Month: July 2010

Americans with Disabilities and the Church

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This month marks the 20th anniversary of the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act, signed into law by President George H.W. Bush on July 26, 1990. It seems a bit strange when you think about. It has only been for the past twenty years that people with disabilities have been guaranteed fundamental civil rights in our country. Granted, it has only been within the past century that women and other minorities have been assured of those rights as well. And of course we all know how often those rights are denied or ignored, and that there are groups in America who have yet to be legally given such basic rights at all. But seriously, twenty years ago many disabled people could not physically enter most buildings, ride public transportation, attend mainstream schools, or not be denied a job simply because they used a wheelchair. There were no signs saying “Able People Only,” but the entire world was set-up to keep the disabled on the outside.

Sad thing, even as a disabled person the only reaction I ever heard about ADA was negative. People complained about the hassle of making space for the disabled. They said it was unfair that the disabled were being given special privileges (yes, seriously people were stupid enough to say something like that). And, most of all, they complained about the cost. And being in the church world, where I heard that complaint most often was from churches. Now I understand that churches often don’t have a lot of money, and to add another few hundred thousand onto a renovation budget to be ADA compliant is difficult. A church I was at once attempted to renovate their sanctuary to fit in more seating, but in the end we lost seats because of the ramp we had to put in to make the stage accessible. It was hard and forced the church to rethink where the money was to be spent, which of course led to some choice words being said about the “liberal nonsense of the ADA.” But in truth, I had to wonder why the church wasn’t the one out there doing whatever they could to include the disabled – even without being forced to by law. Jesus went out of his way to be with the disabled in his society, the church could at least do the same.

Where this gets confusing for me is the intersection of disabled people and worship. Straight-up, there is a lot that churches do in worship (especially in more experimental experiential worship) that is just plain inaccessible to the disabled. There have been a number of times at my current church where I have just sat quietly in my seat because whatever worship activity we were doing would have been impossible to do with one hand. And I always cringe a bit when we do active things, or create art, or meditate on a film and exclude the wheelchair users and the blind in our congregation. I similarly don’t wish to exclude the say, kinesthetic or visual learners in the church, but it sometimes feels as if there is no awareness of how a disabled person could enter into the worship experience. As a church have we forgotten how to go to the lengths of cutting open a roof and lowering our disabled friend in through the ceiling just so they could meet Jesus?

So as we celebrate these twenty years, I think it should be as a reminder of how far we still have to go in our culture and in the church. There are still churches that ban the disabled from serving as priests. And there are churches that see disability as a result of sin or of a lack of faith in the Lord to heal. I’ve been told to just have enough faith and the Lord will grow my arm, or to at least look forward to having two perfect arms in heaven. Disabled people need to be included in worship, but first, we need to be accepted as who we are. Not as people to be pitied or to be cured, but as children of God created the way God wanted us to be. We want to be included in community not because a law forces us to be put up with, but because the church desperately wants to love us and desires to hear our voice.

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A Neighborless Christianity

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I want to thank Glenn Beck. His recent tirade against liberation theology has granted that particular conversation more press time than it’s been given in years. It’s hard to make a theology that bangs the drum of the preferential option for the poor sexy in our land of excess and wealth. Sensationalized stories of sex slavery make the airwaves from time to time, but a theology that makes us take a hard look at economic injustice of our culture, not so much. So, thank you Glenn Beck for introducing a new generation of Americans to liberation theology.

But, obviously, Beck’s portrayal of liberation theology wasn’t exactly positive. Besides calling it socialist (seriously dude, stop being such a one trick pony), he said it wasn’t Christian because it focused on social sin and “collective salvation” instead of the strictly personal salvation message that is at the heart of Beck’s interpretation of Christianity. Granted, Beck knows his audience. His average viewer most likely believes that the message of Christianity can be reduced to this concept of one’s personal relationship with God. The message one hears in many conservative evangelical American churches can be boiled down to “Jesus died for ME. God demands MY worship. I must attend church to strengthen MY faith.”

To question this self-focused religion (even by proposing an outward purpose for our faith) is tantamount to heresy. For instance, I’ve been reading critiques of the evangelical feminist movement and many of them mock the movement because it prompts people to focus on the needs of women and men instead of solely focusing on God. These books suggest that if we were true Christians, we would only care about our relationship with God and not the petty needs of other people. To serve others or to care for people apparently have nothing to do with our personal relationship with God and so therefore must be cast as a deterrent to faith.

I’ve heard the same reasoning applied to Christians engaging in environmental action. I got in trouble when I was in junior high for wearing a “save the dolphins” necklace. I was told that in caring for the dolphins I was worshiping the creation and not the creator. My time and energy should be devoted only to developing my personal relationship with God – which at the time was defined as reading my Bible, praying, doing devotions, singing, and attending church. And as I’ve written about before, I received a similar response at a moms group when I mentioned how important ethical consumption was in my life. I was informed that as a wife and a mother, God does not expect me to care for the poor, but to only make sure I am fulfilling my role in tending to my family (since that is how a woman best serves God).

This “it’s all about me” religion generally masquerades as being “all about God.” In fact in such circles books, buttons, and bumper stickers that say “it’s not about me” are quite popular. And while I think there are serious issues with some of the self-deprecating, soul-silencing, and passion-erasing messages that such a stance often promotes (like telling women they are selfish for pursuing a career or that to cure depression one just needs to get over oneself and pray more), on the whole this sort of religion is very self-focused.

But the disturbing consequence of making Christianity all about MY personal relationship with Jesus is that we eliminate our neighbor. Oh, we are taught to pray for our neighbor in order to strengthen our own faith. We are taught to fear the corrupting influence of our neighbor. And, above all, we are taught to condemn our neighbor. But we have inoculated ourselves from having a neighbor to love. If we are not to care about the plight of women, or the destruction of the environment, or the oppressed third world farmer because it would take away from our complete devotion to God, then the idea of loving our neighbor becomes a meaningless concept. That command then becomes so confusing that we have to start focusing on the “as yourselves” part of the verse instead – making sure that each of us loves ourselves enough to devote ourselves only to God.

Having no neighbors to love does make our faith easier. As long as we aren’t going on murder sprees, cheating on our spouse (or looking at porn), and only gossiping in the form of “prayer requests” we don’t have to do the hard work of repentance very often. But add social sin into the mix and say that part of worshiping God involves caring for the poor and oppressed and faith becomes exponentially more difficult. None of us could claim a good relationship with God by those standards. And most of us would have to drastically alter our consumeristic lifestyles in order to avoid daily sin. So therefore it is easier to ignore the parts of the Bible that tell us God hates our worship and closes his ears to our prayers unless we are caring for the poor and the oppressed than to actually figure out how to do it. It is easier to label (and mock) such things as socialism or to say that loving our neighbor distracts us from loving God than it is to repent of social sin. It is easier to say, “MY faith is all about ME and MY relationship with God” than it is to making living sacrifices of ourselves.

So Glenn Beck gets it right – at least when it comes to understanding the felt needs of his target audience. Who cares if you are ignoring scripture and rewriting Christianity, the best way to keep ratings high is to define right living and true religion as looking out for number one. Because, seriously, who needs a neighbor to love when we have ourselves?

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Justice Around the Web

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It’s been awhile since I’ve done this, but today is all about the links. All justice related, so enjoy!

  • Jennifer Gainer Wildeboer has embarked on an ethical eating project and is blogging her way through it. She writes –

    I’m developing a blog (and eventually a book, if the door opens) over the next calendar year. I am calling it Whole Food/Soul Food: A Year of Eating Ethically. I am changing my family’s eating habits to remove all foods that I can’t pronounce as well as trying to eat fresh, local food and not eating factory farmed meat or dairy. The goal of the project is to get healthier, eat more ethically, make my actions match up the ethics of my faith, and to prove that it can all be done without being rich. I am planning on blogging and writing about the experience as well as interviewing local farmers and the like. 

    Fantastic endeavor. I wish her luck and I am eager to read what she discovers about food, her faith, and herself along the way.

  • Also my friend Shelton Green in currently in India forging relationships with fair trade factories for his newly launched fair trade clothing company Good & Fair. He is awesome, the company is awesome, and I love that he just went to India to really get to know the people he will be working with. He has been blogging through his travels there, reporting on what he is experiencing and the people he is meeting – I highly recommend checking it out. This recent entry is a great perspective on the impact of fair trade –

    I have spent the last two days at the factory of a fairtrade clothing producer here in Kolkata, India. I have conducted a few interviews and begun to take pictures. I have spoken with people at all levels of the company. Honestly, I am struggling a bit to understand how people live in such abject poverty. Culture shock set in right away when I arrived and I am now beginning to tread my way thru it as I attempt to understand the cultural context in which I find myself.

    I think I expected “fairtrade” clothing production to look very different than what I found. Without thinking thru my expectations, I now see that I wanted it to be “western” and easy to identify. Fairtrade simply looks different “in the flesh.” It is very relative. The wages are enough to lift people out of poverty, allowing them to a place to live and the basics of life for the wage earner and his or her family. The company I am looking at and will likely partner with, does more than pay a living wage (which, as you would expect, is more than minimum wage). They pay for the children of employees to go to school, they pay part of the employees premium in order them and their family (including parents) to access the government health care program, and several other things that are benefits on top of wages. This company is the only company in India that is fairtrade certified by one of the U.S. based fairtrade organizations.

    Even after all of that I am struggling to understand that what I am seeing is what fairtrade looks like in the real world. Fairtrade gives the poor a life, it doesn’t give them the life that I have and luxuries I enjoy. I want them to want the things that I want, to look like me and to act like me, then they will no longer be “the poor.” That’s what the unreformed, unacknowledged, old school “missionary” in me wants to do. And that is the worst thing I could hope for them. They deserve the life they want, and not one that conforms to my ideas of prosperity.

    The work of Good & Fair is to tell the story of these workers who are treated and paid fairly, and who are safe and free at work; and to support them by utilizing ethical supply chains. Their is more to fairtrade, but I am learning those things are at the heart of it.

  • And finally, in a completely self-serving bit of self-promotion – as I mentioned on Facebook, I submitted an entry into the Anthony Bourdain Medium Raw essay contest. The topic was, “Why Cook Well?” and I wrote from the perspective that cooking well helps us get over ourselves by pushing us to care for the people we are cooking for as well as the people who grow our food and the earth it grows in. I just wanted the larger voice of justice to be represented among the essays. So if you want to support me and those ideas, I invite you to go read and vote for my piece. You can vote once a day, so if you really love me… :) Okay, end of Julie commercial.

Enjoy the links!

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Why Cook Well

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I’m good at the self-centered, me-first sort of living thing.  Hell, most of us could win employee of the month in that category.  We’ve got that rugged individualist out of American legend role down pat – each of us hell-bent on living the American Dream, not caring who we have to screw-over to get what we want along the way.  Strangely enough it isn’t working too well for us.  Instead of launching us each into a nirvana-like state of self-actualization and bliss, this narcissistic soul-masturbation is tearing us apart.  The white picket fence and car in every driveway dream we were sold (complete with well stocked supermarkets of course) failed us.  In the “every man for himself” scramble we lost our connection with each other, with the people who produce our food, and with the earth it grew in.  And as the community that defines our humanity crumbled around us, we lost a part of ourselves as well.

Take the food we buy in those well-stocked supermarkets.  As long as the tomatoes stay cheap, we don’t care if the guy who picked them is paid an unlivable wage or was trafficked into this country and kept as a slave to work in the fields.   We don’t care if villages in Pakistan have no access to clean water because a major water bottle company obtained exclusive rights to their local spring.  We just want our bottled water.  Me-first all the way baby.

Or take the ubiquitous canned-food drive.  As we clean out our pantries, instead of asking what are the healthy foods people who can’t afford to buy food might need or even desire to eat, we toss them the nasty crap we want to get rid of anyway.  Or we go to the store and buy the ultra-cheap generic foods full of trans-fats, preservatives, and “that-color-sure-as-hell-doesn’t-exist-in-nature” food dyes.  It’s far more about us feeling good about ourselves (or cleaning out our pantry) than it is about giving food to others.

This is why we so desperately need to cook well.  As crazy as it sounds, it can function as the antidote to our disease.

Cooking well pushes us beyond ourselves.  Cooking well allows our family to come together to share and enjoy a meal at the same table.  Cooking well ensures that our children can have healthy and nutritious food that strengthens their minds and bodies.  Cooking well implies caring that the people who grow our food are treated with dignity and respect and paid the wages they deserve.  Cooking well challenges the continued rape and destruction of the earth for the sake of high yield and momentary convenience.  Cooking well reconnects us with who we are, with the people we love, and with the community around us.

Food holds power.  It brings people together.  For too long we’ve used food to divide, oppress, and destroy.  Let’s start cooking well so that we can get over ourselves and start healing the world instead.

Cooking well is the antidote to our disease of being self-centered jerks.  It forces us to care not only for the people we’re cooking for, but also for where our food came from.

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Freedom in America

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In this week after the Fourth of July, I’ve heard a lot of talk about what it means to have freedom as an American. Not that I necessarily agree with this view of history, but that sort of talk generally focuses on a sentimental reflection on how a ragtag people’s movement stood up to the evil and oppressive British and paid the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom. Who cares that when other countries do that nowadays we call it insurrection or communism, for us it was all about our freedom. To be American means to have freedom.
I love freedom; I appreciate the freedoms I have. What I find intriguing though are what exact freedoms it is that we celebrate in this country and which ones we could care less about. The freedom to hold a sign with a racist slur about the President is apparently something we hold dear, as is our “right” to have free and immediate access to porn (not to mention guns). The government had better not interfere with our access to junk food or dare tell our kids how to eat healthy; we’ll develop diabetes and drive up insurance rates if we want to. But we’re okay though with the government tapping our phones and having a kill switch for the internet. And apparently we are also okay with the government allowing companies to sell contaminated meat to our schools and passing laws making it illegal for us to publicly question the companies that do so. Let’s just say our relationship with freedom is complicated.

Anthony Bourdain addresses the food contamination issue in his latest book, Medium Raw, wondering why we are okay giving up the freedom of our access (our children’s access) to uncontaminated food. His snarky, uncensored take on the subject is one of the best I’ve read yet. And this is from Bourdain, the guy who is not shy in his frequent mocking of vegetarians or the organic/locavore movements. He writes on the meat industry in America –

In another telling anomaly of the meat-grinding business, many of the larger slaughterhouses will sell their product to grinders who agree to not test their product for E.coli contamination – until after it’s run through the grinder with a whole bunch of other meat from other sources. Meaning, the company who grinds all that shit together (before selling it to your school system) often can’t test it until after they mix it with meat they bought from other (sometimes as many as three or four) slaughterhouses. … It’s like demanding of a date that she have unprotected sex with four or five guys immediately before sleeping with you – just so she can’t point the finger directly at you should she later test positive for clap.
…
I believe that, as an American, I should be able to walk into any restaurant in America and order my hamburger – that most American of foods – medium fucking rare. I don’t believe my hamburger should have to come with a warning label to cook it well done to kill off any potential contaminants or bacteria. I believe I shouldn’t have to be advised to thoroughly clean and wash up immediately after preparing a hamburger. I believe I should be able to treat my hamburger like food, not like infectious fucking medical waste. I believe the words “meat” and “treated with ammonia” should never occur in the same paragraph – much less the same sentence. Unless you are talking about surreptitiously disposing of a corpse.
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Is it too much to feel that it should be a basic right that one can cook and eat a hamburger without fear? To stand proud in my own backyard (if I had a backyard), grilling a nice medium-rare fucking hamburger for my kid – without worrying that maybe I’m feeding her a shit sandwich? That I not feel the need to cross-examine my mother, should she have the temerity to offer my child meatloaf? P.98-100

Seriously, when did cheap and convenient become more important to us than avoiding consuming fecal matter, chemicals like ammonia, and deadly viruses (or for that matter the right to question the presence of such things in our food)? In the wealthiest and most technologically advanced nation in the world, that we have given up the freedom of knowing that the food we eat is safe is telling. Or perhaps it’s just that we value the freedom of the meat-industry to serve us contaminated food more. Like I said, our views of freedom are complicated. Or just plain crazy.

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So Al Gore’s a dick, so what?

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So Al Gore is a dick. There, I said it and I really don’t care if these recent charges of sexual assault are proven false (like he claims they are). I know it’s not very loving or generous of me to assume guilt in our “innocent until proven guilty” society, but I have no problem believing that a rich, white, southern, male politician is a scum-bag. It kinda comes with the territory. I expect those guys (most guys) to objectify women like that. My worldview isn’t crushed to discover they are dicks.

What I do find incredulous are the number of people who are using this latest Al Gore scandal to “prove” that everything he ever said about global warming must be false. It’s crazy in my opinion, but it’s not like he hasn’t faced such ad hominem arguments before. A few years ago when the energy bills from his Tennessee home were made public, certain people used his wastefulness to tell the world once and for all that all those inconvenient truths weren’t actually true. It’s like the argument that absurd book, Good Intentions, made against Christian environmental actions – it argued that because some environmentalists purchase carbon offsets they are just hypocrites and so therefore global warming doesn’t exist. Sigh. Apparently most of these people missed the day in college when they covered logical fallacies.

Yes, Al Gore is a sucky messenger if not a sucky human being. So what, so are most of us. I published an entire freaking book on living justly in regards to consumer habits, and I rarely make it a week (or a day) without doing the exact opposite of what I advocate in the book. Sure, I feel a twinge of guilt each time I make a beeline for the children’s clearance rack at Old Navy or order a cheeseburger with meat of indiscriminate origin. But in no way do I assume that my (or Al Gore’s) failure to be perfect in any way discredits the truth of our message. Sure we are hypocrites and scum-bags, and don’t set very good examples, but our failings don’t have the power to create a falsehood out of truth.

If being a hypocrite (or general all-around jerk) proved that one’s beliefs are false then Christianity wouldn’t exist in this country. For that matter, most of the good and just things we belief wouldn’t exist. I can wax eloquent online about being an empowered woman who stands up to sexism, but in reality I don’t always have the strength to be that person fully. In truth I am often plagued by self-doubt and confused by the lies fed to me by my culture as to my worth as a woman. Do my struggles make my beliefs about equality and empowerment pointless? Or are they simply part of the process of claiming a belief while still being a fallible human being?

If there wasn’t room for grace in our faith, then who would follow Jesus? No one is capable of loving one’s neighbor, obeying God, denying oneself, and taking up the cross to follow Jesus every moment of every day. As much as I agree with and strive towards those things, I often let myself get in the way. I know when I’m being greedy and selfish and unloving and a jerk, but even as I do those things I cling to the belief that I shouldn’t. That doesn’t excuse me in any way or negate the fact that I am a hypocrite. But neither does the fact that I am a hypocrite negate the validity or goodness of what I believe.

We are quick to crucify the messenger in our society. Granted, some messengers might need to be so treated, or at least removed from their pedestal. Others perhaps could simply use a bit of understanding and grace. But we tread dangerous ground when we are so indiscriminate to throw the baby out with the bathwater – to disengage our minds to the point that we reject truth in our gleeful tar and feathering of its source. If our world is falling apart and being destroyed by our own hands, so what if Al Gore is a dick? If he’s broken the law, treated women as objects, and been a hypocrite he of course needs to be held accountable. But it is our minds clouded with zealous shadenfreude that are proved foolish when we confuse the messenger for the message in such a way. We might all be hypocrites and selfish jerks, but we can do better than that.

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