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mackenzian

Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

faith

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Disrupting the familiar

A view of the Carnegie stage from five flights up.

I’ve been reading about the life and death of Jesus since I was about three years old. And I spent many Friday nights during my childhood singing my way through all six cassette tapes of Handel’s Messiah (only Hogwood’s interpretation of the 1754 Foundling Hospital version will do!).

Like the Nativity story in December, the Passion (betrayal-to-resurrection) is familiar ground for dramatists and musicians to recover at this time of year. The second half of Messiah, which many choirs perform during the Easter season, covers the betrayal, trial, murder, resurrection, and restoration of Jesus.

Composer John Adams took the well-worn Passion tale and the four-hundred-year-old tradition of the oratorio, and created something surprising and remarkable in The Gospel According to the Other Mary (2013). The St. Louis Symphony played it at New York’s Carnegie Hall tonight: a full orchestra of strings, wind, brass, and percussion, with at least 60 choir voices, a triad of countertenor narrators, and Mary (mezzo soprano), Martha (contralto), and Lazarus (tenor).

It took Adams’ postmodern, postcolonial minimalism to help me see the story in a new way. I frankly didn’t expect to experience a “third testament” that spanned millennia thanks to sources like the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, the poetry of June Jordan and Rosario Castellanos, the journals of Dorothy Day, and the visions of Hildegard of Bingen.

But I did.

I recognized the tale of Lazarus’ death and resurrection in all its chilling, creepy weirdness. I felt the building amoral energy of the mob at Golgotha. I heard the gentle transformation of the resurrection of Jesus, too, and I watched that story unfold mostly from the perspective of women, both ancient and contemporary.

More than I’ve realized lately, I’ve needed some disruption to my most familiar stories; I’ve needed help to be surprised.

When was the last time you told an old story in a new way? What did that disruption do for you?

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Sending love to Gavin

I have had no problems from students—only adults. I am just a human. I am just a boy. —Gavin GrimmGavin 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!

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Practicing faith responsibly

A close-up of a large brown leather-bound Bible. Most of the text is unfocused; a verse about the law is highlighted to the center left of the image. The Bible rests on a wooden tabletop.
Photo credit: Aaron Burden

In Unprotected Texts, Jennifer Wright Knust reviews the internal complexity of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.

Many voices, communities, and perspectives are part of the anthology we now call “the Bible,” and these many perspectives sit side-by-side, sometimes rather uncomfortably.

The Bible’s polyvalence—its many-sidedness—isn’t something that only anti-religious readers perceive. Over centuries, Biblical scholars have noted it too. Scholars and believers just vary on how they interpret that textual evidence and what conclusions they draw from it about God.

As Drs. Jean Sheldon and Olive Hemmings have said, the concepts of God that religious people take from their scriptures have significant consequences for how we perceive each other and the quality of community that we build together. We don’t rise higher than the level of our gods, and that can be devastating when, as Sheldon shows, our gods are violent, destructive, capricious, or fundamentally untrustworthy.

So when we read the stories of our scriptures, we’re not just reading stories. We’re engaging other and ancient cultures, interpreting their values, mapping our ideals onto our own worlds of experience. We’re responsible for the meanings we assign to their texts, and we’re accountable for whatever the texts inspire in us: we don’t get to blame the text or praise the text for our ethical decisions.

“Ignoring the passages we don’t like and holding onto the passages we love will not make what we hate go away,” Knust writes:

The Bible is complicated enough, ancient enough, and flexible enough to support an almost endless set of interpretive agendas. That’s why abolitionists could find inspiration in the Bible’s pages despite centuries of biblically sanctioned argumentation in favor of the enslavement of fellow human beings… We ourselves must decide what kind of people we will become [and] how best to love one another.”

Does humanity’s future depend on us properly stewarding this responsibility? I say yes.

An increasing number of people disaffiliate from denominations and other forms of organized religion each year. Yet religions and spiritualities still deeply influence individuals and the societies we shape.

In the Christian epistle James is a definition of “true religion”: caring for the vulnerable and refusing to be overrun by the small-hearted and dominating customary ways of the world. If this definition is valid, true religion is a call for us to be totally and faith-fully engaged with all that means life and all that makes good tangible for real people. True religion isn’t like a strong drink: it’s not an escape; it’s rather a call to step up with others impartially and for all our sakes.

For people in text-influenced religions like me, responsibility includes how we read our central texts and apply them to each other and the core issues of our time. For all the havoc and folly we people of faith can wreak, it matters that we choose to practice faith responsibly.

One person who’s done this exceptionally well over the last several years is Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, a Texas Tech professor and researcher who specializes in climate change. Hayhoe explains to ordinary people all over the country that they don’t have to jettison their faith to act on climate.

Peterson Toscano recently shared Hayhoe’s work on Citizen’s Climate Radio. The video of her presentation is captioned. Check it out.

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Photo: Responding to the Cruciform Life

The first presentation is complete! This afternoon, I responded to Greg Boyd’s treatment of Christian discipleship as the call to live cruciform, in the form of the cross.

Boyd has argued that Christians have a responsibility to shape their lives in terms of self-sacrifice. Grounded in Black history and theologies, I suggested that this teaching could inure the Church to people’s suffering and make it complicit with oppression and abuse. These sorts of teachings, I said, can have unhelpful consequences at the levels of congregations and families.

Boyd clarified his perspective with a great two-liner:

"The context in which you preach a cruciform life matters. You have to have power in order to put it down." --Gregory Boyd #2016AFConf

Thanks to Spectrum’s Jared Wright for capturing me mid-sentence!

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A better basis for conversation

A white-and-grey speckled rooster photographed in profile with its beak open. It has a bright red comb atop its head.
Image: Sam Watkins

We are here. We have always been here. The fact that most of the churches have lived in blissful ignorance of our presence means nothing. Our task—our ministry to ourselves and to the church—is not to justify our presence, but to tell the church who we really are by our own definitions, rather than by [others’], because we know who we are…

The gospel is not about smoothing over the issues that divide us, nor integration in the sense of making us all agree, think alike, or even worship alike. It is about affirming the godly identity of every human being, even those whom we find strange (or queer). [The gospel’s] work will continue until we can all take our places at the table without challenging anyone’s right to be there. Whom God has called, no human being has the right to turn away.” —L. William Countryman and M.R. Ritley

This topic came up during the filming of Enough Room at the Table last spring. It comes up during every post-screening conversation I’ve been in.

And it comes up in other community discussions as well, because all appearances aside, the topic isn’t actually about the kinds of people we exclude or debate or marginalize. It’s about the kind of community we are. It’s about “us.”

This topic keeps coming up because we keep designing conversations on the premise that the existence and presence and contribution of the Other is a debate question.

We can have conversations about women ministers as if they aren’t already pastoring, preaching, and serving thousands of congregations worldwide. Our conversations about them don’t take the evidence into account, and we study questions that are already answered in the lives of real people.

We can talk about being “one in Christ” without reckoning with the “every nation, kindred, tongue, and people” already present in our communities, yet not present in our communities’ leadership teams; already active in service and support, yet not factored into programs or policies.

These and other examples represent dialogues that have calcified inequity and skewed our thinking. From design to execution, these conversations undermine our ability to build more sustainable community dynamics because they fail to acknowledge the communities we already have.

But “we are here. We have always been here.” Blissful ignorance is no longer an option, and some of us are going to challenge the basis of conversation until it changes.

We deserve communities with a more solid ground floor than quicksand.

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Defining “Us”

Expand the definition of "us." We won't heal the world if when we say "world" we merely mean "my friends and me." —@mackenzian

A few recent headlines on climate and environmental justice:

  • While Shell’s Perdido platform has spilled 90,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, and Shell faces a lawsuit on behalf of communities in Nigeria, Exxon’s shareholders have rejected proposals to include a climate change expert on their corporate board or consider how global carbon-reduction agreements would impact the company.
  • Residents of Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, are the first in the US to be described as “climate change refugees.”
  • People in Brooklyn challenge NYC’s government to plan a new streetcar service around the needs of “the city’s neediest,” not gentrifiers and developers.
  • Meanwhile, UpRose Brooklyn, a 50-year-old local environmental justice movement, is pushing back on plans to displace Sunset Park’s working class community. Executive Director Elizabeth Yeampierre writes that we have a moral imperative to use industrial zones to drive development that’s renewable, efficient, carbon-neutral, and climate-adaptable. But the campaign is swimming against the current of money and power in NY’s City Hall.
  • Chagos islanders, from the archipelago in the Indian Ocean east of Mauritius, are still landless despite multiple UK court and UN rulings affirming their right to return home. The UK and the US forcibly removed the Chagos during the Cold War, and the US has used the largest island as a military base since then. (Learn more.)

There are a few common threads here.

  • Private corporations value their profits over their impact on millions.
  • Cities value short-term benefits over residents’ long-term needs.
  • Western governments close ranks against populations too small or too remote to resist armed power, and ancestral land is a great chessboard for modern war games.

Our definition of “us” limits whose gains and losses we’re willing to care about. Our definition of “we” excludes the people who most need its protection and favors those among us who need it least. Money and media consistently affirm the concerns of a very narrow slice of the human race, and people working for good on the ground floor face incredible institutional resistance.

This is not how we heal the world. 

A candid photo of Peterson Toscano's head and shoulders. He is looking into the camera and grimacing slightly. In the background to his right, are trees: he appears to be in a forest. The branches are bare and the sky is blue.
Peterson Toscano has hosted 49 episodes of the hopeful podcast, Climate Stew. Episode 50 will be out in a few days.

In the penultimate episode of Climate Stew, Peterson Toscano asks, “How do we get people to listen, to care, to act?” We certainly can’t do it with fear rhetoric. Fear of crisis and collapse terrifies people, contracting their ability to envision a future worth living in or make sound, long-term decisions about that future.

But we naturally care for our own; we don’t have to argue people into doing that. So part of our failure lies in our definition of “us.” We have to engage people at the level of their values, the values that determine who in the human family people claim as “theirs” and how we should treat those on this or that side of the in-group line.

Christian theologian Walter Brueggeman has some thoughts about that:

We in the United States live in a deathly social context that’s marked by consumerism and militarism and the loss of the common good… [This] ideological system causes us to be very afraid, to regard other people as competitors, or as threats, or as rivals. It causes us to think of the world in very frightened and privatistic forms…

“The gospel very much wants us to think in terms of a neighborhood, in terms of being in solidarity with other people, in sharing our resources, and of living out beyond ourselves. The gospel contradicts the dominance values of our system, which encourages self-protection and self-sufficiency at the loss of the common good. The church is in some ways a reflection of those dominant values.” —Walter Brueggeman, January 2015

Brueggeman believes that Christianity in the US has adopted domination values, choosing threat consciousness and isolation over the harder work of negotiating what it means to live on a common planet with others. But for him, and for the thousands of people of faith involved in climate action work, this isn’t a merely political or scientifically logical or economic matter. It’s not even about existential preservation, or saving corn, beans, or chocolate, as much as I care about these crops. Since so many people are frozen out of quality life, my concern for injustice isn’t about keeping things the same. It’s about changing things.

Awakening to our connectedness is about imagining a world unlike the past and distinct from the present. There’s a moral basis for imagining our future knowing that we’ll share it with people we haven’t yet been willing to claim as “ours too.” The facts haven’t changed much since the 1800s: we’re responsible for humankind and we have the capacity to live differently. So it’s our values, and not so much the facts, that can guide us in finding more fruitful ways to handle our social decisions, our use of land and energy, our approval of local re/development plans, our reception or rejection of climate refugees, and the calculus we use in policymaking.

Who’s in our “we”? We have to expand our answer.

Because the only way we can heal our world is if when we say “world,” we mean more than “my friends and me.”