May 7, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Poisoned wells and expectations

In the second season of the Wachowskis’ web series Sense8, there’s an exchange between the ever-earnest Capheus and a television anchor.

“I drive a bus,” Capheus tells the anchor. “If I didn’t take people where they hired me to take them, I wouldn’t expect them to get back on my bus. We expect leaders to take us where we want to go. The problem, it seems to me, begins when they don’t, when things do not improve and yet these leaders keep expecting us to get on their bus. I think this is when leaders become something else.”

“What?” the anchor asks.

“Politicians.”

Broken electoral trust has been a perennial topic over the last year. In the UK, in the US, in Turkey, and most recently in France, voters, activists, and politicians too have debated whether the leaders jockeying to become head of state have earned respect or trust.

Mostly, the consensus is no. And people struggle with what to do after acknowledging that the communal well has been poisoned.

I heard apathy and uncertainty from more British friends and relatives than I expected during Brexit season last year. Most of my US friends were resigned to voting but a substantial percent of the electorate either couldn’t or didn’t.

Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis recently broke the stakes down in a video on France’s second round presidential elections for Open Democracy (English captions).

France did choose Macron this weekend, and Varoufakis and others will be watching to see whether the country’s Left follows through with the second half of the strategy: challenging the new incumbent now that they’ve dodged his opponent.

“We’re not looking for a politician,” local party members tell Capheus in the show. “We’re looking for a leader.”

Off-screen and in this world, millions and millions of ordinary people are too.

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.

November 1, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

What makes public life work well

Commit no wrong, but good deeds do, and let thy heart be pure.” —Dhammapada

We have to consciously decide that to the best of our individual ability, and out of respect for life and all the beings, animals, and plants, we will live our lives in a way that doesn’t bring harm to others. The decisions we make must take into account our connection to the greater community. The greatest contribution we can make to our community is to have lived harmoniously. To have been in sync with life rather than perpetuating pain… We don’t want to soil [our existence] with harmful actions, words, or thoughts.” —Angel Kyodo Williams

One of the hardest things about navigating the public sphere as a person of faith is recognizing and also teaching others that sincerity of belief isn’t the prime measure of the good.

We can be sincerely and sweetly wrong. Sometimes our wrongness has deep and multi-faceted negative impacts on people. We all deserve our own journeys, and at the same time, some people’s stories can affect millions of others’.

Public policy depends on the leveraging of individual experiences like lobbying, canvassing, and voting, and the mass mobilization of hundreds of thousands of people. It matters so much that people in general and people of faith in particular harness our ability to link values and real world consequences, teach others to recognize that link, and take accessible action to improve our world.

It’s not enough, as Miki Kashtan has written, for isolated individuals to change. We don’t have the time for the drip-drip that carved the Grand Canyon! And we don’t have to wait that long either. Instead we can redesign the contexts in which individuals choose what it means to “not do harm.” Redesigning can take a lifetime or two, but it’s that mass action that really makes the change.

October 14, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Throwing our voices in public communications

The ventriloquist is an entertainer whose performance involves throwing their voice so that it appears to come from another source, like a puppet. Think Jeff Dunham.

The stage actor is an entertainer whose performance includes conducting conversations with peers on stage but projecting those conversations out into the theater audience. Think Shakespeare.

And then there’s the public communicator, a person whose aim isn’t to entertain at all, and whose actual audience may not be obvious either.

As Dr. Katharine Hayhoe explains in a talk with the Citizens Climate Lobby, sometimes the public conversations we have aren’t for the benefit of the people we’re ostensibly talking to.

Sometimes these conversations are for the people watching quietly, people who may never themselves speak publicly but who are engaged with the issues nevertheless. They’re open to interaction, willing to seek common ground where our values intersect, and merit even indirect dialogue as much as the people who prefer confrontational debates.

The filmed dialogue Enough Room at the Table is a good example of how this indirect communication can work.

Thirteen people gathered one weekend far from home to talk amongst ourselves and learn from each other about each other. We also gathered that weekend to talk to the audiences who watch our film, and to demonstrate in their asynchronous presence what quality dialogue can look like.

In the era of “fair and balanced” public conversations, moderators often set “both sides” of a question against each other as if they were peers. We’ve let this model of discourse loose on network news broadcasting for the last 60 years, current US election coverage is every bit a part of it, and we aren’t better informed or more socially cohesive for its influence.

What made Enough Room at the Table work as a conversation, filmed or not, was that it didn’t insist on the common foundation of false parity. It didn’t assume that all approaches to marginalized people are equal. We acknowledged that some approaches have caused and continue to cause harm, and we didn’t make room for the “freedom” to disparage or personally attack participants that’s so often accommodated elsewhere in the public sphere.

That made some parts of the conversation super awkward, and yet I thought that was just right: when we understand and accept the value of the people we speak with, we should wrestle with our customary words. We should hold conversation space as if it were sacred. Because it is. And the stakes are high.

When we throw our voices in this way, sharing what’s real and good with each other and with audiences we may never meet, we might be performing roles like ventriloquists and thespians, but we’re also helping our wider society to practice conversation beyond fruitless agonistic debate.

Even if the results are far less entertaining, they just might also be that much more whole. And that makes it worth it.

March 4, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

Reader Review 05

Posts tagged “Reader Review” include a few top articles from my weekly reading. Their topics may vary, but their quality and provocation quotient won’t. Enjoy.

Quakers examining core principles: non-violence and a returning Christ

QuakerQuaker: A Hermeneutic of Non-Violence (Randy Oftedahl)

QuakerQuaker is a site that collects posts from Friends (Quakers) from across the internet and allows members to discuss the points they raise. Quakers are well known for their “peace testimony,” a conviction and witness about peace-building and war that has expanded over generations. In this post, Oftedahl asks whether there is or should be a Quaker hermeneutic about non-violence: some kind of meaning and interpretation heuristic that helps Quakers identify and pursue peaceful options not just at the macro-state level but also at the micro-level of the person:

We live in an era when large scale State violence, though still very present, appears to be on wane while interpersonal, communal, and social violence, from the surveillance state to online bullying, is finding new venues in the technological age. A new “democratization of violence” is happening, as culture wars begin to look more and more like real wars. What might the Spirit require of us?

Should this [hermeneutic] include a willingness on the part of each one of us to examine and speak out against ALL forms of violence, in ourselves, in others, in our S/society, in our country, and in our world, whether inter-personal violence or cultural violence, whether in the form of militarism, or racism, or sexism, or classism, or economic exploitation, or religious prejudice, or any other form, whether historical by our ancestors or in ourselves today, whether blatant, or latent, or actively denied?—Randy Oftedahl

Peaceable Kingdom, oil on canvas, 75 x 89.5 cm — “The Peaceable Kingdom” by Edward Hicks, 1820

This is a question about how the identity-shaping practice of telling stories about a religious tradition and its historical advocacy might discourage an adherent from working out similar convictions in the present day, centuries removed from the contexts and concerns of their tradition’s founders.

In a sense, this is the classical “religious sustainability” question: how shall we honor our religious heritage while ensuring we’re expressing something of value in our time and passing on something valuable to those who will follow us?

I’m also mulling over a fantastic series on a Quakerly way to view the Second Coming, in terms of anticipation, transformation, and present intimacy: “Christ is come, and is coming—not Christ will come.” British Quaker and teacher Ben Pink Dandelion shared these ideas with the Canadian Yearly Meeting late last summer. The videos run about 5 hours in total.

My intent is to take a few months to revisit the concept of the peaceable kingdom, which I referred to in my talk at Loma Linda last month. I have a couple of books on my study list; if you have recommendations, please let me know.

Why Comparing Your LGBTI Children To Murderers Is Neither Supportive nor Progressive

Believe Out Loud: “If My Son Was A Murderer…” (Johnie J. Guerra)

Heard this one before? A child discloses they aren’t heterosexual. Their parent says “If you were a murderer, or in jail, or an alcoholic prostitute, I would visit you, and I would remember you in prayer, but I would mourn forever. That is what I’ll do with you now and I’ll never condone your choice.”

Nice.

The cutest kitten and puppy ever. (via Tumblr)

Some Christian parents feel compelled to make some version of this speech to their LGBTI children—and while I’m sure it’s not an easy speech for the parents to deliver, it’s even more horrific for the children forced to hear and bear it. Johnie Guerra, a hetero Christian, explains in his Believe Out Loud piece why rhetoric like this just doesn’t work—and isn’t a necessary part of keeping the faith. I, too, hope his parents will adjust to his beliefs in time.

As another blogger wrote this week:

“We are complicated beings. Emotionally. Sexually. Intellectually. Being in love can be complicated, as most of us know.
But supporting love is not complicated…

Love. Acceptance. Safety. Affection. Respect… Giving another human being these things is not going to shred the very fabric of society, or ruin your children.

Your children will benefit from your willingness to get rid of those calluses and be open to more LOVE in the world. They may be one of those tender souls that the anti-gay movement is so viciously attacking. It may be your vulnerable child you are burning painful scars into with your bigoted remarks and support of anti-gay rhetoric. It might be your child that will sit at the lunch counter and be refused service because of who they are.” —Megan P.

What’s Going on for Public Sphere Religion?

Salon: The dying right: Why Christian fundamentalists are in panic mode (CJ Werleman)
The Atlantic: How religious-freedom laws could come back to haunt the faithful (Jonathan Merritt)

Werleman reviews recent US surveys of religious adherence and whether people stay with childhood faiths over time. The Public Religion Research Institute’s survey, which CJ cites, is worth looking over:

Among its key findings for Millennials: that almost one-third of Millennials who leave their childhood church say they did so because of that church’s anti-LGBT policies. 14% said church anti-LGBT policies were a very important factor in their decision to leave, and 17% said it was somewhat important. On general perception, 70% of Millennials surveyed think religious groups’ anti-LGBT approach alienates people.

Similarly, “Majorities of Americans perceive three religious groups to be unfriendly to LGBT people: the Catholic Church (58%), the Mormon church (53%), and evangelical Christian churches (51%). Perceptions of non-evangelical Protestant churches, African-American churches and the Jewish religion are notably less negative.” As I’ve said many times, these are well-earned reputations; they’re not unfounded perceptions at all.

The Adventist denomination and North American Division both keep wondering what’s going to happen to their Millennial members. As even the GC’s Archives and Research office realizes, we can draw the lines between the church’s anti-LGBT work and my generation’s perceptions of it; what remains to be seen is whether we’ll change anything, or rather dig in and hope that Adventists trained to sustain the church’s current trajectory will carry the denomination into increasingly “pure” irrelevance over the next 25-40 years. Meanwhile those constituencies will also change and I can only hope that the denomination will adapt to them better than it has to its North American membership.

Werleman notes how some Christians affiliated with the right political wing have responded to and stoked these demographic trends: “These ‘religious freedom’ bills did not arrive here overnight,” he says; “they’re three decades in the making.” While Adventism was more hands-off in its public sphere work during the Moral Majority’s rise (1970s-1980s), it has still been affected by the MM/Religious Right’s approach. Even today, the church paper, the Adventist Review continues to promote columns and “analysis” from Albert Mohler (Southern Baptist Convention).

By contrast, Merritt, an evangelical columnist, recently took some hits for questioning the anti-LGBTI “religious freedom” discrimination laws being proposed across the US, in Kansas, Arizona, and Tennessee, for instance. In this column, he asks the question he shared on his website a week or two ago: “If Christians really believe they’re becoming marginalized, why would they disempower marginalized people in the marketplace?”

The thought that has recurred for me ever since this story cycle began was “Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.” But ethics of reciprocity are, as it turns out, low-hanging ethical fruit: even children know how to trade. Surely religious ethics can call one to something a little less self-centered than “better not persecute if we don’t want to be persecuted”?

Unfortunately this seems to be the beginners’ level we’re at right now.

What intolerance looks like outside the US: inter-religious violence in the Central African Republic

Washington Post: Christian vigilantes wielding machetes have killed scores of Muslims (Sudarsan Raghavan)
NPR: Jewels Lie Beneath The Violence In The Central African Republic (Gregory Warner)

Between these two articles from the Washington Post and NPR, we get a sense of how religion and economics and ethnocentrism and nurtured grudges can produce and maintain cycles of vicious violence, cycles that some religious people struggle to stop or don’t even wish to stop. I’m reminded of the 1990s genocides in Serbia and Rwanda, each fueled and coddled by different kinds of religious adherents.

I’m concerned that our moral outcomes are so mixed. I’m also concerned that contemporary moral arguments seem so tangled up with fiscal concerns rather than more fundamental human values: what we plan to do with minorities is evaluated in terms of legal and institutional policy impacts, not impacts to the human person. It can’t always be about the dollar: people will always matter more.

I’m keeping an eye on updates on the situation in CAR and will share when I see news. It unnerves me that it didn’t merit a mention at the Academy Awards this weekend when the Ukraine and Venezuela did. We have the capacity to attend to all critical issues, and I hope CAR and Uganda don’t get left behind.

[Update re. Uganda: Local civil society workers have published several concrete ways that concerned non-Ugandans can support them now. Hop over to GLAAD and check out their list. Note, too, that they don’t recommend general aid conditionality.]

February 13, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

From the Kansas State Constitution

Sec. 1 – Equal rights
All men are possessed of equal and inalienable natural rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Sec. 2 – Political power; privileges
All political power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority, and are instituted for their equal protection and benefit. No special privileges or immunities shall ever be granted by the legislature, which may not be altered, revoked or repealed by the same body; and this power shall be exercised by no other tribunal or agency.
Sec. 7 – Religious liberty
The right to worship God according to the dictates of conscience shall never be infringed; nor shall any person be compelled to attend or support any form of worship, nor shall any control of or interference with the rights of conscience be permitted, nor any preference be given by law to any religious establishment or mode of worship. No religious test or property qualification shall be required for any office of public trust, nor for any vote at any election, nor shall any person be incompetent to testify on account of religious belief.

A stone spiral set into a wall in Austin, TX. Keisha took the photo herself. — The Spiral Stone, Austin TX (c) Keisha McKenzie, 2008

In a bizarre throwback to the days of religiously-motivated lunch counter segregation, and despite some objections, the Kansas legislature prepares to legalize religiously-motivated discrimination in both public and private services. The target this time round is the LGBT consumer.

So if you’d thought that questions about public service discrimination had been settled 50 years ago, you were wrong.

However, the right to worship according to one’s convictions and the right to conduct business with and provide services to the general public are very different things. Christians’ right to worship according to our conscience is not abridged anywhere in the United States.

In fact, the recent SCOTUS case Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC reaffirmed religious organizations’ right to make decisions about employees classified as ministers (including teachers) even when those determinations were discriminatory and breached anti-discrimination law that would apply to any other employer. In other words, recent US law grants religious organizations all the special privileges to discriminate in their own sphere that they could reasonably want. It does not dismantle 50 years of hard-won rule-making about preserving equal access to public services in the public sphere we all share whether we’re aligned with specific religious expressions or not.

Dear America, this is ridiculous. Please get it together.