Category: Culture

Femininity, Image, and Identity

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In response to my last post, Bo Sanders over at Homebrewed Christianity brought up some related ideas and addressed a few questions to me. Here’s my (long and somewhat rambling) response. He writes –

Last week I saw two movies and was quite intrigued by a pattern I noticed during the trailers: women being tough guys. The three trailers were for Underword:Awakening with Kate Beckinsdale, Haywire with Gina Carano (both action films) and The Iron Lady with Meryl Streep playing Margaret Thatcher.

I have read enough feminist literature to know that there is a principle (which Thatcher made famous) that “In a man’s world …” a women often has to out ‘man’ the guys in order to break into the boys club and be taken seriously….

What do we do with the karate-chopping drop-kicking heroines of violence on the silver screen these days? On one hand, it is nice to women getting these big-deal leading roles in major films… on the other hand, are they real portrayals of women-ness or is it the bad kind of mimicry – like ‘Girls Gone Wild’ as a picture of sexual liberation or power.

Bo brings up some really good questions to which there are no easy cut and dry answers. I ranted/blogged about this general topic a few years ago, but the issues still exist, and perhaps are even intensified. On one hand, I would start by pointing out that just because a woman is an action hero, tough as nails, or possess traditional leadership qualities doesn’t mean she is acting like a man. That could simply be just who she is and she should be given space to be herself without being judged. But at the same time, I agree that it is a widespread cultural issue that women often feel like they must put on the persona of men in order to succeed. Our culture doesn’t know how to handle women who are strong, intelligent, and assertive. So women who are those things must become overtly masculine (like Thatcher) or play up objectified femininity in order to appear safe (be in perfect shape, always look pretty and put together, or be the supermom). For instance, I’ve found in settings like seminary, church, or conferences if I am even half as vocal and assertive as the guys around me I get told I am rude or am mocked. But if I can talk about my kids, help with a family event, or provide food for something, I am seen as more feminine and therefore safe. Like you said, we have to find ways to overdo it in order to gain credibility.

The main issue for women at hand here is how aspects of our self (traditionally labeled as feminine) are objectified and therefore not embraced as strengths but become symbols of our weakness or inferiority that make us safe and acceptable. Most action movies with female leads give us physically strong women who are also eye candy and use that to their advantage (seriously, who does martial arts in a leather catsuit and high heels? It’s not even physically possible). These strong women are safe because they can be objectified as sex objects. It is the rare film that breaks that trend. I recall after watching Salt that that it was refreshing that Angelina Jolie never once used her sexuality as one of her weapons in the film, she was simply a slightly awkward, highly intelligent, kick-ass spy. Then I found out the part had originally been written for a man, mystery solved. Sucker Punch also brilliantly deconstructed and critiqued the pattern in movies of women entering worlds controlled by men and having to become oversexualized and exceptional in order to succeed in those places. But neither Salt or Sucker Punch did well in the theaters – they strayed too far from the mold.

In college I recall reading a novel for class and thinking that it had the best portrayal of women that I had read all semester. In class though the professor tore the book apart for its horribly unrealistic portrayal of women. He argued that not just in fiction, but in reality all women fit the Madonna or whore category (pure saints or sensual sinners) – for him (to the shock of many of the women in the class) women can’t be real people we can only be those archetypes. That is what the world expects as well, so our movies deliver – we get weak princesses in need of rescue or sexualized action heroes – but very few real strong women. Don’t get me wrong, I like the kick-ass female action heroes. After we saw the Haywire trailer, my husband leaned over and said “that is soo your type of movie.” Sydney Bristow and Mara Jade are my heroes. Accepting even objectified strong women is at least a first step (albeit flawed) towards accepting strong women for who they are. (My hope is that with Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games (pictured) we will be getting a wholistic strong woman who captures audiences’ attention.)

In an ideal world women could be strong, kick-ass, and intelligent without being objectified or assumed to be acting masculine. And our other strengths – even the traditionally feminine ones like mothering, or cooking, or artistry – will be seen not as things that make us safe because as the weaker sex we should be limited to them, but as strengths in and of themselves that are all part of the matrix of who we are (the Doctor Who Christmas Special this year did a fantastic job portraying this btw). As a mother my identity should not be reduced to that role, but neither should it be something I should be ashamed of or use to prove I can succeed at everything. Women should be able to be strong without having out out-violence or out-revenge the men. Women should be able to be smart without having to either be the smartest in the room or search for ways to make her intelligence acceptable to men. Women should be able to feel pretty and accept their sexuality without being turned into be eye-candy or live in fear that they are causing men to stumble. Women (and men) should be valued as themselves regardless of whether or not they fit traditional masculine or feminine labels.

The world is not there yet. And the church certainly is not. But the rise of the female action hero means that the conversation is started. The confines of gender stereotyped identity are being deconstructed, we simply have not gone far enough yet. Instead of allowing people to be whole in who they are, we assume that to not be feminine is to therefore be masculine (or vice versa) and therefore that the person is lacking for not conforming to our gender expectations. I don’t know if we will ever get rid of the categories of masculine and feminine (which sadly always portrays the feminine as weaker and lesser) in favor of simply naming strengths and virtues for all people. Perhaps the place to start is in making our heroes women who display “masculine” strengths and men who display “feminine” ones in hopes that the definitions will one day become too blurred to be distinguished, or at least the feminine traits valued more. I know for me, I am encouraging my kids (as I did when I worked with youth) to question those limits, to interrogate images in movies and television, and embrace their strengths no matter how they are labeled. I am still trying to navigate how to be a woman in a world that tries to limit, ignore, or objectify me so I know it is not an easy task. But being aware that it is a struggle, and helping my kids be aware as well, I think helps make it more doable.

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What It Is Is Beautiful

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This LEGO ad from 1981 has been making its way around Facebook. With LEGO’s recent campaign to market its “girl toys” (very pink and purple buildings sets featuring a beauty parlor, fashion design studio, bakery, convertible and pool party) prompting irate responses (and rightly so) from those who don’t see why play and creativity must be limited by such gender stereotypes, this ad has stirred up nostalgic desires for a different world. While such a stereotype-free world might never have actually existed, this ad with a real girl in blue jeans (and no pink in sight) simply being creative symbolizes a world that is becoming increasingly difficult to find these days. That it once existed in the realm of advertising – which like it or not determines our culture’s idea of how the world works – is both a painful reminder of what has been lost as well as a rallying cry that things need to change.

Parents of real kids know that our girls (and boys) don’t fit any gender stereotyped box. My daughter loves dressing up as a princess and playing with her fairy dolls just as much as she loves imaginative pirate adventures in the backyard and pretend space battles with her Star Wars figures. Assuming any of those activities to be more for girls or boys denies her of her true self. If building spaceships as opposed to a bikini pool party scene is for boys, then girls that like doing so are implicitly labeled as not being real girls. This message assumes there is something wrong with them – which if they are not bullied for they often learn to be ashamed of and hide. Who they are supposed to be is dictated to them by these stereotypes – defining for them what they should look like, what they should enjoy, and what they should do with their lives. Who they really are, the person God created them to be, gets denied as they try to live up to these images. This holds true for boys as well, but it is often intensified for girls.

This denial of the true self was brought home to me as I recently read the poignant blog post, How
Modesty Made Me Fat. The author honestly tells of how the message that it was her responsibility to ensure that she never cause a man to stumble led her to serious eating disorders and health issues. The message she received was that who she was as a person didn’t matter, all that mattered was how she appeared to the world. She writes –

Modesty taught me that what I looked like was what mattered most of all. Not what I thought. Not how I felt. Not what I was capable of doing. Worrying about modesty, and being vigilant not to be sexy, made me even more obsessed with my looks than the women in short shorts and spray tans I was taught to hate.

Her post wasn’t a call to immodesty (the pressure to be sexy is of course just as damaging), but an attempt to expose the modesty culture as simply being the flip side of that same coin. When women are reduced to appearance, just as when girls are limited to stereotypes, it takes away their true self. The personality, the intelligence, the creativity, and the vibrancy of who they are are silenced as they are replaced with a puppet version of themselves – controlled by the hand of another.

It is easy to get distracted by the debates surrounding these issues without realizing what is happening to actual people. In the debates – Are girls different than boys? Is she dressed too sexy or not sexy enough? – we can miss looking at actual girls and women and seeing who they truly are in all their creativity and emotional depth. To be able to say of any girl or woman, “what it is is beautiful,” we first have to let them be themselves.

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The Call to Mourn on Thanksgiving

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For the 1970 annual reenactment of the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth Rock – a festive tourist attraction complete with costumes, prayers, and parade – the organizers wanted to highlight the relations between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag tribe since it was the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ arrival. To do so, the organizers invited the current leader of the Wampanoag, Frank James, to deliver a speech for the occasion. James wrote his speech based on the Pilgrims’ account of their first year in the area which included how they had opened Native graves in search of treasure, forcefully took food from Native tribes, and then captured and sold Native Americans as slaves. Although his speech’s theme was on reconciliation it was rejected for being too inflammatory. Rejected from the official Thanksgiving celebration, James instead delivered his speech on a nearby hill, establishing the first National Day of Mourning. Every year since a group has gathered there for a National Day of Mourning – committing to gather as long as there are injustices in our nation that need to be mourned. At times the gathering has been met with armed police, state troopers, and pepper spray, but since 1998 the gathering has been permitted to assemble as long as it doesn’t interfere with the official Thanksgiving celebration.

Not just in November, but every week, Christians around the world gather for official Thanksgiving celebrations. Eucharist, which means thanksgiving, is a celebration of praise and thankfulness to God situated in the memory of a death. When we gather, we hear the story of what happened on the night Jesus was betrayed and partake in the broken body and shed blood, for we believe that “as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” Our process of giving thanks involves the retelling of a sacrifice – a confession of acts done on our behalf. To do so in remembrance implies that the past, however painful and uncomfortable, cannot be forgotten. We gather not only to give thanks and praise, but to remember the events of the story that we find ourselves in.

Participating in this ritual of thanksgiving and remembrance shapes us. We in the church not only partake symbolically of the body of Christ, we are the body of Christ which believes that sharing the bread and the cup represents the communion we have as a body. We are not individuals who happen to gather once a week, but integral parts of a body that depend on each other in order to function. We remember the sacrifice of Jesus by caring for each other’s needs – living sacrificially for one another as part of that act of remembrance and thanksgiving. Within that communion many of us pray as part of our very act of thanksgiving words of confession and repentance for what we have done and what we have left undone, including our failure to love our neighbors as ourselves. Those aren’t (or shouldn’t be) just perfunctory words; for to enter into thanksgiving involves placing ourselves in community and not only confessing the ways we have failed to remember the sacrifice of Christ as part of that community, but repenting of those ways by seeking reconciliation instead.

Thanking God for all God has done for us without acknowledging the parts of our body that are in pain or even the ways we have caused harm to that very body is to fail to remember Christ’s sacrifice. The first Thanksgiving is not just a tale of blessing (if it is even that at all), it is also a tale of the failure to love our neighbors – a failure that gets perpetuated every year mourning and reconciliation are avoided in the name of a celebration. Participating in Eucharist, in thanksgiving, involves acknowledging that because of Christ our lives are intricately bound up in each others’. We rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn because we are all one body. There should not have to be a separate National Day of Mourning to call us to repentance for the injustices caused by things done and left undone. Pleas for the confession of our failure to love our neighbor should not be silenced for being too inflammatory or met with armed police for getting in the way of official celebration. Thanksgiving for the body of Christ should by its very nature involve mourning as well as celebration and confession as well as praise.

The Thanksgiving table is also the Eucharist table where we can partake only in lived remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice.

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Dangerous Questions

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In the traditional Jewish service for Passover, it is assumed that children will ask questions about why the family is partaking in a meal of remembrance. The service states that there are four types of children asking questions – the wise child, the wicked child, the innocent child, and the child who does not yet know what to ask. Contrary to what many Christians who are fixated on right doctrine might assume, the wicked child is not the one asking forbidden questions that challenge static absolute truths. The wicked child is instead the one who refuses to ask questions – the one who doesn’t engage and therefore places herself outside the community. It is a poignant reminder that wrestling with the hard aspects of faith and even being consumed with doubts and questions is a far better place to be in than one who has stopped asking questions. Challenging the status quo through engaged reflection on one’s faith implies that one is still on the trajectory of discipleship – seeking to ever discern what it means to follow after God even when it might unsettle the assumptions of the community.

It was this wickedness, this failure to care about what God cares about by challenging the status quo, that Amos witnessed when he came to Jerusalem. A poor herdsman from Judah, Amos was part of a population that was subservient to Israel at the time. Judah therefore bore the brunt of the expenses of Israel, with the poor and needy being trampled to cover the expenditures of those in power. Through the manipulation of debt and credit, the wealthy had amassed more and more of the land at the expense of poor landowners. Some scholars believe that the only thing that would have even brought a poor shepherd like Amos to Jerusalem was the requirement that he pay tribute to those that controlled his lands at an official festival. But what a struggling working class man saw in Jerusalem was a population that not only lived in extravagance, but one that had stopped asking questions about if they were living in the ways of the Lord. In fact they not only had stopped asking questions about whether their lifestyles based on the oppression of the poor reflected God’s desires, they had been told by the powers that be that it was not proper (or permitted) to ask questions that challenged the ways of Israel.

Seeing this abandonment of the faith in the guise of apathy moved Amos, who was not a religious professional, to speak the word of the Lord to Israel. Although the governing religious hierarchy told him to not prophecy against the ways of Israel, Amos knew he could not remain silent about the injustices he saw. He saw the people doing religion as normal while the poor were exploited on their behalf and knew they had rejected their God. So the message he was given to deliver on the streets of Jerusalem was that God hates their worship gatherings and the noise of their praise songs because they have given up on caring about what it actually means to be God’s people. Amos tells them –

Alas for those who lie on beds of ivory, and lounge on their couches,… who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp, and like David improvise on instruments of music; who drink wine from bowls, and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph!” 

Not caring about how their lives and not just their ritual gatherings are caught up in following God had turned Israel into the wicked child at Passover. They enjoyed the prosperity injustice allowed them and therefore had accepted the injunction against questioning the practices of the government and economic system. They went through the motions of liturgy without doing the actual work of wrestling with the questions of the faithful. Amos called them to instead to stop exploiting the poor and let justice roll across the land. He begged them to ask the hard questions of themselves and of their rulers – to be disciples despite the cost.

But questioning the status quo is dangerous. Jerusalem had no interest in hearing the word of the Lord that challenged their economic prosperity. The powers that be moved to silence his prophecy and evicted Amos from Jerusalem.

And yet his witness stands as scripture. Thanks be to God.

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It Isn’t Nowhere to Them

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I was watching one of those competitive cooking shows the other night with my six year old daughter Emma. The challenge in that particular episode involved taking the chefs out to (as they called it) “the middle of nowhere” and having them butcher a pig and cook it over a fire they built from wood they gathered. I found the whole thing to be amusing, but Emma was visible confused by what they had said. She asked me, “How can they be in the middle of nowhere? Someone must know where they are. They had to get there somehow, so there must be roads and towns nearby. I bet the people who live there know where it is; it isn’t nowhere to them.”

It is in our nature to trivialize the other. To redefine what is precious to others according to our point of view. So what is home to someone becomes nowhere under a certain gaze. It is this tendency to redefine the other or the space of the other in light of our own image or interests that shaped the entire westward expansion of the American nation. If the land was redefined as wilderness or frontier – a wild space that needed to be tamed by those with the science and skills to do so – as opposed to being someone else’s home, then it was not only permissible but our duty to claim that nowhere as our own.

The same story plays out in the religious realm. Call a place or a group of people godforsaken or simply in need of receiving (and incapable of giving) ministry and their identity changes. I’ve been reading recently of the history of Hispanic churches in Texas where this dynamic was in evidence. The studies I read demonstrated that the denominations that started mission churches in what was then Mexico did their best to Anglicize those they converted. The Mexicans (who when the border shifted became Mexican-Americans) were expected to accept hymns, liturgies, and preaching styles in an imposed cultural idiom. They were barred from attending seminary and therefore from serving in leadership in those denominations – in the eyes of the traditional denominations their identity as other was as needy inferior. Outsiders defined their somewhere as a religious nowhere in need of being shaped and formed in an Anglo image. It is no wonder then that many Mexicans eventually rejected traditional denominational churches and flocked to fundamentalist churches that didn’t strip them of their culture or their dignity, but instead provided space for such things like indigenous expressions of music, preaching training for laypeople, and the respect of communal self-definition in worship.

As such obviously racist and colonialist redefinitions of the other (slowly) become a mistake of the past, the urge to question the validity of the identity of the other remains strong. Instead of scorning the culture of the other however, it is now the very idea of culture and identity that gets scorned. In an age of identity politics where the voices from the margins are finally emerging as valid conversation partners, the latest redefining trend is to deny the very idea of identity. “It’s not that you are inferior it is just that you are not actually who you think you are. Gay, female, black? – those are meaningless categories, so therefore there’s no need to argue about the need to listen to something that doesn’t actually exist.”

Once again the other is being redefined as being nowhere.

But, as my six year old so astutely pointed out, it isn’t nowhere to them.

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He Has No Power?

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At a conference I attended recently we sang a worship song one evening with the repeated refrain “He has no power.” The song was a South African freedom song and the cantor explained that the “he” in the song refers to Satan. Knowing how songs of liberation work, the reference to the oppressor Satan here serves as a place-holder for the actually physical oppressors which in this situation would be the white Apartheid government (for more on this in songs see James Cone’s work). In instances of such extreme oppression, it is safe to sing hymns about freedom from Satan, but not so safe to sing openly about the desire to be liberated from the racist forces of the white government.

So there I was in a room full of a few hundred older, very reserved, and 99.9% white Christians who were singing a South African freedom song as if it were a 17th century hymn. It was in the middle of singing the song that I was stopped short by the thought that what we were doing there was the exact opposite of what we were proclaiming in song. How could we truly believe that the powers of oppression have no power if we weren’t embodying any visible sign of it? Beyond the oddity of having someone conduct our singing about freedom so as to ensure we hit the right pitches, the dissonance of the entire situation was unsettling. I couldn’t help but wonder if the act of appropriating a song of liberation from another culture and subduing and anglicizing it was not in itself an act of oppression of the song’s very power all for the sake of allowing us to feel multicultural an affirming of the “other.” Where were the acts of liberation? Where were the faces and voices of those others? Where in our midst was the struggle to turn the world upside-down, destroy the segregation of our churches, and humbly sacrifice our vision of how a worship service must function in order to make room for the hallelujahs of others?

These thoughts stopped my voice in the moment; I couldn’t finish singing the song. I did hear others grumbling about the song after the service. Either they had missed the explanations of the “he” referring to Satan and were upset that we would dare sing that God had no power. Or they were upset that they had to sing about the person of Satan since we all know he doesn’t actually exist. But I was met with blank stares when I suggested that I was uneasy singing a song of liberation in an unliberated space.

I am fully aware that no one there, especially not those who planned that liturgy, had such motives in mind in choosing that song. In fact I am sure they assumed that the choice was one for diversity and inclusion that challenged assumptions about what constitutes proper hymns. But as I reflected on the moment my unease remained. It made me wonder how often in the church we make that promise of freedom into a hollow platitude. Like when we spiritualize the call to release the oppressed and free the prisoners into being simply about overcoming our personal demons. Or twist the call to love our neighbor as ourselves to really be about just loving ourselves. Or preach that Christians shouldn’t be distracted by politics, or economics, or corporate greed (since addressing those issues might require us to live counter-culturally…). We speak of liberation and freedom as if they are facades. They make us look great on the outside, but are so impotent of concepts in our theologies that they do nothing to affect who we actually are. But the veneer of liberation only serves to further hide away the oppression still inside. The most empowering thing for racism is for people to believe it has been dealt with. But that isn’t true freedom.

Liberation cannot be just a guise. Inclusion cannot be trivial. Freedom from oppression cannot be spiritualized away. I had to stop singing because I felt like I was participating in the very act I was claiming to have overcome. There were voices missing in that space and I knew I couldn’t say Satan had no power in the midst of that absence. But even so, all I could do was not sing.

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To Occupy, Liberate, and Love

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Although I am late to the game, I have recently started watching through the newer seasons of Doctor Who. The Season 3 episode “Gridlock” has been haunting me since I watched it. In this episode the Doctor and Martha Jones visit New New York in the year 5 Billion and 43 where they find an underground world consisting of one massive traffic jam. In an overpopulated world, underworld families live in small flying cars on a deadly polluted underground highway. It can take years to travel a few miles, and so they exist isolated in their cars as they inch forward through the gridlock. The commuters have hope that the police will one day open more lanes or solve the traffic problems and they then take comfort in the moment by singing nostalgic but meaningless hymns (like “The Old Rugged Cross”) during broadcasted daily reflection moments. The Doctor steps into this world and breaking all established rules of traffic discovers that the overworld has been wiped out leaving the commuters stuck in hopeless and pointless gridlock. He subsequently flings open the doors to the overworld, showing them the way out if they are willing to simply fly themselves out into the light.

The episode is a beautiful incarnation story and has repeatedly popped into my mind as I reflect on the current Occupy Wall Street protests (yes, this is the way my mind works). There is no precise correlation, but I couldn’t help but notice similarities. In our isolated attempts at living the American dream according to the rules the system imposed upon us we know there are problems, but there is a tendency to assume that some authority will somehow eventually fix our problem for us. So we wait patiently, abiding by the rules, taking comfort in our sweet but impotent religious rituals, dying slowly as we come to mistake the rat-race for reality. A few of us might get ahead, moved to the fast lane so to speak, which we take as a sign of hope that the system is working and that one day we might actually arrive. We might talk about freedom, and love, and justice, and mercy as if they are some ideal we can strive towards – a better world we can hope to someday arrive at – but they aren’t reflected in the shape of our everyday lives. That is consumed with inching forward in our individual existence.

So when something like Occupy Wall Street comes along it challenges the status quo. And if our hope is in the fulfillment of the status quo, a challenge to that makes us fearful. What if we lose our place? What if all the time we have spent was wasted? Shouldn’t we just wait for the people in charge to figure it all out and get us all running smoothly again? What is scary to some about the Occupy movement is that instead of giving comfort in the moment or hope in the continued status quo, it is calling for liberation. Perhaps that is not the message of every voice or even of the details, but the collective message is one calling people out to a different way. It is a message that the system is broken, we are hopelessly stuck, and we need to find a way out.

There might not be a TARDIS to incarnate the Doctor into our particular moment, but for the sake of liberation perhaps we are the one we have been waiting for. Liberation is the result of the event of love. Not a vague hope in the idea of love, but the event of love entering into and utterly transforming the tragedy of the status quo. As Jurgen Moltmann wrote about this love,

It is not the interpretation of love as an ideal, a heavenly power or as a commandment, but of love as an event in a loveless, legalistic world: the event of an unconditioned and boundless love which comes to meet man, which takes hold of those who are unloved and forsaken, unrighteous or outside the law, and gives them a new identity, liberates them from the norms of social identifications and from the guardians of social norms and idolatrous images. … [But] Just as the unconditional love of Jesus for the rejected made the Pharisees his enemies and brought him to the cross, so unconditional love also means enmity and persecution in a world in which the life of man is made dependent on particular social norms, conditions and achievements. A love which takes precedence and robs these conditions of their force is folly and scandal in this world.”

The impulse toward freedom, toward liberation, is slowly awakening across the nation. The doors have been thrown open; we now have to choose if we will drive out into the light. The protests are, of course, not perfect. There are the dangers of creating new constraining status quos, of corruption, or simply the re-iteration of the same status quos with new faces at the helm. These are the typical demons that prey upon those embracing the event of liberating love – demons that the guardians of the current status quo are sure to parade about in attempts to scare the timid away from joining the movement towards freedom. But love always involves risk. Freedom from the conditions and gridlock of this world is always tied to the ongoing event of love. Love – that unconditional event that liberates for the shalom of the whole – is not an ideal but that ongoing way of life. It takes work to live into a new identity – to figure out how to live differently. The call to occupy isn’t for a quick fix (which I sincerely hope it doesn’t settle for), but it is instead the call to usher in an entire new way of being that requires us all to drastically change as we enter into the difficult work of liberating love – despite obstacles, despite opposition.

It’s hard to speak of a different way in our world today. Perhaps all I’m doing is just reflecting on a good story here. But maybe it’s a parable, or better yet, a dream. And the world is waking up and sometimes dreams do come true.

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Remembering September 11th

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I woke up on the morning of September 11, 2001 both nervous and excited. I had spent the last two months slowly proceeding through the application and interview process for an entry-level editorial position at Christianity Today to work with their Christian History and Christian Reader magazines. I’d had multiple interviews and had to write a few research heavy articles along the way. For someone with degrees in English and History and a graduate degree in Missions, it seemed like the perfect job. My final evaluation involved joining the staff at an all day off-campus retreat where they would be evaluating potential articles for magazines. I was a bit nervous, but an insider in the company had told me the job was mine so the excitement of finally landing my first real job after school prevailed.

So on the morning of September 11, I arrived at the country club where the retreat was being held and situated myself at the conference table in a room with a panoramic view of the far west Chicago suburbs. We dove right into discussing the submitted articles, but about an hour later when the waitress came in with more coffee and Danishes she mentioned that a plane had just flown into the World Trade Center. We all assumed it was another personal plane incident like the one that had flown into the Empire State Building a few years before and continued working. When we broke for lunch the head editors called the office and then quickly left. The rest of us stayed on and even watched a Bibleman episode for possible review, fairly oblivious to the events of the day.

It wasn’t until I left the country club in the late afternoon and turned on the car radio that I began to have an inkling of the magnitude of the day. I rushed home to my tiny basement apartment which had no TV reception and tried futilely to get online but the dial-up lines were all busy for hours. I recall going out to get the special evening edition of the newspaper and crashing the Wheaton College student lounge (with their TV and cable hookup) just to get some idea of what was happening. The next day I was scheduled to host my church’s table at the Wheaton College ministry fair, which meant I spent the day surrounded by not only college students but also representatives of every church and parachurch ministry in the Wheaton area. It was a surreal day as people attempted to process the shock and openly shared the subsequent anger and hatred that had started to develop. That evening my church held a prayer meeting, and I recall praying that this act of terror would not lead to people lashing out against the innocent as a form of revenge. I was informed afterwards that my prayer was inappropriate. Three weeks later I heard back from Christianity Today informing me that they had a hiring freeze and the position I was applying for was eliminated in favor of restructuring the department.

It’s strange to reflect back on the day the world changed. And a bit eerie to recall that I spent the afternoon of September 11 watching the Bibleman episode about how good Christian students need to stop hanging out with their non-Christian peers because they can be a bad influence on their faith and then spent the next day listening to Evangelical leaders responding to their enemy in hate. I couldn’t have know it at the time, but within those first two days after the attack I caught a glimpse of how the events of Sept. 11th would shape the church over the next ten years. The world has irrevocably changed – despite the ongoing attempts to pretend that that the false security and pride of American exceptionalism is still a viable option in a globalized world. Over this past decade this new world has forced me to abandon a naïve faith that cared only for the state of my own soul, and embrace the fact that I am connected to others as a child of God. Who I am is as much dependent on how I honor the image of God in them as it is on any acts of ritual or piety I engage in.

Perhaps it took 9/11 and the response of fear and hatred I found in the church to push me to finally realize that my faith had to be more about God than myself. I don’t know if I will ever know for sure, but it has assuredly been a decade of change from which there is no going back. And sadly, constantly living in a culture of fear has prevented many in the church from wondering what sort of people we are being changed into. But the questions need to be asked. Are we more Christ-like now? Is God’s Kingdom more visible ten years later? Maybe simply asking those questions this Sept. 11th can help us turn a day that could easily kindle new waves of hatred into one that pushes us outside of our all-consuming selves and back to the sort of people Jesus calls us to be.

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The Complexity of Identity

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Over the last few weeks I have finally had the chance to introduce my kids to the Star Wars movies. It took them awhile to get interested, and since Star Wars was one of the defining narratives that shaped my childhood, I had to force myself to wait to show it to them until they were ready (and yes, like any good parent of my generation, we started with Episode IV). But as we watched it and the array of characters appeared on the screen my daughter would repeatedly ask, “so is that a good guy or a bad guy?” When she asked that about the Ewoks I had to laugh (seriously, how could wonder if a teddy bear was a bad guy?), but most of the time I found myself having to give qualified answers. She is used to disneyfied depictions of the world where there are obvious good and bad characters. But Star Wars, like reality, is nuanced. The good guys can be self-seeking and greedy, and cute little Anakin becomes the evil Darth Vader who still has enough good in him to be redeemed in the end. Identity is fluid and people are complex. My six year old (along with many adults) would rather have the world be easily divided into clear cut categories of good and evil, but that’s just not the way it works. Heck, even the Ewoks tried to roast Han and Luke alive.

While our nature as children of God created in God’s image defines us at our core (and makes the ultimate redemption of all possible), who we are in relation to each other is constantly being shaped and changed as we proceed through life. We, at various points, can be both good and evil – as well as simply greedy, self-centered, and apathetic even as we try to follow the way of Jesus. We are the good guys and we are the bad guys. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously wrote –

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

Not only are we unwilling to destroy that part of ourselves, we often can’t even admit to the complexity of our identity. If we see ourselves as decent citizens and committed Christians, we have a hard time admitting that within that framework we might be participating in evil. I hear this all the time when I speak on justice issues. It’s the “I’m a good person, how dare you suggest I am hurting others when I buy clothing made in sweatshops or treat the environment however I wish.” We prefer our binary categories that help us label and judge the world. I’m good, others are bad. I’m normative, others are abnormal. It’s not reality, but it’s how people cope.

Getting at that reality is part of why I’ve recently become obsessed with the show Torchwood (a Dr. Who spin-off). Described as a postmodern, postcolonial, pansexual narrative, episode after episode it serves to deconstruct binary assumptions about our world and our identity. Captain Jack Harkness, the 51st century time-traveling, omnisexual, and morally ambiguous main character who is constantly re-negotiating the identity of the alpha-male lead role, dismisses our tendency to be comforted with the binary with “you people and your cute little categories.” There is no one purely good or evil in the show, simply people trying to survive as best they can. Friends who would otherwise die for each other turn on each other when it could save those they love the most. Middle men just doing their job contribute to systems of evil and yet are not powerful enough to stop them. In one poignant scene one sees that it is the poor gang members who have nothing left to lose who are the only ones willing to stand up against an act of extreme injustice the government tries to commit. The show pushes the boundaries of sexual identity, but also tears to shreds the stereotypical colonial narrative of the alien invasion story. In one storyline an alien race was threatening the destruction of earth unless we gave them 10% of our children to use as drugs. As the story unfolded we saw that the humans weren’t merely victims, but as capable of sacrificing the weak for their own comfort as the aliens. Even Captain Jack’s solution to the invasion revealed him to be just as much monster as hero. Assumed categories of right and wrong broke down in light of the messiness of reality.

I love the show because it is so real. As absurd as it sounds to describe a science-fiction show as real, it is the honest depiction of the fluidity and complexity of our identity that resonates so well. Most episodes leave me deeply frustrated and unsettled, but also commenting to my husband that this is the way evil works in the real world – not as some absolute tyranny out to destroy the world, but in the accumulation of everyone’s small decisions to shape the world for their own personal benefit. It takes these sorts of postcolonial stories that deconstruct hidden power structures and allow for the exploration (as opposed to imposition) of identity for us to become aware of the complexity of our own selves. The rigid definitions of who we claim to be break down when seen light of our relations to others. We are the victim and the oppressor, we are the hero and the villain, we are friend and we are the enemy – all at the same time. South Africa discovered this after Apartheid. They knew that to even function as a postcolonial nation the community had to let go of binary labels like victim and oppressor, confess their corporate complicity in evil, and embrace the messiness of living in relation with complex people.

Good relationships evolve because they allow for people to be in process. To understand where that line of good and evil exists in their hearts and to hold their cute little identity categories loosely. People change, we grow, we constantly fail, and yet we must remain in community. Unless we start to understand the fluidity and multiplicity of our identity in relation to others it is impossible to build healthy relationships that revolve around our core nature of being created in the image of God. And ultimately it is those relationships with God and others that matter the most.

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Speculative Fiction, the Church, and Hope

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So NPR just released the results of their survey for the Top 100 Science-fiction and Fantasy Books. It’s a great list with some of my all-time favorite books on it (although I disagree with their decision not to include young adult books on the list, but that’s just me). Some 5,000 books were nominated for the list, but the ones that made the top 100 were mostly ones that were more than just entertaining stories; they are the stories that mean something. Stories that through their imaginings of alternative worlds tap into the power of the prophetic to deliver the message that our world too is not absolute, but imagined and therefore capable of change.

Now while I have complained in the past about why imaginative challenges to oppressive orders in our world only seem to happen in speculative fictions, the genre still remains my favorite – often for that very reason. As this recent comparison of women of sci-fi vs. women of prime time shows, there are just so many more substantial ways of being in the world than the status quo generally allows for. Speculative fictions not only present the possibility that the dreams we struggle for now could someday actually be realities, they are also the prophetic voice calling us into that world.

In many ways these fictions take up the task that the church has nearly completely abdicated. Churches don’t use their collective voice and energy to challenge the existence of a world where God’s ways are not allowed to reign. Oh, churches fight for their rights, but rarely are the ones helping build a better world for all. Churches instead help people feel fulfilled, spiritually connected, and generally as comfortable as they can. The church is often nothing more than a support group or vendor of experiences to help us feel like we belong. God is tacked-on to make our experiences feel meaningful, but not to challenge us to subvert the constraints to the sovereignty of the Kingdom of God. So we go to church to feel connected to a tradition, we go to get an “I’m okay, you’re okay” affirmation, we go to hear why we are right and everyone else is wrong, we go to feel safe and secure amidst likeminded people – but rarely do we go to imagine how everything could be different. Dreaming of better world is apparently only for those sci-fi/fantasy geeks.

But it was the role of the biblical prophet to imagine alternative ways of living in this world that reflected the ways of God. As Walter Brueggemann wrote about the prophetic, it is “an assault on public imagination, aimed at showing that the present presumed world is not absolute, but that a thinkable alternative can be imagined, characterized, and lived in. … Thus, the prophetic is an alternative to a positivism that is incapable of alternative, uneasy with critique, and so inclined to conformity.”
Churches are inclined to comfort and emotional well-being, and so therefore to conformity (read a fantastic article about that here). Prophetic voices are dismissed as too political, too extreme, or just a quirk of personality. Heck, in many churches even science-fiction and fantasy are banned because they are too subversive. Churches don’t bother imagining a better world where God’s ways of compassion and justice reign because we are too comfortable with the world we have now. We don’t want a prophet to challenge our comfort, or force us to look outside ourselves, or (heaven-forbid) start caring about the things God cares about.

The church has shut the door on imagination.

Which is why so many of us are desperate for the hopeful imaginings offered in speculative fictions.

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