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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

reconciliation

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Building Beloved Community on Bones?

The principles for managing great community conversations are about the same as the principles for managing great relationships: mutual respect, equity, integrity, freedom from violence or abuse, and a bias toward care and common growth.

Enough Room at the Table is now available for digital view: Go to enoughroomfilm.com and pay what you can.
Watch Enough Room at the Table online; pay what you can.

Last spring I worked with Daneen Akers and Stephen Eyer, co-directors of the narrative film Seventh-Gay Adventists, on a new project designed to model dialogue on gender, sexuality, and faith.

Enough Room at the Table is now available for digital streaming, and a limited DVD print is in progress. If you haven’t watched it, it’s worth it.

Showing up in another state with people I hadn’t met to talk about things that are precious to me—my life, family, faith, church, and communities—all on film: that was a real exercise in trust.

And it was the best work I did all year, not just because of the energy I put in to showing up, but because of the openheartedness and common values our group used as the soil for our weekend together.

Unfortunately, faith organizing isn’t always that rewarding.

As the Adventist community wrestles with faith, sexuality, and gender, the United Methodist community is navigating the same ground.

The UMC General Conference’s process has included “court trials,” proceedings where LGBTQ-supportive clergy members have been prosecuted and either threatened with expulsion or expelled, as well as public panel-style conversations where theologians and other church leaders discuss LGBTQ people. Only in the last year have these panels also included people who are themselves LGBTQ.

Love Prevails’ Rev. Julie Todd recently described what dialogue in these conditions can cost some of the people being asked to participate. Group unity built on the foundation of ongoing abuse is not “an unmitigated good,” she writes.

Liberals tend to think that any form of inclusion is good, as an end in and of itself. Inclusion on a panel is better than exclusion from a panel and therefore it is a good thing, right? …Methodist holy conferencing is especially good, because it is holy.

In fact, this logic is not good. This kind of thinking is lazy analysis that fails to include the dynamics of power and pain…

None of these panels nor proposals to General Conference, not holy conferencing nor the invoking and implementing of a Rule 44 alternative process for General Conference – none of this has anything to do with the true welfare of LGBTQ persons at all. None of this is about “balanced views,” respectful dialogue, shared Christian values, or the gospel of Jesus Christ. All of these efforts are about how to maintain the institutional church at the expense of queer people. (Read the rest.)

"Expecting marginalized people to disregard their own emotions to calmly educate you is the epitome of entitlement." —Sangeetha Thanapal
Image via Chanda Prescod-Weinstein.

As we filmed Enough Room At The Table, our group explored these questions in our own way:

  • What assumptions are we designing into our challenging conversations? How do they affect the policies we take for granted?
  • What historical and ongoing damage do we need to recognize and end before we can legitimately speak of “reconciliation” or “unity”?
  • And how can we ensure that the Beloved Community we want isn’t built on the bones of the vulnerable?

As large groups figure these social dynamics out, the constant grind of stagnation dressed up as progress and progress shrouded in apathy can become tiresome. But Todd is absolutely right on this point:

The terms of a dialogue are critical.

If those terms foreclose our ability to acknowledge harm, our conversations will be hollow and won’t be able to benefit the entire community we hope to help.

Newsletter subscribers got free access to the dialogue film at the end of December. If you’ve not yet subscribed, sign up here.

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The Under-told Western Hemisphere Black History Boat Tour

 This casual essay, which began as a series of tweets posted over 3 hours on July 4, 2015, focuses on the English, Caribbean, and mainland U.S. components of the Western Hemisphere’s story: these are the parts that intersect with my lineage. There is much, much more to be told, particularly of the Black Africans that White Spanish and Portuguese traders took to South America. There are also many others more qualified than me to tell the South and Central American chapters of this story.

As far as I can tell the only appropriate place to start this story is 12,000 years ago with the ancestors of the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island.

When they first arrived on this continent, fanning out from the north and from the south, Christianity had not yet been invented. 11,400 years later, when Portuguese, Spanish, and other European sailors got lost in the Western sea, there was no such thing as a Protestant either. The indigenous nations in the northernmost territories of this continent successfully repelled the Norse at the start of the 2nd millennium. But they couldn’t stop the Western Europeans from sailing west.

In most ways, the 15th Century was discontinuous with the era I was fortunate enough to be born in. But it was continuous in two ways:

  1. Christians claimed the right to subdue the earth and use all its resources, including “human resources.”
  2. Black lives did not matter.

By 1619, English traders and pirates had been touring the Atlantic for just over a hundred years. Giovanni Caboto made the first trip between Bristol and what’s now Canada for England’s Henry VIII—but that was just the start.

When we say history is usually written by the victors, this is what we mean: every fall, United States residents take a few days off and argue about 1620. Good, plain-minded Americans have their children dress up as turkeys and pilgrims and wave corn husks and reflect on gratitude. Every fall! But there was 12,000 years or more years of history here prior to 1620.

I make it a point to read articles from indigenous writers at every national American holiday including the one some celebrated on July 4. Read, for example, Mark Charles (@wirelesshogan) on how the Declaration of Independence smears and defames indigenous people. Also read Simon Moya-Smith (@SimonMoyaSmith) and the web publication Indian Country Today (@indiancountry) for stories on the ongoing and vibrant-despite-everything indigenous life on this land.

I.

“America, America! God mend thine every flaw, confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.” —Katherine Lee Bates


The first permanent English settlement on what’s now the US was in Jamestown, Virginia. Its birth year was 1607, and it was one of three formed around that time. A comparable company docked in St. George’s, Bermuda (1612), and a third claimed rights to St. John’s, Newfoundland, now Canada.

The Jamestown colony was governed by a contracted stock-based structure called the Virginia Company of London. The Virginia Company had the full authority of the English monarchy to come west, seek gold, and claim land around the Chesapeake Bay. So when English separatists eventually got here in 1620, they found indigenous people, prior European settlements, and a small African population.

Every second of the United States’ history is entangled with migration, human trafficking, labor, and commerce. In the Virginia Company (1606-1624), we can see the corporation preceding the state. The song of the American state has always included a profit bassline. The driving motif has not been wonder. It’s not been escape from tyranny. The driving motif has been resources and power, and “One ring to rule them all.” That ring is commerce, backed by religion.

From the very first boat, the United States’ European settlement project has privileged the corporation. And this makes rulings like Citizens United vs. FEC much more aligned with the US national project than departures from it. We’re simply becoming more explicit about the comparative value of the human life. It’s a calculus usually only implied in common rhetoric: our value is latent in the government’s continuing and routine treatment of indigenous, Brown, and Black peoples on this continent and beyond.

At the National Cathedral’s July 4 organ recital this year, the host quietly and soberly told the crowd, “This nation was shaped from borrowed materials and transported peoples.”

They weren’t borrowed, though. They were stolen and never returned. They weren’t transported. They were kidnapped and used for profit. Even in our effort to face the history every holiday, we continue to resist language that doesn’t occlude and obfuscate.

As I’ve searched for those Black people who were already here when the Mayflower docked, I’ve only come across a few names and thin stories. *

There’s “Juan Pedro,” a Spanish-speaking Angolan who, born free on the African continent, became war booty for the Portuguese. He was born in 1593, and enslaved 26 years later. The Portuguese slavers on the San Juan Bautista marched him to the port of Luanda and set sail for the New World.

Take a moment here to note the name of their ship. The San Juan Bautista. The St. John the Baptist. John the Baptist was a character in the “good news” stories of Jesus who assumed responsibility for preparing people for Jesus’ public work.

But there was no good news in the hold of that slave ship. The crew of the English ships the Treasurer and White Lion boarded the Bautista and took possession of its cargo and all the enslaved on it. That was how Juan Pedro ended up with 349 other Africans working on the plantations of the Bermudan governor.

And then there was the 20 or so slaves already on the Treasurer, the ship that raided the Bautista for England. And the 32 blacks already in slavery in Jamestown in 1619.

There was a woman deposited from Africa to Jamestown via The Treasurer who we only know as “Angela.” And there were “Anthony” + “Isabella,” two of the 1619 cohort, who gave birth to William Tucker, the first known Black child on the continent (1624). What possessed these two—what possesses any of us?—to sustain love and create new life under these conditions? I still don’t know.

II.

“Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?” —Francis Scott Key


The Dene Nation’s Georges Erasmus has said that community isn’t possible without common memory. The one thing that the United States does not have is a common memory. What students and voluntary immigrants like me learn via textbooks, monuments and the media does no justice to the 12,000-year histories of this “land of the free.”

The United States began with White families that saw no conflict between wriggling out from under the Crown and using force to master others. Not only were they and their generations affected by this logic, but, through the baby state, it also ensnared the NDNs they dispossessed and determined the environment in which Africans they imported would be expected to work without pay and freedom for the next 89 years. And so it was incredibly appropriate that the Independence Day recital at the National Cathedral included both Darth Vader’s Imperial March and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Many of us know that Thomas Jefferson included an anti-slavery clause in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence.

A clip from the Jeffersonian first draft of the Declaration of Independence (via the National Humanities Center).
A clip from the Jeffersonian first draft of the Declaration of Independence (via the National Humanities Center).

The clause didn’t make it into the final version: when the draft went before the majority, they were too comfortable with slavery to remove it. And the English abolitionists noticed. Here’s Thomas Day in 1776:

Thomas Day was an English abolitionist who skewered colonial hypocrisy about seeking freedom while repressing an entire class of people. Via the National Humanities Center.
Thomas Day skewered colonial hypocrisy about seeking freedom while repressing an entire class of people. Via the National Humanities Center.

In 1835, Rev. Dalcho wrote, “The celebration of the Fourth of July belongs exclusively to the white population of the United States.” A minister who owned slaves in South Carolina, Dalcho wrote in his local paper that the US independence war was a fraternal quarrel “among equals,” that it did not concern “Negroes.” All this despite the fact that Black soldiers fought on both sides of that war. Indigenous people also fought on both sides of that war. But a slave-owning Christian minister said the Fourth of July had nothing to do with them.

Oh, how convenient it must be to have religion, ideology, and politics at the ready to crown you the apex of creation.

I recently argued we need to “tell the truth” about US racism. But that requires us to tell the truth about the US. Even more basic than the Union or Confederate battle flags are the battles begun with the first ships and the first New World pulpits. The logic’s embedded in the first drafts of the Declaration and constitution, in the battle-poem-turned-anthem, and the battle hasn’t ended.

III.

“This nation, for all its hopes and all of its boasts, will not be free until all of its citizens are free.” —John F. Kennedy

The battle hasn’t ended.

I remember Juan Pedro, the 26-year-old Bantu man I mentioned earlier who survived the Atlantic crossing only to be traded again. Lord Rich, former Bermudan governor, sent Juan to Essex, England, and then sent him to Plymouth a year later. Juan was the first Catholic in Plymouth, and in the New World war between the Calvinist Puritans and everyone else, Juan Pedro lost.

Plymouth’s slaves gained freedom in the mid 1600s as England went into its civil war: would-be loyal Royalists hoped to attract free Blacks. By the 1650s, Juan Pedro had found land to own. He was also a Black Catholic man caught in anti-Catholic, rising White Protestantism. In 1654, he armed himself in support of the Catholics in Maryland and Virginia being attacked by regional Puritans—and as they fell, so did he. Virginians executed him by firing squad in 1655. He was 62 years old and a long, long way from home.

Not all Western Hemisphere Black people feel this way, but some of us sense, from time to time, that we’re also a long way from home. We make lives here, lives of faith, lives beyond faith, we build houses and families, we have children in hostile territory. We survive. I don’t know why we survive. I only know that we do.

The last year has been hell for Black people in the United States. I was so excited about Independence Day 2014. I didn’t have to work on July 4, for the first time in a decade, and so I stopped everything—all writing, editing, and reading—and instead ate tasty, inauthentic New World pizza and watched the World Cup. I had just that single month where I thought the illusory American Dream might include a viable role for someone like me.

And then Ferguson became a hashtag.

Every month after that, there was some other trauma, some new revelation of trauma, some belligerent sign this wasn’t “home.” The last year, I’ve manifested the most amazing experiences of my life and I’ve also felt the most besieged in my life. The hashtags keep on coming. The war dead keep piling up.

That’s why the only way I could think of to handle the holiday this year was to wear all-black, write my little heart out, and light fire on my TL with this article.

Thank you for witnessing my process and also witnessing our collective story.

ACTION: Mark Charles would like to convene a conference in Washington, D.C. at the end of 2016 to begin building a common memory. There’s so much merit in this goal. Please work with the 5 Small Loaves community to make it happen.

* I drew several of the most humanizing details about Juan Pedro, the Bantu Catholic freeman-turned-soldier, from Tim Hashaw’s book, The birth of Black America: The first African-Americans and the pursuit of freedom at Jamestown (2007). Hashaw wrote this book to help fill in some of the deep silences about African-Americans in history on this continent.

I especially appreciate his work because one of my frustrations as I wrote this, and one of my perennial frustrations about national histories generally, is not being able to hear these ancestors in their own voices. Some weren’t literate and couldn’t write. Others who did write were writing apologetics for the White moderate and abolition movement, a social and political movement structured around persuading voting White Americans that emancipation was a moral good, even when it failed to persuade them that Black people and White people were also equal. I want to hear my ancestors in their own voices. Perhaps, one day, my descendants will also want to hear mine.

Further Reading

Abagond, J. (2012, November 21). America did not start with the Pilgrims [blog post]. Retrieved July 3, 2015, from https://abagond.wordpress.com/2012/11/21/america-did-not-start-with-the-pilgrims/

Adam, P. (2009). Australia—whose land? A call for recompense. John Saunders Lecture 2009. Retrieved July 6, 2015, from https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnx3ZXN0b2Ztb29yYWJiaW58Z3g6NDg5M2ZjMjViMmQ1MTI2Yg

American Anti-Slavery Society (1835). The Anti-slavery Record, Volume 1 (digital edition, pp. 115). Retrieved July 3, 2015, from https://books.google.com/books?id=_vISAAAAYAAJ

Bennett, Jr., L. (1984, February). The 10 biggest myths about Black history. Ebony, 39(4): 25. Retrieved July 3, 2015, from https://books.google.com/books?id=ttgDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA25&lpg=PA25#v=onepage&q&f=false

—. (2003). Before the Mayflower: A history of Black America. Chicago, IL: Johnson Publishing Company.

Brown Douglas, K. (2015, July 2). Why the Black church forgives Dylann Roof. Retrieved July 4, 2015, from http://www.thenation.com/article/why-the-black-church-forgives-dylann-roof/

Charles, M. (2014, December 22). The Doctrine of Discovery: A buried apology and an empty chair [blog post]. Retrieved July 5, 2015, from http://wirelesshogan.blogspot.com/2014/12/doctrine-of-discovery.html

—. (2015, April 24). Creating a common memory with the Doctrine of Discovery [blog post]. Retrieved July 6, 2015, from http://wirelesshogan.blogspot.com/2015/04/creating-common-memory-doctrine-of-discovery.html

—. (2015, June 11). The dilemma of the Fourth of July [blog post]. Retrieved July 3, 2015, from http://wirelesshogan.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-dilemma-of-fourth-of-july_11.html

Clark, A. (2015, May 21). Doctrine of Discovery series. Retrieved June http://twofriarsandafool.com/2015/05/doctrine-of-discovery-series/

Editorial Board. (2015, July 6). How Texas is whitewashing Civil War history. Washington Post [online]. Retrieved July 6, 2015 from http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/whitewashing-civil-war-history-for-young-minds/2015/07/06/1168226c-2415-11e5-b77f-eb13a215f593_story.html

Hashaw, T. (2007). The first martyr. In The birth of Black America: The first African-Americans and the pursuit of freedom at Jamestown (pp. 127-151). NY: Carroll & Graf Publishers. Retrieved July 2, 2015, from http://www.scribd.com/doc/151439192/John-Pedro-First-Martyr#scribd

Higginson, T. (1861, June). The story of Denmark Vesey. Retrieved June 18, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1861/06/denmark-vesey/396239/

Levine, J. (2015, July 3). Millions of Americans have nothing to celebrate on the Fourth of July. Retrieved July 4, 2015, from http://mic.com/articles/121671/native-americans-have-nothing-to-celebrate-on-july-4

Legacy Genealogy. (2013, July 20). African explorers and settlers of the New World [blog post]. Retrieved July 3, 2015, from http://legacysunfoldingjourney.blogspot.com/2013/07/african-explorers-and-settlers-of-new.html

Loewen, J. (2015, July 1). Why do people believe myths about the Confederacy? Because our textbooks and monuments are wrong. Washington Post [online]. Retrieved July 6, 2015, from http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/07/01/why-do-people-believe-myths-about-the-confederacy-because-our-textbooks-and-monuments-are-wrong/?tid=pm_opinions_pop_b

McKenzie, K. (2015, July 4). The under-told Black Western hemisphere boat tour . Retrieved July 6, 2016, from https://twitter.com/mackenzian/status/617409067712184320

Oak Hill Publishing Company. (undated). The declaration of independence. Retrieved July 4, 2015, from https://www.constitutionfacts.com/us-declaration-of-independence/read-the-declaration/

Sullivan, K. (2011, November 24). Black Pilgrim stirs controversy, 30 years on. WBUR.org. Retrieved July 1, 2015, from http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2011/11/24/black-pilgrim-puritan

Zwartz, B. (2009, August 11). Compensate indigenous Australians or leave, says minister. Retrieved June 28, 2015, from http://treatyrepublic.net/content/compensate-indigenous-australians-or-leave-says-minister

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Reader Review #04

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.

When spirituality gets corporatized: The commercial dharma

Tricycle Mag: Protesters crash Google talk on corporate mindfulness at Wisdom 2.0 conference (Alex Caring-Lobel)

Alex’ sharp critique of corporate spirituality—Buddhist-ish instruction of mindfulness to help corporations improve business effectiveness—prompted me to write on Twitter “The snark is strong with this one.”

And so it is, but perhaps no more than Zizek’s challenge to compassionate consumerism. Both Caring-Lobel and Zizek challenge the way that capitalism and corporatism have co-opted narratives of social concern and/or spiritual awareness. For Tricycle Mag and Curtis White, Google’s ability to sponsor a presentation at Wisdom 2.0 over local objections about its business impacts is a sign that mindfulness has been divorced from its religious roots and any responsibilities that those roots might challenge practitioners to address.

A January 2014 TIME cover reignited similar questions about how publications package and represent practices like yoga and meditation to Western readers—almost exclusively with photographs of thin, White women, and usually in terms of individual benefits and stress relief.

The RSA animated part of Zizek’s talk in 2010:

(A London Guardian columnist snapped back at Zizek quite hard the next year. The debate continues.)

If the Other feels forced to cover, we all lose out

Harvard Business Review: Fear of being different stifles talent (Kenji Yoshino and Christie Smith)

Yoshino and Smith surveyed 3,000 corporate employees and analyzed participants’ responses by demographic categories. They found that when employees felt pressured to “cover” or repress their differences to fit in with the corporate culture, they also reported feeling less committed to the organization, less self-assured, and less engaged.

I look forward to research that correlates these self-reports to more objective performance measures, and I suspect that the patterns will be similar: environments that encourage employee self-repression also purchase poorer employee performance. There is already some related research showing that stereotype threats undermine students’ performance in tests.

“Obeying God rather than men” on the left side of the political spectrum

Quaker Quaker: The case of 1st amendment vs. 1st commandment (Clem Gerdelmann)

A short reflection on how theocratic arguments can be made for people who are otherwise left-leaning. For instance, if the law of the land is pro-segregation, but you feel compelled to promote equality, you might just appeal to your deity as creator of all and consider human rights that deity’s legacy to all.

Gerdelmann doesn’t explain what we should do with this reasoning, whether we should think it valid or invalid; he simply offers it as a narrative that complicates the usual dichotomy of “constitutional permissions vs. moral imperatives.”

This morning another Quaker article caught my attention. Friend minister and theology professor Dr. Wess Daniels weighs the difference between denominational branding—PR marketing—and rearticulating denominational mission and impact as salt, light, and center of transformation. This mirrors some of the conversations I had with Seventh-day Adventists at this weekend’s panel on the future of the church and its relationship with Millennial members.

If someone tells you not to look in a box, do you look?

Vimeo: Bombay Sapphire’s Imagination Video series

The short film is a fantastic medium in the right hands. Imagination Video is a series of shorts based on the same script and sponsored by Bombay Sapphire. The three below are my favorites, and are all subtitled.

What to do about the US’ tolerance for violence against black men?

New York Times: Young, Black, and Male in America (Room for Debate Panel)

A nine-strong panel of commentators discusses black men, assumptions of criminality, education access, parenting, employment, multi-generational stigmatization, and low conviction rates for cases where people coded unarmed and non-aggressive people as a threat and killed them.

“Stand Your Ground” laws have received special attention since the Trayvon Martin case (2012) and similar cases since then (e.g. Jordan Davis, Oscar Grant, Rekia Boyd, Aiyana Stanley Jones, and Jonathan Ferrell). Esther Armah also writes on the latest case in which a white man who shot at a car full of young black men has been convicted for shooting at several of them, but not convicted for actually killing one. She also framed that case in terms of social entitlement and the privileged expectation that Others will submit to one on demand.

While there are several articles reflecting on the violence trend, the NYT series links the outcome to possible sources elsewhere in society. Is it a pattern we can break?

HT for the NYT piece to Broderick Greer, a Virginia-based MDiv student and writer.
Related: Dr. L’Heureux Dumi Lewis-McCoy’s article on the PBS education documentary, American Promise, which focuses on two Black American boys’ experience with discipline and diagnosis in public-private education.

On the intern/no-hire cycle: for creatives, what’s the path forward?

Buzzfeed: Can the intern hamster wheel be stopped? (Doree Shafrir)

This is the article that inspired the #myinternship hashtag on Twitter this afternoon. Lots of stories and experiences from current and former interns there.

People who are on the internship hamster wheel for years need to think about whether these industries are right for them, and we who are now in charge need to figure out a way to be able to hire the brightest, most creative people if we want our industries to survive. Keeping the gates completely closed to young people—and their new ideas and perspectives—is probably the fastest way to ensure our collective irrelevance. —Doree Shafrir

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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.)