theology : mackenzian

May 3, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Why it can be so hard to change our minds

Left: A new concept with legs. Right: A brain with bug eyes and gaping mouth waving a sword in each hand. Speech bubble: “Have no fear. I will kill it with swords!”

If you’ve ever scribbled a rough denial in the margin of a book that challenged your core beliefs, you’ve experienced some of the emotional turmoil that the backfire effect relies on.

The last time I wrote about this psychological defense mechanism, I was myself in a state of mild resistance to the concept. No one working on public education or social change loves the idea that people are more likely to reject new information than they are to accept it.

Furthermore, in the era of viral falsehood, researchers are discovering that repeatedly exposing people to nonsense helps to build its popular credibility. People are also more likely to believe nonsense they see friends share alongside fact, and debunking lies doesn’t help.

Lies are exhausting to fight, pernicious in their effects, and, perhaps worst of all, almost impossible to correct if their content resonates strongly enough with people’s sense of themselves… Repetition of any kind—even to refute the statement in question—only serves to solidify it.” —Maria Konnikova, January 2017

It’s the amygdala’s resist-or-run response that can make encountering new information risky business. Read The Oatmeal’s account of the backfire effect for more.

April 25, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

A message I didn’t expect

An unexpected message from an unexpected source: Pope Francis tele-presented at this year’s TED conference on the topic of inclusion and social responsibility and used the parable of the Good Samaritan to underscore his points.

The more powerful you are, the more your actions will have an impact on people, the more responsible you are to act humbly. If you don’t, your power will ruin you, and you will ruin the other.” —Pope Francis

We agree that “life is about interactions.”

Life is a perpetual conversation between people, things, and their environments, and none of us is an isolate. Even when the external world and other people are annoying, frustrating, or disappointing, not being able to ingest or digest their gifts means dying.

In some ways, this is a message that counters Brueggemann in The Prophetic Imagination. In the introduction, where he describes how the way of YHWH/Moses is different from the way of Pharaoh, Brueggemann underscores the idea that “the shaping of Israel took place from inside its own experience and confession of faith and not through external appropriation from somewhere else.”

The theologian views external influences on the Israelites as likely corrupting and diminishing and so worth dismissing out of hand. This is a move I’d expect cultic and exclusivist traditions to make: he could just as easily perceive these influences as nourishing, challenging, and enriching. God forbid the ancient Israelites learned monotheism or Sabbath from the people around them. God forbid there is so much room in our communities for the Other that they don’t have to question whether their sanctuaries and ours can be the same.

I sometimes hear that isolationism framed as good among members of my own tradition, and it seems very much contrary to the relational emphasis Francis speaks of in his talk.

“The future,” he says, “is, most of all, in the hands of those people who recognize the other as a ‘you’ and themselves as part of an ‘us.’ We all need each other.”

The video is 17 minutes long and transcribed in 22 languages. Audio is in Italian. I’d like to read your ideas on it; send me a message.

H/T: The Washington Post

April 24, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

The consequences of belief

Last fall, I learned from Professor Jean Sheldon about why it’s important to be choosy about one’s ideals, mentors, models, and gods.

“The picture I have of God today,” Sheldon wrote, “is the photograph others will take of me tomorrow.”

People may well rise to the level of their gods. We only rise higher or stretch further when extremely motivated. It’s too uncomfortable to do otherwise and there’s every possible social justification not to!

In his book on prophecy, imagination, and hope, another Old Testament professor addresses the same point Sheldon did:

If we gather around a static god of order who only guards the interests of the ‘haves,’ oppression cannot be far behind. Conversely, if a God is disclosed who is free to come and go, free from and even against the regime, free to hear and even answer slave cries, free from all proper goodness as defined by the empire, then it will bear decisively upon sociology because the freedom of God will surface in the brickyards and manifest itself as justice and compassion.” —Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination

Just as belief has practical consequences, so too claims of freedom should have material outcomes. M. Shawn Copeland once explained that we’re “freed for something,” not for freedom’s own ideological sake.

Our freedom isn’t to mimic the predictable patterns of the already is. There’s unpredictability, invention, and imagination in freedom. We’re free, instead, to live out an alternative: “a new social community in history,” and a new material reality.

Freedom means not leaving our ideals in their original packaging, never to be tested. It means being able to pull them out of the box, let the air and wind hit them, and get them as dirty as the construction materials they are.

It’s a vision that’s frightening only to empire and those of us whom empire has well-trained.

April 23, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Trace your training

During my presentation at CityLights today, members shared some of their experiences working under the order of Pharaoh: the insatiable, grasping, perfectionist, reductive, and never-satisfied energy of imperialism.

Sometimes, I said, it’s not that we’re working for Pharaoh; it’s that we’ve become so accustomed the culture of Pharaoh that we enact its ideology on others and on ourselves. It’s the air we breathe and we don’t have to be instructed into it. Resistance takes much more work.

A group member reminded me that Pharaoh’s rules aren’t only in effect in the public and corporate sectors, among governments and business leaders. They also operate in the third sector, among non-profit heads and religious administrators.

It’s disconcerting to hear “I won’t give you straw. Get it yourselves wherever you can find it; but you’ll still have to make the same number of bricks as before” from the same people singing “They’ll know we are Christians by our love.”

But there’s a reason we hear those dissonant notes: just as Moses was trained to be a pharaoh before he was trained to be a shepherd, we’re members of mainstream society before we’re members of counter-cultural groups. We learn imperial logic and relational habits before we learn that there are viable alternatives, before we recognize we’re called to put flesh on our ideals and live those alternatives with other people.

Building prophetic community means acknowledging all the ways our prior training seeps into our new societies.

It means recognizing that when we confess with Brueggemann that “God’s people in the world are not commodities to be dispatched for endless production [but] subjects situated in an economy of neighborliness,” we’re not just working against the currents of the external social world. We’re also working against the currents of the social world that flow through us.

Just for you

Download my handouts from today’s talk, “Sabbath: Rest and Resistance.” There’s a neat life design exercise on the second page.

April 15, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

From where we stand

Congregations across the US will sing the song “In Christ Alone” this weekend, just as mine did this morning. It’s an obvious choice for Easter weekend because its verses trace the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

A line midway through the song recently became a flashpoint for the last ten centuries of debate among Christians about how best to explain the atonement. Presbyterians felt so strongly about it that they excluded the song from their hymnal.

The line, “the wrath of God was satisfied,” draws on a pre-Reformation version of the penal substitution theory. It emphasizes God’s wrath against sin and sinners and mercy in making of Jesus “a way of escape” for believers, and the Presbyterians who excluded it aren’t the only ones who’ve challenged it over the last several decades.

This weekend, I’m reading women and womanist theologians for other perspectives on this season’s stories. What happens when attempts to retrofit the old explanations no longer work, when it’s no longer enough to simply substitute a phrase like “the love of God was magnified”?

It’s a long journey that some don’t feel they can discuss openly. But if we find ourselves gripped by the stories and ethics of our faith, despite fatigue, and despite disillusionment, it may be worth taking that trip.

As Jacquelyn Grant writes in White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus, women from previous generations managed to nurture an enduring, nourishing sense of life’s connectedness and the transcendent even while being taught religion—and judged wanting—by slaveholders and abusers.

They learned to privilege direct revelation and inner wisdom because the scriptural revelation they were being taught was tainted by what Grant calls White ministers’ “oppressive interpretations.” Few of these women resolved the tension by rejecting the scriptures and their religion. Instead many of them reclaimed these texts and interpreted them in ways that supported life, freedom, and wholeness.

Womanists must, like Sojourner [Truth], ‘compare the teachings of the Bible with the witness’ in them. To do Womanist Theology, then, we must read and hear the Bible and engage it within the context of our own experience… Black women of the past did not hesitate in doing this and we must do no less.” —Jacquelyn Grant

March 12, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Hope and realism

The white race in America will not admit the Negro to equal rights if it is not forced to do so.” —Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 1932, via James Cone

Niebuhr wrote wrote this statement 25-30 years before the height of the civil rights movement. It suggests a clarity about US race relations that he perceived during the era of lynching but somehow couldn’t sustain while Christians resisted desegregation and police officers cracked protesters’ skulls on the street.

According to James Cone, Martin Luther King, Jr., once answered Niebuhr with the line, “It is hardly a moral act to encourage others patiently to accept injustice which he himself does not endure.” Niebuhr presumed that marginalized people should be patient with the mainstream.

And that expectation doesn’t square with his conclusion in the quote above.

I’ve been struggling with the quote over the last few days, not just because I have moments when I think he was right, but also because he seems to promote the use of force—and I don’t believe there’s evidence that ethical evolution can be “forced.”

The history of the civil rights movement is a perfect example of the gap between legal compliance and ethical enlightenment.

Loving v. Virginia, the SCOTUS case that challenged laws banning interracial marriages, was settled in 1967. The case meant that White and non-White Americans could marry three years before most of their countrymen thought it should even be legal and almost thirty years before a simple majority of other residents “approved.”

Gallup’s polls showed this majority shift from disapproval to approval somewhere between 1994 and 1997: Loving v. Virginia created a bridge that most people in this country didn’t want to walk across themselves and didn’t think their children should walk either.

“Force” didn’t change them. I don’t know what did, but I don’t think it was the threat of state power or street pressure. I don’t know that it was moral maturity either: there’s been too much continuing institutional racism since the 1960s for me to suggest the United States simply grew up. Still today, more White Americans than Black Americans disapprove of interracial marriage.

This is a question that I’m asking with others who work on long-term social change and not just temporary mass mobilization: what inspires deep change?

What really helps us to apply our hermeneutic of suspicion first to the casual assumptions we grew up with and only secondarily to other people? What makes it easier for us to trust one another to the point that we will dismantle oppressive institutions and will walk across the bridges new public policy builds for us?