Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
13th century Persian poet and Islamic mystical theologian Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi-Rumi (thanks to Krista Tippett’s December “Speaking of Faith” interview with Dr. Fatemeh Keshavarz)
In response to the recent spate of hate motivated killings of gender non-conforming youth, Michael Adee of More Light Presbyterians asks, “Where is the Church?” Where indeed. Preaching against LGBT “lifestyles” plus silence on hate crimes against LGBT people equals implicit permission to kill them. And, dare I say, complicity in their deaths. I hear echoes from Genesis: “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground…“
Where is the church? Oh, wait, there they are! They’re holding “prayer sieges” along Interstate 35! But Rabbi Rami Shapiro, writing at Ethics Daily, has some hard questions for this movement and the philosophy that undergirds it. (Rabbi Shapiro’s essay is a Crossing the T “must-read.” Really. Go read it right now.)
Wait. What’s that I hear? Could it be? Yes! There is the voice of the church! Tutu calls on Ugandans to protect LGBT community. Quote of note: “No one should have to live in fear simply because of who they are.” Amen.
Who would Jesus marginalize? No one, of course.
But do we really believe that? More importantly, do we really practice it?
The most effective means of marginalization is genocide, death being the ultimate form of powerlessness. In societies where mass murder is prohibited or prohibitively costly, however, the powerful must resort to other methods to protect their power. History shows that the means to be limited only by human ingenuity. Justifications for marginalization, on the other hand, and particularly those that stand the test of time, are not so easy to come by.
To survey the means and methods by which human beings marginalize one another one doesn’t need to travel to Darfur or North Korea or Saudi Arabia, though. In fact, one needs travel no further than the local middle school. Middle schools may not be where we learn the art of oppression, but they are the place where we begin to practice it with the intelligence and organization of adults. Ask any middle schooler, and they’ll tell you who has the power in their world, who doesn’t, and what the powerful do to keep it that way.
One of the most powerful methods of marginalization in this or any context is silencing. The concept is simple. Those in power simply ignore those they want to marginalize. The “in crowd” refuses to relate in any way to the “outsiders,” as if they simply do not exist. The result, in essence, is a kind of “genocide of the imagination,” and the psychological effects on those who are silenced can be devistating.
Someone once said, “If you preach about pain, you’ll never lack an audience.” My own experience, both in the pew and in the pulpit, confirms the truism. The reason is intuitively obvious: the current of suffering passes through every life, leaving among the ruins in its wake the Great Question, “Why?” The whole human race, it seems, is seeking an answer.
Our credibility as ministers of the gospel–and, by extension, the credibility of our gospel as a body of teaching and as God’s message to the cosmos–hangs on the answers we offer to this universal question of suffering. If people find our answers to this question unsatisfactory, they will (rightly, I think) reject off hand the answers we might offer to any other questions they ask. In his new book God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question–Why We Suffer, Bart Ehrman (Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) describes how his own search for an answer led him away from evangelical Christianity and, ultimately, to agnosticism. (Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air interviewedDr. Ehrman this week; you can listen to the interview and read an excerpt from Ehrman’s book here.)
I can relate to Ehrman’s journey. My own questions formed in the fire of the pain brought about by feeling like a woman in a world and a church that required me to be a man. Why would God do such a thing to me? As I wrote in the ”coming out” letter I sent to some of my dearest and most respected Christian friends,
For most of my life, I believed that this deep impulse I felt to live as a woman was sin or sickness, and I prayed fervently for God to heal me. The fact that God did not heal me, in spite of all my pleading, led two years ago to the most profound crisis of faith I have ever experienced. There seemed to be three possible explanations. My prayers had gone unanswered because (1) God did not actually exist, (2) God felt no compassion for my suffering, or (3) my feelings were neither sick nor sinful, and I was free to seek a way to integrate them into my life.
As one of my friends who received my letter was quick to remind me, there is another possible explanation. Perhaps my being transgender was something akin to the burden the apostle Paul refered to as his “thorn in the flesh.”
In order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. (2 Cor 12:7b-11)
Reading these words over the years, I wondered if perhaps feeling myself to be a woman, feeling discomfort at being forced to exist in the world as a man, was my thorn in the flesh. Was it simply my cross to bear? Read the rest of this entry »
On Saturday, Sanesha Stewart, a transwoman of color living in the Bronx, was murdered in her own apartment. She was 25 years old. Her accused killer, Steve McMillan, had known her for months, yet when he was arrested, he claimed to have been enraged to find out that she was what the media coverage called not really a woman. He stabbed her over and over again in the chest and throat. She tried to fight him off; there were defensive wounds found on her hands.On Tuesday, eighth-grader Lawrence King was in a classroom in Oxnard, Calif. He was openly gay, and often came to school in gender-bending clothing, makeup, jewelry and shoes. According to another student, it was freaking the guys out. One of them shot Lawrence in the head. He was declared brain-dead on Wednesday.
It is easy to look at cases like this and think, how tragic. How random. How senseless.
But then, you forget how easy it is to kill a transgender person.
If it were a matter to be determined by my personal sympathies, tastes, or feelings, I would be as ready as any man to condemn the institution of slavery; for all my prejudices of education, habit and social position stand entirely opposed to it. But as a Christian, I am solemnly warned not to be “wise in my own conceit,” and not to “lean unto my own understanding.” As a Christian, I am compelled to submit my weak and erring intellect to the authority of the Almighty. For then only can I be safe in my conclusion, when I know that they are in accordance with the will of Him, before whose tribunal I must render a strict account to the last great day….First, then we ask what the divine Redeemer said in reference to slavery. And the answer is perfectly undeniable: He did not allude to it at all. Not one word of censure upon the subject is recorded by the Evangelists who gave His life and doctrines to the world. Yet, slavery was in full existence at the time, throughout Judea; and the Roman Empire, according to the historian Gibbon, contained sixty millions of slaves on the lowest probable computation! How prosperous and united would our glorious republic be at this hour, if the eloquent and pertinacious declaimers against slavery had been willing to follow their Savior’s example!
The Rt. Rev. John Henry Hopkins, Bishop of Vermont and Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church, in A Scriptural, Ecclesiastical, and Historical View of Slavery, from the Days of the Patriarch Abraham to the Nineteenth Century, 1861
(Thanks to Tobias Stanislas Haller of In a Godward Direction.)
In Nigeria, 18 men who were arrested last year under Sharia law on charges of sodomy have had their charges reduced to cross-dressing, according to the BBC. As a result, they will no longer face the death penalty if convicted, but will still be severely punished. With the Nigerian (Anglican) church’s vocal opposition to LGBT rights, who will call for justice for these people? (Thanks to Elizabeth Kaeton at the Telling Secrets blog.)
Church leaders in Jamaica have rejected a plea to their government by the International Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches to act to end violence against LGBT people. One pastor called the idea of conducting a public awareness campaign to sensitise Jamaicans on the issue is “ludicrous.” By failing to condemn violence, does the church not share in the moral responsibility for it? (Thanks to Box Turtle Bulletin.)
Closer to home, Timothy Kinkaid asks, “In Response to the Murder of [Gay Teenager] Lawrence King, Where is the Voice of the Church?“ He finds American Christians too busy shouting down the “homosexual agenda” to take time out to condemn hate violence motivated by sexual orientation or gender non-conformity.
Writing this morning at Ethics Daily, Drew Smith reminds us that the political message of Jesus has more in common with that of the Hebrew prophets than with many American Christians today. He argues the prophetic political mandate was to “confront the leaders of Israel with their injustices.”
These leaders, who were to be the shepherds and caretakers of God’s people, were charged by God to govern people with justice, to strengthen the weak, to feed the hungry, and to shelter the displaced and homeless. These leaders were charged by God to be generous in their leadership, and they were judged by God when they kept their positions through political compromises with the rich and powerful.
For Smith, this mandate translates into the contemporary situation like this:
We have the power to change things, if we only will. Like Jesus, we need to have a sincere consciousness about the plight of people in our country, especially the poor. In developing such a consciousness, we must hold our leaders accountable until they make real progress in solving the poverty of this nation, and indeed, our world.
So in response to the WWJD? question, Smith says, “Elect leaders who will priortize the problem of poverty.”
This is a good word and a needful one. I wonder, though, if it misses the forest for a single tree. As I read the prophets and Jesus, I see them treating poverty as an important problem, but not the most important problem. Poverty is just one of many results of oppression, the abuse of power to deny some their basic human rights. Oppression in American society is so systemic and so protracted that the poverty it produces has proven all but intractible–a condition I suspect Jesus observed and lamented in his own society, noting, “The poor you will always have with you.”
Oppressive acts by the powerful against the weak take many forms, but can be understood collectively as marginalization, the relegation or confinement of a group to a social position of powerlessness. By marginalizing the poor, the wealthy keep their disproportionate influence–they keep themselves in power. (As evidence, note that the four remaining Presidential candidates spent a combined total of over $198 million on their campains in 2007, according to documents filed with the Federal Election Commission. Our system of choosing a Chief Executive favors the rich and marginalizes the poor.) But the poor are not the only victims of marginalization. As commentator “PW” noted in response to Christianity Today’s recent article on transgender people,
When conservative Christians, particularly Evangelicals appeal to “moral authority” and “the Christian sexual ethic,” it is important to understand that they are actually appealing to the patriarchical heterosexism that they think God has given his divine seal of approval. The focus and teaching of many Evangelical churches (with which I am very familiar) is completely slanted in favor of straight married people, particularly those with children. People who don’t fit into this box might as well be invisible as their experiences are not acknowledged as part of reality as Evangelicals understand it. So it’s not surprising that many of them ignore the obvious [gender] variations in the Bible, nor is it surprising that gays, lesbians and the transgendered (and others for that matter) find themselves being discriminated against by people of Evangelical belief. Their devotion to patriarchal heterosexism is very strong; so strong that I suspect that the response the article mentions, the appeal to ‘biblical compassion’ is really about making sure that Evangelicals are armed with the “right” rhetoric, the “appropriate” support groups and the “biblically correct” agendas to make sure that the rest of us conform to their view of reality.
Those who would seek to practice politics in a way that is faithful to the political ethic of Jesus and the prophets should address the problem of poverty, to be sure. But the only effective way to do that is by dismantling oppressive systems and institutions and enacting legislation that protects the basic human rights of all people. To do anything less is to treat a symptom rather than the syndrome.
I just want my understanding of the world to be informed by my experience in the world, instead of shoving my experience into the misshapen box of my pre-established worldview.
Michelle Galo, who blogs at Quasifictional, replying to a recent attempt to “convert” her via traditional, revival style evangelism
And a comment from me: I have rarely heard the case for rationality in religious thought and the role of experience in theology made so clearly, and never by someone who is not a theological professional. Wolfhart Pannenberg would be proud.
In an op-ed published in today’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Ken Pennings and Heather Rittenhouse of the Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists share some hopeful impressions of the recent New Baptist Covenant Celebration:
During the three-day event, former President Carter noted that Baptists hold diverse opinions about gay people. Best-selling novelist John Grisham called for the church’s inclusion of gay people. Rev. Tony Campolo wore a rainbow-colored stole. Hundreds of participants sported rainbow stickers to proudly reveal their support for gay people.
These are positive signs, to be sure. And yet it’s important to remember that organizations like AWAB and the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America (which also affirms the lesbian and gay experience) were not permitted to join the celebration as “official participating organizations.” In a July 18 e-mail to these two groups, Alan Stanford, one of the Celebration’s organizers, justified the exclusion of welcoming and affirming organizations by saying, ”We can not hold together the large coalition of Baptists needed to create a new Baptist voice in North America and address the issue of sexual orientation at the same time.” Individual members of these organizations were allowed to attend the event, but the organizations themselves were excluded. Stanford asked for LGBT Baptists’ “forbearance and understanding.”
In their editorial, Pennings and Rittenhouse describe why the chose to participate in the event despite the official marginalization of the AWAB:
It seemed to us that if we built a response of protest, we would only have proved that we were operating from the outside rather than persistently and gracefully demonstrating that we were, in fact, on the inside. In effect, a protest would have broken down even further the ties that bind us as Baptists.
While I affirm their “bridge-building” approach and applaud their courage for undertaking a ministry of presence at the Celebration, I question the ultimate effectiveness of this kind of ”demonstration.” Their attendence may have demonstrated to some that LGBT Baptists exist, and it may have helped to put a face on what, for most Baptists, has been an impersonal issue from which they could previously claim detachment. In the Baptist world, these are anything but small achievements.
But their approach did not and could not show that LGBT Baptists are “on the inside” of Baptist life. If anything, it accentuated the ongoing marginalization not only of LGBT Baptists, but of any Baptist who speaks out for a welcoming and affirming theology. “You can ignore us, but we’re not going away” may be a great slogan, but it is a poor strategy. It may preserve the appearance of unity–it keeps people on both sides of the issue happy–but it doesn’t promote justice. It doesn’t advance the Kingdom.
Organization is the heart of activism and the engine of social justice. As Ecclesiastes’ Preacher taught, there is strength in well-organized numbers. Majorities frequently deny minorities the right to organize as a way to maintain their status, which is precisely why freedom of assembly was enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Within a culture like ours that values such freedom, the next best way for a majority that wants to maintain its status to marginalize a minority is to downplay or deny the legitimacy of minority organizations. From my perspective, this is precisely what occurred at the New Baptist Covenant Celebration–and we offered no organized response.
Shortly after the Celebration’s organizers announced they would not let LGBT-affirming Baptist organizations participate, some of our leaders began to consider the possibility of holding an “auxiliary event…to discuss gay rights and other peace and justice issues,” according to Evelyn Hanneman, who was at the time the interim director of the Peace Fellowship and now serves as its operations coordinator. Such an event would have powerfully demonstrated that LGBT Baptists refuse to be marginalized or denied legitimacy. It is a shame that such an auxiliary event did not materialize; a great opportunity was lost.
As long as we allow our organizations to be treated as less legitimate than others’, our voice will be muffled. As long as we allow our issues to be thought of as less urgent than those of other constituencies, our issues will be brushed aside. The courageous support of straight allies such as Grisham and friends of unity such as Carter and Campolo will be squandered if we don’t do more than simply show up. A ministry of presence is vital, to be sure, but it is insufficient. We must “make the most of every opportunity in these evil days.” We will never see the change we long for, and we believe God longs for, if our motto is, “We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re not going to say it too loudly if that makes you uncomfortable.”
