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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

womanism

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From where we stand

A telephone pole with a tall crossbeam. The whole photo has a green-grey wash. In the foreground are blurry grasses.
Photo credit: Allef Vinicius

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

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Core questions for Christianity

In order for us to become whole we must reject the culture that shapes our abuse and dissociate ourselves from the institutions that glorify our suffering.
In the classic book Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse, several writers and feminist theologians discuss how Christianity teaches people, particularly women, to accept suffering as a utility for spiritual growth or an explicit virtue modeled by God Godself through Jesus.

This was a theme that I and Herb Montgomery addressed during our talks at the Spectrum Conference on atonement and nonviolence this fall.

In the first chapter-essay, coauthors Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker broach the conundrum that people who want to keep participating in religion face: we have to determine whether our faiths are fundamentally flawed or simply complicit with cultural oppressive patterns. Neither is a fun conclusion to come to.

As we make that determination, though, we have to be careful that we don’t simply become apologists, making shallow excuses for our religions as Brown and Parker say: “they don’t mean it; they said they were sorry and would be better; they need me/us; we can fix it if we just try harder and are better; I’d leave but how can I survive outside; we have nowhere else to go.”

I’ve heard the latter few justifications several times in the last five years, and may have made some myself, while male ministers have debated whether female colleagues who share similar and sometimes greater workloads should receive the same denominational credential as they do. The denomination has declined to treat all of its ministers equally, and ministers and members alike make comments like “Leaving this church would leave me in cold isolation.” It’s not just women’s imaginations that are limited in this system—the source of the quote in the previous sentence is a man who’s invested almost 40 years in denominational work and cannot imagine a whole, healthy life without it. That concerns me as much as I imagine it would concern Brown and Parker.

“Only if the church is the place where cycles of abuse are named, condemned, and broken can it be a haven of blessing and a place of peace for women. That the church is such a place is not clearly evident.” —Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker

While these authors come to bleak conclusions about the historical Christian tradition, they also counter-propose a compelling vision of how Christianity and Christians can express faith that “frees” people instead of “imprisoning” them in the assumption that the best they can hope for in life is enduring suffering patiently.

As I continue my public faith work, I keep asking and beimg asked the question “Why stay?” My answers have changed since I first began my work, but still boil down to this:

If I can be a counter-illustration just by showing up, that’s fun; if I can cooperate with others in the spaces between the bricks and logs of an institution carrying on as normal, that’s great; and if either of those things is no longer true, I will stop. (“When faith fails, people move on.“)

In the meantime, it’s better for me not to daydream about changing the character of a multi-million-member organization from the edge: you have to be in the center to do that, and the center turns much too slowly for the kinds of people I’m committed to.

But out on the edges, when we recognize people are overtly suffering and where we can take much more fluid direct action, we don’t need permission to work with them, and we don’t have to wait for the fundamental logic of the institution to change. We can acknowledge the system’s gifts and weaknesses with clarity, and work without flinching with all the people, not just those our institutions deign to include.

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In Search of My Mother’s Garden — Walker

From Robin Carnes and Sally Craig’s book Sacred Circles:

“In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.” —Alice Walker

“We might look at our mothers as our first mirrors of ourselves. What they reflected back to us about ourselves we often took as the truth. When we begin to see our mothers as real people, not just as parents, who are struggling as imperfectly as the rest of us to make the journey, we see that what they mirrored back to us about ourselves as children was probably not about us at all but rather about who they were at that time. Talking about our mothers and how we feel about the people they were and are helps us to differentiate ourselves from them, even as we honor our connection with them.” (pp. 138-139)

Differentiating and connecting are both essential and complementary aspects of healthy relationship. Too little differentiation leads to enmeshment; too little connection leads to isolation. Too much differentiation produces distancing; too much connection undermines boundaries.

The metaphor I’ve often used for my own path with and around other people is planetary or stellar orbit: I travel an orbit myself, I have regular companions and am the regular companion of others. I cross orbits with others; I approach more closely at some times and more distantly at others. I attract some and am attracted by some. On rare occasions I crash into other travelers or am hit by one—but I still have my orbit to travel.

Our relationships are similar: partners, friends, siblings, parents, neighbors, coworkers, peer commuters, the panhandlers we pass each day, the accountants we see twice a year, our doctors and consultants, our religious teachers, and on, almost infinitely… Each of us has an orbit to travel. Each of us negotiates our connection and differentiation patterns with the people we meet and know. And both processes are necessary.

This is one of the insights that I processed over several years; it helped me to make sense of my relationships with other individuals but also helped me to understand and shift my relationships with the institutions I’m a part of.

If you missed this week’s series on sexuality and the Seventh-day Adventist church, I’ll be keeping the three installments up on this site:

Part I: The Magic of Shame (6/3)
Part II: Caring for our Mother (6/5)
Part III: Filling in the Gaps (6/7)