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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

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Review: Torn And Not Mended

This review originally appeared at the Hillhurst Review on April 8, 2013.

Lee, Justin. (2012). Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate New York: Jericho Books.

It all started with the kid in high school who called me “God Boy.”

Justin Lee, co-founder, director, and public face of the Gay Christian Network, has been building bridges between evangelical Christians and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people since the late-1990s. Torn, his memoir, describes his work as a gay Christian to increase understanding between two communities that have clashed in churches, the media, and the courts.

As Justin explains, his goals for writing and advocacy are to elevate love, transcend too-common battles, and work with individual people. In part because of his focus on the individual—a natural focus for an evangelical whose religious tradition emphasizes personal piety—Justin doesn’t offer much comment on the systems of custom, culture, or law that nurture individuals, shape their beliefs, limit how they read their scriptures, and govern whether they feel free to accept people different from them.

During the first half of the book, Justin describes other Christians in gentle language. Whether they accept him as a peer or patronize him as a special class of sinner, he represents them as well-intentioned, misinformed, and always sincere—never “bad people.” [1] Not until halfway into Torn does Justin start unpacking American Christianity’s approach to human sexuality or LGBT people.

Most readers will appreciate Justin’s stories about his teen and college years and how he integrated his religious convictions and sexuality with his parents’ support. Though some might want to dismiss him as an “activist,” he is never aggressive or rabid; he is only passionate. He narrates calmly throughout, writing as mildly as he speaks. But he is sometimes so charitable that he slips into inaccuracy.

On page 10, for instance, Justin writes that American Christians have been “unwittingly instrumental” in promoting anti-gay sentiment in Uganda and other African countries. In 2009 and 2010, Uganda’s parliament introduced the “Anti-Homosexuality Bill,” a law that became known as the “Kill-the-Gays” bill because early drafts provided for capital punishment as well as life imprisonment. [2] But Christians like Pat Robertson, Rick Warren, Scott Lively, Caleb Lee Brundidge, Exodus International’s Don Schmierer, and the C-Street Congressmen have intentionally shaped Ugandan sexual politics. [3] As recently as November 2012, a US Seventh-day Adventist group took their “ex-gay” message to Africa: not only are these international engagements deliberate, not only do groups invite American supporters to fund them as “mission trips” and “the Lord’s work,” but they have continued to happen despite outrage outside the church and from sexual minorities in Africa. Evangelical influence on this climate is not accidental, and it’s not “unwitting.”

In Chapter 10, “Faith Assassins,” Justin turns his attention from the Church’s international issues to its internal ones. Explaining that restaurant wait staffs have come to expect after-church diners to be cheap tippers, he writes:

If our reputation can be damaged by poor tipping, how much more can it be hurt by the perception that we are actively hostile to an entire group of people!
… We Christians can say Jesus changed our hearts, but if our reputation is that of uncompassionate culture warriors, why should [non-Christians] believe us? We can say that God is loving and merciful, but if the church isn’t loving and merciful, why would we be in any sort of position to know that God is? [4]

The “we” orientation in this passage is consistent with Justin’s voice whenever he describes the Church: he identifies strongly with its evangelical wing and has no plans to leave it. This may be why his stories about other evangelicals all have such an authentic ring: these are the believers he knows and resonates most easily with. Even when he challenges the status quo, he’s speaking to his own.

But Justin’s comments on other branches of the Church are more one-dimensional. In one story, Justin describes a church whose preacher interpreted a gospel story without reading its supernatural elements literally. For him, the experience was foreign and unsettling; he interprets it and the wider non-literalist tradition as “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” and undermining the bible’s trustworthiness. Just a page later, Christians like those in the story are advocates of “one of the earliest heresies of the church.” Lacking doctrinal clarity, they “fail to stand for anything at all,” and risk “losing the things that set them apart as Christians.” At the end of this assumption chain is a mocking chant that begins “O large Person or Persons of whatever gender or branch…” [5] Its source? A comedy routine.

In the context of Justin’s closing thoughts on “the way forward” (e.g. “Christians must show more grace, especially in the midst of disagreement”) this section fails. It doesn’t increase understanding but does reinforce stereotypes, and it also highlights the limits of the author’s personal experience. Do the bridges between gay and Christian communities require all Christians to treat US evangelical doctrine as normative? Justin is clear that he’ll never be “spiritual but not religious” even if some gay people are, [6] so isn’t it curious that Truth matches evangelical beliefs (except for that gay thing!), and not, say, Orthodox or Unitarian Universalist approaches to scripture or teaching? Who set up evangelicalism as the archetype for faithful Christianity? And why would someone so dedicated to respectful dialogue be satisfied with a “heresy” slam or jokes at the expense of others?

Even though I grew up in a religious and cultural community that was as insular as Justin’s, I felt similarly uncomfortable about his descriptions of and dissociation from “gay culture.” [7] I didn’t know any self-identified LGBT people until I’d left home for college either, but it would be unfair of me to credit my early awkwardness with the community to others’ “lifestyle” or “culture” rather than my own limited perspective. “Egocentric carnality” and “anti-intellectual” attitudes aren’t the preserve of any demographic, and gender and sexual minorities have no more of a monolithic lifestyle or culture than heterosexuals do. I wish Justin had been much clearer about this.

Overall, I found Torn an important contribution to the gay Christian memoir genre, not only because of its content but also because its author represents a new cohort of young and fully-engaged evangelicals. Like older memoirists Mel White and John J. McNeill, Justin patiently tells his own story while sharing some basic realities that the Church needs to accept in order to be more effective. His most likely audiences are the wider evangelical community that he calls home and the LGBT people, friends, and allies that are part of the Gay Christian Network and its sister alliance-advocacy groups across denominations.[8]

Ultimately, bridge-building doesn’t have to mean that two populations travel more to The Other Place. It only means that anyone who wants to travel across can. While I question Justin’s skill in engaging non-evangelical Christians based on how he described some of them in the book, I understand that some people are better at working out differences in person than on paper. These are yet early days in the US Church’s bridge-building movement and each community involved needs people who can address it in language they understand. Justin is one such person and I support him in his work.

[1] Compare this to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ reflection, “The Good, Racist People” (2013). Coates wrote: “In modern America we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs. We believe this even when we are actually being racist.” Similarly foggy thinking hovers over prejudice and discrimination against gender and sexual minorities.
[2] Versions of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill circulated in 2009 and 2010. While threatening LGBT-supportive people and groups in and out of Uganda, the bill created a new crime called “aggravated homosexuality” (sex involving an HIV-positive partner, pedophilia, incest, and “serial [homosexual] offenders” in consensual relationships).
[3] Kapya Kaoma, The U.S. Christian Right and the Attack on Gays in Africa, 2009. Also Jeffrey Gettleman, American’s Role Seen in Uganda Anti-Gay Push, 2010.
[4] Torn, pp. 137-139.
[5] Torn, pp. 144-146.
[6] Torn, p. 157.
[7] Torn, pp. 149-151; 158-164.
[8] I think especially of faith-based groups like Seventh-day Adventist Kinship International, Affirmation, Dignity, Integrity, and the Believe Out Loud community. (I work with SDA Kinship.)

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We Remember Differently

We Remember Differently

In November 2012, Chimamanda Adichie reflected on Chinua Achebe’s literary legacy, his gifts to her as a new writer, and his contributions to Nigeria’s rendering of its complex and traumatic recent history. Our forerunners cast a long shadow and their stories have such power.

Achebe died today in Boston aged 82. Nigeria’s Senate has called Achebe “a fearless man who told the truth as he saw it” and his death “a great loss to Nigeria and Africa.”

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Elie Wiesel: I Still Believe in Man

Living With an Open Heart

I belong to a generation that has often felt abandoned by God and betrayed by mankind. And yet I believe that we must not give up on either… We must choose between the violence of adults and the smiles of children, between the ugliness of hate and the will to oppose it, between inflicting suffering and humiliation on our fellow man and offering him the solidarity and hope he deserves. Or not. I know—I speak from experience—that even in darkness, it is possible to create light and encourage compassion. There it is: I still believe in man in spite of man. — Elie Wiesel, Open Hearts

Wiesel appeared on OWN TV’s Super Soul Sunday program on December 9, 2012.

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Habibi by Craig Thompson (Review)

(Warning: Spoilers)

This week, I finished reading Habibi, the epic-length graphic novel by writer and artist Craig Thompson. [1]

From the Divine Pen fell the first drop of ink.
And from the drop, a river…
When the land dried up with drought, my parents sold me into marriage.

As the lead narrator Dodola explains, the Arabic word habibi means “my love” or “my darling.” Dodola, sold into marriage as a child and then kidnapped by raiders, uses this word to rename an enslaved black toddler she flees into the desert with. Together, she and Cham (Zam) live among the dunes in an abandoned boat until Dodola is abducted again and Zam goes to the nearest town to look for her.

There’s a Lot to Love about Habibi

Thompson has crafted a nine-chapter story that combines dialogue, emotion, rapidly evolving characters, dream-like reflection, vivid acts of violence, poetry, scriptures, and art in a whole that shouldn’t cohere, but does.

I’ll be keeping the book on my reference shelf, not for its plot, but for Thompson’s numeric and ink work. The section dividers are all based on geometric patterns, themselves based on geometric and numerological grids in a visual style that’s both beautiful and striking. It will be one of the books I’ll study to learn about lines and the contrasts of lights and darks.

Section Panel from Habibi

And when I get lost in this art, I love that the characters use story to build a sprawling safe haven for each other amidst experiences and cultural forces that are brutally limiting.

But it’s Arab-ish, not Arabic

This is not an Arabic story. It’s what an American imagined an Arabic coming-of-age/resilience myth might look like if set on an unspecified Near East landscape with no Western participants and no hint of the religion- and oil-tinged geopolitics, nation-state instability, or cyclical populism that have characterized the actual Near East over the last several years.

In fact, the currency of power in this novel isn’t oil at all, but water. Readers who’ve seen Daniel Craig’s Bond in Quantum of Solace will find this familiar, especially given recent military intelligence estimates about future conflicts based on access to and control of water. A British cabinet minister also extended this warning last March. Note, too, that all three of these sources—the Bond franchise, the US. Director of National Intelligence, and the British secretary of energy and climate change—are Westerners gazing at Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent.

Religion, so influential in Arab nations today, is a transitional narrative device in Habibi, and the stories held as sacred across religions prop up characters’ self-apprehension: Thompson uses Islamic and Jewish religious myths to deepen characters’ backstory or context. Some thoughtful detours into the literature of regional religions prevent the novel from being a 672-page ahistorical projection—but only just. There’s something of an authenticity deficit here.

So There Are Some Barriers to Full Endorsement

If you google Habibi, you’ll notice several substantive reviews by people far more versed in Arabic cultures, literature, and story-telling traditions than I am. [2] One recurring criticism is rooted in the fact that the book is Orientalist exotica predicated on an Occidental caricature of the rest of the world. Thompson also foregrounds this perspective in some of his promotional and post-publication interviews. [3]

A result of Habibi’s Othering is Thompson’s rendering of women, female agency, and female sexuality along the story arc; another is his essentialist depictions of Arab and black characters throughout. We’re expected to assume we’re in a mythic world where racialist hierarchies and the enslavement of children and women are normal and immutable (and the lead characters participate in this trade in the final chapter). But at the same time, when Thompson draws callous acts in ways calculated to trigger reader disgust, we’re clearly led to disapprove and to root for the escaping slaves rather than their traders or abusers.

This mash-up produces an ambiguous literary morality and something of a lost opportunity for a writer who clearly has researched. His research could have supported an alternative to the totalizing gaze Western readers are so accustomed to already, but ultimately it did not. In his Comic Con interview, Thompson says that he didn’t view Habibi as mere “escapist fantasy” though he was inspired by the fantasy of 1,001 Arabian Nights; he wanted to “humanize” Islamic culture though he tells one reviewer (Damluji) that the lead characters predated American Islamophobia… How does this all work? It doesn’t.

As much as the structural elements of the book cohere—the dialogue, emotion, character, reflection, violence, poetry, scriptures, and art—Thompson’s “Aw, shucks: it’s still just a comic!” and the “I wanted to humanize Islamic culture!” don’t cohere. He “enjoys the conflict” between these elements, but for this reader just a comic trumps sweeping consequence. I hope other artists who don’t minimize the ethics of representation or the potential of the graphic novel as a genre will challenge Thompson on these questions over time. He has incredible talent.

I’ve rated Habibi with 3 stars on Goodreads.

—
[1] Thompson, Craig. (2011). Habibi. Pantheon. (672 pages | hardcover)
[2] Sample reviews: Michael Faber in the Guardian; Nadim Damluji at The Hooded Utilitarian. Damluji’s review contains several more images from the book. I noticed that Damluji credited Thompson for humanizing Islam, but Thompson proposed humanizing Islamic culture. These are very different goals.
[3] Sample interviews: at New York Magazine; with Nadim Damluji; at San Diego Comic Con 2011; and at Mother Jones).

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Reading scriptures with a little humility

If you’re in a church service with me (or a non-religious lecture otherwise), you might see me tapping on my phone. It’s not because I’m not paying attention, but because I am: I use a bible app, take digital notes, and if something’s well said, I’ll tweet it immediately. This is a few steps ahead of the pen and paper notes and illustrations I’ve made during presentations for most of my life.

Sometimes a sermon comment also triggers a thought series. So it was this morning.


1: “If you’re going to understand scripture, you basically have to journey into someone else’s mind.” — GP, @newhopefulton #humility

The minister made this point while sharing some background on the “lost sheep” parables in the Christian gospels. It wasn’t his main point, but it helped to frame the information he shared about shepherds that the original auditors may have been more familiar with. More importantly, it reminded the congregation that the bible was not written as a single book nor originally addressed to them.


2. Challenge w/ “journeying into someone else’s mind”: all those someones are long dead + there’s limited consensus on how they lived.

I didn’t grasp the legitimate controversies in biblical history, archaeology  anthropology, linguistics, and interpretation until I started reading on my own. Though this discussion does happen in many mainstream seminaries, in churches it’s much less likely. This is a loss, not just for the local congregation, but also for the broader religious fellowship and for the quality of conversations we can have together.

Instead of conversation, one might hear that pesky debates develop only because Those People, who are Wrong, are foolish, haven’t read the right books yet, or have been deceived by Satan. These rationalizations mean that there’s “debate,” but not debate: whatever information could challenge our presumptions is automatically devalued and so never merits review.

No debate is possible if people aren’t working with the same fact base: failure to deal with data means defaulting on conversation about the data. Without common facts, no common sense can emerge. But once people have caught up, legitimate debate arises.

And when it comes to these sources, there’s no resolution because the data sources are no longer alive. The people who could’ve settled our questions about intentions, phrasing, explicit teachings and silences, and who could have fielded constructive criticism about their positions and those positions’ implications, are not here to speak for themselves or engage in a building dialogue with us. Traditions have also done a weak job of representing founders and their concepts without setting layers of cultural and institutional bias over those representations along the way.

Beyond what’s going on with the sources or the traditions, though, it’s the rarest of readers who isn’t infused with contemporary cultural or institutional bias in any way. I don’t know anyone who isn’t. I’m not myself: I’ve been shaped too. Knowing this has consequences.


3. Often what we learn through archaeology and history doesn’t affirm our pet theories about the texts or the characters in it. 

When we read texts like the Christian bible, we can expect to read the framing stories that communities have found valuable over time. We can expect to trace the cultural and institutional biases that emerged, were reinforced, and were challenged over the same period. But we cannot expect a single story about humankind or our religion of choice, and should no more expect ideological coherence from the text than we’d expect it from a cable reality show.


4. What saves scriptures and sacred texts for me is the premise that wisdom literature is not technical writing.
5. Treating technical writing like wisdom literature corrupts it. Treating wisdom literature like technical writing impoverishes it. 

I love technical writing, and not just because I’ve studied it or practice it. I love it because at its best, it’s a facilitation tool. It’s designed to ease users’ experience with a given technology, process, or interface. It’s a helpful way to become more smoothly accommodated to the world we’re in. Perhaps this fundamental purpose is why it’s not the sum of things.

With wisdom literature from several sources, from dualists and non-dualists, within and well beyond Christianity, I have a different type of reader experience than I do with technical writing. A story, poem, or reflection doesn’t derive its value to me from its usability, accessibility, or fact-to-fluff ratio.

Its value is in its capacity to inspire, to illuminate an aspect of human life, to make an insight more vivid, to create a space for meditation, to highlight possibilities my linear mind has missed, to spark my creative and constructive imagination, to challenge me to flourish and to keep becoming.

No matter how precise or persuasive a piece of technical writing is, these simply aren’t outcomes it’s fitted for. And wisdom literature isn’t about how to choose your profession or customize your new phone.

Treat a thing as the thing it is, and it will never disappoint you.

This post was originally titled “5 Tweets on Wisdom Literature.”

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When the Pilgrims Met the Borg (Stueart)

My friend Jerome Stueart recently shared his 2010 story “When the Pilgrims Met the Borg: Faith, Perfection, and the Assimilated Pilgrim.”

It’s a fantastic mash-up of colonial America and the Star Trek universe, written in the voice and style of Plymouth colony’s William Bradford.

My faith, it scares me.  Its efficient, courageous march across the landscape of the New World, taking Pilgrims, Natives, Quakers, Fishermen and turning them into Borg–seems to match our purpose, but not our aim.  Do we seek to create only those who agree? — Jerome Stueart