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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

evangelicals

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Backstory on the right to discriminate

Close-up shot of brick wall.
Photo credit: Seref Yucar

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.

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Learning about character from Shakespeare

On a jet black background, a pink-to-purple rose. The lighting highlights the color of the flower and deep shadow. The flower is lit from the bottom left.
Photo credit: Simone Dalmeri

In William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet muses about the conflict between her family, the Capulets, and the family of her beloved, Romeo. The two families are feuding and she’s been trained to hate the name “Montague,” yet she’s still managed to fall in love with someone from that clan.

Jul. O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father, and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet…

’Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself though, not a Montague.
What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O! be some other name:
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name;
And for that name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.” —Romeo and Juliet, Act II, sc. ii

Romeo, who’s been eavesdropping out of sight until this point in the scene, tells Juliet that he’d abandon his name if he could because of her antipathy for it.

The phrase that’s passed into common English: That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Shakespeare was partially right: the substance of a thing is still its substance no matter what it’s called.

But marketing rests on the fact that we don’t always accurately perceive substance when its branding or marketing points us to something different. When the name of a thing misdirects us, that affects our perceptions of it. And when there’s a mismatch between a thing’s “name” or self-declaration and its actual nature, there are only negative feelings.

Back in the 1990s, three or four major soda companies tried a “clear cola” experiment, and soda drinkers just wouldn’t latch on. Coca Cola’s Tab Clear made it just two years in the UK and US. It had as much caffeine as classic and diet Coke did, and it was just as flavorful.

But Coca Cola sold the drink under one of its down-quality product lines, and they positioned it to tank a Pepsi competitor. To consumers, it wasn’t Coke enough: A cola by another name and color didn’t taste as sweet.

In the aftermath of the US federal election, Evangelicals including Tony Campolo and Shane Claiborne have worried that the Evangelical brand is so corrupted that they can no longer use it. “Jesus-centered faith needs a new name,” Campolo and Claiborne wrote in the New York Times, arguing that the community once known as Evangelical needed to shed its sociopolitical baggage and its association with the 45th President and the Republican Party.

Other writers have pushed back hard on Campolo and Claiborne’s attempt to dissociate, but the core issue Evangelicals face today is the same one Shakespeare explored through Juliet and Romeo:

People are susceptible to Madison Avenue’s psychological marketing techniques, and we wrestle with the distances between the substance of a person, product, service, or community and whichever associations its marketers and brand strategists promote. When character and name or experience and brand are at odds, we notice. No one likes false advertising and expectations that aren’t met, but we do like to be pleasantly surprised, to have our expectations exceeded.

The lesson from this could be the simple dictum “under-promise and over-deliver.” But perhaps a better lesson is that in religion and in relationship we should rather focus on the health of our characters and the quality of our contributions. No matter what people call it, a rose only smells sweet when it is fresh. No marketing campaign, even on Madison Avenue, can cover up the stink of rancid flowers or the disappointment of a clear soda.

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Writing from The Justice Conference

In popular culture, doing business is synonymous with taking action. Flip open a magazine about business or entrepreneurship and you’ll see articles and imagery about design scrums, mergers, stocks and sales, commercial transportation options, the best ways to expand, and ideal places to travel on your down time.

Vacations, too, are framed in terms of activity: hunting for a region’s best restaurants, heading to the waterfront or mountains for an adventure away from the office, and exploring galleries, exhibitions, and touring festivals. Advertising promises we can absorb the best of a town “in 18 hours!” and perhaps we can, but by the time anyone could possibly account for all of the recommended destinations and detours, they’d have worked enough to merit another vacation.

The challenge for our time isn’t filling the hours of the day. We’ve mastered that. Our deep challenge is releasing the vise grip of clock-time and calendars, knowing when and how to pause, and how to take the liberty to rest, refrain, and recover even when the culture around us is ambivalent about it.

I grew up in the Seventh-day Adventist community, a comparatively small 150-year-old Christian denomination that teaches the observance of a weekly Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. Sabbath is still one of my favorite spiritual practices: beyond its many theological and sociological rationales, Sabbath is a material and embodied reminder that everything that lives participates in an in-breath as well as an out-breath, reception as well as expression, rest as well as activity. Hustlers, business-builders, and worldchangers need that reminder.

The body constitutes a site of divine revelation.” —M. Shawn Copeland

As much as “the social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived” (Mary Douglas), it’s the physical body that limits not only what we can perceive on our own but also frames, through shared mental structures such as metaphor and analogy, how we organize and interpret the data that comes to us through our senses and all that we experience through our bodies (Beatrice Bruteau, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, and Richard Beck).

Even more: we live in a world where law and convention each regulate our bodies, our enfleshed us. In this world, social systems frame some bodies as ripe for hyper-analysis and suspicion when alive and fit for dissection and critique after death.

Andreas Vesalius, father of modern dissection, was neither the first nor the last to imagine that one could extract more wisdom from a tortured, dead, or carved-up body than from living bodies, pulsing and mobile, unpredictable, and capable of talking and pushing back.

As someone just four generations removed from people whose Christian slavers refused them the liberty to rest when their bodies demanded it, the capacity to cease work is sacred to me. And as someone driven to make, to investigate, to develop, to teach, to heal, and to help in a world with no off-switch, the disciplines of rest and listening are a critical counterbalance for me.

This weekend, Sabbath meets me away from home and work near what used to be the Cabrini-Green projects of North Chicago. Now “redeveloped,” that is, gentrified, this block hosts an expanding mostly White, middle-class mega-church and out-of-town tourists like me. We’re in town this weekend for the 2016 Justice Conference (#Justice16) and I’m most excited about hearing from Mark Charles (@wirelesshogan).

Mark Charles on stage at The Justice Conference, Chicago, IL.
Mark Charles speaks at The Justice Conference (Chicago, IL), June 3, 2016

Charles is a Navajo writer and consultant who teaches about the Doctrine of Discovery, the complicity of religion in the Western Hemisphere’s genocides, and the United States’ desperate need to tell the truth about the violations that scar its social body. These violations are ongoing, not merely historical. We sustain this pace of frenetic activity despite that ongoing injury, and that’s about as wise as running a marathon on a broken hip.

Charles calls us to pause, to stop and take stock. To stop acting long enough to allow truth to bubble up through layers of dehumanization and injustice. To stop acting long enough for all us to move from oppression and confession to lament and deep change.

What does justice look like when everything you have is stolen, when the entire system is corrupt?” —Mark Charles

I’ll share more tomorrow.

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The Evangelical Turn — A Few Hard Questions

This week, Eliel Cruz interviewed evangelical ethics professor Dr. David Gushee for his LGBT-faith column at the Religious News Service. I’ll either share or comment on that interview when it’s live.

[Book Cover] This October, Gushee published a new book on how the evangelical community might now address the LGBT community. Changing Our Mind includes forewords from Brian McLaren, Phyllis Tickle, and Matthew Vines.
This October, Gushee published a new book on how the evangelical community might now address the LGBT community. Changing Our Mind includes forewords from Brian McLaren, Phyllis Tickle, and Matthew Vines.

Gushee, who teaches at Mercer University in Atlanta, hit the national papers earlier this fall after declaring that his theology had changed and he could no longer support the abusive marginalization of LGBT people in or out of the Church.

At a Reformation Project regional conference in Washington, D.C., Gushee told attendees: “I do join your crusade tonight. I will henceforth oppose any form of discrimination against you. I will seek to stand in solidarity with you who have suffered the lash of countless Christian rejections. I will be your ally in every way I know how to be.”

And he’s just published a new book that describes his change process and how evangelicals might re-engage the scriptures and freshly engage the LGBT community affected by their scripture-reading and doctrine-making. I didn’t know about the book until yesterday, but am not even mildly surprised.

Eliel invited the #FaithfullyLGBT tag to contribute questions for Gushee—and I shared a few, which I’ve amplified for this post:

  1. Anticipated Peer Group: Which affirming Christian organizations will Gushee now be working with, and why?
    This question establishes the fact that he’s not exploring undiscovered country; he’s new to a 50-year lineage of scholarship, activism, marginalization, and service without praise.
  2. Influences: Which books and/or people does he credit with helping him understand the limits of his former position?
    This question acknowledges that we’re all products of our network, not intrepid isolated heroes or Thomas Carlyle’s “Great Men.”
  3. Issue Framing: What does he think is the biggest obstacle to the Church embracing its born and raised LGBT members?
    This question addresses the fact that LGBT people are native to the Church not Other to it and that the evangelical community could very naturally embrace its own but resists. I’d like to hear Gushee explore why that is.
  4. Significance/Unique Contribution: The tide has already turned legally & in the mainline community. What can evangelical affirmers like him uniquely add now?
    This question assumes that Gushee would self-define as an “affirmer”; I told Eliel that I wasn’t entirely sure about that.
  5. Intention: What message does he want LGBT current or former Christians to hear? What about him does he want us to understand?
    This question gives Gushee an opportunity to clarify his intentions and his core message—primarily for LGBT people in and beyond the Church and not just for his heterosexual evangelical peers.

In just the last two years, a whole series of prominent male evangelicals has shifted on sexuality, mostly to suggest that LGBT people might also enjoy the ability to marry their beloved ones. Examples include Rob Bell, Jim Wallis (though Jim didn’t understand the intersection of sexuality and US immigration), the UK’s Steve Chalke, and Ken Wilson and Danilo Cortez, both local pastors who proposed what they call a “Third Way” approach in their congregations. Cortez lost his denominational affiliation and 40% of his members over that move. Wilson, who like Gushee has written a book about his process, escaped with a 90 page rebuttal from the church association he co-founded and complete erasure from his former church’s website.

In the Adventist corner of Christianity, Herb Montgomery lost donors and supporters over open solidarity with the LGBT community earlier this year. Yet the caravan has kept progressing alongside the closure of US-based Exodus International, early professional ex-gay campaigner John Paulk’s apology, and the Church of England including Accepting Evangelicals, a 10yo inclusive network, in its deliberations.

Each of the questions I shared with Eliel this week cracks open a different door, and every door opens up a whole room of reflection that I’d recommend new supporters visit, sit down in, and meditate in slowly. Yet I’m not a publisher or a gatekeeper. I’m not the manager of the New Ally Pipeline. I’m only a small part of the community that Dr. Gushee would like to support. And Eliel may have had a different set of priorities for his interview than to make sure someone like me had her questions answered.

I’m at peace with that.

If any just-out supporter did seek me out for a word, I’d have a few notes of caution to sing. Some of us are wary of those who seem to lead with optics and branding, not substance or human/humane care, and who use the community to shore up their visibility, relevance, or credibility with others. FYI: bristling about my last sentence, laundry-listing one’s many acts of kindness to Those People, or reflexively denying their application in any specific case won’t mitigate that communal wariness in any way.

The only thing that mitigates community wariness is consistency demonstrated over time. And there’s no way in heaven or earth for a new supporter to accelerate the passage of time.

In the meantime, I’ll choose to trust the steady progress of the Earth around the Sun, even if I note human variability out of the corner of my eye. And I’ll hope that community members with a far broader vision of the future than the one the status quo dreams of can speak to Gushee in language he can understand.