May 16, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

The mechanics of an oppressive society

Walter Brueggemann explains in The Prophetic Imagination some of the ways that King Solomon’s reign returned the Israelites to the oppressive culture they’d once experienced under the Egyptians.

The top three tools are the “economics of affluence,” the “politics of oppression,” and the “establishment of a controlled, static religion.” According to Brueggemann, Solomon’s regime used these three cultural elements together to consolidate’s the king’s power, marginalize outsiders, and coopt the people’s labor.

I think Brueggemann overstates his case about divine freedom (unpredictability) in the era of Moses, but his description of Solomon’s controlling and centralizing legacy seems accurate.

Never before have I linked Solomon to a society where some have plenty and others are slaves, ordinary people are conscripted and excessively taxed, and the king literally controls the nation’s temple and can, without irony, tell his deity, “Look, God, I built your house.”

In the state’s religion, which Brueggemann calls a static religion because it is both “of the state” and closed to deep change or creativity, God is effectively under house arrest.

Now God is totally and unquestionably accessible to the king and those to whom the king grants access… God is now ‘on call,’ and access to him is controlled by the royal court. Such an arrangement clearly serves two interlocking functions. On the one hand, it assures ready sanction to every notion of the king because there can be no transcendent resistance or protest. On the other hand, it gives the king a monopoly so that no marginal person may approach this God except on the king’s terms.”

Except on the king’s terms sticks in my gullet because it’s exactly that capricious when it plays out on the ground, and the people affected most by caveats like that are often the people with least social power.

An oppressive society depends on rules and structures just like Solomon’s regime did: constantly consolidating the authority to choose which voices are heard and which are ignored. These are the rules that marginalized people not only have to navigate but have to imagine their way around.

It’s almost designed to be exhausting… and so it is.

October 27, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

The ability to choose

As well as giving us the ability to support international liberation movements and trade ideas and strategies with people all over the world in an instant via social media, interdependence also means arms- and knees-deep relationship with systems, ideologies, and people who use their power to cause others harm… There’s no way to live in this world and come up clean.” —Me, in August

When I visit new places, I like to pay attention to which kinds of commercial resources are in the area. I look at the ratio of banks to check cashing places and the financial terms those institutions offer in that zip code. I check out the kinds of grocery and restaurant options available. I notice which public transit services residents have accessible to them. All of these and other things tell me a story about the community and how invested its governments are in the people who live in there.

I walked around today in a part of New York that has Chase Bank signs every few blocks. New York City is JP Morgan Chase Bank’s home base, and one of its recent merging partners, Bank of the Manhattan Company, has operated on that part of the NY archipelago for 217 years.

Contemporary Chase advertising may be fresh, trendy, and blue, but whenever I see the company’s name, I associate it with the sour history of big bank participation in both the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the German-Jewish Holocaust. It’s not just a small-business-friendly bank. It’s also a bank that’s nourished itself on blood. And it’s unusual only in the sense that it’s publicly acknowledged this history.

Working with any centuries-old institution means becoming part of its stories. When the institution’s stories involve oppression and blood, that means our stories will too. We, too, become entangled; we, too, become enrolled.

There’s no living in this region, on this land, under these flags, on this planet, and still having clean hands. Yet only some of us seem to get a choice about how much dirt gets under our fingernails.

It’s expensive to be poor, and not just in money but also in options: what makes wealth most meaningful, after we’ve gained the ability to survive and assure our fundamental needs, is our ability to choose more of the social stories that we participate in.

When only a handful of banks are accessible, and each bank punishes the public with fees for using competitors’ services in a pinch, people have a much more limited capacity to choose whether they’ll partner with an institution that grew rich from seizing Jews’ assets or from turning enslaved people into debt securities. Even when these organizations have verbally apologized, their contemporary position rests on them leveraging the wealth they gained once upon a wicked time.

I don’t know what to tell you about how to choose when we’re all one or two degrees away from evil or when we ourselves are the portal through which injustice flows. I can’t tell you, for instance, to eschew every major bank and retreat to credit unions, though I know people who have. Many of us participate in the stock market in some way, directly or indirectly, and evem when we abandon certain banks on principle, the health of our portfolios is still bound up with theirs.

We can’t withdraw from the “network of mutuality,” even when we want to. We can only strive for a world in which individuals and institutions alike have meaningful choices and the rough places of our collective pasts are “made plain” through much more just relationships. The past took centuries of intention to create, and so will the divergent future that I’d prefer to live in. It’s a future where there’s room for all, and all may choose.

December 24, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

John Newton, Zacchaeus, and a Life Beyond Complicity

This year, I told Twitter, I want to stable Rudolph and his red nose. I don’t want to hear the angels talking about peace and goodwill. With a nation still unwilling to comprehensively address abusive policing and community distrust as youth have asked, angelic pronouncements about peace feel premature, if not presumptuous.

Over the weekend, I read through the goodwill messages that 70 or so nations sent to NASA in the 1960s for the Apollo 11 moon landing. NASA engraved these messages in a small silicon disc and the astronauts left it behind them in the dust of our only natural satellite.

“It is our earnest hope for mankind,” one message read, “that while we gain the moon, we shall not lose the world.”

That message came from Eric Williams, then Trinidad’s prime-minister. Williams was also one of the Caribbean’s preeminent historians. He’s now best known for his 1944 book, Capitalism and Slavery, one of the first studies to explicitly describe how the British slave trade thrived on its enmeshment with the Industrial Revolution and a blend of non-monopolistic capitalism and free or cheap human labor.

Just as US slavery adapted with the nation’s farming culture and favored crops—tobacco, cotton, and corn—and then later morphed with the rise of manufacturing, British slavery adapted with new markets in Asia and South America, and England enriched itself with the profits from that trade. Both American and British systems predicated their success and stability on the labor of certain kinds of human beings, and both societies continue to do so.

Some people are waking up from the system’s slumber, though.

I’ve written about David Gushee, an American evangelical who, earlier this year, wrote a book and a few well-placed articles on his changing theology and support for LGBT people. And then there’s Herb Montgomery, who uses the gospel stories and Girardian anthropology to teach Adventist audiences about Jesus’ new world.

I talked with Herb recently about the redemption myth of former slave trader John Newton. Many Christians know the tidy traditional story as told by evangelists like Wintley Phipps. At a Gaithers Band concert in 2002, Phipps told his audience that John Newton was a sailor and slave trader who converted to Christianity. Moved by the “amazing grace” that saved him, Newton then set his poem to the tune of a “Negro sorrow chant.”

“I believe God wanted that song written just the way it was,” Phipps says. “We’re connected by God’s amazing grace!” The audience whoops for this point.

But as I told Herb, Phipps’ story and the Amazing Grace myth it’s based on leaves a long forty years out of Newton’s tale. It actually took 40 years for Newton’s conversion to filter into his public stance on slavery—and in those 40 years he continued to buy and sell human beings or profit from their sale.

He became a Christian in 1748, yes, and he even served the Church of England as a priest, but he didn’t publish his Thoughts Upon the Slave Trade until 1788 after connecting with English politician and abolitionist William Wilberforce. Months before he died in 1807, Newton saw the British parliament abolish slave trading across its empire in 1807. The last boat of slaves docked in Jamaica that year.

While slave trading was now illegal, slave holding remained legal until the 1833 Abolition Act. Slaves forced into post-abolition “apprenticeship”—freedom training in theory and indentured servitude in fact—only became free in 1838. As slaves were finally emancipated, the government paid British slave-owners a total of £20 million in compensation for “lost property.” That grant would be worth over £989.8 million today (about US$1.5 billion). Former slaves received no such compensation for stolen liberty.

A corrupt system hates it when a body leaves its assigned place. When that body does leave, the system will come hunting for it in every possible way. It doesn’t matter whether your assigned place is farming as a slave, scraping by as a sharecropper, or running usurious and manipulative housing scams on people the banks won’t lend to; it really doesn’t matter. Unless you comply or cooperate with the system, unless you continue to be complicit, the system will come for you.

Knowing this makes Luke’s story about Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-10) somewhat incomplete for me.

Zacchaeus meets Jesus - Luke 19 (via Bible Gateway) — Zacchaeus meets Jesus – Luke 19 (via Bible Gateway)

Luke is the third gospel, traditionally described as the gospel that emphasizes interactions between Jesus and his culture’s outsiders, from non-Jewish people and children to women and tax collectors like Zacchaeus. Luke’s gospel is also the only one to mention Zacchaeus, a man who becomes rich through professional grift. Having stolen from the people as he ported money between them and the state, Zacchaeus was viewed as a “sinner” and therefore unworthy of Jesus’ time and company.

The story spins in an unexpected direction when Zacchaeus responds to Jesus with a restitution plan instead of pride, comparison, or dissociation: “Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”

Just for today, I’ll give Zacchaeus a pass on that word “if.” Twenty-first Century readers are all too accustomed to public apologies that throw the responsibility back on the interpreting, aggrieved audience.

“If I offended you…”

“If I hurt your feelings…”

“If I disappointed you, I’m sorry.”

But in this story, instead of becoming a character for us to be cynical about, Zacchaeus becomes a sympathetic figure. Zacchaeus is sympathetic not because he offers the community restitution but because no one had to ask him to. He doesn’t wait for Jesus’ permission to make things right. He doesn’t seek anyone’s permission at all: he knows what went wrong, and what his part in it was, and he announces ways he can restore good order.

I wish the Church—my Church—might be more like Zacchaeus at times like this. I wish it would acknowledge that its recent discoveries about racism, sexism, and heterosexism are still so late for so many, that it cannot hide in ignorance or empty disavowals, that it ought to be returning to its Earth community four times all that it’s taken. Perhaps we’d see a lot less self-congratulating about our latest revelations, and we’d carry several buckets more humility for the human costs of our tardiness.

I also wish Luke had chosen to report whether Zacchaeus followed through with his insight after that wild day. Or did his conviction fade as the crowd moved on to the next strange Jesus event and no one hung back to audit his promise? There’s a Clementine tradition that Zacchaeus earned a new name and joined the post-resurrection disciples as Matthias in Acts 1. But I don’t know. It may be just enough that this man survives in the tales of Luke as a wayshower for the well-intentioned souls in every age.

“There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.” —Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

So Jesus sees this man in the tree he’s using to elevate himself above the masses. He calls him by his name and not his social position; he addresses him by the name that means “the pure, the innocent” and not by all the names that accurately label this man’s guilt. He calls him by his name, and invites him into relationship.

“I must stay at your house today.”

That’s the invitation to all tax collectors. To all who’re enmeshed with the enslavement and abuse of other human beings, Jesus says, “Come down immediately.”

To those who’ve been complicit with the violence of rank- and classism, Jesus says, “The new world has room for you; now you make room for me today.”

“You’re not a lost cause because you have been complicit. Come down from your lynching tree. Come down so we can commune; we can’t commune while you set yourself apart.”

I think it was in Paolo Freire’s writings that I first saw oppressors as humans being dehumanized through their own acts of oppression. And then when I reread the Hebrew Proverbs, I saw the lesson there too: “Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein: and he that rolleth a stone, it will return upon him.”

If oppressing others degrades the self, then none are more in need of healing than those who harm others.

Zacchaeus climbs down from his tree and stands on level ground. His awakening doesn’t change his height, nor the press of the people blocking his path. Perhaps the hostile crowd around him makes him doubt his choice to abandon his old perch. The known life might have been lonely, but at least it was familiar. At least it paid. The promise of a shared meal with those he has stolen from only pays him a choice: will he choose complicity or communion?

Complicity secures ill-gotten privilege and protects one from the system—at least for a time. Communion makes us no such promises: it exposes us to others, and we sit around the common table awkward and unsure. There’s no script for this relationship, only invitation.

Merry Christmas, all of you.

October 1, 2013 By Keisha McKenzie

Inspired Possibility: Opening the Gift of the Queer Soul

Part of the 2013 Queer Theology Synchroblog | Thanks, @shannontlkearns, for the invite.

The earth was without form and void
and darkness was on the face of the deep.
And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. – Genesis 1:2

Imagine with me the void before “Let there be light”—the empty space before the components of creation started to self-assemble. In the formlessness of the earth, there’s nothing to see, and nothing to see by: no light or substance but water, Spirit, and movement. The water ripples while the Spirit hovers overhead, and all else is still. This second verse of Genesis shows us a planet-sized zero, and in the midst of this zero, God is. Before land, life, or any recognizable form has emerged, the Spirit of God moves. All that exists begins in this formless place, and with God present, anything is possible.

Inspired Possibility

Perhaps because so many verses come after Genesis 1:2 and only one comes before it, we often struggle to understand what “anything is possible” actually means. We enter this life and find pre-mapped worlds of experience, interpretation, and meaning already here. If anything in the scriptures is foreign to us, it’s the formless void described in this text. We don’t know what to do with formlessness; it’s a shifting thing to us, and so we struggle to tame it by assigning it a name: queer.

The Hebrew word translated “spirit” in Genesis 1:2, ruach, is a word that can also mean “wind,” or “breath.” When ruach appears in the Bible, it almost always signals God’s presence. God breathes, and divine breath brings life. In John 3, Jesus says, “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes.” We can see what wind and Spirit produce, but we can’t trace their source or project their next motion. We don’t know what the blowing wind or moving Spirit might become, but we can experience their presence with us in this moment. An experience of presence: that was the experience and gift of the beginning, when the infinite possibility of God appeared without form and void.

“And so is everyone that is born of the Spirit,” says John (John 3:8). We are formed in God’s image, and unfolded by the Spirit of God. The Spirit that once moved over the waters now moves through us, and like the once-formless earth, we are fluid in the hands of God. As the void held space for God’s designs, so we express all the variation God can imagine. As the Spirit moves through us, we receive in our bodies new possibilities for the world.

Breathing through Uncertainty

But just as the primeval void came with darkness, new potentials come with uncertainty. Formless spaces are both liberating and paralyzing: it’s when we gain the freedom to create absolutely anything that we can be tempted to mimic the commonplace, the average, the usual. Because of our bias toward the already created, it’s easy to fear the darkness that covers the deep and makes the familiar strange.

Yet that darkness also teaches us: the possible doesn’t have to use precedent as its foundation. “Tradition” is not reified in the darkness or in the void of potential. We can choose to cite the already-done, to incorporate it into new life-yielding patterns and rites, but tradition stands with and never over us. Convention stands in the same relationship to the void and the pre-manifest space of potential as any other configuration of reality. The so-called normative, dominant, and customary are not the heart of all things; there is only one Heart, and we are Its very good creation.

The moving Spirit of Genesis 1:2 is the Breath of God that connects the creature to the Creator, and this connection cannot be broken by any made thing (Romans 8). We’re entangled with God, moved by the ever-present limitlessness of Spirit-Wisdom, pulsing with Her potential for innovation and life. Connected to our Creator by our in-breath (inspiration) and out-breath (expression), we’re inherently part of something more deeply coherent than atomized identity, institutional affiliation, or conditional belonging. As God inspires matter, as energy moves through what is, earth’s formless void becomes a teeming planet. We can breathe deeply and in trust, being inspired through the Spirit, and opening to what could just as easily be and not only what is. ¹

Generating as well as Restoring

So queer creation may begin with reshaping, recasting, and recreating what’s already here. In To Heal A Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility, R. Jonathan Sacks writes that we all have a role in reshaping this world: “We are here to make a difference,” he says, “to mend the fractures of the world, a day at a time, an act at a time, for as long as it takes to make it a place of justice and compassion where the lonely are not alone, the poor not without help, where the cry of the vulnerable is heeded and those who are wronged are heard.” Yes, this is part of our work; it’s a restorative, “repairing the breach” role, and as long as we’re queer in a world that resists and oppresses the different, we’ll have that role to play.

But queerness is more than merely restoring what is: we can also sense and draw out from the void possibilities that rigid and exclusive structures didn’t allow to emerge in the first place. Our generative work requires that we add to the world fresh wisdom and new structures, not merely revisions, hacks, or disruptions. Just as our Creator drew us out of nothing, we too have the capacity to create powerful newness through our lives, in our relationships, religious and spiritual communities, and social organizations.

When I shared Genesis 1:2 with a group of LGBTI and queer Seventh-day Adventists three years ago, I didn’t yet have the words for what I sensed in the text or in the slow development of my life: our very existence as queer people invites us onto a different pathway for imagination, vision, and creation than those opened to us by a hyper-structured hetero- and cis-sexist society. Not only do we see this reality differently because of who we are and how we experience life, but it’s also our spiritual responsibility to share our vision from the ground on which we stand instead of rejecting our ground and privileging others’. When we fail to express out of who we are, whether because of fear, repression, or disbelief in our own value, our band of creative potential is wholly lost to the manifest world.

To express this capacity in a coherent way, we’ll have to develop and practice a new gaze.

Creating with a Different Gaze

Earlier this year, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison spoke to the Cornell University community about her literary legacy and her play Desdemona. She explained to the audience why the character Iago didn’t survive her editorial cut as she re-envisioned Othello through Desdemona’s eyes, what it means to excise “the white gaze” from one’s work, and how doing so opened up creative space for her. Listen to what she said (38:58-47:12).

[This is what] has been happening more and more and more in my books, actually all of them, and that is to take away what I call ‘the white gaze.’ Whose eye, whose language is controlling this? Well, in Othello, it’s Iago…

[In the traditional African-American novel] the oppressor is the white man, or the white idea, or the captain, or the plantation; that’s who they were confronting. [Ralph] Ellison, [James] Baldwin, Richard Wright—you understood they were responding to, defending themselves, or aggressively attacking that idea of the white oppressor.

And I thought: I can’t do that. What is the world like if [the oppressor’s] not there? The freedom, the open world that appears… it’s stunning. And I notice most African-American women writers did the same thing. Toni Cade Bambara, not always Alice Walker but many times, Maya Angelou, those writers, and the poets…

There was this free space opened up by refusing to respond every minute to the gaze, somebody else’s gaze. So that flavored a great deal what I was writing. But you’ll understand about Iago now, why I had to get rid of him.—Toni Morrison

Refusing to respond every minute to the gaze, someone else’s gaze. Refusing to root our creative acts in the limitations others project onto us or the frameworks of meaning and value they map onto the world. Refusing to allow our Iagos to dominate our attention or conversation. Using our creative energy not to battle or defend, but to build up and out instead from the beautiful we see in ourselves. Having shifted our gaze, we center ourselves and our visions for this world on what we see from our perspective and the connectedness we experience with our Source and the Source of all creation. If, according to community catechisms and statements of belief, we’re not enough as we are, creating anew must become enough for us.

What’s the world like if the oppressor’s not there? What will we see when our gaze is authentic, when we’re grounded and clear? What will we make with our talk-of-God and love-of-others? How will we change? What will we teach?

May we inquire of ourselves, and answer in our creating.

Let there be light… and may it be queer.

^{1. I owe this formulation to the man I call My Friend’s Dad: an incredibly wise grandfather and sense-maker who sees beyond the manifest and inspires me to do the same. ↩}