Category: class

What the Church Must Now Do : Listen

The Church is so accustomed to preaching to the culture. It needs to listen.

For the first time in Minnesota history, a white police officer has been found guilty on three counts of murder of a Black man. The killing of George Floyd, captured on video, ignited a year of protests and riots, memorials, local distress and international outrage, all during a historic worldwide pandemic. It was horrible, and the impact, frightening and exhausting. The verdict, braced as we were for more violence, gave a sense of victory and relief.

Many are hopeful that this verdict is the signal that white Minnesotans are finally ready to confront innate racism, an implicit fear of people of color in general, and Black men in particular. But while we celebrate this milestone of difference and change, the deaths of Black citizens during interactions with police has not stopped, and the trials continue. Several weeks ago, 20- year-old Daunte Wright was killed during a traffic stop and arrest in Brooklyn Center.

How did Minnesota, a state proud of its progressive politics, the land of Hubert Humphrey and Paul Wellstone, a culture that continues to claim the Christian value of welcoming immigrants and refugees, and is proud of its tolerance and high quality of life, create a culture where darker skin color seems to automatically signal inferiority or threat, even to police officers who carry weapons and are trained in use of force?

Implicit bias began long ago with European colonialism, its slave trade, and 250 years of slavery in the South. The struggle to end slavery sparked our Civil War. What followed — Emancipation, the South’s surrender, Lincoln’s assassination, federal Reconstruction, and Reconstruction’s reversal — soon made room for the policies of widespread legal racial discrimination.

Inequity based on skin color was routinely written into American family and marriage law, banking and mortgage lending, employment, voting rights, education, housing, public transportation and accommodation laws. All of which was routinely supported by teachings, sermons and policies of most Christian churches. These practices and attitudes effectively created a two-tiered American society, based solely on perceived skin color.

Minnesota was not immune. That century of legal segregation and migration out of the South shaped where children attended school, what families lived near whom, and where Americans worshipped, worked and played. It shaped where poverty was concentrated, where resources were located, how schools were funded. It has been such a part of our culture that our religious life has unwittingly reinforced these racial divisions.

What can we do as people of faith in response to this terrible legacy? We in the Christian church are quite accustomed to speaking to our larger communities with the words of our faith and traditions. Many of us are coming to realize we have been tone-deaf to the impact of our attitude and practices on people of color. It’s time we listen more than we speak.

Remember when most churches taught that homosexuality was an aberrant, shameful, sinful lifestyle? That majority religious opinion changed only when many of us began to really listen to the life experience of gay neighbors and friends. Opinions about sexual orientation have changed faster than during any other social movement in American history. While racism is decidedly different, it is our calling, as Jesus followers, to repent and renew ourselves for the sake of our neighbors’ lives and dignity.

These times call for the courage to relax our loyalties to the past and wonder how we might better embody the grace of God in a world of diverse history, race and experience. I believe we are being called by God’s spirit to humility as we consider how Christianity has been used to bolster the cause of slavery before the Civil War, and again, during the generations since. Even in our own state, in our churches, and in our families.

It’s not easy to shift our primary focus from indifference to curiosity, from speaker to listener, from confidence to humility. It means working against our own mental habits, our language, our assumptions about people and their experience in the world. But if we want to live lives of authentic discipleship, we must respond to the world around us as it is. We can work to listen and learn from neighbors we have excluded, judged and dismissed. Even when what they tell us confuses us. We may have tried to create churches that embody the gospel of Jesus, but our own history, revealed in eyes of those we have systemically excluded, shows us all otherwise.

  • Originally published as Spiritual Reflections column, The Savage Pacer, May 8, 2021

The Huge Problem of Binary Thinking

There is so much the small child’s brain is figuring out about the world it’s no wonder human memories don’t begin to form until our third or fourth year. And even then, they are impressionistic: a beloved face, the flash of a dog running across a lawn, the yellow wallpaper over a grandparent’s shoulder as he lifted us out of a crib. So much experience and so few ways to describe it to ourselves.  One of the very first ways our brain organizes the world is to divide known things in two: night, day; up, down; yes, no; cold, hot; mother, father. This binary division is one of the first ways we know how the world is.

By the time we are ready for kindergarten, we can expand those mental and linguistic maps. We know there are more than two temperatures of things, the day is divided by clocks into hours, and we have a box of crayons which contains a dozen or more different colors. But this automatic binary thinking seems to really stick when it comes to sorting people. Small children believe the world to be clearly sorted into good and bad people, boys and girls, rich and poor, young and old, black and white. A critical problem in our country at the moment is that many adults refuse to grow beyond these mental labels. And spend enormous energies reinforcing these labels when they are shamelessly simplistic or just plain wrong.

I’ve been lamenting the way we compartmentalize one another this way as we approach the midterm election this November 6th. Nothing is as distorted and illustrative of this binary division than the current crop of negative campaign ads. While officially a multi-party political system, our politics have evolved into a binary choice: the Republican Party or the Democratic Party. Dividing our political visions into two teams has created an Us vs. Them strategy that currently draws no one to middle ground.

Push, pull, left, right. Yes, our politics have been in this tug of war for generations. But the new pervasiveness of personal technology, the internet, and social media have allowed white racial anxiety to reemerge from the far shadows into a frighteningly broad cultural attitude, fanning the anonymous rage of some into flame. Just this week over a dozen mail bombs were sent to Democratic leaders, and neo-Nazi anti-Semitic rhetoric spurred one gunman to slaughter 11 Jewish worshippers at prayer in Pennsylvania.

Some of us were once naïve enough to believe that the election of Barack Obama marked permanent social change in America. The 2016 campaigns demonstrate that racial fear is still at the heart of majority America. With no political experience and a self-professed history of exploiting women, with a campaign promise to build a giant wall on our southern border and reverse trade agreements with China, Trump won his party’s nomination and then the national election. His current policies attempt to upend sexual minority rights, stall climate change efforts and reverse laws that protect women’s reproductive decisions. Every one of these choices repeatedly divides us, each speech he gives shamelessly promotes himself, all the while Russian efforts to sow political unease in America by planting false political stories in social media, shared instantly by millions across Facebook, succeed. Putin must be thrilled.

Us/them, either/or binary thinking never could sustain a complex democracy. The answers to our personal and social challenges are too complex. I urge you to become part of the solution, and vigorously resist the racial bias we have all grown up with; to question political rhetoric, even from your own party of choice; and to recognize that the words we use to think, describe and talk with one another can have life and death consequences in the real world. Leadership at every level of government matters. Vote.

 

(First published 10/31/18 in Savage Pacer “Spiritual Reflections” column)

https://tinyurl.com/yam6flnq

 

Jesus Was Not a Marxist

This fall’s public demonstrations begun as “Occupy Wall Street” follow in the time-honored political traditions of modern cultures. Concord, Massachusetts; Selma, Alabama; Tiananmen Square, China; Cairo, Egypt: people have risen up in massive numbers across the world to seek change. Whether you have joined them, or even disagree with their perspectives, as a democracy we all value the power of citizens to peacefully organize to seek justice and change.

            The energy of Occupy Wall Street-like gatherings is born in the increasing gap in our country between the rich and the poor, and a shared impatience with the lingering effects of our last recession. Wall Street in New York City, the geographic center of the United State’s Stock Exchange, is also home to many of the world’s largest financial institutions, many of which were involved in complex tinkering with mortgage lending that sparked our long economic slide. Too big to fail, our own tax dollars have been spent to bail out the biggest banks and other financial giants, as many of us watch our savings, pensions and home values shrink. We have all suffered, the poor disproportionately, and finding the villain in this melodrama seems like a natural thing to do.
            When at its best, the Christian community has traditionally been an advocate for the sick, imprisoned, and the poor. Taking it’s mission from the example and command of Jesus, to tend to the sick and suffering, “the least of these,” it makes sense that activists and clergy from all parts of the faith have joined the demonstrations taking part around the country this fall. I celebrate the long legacy of Christian ministries that have sought to bring love, light and relief to those in need. I praise the clergy who gather in the streets with the protesters as witness and support for those who live, chant, and demonstrate for change.
            But I won’t sit silently and let one particular claim I have seen recently in social media go unanswered: “Jesus was a Marxist.” No, he was not.
            Marxism is a modern political movement that has its roots in the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. They argued that human beings could establish a perfect economy if everyone shared their resources communally. A new communism would develop following a class struggle, the result of failed capitalism. Marx believed that religions are “the opiate of the people,” dulling their will to revolt. While these ideas do serve as a stark contrast to the rigid classes and oppressive, generational monarchies of old European and Asian cultures, the application of these ideas in real human cultures has failed.  The Soviet Union, China, East Germany, Somalia, North Korea, and Cuba have been cultures of oppression. The powerful hoard power. The weak are kept weak and anyone opposing the powerful is kept behind bars, barbed wires and walls, or killed. Exactly what part of this broken political model would Jesus advocate?
While Jesus constantly advocated for the sick, suffering and oppressed, he rejected the pressure to start a revolution or class war. In fact, he repeatedly said his “kingdom was not of this world.” Instead of setting up a new government, as some of his disciples believed he would, he lived on the margins of power and when confronted, told the Pharisees to “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” Jesus’ vision of God’s kingdom is about bringing all people to God’s table: rich, poor, powerful, weak, visible, and invisible. It pointed to a way of seeing the world far different than how human beings do. Jesus pointed to a kingdom of peace and justice that included women and children, the old and infirm, the powerless and the powerful. This is God’s kingdom, not ours. When we live with this vision, we share in the vision of God.
Jesus was a healer, a teacher, a sage, a prophet, and a revolutionary, the Messiah who refused to lead a revolt. After a short life, he was executed because the earthly powers feared his kingdom of peace, healing, inclusion and non-violence. Call him a revolutionary for God. But for Jesus’ sake, don’t call him a Marxist. It’s just plain wrong.

(First published in the Savage PACER, Saturday, 10.22.2011)