Hope - Julie Clawson

On Banning Books and Forgotten Memory

Posted on October 11, 2025

As an avid reader, a common trope I encounter in books is that of cultural history fading from memory. In The Lord of the Rings, the memory of the One Ring fades and we see Gandalf digging through dusty old scrolls to find fragments and mentions. In The Chronicles of Narnia, after the Pevensie children are returned to our world after their reign as kings and queens in Narnia, they later return to discover a Narnia in ruins, devoid of magic and Aslan, where their reign is dismissed as myth. In The Hunger Games, the Districts have forgotten their history (as the United States) and even the very existence of District 13. In Star Wars, the Empire so destroys the Jedi with Order 66 that a mere 20ish years later Han Solo says he’s flown from one side of the galaxy to the other and has seen no evidence of the Force. Even in the Bible, after the Israelites were conquered, the Babylonians relocated the rulers and scholars of Israel by force into exile. When the Persians allowed them to return to Jerusalem some 70 years later, they had forgotten their faith, and it was only after discovering an old scroll of the Torah in the Temple and tracking down the elderly prophetess Huldah that they were able to returned to their faith (2 Chronicles 34).

When the stories of history are no longer told they are forgotten. If the powers that be want people to forget that something exists (usually something of great power in opposition to them), they destroy all mention of its existence. It benefitted Sauron that the One Ring (the source of his power) was forgotten; it benefited the Calormen to destroy stories of Aslan and magic; it benefited Snow to tell people District 13 (the rebels) no longer existed; it benefitted the Emperor and the Dark Side to erase every bit of knowledge about the Jedi and the Light Side; it benefited the Babylonians to destroy the Israelites’ faith and identity as a people. If there is memory of something different than authoritarian oppression it must be destroyed in order for the oppressors to hold onto power. Stories that contradict their narrative can give people hope that a better world is possible and hope is the most dangerous thing of all to authoritarian regimes.

And so, one of the very first things authoritarians do is try to control the narrative. Despite them out of one side of their mouth claiming that banning guns won’t stop children dying because banning things never works, they jump headfirst into banning books and knowledge. They change how history gets told – making it illegal to teach about slavery, or internment camps, or the mere accomplishments of women or people of color. They instruct their monuments to take down mentions of Trans people so that story doesn’t get told. They tell their military to remove stories and pictures of women and people of color from their social media. They ban public displays like rainbow crosswalks and “Black Lives Matter” signs. They remove books from schools for even mentioning that LGBT people exist – redefining the very existence of gay people as porn or smut. They make sure they control the narrative in every way, so only the stories they want people to know are ever told. And when someone’s story doesn’t get told, people come to believe they don’t exist or are a strange aberration to be shunned from society.

For instance, under the oppressive USSR government it was considered un-patriotic for visible reminders of the government’s failings to exist in public. So, when their horrible environmental practices and disasters like Chernobyl led to children being born with numerous birth defects, these kids were not allowed to exist in public. Much like when the Nazis rounded up all disabled people into concentration camps, these children were taken from their families and put into “orphanages” where they were hidden away from society, and no one was ever reminded that the government wasn’t perfect. Shortly after the fall of the USSR and before an even more oppressive regime was institute under Putin, I had the chance to visit Latvia and Russia. I almost wasn’t allowed to go on the trip with my youth group because I too am missing my lower left arm and it was well known that people like me were not allowed to be in public there. But I went and at one point we visited one of these orphanages full of people with varying disabilities. I got to spend an afternoon surrounded by kids who were missing limbs just like me being asked questions like “So in the USA are you allowed to go to school?” This is why when RFK Jr. talks about putting people with Autism and other disabilities into Health/Education camps, I know exactly what that is about. If we can be hidden away then we do not exist, we will be forgotten as normal humans and considered freaks. Banning us means us no longer being seen as humans deserving of rights, but as diseases to be dealt with.

Banning people and stories about them rewrites history and cultural perception as well. For example, the Institute for Sexual Science was a sexology research institute in Germany from 1919 to 1933. It conducted research on transgender, gay, and intersex people and campaigned on rational scientific grounds for LGBT rights. When the Nazis gained control of Germany they declared the institute un-German; their censorship programs then destroyed the institute and youth brigades burned its research documents in the streets. The most intensive and detailed research about these topics in existence at the time was not just suppressed, but utterly destroyed. This resulted in a massive setback for LGBT rights and public awareness. To this day people believe that being transgender is some new fad or that intersex people have never existed. None of it is new, none of our sexual desires or attractions are new, but when the research is destroyed and people are banned from talking about it (even sent to concentration camps and tortured for it), it fades from memory and those in control can twist the narrative to make people believe it is something abhorrent and unprecedented. There have ALWAYS been gay, trans, and intersex people but when all records of them are destroyed and it becomes a crime to write or talk about them, the public can be told any lie those in power want and it will be believed.

Censorship is terrifying because it works. Stories teach us empathy towards others. Knowing a person’s story, a people’s history, helps us see them as human – people to be loved and accepted. Seeing disabled people or people of color, or LGBT people represented in books and media, existing in public without fear, and being able to be fully ourselves normalizes our very existence and leads to greater acceptance. Those that want to harm and oppress us can’t allow that to happen. When people know we exist, know our stories, they come to accept us – people (usually) only fear and hate that which is outside of their experience. So, the authoritarian powers that be seek to ban us – they ban our stories, they ban our presence, they ban any reminders of us. We become erased so that they can more easily oppress us and spin the narrative they desire.

That is why we have to be loud. That is why we celebrate Banned Books Week and insist that all stories should be told. That is why when they paint over Pride crosswalks the community draws the color back in. That is why we still celebrate Indigenous People’s Day despite the government trying to overturn it. That is why we protest ICE removing people of color from our communities and disappearing them into secret prisons. That is why we shout that vaccines work and Autism isn’t a disease to be cured. We will not be erased or silenced or have our stories forgotten. That is why we rage against the dying of the light and choose to cling to hope. Rebellions are built on hope. We must tell our story.

Emerging in Hope

Posted on January 31, 2013July 12, 2025

Following the Emergence Christianity gathering a few weeks ago, there have been numerous conversations on blogs, podcasts, and Facebook around the nature of the conversation and who exactly gets to define it. I don’t want to rehash the arguments here nor do I have time for the ill-informed “the emerging church is dead” comments. The world has changed and the church (whether it likes it or not) is changing with it as it has always done. Yes, there were those who claimed the label “emerging” because it was the latest fad and there are those still trying to apply it like a veneer to a dying institution, but what is happening around the world is far larger than any one manifestation of the phenomenon.

But responding to change is never easy. When it is obvious that the way things have been done are no longer working one has the option of simply staking one’s claim in the past or adapting to the new situation. Yet to adapt implies the uncertainty of change and that can lead to fear. Fear of the unknown, yes, but also fear that in making changes we will just be repeating the same mistakes that have come before.

In the midst of all these discussions on emergence, I came across this passage in Anselm Min’s The Solidarity of Others in a Divided World that helped clarify the situation for me –

William James once spoke of two attitudes toward truth and error. One attitude is that of the sceptic, who is driven by an obsessive fear of falling into error and does not want to believe in anything except of sufficient evidence. The other is the attitude of the pragmatist, who is more driven by the hope of finding truth than by the fear of falling into error and is therefore willing to risk even believing in error in order to find truth. Deconstruction is more like the sceptic than the pragmatist. It is fundamentally fearful of all determinate embodiments of human sociality in history because of the terror of the same. It may offer prayers and tears for the coming of the wholly other and its messianic justice, but it does not want to dirty its hands by working at establishing determinate institutions of religion and politics. In the name of differance it flees, in neognostic fashion, from the historical determinacy of matter, body, senses, objectivity, and sociality; from the world of presence, identity, and totality; and takes refuge in the dream of the impossible. (44)

While I would not be so quick to dismiss the need for deconstruction, I see the danger of getting caught up in its cycle of fear. It is one thing to diagnose the problems in the church and its disconnect from the realities of the world, but while voicing such might be a necessary part of a healing process or the claiming of permission to seek freedom, it can be easy to let fear confine us to the refuge of this dream of the impossible.

We have seen the pain and the problems in the church and we want something better. Yet the idea of imperfect people imperfectly trying to put flesh to the idea of moving forward in hope is scary. They will mess things up, they will create broken systems, and they will fail in their attempts to embody the dreams and ideals of the emerging ethos. Inevitably, structures and institutions will develop as the pragmatists seek to build rather than just dream. And because such things have terrorized in the past they in and of themselves are feared. It then becomes easier to attack those who try to actually do something than it is to take that step into the unknown.

I like to dream and to deconstruct, but I need to have hope. I need to have some solid ground upon which to place my feet as I journey towards that hope. I need to see ideas assume flesh and exist in social actualities. I’m not all that good at making it happen, but at heart I am a pragmatist. I cannot just say that a better world is possible, I need to live it. Even if that means I might fail or (what’s even scarier) never stop journeying towards hope always in the process of deconstructing and building.

I am emerging not just out of something but into something. I am done with talk for the sake of talk (or even for the sake of hearing if my voice resonates with others); I need to do something that affirms hope. That is how I am moving forward these days.

Do You Hear the People Sing?

Posted on January 23, 2013July 12, 2025

There has, of course, in the past couple of days been much talk about Obama’s inauguration speech (and just about as much talk about Michelle Obama’s haircut and dress, but that’s a whole different issue). It is difficult to even begin to comment on the speech because as soon as you say anything supportive or positive you get labeled as an Obama-worshiping fanatic. So just to be clear – I have some serious issues with Obama, especially with his record of violence and for sometimes being too weak to stand up to bullies and just get stuff done already.

That said, I was fascinated with the tone of his inaugural speech.

I honestly could care less that he used the language of the right to promote leftist (actually, more like centrist) ideas. What I loved was the language of action and hope.

As I was watching the inauguration I cringed a bit as I heard the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir start to sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The triumphalist eschatological imagery of “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on” isn’t exactly the sort of Christianity (even in a civil religion guise) that I want to see on display, especially at an event like this. Then I was reminded that this was an abolitionist hymn. The coming of the Lord was in fact the Union soldiers trampling the South. In its odd postmillennial theology this hymn teaches that the crushing of the South was in fact part of a much larger series of events—the very Second Coming of Christ and the realization of God’s kingdom on earth. The hope is that we, with our own actions, can bring about the realization of the full and complete reign of God on earth.

But barely a decade after writing those lyrics Julia Ward Howe had changed her tune. She had witnessed a bloody war and the detestation it wrought. No longer was she advocating violence as the means of bringing about the reign of God, but instead was a proponent of peace. For anyone with open enough eyes to see the realities of war and the pain in the world, it is hard to hold onto such a vision of hope through military conquest.

As I heard that song sung at the inauguration I could not help but be reminded of the final song from Les Miserables –

Do you hear the people sing?
Lost in the valley of the night
It is the music of a people who are climbing to the light
For the wretched of the earth
There is a flame that never dies
Even the darkest nights will end and the sun will rise

They will live again in freedom in the garden of the lord
They will walk behind the ploughshare
They will put away the sword
The chain will be broken and all men will have their reward!

Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Somewhere beyond the barricade is there a world you long to see?
Do you hear the people sing?
Say, do you hear the distant drums?
It is the future that they bring when tomorrow comes!

While in stage productions of the musical this song is sung by the entire cast, the recent movie had it sung on the barricades by those who had died. That disturbed me. Here are the miserable of the earth, those who suffer under the system that cares little for their needs, and the message of hope is that someday after death in the garden of the lord the chains of oppression will be broken and all will have their reward. After seeing Cosette and Marius have their “hey look we are rich and happy now” wedding this message that someday the miserable will escape and find comfort did not play well. It doesn’t matter if we hear the people sing or dream of a world beyond the barricade (much less work to make it a reality) if all that matters is that reward comes in heaven someday after we die.

This message is just the flip side of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Hope – the realization of the Kingdom of God – in these views must be fully here and now or only in the world to come.

The problem is that neither view is actually hopeful and both are a bit dangerous. Either one assumes responsibility for saving the world (which is never our responsibility to bear) and becomes discouraged and disillusioned when it doesn’t fully happen or one doesn’t see the need to work for change in the present since what matters most is the life to come. Meanwhile the poor are always with us and the miserable remain.

So it was with these thoughts about the failings of such eschatology that assumes either an already or not yet view of the Kingdom that I listened to Obama’s speech and found in his words a balance of these extremes. That is not to say that I liked everything he said or that I think Obama or politics is our only hope (so don’t even go there). What I liked was that he modeled a way of talking about hope that admits to the realities of suffering in the here and now and that doing what we can for those who suffer is a never-ending process. There were no promises of a perfect world or guarantees that we can eradicate poverty, hunger, or prejudice in our time, but instead a reminder that our job is to join in on the ongoing struggle to put into effect our values. We are following that guiding star, Obama noted, just like those before us did at Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall. Working on the side of hope is never something that we ever finish doing or something we can put off for another day, but the essence of our very day to day journey.

That, sadly, is a message that many in the church seem to have forgotten. Hope can be present here and now, but it is also always something to be seeking as well. God’s Kingdom is both to come and made present now when we live in its ways.

I applaud the President’s speech for highlighting that reality. But I also wonder, why does it take a Presidential address for this message to be stated? Why isn’t the church the one known for speaking of hope in such ways?

Dangerous Hope in The Hunger Games

Posted on March 25, 2012July 12, 2025

The Hunger Games is a story about hope. What begins as a hope to merely survive turns into hope that a better world is possible.

In the face of starvation, oppressive government, economic inequalities, the people of Panem have very little hope. And the ruling Capitol knows that. As the Capitol reaps children from the districts as tribute for its sick and twisted spectacle of the Hunger Games, it dangles the smallest thread of hope in front of those who have no choice but to go along with the Capitol’s mandates. For even as twenty-four young people are sent into an arena to fight to the death, the Capitol offers the hope of a life of luxury for the victor. All that person has to do is play the Capitol’s game, slaughter the other contestants, and give the watching world a good show and he or she can grasp that better world he always dreamed of.

So I loved this scene with President Snow and Head Gamemaker Seneca Crane that was added to the film version of The Hunger Games –

“Hope… it is the only thing stronger than fear. A little hope is effective; a lot of hope is dangerous. A spark is fine – as long as it’s contained.”

A little hope can keep people in line. Offer people rewards in heaven someday after they die as long as they are good submissive people now and you keep them subdued. Promise people a secure society as long as we write them a blank check to invade other countries and torture people and you can do whatever you want. Encourage people with, “may the odds be ever in your favor,” and some will actually train for the chance to win the Games.

The Capitol knows how the play the Games. It is a festival in the Capitol and something to be endured in the districts – a perfect balance of entertainment and dread that ensures nothing will ever change. One of the most disturbing images in the film was not of the Games themselves, but of a child in the Capitol opening a gift of a toy sword from his father and then using it to play-act at slaughtering his sister as if he were in the Hunger Games. When death is celebrated to the extent that it is truly child’s play or it is something that must be endured for the chance of survival and freedom – the people are effectively contained.

And we wonder why Jesus made Rome so uneasy that they publicly executed him as a warning to others. He offered people real hope. Not just the hope of a happier future someday in heaven, or the empty hope of violent rebellion – but a completely different way of living where no one went hungry, the oppressed were set free, and the marginalized welcomed. His followers were accused of turning the world upside-down and they sparked riots for how they disrupted unjust economic systems. Instead of encouraging the poor that if they too exploited others they could be rich someday, Jesus called the rich to end their practices that took advantage of others. His wasn’t a hope that ensured the status quo never changed; he offered dangerous hope, a spark that kindled into a movement that truly did turn the world upside-down.

This scene with President Snow in The Hunger Games of course sets up the story for the next two movies. The girl on fire becomes the spark that sets the world aflame – plunging Panem into violent rebellion. It is a hope in a better world that cannot be contained. Yet ultimately, as Katniss discovers, it is not the fires of rage but the hope of love that is most needed. The violence only continues the Capitols’ Games, with the districts play-acting like that child with the sword. But just like the Capitol citizens who were so brilliantly portrayed in the film as brightly colored and made-up facades – devoid of any substance or character at all – the violence too proves to be an empty hope.

Winning the games costs everything you are as Peeta later confesses to the people of Panem. It is not worth gaining the world and losing your soul. There is no hope in that. Where hope is found in The Hunger Games is in the image of the dandelion in the spring – the image of rebirth that sustains life. The dandelion is the symbol that one need not trust the Capitol for one’s daily bread, that self-sacrificial love is better than revenge, and that goodness survives even destruction. This is dangerous hope that declares freedom from being a piece in the Games. This is the sort of hope that got Jesus crucified. This is hope that cannot be contained.

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For more about how The Hunger Games can help us understand Jesus’ message of hope, see my book The Hunger Games and the Gospel: Bread, Circuses, and the Kingdom of God.

Halfway Out of the Dark

Posted on December 14, 2011July 11, 2025

“On every world, wherever people are, in the deepest part of the winter, at the exact mid-point, everybody stops and turns and hugs. As if to say, “Well done. Well done, everyone! We’re halfway out of the dark.” Back on Earth we call this Christmas. Or the Winter Solstice.” – Doctor Who, A Christmas Carol

Christmas. Halfway out of the dark. This is my new favorite definition of Christmas. On one hand it connects the celebration of the birth of Christ to the natural patterns of the world – an affirmation of the physical that mind/body dualistic Christianity has attempted to hide in embarrassment. But it is also an affirmation of the paradoxical space that Advent calls us to live into.

The light shines in the darkness but the darkness does not understand it. In fact even those that claim to follow the light, keep the light at a safe distance as they wrap themselves in darkness. The coming of light into the world, the birth of the incarnate God, is for some simply a reminder of a far off promise. The light will eventually shine someday chasing away all shadows, but for now we must put up with the darkness as we dream about the light. The darkness doesn’t understand that the light has already broken into the world, not simply as a tantalizing glimpse of the future, but as an illuminating hope shining in the now.

I recently heard a women from Cuba share about how waiting for this light, this promised hope someday, is the only thing that people there have to help them make it through the day. Then she added how blessed she felt that the government is now not only allowing Bibles to be distributed and evangelical churches to gather so that people can have access to this comforting hope, but that the Cuban government is funding such things. The communist government knows the power of light. To allow it as an ever-receding hope in the future turns it into the subduing opium that they need. To allow light into the present would be dangerous, for light can’t help but chase away darkness. So of course they pour money into systems that convince people that liberating hope is only something for the sweet by-and-by. It allows the darkness to thrive.

The darkness always resists the light. If it can convince us that all we should do is perform half-hearted incantations to the idea of light while we ourselves shove the advent of light off into the future, then the darkness will have won. We distract ourselves with complaining about a so-called “war on Christmas” while it is our own theology that hides the light under a bushel. We shrug at the poverty, oppression, and injustice of the darkness as we mumble about God imposing his kingdom someday all the while hoping that the darkness continues to hide our involvement in those very injustices.

Someday, yes, the light will shine in its full brightness. The Kingdom will come in full and the darkness will be no more. But the paradox of Advent is that this light has already broken-in; the light might not be fully apparent yet but we are halfway there. The light is not just to come; it has arrived and is there to help us see. So to await the advent of the ultimate illumination means to live in the light in the now. It means having hope that the shadows of injustice and oppression can be chased away. It means not letting ourselves be subdued into reconciling ourselves with the darkness. It means not simply talking about the light or defending an impotent idea of light, but seeking it out, basking in it, and taking it to where illumination is needed. It means remembering that Christmas is situated at the turning of the seasons, at the time when light always returns and the darkness never ultimately triumphs.

Darkness abounds, but light is shining in and we are halfway out of the dark. That is the meaning of Christmas.

Emerging Christianity, Soularize, and the Future

Posted on October 23, 2011July 11, 2025

I spent this past week hanging out with the awesome folk at Soularize 2011 – a three-day learning party in (not so) sunny San Diego. This year’s Soularize marked both its tenth anniversary as well as its final chapter. Ten years ago the first Soularize (put on by Spencer Burke of TheOoze.com) was hosted by none other than Mark Driscoll at his Mars Hill church in Seattle. That fact right there is evidence that a lot has changed in this past decade. But a lot more has changed since then, the world has shifted and along with it this emerging conversation.

Ten years ago I had never heard of the emerging church. Oh, I was reading postmodern philosophy and asking all sorts of questions that were getting me in trouble, but I had no idea that there were other Christians discussing these sorts of ideas. I had just finished my first round of grad-school having studied Intercultural Studies and Missions at Wheaton College. I often had made my classmates (and a few of my professors) uncomfortable by asking why missions concepts like contextualization of the Gospel, socio-linguistic relativity, and intercultural difference could not also be applied to our own American culture. If it was okay to have the Gospel make sense culturally in some third world country, why couldn’t it make sense to all people in the United States?

But this was the era when “purpose driven” churches were cutting edge and where in a post-9/11 flag-draped America, homogeneity trumped authenticity. Facebook and Twitter were still years away, so it was a lot harder to discover that you weren’t the only one asking the crazy questions. Even so, it was early in 2002 when someone recommended to my husband and me that we might enjoy reading a book by this guy Brian McLaren. As others have often mentioned, what I discovered in A New Kind of Christian wasn’t completely new, but more of an affirmation that there were others exploring the same sorts of questions about faith as I was. And knowing that one is not alone holds a special power. Knowing that I didn’t have to ignore those nagging questions or divorce my intellect from my faith saved my faith. Instead of a hollow and confining static system, it had been transformed into a living reality.

Knowing that there were others out there meant I had to find them – which is where The Ooze enters in. I found that community online, and more specifically its message boards. I created a profile with a fake name (MaraJade) and a false avatar and jumped in with both feet. Over the next few years the evolution of my faith played out on those boards. I eventually added my real name as virtual friendships morphed into physical ones, but it was there that I began to re-imagine theology, and church, and what it even meant to be a Christian. While it was not always the safest place to explore such questions in a public forum, it was the only place where such dialogue could even occur. It is amusing now to think as The Ooze shuts down that all these old conversations, these snapshots of a faith in transition, will now be archived at Fuller Seminary. I pity the sociologist of religion who will sift through them someday for her dissertation.

But as the conversation grew, territories were claimed and lines began to be drawn. Certain groups declared that there was a range of acceptable questions (generally permitting the re-imagining of worship practices but not theological stances) and they (loudly) denounced the rest of us. Others set up camp as either for the Ooze or for Emergent Village – competing for publishing contracts, conference speaking spots, and (of course) advertising dollars. Those of us involved in both observed that tension and felt like we were being made to choose sides. Looking back, it seems so silly that in a conversation about deconstructing the systems of modernism in favor of re-imaging a wholistic and healthy way to be the church such petty fights would ever be waged, but I guess that is the way of man (and I intentionally used the masculine there). For me the conversation was holy in whatever guise it took.

I never made it to a Soularize until this year and I regret that. But there was still something intriguing to enter into that space ten years on and discover where the past decade has taken the conversation. In a struggling economy the trappings of financial success have long since lost the power to sway the conversation. Petty differences have given way to collaboration as those who believe that re-imagining church for a postmodern world is more than just the latest trend to follow. The angst of needing to constantly deconstruct where we all have been has mellowed into a loosely held space where dreams and critique coexist. The urgency to fix the world has passed while the passion to hope for a better world remains.

In short, the emerging conversation I encountered at Soularize this year was one of hope. While it might not burn as brightly as it once did, a bonfire requires too much empty energy to sustain itself. What we have left is a smoldering movement – not in the negative sense of having been reduced to ashes, but of the sort of long-burning coals that warm homes and bake bread. And there are still new people joining the conversation – asking their own questions and desperately attempting to cling to their faith in meaningful ways. But how they enter in looks different now that there are those of us who have matured in this conversation for the past ten years or more there to welcome them in.

Groups like Soularize and The Ooze may be winding down, but that is because the conversation has shifted. We no longer just need space for questions; we need space to build as well. Learning parties are no longer just about questions, they are also about formulating responses with our lives. I am grateful for this last Soularize for serving as a transition in that shift. And I am looking forward to what lies ahead.