Getting Political

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“Our engagement with the empire can quickly become a case of the frog in the pot of boiling water.  A little support of war, a little indifference about the environment, a little disregard of poverty, a little failure to notice racism or sexism, a little collapse of indignation and hope, a little innocence about class privilege; a little of this and a little of that, and all too soon comes a lethal society.”

Walter Bruggemann, Out of Babylon, p.152

Author Diana Butler Bass recently posted on Facebook about a pastor who can no longer preach about Jesus’ call to love our neighbors because it is too political.  I’ve been warned away from speaking about the same because it might get taken as socialist.  There is no denying the divisive state of politics these days.  People fear getting political and offending others.  Most pastors I know shy away from preaching about any issue that could even remotely be construed as political.  Issues like loving our neighbor, serving the poor, and releasing the bonds of oppression.  Those are all apparently too controversial.

This fear of offending congregants or getting political has essentially silenced the words of Jesus in many churches.  But in trying to navigate these waters and not upset any opinions, the church doesn’t seem to realize that it is being political.  By not delivering the message of Jesus or being a prophetic alternative to empire, the church is allowing the voices of the anti-Christian forces to win.  It’s like Bruggemann mentions in the quote above, when we let little advances of empire overtake the kingdom of God, we end up with a lethal society.

Standing up for the God we claim to follow might be deemed political because it is.  When we resist the siren call of empire – when we stand against a message that tries to convince us that the only thing we should care about is ourselves – we are making a political statement.  We are aligning ourselves with the Kingdom of God instead of the kingdoms of this world.  To do so will always be political.  It will always offend the defenders of empire.  But that is the choice the cross presents us with – to follow God or this world.  And if we are afraid to call the church to follow God, then we simply have handed the church over to empire and allowed it to win.

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In the Immigration Debate, The Children Suffer Most

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My latest post at Sojourners’ God’s Politics blog –

It’s hard to ignore the children. As voiceless as children are in our world, when we hear stories of injustice being inflicted on children it is hard not to be moved. There is something about hearing the stories of six year old girls being kidnapped and forced to be sex slaves or young boys trafficked to work in cocoa fields that push us beyond the confines of our political opinions to offer help to the hurting. Politics can often obscure human rights issues as it did in our country with the early labor movement. It took revealing the horrors of child labor to get those opposed to reform to enter the conversation. For even when we can ignore or even support injustice against adults, most decent human beings innately know that it is wrong to harm a child (or fail to stop the harming of a child). We hear stories of such and the mama bear instinct kicks in – a child’s life is too precious for us to allow it to be terrorized.

From the Bible passages that remind us that true religion is to care for orphans and widows to Jesus’ command to welcome the little children, there is a strong biblical mandate for caring for the least of these. While loving our neighbor (no matter our politics) should be at the heart of what it means to follow Jesus, it often takes hearing the stories of the children who suffer and need our care to mobilize the majority of people to extend mercy and justice.

That is why I am grateful for Melissa Del Bosque’s fantastic article this week in The Texas Observer, Children of the Exodus: What becomes of kids who are deported without their families? The article tackles the polarizing topic of immigration, but does so through telling the often tragic and heartbreaking stories of the children caught in the political mire.

She situates her story in a Mexican Immigration office where children who have been apprehended and deported by U.S. Border patrol have been delivered. These are kids desperate to join their parents in the United States after the death of their caretaker grandparents, the babies and young kids whose mothers died of exposure in the harsh desert crossing, and the kids the drug cartels have kidnapped and use as drug smugglers. Their stories are complex, as complex as the tales of adult immigrants, but they strike us more poignantly because they are children. And these children are suffering.

On paper, the officials say that all children who are deported back to Mexico can only be claimed by a relative with proof of relation. Yet documents are often forged and there is little to no follow up of the children once they are released into the hands of “a relative.” Officials who desired to remain anonymous out of fear reveal that often (with the police’s knowledge and aid) the children end up in the hands of the drug cartels to be trafficked or used for smuggling drugs. But beyond that well known “secret,” even the government admits that not all the children are claimed and are left to fend for themselves. As the article states, “In 2008, a Mexican congressional committee reported 90,000 children had been sent back by U.S. authorities to border cities … At least 13,500 were never claimed.” For when parents live in the U.S. or die in the crossing there is no family to come claim these children. But when governments of either country don’t want to be bothered with these kids, there are vultures waiting to snatch up weak and innocent.

What these children experience – injustice, trafficking, kidnapping, separation from family – has to be part of the story that gets told as part of the immigration debate. We can argue the legality of the immigrant’s decision or from our place of plenty question what parent would ever leave a child to go try to make a better life for that child until we are blue in the face, but meanwhile the children suffer. If our debate doesn’t make room for caring for these children, then we truly have lost our way as a nation.

I appreciated how the author called for immigration reform at the end of the article with the needs of these children in mind. She first suggests ways that both the U.S. and Mexico could actually follow the laws already in place to protect children by doing things like setting up a simple database to monitor these kids and not let them slip through the cracks. She also called for U.S. immigration reform that helps reunite families not punish them for trying to do whatever they can to help each other. And finally, most importantly, she asserted that until the underlying problems like poverty are dealt with these children will continue to be caught in the middle facing this pain. For when people are pawns in lofty government economic programs, they will continue to be pushed to seek out a better life in order for their family to survive. Justice is needed here on all levels. And maybe with the telling of the story of these children even the hardest of hearts will be opened to loving the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner sojourning in our land.

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Singing the Songs of Babylon

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I arrived home at midnight last night after three exhausting days at the Emergent Village Theological Conversation. I’ve been to Emergent events in the past and have returned home inspired, ignited, and hopeful, but this event was different. As friends mentioned after the event, in the past we have gone home ready to change the world and pumped up with the joy of friendships and yes, even the navel-gazing affirmation of our own spiritual intelligence. Those events shaped the conversation and inspired us to build something new. This wasn’t that sort of event.

Since leaving yesterday, I’ve been walking around with an ache in my heart. I feel wounded and broken – my soul has been permanently changed and now feels alien in its own skin. What we heard these last few days changed us. And I am beginning to realize that we can’t unlearn what we heard this week, the stories we heard have altered our very being. We can choose to deny what we heard or refuse to let what we heard move us to action, but there is no going back to the people we were before this conversation – for us as individuals or for the organization Emergent Village.

Strange thing is, I wasn’t expecting this conference to affect me so strongly. I knew about the horrors of colonialism. I’ve read books on liberation and postcolonial theology. I speak up for justice and believe the call for Christians is to end oppression. I admit my complicity in ongoing oppression and colonialism and strive to repent of such sins. All those things I knew in my head. But sitting down and listening to the stories and the prophetic words of people who speak the truth about their own experiences with such things is something entirely different. I hope over the next few weeks to write about some of what I heard there, but for right now all I can do is attempt to process the space I am in at the moment.

This ache in my heart, this realization that opening myself up to hearing these words means that I can never return to who I was before is difficult. It is an uncomfortable liminal space to inhabit. And it is in that uncertain space of discomfort that we ended the conference. No moments of feeling theologically astute for chatting with some famous theologian, no triumphal feeling of understanding the emergence of the church in postmodern times – simply people stripped raw, uncertain how to move forward. For me, the uncomfortable strangeness of that discomfort was manifest in how the event wrapped-up.

Here we had spent three days discussing the effects of the colonial project. The speakers had led us to see how the Bible is used as a colonizing text and how the rituals and trapping of the Western church have colonized the minds of indigenous peoples. Their dream is to find ways to do distinctly indigenous theology and develop spiritual practices that are native to who they are. They pleaded with us to stop seeing Western theology, philosophy, academia, and liturgy as the norm that all others must aspire to or at least subjugate their spiritual language to. And above all to not just allow native peoples space to pursue those paths, but to join in with them valuing their voices just as much as we value Western voices.

So after all that we closed with a time of communion where we stood serving the broken body of Christ to one another. And as we served someone started singing hymns. Old hymns. Traditional hymns. The hymns of the great Western churches. As others shakily joined in, I sat in my chair stunned and silent feeling that something was deeply wrong. And then Musa Dube, the Botswanan biblical scholar who had been sharing and challenging us about the need to re-imagine our theology and rituals started singing “How Great Thou Art.” She later shared how singing is how she has always been able to connect with God. And it was in that moment that the tears started to fall. I couldn’t help but weep that when confronted with our own complicity in the sins of empire the only way we knew how to respond was by singing the songs of Babylon. That in even this moment of worship all we knew to do was speak the language of empire. Part of me wanted to believe that in that moment it was enough to be who we were, but part of me also wanted to stop the whole thing and beg Richard Twiss or Musa Dube to give us the language to move beyond ourselves. Yet all I could do was weep at my inability to do anything but sing the songs of Babylon as an offering of reconciliation to the God who brings freedom to the oppressed. And that has left the ache in my heart that has stripped me raw.

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My Wild Goose Chase

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I love the use of the Celtic “wild goose” as the symbol of this gathering exploring creativity, justice, and spirituality.  It evokes that other distinctly Celtic idea of peregrinati – journeys or wanderings of an undefined but spiritual nature.  It is the wild goose flying where it will, exploring new territories and discovering new horizons amidst even the everyday and the familiar landscapes of home.  The Celtic monks followed that call of the wild bird on their peregrinati, journeying with the spirit on undetermined paths.  They served, and worshiped, and reflected along the way but often had no real goal or destination beyond the journey itself.  They embodied Tolkien’s famous “not all who wander are lost” phrase, for it was their wanderings – their wild goose chases -that held the meaning in themselves.

Over the last decade or so I have come to embrace this idea of peregrinati.  Static systems that enforced doctrine, demanded conformity, and discouraged questions had left me hollow.  Those were expressions of faith focused primarily on enacting a transaction that guaranteed what would happen to me after I died.  There was no continual quest for truth, no moving to where the spirit led, no grasping of the idea that following Jesus was the purpose of my faith and not just a means to an end.  It was at the point when I was about to walk away from that façade of a faith that felt so lifeless and bereft of soul that I stumbled upon the most basic of truths – that the wild goose cannot be caged.

It was freeing to discover that to be led by the spirit was what it meant to follow Jesus.  Both require movement – intentional wanderings where the life of faith is to be lived.  My peregrinati were not just missional moments in my faith journey, they were the shape of my entire embodied faith.  Embracing how God’s image is creatively reflected in my life and pursuing the call to seek justice for the oppressed became more than just optional additions to an unchanging faith, but the very substance of the journey itself.  To follow Jesus and be led by the Spirit means engaging in this intentional wandering.  I am now free to be always seeking, always serving, always following as I wander on this journey.  And it was stepping out on that wild goose chase that not only saved my faith, but drew me onto the path where that faith is ever developing and discovering new things.

So I look forward to merging our peregrinati at this gathering and sharing our stories of where this wild goose chase has led us.

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God Bless

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In reading Walter Brueggemann’s latest book, Out of Babylon – a fantastic read full of thought provoking insights – I was intrigued by his discussion of blessing. In referring to the confidence of the Davidic dynasty in the years leading up to the exile, he writes –

These [texts] concerning dynasty and temple, regularly reiterated in state-sponsored liturgy, gave certitude and entitlement to those most closely gathered around the center of Jerusalem power. All this certainty about God’s blessing of Jerusalem, its king and its temple, gave the people of Jerusalem an excuse to ignore the social facts on the ground. If God was indeed blessing the power structure of Jerusalem unconditionally, then they need not worry about the economic exploitation and political oppression going on around them.

I think we all too often use this idea of blessing to ignore the needs of others. Living for ourselves, demanding God’s blessing for ourselves, prevents us from opening our eyes to the needs of others. And often enjoying that blessing (politically or economically) results in the direct exploitation and oppression of others. What we see as blessing is simply ill-gotten gain – what we call blessing others live as misery. Brueggemann goes on to say how even with the empires at their backdoor many in Jerusalem lived in denial as they tried to keep up this certainty of blessing with false mantras of “shalom, shalom.” His point is that only the poetic utterances of the prophets quietly challenged those false assurances by implying that the mere saying of “shalom” does not create peace. Saying “we are blessed” while others suffer for our false sense of blessing has nothing to do with actual blessing.

The parallels to modern day America are obvious (which is where Bruegemann goes in the text). We claim God’s blessing with the certitude of a blood drenched flag backing it up and the exploited poor suffering in our wake. We’ve mistaken greed, power, and consumption for blessing. Yet, beyond this obvious comparison to America, what these words on blessing brought to my mind was how often the church acts in these ways as well.

If a church is growing – determined almost exclusively numerically these days (the counting of butts and bucks) – then they deem themselves to be at the receiving end of God’s blessing. If people are showing up and spending giving money, then they must be doing something right for God to bless them in such ways. Unfortunately the same rationale could be applied to a movie theater or football stadium. Claiming God’s blessing because people are showing up to be entertained or affirmed in their pursuit of the American Dream makes no logical sense, but sadly has become a handy excuse for the church to continue ignoring its participation in communal sins of exploitation and oppression or even ignorance. For if God is blessing a church (growing numbers), then why should they change or examine who they really are? Why bother asking what it means to sacrificially follow Christ when everything is going so well?

At the church I attend we have entered into an intense period of discernment as a community. Part of why we are doing so is because the numbers aren’t there, we’re hurting. I think it could be easy to see this struggle as a lack of blessing, or at least to say that we are in need of more of God’s blessing (not that I’ve actually heard this being said). But what I’ve been reflecting on during this time is that perhaps this is an opportunity to help us realize that any blessing we have exists for the sole purpose of us by extension blessing others. It has been providing us a chance to really examine who we are – which I do hope will lead to a response of sacrificial living. I don’t want us to have confidence in our own community for the sake of itself alone, for sometimes even in the midst of struggles it can be easy to do so, just like Jerusalem saying “shalom, shalom” with certainty as empire breathed down their necks. It can unfortunately be just as easy for the struggling as well as the numerically “blessed” church to turn inward and start existing only for acquiring “blessings” for themselves.

The nation of Israel was told that they were blessed to be a blessing to the nations. This wasn’t some warm fuzzy perk – this was a task that required sacrifice, generosity, and ongoing humility. Existing for the sake of others is hard work. Ensuring that the people around us are finding justice, not being oppressed, and being showered with the blessing of God is a lot harder than getting a few more butts in the pews or dollars in the plate. Giving up perceived blessing when that blessing feeds a system of injustice is even harder, but it is only in such actions that the true path to blessing can be found.

So I appreciated Bruegemann’s reminder that blessing can be a tricky thing. It is easy to think we are blessed and miss the point entirely by failing to be actively serving others and seeking justice for all. But we can also easily desire blessing for ourselves without realizing that that is not how God works at all. A church should never exist for the sake of itself, no matter how great of a community it might be. The body of Christ is called to bear witness, to be that communal voice answering the call of Christ – seeking justice for all. Blessing can only be used to bless – to be the healers of this world. Just as saying “shalom” does not bring peace, simply saying “we are blessed” (in praise or supplication) does not make it so unless there is the evidence of a simultaneous blessing of others.

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Christianity and Cages

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Earlier this week I received an email mocking the quote at the top of this blog. Eowyn’s words from The Two Towers about her greatest fear being to live life as if it were a cage that not just prevents but crushes the very desire to do great deeds of service in the world capture my feelings on living missionally and purposefully as well. The email’s author though charged that by believing in Christianity and God I am living in a cage and that I am an insane, pathetic, uneducated fool because of it. Most of me simply pities the person with such unresolved anger issues that they lash out in emails to strangers, but the email prompted me to think on cages and Christianity – or more specifically our involvement in our own faith.

When I think of a cage, I imagine someone (or something) living in a world that is controlled by another. A fish in a bowl or a bird in a cage has its existence defined and determined by an outside force. It exists, but not in any way that determines the path of its own existence. A caged creature does not have a voice in its own life, and, more significantly, nor can it affect the world outside it. Like Neo trapped in the Matrix, the caged creature might assume it is living a full life; but even if it is unaware of the bars of its cage, they still exist to confine it. To be caged is to live a life without change. Static lives cannot participate in the act of becoming – be that becoming better selves or serving towards building a better world. Behind the bars, be they perceived or not, all chance of valor has truly gone beyond recall or desire.

In truth, I do see cages in Christianity. They might not be the cages that the email author implied, but we have erected structures that preclude our intimate involvement in our own faith journey. For instance, I’ve been immersed in studying theories of the atonement in seminary recently and I’ve seen how in allowing the atoning work of the cross to be perceived simply as a transaction that occurs on our behalf and not something we participate in with fear and trembling, we turn what should be a dynamic and transformative relationship with Christ into a static event. When salvation is fully outside of us, it becomes something done to us like unto kept creatures in a cage. But true grace does not involve God keeping us in a cage feeding us the scraps of salvation for his amusement. We are not caged creatures with no voice or role in the unfolding cosmic drama. Far from being an imposed act, atonement is an invitation to conversion and transformation, a chance to respond to Christ’s act of sacrifice through participation in the missional act of worship.

The tragedy of a broken world where all is not as it is meant to be finds salvation in Christ as it is transformed into wholeness. This isn’t done through human will as some seem so ready to accuse social justice Christians of, but nor is it an act of a mad scientist God experimenting on caged creatures. I love how Rowan Williams explains it, “The story of Jesus is not one of miraculous suspension and interruption of the human world, nor is it a story of human moral and spiritual heroism; it involves us in a self-declaration and a self-discovery.” Salvation is conversion, which is transformation. Transformation isn’t done to us, but it is a process that we are invited into in hopes of healing this broken world.

So I see how often Christianity becomes a cage. To believe that we are objects of some divine transaction who need not do the hard work of participating in the transforming restoration of all creation is to erect that cage around ourselves. We are songbirds who see no purpose but to stay behind bars singing pleasant tunes while all chance of valor, service, worship, and true relationship with God pass beyond recall or desire. Instead of becoming who we were meant to be (and seeing the world put right as well), we embrace the easy faith of a gilt cage unaware that we are living behind bars. Caged Christians don’t join in with Christ in the work of bringing freedom to the oppressed or healing the wounds of this world. If there is nothing to become, if everything just plays out outside of our cage, then there is no reason to ever desire to do great acts of valor in service of the redemption of all things.

But God is not a puppet master or mad scientist or even caring pet owner. When God desires relationship with us, it is not as one tending to a mindless bird in a cage. No, it is a relentless pursuit intent on redeeming our humanity through the continual transformation of that very humanity. Following God engages not just our mind and wills, but every aspect of who we are.

I, for one, am not content in a cage. I am not content with a faith that disengages from the discipline of becoming the person I was meant to be or from working to make the world as it was meant to be. I cannot believe God wishes for us a static life where our ultimate callings and purposes are domesticated by the assumption that we can be blessed without ever being a blessing. Relationship requires participation – not the numbing apathy of a cage. I do truly fear that cage – I fear living a life where I stop being transformed and stop participating in the work of Christ to bring justice and healing to our world. I fear a faith where I let the cage of my own theology confine me from participating in relationship with Jesus. I fear becoming so content in my cage that I stop becoming who I am meant to be.

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Citizens or Neighbors?

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Last week a Tennessee man’s house burned to the ground while firefighters stood by and watched. Gene Cranick hadn’t paid a $75 insurance fee that opts him into his county’s fire protection services, according to him he simply forgot to send it in. So when his house caught fire, firefighters showed up and watched his house burn (with his pets inside). They worked to save a neighbor’s field (who had paid the fee), but simply stood by as his house burned to the ground. There is much to-do being made about following the laws of the land and the safety of firefighters working in a place they aren’t insured to protect. Comparisons are (rightly) being made to instances where people die in the ER because they are refused treatment since they don’t have health insurance. What we see is that the system rewards those with privilege any money who can afford protection, but denies help to those who fall outside that group.

Those, of course, aren’t the only laws that prevent help from reaching people. Numerous cities have passed laws against panhandlers. Included in these laws are rules that forbid giving handouts to beggars. These laws make it against the law to feed the hungry – giving a sandwich to a homeless guy on the streets is technically illegal in many areas. Also there are the laws about not giving aid to immigrants. Pastors cannot offer shelter, food, or sanctuary to the needy if they are illegally in this country. Doctors cannot treat the wounded for fear of lending aid that is against the law. We have allowed ourselves to be consumed by a system where we have essentially forgotten that the Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath.

Somewhere along the way we have started caring more about being a good citizen than being a good neighbor. It’s strange, because we still attempt to instill in our children the idea of being a good neighbor – to help even those that oppose us. With two young children at home, I see a lot of the TV shows and movies aimed at kids. I see Dora going off to help out her arch-enemy Swiper when he gets in trouble. Or in the new Tinkerbelle movie, I see the fairies mounting a rescue attempt for the one fairy that always tries to ruin their lives. No matter who those people are or how bad they have been, the message gets sent that if they are in trouble you help them no matter what. In the same way we teach our kids the story of the Good Samaritan, emphasizing that racial, cultural, and economic lines do not matter when it comes to how we should help others who are hurting. We say that we value being a good neighbor, but how quickly that gets abandoned when it gets in the way of being a good citizen.

Allowing the laws of the land to stand in the way of love is not what it means to live out what Jesus was encouraging in that parable. Standing by and watching a house burn down and pets be burned alive because of a $75 fee is not being a good neighbor. Nor is letting someone die because they aren’t rich enough to afford insurance. From a certain political perspective it can be justified as being a good citizen, but that is not even close to being the same thing. Perhaps we need to listen more to the lessons we teach our children. Being a good neighbor means taking care of people no matter their economic, racial, or political status. It means loving them no matter how badly they may have treated us or offended our sensibilities. It means we have to stop being the Priest or the Levite who let the excuses of legality and red tape justify our crossing to the other side of the road and walking right past those who suffer. Being a good neighbor means revering compassion and love above following the letter of the law. The laws were made to serve, not to prevent us from actually serving.

But I fear we have it all backwards in our society as we constantly seek to find new and more creative ways to avoid doing the hard work of actually following Jesus.

Update – For a perfect example of this messed up worldview, read these comments arguing that letting the house burn down was the “Christian” thing to do since having compassion means you follow a weak “feminized” Christianity that doesn’t care about responsibility or prosperity.

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The Church Needs a Prophetic Voice

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We have all heard the old saying that Satan’s greatest ploy is to get people to stop believing in him. For when people aren’t looking to fight his evil then that evil has more room to flourish. I fear something similar is occurring in our country in our rejection of social justice. Instead of gathering the people of God together to work against injustice like Jesus commanded us to do; those with interests in allowing injustices (especially economic injustice) to continue are attempting to convince the church to shun the very idea of justice itself. The easiest way for the evil of injustice to flourish in this world is for the church to believe we should be doing nothing about it. And as crazy as it seems, that tactic is succeeding. The public is being encouraged to flee churches that teach about justice, to equate social justice with the atrocities of Nazi Germany, and to believe that supporting social justice will result in the elimination of all religious liberties. Basically, to embrace the exact opposite of the justice-seeking way of life that Jesus demands of his followers.

Glenn Beck’s recent tirade against those that care about justice illustrates this revisionist view of justice. He states that people who support justice for the oppressed are promoting a state sponsored church similar to the Nazi controlled churches in Germany. Playing on people’s fears, Beck convinces them that unless they stay silent on justice issues then the government will take over their churches. According to Beck, “when you combine church and state, and you take… a big government and you combine it with the church, to get people to do the things that the state wants you to do, it always ends in mass death.” His solution is to silence the voices for justice and let faith simply be about individual private commitments. What Beck fails to realize is that silencing the voices for justice within the church is simply a passive way of giving control of the church to the powers of this world. Empires (the State in both political and economic realms) can either directly control the church (as Hitler did) or it can control the church by rendering it impotent.

Beck’s example of Hitler’s Nazi controlled church, reminds me of the Barman Declaration (1934). An ecumenical group of Confessing Christians in Germany did stand up to the State controlled church, sending the message that they had no Fuhrer but Jesus. It was a bold move, but in demanding their autonomy they also gave up the right to speak truth to power. In creating for themselves the space to worship as they choose without interference, they inadvertently gave the state control of their voices, leaving the Confessing Churches little room to speak up on justice issues (like the extermination of the Jews). For this reason Dietrich Bonhoeffer disagreed with Karl Barth over the drafting of this declaration – it sacrificed justice for the sake of supposed autonomy. While there is much to be admired in the Barman Declaration, I have to wonder how Jesus can truly be the leader of the church if that church has allowed itself to be silenced in regard to justice issues.

Beck is correct in pointing out that throughout history the church has been controlled by the state to disastrous ends. But this is never because the state cared too much about justice. On the contrary, it was when the state controlled “church” ceased speaking out on behalf of justice for the oppressed that power was corrupted, liberty was denied, and mass deaths did occur. One thinks of Persian-controlled Ezra casting the foreign wives and children of the Jews into the wilderness to die as his religious zeal cleansed the land. Or of Charlemagne forcing the conquered Saxons to be baptized at the point of a sword. Or the silence of the church in places like Liberia, Kenya, Bosnia or Rwanda when their “Christian” rulers oppressed the people. The state controlled church can commit atrocities, but a church controlled through silence on justice issues is just as complicit in those atrocities.

The church must retain a prophetic voice. It cannot be a puppet of the state, but it also cannot be manipulated into silence. The church is never just a collection of individuals desiring their own private worship experience; it is the Body of Christ called to do his will. Standing up to Empire (political or economic) on behalf of the oppressed is simply part of what it means for the church to be collectively faithful. That prophetic voice has to call for an end to injustice, and since Empire is often the cause of much of the injustice in the world, it is going to have to be Empire that takes the steps to undo that injustice. If Christians abandon the right to push the State to repent of (undo) the wrongs it has committed (even if that undoing makes our lives uncomfortable), then we have just granted the state the freedom to control us all.

I look to the people of faith in recent years who have done the hard work of helping the church find its voice as it not only speaks truth to power, but does so in ways that seek justice through reconciliation. When Fr. Andre Sibomana was named administrator of the Rwandan diocese of Kabgayi in August 1994, he knew the church had to find a way to repent of its silence and complacency during the genocide. So he suspended all baptisms, first communions, confirmations, and weddings until Christmas and called the church into a period of confession and penance. He knew that the church could not move forward into new life until its political sins had been dealt with. Similarly Desmond Tutu was the Christian voice calling for justice for years in South Africa. Once Apartheid ended, it was only through the church working directly with the state through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that healing was able to begin. The church as prophetic voice had to call the state (and its own members) to justice and at the same time grant healing through the transformative power of Jesus Christ. Or as Ugandan theologian Emmanuel Katongale suggests, the church can never be just another NGO; it has to be a body that witnesses to a “different world right now.”

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Religious Knowledge and the Church

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My laptop crashed last week, so as it was being repaired, I immersed myself in my schoolwork since we’ve reached the point in the semester where it all seems to be piling on. Yet even as I was surrounded with discussions on proper Christology and post-exilic apocalyptic literature, I was not surprised to read the results of the recent Pew Religious Knowledge Survey. It is just part of who I am to seek religious knowledge, but according to this survey the general public can only answer 16 out of 32 questions correctly on a very basic religious knowledge survey. These weren’t questions about Augustinian views of atonement or the historical roots of the Hindu pantheon, these were ultra-basic questions necessary for a working knowledge of the other in a pluralistic globalized world (multiple choice questions like “Which Bible figure is associated with leading the Exodus from Egypt?” (Job, Elijah, Moses, Abraham) or “Ramadan is…?” (A Hindu festival, a Jewish day, The Islamic Holy Month) (you can take the quiz here)). There has been much said regarding the fact that atheists and agnostics scored the highest on the quiz, scoring an average 20.9 questions correctly while Protestants scored an average of 16 and Catholics 14.7. But, like I said, even as it astounds me, it doesn’t surprise me. The numbers are interesting, but they merely reflect the ongoing lack of desire for religious knowledge that pervades our culture.

One can obviously point fingers at the recent trends fearing learning about non-Christian religion here in America. The Texas School Board pushing to eliminate a seemingly pro-Muslim (and hence “anti-Christian”) bias in textbooks since those texts actually teach about Muslin history. Or the protestors of the Park51 community center who proclaim “all I need to know about Islam I learned on 9/11.” Or even the families at the church I used to work at that got upset that we were exposing the youth to (as they called them) “non-Christian religions” when we took them to visit Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. That sort of prejudice and ignorance is sad, but willful. What troubles me is the ignorance of Christians of our own faith. Mike and I both discovered in attending mainline seminaries that most of our classmates readily admit to having never studied or really read the Bible. As my theology prof quipped recently after having to ask a Baptist student in the class about a scripture reference, “if you want to know which fork to use for dessert, ask an Episcopalian, if you want to know something about the Bible ask a Baptist.” It’s funny, but with the evangelical obsession with Bible memory, sword drills, and Bible knowledge, it’s a fairly true stereotype.

And yet even with our of our Bible knowledge, evangelicals often willfully avoid knowledge with the best of them. For all the Bible trivia we amass, there is generally very little depth in that knowledge. We do countless “Bible studies” where fill-in-the-blank answers and “what does it mean for my life” reflection questions masquerade as knowledge. And I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard pastors (or youth pastors) warn people about the liberal influence of education – as if just the idea of thinking for oneself is a threat to the faith. Or the number of testimonies I’ve heard that focus on how the person realized they trusted too much in their intellect and so had to let that go and follow God. It’s like the Kurt Cameron clip I saw recently where he actually said that to have faith we have to “bypass the intellect.” I was reminded of this stance this past week, when on a whim I pulled out the Old Testament Survey textbook I used at Wheaton College to compare it with the text I’m using in my survey class in seminary. I fully admit that both texts are biased, but it was sad to read how my Wheaton text willfully rejected most biblical scholarship. Instead of engaging with historical facts and textual criticism, the Wheaton text presented those arguments only to reject them. Almost every chapter is framed as – here is the evidence of scholars, but since we believe in the supernatural/unity of scripture/predictive prophecy we have to reject those arguments and just believe in the text as it is (as if that somehow actually exists). If knowledge falls outside of the tiny little box they were preconditioned to believe in, it is that knowledge and not the box that gets rejected and suppressed in the church. (although, I have to say, it made for a far easier Old Testament survey class…).

I think the church, in all its forms, is failing its members in this realm. Fearing learning about other religions or even about one’s own has crippled the body of Christ. The church doesn’t know how to navigate knowledge well. I understand why so many people do lose their faith when confronted with knowledge about history, or cultural influences on our faith tradition, or how the Bible came to be. When our faith is based on ignoring such knowledge, or even willfully hiding from it, its revelation can be devastating – especially when the church is utterly ill-equipped to provide a lens to help people understand that knowledge. We all always have more to learn and discover. What we think we know about God, the Bible, our faith, or other faiths is only just the very beginnings of what we can know. Fearing truth because it might force us to understand and love others or because it might challenge our presuppositions doesn’t seem like a healthy way for anyone to be living. To me what matters the most here is not whether people in our culture can answer certain questions correctly or not (although some of those Pew questions were rather basic), but whether or not we care enough to be continually learning and growing. And sadly, that is what I generally see lacking.

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Privilege, Race, and Excuses

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Since entering into discussions about the upcoming Emergent Theological Conversation on “Creating Liberated Spaces in a Postcolonial World,” I’ve been intrigued by some of the responses I’ve encountered. There were the expected ones accusing the entire conversation of being socialist or Marxist or whatever, but then there were the more nuanced ones which in truth were even sadder. I am sure there must be people out there who have decent, well reasoned arguments for why Christians shouldn’t give a rip about postcolonialism, but so far I have yet to encounter them.

What I find more of are the (white) people who automatically get defensive when it is suggested that perhaps there might be something wrong with the colonial past and that it might be beneficial for Christians to listen to the voices of all the members of the body of Christ. Apparently by suggesting that there may have been ills in colonialism we are demonstrating that we are deluded by “white guilt” which invalidates everything we have to say. What a convenient excuse – for avoiding whatever this “white guilt” is has become a valid reason to avoid responsibility. The defensiveness then proceeds in one of two directions.

The first is for the objector to claim that they are color blind – they don’t see race, so how dare I be racist by saying that people of other races or ethnic groups should be listened to. The underlying argument is that if we are all one in Christ, then all voices should matter. So to them to have to stop listening to (all) white voices in favor of hearing the perspective of an African or an Asian (or a woman for that matter) is a promotion of racism against whites. They convince themselves that race shouldn’t matter, so that they can feel comfortable never interacting or learning from anyone who isn’t white. (please see Bruce Reyes-Chow’s recent piece on this whole issue)

The second common defensive response is for someone to give the, “how dare you imply that Christianity needs changing, it is heresy to abandon the established truths of the past!” While there may be a decent argument somewhere in there, what it generally implies is that the person thinks that the church has existed in stasis since the day Jesus floated up into the clouds. Any perspective that is other (different to what they know) must obviously be pagan or an attempt to corrupt timeless truth. Once again a very convenient way to avoid the truth of history or actually assuming responsibility for one’s theology.

But by far the most disturbing response I have encountered so far is the “why bother?” response. It will come as no surprise that registration for this year’s conference – where instead of hearing from some rock star white male theologian we are hearing from an African woman and a First Nations man – is significantly less than usual. Granted, some of this is to blame on the economy, people just don’t have the funds to travel to multiple conferences anymore. But I’ve heard over and over again that this conversation just isn’t important enough to “waste” limited conference funds on (I heard the same thing leading up to Christianity 21 last year with its all-female line-up). Sadly, listening to the voices of those questioning the theology our ancestors thrust on them to manipulate them with and who engage in dialogue regarding how the faith of those who claim that we are blessed to be a blessing can truly bless all the nations of the world just isn’t relevant enough to the American church.

Hearing those responses helped me see the narrow boundaries the American church permits for the conversation of race and reconciliation. It is fine to throw the emerging church under the bus for being for whites only, but when conservations start to occur where the goal is to simply listen to supposedly neglected voices – the passion around that issue disappears. It is fine to say we want diversity, but not to actually work for it. It made me wonder if much of that conversation stemmed from people who want to claim the token minority in their church as “diversity” but who aren’t willing to give up enough privilege to actually listen and learn from people with differing experiences. And I fully admit – I cling to my privilege in a million ways and have been guilty of tokenism more than I would care to admit. But, I have to wonder why people are so afraid to care and make changes where it would really matter.

It reminds me of a Delta Airlines ad I saw recently. It had a picture of a woman sleeping on an airplane with the caption “Sleep Shouldn’t Be a Perk.” The copy went on to explain that since sleep is a basic necessity that on a (very) select number of International flights (to places like Dubai or Sydney) Delta now provides fully horizontal beds – in their Business Elite cabin. So apparently if it is in First Class it is a perk, but if it is in Business class then it is a necessity. Those of us who can barely afford economy class will continue to be treated like crap and packed in like cattle. Privilege can be admitted and the playing field equalized, but only within certain very narrow boundaries.

I wonder if the same is ultimately true of the (white) church. We like to talk about overcoming racism and how much we love Martin Luther King Jr., but it seems like we are willing to accept others only if they are already almost exactly like us. We don’t want to do the dirty work of admitting privilege and how our theology has been used to oppress others. We will make a million excuses why we dislike the very conversation, but in the end I thing we are just afraid. Afraid of what is other, afraid of change, and afraid of having to give up some of the perks we hold so dear.

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