religious freedom : mackenzian

February 17, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

We’ve been here before

I grew up hearing about the civil rights era lunch counter sit-ins. It took me a while to understand that they were about much more than food.

In Greensboro, NC, in 1960, four Black students sat down at a Whites-only counter in a Woolworths store and refused to move until served. They sat down at Woolworths and other counters over the next five months, disrupting the custom that they shouldn’t expect the same service that White people received.

Some restaurant owners and patrons sincerely believed that Black people and White people shouldn’t eat together and that integration was a kind of moral contamination. Some of their religious leaders taught them that; after all, the Klan was a religious organization as well as a political one.

The discrimination of that era was sustained in large part because of religious rhetoric and people of faith. As much as people of faith worked together to expose segregation as ethically bankrupt, people of faith also worked really hard to keep it and the “good order” segregationists claimed to be preserving.

Evil doesn’t require cold-hearted monsters to persist. It only requires ordinary people who are willing to follow exclusionary customs, and it doesn’t matter whether they credit God for those customs or not.

For example, when Lucille Lewis Byard developed pneumonia near Washington, D.C., her husband took her to be treated at the Washington Sanitarium and Hospital (later Washington Adventist Hospital in Takoma Park, Maryland).

But it was 1943, and the good religious people at the San stopped treating Byard when they realized she was Black. They referred her across DC to the “colored” hospital at Howard University, and she died. The prejudice and negligence of the San’s medical staff—discrimination—meant that a woman lost her life.

Exactly 70 years later, a florist in Washington State stopped arranging flowers for longtime clients, a same-sex couple, when she learned that they were planning their wedding. She’s cited her sincerely held beliefs for this choice.

It’s true that no one died in the state of Washington because they didn’t get flowers. It’s also true that no one died in Greensboro, NC, because they didn’t get lunch. But people sat in at the Woolworth’s counters for months, because they recognized that the stakes were greater than food. The stakes are greater than flowers.

People have been using religion as an excuse to deny others services, facilities, or benefits for years: unfortunately, it’s not new for people to refuse to serve others on the basis of who they are and how they’re socially classified. It’s not new because sometimes our sincerely held beliefs are trash.

But we’ve had this discussion before. We have, as a society, decided that discrimination in public accommodations is not ok and does not deserve to be protected. It explicitly harms the people who’re marked for unequal treatment and it implicitly corrodes neighborly trust in communities as well.

I’d like to see more people of faith who will honor our religions’ best values and say that.

Next weekend, Believe Out Loud team members will travel with other organizers to Greensboro, NC. There they’ll spend a day training people of faith to recognize discrimination and learn to share how discriminatory policies affect their daily lives. If you know anyone who’ll be in commuting distance of Greensboro on February 25, encourage them to sign up. Materials will be delivered in both English and Español.

February 15, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Backstory on the right to discriminate

Why are White evangelical Protestants in the United States so likely to justify discrimination based on religious or moral conviction? Because they’ve done it before.

Christians using our religion to shield ourselves from the consequences of our social prejudice isn’t new. It’s also not a personal attack, though that’s little assurance for Muslims, LGBTQ people, single parents, or anyone else marginalized in mainstream evangelical culture. It’s part of the community’s history, and it goes back more than fifty years.

As Randall Balmer explains, the 1969-1970 case Green v. Kennedy inspired White Evangelicals to abandon rapidly desegregating public schools for schools and colleges where they could be sure their children would only learn with and date other White children. When President Nixon’s administration argued that the Civil Rights Act required non-profit organizations not to discriminate or risk their federal tax exemption, evangelical people mobilized to protect their “right to discriminate.”

Clear into the year 2000, Bob Jones University discouraged students from multi-racial dating. Its policy, like its restrictions on the enrollment of Black students through the 1970s, rested on the “sincere moral convictions” of the university’s board and constituencies. Today, the university website includes statements that repudiate that era. “Scripture is our final authority for faith and practice,” the university wrote in 2008, “and it is our intent to have it govern all of our policies.”

For almost two centuries American Christianity, including BJU in its early stages, was characterized by the segregationist ethos of American culture. Consequently, for far too long, we allowed institutional policies regarding race to be shaped more directly by that ethos than by the principles and precepts of the Scriptures.” —Bob Jones University, Statement about Race at BJU

Today it seems obvious that Christianity should be incompatible with racism and prejudice, but it wasn’t always obvious, and the evangelical community hasn’t always argued that it should be. Some members of the community still don’t.

David W. Congdon tracks these patterns not just fifty years back but four centuries back. Congdon is a systematic theologian and staff member at the InterVarsity Press, and developed two Twitter threads that outline historical and philosophical influences on evangelical culture’s custom of pulling up the drawbridge behind it and leaving the riffraff outside the walls.

Allowing theological differences, esp. on touchy issues, threatens the unity and financial future of an organization. Whether it’s a ban, physical wall, firing, church split, or statement of faith, it’s all the same fear of the other [and] pursuit of purity.” —David W. Congdon, February 9, 2017

Congdon may be alluding to a 2016 controversy about InterVarsity enforcing constraints on what its staff members can believe about marriage, all in the name of faithfulness to Biblical convictions. Staff members who wouldn’t or couldn’t sign an IVP statement of belief faced job losses.

Given this context, when PRRI finds that 42% of White evangelical Protestants oppose refusing Others service on the basis of religion, it’s not surprising that there are so few. It’s surprising that there are so many! The Church needs to generate more.

As new policies about denials of service emerge over the next several months, one of the biblical parables that you can expect to hear a lot about is the story of the Good Samaritan. In this story, the outsider is the most moral character in a narrative usually set up to praise ordinary Israelites not from the families of Aaron (priests) or Levi (Levites or temple staff). Christian communities are beginning to use this story to challenge the poor habit of using our beliefs to raise walls between “us” and those “not like us.” It’s tempting, for non-evangelicals too, to leave someone out, to deny, repel, and reject, and to credit (or blame) God or other authorities for our choices to do so.

As Jesus tells this parable, his audience asks, “Who is my neighbor?” The more I hear about religious freedom, especially from the constituencies that elected the current federal administration, the more I sense that Jesus’ original audience didn’t like his answer any more than we do.

But that doesn’t make his answer wrong.

January 17, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

A shield, not a sword

A person in medieval full armor, including noseguard and chainmail. Sword is raised and so is the shield. — Photo credit: Henry Hustava

Aspiring clerical aristocrats debase the idea of religious freedom when they use it as a tool to seek exemptions from the generally applicable laws of the United States—particularly those that prohibit discrimination.

Religious freedom and civil rights are complementary values and legal principles necessary to sustain and advance equality for all.” —Fred Clarkson, January 3, 2017

In her book Enfleshing Freedom, M. Shawn Copeland argues that freedom is an enabling state: it liberates us to step more deeply into community, to interact with other people and with the world around us. It enables us to mutually care, serve, and be served. As free people we are free to live with more vulnerability and less fear.

I’ve been baffled by ongoing Christian attempts to carve out legal permissions to withdraw from community, to reject opportunities to serve people in our society, and to deny calls to hospitality, generosity, and compassion.

I’m also not all that different from the people I’m talking about.

A few months ago I mentioned that one of my recurring clients had folded into his work some text from a church official who had spent the preceding few months campaigning for the continued criminalization of LGBTQ people’s relationships in his country. The official is the kind of person who wants non-heterosexual people to slink away to the edges of society, and as such he’s not the kind of person I would want a client relationship with.

Rather than dumping the project and disadvantaging my client, however, I decided to breathe through it, and not charge them.

I’m not sure whether this is the only possible community-preserving solution I had, and I’d love to hear how others have handled similar scenarios.

But what I did helped me to respect the relationship I’ve had with my client, do something kind for a third party, and apply a few of my beliefs. Community, real community, is awkward, unpleasant, and grey from time to time. It’s not always as clearly defined as it sometimes looks in retrospect, or from a distance. In the moment, a confrontation might absolutely be the right thing. It also might not.

In community, we can vigorously disagree. Some members of my family, for instance, have horrendous beliefs about me and my groups. That has consequences. For a start, it makes fellowship difficult: toxicity isn’t easily repressed.

So whereas I no longer feel compelled to spend all my free time with people who can only digest slivers of my life, I’m also not at peace with doing what some Christians are striving to do—get a government pass to turn the Other away at the door.

There’s something about Christianity that calls me to serve without partiality. And this isn’t even a modern teaching; it’s part of the book of James.

So that’s one area where I part ways with the Christians seeking to carve out state exemptions for themselves and asserting the “right” to refuse to serve.

Here’s another: they’re not evaluating the quality of the relationship between two people who want to commemorate their anniversary with good photographs. They’re looking at the genders and/or legal status of the couple and making assumptions about what those facts mean. In the end they don’t care whether the couple’s relationship is sound; they’re only distressed that the couple has a relationship at all.

I empathize with artists as much as I value my own skills. I’m careful about the projects I apply my skills to and not every opportunity fits for me. But I can’t imagine using someone’s social categories as my basis for choosing. And I can’t imagine asking my government to back me up if I did do that.

The state should have better things to do than facilitate our prejudices. There’s also no turning back now: we’re very firmly post-1964 and living in plural societies with the ability to have neighborly relationships that draw our prejudices from unconsciousness into broad daylight.

We live, study, form families, and work alongside people who may appear vastly different from us, and we also have the blessed opportunity to learn from and with those people. Shutting them not only out of our personal lives but also out of our commercial lives is a bold way to squander connection and to waste the freedom that frees us to be more tender-hearted to one another, not less so in the name of God.

If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ you are doing right.” —James 2:8