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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

religion

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Habits of Mind

A thoughtful duo of posts from Empire Remixed’s Andrew Stephens-Rennie:

A Lifetime of Habits (April 9, 2013)
Idolatry & the Crisis of Being (April 11, 2013)

My favorite exchange comes from the comment section: A respondent writes:

Habits of living, rituals of inclusion, shape habits of reading.

And Andrew replies:

There is this feedback loop in a closed system – a loop that reinforces prejudice and idolatry – that can only be dismantled (and must be dismantled) by introducing new people, new encounters, new ideas and habits into the system.

Couldn’t agree more. So what happens when that closed system refuses to absorb new people, encounters, ideas, or habits, or expels them as they appear? What can be shared with a closed hand?

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Review: Torn And Not Mended

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Response: 5 Deadly Sins of the Church

Today I finished Hollywood SDA’s sermon series, 5 Deadly Sins of the Church. I’m grateful that the church posted them and has kept them available to those of us who aren’t local but still enjoy learning with others.

1. Patriarchy + Heterosexism (video): I was so glad to hear Trisha distinguish between loving people for who they are and loving people despite aspects of themselves. This is something I’ve been learning to teach by example, and thanks to the curves of my life and the communities around me I’ve had a lot of practice.

I’ll be happy to listen to the presentation again but do not see what some people have found so offensive about her thoughts. Given the thumbs up-to-thumbs down ratio and the wild viewing numbers for that video compared to the rest of the series, my hunch is that thumbs-downers have reacted to the topic and the implications they see in it but have not yet engaged the actual content and the people represented in it in an open, dialogic way.

2. Racism + White Privilege (video): I appreciated Jin complicating the common white/black binary. Wish he’d been able to speak more about how racism flows from sexism: it was a provocative idea. Great points on how demonizing Those People leads to fear and bigotry, and how it’s more our psychology than our reasoning that blocks intimacy with Others and is the root of social prejudice.

I nearly retweeted Jin’s line about minorities snacking on the crumbs of white privilege instead of choosing a different way to engage a dysfunctional social order (I still might tweet it!). There’s a lot to be said for an oppressed group absorbing messaging that harms them and using it to police themselves or attempt to control others. For du Bois this was linked to the “double-consciousness” of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” Freire also tackled the tie between an oppressed people and their oppressors’ values in his pedagogy books.

The last 10 minutes re. sullied reputations and crucifixion was almost prescient for the Hollywood community and I wonder how much of that foresight was conscious.

3. Nationalism + Militarism (video): My perspective on Maury’s talk is skewed in part because I’m not an American, I lean pacifist, and the Seventh-day Adventist denomination’s recent apathy about war, combat, and the attitudes that nourish them is really uncomfortable for me. I’m curious how American citizens respond to this message, and have bookmarked the book Maury suggested (Theology for a Nuclear Age).

I struggled with the “redemptive violence” frame for war, though I understand that redemptive violence is a common way of looking at, say, the crucifixion of Christ or how God might resolve “sin.” I agree with Maury that “war no more” is the target but do not see redemptive violence among men or from God as a viable way to get there.

4. Consumerism + Ecology (video): I enjoyed Ched’s comments on a rounder way to engage Sabbath. I’d never thought to consider it the 1st commandment rather than only the 4th though I knew it preceded the Sinai story. I have come to treat it as a ritual answer to our programming to grasp for more rather than live “enough.”

Something Ched can’t do from his perspective but which I hope more Adventists do from theirs is to wrestle with how the Adventist lineage can inspire more engagement with this world as it is (i.e. ecological responsibility) instead of less engagement ahead of apocalypse. If one text were enough to settle this, Revelation 11:18 might be it. But one text isn’t enough and we need a more comprehensive model: the church’s apocalyptic bias will probably not go away but it can be channeled such that it doesn’t produce fatalism or passivity.

5. Classism + Wealth Privilege (video): This is a topic I think about a lot because of where I live and my place in this society. The apostle James’ teachings on partiality are important—and I actually think they cut in both directions: they address the comparative rich (us) looking down on the comparative poor and the comparative poor (us) making assumptions about the comparative rich. I grew up and went to college in two hyper-class conscious societies, and I see how class consciousness binds everyone who participates in it, not merely the rich and not merely the poor. Income and wealth may grant us certain kinds of options, but they can also constrict our vision in other ways. I do agree that wealth grants out-sized influence in this culture but I don’t see this or any other privilege as one-dimensional.

Blessings and love to Trisha, Jin, Maury, Ched, Ryan, and the Hollywood SDA community. Thanks so much for sharing!

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Faith and Freedom

“To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” — Nelson Mandela

Link Chains

Earlier this month I was looking for updates on Baptist-affiliated Shorter University, which lost 43% of its faculty last year after requiring staff to sign so-called “faith” pledges. The university hired 51 new faculty members for the following school year and framed its statement and employee turnover as part of maintaining an “authentic Christian context.”

Similar reasoning came from the Ohioan administrators who terminated a teacher because he wouldn’t take down a social media post that varied from diocese teachings (I’ve written before about this case). At about the same time, I learned of a similar struggle at Ohio’s Cedarville University. The NYT reported on the forced resignation of Cedarville’s student affairs vice president; by the time of the article, the university president was also stepping down—all apparently because these administrators accommodated a visit from SoulForce’s bridge-building Equality Riders that the denomination disapproved of.

So Shorter’s last few years might be a fairly extreme illustration of a religious school “cleaning house” to maintain its purity, but it’s not exactly unusual.*

Reporting on Shorter’s situation last November, education magazine Inside Higher Ed identified the root issue as a series of questions: “Which tradition is more powerful: articles of faith or academic freedom? Who defines [denominational] values? And what does it really mean to be a Christian college?”

I don’t believe there is a necessary conflict between faith and freedom. I don’t think it impossible for these communities to infuse their relationships and policy making with more thought-for-others and more respect for both conscience and constraints freely chosen. I’d love to support communities in understanding that force sullies compliance, that securing mass compliance with weak policies and via compulsion is actually the worst possible outcome, not the best. It’s the worst outcome because it’s so beguiling: the masses have bowed down, and so our kingdom shall stand forever.

It can be hard for groups to assess their policies’ strength and value, I know. Beyond that there are the impacts of our policies on real people; using a mix of “objective” assessments and impact statements is one way to design the path ahead. I’m sympathetic to the fact that this work is complex, and sometimes thankless. I can understand why administrators might be tempted to sweep it aside.

Yet if faith is about deepening one’s alignment with reality and academic freedom is the ability to research, explore, describe, and comment on that reality without intimidation or retaliation, how can faith and freedom be opposed? What it is about this freedom that makes religious schools more likely to limit it through polarizing confessions like the one required at Shorter or the lifestyle conformity required at Adventist universities? Why do we so often default to using these strictures to shape institutional culture?

A community that didn’t regard its standards as inherently sound would be smart to use pressure and prohibitions to bolster those standards and keep community members in line. Secular states often do this. But relying on this kind of force in a religious context suggests that an option isn’t attractive or persuasive enough on its own terms to inspire free consent or voluntary compliance.

Does life not provide enough natural feedback to validate our preferred moral guidelines as the best rules for our groups and their members? Does God’s Spirit require institutional support to guide people into “all truth” and keep them hemmed in once they’re there? We seem to design our institutions as if we can’t trust people to be moral or morality to be reasonable. Why is that?

I was once taught that the end-game of this human experiment was that right-being and right-doing would be intuitive and internally driven. If that’s more than a pipe dream, shouldn’t religious institutions be the most skilled at honoring and nurturing free conscience and persuasion and teaching all of us to do the same? Shouldn’t they be leading freedom, not limiting it?

—
* At the end of 2012, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools reaffirmed Shorter University’s accreditation. US schools retain the legal room to define their religious and non-religious educational philosophies and craft policies to match them.

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Promise of the Internet

Re: Religion May Not Survive the Internet — Valerie Tarico returns with more End of Religion evangelism.

“Religions have spent eons honing defenses that keep outside information away from insiders. The innermost ring wall is a set of certainties and associated emotions like anxiety and disgust and righteous indignation that block curiosity. The outer wall is a set of behaviors aimed at insulating believers from contradictory evidence and from heretics who are potential transmitters of dangerous ideas.” — Valerie Tarico

I think the headlined conclusion is completely wrong: some folks thought the rise of writing and the printing press meant The End of All Good, too, yet here we are.

But Tarico may be right about some important details. The internet has already transformed several conservative denominations in the last 15 years, and changed them irrevocably. For example, a strong, open network of progressive Seventh-day Adventists has evolved out of isolated college and university towns into a global conversation. Even if small in relation to the international membership of its home denomination, the Spectrum and related progressive web forums are  influential because they provide information and discussion channels beyond the scope of authorized church publications and Saturday morning classes.

It’s not all light, however. While open and accessible, Spectrum and similar nontraditional channels are also characterized by thick discursive conflict: comment sections feature as much misapprehension and ad hominem detours as insight and open-hearted listening. These channels are also dominated by vocal minorities while the majority of users “lurk” or monitor sites without contributing content. As a Salon respondent writes: “Extremist minorities often drive the conversation because the moderate majority can’t muster enough interest to even engage.”

Complaints about deep social polarization on and off the internet often focus on various “rabid extremists” who (so the story goes) have hijacked the public sphere and who consistently destroy opportunities for mutual engagement and respectful dialogue. It’s easy enough to observe conversations that fit that bill: cable news thrives on stalemates among energetic opposing voices, and reality television is designed to create it.

The Salon comment points to something else just as important: where is the “moderate majority” on this landscape? Are we the passive audience that extremist drama plays for? As much as we might complain about the people running public conversations, do we actively participate ourselves? Of what value are our complaints about degraded public dialogue serve if we’re apathetic about direct, constructive involvement?

As we discussed this article, a friend pointed out to me that the internet has been a boon to many denominations: it supports increased and more symmetrical connection among members. Surely this is good if society at large tends toward disconnection and less engagement person-to-person and denominations have a norm of hierarchical relationships.

But I wonder if the communities for whom the internet has been a good thing are mostly non-traditional from their start: geographically distributed, experimental, intentionally dialogic, and with a strong sub-population of early adopters. For more mainstream congregations, the net has provided some benefits and proactive leaders have capitalized on them. A whole battery of communication channels are now available to churches because of the internet. Centralized PR offices can disseminate more information in more ways: websites, social media, email, list-servs, webcasts, live-streams, and forums. Despite this, there’s almost a species-sized difference between groups that use Twitter or Facebook mainly to host discussions or facilitate support, and groups that use the same media like a univocal billboard service. The latter are often wildly unprepared for the interactive internet and the unpredictable, uncontrollable people who use it and expect feedback from site owners.

So what now? I’m still waiting for some of the internet’s promise to manifest: we were told that the net would democratize relationships and the flow of information. In some ways it has. But in other corners especially those not filled with early adopters, openness, transparency, and cross-function collaboration are second-tier values and reluctantly pursued.

My sense is that the majority of people are still interfacing with the old world’s glacial institutions and that we’re creating at least two distinct realms of experience: one actively interconnected and the other persistently disconnected. If, regardless of our groups and cliques, we need curiosity about ideas and possibilities to grow, is this bifurcation of values the best future we can imagine?