Here Are Your Prophets

This is what the Lord says:

    “You false prophets are leading my people astray!
You promise peace for those who give you food,
    but you declare war on those who refuse to feed you.
Now the night will close around you,
    cutting off all your visions.
Darkness will cover you,
    putting an end to your predictions.
The sun will set for you prophets,
    and your day will come to an end.
Then you seers will be put to shame,
    and you fortune-tellers will be disgraced.
And you will cover your faces
    because there is no answer from God.”

But as for me, I am filled with power—
    with the Spirit of the Lord.
I am filled with justice and strength
    to boldly declare [the colonizer’s] sin and rebellion.

Micah 3 (New Living – with slight paraphrase)

The more famous passage of Micah, where your sons and daughters will prophesy, follows this passage. We find where the prophets are when we dismiss the so-called prophets of the kings and queens – the appeasers. Those who disguised their words uplifting the oppressive systems of the halls of power, of destruction, of war, of racism, of sexism, as the Word of the Lord. Who sell their images as God-speakers, yet what they have to say sounds oddly and eerily what the powerful already say.

Not Jesus

One of the hallmarks of living in a kyriarchy economy is how easily and quickly the lower social stratus can be dispelled from sight and community with the elite groups. We can colonize, we can take the land and work and bodies, and then throw aside their personhood through colonialism and heteropatriarchy. This makes it easy for elites – for white, middle class, able-bodied, neurotypical males above all – to dismiss criticism and malign prophets.  For what are the dispossessed if not prophets? Do they not speak the Word of the Lord to the Kings and Queens?

Fortunately, we now live in the digital age and the voice(s) of the prophets are everywhere. So when a white male pastor asks where all the prophets have gone, he is missing the picture: they are here. Here is your family of prophetic voices. They speak with passion and knowledge and wisdom and joy and hope and anger and resentment and frustration and within community and from outside the very community they have been cast from. Meanwhile, the white heteropatriarchy asks why they can’t be nicer, why they don’t work within the very kingdom they have been cast from?

If you want the voice of God, it is not to be found in mass media (cf, pt 3), whose ultimate purpose is to support the hegemony of White Culture and consumer capitalism. You may find it in Dexter or Breaking Bad or True Detective, but these are shows of violent white males and I’m not sure how that is much different than other predominant White Male Supremacy voices of Dick Cheney, Exxon Mobil, or penal substitutionary theory (Nothing But the Blood, indeed).

Yet these same people will call Liberation Theologians “ultimately violent”* for loudly resisting the kyriarchy and will proclaim or accept the title of prophet for themselves. They will make racist, sexist, homophobic utterances about the very people they dispossess from the lands. They will talk about how inclusive they are, and how racially conscious and wow what Jesus Feminists they are, but promote White Males all day long.  They will present themselves as lgbtq allies while not just blocking LGBTQ people (but will engage with homophobes all day long), but talk about trans people as having a sexual preference, refer to “a gay lifestyle” and “sin” and say (repeatedly) that the “purpose for marriage equality is to promote lifelong monogamy, which is preferential for everybody.”

Did I say they block LGBTQ people? Yes. Yes they do. In fact, they block People of Color, feminists, and their accomplices – any critic who doesn’t take kindly to being tokenized and co-opted. Any prophet who will not kowtow to the White Supremacist, Heteronormative Patriarchal Structure of the White Western Church. This is because the kyriarchy is not used to being talked back to in such tones, so they will consider it an act of violence [link to Zahnd’s tweet on liberation theology being violent; other suggestions?]. You want to know where the prophets are? They are right here, but your mute button has put them on silence.

It is an act of intentional cultural genocide. In this manner, they act as Ahabs, erasing prophets from the land for the fear of being confronted with their participation in the White Supremacist, Heteronormative, Neoliberal Patriarchy.

Speak Out! by Chris Schluep, via Flickr You can watch UNICEF video here: http://www.theoneminutesjr.org/

And yet they have the gall to call themselves, endorse others who call them, and then call others that also look like them as “prophets” and “prophetic”, “called you in this time“. They use prophecy as a branding tool rather than a way of God speaking to the powers, to the oppressors, as Amos and Daniel did.

The Empire cannot prophecy to the Empire. White middle class heterosexual men are the Empire in this society. Rather, the sons and daughters of the dispossessed are your prophets.

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*Though Zahnd would later walk the statement back, he barely did so, in fact equating people’s revolutions (who were sometimes backed by Liberation Theology) with the violence of fascist regimes in Latin America that they were fighting against. But could we then not say that Euro-American theology is even more violent, since it has and continues to support genocide, war, and slavery? For more in-depth understanding of White Anabaptist approaches to Liberation Theology, cf Political Jesus’ “Anabaptist Theology & Black Power: A Subaltern Ethics Of Peace #AnaBlacktivism.”

The Cross and States of Denial

Content Warning for discussions about DV & erasure.

What do we know about the cross, about suffering, about a God who chose to side with the oppressed and was executed for it? What do we choose to un-know about suffering, about the oppression of black American men, rounded up, imprisoned for petty crimes, denied opportunity, released, denied opportunity, rounded up again? What do we know of women trapped in domestic violence situations and encouraged to stay there by economic, social, and physical forces? What do we know of homosexual, bisexual, or trans runaway teens, violently not welcomed at home, violently not welcomed not at home. What do we know about and yet un-know about how people with learning or cognitive disabilities are scorned, mistreated, abused, robbed?

What do we know of hungry children in a land of plenty, or hungry communities that we extract resources from? For here, we debate over how much food they can eat and in others we talk about our generosity in sponsoring little black and brown individual children, as if we are being magnanimous in either approach when we should talk about restoring to the communities what we have robbed them of, both domestically and abroad.

Graves and crucifix at Engelberg by FHgitarre via Flickr

 

How can Christians contend to understand the suffering of Jesus and yet tell sufferers – either through silence, policies, or through rhetoric and guilt – of all stripes that they need to be content where they are. That their lives are not as important as our comfort.

The claim that we really know where all the black men have gone may inspire considerable doubt. If we know, why do we feign ignorance ? Could it be that most people really don’t know? Is it possible that the roundup, lockdown, and exclusion of black men en masse from the body politic has occurred largely unnoticed? The answer is yes and no.

Much has been written about the ways in which people manage to deny, even to themselves, that extraordinary atrocities, racial oppression, and other forms of human suffering have occurred or are occurring. Criminologist Stanley Cohen wrote perhaps the most important book on the subject, States of Denial. The book examines how individuals and institutions—victims, perpetrators, and bystanders—know about yet deny the occurrence of oppressive acts. They see only what they want to see and wear blinders to avoid seeing the rest. This has been true about slavery, genocide , torture, and every form of systemic oppression.

Cohen emphasizes that denial, though deplorable, is complicated. It is not simply a matter of refusing to acknowledge an obvious, though uncomfortable, truth. Many people “know” and “not-know” the truth about human suffering at the same time. In his words, “Denial may be neither a matter of telling the truth nor intentionally telling a lie. There seem to be states of mind, or even whole cultures, in which we know and don’t know at the same time.”

Today, most Americans know and don’t know the truth about mass incarceration. For more than three decades, images of black men in handcuffs have been a regular staple of the evening news. We know that large numbers of black men have been locked in cages. In fact, it is precisely because we know that black and brown people are far more likely to be imprisoned that we, as a nation, have not cared too much about it. We tell ourselves they “deserve” their fate, even though we know— and don’t know— that whites are just as likely to commit many crimes, especially drug crimes. We know that people released from prison face a lifetime of discrimination, scorn, and exclusion, and yet we claim not to know that an undercaste exists . We know and we don’t know at the same time.
~ Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow, pp. 181-182*

Today we remember a man who rendered unto the poor and marginalized what belongs to the poor and marginalized, one who chose to side with the oppressed against the oppressors. Today, Christians, we dip our bread in the bitter herbs and remember – we know.

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*This quote lifted whole from the comments section on Corey Robin’s blog on Clarence Thomas and Lacanian Silence 

On Praxis Versus Stasis: #TheNewPacifism

Stoop down and reach out to those who are oppressed. Share their burdens, and so complete Christ’s law.
Galatians 3 (The Message)

I identify as a Christian, as a communist, as anti-violence, and as an anarchist. Which I know confuses the mess out of people (partly why I like to identify as such).

But these are words. Markers. They help to frame, but don’t quite place. What does it mean to be a Christian (and particularly a White, male, straight) Christian in the United States? Both Cornel West and George W Bush are Christians. What does it mean to be a socialist – as one tends to think of Che, Mao and Castro, of violent unions and Soviet propaganda or super-duper unions and guys on Macs talking about revolution in coffee shops? And how does that jibe with they typical understanding of anarchism – whether that be Sex Pistols fans burning stuff down, wearing handkerchief masks and beating down cops in the most popular imagination, or people who really like Ron Paul and Austrian Economics who insist that taxation is coercive theft and government is slavery.

Briefly, I believe in following Jesus Christ as my Lord and his counter-intutive ways of loving my neighbor as myself and seeing the Supreme Creator God in every person and interaction. This definition isn’t necessarily the same type that Billy Graham or Pat Robertson would use, but it fits in within the history of Christianity.

I also come from a tradition that states that Christianity is a central identity – that “once saved, always saved.” I suppose maybe that is true, but I see salvation as being something that is never complete, never full (of course, we mean different things when we speak of “salvation.” But Christians have generally meant different things by these terms throughout Christian histories and traditions): salvation as following Jesus and acting according to his Spirit as mediated in the world. It’s “captivating every thought and principality” and so there is never a point of completion, never a destination. Always a journey. (This idea isn’t unique, of course. Just rather foreign to some sections of fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity.)

Socialism and anarchy appear paradoxical. But, in short, socialism and anarchy combine to be the sharing of resources and wealth and political agency of each person – from what each has to what each needs (socialism) but without centralized power (anarchism). Generally, when people hear these terms, they also imagine a kind of netherworld destination. With these two, it is a place, a no-place, a Utopia. Rainbows and ponies and all that razzle-dazzle (not that there’s anything wrong with rainbows and ponies!) where all problems are forever solved and everyone drinks free milk pumped by brawny hands and sits on down pillows and 4000 count thread sheets sewed by delicate fingers.

But I can’t subscribe to that. There will be no such future state, because that is not who we are – we are not wired like that and there will always be someone to take advantage and oppress. Rather, I think of anarchy and socialism as trends, as direction, as practice. Not a future destination– but a way of equality and solidarity and mutuality where no one group or person is marginalized or oppressed for another, where all are represented and the underrepresented are finally represented.

It is for this that I cannot separate my Christianity from my praxis, my anarchism from my praxis, my socialism from my praxis – they must be more than words. They must be doings. Faith without deeds is dead, said the Apostle James, brother to Jesus.

Just as integrally, I cannot separate any of these from feminism and womanism and mujerism, from anti-racism and post-colonialism, or from anti-ageism and anti-ableism and all intersectional forms of justice and equality and talking back to the colonizers and oppressors.

It is feminism and anti-racism and anti-ableist agency that teach us how to recognize all people as fully human and respect places, identities, and the things that the privileged and powerful see as abnormal, as oddities, as less-than. These movements also teach us to identify and deconstruct the systems of power and violence that keep people in the margins and that deny access to integral resources and support. White men cannot quite comprehend the oppression and violence that black women face on a daily level through just the lenses of pacifism or anarchy or socialism because none of those strains are neutral. They come about through prisms, and for white men, they come through the perspective of white men. So we must learn to adopt and sync to other views as well; for though we White men can never lose our perspectives, we are foolish to merely retain ours as if it were the ONE TRUE objective perspective. There is no such thing.

Some would-be radicals will say that all of this is extra excess and nonsense. That all you really need is communism or anarchy or Christianity and the rest just naturally fall into place. But each identification has troubling aspects. Each identity must be subjugated to questioning and interrogation for its participation in White, Male, Cis-, Class, and Hetero-Supremacy.

When I teach or tutor or write or become involved in community efforts or parent, I consider that I am not the only shaper, that my experience is not universal; I am not the only person influenced and influencing this world. I can’t teach without desiring to empower my students and trying to meet each of them as not just students, but as equals, as human beings, as complex and wonderful people. I can’t father without believing fully that my daughter is a full and equal human being who is now a little girl and that I want to make the world somewhat better for her while helping her carve out a good path in this hostile world – hostile to women’s bodies and experiences and minds.

That is why I am not satisfied with just anti-violence or just Christianity or just anarchism or just socialism.

And so I listen to the marginalized and oppressed voices and I practice and I meditate and listen some more.

It sounds like something Jesus would do, bear with others. And so I try to act in accord.

Note: This is the third in my series on the #TheNewPacifism synchroblog, all of which are hosted by Political Jesus.