morality : mackenzian

December 1, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

The foundation of social good

I’m back from a short series of meetings in Orlando with a mixed multitude: LGBTQ people from various faith traditions, religious scholars, nonprofit leaders, and people committed to reducing, preventing, and intervening in social oppression.

This is my tribe, one of them. These are people who give time, resources, attention, and talents to projects and actions that benefit vulnerable or marginalized people. They do it regardless of their employment status. They do it even when they don’t have to. They do it because they can’t not do it and still sleep comfortably. Many of them experience a sense of call to it.

It can be easy to think of social change work in terms of the mechanics of the work: the analysis, the strategizing, the base-building, the fundraising, the campaigns, the evaluation. But these are all activities and don’t require any particular moral foundation. The people I partner with do have a particular moral foundation and they’re driven to express that morality through their work with and for others.

They seem incredibly fulfilled by that, not just during clear victories, but over years and decades of intense effort and many emotional highs and lows. I have to think there’s something nourishing about approaching the world as they do, accepting that we’re mutually interconnected and choosing to build their lives and relationships with a much different logic than the rules of a society that’s always-striving and never-sated.

November 8, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

We leave no one behind

In the book Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace, Angel Kyodo Williams explores spiritually grounded and grounding ways to live in a world where all is not well. Chapter 3 includes an analysis of the Three Pure Precepts: “to not create evil, to practice good, and to practice good for others.” These values imply, require, and inspire a generous approach to life, one that acknowledges our and others’ inherent dignity and worth.

I’m struck by the practical implications, especially today when many of my American friends are monitoring key state and local races or thinking about the work that lies “beyond the ballot.” There are, again, so many ways to participate in that work.

Generosity doesn’t only mean gifts and is not necessarily related to money or anything tangible. You can be generous with your time by making space to babysit for your brother’s kids. You can share the extra workload with a co-worker who is swamped instead of punching out at 5:00 on the nose. Give a stranger directions. Hold the door. Pick up a fallen jacket. Spend more time with your family and less with your TV or telephone. Help out at your church. Volunteer your time. Become a mentor. And, because it does still make the world go round, it is important that you support the work and ideals you believe in with money, too. Not just when it is ‘easy,’ because we can always find ways not to give. We can always decide that buying a new outfit is more necessary than giving our financial support to issues we care about, but if you want there to be a cure for the many black women living with AIDS, you have to support AIDS research. If you want the mayor that has been responsible for the unnecessary loss of black men’s lives to disappear into history, make a contribution to a more responsive candidate, then vote. If you want to have peace in your own life, support the effort toward peace in the whole world in any way you can.” —Angel Kyodo Williams

Investing in the entire world and not just my own micro-world of experience is one way for me to honor the fact that I will only flourish as the world flourishes: mine is an ecological existence! We can’t fully manifest our own well-being in a dysfunctional world. Williams continues:

There are many, many ways to serve others, and you will find a way that is most appropriate for you. You may be a firefighter that runs into burning buildings to save lives. Or, equally important, you may be a mother of four or five that tries to raise well-balanced children for the world to experience. The point is not what you do, but what your intention is in what you do. No one wants you to starve or deprive your loved ones of access to you so that you can stand on a soup-kitchen line. No matter what effort you put forth in the world toward enlightened being, it is only enlightened if it is balanced with care and regard for yourself. We have no use for a nation of martyrs. What we are creating [instead] is an endless army of energetic, compassionate warriors [who] understand how to use their gifts and skills to actualize and maintain a better world for themselves and for others. Awakening warriors understand that there are no enemies. Everyone belongs and has a right to happiness and living a life free of oppression and unnecessary suffering. We leave no one behind. Each of us goes forth in our own lives of enlightened being with the full and complete intention of bringing every single soul with us.” —Angel Kyodo Williams, emphasis added

We leave no one behind. We don’t even leave our nemeses and antagonists behind. I’ve noted before how Christian leaders and denominations opposed to the 20th Century movement’s purpose, timing, or persistence have still benefited from the 1964 Civil Rights Act that protected all religions’ rights to free expression and nondiscrimination. These leaders and denominations (including my own Adventist denomination) resisted the Civil Rights Movement but have spent the last 50 years taking refuge in the Civil Right Act’s Titles II and VII!

And that’s exactly what the activists these churches resisted were working for: that all would benefit. Some people may never help to bake the bread, but we bake more than enough anyway so that one day, should they wish to eat from the loaf, they will find food and a common table to eat at. When we do good for the world, we leave no one behind.

We don’t leave ourselves behind either. There are now thousands of resources on sustainable activism—change-making that doesn’t depend on the suffering of the activist. But the question of how to sustain oneself persists because our culture seems to take someone’s suffering for granted.

I love that Williams addresses this directly in her book, because, well, a new heaven and a new earth will be no good if we’re all too exhausted to enjoy it.

November 8, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

The Moral Revival at Riverside

Tall scaffolding, and several robed participants in a church service, Manhattan, NYC — The Riverside Church is under construction, and so is the United States.

I spent yesterday evening at the Riverside Church, a nondenominational church with great Gothic arches and 80 years of practice supporting Christian social activism. Riverside is the church where in 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr., declared the war in Vietnam a moral failure. To this day, the church includes portraits of King, and a wing of the building is named after him.

I was there for the final pre-electoral stop on the Moral Revival tour, a series of rallies on people of faith’s responsibility to “tell the truth” in the public sphere and hold space for personal testimonies of public policy’s human costs. (There are, of course, many ways to tell the truth and hold space. Find your ways and work them.)

The Moral Revival tour began in 2015 “with a revelation,” Rev. Dr. William Barber told us. His insight about the kind of values and discourse shift that the United States needs was confirmed by Rev. Dr. James Forbes, one of Riverside’s former ministers. Pastor Traci Blackmon of Florissant, MO, and Sis. Simone Campbell of NETWORK and the Sisters of Social Service also joined the core team and they have toured twenty states since then.

Last night they and partnering ministers and activists from several religious traditions shared a litany that directly names the values that motivate them.

I’m reproducing it here in full from the printed copy I received. Go to the Moral Revival website to learn more.

Call for Prayer, Conscience, Healing, Action, and to Vote

Rev. Fred Davie: On April 4, 1967, in this The Riverside Church in the City of New York, Martin Luther King preached, ‘We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.’

Brother Mansoor Najeeullah: Since sent out from this church on April 3, 2016, the Revival: Time for a Moral Revolution of Values has traveled around the nation listening to the cries of the people, hearing the hard truths of deep poverty, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, the lack of access to healthcare, the trials of predatory lending, the horror of police violence and mass incarceration, and the destruction of our land and water.

Linda Sarsour: This Moral Revival has visited 22 communities, connected tens of thousands of community members, and gotten thousands of people including more than 3,000 interfaith clergy and faith leaders to sign on to the Higher Ground Moral Declaration.

Rev. John Vaughn: The Moral Revival: Time for a Moral Revolution of Values has heard the call from faith and community leaders to focus on the real moral issues of our day: voting rights, worker’s rights, immigrant rights, the rights of indigenous peoples, the rights of religious minorities, women’s rights, the right to health care, housing, education, and the affirmation of dignity and righteousness for all. We have heard the prophet’s call to repair the breach and we know our Constitution’s goal of a more perfect union.

People: We reach back to our sacred texts that affirm life, love, and justice. ‘This is what the Lord says: Do what is just and right. Rescue from the hand of the oppressor the one who has been robbed. Do no wrong or violence to the foreigner, the fatherless, or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood.’ (Jeremiah 22:3)

Rabbi David Adelson: We affirm the prophets and proclaim, ‘Doom to you who legislate evil, who make laws that make misery for the poor, that rob my destitute people of dignity, exploiting defenseless widows, taking advantage of homeless children.’ (Isaiah 10:1-2)

People: We hear the cries of the people from the [Hebrew scriptures], ‘All the workers you’ve exploited and cheated cry out for judgment. The groans of the workers you used and abused are a roar in the ears of God.’ (James 5:4)

Imam Ali Rashid: We uphold dignity and respect for all from the Qu’ran, ‘The believers, both men and women, are responsible for one another; all enjoin the doing of what is right, and forbid the doing of what is wrong.’ (Qu’ran 9:71)

Dr. Iniva Ngaka: We challenge those who claim [so-called] evangelicalism is only concerned with prayer in public schools, abortion, and homosexuality, remembering that Jesus preached, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoner and recovery of sign for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to protect the year of the Lord’s favor.’ (Luke 4:18)

People: And we will not rest in our quest for freedom until it comes as is affirmed in the Bhagavad Gita, “For the prosecution of the virtuous, for the extirpation of the evil-doers, and for establishing Dharma, righteousness, on a firm footing.

Prabhjoy Singh: From this very pulpit, nearly 50 years ago, Dr. King preached, ‘There comes a time when silence is betrayal. The truth must be told.’

People: And the truth is that more than 250,00 people die from poverty and the lack of education each year in the United States, and that millions of children are homeless, lack adequate food and housing, and don’t have quality education. There comes a time when silence is betrayal. The truth must be told.

Arisleyda Tapia: Llega un momento en que el silencio es traición. La verdad debe ser dicha.

Milly Silva: And the truth is that voting rights are being eroded 50 years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, that systemic racism plagues America as extremists drum up bigotry and hatred, that in many communities it is more likely that teenagers will end up in prison than graduate from high school.

People: There comes a time when silence is betrayal. The truth must be told.

Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis: But we also believe this to be true: All people have inherent rights, and no one can take them away.

Arisleyda Tapia: Todas las personas tienen derechos inherentes, y nadie pue llevárselos.

People: We have the right to live, to liberty, to enjoy the fruits of our labor, and to the pursuit of happiness.

Rev. Ray Rivera: We believe that the power of our governments derives from us, the people…

People: For the purpose of providing for the general welfare.

Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis: We believe in the values of democracy we were taught, so we cannot accept our democracy’s feeble state.

People: We cannot accept voter suppression and intimidation that target people of color and the poor.

Rev. Ray Rivera: We cannot accept demagoguery and fear-mongering that demonize and divide.

People: We cannot accept that half of the US population are poor or low-income in the richest country in history, or that 1 in 5 children are food insecure.

Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis: We cannot accept wages that don’t provide for a decent life, or the suppression of workers’ rights to organize and bargain collectively.

People: We cannot accept segregation and inequality in our public schools, or the attempts to privatize and profit-ize them.

Rev. Ray Rivera: We cannot accept that 29 million Americans don’t have health insurance, including more than 4 billion denied Medicaid expansion by their state.

People: We cannot accept inaction in the face of climate change and the disproportionate impact of the ecological crisis on impoverished communities nor suppression of the rights of those protecting our water and land.

Rev. Dr. Jackie Lewis: We cannot accept that 1 in 3 Black men born today can expect to spend time in prison, nor that our country holds one quarter of the world’s prisoners but only 1/20 its population.

People: We cannot accept endless war, which spends lives and resources only to destroy lives and resources.

Rev. Ray Rivera: We cannot accept attacks on our neighbors: immigrants, indigenous people, religious minorities, people of color, lesbian, bisexual, trans and queer folks, [disabled people], or the poor.

People: We cannot accept the way things are because we have been given a moral vision of how things ought to be.

Rev. Yolanda Brown: We are here to summon the better angels of our nature and press together toward higher ground. We are here to revive the heart of our democracy. We are here to get engaged and to prepare to cast our ballots for justice and morality. We are here for a call to prayer, a call to conscience, a call to healing, a call to action and to vote!

All: Hallelujah, Thine the glory.
Hallelujah, Amen.
Hallelujah, Thine the glory.
Revive us again.

September 10, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Just do something

Screen print t-shirt: "Just do it later. Jamaica" The famous swoosh becomes a resting place for a reclining human figure. — I bought a t-shirt like this last year.

International tragedies come to popular consciousness so often now, we know what to expect: a wave of public thoughts and prayers, followed by criticism of those thoughts and prayers, and criticism of the criticism until attention dissipates or there’s another international tragedy to move toward.

One of the most pointed critiques of the cycle came this year in the form of a cartoon by Kristian Nygard. The cartoon flows so well because it captures the distance between speech or comfort and intervention or change: in a material world, we need material actions, and unexpressed thoughts, ungrounded prayers, and well-substantiated doctrines don’t take us far enough.

Black Christianity offers three premises that might help us disrupt this pattern. From Kelly Brown Douglas’ book Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God:

1. “Black prophetic testimony calls people to moral participation. This is a participation marked by a commitment to freedom, love, and life. Such participation is a matter of faith.”
2. “To have faith is to accept the invitation to be an ‘active presence in human history.'”
3. “The only way to change the realities of the world is through moral participation in history.”

We can’t change this world through thoughts and prayers that we never express or manifest, but through our active presence and participation, we can play a part in the re-creation of our world.

We just need to do something, and not “later,” but today.

May 29, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Defining “Us”

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.”