Mr Mayor, This Is Our Town

Walking through my library and I notice a framed photo of our mayor towards the front, in the information table. It’s where we can find out about events and about what the community and the library are doing. 

And it struck me that Rahm Emanuel, like many politicians, is in a position of power and works hard to cultivate this image of his position of power. Not just as a benevolent or wise leader (which is untrue and anybody paying attention to the city and how it is handling the non-business district/non-White Chicago portions of town will figure this out), but as a powerful person and from whom all blessings flow. 

Follow him and we get our bike trails, we get our libraries, we get to keep our schools or get better schools (which is the trade-off lie he is selling now that nobody – again, nobody paying attention – is listening to).

But that’s not true. A mayor is a manager. We are in charge of what we desire, what we need, what we have, and who we give it to.

Emanuel is our puppet. Not for the 0.01%. Not for the neo-liberals. Not for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange or DePaul University or Chicago Parking Meters LLC. But for ALL of Chicago. 

It’s damned time we remind him of who is in charge.

Fitching and Itching and Names

Trigger warning for abusive ableist and sexist language

Mike Jeffries, the Ambercrombie & Fitch CEO, needs to be taken down eighteen pegs and find himself in unemployment. He represents everything wrong with consumptive culture, body-shaming, and class warfare against poor and homeless.

His entire branding philosophy is junior high at its worst – it’s vehemently disgusting, disturbingly shallow, and entirely alienating for those who don’t “fit in”. His honesty with his brand is not refreshingly so as it further alienates any who do not line up to a certain ideal of beauty. It’s bad enough that fashion normalizes thin and symmetrical bone structure as the standard of beauty, making most of us feel inadequate – but then there’s public shaming.

Jeffries says he only wants slim, attractive, cool people wearing his wares despite the fact that he himself doesn’t fit such criteria is a sign of obliviousness and mental gymnastics so thick it gives Frozen Yogurt a run for its money – a closed loop of a mind that reels back on itself a Bizarro-world warped version of Stuart Smalley, but without his warmth or generous imagery.

He’s good enough, he’s smart enough, and goshdarnit, he doesn’t participate in demeaning

Yet efforts to tear him a well-deserved new one have often revolved around his own looks – not just in contrast to the image that he means to advertise, but also just as a signifier of something bad in itself. In doing so, though, his opponents further stigmatize those who don’t measure up. Why, in fact, do we measure up anyway, beyond third grade? Isn’t there a Piagetian stage we cross where we no longer have a need to understand our own worth without tearing down others simply for the way they look or dress?

If we don’t attack his personal image for not measuring up to his ridiculous statements, we accept the tearing down of his brand by linking it to the homeless. But it seems to show a lot about how we as a society think about homeless people. They become stunts, and the fact that those people would wear that clothing is supposed to be a turn-off for that clothing by association. Not that homeless people are participants in this take-down – rather objects to accept the terms of this new re-branding. And that may be the most troubling part of this effort.

As Kirsten at Process points out:

From square one, this movement was never about clothing people who are in need. It’s about thrusting what Karber himself refers to as “douchebag” clothing into the hands of scores of the nameless, faceless homeless.

Clips of Karber handing out the clothing show him placing pieces of A&F clothing onto the personal belongings or into the hands of the people of Skid Row and briskly moving along to the next token “homeless person”, leaving them with an new t-shirt or pants (nevermind if the clothing actually fits them) and a puzzled look.

Sure, Karber’s readjusting the brand name, but at the expense of the further dehumanization the people of Skid Row. We never hear from a recipient. We never learn their names. We never see more than a brief pan over their befuddled, care-worn faces.

The denigration-by-association doesn’t stop there, of course.

Earlier this week, a couple of my friends and I happened upon a thread in a Christian music Facebook group (this thread was started by a Christian musician) about how garbage-y Christian music performers are. Except he didn’t say “garbage-y.” Gay. He called these Contemporary Christian Music groups “gay.” Not because they are attracted to those of the same sex. No, but because he wanted to put down those groups he associated them with a marginalized (certainly in Christian circles) people group.

When we belittle the character of a person or company by comparing it to marginalized people, we belittle the marginalized people. We demonstrate that we do not have humanizing friendships with those who are homeless, homosexual, bisexual, trans*, or have learning disabilities or mental disorders. Rather, we know them only by their labels – by their branding.

But not only that, the responses to this thread were fairly silent on the use of the word. Gay is still an accepted term of derision. When some finally protested, they (we) were silenced and mocked by several others.

“Take it easy.” “Why are you so humorless? Can’t you take a joke?” “Political correctness will be the death of our freedom of speech.” “Gay is sin!!”

Lovely. Just lovely.

They’d hate to be called homophobic, but the idea of shaming one based on connections to another is to say that the second group – whether it be people with learning, physical, and/or cognizant disabilities; or people who experience sex or gender differently; or people of another color, culture, religion – are worthy themselves of being shamed – are so low that any association automatically lowers those being associated.

This kind of demeaning doesn’t start or end with one particular group. It’s not just those conservatives who do it. I’m guilty of this. Chances are, so are most of us. We live and breathe a type of way of looking at people that measures each one of us and labels us defective in one way or another – unwhole, unclean, less-than, not-good-enough, rubbish. And so we make comparisons that harm both the target but also ones we compare them to, rather than dealing with the problem in itself.

The politician makes a racist statement and she is “a bitch.

The radio host makes classist arguments and he is “crazy.”

Someone is wrong on the internet and they are “retarded.”

When we make these comparisons, we are not just talking mean about a person and a position we do not like, we are not just ignoring the problem itself in order to make ad hominen attacks, we are demeaning women or people with disabilities, dragging their names through the mud as if there is something wrong with being a female or having a learning or mental disability.

This says a lot about our society and how we prioritize fellow humans.

The Inclusive, Participatory Tongues of Fire

When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.

Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken. Utterly amazed, they asked: “Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language? Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!” Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?”

- Acts 2

If the Tower of Babel is the story of God’s dismantling of Empire – the Babylonian one, particularly, as a stand-in for the Egyptian empire – through the scattering of language from the one dominant culture, the babbling of Pentecost is the antidote, the unprivileging of any one specific people or culture. It is the decolonization of a God who only speaks for and from the perspective of the privileged.

Pentecost is also the completion of the incarnation begun on Christmas – allowing human participation in divinity in an effort to allow each access to each other.  Before, the God of all creation spoke through one, limited people group. Through the incarnation of Jesus, God then becomes a member of that people group (as an able-bodied male, at that), but grants access to God to those denied that access previously – including people with disabilities, women who are deemed unclean, foreigners, those who cannot afford to buy sacrifices. Now, in the Pentecost, God is present through the Holy Spirit upon all people. It is a movement of divine solidarity that spreads out to all.

And this is radical. It is so radical an introduction to a new way of life that the recipients are labeled drunk. So radical, indeed, that the participants decide to gather, live together, eat together, pray and learn together about this new way – about this revolutionary, anti-Empire God revealed through Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

This is also known as the introduction of the Church – the inauguration of its particular mission on Earth.

And we see the way that this explosive, revolutionary gathering is met out – through gathering in communes.

The Holy Spirit comes upon the people, and the people become a collective, inclusive mishmash of willful, participatory communism.

Why does it look so different today? Why does the Christian Church often deny access to God through our practices and the policies that we endorse? Upon reading this interpretation, the typical US Christian may become defensive – may sputter that communism never works and that English is the primal language of the real world as they did on my friend David Henson’s blog.

Christians in the age of the American Empire, in other words, have an awfully small amount of holy imagination – we are busy building the tower of Babel when we need tongues of fire. 

Because Jesus Is a Megalomaniac?

@jimmyspencerjr Well, no, Jesus is my Jesus b/c I agree with Jesus about the things he said about himself. But nice try

— jaredcwilson (@jaredcwilson) May 14, 2013

After chastising what he calls “Liberal Theology” (whatever that means), Mr. Wilson here propagates the unbiblical (I say “unbiblical” because it’s not found in the bible) myth that disagreeing with a certain view of how Jesus presented himself is what got the Pharisees into such hot water (see the convo here for context). But that ignores the entire focus of Jesus’ ministry. It had little to do with himself and everything to do with showing a new way – a way that was actually contrary to dominant and oppressive religious, political, and economic pressures.

This statement brings us to another problem: Does God need us to understand something about God in order to be saved? Not agreeing with this view – whatever it may be according to whoever is defining the parameters – is a guarantee that we deserve hell. Agreeing with “the things he said about himself” is like winning the trivia contest, only with the extra bonus that you don’t burn forever in hell after you die. Heck, your name may be put in a special drawing and Jesus will personally come and get you before he burns up the rest of the world.

Or maybe Jesus is a short-tempered jerk who only wants to be around people who agree with him about who he is?

I just don’t think that any of this is consistent with the Jesus we see in the Gospels. Not even when he’s cursing out the Pharisees in Matthew 23.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.

Woe to you, blind guides! You say, ‘If anyone swears by the temple, it means nothing; but anyone who swears by the gold of the temple is bound by that oath.’ You blind fools! Which is greater: the gold, or the temple that makes the gold sacred? You also say, ‘If anyone swears by the altar, it means nothing; but anyone who swears by the gift on the altar is bound by that oath.’ You blind men! Which is greater: the gift, or the altar that makes the gift sacred? Therefore, anyone who swears by the altar swears by it and by everything on it. And anyone who swears by the temple swears by it and by the one who dwells in it. And anyone who swears by heaven swears by God’s throne and by the one who sits on it.*

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.** (NIV)

I don’t think Jesus cares if you agree with him or not. He doesn’t have the fragile ego that I do. But he’s pretty ticked – at least here – about putting extra burdens on the people, about ignoring the hurt of the people while puffing ourselves up.

Can that Jesus be my Jesus? I like him better; he seems more divine.

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*This section can be updated to talk about theological conclusions built on Sola Scriptura, which is built on a way of understanding God primarily through reading the Bible, sans much cultural context – a very dangerous way of viewing the Living God in any case. But in this, the Bible is elevated over the God that makes the Bible holy.

**I like to think that my questioning of my contexts, and particularly patriarchy and capitalism and their effects, as they have and continue to influence me is a way to clean the cups full of greed and self-indulgence. But that may be a bit generous to my self-indulgence….

Christianity & Capitalism: A Love Story

Roll

Eugene McCarraher, a professor at Villanova University reviewed Occupy Wall Street resident historian Dave Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years and  Simon Critchley’s The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology for Christianity Today’s Books and Culture magazine recently and I’m just fascinated that such an anti-capitalist view would be espoused in anything published by CT these days. Particularly, he calls the main religion of the US Chrapitalism, an unholy mixture of Capitalism and Christianity and a perversion of the latter that is so far removed from its roots that he calls for a return to Christianity by Chrapitalism’s followers (ie, most of us). However, that hybrid name needs some work. Capitalstianity.

Still working on it.

Some long excerpts:

The Plutocracy’s beatific vision for the mass of Americans is wage servitude: a fearful, ever-busy, and cheerfully abject pool of human resources. Rendered lazy and recalcitrant by a half-century of mooching, American workers must be forced to be free: crush labor unions, keep remuneration low, cut benefits and lengthen working hours, close or narrow every avenue of escape or repose from accumulation. If they insist on living like something more than the whining, expendable widgets they are, reduce them to a state of debt peonage with an ensemble of financial shackles: mortgages, credit cards, and student loans, all designed to ensure that the wage slaves utter two words siren-sweet to business: “Yes, boss.” It’s the latest chapter in the depressing story that David Graeber relates in Debt: debt as an especially insidious weapon in the arsenal of social control. “There’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence … than by reframing them in the language of debt,” he writes, “because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong.”

Alas, we’re living in the early, bewildering days of the demise of the American Empire, the beginning of the end of that obsession-compulsion known as the Amerian Dream. The reasons are clear, if often angrily denied: military hubris and over-extension; a stagnant monopoly capitalism with a bloated financial sector; a population on whom it’s dawning that low-wage labor is their inexorable fate; ecological wreckage that can only be limited or repaired by cessation of growth. The patricians’ task will be threefold: finessing the increasingly obvious fact of irreversible imperial decline; convincingly performing the charade of democracy in the face of popular vassalage; and distracting or repressing the roiling rage and tumult among the plebs. How will the elites maintain and festoon their ever-more untenable hegemony? …

The injustice and indignity of capitalism have seldom been so openly wretched, but as Graeber ruefully observes, just when we need “to start thinking on a breadth and with a grandeur appropriate to the times,” we seem to have “hit the wall in terms of our collective imagination.”

Don’t expect any breadth or grandeur from the Empire’s Christian divines. Across the board, the imperial chaplains exhibit the most obsequious deference to the Plutocracy, providing imprimaturs and singing hallelujahs for the civil religion of Chrapitalism: the lucrative merger of Christianity and capitalism, America’s most enduring covenant theology. It’s the core of “American exceptionalism,” the sanctimonious and blood-spattered myth of providential anointment for global dominion. In the Chrapitalist gospel, the rich young man goes away richer, for God and Mammon have pooled their capital, formed a bi-theistic investment group, and laundered the money in baptismal fonts before parking it in offshore accounts. Chrapitalism has been America’s distinctive and gilded contribution to religion and theology, a delusion that beloved community can be built on the foundations of capitalist property. As the American Empire wanes, so will its established religion; the erosion of Chrapitalism will generate a moral and spiritual maelstrom.

As Critchley asserts, “ ‘God’ is the first anarchist, calling us into struggle with the mythic violence of law, the state, and politics by allowing us to glimpse the possibility of something that stands apart.” By inciting us to curse and renounce the homespun idolatry of Chrapitalism, Critchley and Graeber can point Christians back to a terrible but glorious moment in their history: when the avant-garde of the eschaton were maligned as godless traitors. We’ll need that dangerous memory in our frightful if doubtless very different time.

Note: That’s what it sometimes feels like. In questioning the morality of a system that allows for and necessitates the starvation of billions of people, the questioners are made to feel like they are proposing shooting babies in the head. I have been called a communist in a pejorative sense – with the assumption that I am an atheist and I don’t believe in God. I am often asked if I hate the US. I cannot blame those who question me – we have all been fed this idea that at its roots, capitalism is a godly, natural good connected with a benevolent God. At its core, we are taught, capitalism is responsible for our well-being through God’s generosity.

But when you live most of your life in poverty and study to find that you may never – like the vast majority of the world – rise from under its boot heel, you start to question the unquestioned goodness of capitalism and whether or not it is of God.

In Graeber’s view, economics’ most nefarious impact on morality is its perverse account of social relations, especially those revolving around obligation and interdependence. Graeber distinguishes between obligations—the incalculable owing of favors, as when you give me something, and I owe you something back—and debt as a precisely enumerable obligation, and therefore calculable in terms of equivalence and money. Conceivable only when people are treated not as human beings but as abstractions, equivalence is the categorical imperative of pecuniary reason, and it sanctifies the self-righteous, skinflint buncombe that parades as an ethic of “character.” Isn’t paying one’s debts the basis of morality and dependable personal character? Especially when translated into money, the quantification of debt can justify a lot of indecent, horrific conduct. Can’t pay me back? I’ll take your daughter, or foreclose on your home, or demand austerity measures that result in famine, disease, or destitution.

Graeber’s alternative to debt and its moral atrocities is communism: “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.” (Not, note well, according to their “deserts.”) Knowing that he’ll face a fusillade of umbrage about “totalitarianism,” Graeber insists that communism “exists right now” and lies at “the foundation of all human sociability.” Our lives abound with moments of everyday communism: we don’t charge people who ask us for directions, and if we do, we’re rightly considered jerks. Communism is not “egalitarianism”—which, as even Marx observed, partakes of the boring, inhuman logic of equivalence—and in Graeber’s view, it doesn’t entail any specific form of property. (An unromantic admirer of peasant societies and their moral economy of “the commons,” Graeber appears to endorse what anthropologists sometimes call “usufruct,” in which property becomes a kind of trusteeship dependent on the performance of a function.) A communist relationship—between spouses, lovers, friends—is not only one in which accounts are not kept, but one in which it would be considered “offensive, or simply bizarre” to even think of doing so. Love keeps no record of wrongs—or rights…

As 19th-century craftsmen and workers understood better than we do today, wage labor is the slavery of capitalism: if you don’t own the means of production, you work for those who do—unlike chattel, you enjoy the dubiously ennobling privilege of choosing your master.

Graeber affirms redemption and friendship against the command economy of libertas. Friends and lovers don’t treat each other as servants or vendable objects, so freedom should be “the ability to make friends,” the capacity to enter into human relations that are uncoerced and incalculable. And since friends are naturally communists, they’ll live without thinking of their relations in a way that leads to double-entry bookkeeping; they’ll live in the light of “redemption,” which isn’t about “buying something back” but rather about “destroying the entire system of accounting.” To create a more humane and generous world, we must unlearn our moral arithmetic and throw the ledgers into the bonfire. A communist society of friends requires the abolition of capitalism.

Graeber concedes that Christianity harbors traces of a moral and ontological revolution against the regime of debt. “Redemption” could point to the destruction and transcendence of equivalence; as Thomas Aquinas and other medieval theologians explained, “our relation with the cosmos is ultimately nothing like a commercial transaction, nor could it be.” You can pay off the bank or the bartender; how do you square a “debt ” to God?

Indeed, how does one pay back God? To put it another way, how can we pay back demigods, as our banking and lending institutions are set up as? Us mere mortals?

No. Seriously?

Rocks Erode, Rivers Change, Truth Reflects

No one can be unbiased. Everything we approach, we do so with prejudice, with perspective, with personal and social histories. And each time we approach something, we do so with a slightly different ear or eye – with different information running in our heads, different stimuli, different moods and tones and colors and blind spots.

I’ll admit my bias: It’s towards love and humanity as a reflector of God. I do not believe it is possible to find truth without love, and I do not believe it’s possible to love without seeking justice. Justice leads to love because justice seeks to equalize and ease sufferings. Despite what Michael Scott says, a boss cannot love employees he treats like crap. A parent cannot love the child she abuses. No citizen can claim to love people in areas that he advocates we bomb.

We cooperate in the process of liberating those we love, allowing them to find how and where they need liberation and to be the main participants and determiners in their own freedom garnishing.

Truth cannot be true without love as well. Facts can be presented in hate, apathy, dispassion – with or without emotion, with or without agenda, with or without perspective. But facts are not truth, and truth, though related to facts, is not the mere sum of facts.

That which is true is necessarily not only real and factual, but transformative. Truth moves mountains and shakes foundations. Truth is relative because it affects current reality. And current reality is relative – which means that truth is not fixed in a stone that never erodes, etched for all time in perfect stasis.

Rather, the Word is alive, living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword. And like anything else that is living, it adapts to its environment, it responds, it changes.

It both informs and is informed. It’s not a Death Star. It doesn’t get to destroy anything within its path. But it both changes and is changed by whatever it comes in contact with. That is true for anything that occupies space. Rocks erode and turn into sand. Rivers change course as they run to the sea. And truth reflects the environment in which it resides.

People change. Our memories and experiences inform us and they change and as they interact with each other and with others in a social space.

Thank God for that.

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This is an excerpt from the new book I’m writing on Christian community-living and social responsibility. I’m also looking for other bloggers to speak your perspective, thoughts or experiences on Christian community.

Entertaining Angels

[During the lost decade of the 1980s], more than 140,000 died in Guatemala, 70,000 in El Salvador, 60,000 in Nicaragua–unimaginable devastation for a region that has fewer inhabitants than the state of Texas.
- Juan Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire

You must not oppress foreigners. You know what it’s like to be a foreigner, for you yourselves were once foreigners in the land of Egypt.
- Exodus 23:9

Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.
- Hebrews 13:2

Fruits of the Spirit: Our Imperialist Christian Standards, pt 3

There is a lot to unpack in any reading of Scripture, and certainly in any of the letters attributed to St Paul. We have to take account that it was written for and in a different time, different place, different language, and very different context. So when Paul is talking about witchcraft and when Pat Robertson is talking about witchcraft, they are not speaking of the same thing. Nor are they even necessarily speaking of the same thing when they talk about sexual immorality – or homosexuality.

Sadly, they’re not even talking about the same thing when they refer to The Kingdom of God. The Kingdom, as NT Wright and other biblical scholars often point out, is a place that is not in space but is yet on Earth and now rather than away and later. It is the reign and rule of God in the hearts of the people that live the new way to be human that Jesus demonstrated and taught (cf, the Sermon on the Mount). This new way to be human (to lift a phrase from Liberation Theologian Gustav Gutierrez) is a recognition of humanity’s Imago Dei – the fact that we share in the divine as we are made in the image of God and God – in the form of Jesus – shared in us, in our sufferings and glories and hurts and pains and cramps and laughs.

How do we know if we are a part of this particular Kingdom, away from the dominant kingdoms and empires of the world (and their ways of conquest and power), and the easy ways of the flesh (personal empires)? Besides the various metaphors that Jesus shared (which should also be understood in context), both he and Paul talked about fruits. What we’ve noticed in our series is that much of Christian culture talks about the fruits – and casts people in and out of Christianity based on how they believe another person acts in accordance to their interpretation of one of the “acts of the flesh.” Homosexuality is openly condemned as being “sexually immoral” but wealth accumulation is glossed over when it’s not encouraged and sanctified.

Another note: This isn’t about heaven and hell. The Kingdom of God isn’t about the afterlife (though it accompanies and carries through to that), and it isn’t about fear. It is about the here and now and about love. Let that sink in and soak for a good long while because, when it does, the power of imperialistic Christian standards die a good, silent death.

You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.

So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.

The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery;  idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, faction and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.

Click image for source

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other.

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Part 1 here and Part 2 here

Evangelicals and EcoJustice

Mega Pastor Mark Driscoll gets a lot of un-love from my corner of the progressive faith blogosphere. Where others may rally around disgust at Westboro Baptist Church*, he is our rallying rail. Among people who often disagree about a lot, I think we agree that the reason he is such a necessary punching bag is not only that he asks for it with such flair – like the would-be bully who runs to his bigger brother when he finds himself being called out – but that he perfectly encapsulates almost everything we find wrong about contemporary evangelical culture.

• He touts himself as relevant.
• He’s unabashedly masculine.
• His main motivational points are fear and guilt.
• He’s self-centered and arrogant.
• He focuses on male leadership and female submission.
• He’s obsessed with sex and money.
• He says some pretty stupid, ignorant sheeeeet.
• He’s a control freak.
• He preaches from the gut (ie, In Spirit and in Truthiness)
• He’s homophobic.

When he doesn’t preach from his white, male, middle class privileged perspective, he belittles those who aren’t.*

And all of this sausage encased in one bully of a pastor.

This week, we get another nugget of White evangelical culture captured by Driscoll– this sentence, delivered at the Catalyst Conference:

I know who made the environment and he’s coming back soon and going to burn it all up. So, yeah, I drive an SUV.

This statement could be just a joke that is taken entirely out of context. He could be saying that, even though I know Jesus is coming back, even though I drive an SUV, I know I need to take better care of the world. But that, coming from him, may be a bit of a stretch.

This is the same guy who said recently that wives are horrible to live with when they whine or complain, calling them dripping faucets – on top of the fact that his entire demeanor towards women in general and wives in specific is dismissive. Women exist for men’s sexual pleasure, and not for much else.

This is the guy whoses Facebook status a couple years ago asked his fans who the most “effeminate, biologically male” worship leader they know is. This targeting both managed to demean those outside of both heteronormative experiences (meaning, most dudes who ), and anyone with a queer, trans* identity – as well as males who don’t always want to strut with their stuff out.

This is the same guy who “joked” in the same seminar that males who drive minivans are mini-men.

Note. This isn’t a real minivan.

For Driscoll, “joking” is a way of asserting his aggressive controlling behaviors while protecting himself from criticism. The point is made – and men who don’t live up to his “standards” are summarily condemned and ostracized for not being “manly” enough. Women for not being submissive and quiet enough. And Christians for the slightest questioning of his dominionist, escapist, illiterate, triumphalist, and irresponsible theology.

This statement is troubling – and its retweeting without annotation or judgment by several attendees especially – because not only is it theologically wrong, immature, and shows a lack of concern for the near and remote future – it demonstrates a lack of concern for current conditions for the global and domestic poor and people of color who disproportionately suffer the effects of pollution and environmental disaster. Because those who live on the margins (right, Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans?) are most at risk and suffer the most by breathing the worst air; drinking the dirtiest water; not having access to clean or running water; having oil, tar sands, fracking in their lands, making farming and clean living impossible; developing and inflaming asthma and lung diseases; and acquiring cancer (lung and other types).

This isn’t a laughing matter, Driscoll. And it’s not something the Evangelical culture can ignore and football off – often using some form of the Left Behind eschatological belief system to justify consumerist destruction that physically harms the marginalized. Injustice is the opposite of love, and we show our love of God by loving God’s creation and those made in God’s image. We love God by loving and taking care of the marginalized.

That means questioning our dependence on oil products – gas guzzlers, plastics, centralized retailers, manufactured products. To marginalize from the pulpit those who care about such matters and the people affected by such matters sends a contradictory message: A man of God who doesn’t care about the people of God.

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All of these factors I’ve talked about several times and places before – as well as have – just to pick samples that are easier to find - Sarah Moon, GraceIsHuman, andRachel Held Evans (you’d have to type in his name and hit enter. Sorry for the extra work and #FirstWorldProblems. But this may be the most comprehensive post on him and his position within the conservative Christian location).

Emancipating Ourselves from Mental Slavery

Being an educator, I get the privilege of hearing some pretty outstanding logic being applied to excuse shoddy or nonexistent work – and sometimes within the work itself. But this is done by students who have not taken a single logic or philosophy course. There are various reasons why they make such time-wasting endeavors, but ultimately the old teacher maxim holds true: They are only hurting themselves.

The most absurd reasoning I witness, however, comes from those who fight for inequality. Not just those who deny that it exists in such horrid and wretched conditions – though that is true as well; it does take a weird sort of intellect to assess that so much evil isn’t really happening to billions of people around the world and here in the West due largely to the sex and color of the recipient of that evil (Glenn Beck, anyone?). But it takes a special kind of mind to conclude that that evil is necessarily targeted towards people of color and women for their own good. An mind enslaved to the concept of necessary enslavement.

In Christian circles (where I would hope that Jesus’ message of liberation and inclusiveness would drive out such demonic forces), this type of logic is propelled by thought-leaders such as Wayne Grudem and John Piper (sex) and Douglas Wilson (sex and race), but also in various forms through many, many a warm and happy Sunday morning church service.

Yesterday, I had the privilege of running across a Christian who argued that feminists and Liberation Theologians both had Hegel and Marx to thank for their existence, for without those privileged old White men, they would never have come to formulate their own selves, their own purpose, their own identity.

IOW, Thank God for the Oppressors because with the Oppressors you wouldn’t have the tools to fight Oppression.

This. This is the kind of absurd person one becomes when fighting so hard against equality and justice.

Let us not be that person, that person so mired in trying to protect what little we have that we go to great stinginess, and thus not only limit our reach, but ourselves.

In order for white suffering to have a voice, white people must realize the largest and most invisible way in which they benefit from their white privilege, and it’s the same thing that’s causing their frustration being The Default. If Person A is actively supporting and benefiting from a system that oppresses Person B, it is very hard for Person B to hear Person A say, “But I’m hurt too!” However, if Person A is actively working to dismantle the system they benefit from but which oppresses Person B, then Person B is finally seen — and Person A’s pain can be embraced. In order to see a person you must see the truth of their pain. If you deny their pain, you refuse to see them. This is what makes black people invisible. And black invisibility is what makes white pain invisible to black people.

And so we live our lives never seeing each other.

When White Americans see Black and Brown Americans in this way, Brown and Black Americans will accept their pain. It is a cycle that begins with destroying The Default.

The Default here is the idea that White is the center of the universe. We can expand that to any number of factors of being and privilege: Male; Middle Class; USAmerican; Cisgendered; Heterosexual. That any of these identities makes a person “normal” and thus others “not normal.” According to this perspective, injustice is a necessary form of justice, for the unNormals need our protection to navigate the world. They are helpless children or animals without us.

This kind of thought is so prevalent that it’s like air. It must not be disregarded, but must be demonstrated against in such shocking manners that the “Normals” realize that there is nothing at all normal about their privileges.

This May Day, let’s fight for all of our rights – and thus emancipate ourselves from mental slavery.

Won’t you sing with us these songs of freedom?

Who Let You In: Our Imperialist Christian Standards, pt 2

Landshark is next

Makes sense that I wouldn’t be able to delve into what Imperialist Christian Standards means before some Christian spokesperson/media figure jumps the shark on Imperialist Christian Standards. So, shall we give a hand to Chris Broussard for giving such a fine example on ESPN shortly after NBA player Jason Collins became the first active male professional sports player to out himself?

Personally, I don’t believe that you can live an openly homosexual lifestyle or an openly, like premarital sex between heterosexuals. If you’re openly living that type of lifestyle, then the Bible says you know them by their fruits. It says that, you know, that’s a sin. If you’re openly living in unrepentant sin, whatever it may be, not just homosexuality, whatever it maybe, I believe that’s walking in open rebellion to God and to Jesus Christ. So I would not characterize that person as a Christian because I don’t think the bible would characterize them as a Christian.

There are many troubling aspects of this quote. But it definitely falls under the gaze of ICS. For Imperialist Christian Standards is about not just the wrong standards, but also how whatever truths may be revealed and relevant and fitting to one person or group of persons is then automatically and institutionally impressed upon others within scope - as if they also need to know and experience God in the same way, manner, and place the first person does*. They don’t, of course.

To use this example, let us first consider for a moment the conservative Christian premise that homosexuality is a sin. Not that this is true nor that we agree with it, but let’s start with this as a premise to facilitate this discussion. And by “homosexuality as a sin” we must rule out the ideas that having an attraction is a sin, or that wanting to have sex with those of the same sex is a sin. Some will argue these notions, but many conservative Christians will rightly rule them as being double-minded and utterly ridiculous. Temptation is not a sin, they point out – giving in is. So, here, we would recognize the idea of the Christian discipline of abstinence. This is the idea of voluntarily giving up sex because the only “pure” sex is done within the confines of the heterosexual marriage bed. (Again, this is the argument, not to conflate my views with theirs.)

Under this understanding, then, Jason Collins is sinning by desiring to raise a family with another man rather than disciplining himself for a life of sexual celibacy. Does this then give Broussard the right to say that Collins cannot be a Christian?

No, it does not. For this understanding is an understanding within some frameworks of Christian understanding, but not all.

Christianity is a two thousand year old religion with various expressions that are in no way standard. As much as some try to limit what being a “true” Christian is (and this includes old order Catholicism, the neo-Reformed – think of preacher/teacher John Piper bidding “farewell” to slightly controversial preacher/teacher Rob Bell – and even many of my friends on the Christian Left who put quotation marks around the word Christian when speaking of those they believe are not practicing Jesus’ message of love and acceptance), it is a No True Scotsman fallacy of the highest order. The label Christian is an identity marker with no centralized authority. Claiming the Bible for that central authority, as Broussard did, simply doesn’t work when United Methodists and Independent Fundamentalists – let alone Russian Orthodox or Ethiopian Coptics – can vary so widely and diffusely on basic interpretation about topics like hell, the Kingdom of God, understanding the Old Testament history letters. And this doesn’t count various types and methods of interpretation within these denominations and even churches.

Even if we were to use some of the centralizing ancient creeds, not only do we have to admit that they were also of a place and a time and not inclusive of even the main Christian voices of the time, they just do not address sexuality.

Now, if Christianity – as I believe and as many Christians argue – truly is about relationship with a holy and loving God, then we cannot enforce or understand it by rules. Guidelines may help, but only if and when they are mutually understood and relevant to the place and status the parties share. Touching may be good and pleasant for some relationships, depending on where they stand, but disastrous and even abusive in others. And the types of touching also obviously change depending on factors like closeness, intimacy, fear, respect, trust, sexual compatibility, history. So the sexual ethos I may have, the weariness I have to alcohol because of past experiences, the type of language I can tolerate may be vastly different from how you can deal with it.

As a result, I may be able to offer advice for your relationship, but it would be awfully imperialistic of me to tell you how to live in your relationship based on how I live mine. That would be the British Empire coming in and redistricting national lines based on what and how it amasses land and can control the region. That would be forcing my economic system upon your land. That would be changing your own dynamics of how you deal with understanding your own relationships with yourself, others and God – in effect, saying that you are not human and not fully able to make decisions about what does and doesn’t work for you.

One more thing about these Imperialist Christian Standards that this example typifies: They are unfairly applied. Would Broussard have accused other male players of not being a Christian for the much more standard practice of premarital sex? He says any other sin done as a “lifestyle” would be open to rebuke, but has he ever applied such standards to other practices he would label sin. When a player dances in the end-zone repeatedly, does he cast him out of the Church for pride? Has he excommunicated athletes or owners for greed? Has he told Tim Tebow or Kurt Warner or Joe Gibbs that they should be comfortable with the money they have already received and not ask for more or tell them they need to sell all of their possessions and give them to the poor? Does every straight athlete who is found to have had a sexual rendezvous (whether married or not) declared to be not Christian? What about drinking and driving? What about the very common practice of coach abuse? Are these sins addressed to the severity of kicking out of the faith?

Are they addressed at all?

The only other sin I see getting such publicity are extra-marital affairs (and usually those committed by preeminent Black athletes like Kobe Bryant and Tiger Woods). Even rape isn’t condemned as loudly in most sports. Which causes me to question not just the emphasis of placement, but whether or not we should refrain from condemning sinners in public when their objectionable acts – unlike drunk driving, rape, greed, coach abuse – do not harm others. Maybe that should be our rubric: Does it harm others? If not, that may be a good discipline to have, but it doesn’t have to be another’s in order for her or him to qualify as Christian.

In other words, the types of fruit you bear do not have to resemble the types of fruit I bear.

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*This is traditionally understood as legalism – the rules established for one’s own benefit being suitable for all.

Abuelita y Mija

RIP Rosa. I miss you so much already.

By all accounts, grandma was a hot-tempered Puerto Rican. And a hard-worker.

But she rarely showed her anger at her grandchildren.