inspire that community’s direct investment. With that ability, even small, local non-profits can stay independent enough to focus on their mission and adapt with their audience rather than balance community concerns against sponsors’ priorities.

Yet there’s an underbelly to this shift.

There’s a thread of misanthropy in this philanthropy.

Not all of those deploying web crowdfunding platforms tap into the love of humankind. Several major fundraisers have sprung up in the last three years that have trafficked less in philanthropy and more in misanthropy.

George Zimmerman earned over $130,000 from web fundraising after shooting and killing Trayvon Martin in Sanford, FL in 2012. Two fundraisers launched the week after Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, last year raised just under $500,000 for the officer while he was still receiving a full public salary.

When Indiana restaurant Memories Pizza reaped criticism for announcing that it would serve LGBT people but not cater their weddings, a talk radio host inspired 29,161 people to give $842,442 in less than a week. A bakery that refused to bake a cake iced with an anti-LGBT message was crowd-funded to the tune of $14,549 in 6 days. And a campaign that, like the Andrews University students’ fundraiser, will support a youth homelessness program, has raised more than $132,000 in 5 days.

Funding needs are being met.
The fundraising platforms benefit as well.

I checked out GoFundMe’s terms this week: the company gleans 5% from each donation made in the United States, the fundraiser pays a 3% transaction fee, and the remaining 92% goes to the cause. A ninety-two percent net gain isn’t bad, and 8% pays GoFundMe et al. for facilitating donors’ wish to give. Under these terms, fundraising brokers earned more than $67,000 in fees from the first Memories Pizza fundraiser. If #Pizza4Equality does as well, GoFundMe and WePay will have earned more than $134,000 from facilitating outrage-based giving in just two campaigns.

During the 20th Century, the archetypal Neutral Broker was Switzerland. In our century, the crowdfunding and payment services industry has adopted that role, and online giving fueled by outrage and disgust is making these companies very tidy profits.

Disgust works, but at a cost.

Three weeks ago, I listened to writing, tech, science, and risk communication researchers describe how their students study poverty and other civic issues. They shared how a citizen campaign failed to stop the US Navy from wiping Port Chicago off the map (Sam Dragga2 and Gwendolyn Gong), how much grant-seeking scientists struggle to engage the public as equals (Sarah Perrault), and how ordinary people debate the merits of hydraulic fracturing on web forums (Brian Ballentine).

Connie Mick (Poverty/Privilege: A Reader for Writers
) explained the “politics of disgust” that undergird the enduring myth of the “welfare queen.” These politics separate the “deserving poor” from the “undeserving,” drive public policies and regulations that carve up the public into acceptable and unacceptable classes, and then reward only the former.

In the same session, Dragga and Gong recounted the 1944 military explosion in Port Chicago, CA. Port Chicago’s community activists failed to overrule the Navy’s claim over their land, and their campaign didn’t produce a complete accounting of sailors or residents killed, injured, bankrupted, or made homeless by the military accident. In that incident the Navy asserted an eminent domain claim over one town, but today, landowners around the nation are being asked to yield surface land and mineral rights to natural gas companies for fracking programs. Some residents resist out of disgust for corporate encroachment on family property, and others cooperate.

Each study presented in that session made me think of the balance of power among organizations, citizens, governments, and interest groups, and the disgust rhetorics that drive racist violence, LGBT-antagonistic policies, and discrimination against people based on beliefs, assumptions, and fears about their social groups.

At a psychological level, disgust reduces to revulsion, and it triggers reflexes like withdrawal, dissociation, and avoidance. Applied to people, disgust marks the border between “alive” and “dead,” “safe” and “dangerous,” our group and theirs, and the contamination risked when the boundaries between Us and Other soften. As Daniel Bitton writes, “People are compelled to force others to cease disgusting behaviour in others, and to humiliate or do violence to people with disgusting personality traits.” Disgust has social consequences.

Because disgust affects how we perceive and respond to people, so does triggering that emotion through rhetoric: there are human/humane costs to using metaphors and arguments that tie social groups to our disgust reflex, and yet the strategy is so common in political rhetoric, in the cable news cycle, in internet comment sections, and in non-profit fundraising campaigns. I once warned a non-profit organization that I would never donate again if they sent me another reactive outrage solicitation. I doubt my email stopped them from publishing that kind of rhetoric elsewhere, but it did stop them from continuing to inflict it on me!

If it’s true that disgust is reflexive and operates at a more “primal” neurological level than complex thought, how helpful is it to invoke it in public discussions? Does deploying disgust preempt a thorough debate? Who benefits when it becomes a routine part of communication or fundraising strategies? I wonder, too, if we adjust to outrage and disgust strategies in public communications and whether we notice if an organization divests, giving up disgust as a way to mobilize its supporters.

Disgust is legal. It doesn’t breach fundraising ethics codes. And it works.
Can it get us the results we want?

The values and ethics codes of the Association for Fundraising Professionals, CFRE International (the leading fundraising certifier), and the Society for Technical Communication (which governs technical communicators and rhetoricians like me) don’t have much to say about deploying disgust in public fundraising communications. Of course, professional codes don’t constrain non-professionals like those who use GoFundMe, but professional norms can define the behavior boundaries in which lay people choose and act.

The AFP ethics code, for example, requires AFP members not to “engage in activities that harm the members’ organizations, clients or profession or knowingly bring the profession into disrepute,” and insists that solicitations be “accurate.” It doesn’t otherwise limit the kinds of solicitations that fundraisers can make or the language they use to invite donors to give. Members may not “disparage competitors” and must describe their organizations’ services truthfully, but they aren’t bound to restrict the use of stereotypes or biased language and metaphors in development communications.

By contrast, the Association for Healthcare Philanthropy’s professional conduct statement does include an explicit requirement that members respect “all individuals without regard to race, color, sex, religion, national origin, disability, age, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.” However AHP members honor this rule in their routine choices, respect and revulsion cannot coexist, and only respect can nurture a culture in which the love of humankind becomes the air we breathe.

When I looked at the distribution of small donations to large on the Indiegogo and GoFundMe sites I referred to at the start of this article, I noticed how many of these donations were small, one-time amounts: $10, $20, $50, $100, $200. Each federal election cycle, there’s excitement about the small donor’s power to combine with hundreds of thousands of other small donors and influence legislators through crowd force. Compare this more realistic analysis of Obama’s 2008 campaign income: Politico frets that the era of small contributions “appears to be ending before it ever fully took hold”.

I share Politico’s concern about mega-donors gaining disproportionate influence over the legislative process. Yet I’m not so cynical as to imagine that a culture of philanthropy can thrive without either the exceptionally wealthy or the exceptionally poor. A generous giving culture involves us all, no matter who we are, and no matter how much money we have to share. A generous giving culture also challenges us to reconsider our definitions of wealth as well as our implicit or explicit rules about who’s “deserving” enough to give and receive.

These rules aren’t set above our pay grade.

In the end, as specialists and as community members, we decide who may join us in our ideal world.
And only we can decide whether disgust is the best possible strategy we have for getting there.

1. This week, Andrews University president Dr. Niels-Erik Andreasen announced a new taskforce “to help us gain greater understanding of this problem [LGBT youth homelessness] and propose helpful responses to the needs of these young people.” The university is receiving comments on this at suggestions@andrews.edu.
Andreasen’s letter includes no timeline for the new study, for assessing proposals, or for implementing action.

2. Sam Dragga (Texas Tech University), one of the co-presenters at the CCCC 2015 panel I refer to here, supervised my doctoral research on the organizational structure, competing values, and government staff that influenced the British government’s case for war in Iraq in 2002.

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When Popular Analogies Steer Us Off-course

On Friday morning I eavesdropped on the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s Annual Council meeting at the denomination’s headquarters in central Maryland. Several voices will live-report on the 8-day meetings via the Twitter hashtag #GCAC14: follow along over the next week.

Mark Finley is an Adventist statesman, an internationally known Adventist speaker and elder. For most of the 1990s and early 2000s, Finley was the gentle face of the televangelism series It Is Written. He currently serves the worldwide church as its evangelism vice president, and he spoke to the Annual Council Friday morning on using the stories in Acts 1-15 as conflict-resolution models, as examples for how to address intractable contemporary church debates.

His full remarks are already available via the General Conference Archives. Bear in mind that Finley is a member of the denomination’s theology of ordination study committee and has written that 1st Century believers received the Holy Spirit “without respect to either gender or ordination.”

Using Analogies to Guide Decision-Making

The denomination’s official account and Spectrum Magazine staff shared some of Finley’s key points, including these:

Analyzing the Analogy

Take a closer look at this rhetoric:

Context
1st Century CE: The Acts community of Christians
21st Century CE: The Seventh-day Adventist Church faith community—administered by the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, an association located in Silver Spring, MD. The association is legally represented by the General Conference Corporation of Seventh-day Adventists, incorporated in Washington, D.C.

Decision-makers
1st Century CE: The apostles hand-picked by Jesus Christ and those who knew him
21st Century CE: The administrators and leaders of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Deeply Contentious Problems
1st Century CE: Include selecting Judas’ replacement, Matthias; developing a just process for serving indigent widows; and deciding whether to receive non-Jewish believers
21st Century CE: Include whether to permit women to serve alongside men as ordained elders or pastors

Resolution Method
1st Century CE: The apostles and Acts community resolve disputes via prayer, casting lots, and submission to the apostles’ decision
21st Century CE: The Seventh-day Adventist Church and its members should resolve disputes via prayer, church delegate votes, and lay member submission to thusly-decided administrative policy

1st Century : 21st Century : : the Acts community : the Seventh-day Adventist faith community

This analogical premise requires us to accept a very narrow view of the last two millennia, but it’s a common move for Adventists. As a restorationist tradition, the denomination believes that its gift to the world has two parts: (a) uncovering teachings once held by the first few generations of believers but lost through time; and (b) drawing out a remnant of faithful ones “from any and all corners to the purposes of God.” As such, Adventism represents itself as the end-times repository of Bible truth, and this has consequences for members’ attachment to the group. Former GC president Jan Paulsen once told youth that if he were to leave the denomination he would “risk [his] whole spiritual life and salvation” by doing so. Not all Adventists agreed with this point, but many did.

So Finley is well within mainstream Adventism in looking to the early church for a guide to conflict resolution in our time. We can leap from the 1st Century CE to the present day because the Adventist church’s 151-year history is less continuous with the rest of the Christian story and more a counterpoint to it: Time and Spirit all but warp-drove from the unveiling visions in Revelation to the denomination’s formation in 1863! Our network of assumptions and analogies works to mask both the commonalities and the diversity across 38,000 Christian denominations. At the same time, it suggests that the Acts authority mantle now falls not on the shoulders of the entire Christian community but on the policy committees of one group, ours.

According to the argument Finley presented on Friday, there are just a few roles available in this play and they have already been assigned. Non-administrative church members may be out of the loop when it comes to “points of disagreement” even if we’re otherwise trusting and supportive. And we cannot count on being included in discussions or decision-making about these issues either.

Per Finley, an ordinary member’s role in discussions about ministerial ordination, membership restrictions, and any other church-wide controversy is to pray, submit to the denomination’s decision, accept the General Conference’s conclusions, and “move on” thereafter. The only lines we have to say are “Yea” and “Amen.”

How did we get here?

Finley’s analogies and suggestions about unity are not controversial if we accept that common business logic should bind how family members interact.

Debates on Adventist community websites like Adventist Today and Spectrum Magazine often invoke corporate disloyalty, suggest people who disagree with a given interpretation or policy should “just leave,” or argue that the church is right to bind its pastors, teachers, or vocal members by the closed-circle corporate preservation standards Coca Cola or Apple might use to weed out Pepsi advocates or Samsung sympathizers.

“The church has a brand,” some say, “and it’s only good stewardship to protect it. Further more, it has the right to.”

From Organization to Organism

Because this post will not be a book, I’ll offer just 7 short comments on why using corporation analogies as a positive guide for the “church family” steers us off-course:

  1. Though participating in a denominational group is largely voluntary (at least for those who join as adults and aren’t born and raised in the denominational culture), members of this faith community are not best compared to businesses’ employees. Employees trade skills and services for money and other forms of compensation. Church members freely contribute skills and services without compensation, and also donate both time and money to support their group.
  2. The relationship between church administrators and church members doesn’t map onto the relationship between employers and employees, except in denominational institutions where there actually are employment contracts, responsibilities, and rights. In these contexts, both employee and employer have rights and responsibilities that are buttressed by employment law. The transactional mutuality of the employer-employee relationship doesn’t transfer over to church-as-business, and quid pro quo isn’t a suitable matrix for relationships among members of a faith association. While churches can and do list any number of responsibilities that members are expected to fulfill, U.S. law offers individual church members no rights in relation to their church except for the right to leave.
  3. “God’s family” is one of Christianity’s primary analogies, and has been from the community’s start. In businesses, supervisors and staff can be fired for failure to perform, disagreement with the boss, and noncompliance. There’s no logical expectation of life-long relationship. In families, while parents can divorce and children can emancipate themselves from abusive or dangerous elders, mothers can’t usually fire sons or daughters fire fathers.
  4. Family members are genetically and/or emotionally bonded for life: legal emancipation doesn’t break these bonds. Families do have the option of living in acrimony or deliberate indifference with other. They can also choose to grow through the process of discerning how to work and live together without seeking dominance over each other through social role.
  5. The Adventist church appeals to the Bible in its conversations about hierarchy and role, and the scriptures define the community of believers as a body and not a corporation, as an organism, not an organization. Yet so much denominational energy goes to maintaining hard organizational boundaries, to determining who shouldn’t be permitted to stay and who really ought to go. We use support for “church organization” as a shibboleth (see Finley’s 5th “biblical essential”), yet persist in undermining the mutual trust necessary for the health of the church organism. Appealing to corporate and legal traditions to parse and rank organic variations, discipline members, and govern acceptable norms for debate suggest we prefer the fixed rules of ledgers and manuals to the ever-morphing order of flesh and blood.
  6. It makes no sense to expect to reap healthy, functional relationships of family and friendship from the doulos and kyrios patterns we’ve sown. Every tree still bears the fruit of its kind. Whereas Jesus described and taught his disciples as “servants” at the start of their relationship (e.g. Matthew 10), he spent his last discourse explaining that they were siblings and friends. He changed the matrix for their relationship and we are yet to grasp the implications of that change.
  7. Instead of building our interactions around family and friendship, we operate as if sanctions for disagreement can heal rifts, as if one group’s decisions must bind others absent a proven relationship of trust, and as if the closed discussions of a few can in any way guarantee “the unity of the faith.” This is not wise.

“I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.”—John 15:15

“There is a fellowship of the spirit, fathoms deeper than differences of opinion. It is the fellowship of those who love the Way of the Ages.”—Lewis Fisher

“I care about the Adventist church. I want it to be healthy and, most importantly, faithful to Christ. The only way that I can imagine that possibility is if Adventists can get over their obsession with Adventism, and decide to become a church whose chief question to itself isn’t its confessional identity, but its faithfulness to the One in whom it confesses faith.” —Matt Burdette

A Story from Recent History

The Association of Adventist Women recently honored Merikay McLeod (Silver) as their Woman of the Year. In the late 1970s, McLeod (pronounced Muh-Cloud) settled an EEOC claim out of court with the GC-owned Pacific Press, and, after several more years, the denomination agreed to compensate female workers who’d been denied equal pay for equal work.

McLeod shares the short version of her story with Spectrum editor Bonnie Dwyer in this 10-minute edited interview.

Note: The video is only auto-captioned and caption accuracy is about 65%.

“The Equal Opportunities Commission sued Pacific Press and the court directed Pacific Press to deposit $600,000 into a bank account and distribute it to the women they employed but paid less than men for similar work.

In this case, the state showed more pity for the poor, the divorced, and the widowed than did the church.” —Association of Adventist Women

Ouch.

It’s probably easier for administrators to reframe the church family as a corporation and encourage us to structure our expectations and engagement patterns of it accordingly. After all, there’s no single universal family model: family looks different around the world and among groups within each culture. Family structures are also evolving in each culture in new ways.

Family is no guarantee of healthy relationship, however: “family culture” was the excuse Pacific Press staff gave McLeod for her and others’ low salaries. It also claimed “intra-family disputes” as the reason civil courts and agencies shouldn’t be allowed to intervene on behalf of underpaid female employees. So family isn’t always a sanctuary, but it does suggest a quality of parity, safety, and communion that we’re yet to manifest.

Analogies and metaphors have cognitive, material, and relational consequence: our core analogies structure our thinking, our relationship to others, and how we manage common space and resources. We can’t afford to be cavalier about them.
(To get this point from scientists, start with the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. To get it from humanists, start with the work of Toni Morrison.)

So if we were to prioritize the metaphors of family and organism across this faith community, it’d be appropriate to be careful and thoughtful—Finley-style—about understanding the kind of family we are, what nature we have as an organism, and how to nurture our interdependence and ability to adapt. For now, though, the organization still dominates both our community and our conversation and determines the tight, restrictive way many of our leaders lead.

“As one person or as a small group of insulated advisers to a leader, you don’t have access to all the information you need, and you also, unintentionally perhaps, put in the minds of people ‘Oh, don’t worry, we’ll figure this one out.’ I haven’t met a senior leadership team that actually knows what it’s doing anymore. And I’m speaking about national governments as well as large corporations or very large NGOs.

“I would love leaders to realize that as they narrow their focus and only work with a few trusted advisers—which is the arc that almost all leaders take when they’re in crisis—realize that that [approach] decreases your capacity, and the very people you need who would be a wonderful resource of imagination and creativity and working 24/7, are The People.

“And when you take it back to your office with a few groups of advisors, the signal you’re sending people is ‘We’ll figure this out, and then we’ll tell you what to do.’ And people are becoming more and more dependent as that dynamic gains more traction.” —Dr. Meg Wheatley (with Let Go and Lead)

That being so, it doesn’t benefit us to treat the question of our shared identity as a second-tier priority. Who we are at our core and, hence, what will grow from us as olives grow from their vine must not be deferred while we push doggedly ahead with “mission.” At this stage in the human story, I can’t imagine anything less inspiring than a global purpose that accommodates or justifies sustained discrimination against any vulnerable or marginalized group of people. Discrimination undermines the credibility of institutional religions and the moral universe they present to the world as ideal.

I agree with Mark Finley and Reinder Bruinsma on this point: we’ll get so much more done building up from what connects us and what good we can create together then we now do heel-digging into our differences.

So imagine that Mephistopheles himself offers us an accomplished mission if we’d only leave some family members to fend for themselves while we carry on for the cause. Can you also imagine we’d have the vision to recognize that proposal’s hollow heart? The cause we’re called to isn’t viable without a strong, applied commitment to the value of the whole human person, and I believe this commitment is something Adventism could advance quite coherently if we chose to. I’m in no way motivated to engage or participate by the thought of becoming one of many cogs in one of many organizations, but working with my siblings as peers under God does motivate me: it’s not a self-definition consolation prize. Yes, “God can take care of Himself,” and I say it’s our mission to take care of each other.

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Transcript: Toni Morrison at Portland State, 1975

Educating the conqueror is not our business. —Toni Morrison

Last week some of us heard for the first time a presentation that Prof. Toni Morrison made in May 1975 during a public lecture series on the theme of the American Dream.

“A Humanist View” begins by surveying technically objective shipping records. Comparing the records’ descriptions of rice, tar, turpentine, and humans, Morrison highlights the inhumanity of American slavery, the studied ignorance and skew of contemporary social sciences, and opportunities for Black artists to write and speak to their own community rather than write as educators for curious White audiences.

This weekend I sat down to listen to the 2-hour audio recording and transcribe Morrison’s presentation and responses during the Q&A. She discusses aspects of historical and contemporary racism, the economic roots of the racism tree, and uses racial epithets while describing how specific populations buy their way out of limiting social positions—literally using their creativity to become indispensable to local markets.

Download the transcript in Rich Text Format or in PDF.

Since Portland State’s Soundcloud recording remains free, please don’t sell/resell this transcript or access to it. And to honor Morrison’s argument and intellectual legacy, please do use this content to fuel your own research, self-education, and art.

Please send any transcription corrections via my contact form. I’ll update the links above with the latest versions.

[Latest transcripts: 7/7/2014]

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Sabbath Wisdom: Words Matter

Almost every Sabbath morning, I share with my Twitter network a series of tweets rooted in an aspect of faith or religious ethics. These tweets, tagged #SabbathWisdom, are often inspired by study conversations or sermons at my church. A sermon about the power of the word resonated with me yesterday. I may have been primed by Friday’s post about religious violence.

Displayed under license.
Where the words spread. Displayed under license.

“What you say can preserve life or destroy it; so you must accept the consequences of your words.” —Proverbs 18:21, GNT

“Your words can preserve life or destroy it… Words form us and deform us.” < Language and constructs matter: take care.

We look at ourselves and the outer world through lenses shaped by the words that run through our minds, lives, and  scriptures.

We’re probably past the days when our holy texts can be changed, but we can determine how to read & be named by them.

We can’t choose our bio relatives, but we can decide whether to live by their words or change the corpus they gave us.

“I have come in order that you might have life—life in all its fullness” (John 10:10). That’s the offer. It involves responsibility.

We’re not responsible for the tapes we were given. We’re responsible for the tapes we play and our impact on the world.

We can record new tapes, practice a life-affirming vocabulary, and insist on constructs that are healing, not destructive.

“Recognize and live like the accuser has been defeated.” —Mike Speegle

Carol Dweck writes: “Beliefs are central to the way people package their experiences and carry them forward.” And so they are.

Take responsibility for your words, your beliefs, & how they shape you and your impact on the world. Take responsibility.

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Sabbath Wisdom: Texts and Responsibility

Almost every Sabbath morning, I share with my Twitter network a series of tweets rooted in an aspect of faith or religious ethics. These tweets, tagged #SabbathWisdom, are often inspired by study conversations or sermons at my church. This morning’s series was far more extensive than usual, and I decided to share it with you as well.

Much appreciation to everyone who participated by reading, favoriting, retweeting, or replying—especially @runtodaylight, Peterson Toscano (@p2son), Karl Nova (@KarlNova), Mx A. Hooker (@awhooker), and Bryan Berghoef (@bryberg).

Texts and Responsibility

Today’s #SabbathWisdom tweets inspired by my conversation yesterday with @runtodaylight and last night’s vespers at @SouthernNews.

When I read the Christian scriptures as the collection of texts it is, I see both exclusive and inclusive elements.

I’ve been reading that collection all the way through since I was 13 years old. It isn’t a one-theme library.

I’m being deliberate in this thread about not calling it “a book.” Packaging aside, our “bible” is a library, not a book. The library doesn’t have a single author, a single story, or a single theme. Whoever tells you it does is selling something.

So given the diversity inherent to the Christian scriptures, we have an awesome—full-of-awe—responsibility as readers.

We have the ability to express more wholeness or fragmentation through the stories we tell and the dogma we choose. We have the capacity to advance integrity or promote demonization through our reading and reciting. We’re part of a text-centered religion. The God we invoke from our scripture reading will overshadow everything about us.

Earlier I quoted Greg Boyd, a pastor + open theist who writes about how our God-images & reading train us for life.

“There is now a wealth of research demonstrating that violence in literature that is considered sacred is a powerful force in motivating religious violence. It can only be negated by being renounced.” —Greg Boyd, March 7, 2013 (and March 14, 2013)

He argues that our meditations on violence presented as moral in scripture trains us to accept violence as morality in life. (This isn’t an idea original to Boyd; he’s just said it well recently!)

So we who read these ancient stories and draw insight from them for our lives—our responsibility is indeed awesome. Our moral authority doesn’t come from our libraries. But interpreting and applying them is a moral act. We’re accountable.

I’ve learned I have choices in how I read my library, how I interpret its stories, how I apply them to the world about me, how I apply insights to myself & others, whether I wield my library as a machete, what collateral damage I accept.

And I’ve learned to judge my choices by their outcomes in my relationships and my influence on the world I live in.

When I was a child going to Sabbath School and singing songs with the other kids, two songs really touched me.

The first one was “Oh be careful little eyes what you see.” In retrospect maybe it should’ve felt like the Panopticon? But it didn’t. It gave me a sense of universal benevolence and safe presence in this world that I’ve never lost.

It also taught me that what I reflected on, what I did, how I lived mattered and shaped me. Taught me awareness.

The second was “This is My Father’s World.” I’ve felt like an exile in many countries and groups, but never on this planet. This song taught me a sense of belonging, co-ownership, & hope. I haven’t lost that sense either, despite religion’s best efforts!

“This is my Father’s world: Oh let me ne’er forget That though the wrong seems oft so strong God is the ruler yet…
“This is my Father’s world: The battle is not done: Jesus who died will be satisfied And earth and Heaven be one.” —Maltbie D. Babcock, 1901

Yes: My opinions about some of these themes have changed a lot since I first started reading the Bible for myself. But that doesn’t scare me. It’s proof that I’m not a dead thing. Life requires change, and growth requires learning.

Reading our scriptures & living them out w/ others merits care.
Insist on being humane in your exercise of religion.

I think this was the longest #SabbathWisdom thread I’ve ever written. Thanks for hearing me out, y’all. I welcome feedback.

Feedback

I respond in italics.

From @KarlNova: “I love your tweets. I love your heart and mind. I appreciate your train of thought.”

I love you too, Karl. 🙂 *hugs*

From @runtodaylight, re. sources: “Yes, if I recall correctly theologians call this ‘source criticism.’ It’s especially evident in canonical gospels:  Matt & Luke both know Mark, plus Q. John’s Gospel is MUCH different than synoptics, but in ‘closing canon’ the early Church deemed all four ‘canonical.’ Not so with other gospels, Peter, Thomas, which have a lot of same info. IMHO. The Westar Institute’s Jesus Seminar is a very reliable resource.”

It goes well beyond source analysis. There is multivalence (many-sidedness) even in works thought to have single sources.

@runtodaylight: “Agree. Didn’t mean to imply otherwise (link on Biblical criticism).”

What I’ve been talking about this morning isn’t so much who wrote what with which informants, but how we make sense of the themes and values within these stories, whatever their sources, and how we apply them now. Walt Whitman’s line “Do I contradict myself?” is apropos here. 🙂

"Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes." —Walt Whitman

The study of our texts is so powerful in part because we are multivalent, both as speakers/writers and as hearers/readers.

From @awhoooker: “I enjoyed that you talked about how you used your ‘library.’ Important that our faith stories come from the voices of many.”

Thanks! I agree it’s important for more of us to share. Because of experience, I don’t resonate with the text drive-by model. So I want to encourage more text-religion folks to consider alternate and perhaps more healing ways to treat their texts and peers.

@awhooker: “I think a lot is lost when we come to the texts thinking that God spoke them word-for-word from heaven.”

Agreed. Yet even if God had done so, that speech is now mediated through us. And we can’t blame God for our translation work. (When I say “translation” here, I mean both translation of manuscripts and translation from text to life.)

@awhoooker: “If Christ is the Word of God who imparted the Spirit to us after his death & resurrection, I think we are the living words. So, yes, in a sense, our faith lives are translations of what we read, see, hear, & experience.”

Agreed. My communication background teaches me: We are the “speech acts” of God. 🙂

Thanks to everyone who read, faved, retweeted, or responded to the #SabbathWisdom thread this morning. You all enrich me!

If you’d like to join me in conversations like this on Sabbath mornings (Saturdays, usually between 11:00 and 12:30 Eastern), follow me or the #SabbathWisdom hashtag.