March 2, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Sending love to Gavin

Gavin Grimm is a 17-year-old trans student from Virginia who’s finishing his last year of high school and getting ready to appear before the Supreme Court of the United States.

After parents and members of the public complained that Gavin’s school wasn’t requiring him to use separate facilities from other students, the school board held a hearing. Some of the rhetoric was atrocious, and the board’s resistance has forced Gavin to assert his legal rights to go to school, socialize with other children, and not be stigmatized by school authorities.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Virginia filed a lawsuit against the Gloucester County School Board for adopting a discriminatory bathroom policy that segregates transgender students from their peers. The policy effectively expels trans students from communal restrooms and requires them to use ‘alternative private’ restroom facilities.”

Some adults have been working to make this right. Today, the ACLU released a religious brief signed by more than 1,800 religious leaders and heads of faith-based organizations including Intersections International, where I work.

The weekend’s coming up. Take some time to sit with this brief and its vision of civic space that we’re all free to share no matter who we are or which religions we’re part of.

And send Gavin love!

February 17, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

We’ve been here before

I grew up hearing about the civil rights era lunch counter sit-ins. It took me a while to understand that they were about much more than food.

In Greensboro, NC, in 1960, four Black students sat down at a Whites-only counter in a Woolworths store and refused to move until served. They sat down at Woolworths and other counters over the next five months, disrupting the custom that they shouldn’t expect the same service that White people received.

Some restaurant owners and patrons sincerely believed that Black people and White people shouldn’t eat together and that integration was a kind of moral contamination. Some of their religious leaders taught them that; after all, the Klan was a religious organization as well as a political one.

The discrimination of that era was sustained in large part because of religious rhetoric and people of faith. As much as people of faith worked together to expose segregation as ethically bankrupt, people of faith also worked really hard to keep it and the “good order” segregationists claimed to be preserving.

Evil doesn’t require cold-hearted monsters to persist. It only requires ordinary people who are willing to follow exclusionary customs, and it doesn’t matter whether they credit God for those customs or not.

For example, when Lucille Lewis Byard developed pneumonia near Washington, D.C., her husband took her to be treated at the Washington Sanitarium and Hospital (later Washington Adventist Hospital in Takoma Park, Maryland).

But it was 1943, and the good religious people at the San stopped treating Byard when they realized she was Black. They referred her across DC to the “colored” hospital at Howard University, and she died. The prejudice and negligence of the San’s medical staff—discrimination—meant that a woman lost her life.

Exactly 70 years later, a florist in Washington State stopped arranging flowers for longtime clients, a same-sex couple, when she learned that they were planning their wedding. She’s cited her sincerely held beliefs for this choice.

It’s true that no one died in the state of Washington because they didn’t get flowers. It’s also true that no one died in Greensboro, NC, because they didn’t get lunch. But people sat in at the Woolworth’s counters for months, because they recognized that the stakes were greater than food. The stakes are greater than flowers.

People have been using religion as an excuse to deny others services, facilities, or benefits for years: unfortunately, it’s not new for people to refuse to serve others on the basis of who they are and how they’re socially classified. It’s not new because sometimes our sincerely held beliefs are trash.

But we’ve had this discussion before. We have, as a society, decided that discrimination in public accommodations is not ok and does not deserve to be protected. It explicitly harms the people who’re marked for unequal treatment and it implicitly corrodes neighborly trust in communities as well.

I’d like to see more people of faith who will honor our religions’ best values and say that.

Next weekend, Believe Out Loud team members will travel with other organizers to Greensboro, NC. There they’ll spend a day training people of faith to recognize discrimination and learn to share how discriminatory policies affect their daily lives. If you know anyone who’ll be in commuting distance of Greensboro on February 25, encourage them to sign up. Materials will be delivered in both English and Español.

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: ◄]

March 26, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

Reader Review #7

Discover Magazine: Grandma’s Experiences Leave Epigenetic Mark on Your Genes (Dan Hurley)

Before the 1970s, genes were the fixed limits of life. With DNA as boss and RNA the secretary, combinations of genes produced a certain physiological outcome and it wasn’t clear what made one gene express and another not. But over the last 40 years, through independent research as well as massive collaborations like the Human Genome Project, we’ve learned the number, location, and functions of more than 20,000 genes and the hormones and processes that trigger them.

Now that the HGP is over, more scientists are looking at how experiences shape gene expression during the life cycle and across generations. That’s what the hybrid field of epigenetics is all about. This article from the pop science magazine Discover takes a closer look at two leading epigeneticists and the methylation of DNA—how methyl and aceytl molecules adjacent to DNA strands influences selective protein development, how something as simple as a regular gym practice can change the DNA a person was born with, and which traumas and bonding experiences can trigger epigenetic change.

Like silt deposited on the cogs of a finely tuned machine after the seawater of a tsunami recedes, our experiences, and those of our forebears, are never gone, even if they have been forgotten. They become a part of us, a molecular residue holding fast to our genetic scaffolding… The mechanisms of behavioral epigenetics underlie not only deficits and weaknesses but strengths and resiliencies, too. —Dan Hurley

Beguine Again: Of Dead-Weasel Toupees And Homophobia (James R. Cowles)

If you object to the series of public service discrimination laws recently proposed in four US states and vetoed in a fifth, why? What’s your legal basis? Does it matter to you whether a citizen’s attributes are chosen?

Jim Cowles argues that a completely different question—objective harm—provides a more stable legal basis for evaluating competing rights and the merits, if any, of discrimination against an entire class. The SCOTUS-level reviews of Proposition 8 and DOMA during 2012-2013 also focused on objective harms rather than choice.

As I said to Jim: “I was raised in a particular religious tradition and didn’t have any influence on that environment. But I remain with that tradition by choice, not mandate. I could abandon it; I could choose another tradition; and whether I did or not would still not validate discrimination against me on the grounds of my religion.”

Religion is a protected category in this country, but what if it wasn’t? It would still be to our collective advantage not to use individual choice as the basis for validating whole-class discrimination.

Related: Comicbook Bin: Nightcrawler and the Demonization of Homosexuality (J. Skyler) #LongRead

J. Skyler, a #qfaith participant, shared this essay with the group this week. It’s a long read that’s worth the effort, and fills out some of the rhetorical moves behind recent anti-LGBTI legislation. If you’re unfamiliar with the content, you’ll see plenty to research on your own.

Blind devotion to cultural misconceptions is a plague unto itself.”

Faith, freedom, religious schools, and value conflicts

Religions News Service: Leadership changes at Cedarville University point to conservative direction (Sarah Pulliam Bailey)
Anthony B Susan: I will not suffer a woman (Sarah Jones)
Christian Post: Christian College Solidifies Complementarian Stance (Ruth Moon)

The RNS report updates readers on how one North Carolina university has handled value diversity within its faculty, among its students, and from its off-campus stakeholders: the Southern Baptist constituency has replaced Cedarville University’s senior administration and the new president has begun making course-level changes. I referenced Cedarville in a series on faith and freedom on this site last quarter.

Religious colleges and universities sometimes struggle to host respectful campus conversations about controversial beliefs without resorting to “Agree or Resign.” I think this struggle intensifies when schools can operate as if isolated from the world around them. Legally, of course, religious institutions have a lot of latitude to self-govern based on governance statements and denominational requirements. At the same time, off-campus publicity can and sometimes does motivate institutions to act according to their highest ethics rather than just the most expedient ones.

Wall Street Journal: Success Outside the Dress Code (Shirley S. Wang) [Subscribers-only as of 2018]
Wang sums up some research on group dynamics: how nonconformists mark their difference through clothing selections or language variations, and how other group members interpret these differences. An interesting finding: if group members think someone varies from a norm by accident, the nonconformist gets no status points. Only variations perceived as deliberate are read as additive status markers.

People veer from what’s expected after they’ve built up enough trust within a group. [But] acting differently risks losing the benefits that come with conforming, such as shared group identity and automatic group trust…

Willingness to deviate can be useful for groups as well, particularly when it comes to decision-making… The person who brings up alternative points of view to make sure the group has sufficiently examined all options can help the group reach a better decision. If the group trusts the individual’s intentions, this perspective will be considered seriously and the individual will still be considered part of the group.

I was most intrigued by this finding on trust. It’s trust that allows a group to reap the benefits of nonconformity, but if a group distrusts people who vary from its norms, it won’t accept what they contribute and won’t reap benefits from them.

Framing nonconformists as disloyal to the group undermines trust. So does exclusion.

Exercising One’s Moral Imagination

Temple of the Future (Patheos): How to check your privilege in 5 excruciating steps (James Croft)

I cannot stress how important the development of the moral imagination is for all aspects of ethical discourse and discernment, particularly in cases where you are making ethical judgments regarding experiences you have never had, and never will have.” —James Croft

This is a read-and-reflect kind of article. I look forward to hearing what my network has to say about it.

One of the things that’s missing from much of the moral-ethical discussion in my denomination at the moment is a strong sense of particularity: that we are, as individuals and as members of a larger culture, grounded in a specific body, time, and place, and that this temporal-spatial location constrains what we see in the world and how we interpret what we see.

The insight of particularity is 40-50 years old in social science research, but only just being attended to in evangelical-fundamentalist theological circles. I think it’s one reason why we’ve preferred to pronounce our opinions than listen to the experiences of others.

Taking a Literary Break

Schomburg Center: Between the Lines: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie with Zadie Smith

Adichie and Smith offer a wonderful conversation about identity and writing and womanhood in this video (uncaptioned). I resonate with both women: Smith because of our common UK-Jamaican heritage and experience, and Adichie because of her insights into the Black immigrant’s insider-outsider view of the United States and America’s continuing challenge with the Other.

The Schomburg Center’s recording device lost signal at around the 37 min mark, but hang in there for about 40 seconds and it does resume.

February 13, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

From the Kansas State Constitution

Sec. 1 – Equal rights
All men are possessed of equal and inalienable natural rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Sec. 2 – Political power; privileges
All political power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority, and are instituted for their equal protection and benefit. No special privileges or immunities shall ever be granted by the legislature, which may not be altered, revoked or repealed by the same body; and this power shall be exercised by no other tribunal or agency.
Sec. 7 – Religious liberty
The right to worship God according to the dictates of conscience shall never be infringed; nor shall any person be compelled to attend or support any form of worship, nor shall any control of or interference with the rights of conscience be permitted, nor any preference be given by law to any religious establishment or mode of worship. No religious test or property qualification shall be required for any office of public trust, nor for any vote at any election, nor shall any person be incompetent to testify on account of religious belief.

A stone spiral set into a wall in Austin, TX. Keisha took the photo herself. — The Spiral Stone, Austin TX (c) Keisha McKenzie, 2008

In a bizarre throwback to the days of religiously-motivated lunch counter segregation, and despite some objections, the Kansas legislature prepares to legalize religiously-motivated discrimination in both public and private services. The target this time round is the LGBT consumer.

So if you’d thought that questions about public service discrimination had been settled 50 years ago, you were wrong.

However, the right to worship according to one’s convictions and the right to conduct business with and provide services to the general public are very different things. Christians’ right to worship according to our conscience is not abridged anywhere in the United States.

In fact, the recent SCOTUS case Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC reaffirmed religious organizations’ right to make decisions about employees classified as ministers (including teachers) even when those determinations were discriminatory and breached anti-discrimination law that would apply to any other employer. In other words, recent US law grants religious organizations all the special privileges to discriminate in their own sphere that they could reasonably want. It does not dismantle 50 years of hard-won rule-making about preserving equal access to public services in the public sphere we all share whether we’re aligned with specific religious expressions or not.

Dear America, this is ridiculous. Please get it together.