I want you to understand that, if I seem to have rather a lot to say about the current US administration, it's because, as a white evangelical Christian – albeit one with a different set of cultural baggage and without a vote – I consider myself implicated. It's my theology that has elevated Trump. It's scriptures that I revere as holy that are being used to justify the policies and behaviour of him and his associates. Songs I sing on a Sunday morning are being sung six or so hours later by Christian sisters and brother who voted for him and are openly celebrating his advancement of their cause. Books and articles and YouTube clips that do the rounds in my social networks have their origins in the minds of Christian elites whose allegiance as events unfold have proven frighteningly unswerving.
There is no detaching myself. And, to be honest, the apparent detachment of other evangelicals rather disturbs than inspires me. Especially as I have a hunch that this detachment has theological roots in common with the reasoning that helped bring about Trump's presidency in the first place – roots that have further-reaching and closer-to-home consequences for the church's impact on the world than one demagogue's hopefully short term in office.
I wrote lately about the lack of a second person plural pronoun in modern English, and how this reinforces our consumerism-influenced tendency to 'take the Bible personally' where often it is better understood collectively. Towards the end, I suggested that "the narratives of individualistic Christianity struggle to accommodate ideas of structural injustice and corporate guilt," before promising "more on that another time". Well, now is another time.
In the superb Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Reni Eddo-Lodge unpicks common misconstruals of racism as the preserve of ill-intented individuals and explains why it needs to be understood (and addressed) as a form of structural injustice in which we are all complicit...
In such a context, the suggestion that we are corporately complicit in an oppressive system that none of us 'chose' and no one of us can dismantle on our own feels like a devious trick to reintroduce guilt and shame and to cast doubt and confusion over the claim that all our sin is dealt with on the cross. It is frowned upon as lacking in faith and proper gratitude to God. It conflicts with our ideas about personal responsibility, both because the claimed problem was caused by someone else a long time ago, and because the claimed consequences are that some people's opportunities in life are all but out of their own hands. (And all this on top of the usual heap of objections among (mostly white) people regardless of faith, such as "it can't really be as awful as you say because we would have noticed"). Besides (we reason) Paul wrote that Christians are all one in Christ, and acknowledging the constructed reality of race undermines the unity we celebrate.
But the oneness that Paul asserts (between Jews and Gentiles, men and women, slaves and free people) was very much counter to the divisions and hierarchies rife in his culture at the time of writing ... and that he found it necessary to spell it out rather suggests the church had some work yet to do to make it a lived reality.
Of *course* racial equality should "go without saying". But when, as is shamefully often the case, it doesn't, hadn't we better talk about it? And when the facts don't fit our story, hadn't we better re-examine our story in the light of the facts, rather than make like they don't exist? It is fear (I have found), not faith, that hastes to lock down my current understanding against all tensions and confrontations.
And actually, when we take in the view either side the Romans Road it turns out that the Bible is bursting with God's heart for restored and just community, in addition to reconciled relationship between God and individual humans. (See, e.g., this Twitter thread by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (very worth a follow)).
It's astonishing how deftly we humans filter out what we're not looking for, though. I remember eagerly anticipating a sermon series on the book of Nehemiah. "Is it even possible to preach on Nehemiah without talking about social justice and corporate repentance?!" The answer turned out to be a disappointing yes. Which is not to say that worthwhile things weren't said along the way. Still, I mostly found my mind wandering to the places where the talks didn't go.
I thought about Nehemiah's personal grief over the collective guilt of his community [1] (some of whom were back in Judah, while he and others remained scattered by exile), and his recognition of his own complicity. "When I heard these things, I sat down and wept. [...] I confess the sins we Israelites, including myself and my father’s family, have committed against you." (Nehemiah 1:4a, 6). And I thought about Christianity's role in constructing and upholding the racist 'logic' that legitimised colonialism and slavery. I thought about the then-recent response of too many US evangelicals to the white nationalist rally and subsequent clashes in Charlottesville. I thought about my own complicity – quick to benefit from white privilege, slow to listen to the awareness-raising of people of colour, slow to give my time, energy and resources in active response; afraid of and sickened by the ways that my behaviour and interactions with other people are shaped by bias and prejudice that are at odds with my stated, conscious ideals. For Nehemiah, corporate repentance began with identifying himself as part of the problem; later, in response to the public reading of scripture (Neh 8) the rest of the community were similarly moved (Neh 9).
I thought about the fact that Nehemiah had it relatively easy at the start of the story (cupbearer to the Persian king, while his fellow Israelites, struggling to start over in Jerusalem, faced poverty, disgrace and precariousness), and what he did with that advantage. In chapter 2, he uses his position as a high court official to ask the king for permission and backing to return to Jerusalem and help rebuild and re-establish it. "I was very much afraid," he says (Neh 2:2b) – implying that the request risks his position and likely his safety. Later, distressed by the poverty of the people he was by then leading, and angry with the exploitative practices of other nobles and officials, he relinquishes the governor's right to a food allowance and foregoes the financial contributions demanded by his predecessors (Neh 5). As someone in the process of waking up to white privilege and wondering what to do with it, I feel like there's worse examples to follow: privilege can be used to advocate for the benefit of people without it; privilege (or rather, the protections of it) can be risked in acts of solidarity; the advantages of privilege can be relinquished to resist perpetuating injustice (a small example being when invited speakers decline to participate in events without diverse representation). Having acknowledged himself part of the problem, Nehemiah positions himself as part of the solution.
I also thought about the disturbing aspects of the story. Among the acts of disobedience committed by the community was the intermixing through marriage with the neighbouring people groups – violating Israel's identity as a people 'set apart' for God. The book of Nehemiah is more vague about the practical outworking of their repentance than the book of Ezra, which makes very clear (in chapter 10) that 'foreign wives' and their children were sent away. Where were they sent to – and were they provided for, and treated with dignity? Was such an extreme course of action really necessary? Could the Israelite men not simply have agreed to refrain from any further intermarrying from that point onwards? Most importantly, was it really God's will, as Ezra asserts in verse 11? I don't have answers to any of these questions, but I believe it's dangerous to only raise questions of the Bible that we think we do have answers to. I want to grapple with what it means to revere and obey scriptures that include seemingly uncritical records of abuse and violence [2]. It is also dangerous to treat human characters of the Bible as 'blueprints' for godly living (or, as I am at risk of doing with Nehemiah, to idealise them as social justice warriors!), or to try to translate uncomplicated interpretations of ancient Jewish customs into rules for contemporary society. As it happens, Old Testament laws forbidding intermarriage are among those parts of the Bible that have been co-opted into racist ideologies, where they get wielded as proof-texts against interracial marriage. Just as we need to talk about difficult bits in the Bible, we need to talk about the uncomfortable particulars of our "Christian heritage". Otherwise, not only do we vastly underestimate the goodness of the good news – too big to need protecting even from our darkest truths – we also stand to reproduce systemic harms that are embedded in our culture and our thinking.
Which brings me on to Nehemiah 8, my favourite chapter, in which the entire assembly, "men and women and all who were able to understand" (Neh 8:2) gather to hear Ezra read the Book of the Law of Moses (that is, the Torah).
It's a far cry from the top-down systems of control and manipulation that we too-commonly encounter when it comes to religion. Within such frameworks, ignorance of all but the minimal facts is desirable as it makes adherents more malleable, less prone to ask awkward questions; emotions are suppressed and mistrusted as subjective distractions from the objective facts; performance of the right behaviours and assent to the right statements comes to be valued above the internally transformative engagement of mind and heart. And yeah, no, #NotAllEvangelicals, sure. But it's not difficult to see the potential for a five stop Romans Road-type approach to lead to (and, self-perpetuatingly, follow from) a paradigm of this nature. I'm not saying it's wrong to use explanatory aids! But we should (I suggest) be wary of making them our whole story, however reassuringly safe, simple and certain we find them. Because, as I've tried to show, when we mistake the very real comfort of the good news for an invitation to get comfortable – untroubled by gnarly questions or ugly realities, with leaders to do all the thinking for us – we risk implicitly assenting to continuing injustices, including those that systematically privilege white people over people of colour. It's hard to imagine Jesus settling for such a status quo...
[1] This guilt seems to have included (but not be limited to) oppression and exploitation of poor or otherwise vulnerable people within their community (see Neh 5), and disobedience against the laws designed to protect people from poverty (Neh 10:37-39 cf. Deut 14:28-29). Other themes (see especially Neh 9-10) seem to be neglecting to keep Sabbath and Jubilee, failing to look after the temple and those who serve in it, forgetting God's blessing and provision, and mixing with the surrounding people groups, including through marriage.
[2] Phyllis Trible's Texts of Terror is a truly superb resource on this score.
[Thumbnail image cc from Steven Damron on Flickr.]
There is no detaching myself. And, to be honest, the apparent detachment of other evangelicals rather disturbs than inspires me. Especially as I have a hunch that this detachment has theological roots in common with the reasoning that helped bring about Trump's presidency in the first place – roots that have further-reaching and closer-to-home consequences for the church's impact on the world than one demagogue's hopefully short term in office.
I wrote lately about the lack of a second person plural pronoun in modern English, and how this reinforces our consumerism-influenced tendency to 'take the Bible personally' where often it is better understood collectively. Towards the end, I suggested that "the narratives of individualistic Christianity struggle to accommodate ideas of structural injustice and corporate guilt," before promising "more on that another time". Well, now is another time.
In the superb Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Reni Eddo-Lodge unpicks common misconstruals of racism as the preserve of ill-intented individuals and explains why it needs to be understood (and addressed) as a form of structural injustice in which we are all complicit...
"We can just about recognise the overt racial segregation of old. But indulging in the myth that we are all equal denies the economic, political and social legacy of a British society that has historically been organised by race. The reality is that, in material terms, we are nowhere near equal. This state of play is violently unjust. It's a social construct that was created to continue racial dominance and injustice. And the difference people of colour are vaguely aware of since birth is not benign. It is fraught with racism, racist stereotyping, and for women, racialised misogyny." (Chapter 2)
"Racism is often confused with prejudice, and is sometimes used interchangeably. [...] There is an unattributed definition of racism that defines it as prejudice plus power." (Chapter 2)
"White privilege manifests itself in everyone and no one. Everyone is complicit, but no one wants to take on responsibility. [...] Racism does not go both ways. There are unique forms of discrimination that are backed up by entitlement, assertion and, most importantly, supported by a structural power strong enough to scare you into complying with the demands of the status quo. We have to recognise this." (Chapter 3)The trouble for many evangelical Christians is, this doesn't fit our story. Consider, for example, the 'Romans Road to Salvation' – a concise and popular way of presenting the gospel using verses from Paul's letter to the church in Rome. The precise formulation varies but usually begins by highlighting the problem of universal personal sin (Rom 3:23), for which we will each be held to account (Rom 6:23). That's the bad news. The good news is, Jesus took the consequences onto himself (Rom 5:8), so that when we repent and acknowledge Jesus as Lord, we are personally, unconditionally forgiven and 'saved' (e.g. Rom 10:9). Our saved selves are a work in progress – we continue to fail and fall into temptation – but our justification is through faith and not through becoming perfect (Rom 5:1). Above all "there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus" (Rom 8:1).
In such a context, the suggestion that we are corporately complicit in an oppressive system that none of us 'chose' and no one of us can dismantle on our own feels like a devious trick to reintroduce guilt and shame and to cast doubt and confusion over the claim that all our sin is dealt with on the cross. It is frowned upon as lacking in faith and proper gratitude to God. It conflicts with our ideas about personal responsibility, both because the claimed problem was caused by someone else a long time ago, and because the claimed consequences are that some people's opportunities in life are all but out of their own hands. (And all this on top of the usual heap of objections among (mostly white) people regardless of faith, such as "it can't really be as awful as you say because we would have noticed"). Besides (we reason) Paul wrote that Christians are all one in Christ, and acknowledging the constructed reality of race undermines the unity we celebrate.
Of *course* racial equality should "go without saying". But when, as is shamefully often the case, it doesn't, hadn't we better talk about it? And when the facts don't fit our story, hadn't we better re-examine our story in the light of the facts, rather than make like they don't exist? It is fear (I have found), not faith, that hastes to lock down my current understanding against all tensions and confrontations.
And actually, when we take in the view either side the Romans Road it turns out that the Bible is bursting with God's heart for restored and just community, in addition to reconciled relationship between God and individual humans. (See, e.g., this Twitter thread by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (very worth a follow)).
It's astonishing how deftly we humans filter out what we're not looking for, though. I remember eagerly anticipating a sermon series on the book of Nehemiah. "Is it even possible to preach on Nehemiah without talking about social justice and corporate repentance?!" The answer turned out to be a disappointing yes. Which is not to say that worthwhile things weren't said along the way. Still, I mostly found my mind wandering to the places where the talks didn't go.
I thought about Nehemiah's personal grief over the collective guilt of his community [1] (some of whom were back in Judah, while he and others remained scattered by exile), and his recognition of his own complicity. "When I heard these things, I sat down and wept. [...] I confess the sins we Israelites, including myself and my father’s family, have committed against you." (Nehemiah 1:4a, 6). And I thought about Christianity's role in constructing and upholding the racist 'logic' that legitimised colonialism and slavery. I thought about the then-recent response of too many US evangelicals to the white nationalist rally and subsequent clashes in Charlottesville. I thought about my own complicity – quick to benefit from white privilege, slow to listen to the awareness-raising of people of colour, slow to give my time, energy and resources in active response; afraid of and sickened by the ways that my behaviour and interactions with other people are shaped by bias and prejudice that are at odds with my stated, conscious ideals. For Nehemiah, corporate repentance began with identifying himself as part of the problem; later, in response to the public reading of scripture (Neh 8) the rest of the community were similarly moved (Neh 9).
I thought about the fact that Nehemiah had it relatively easy at the start of the story (cupbearer to the Persian king, while his fellow Israelites, struggling to start over in Jerusalem, faced poverty, disgrace and precariousness), and what he did with that advantage. In chapter 2, he uses his position as a high court official to ask the king for permission and backing to return to Jerusalem and help rebuild and re-establish it. "I was very much afraid," he says (Neh 2:2b) – implying that the request risks his position and likely his safety. Later, distressed by the poverty of the people he was by then leading, and angry with the exploitative practices of other nobles and officials, he relinquishes the governor's right to a food allowance and foregoes the financial contributions demanded by his predecessors (Neh 5). As someone in the process of waking up to white privilege and wondering what to do with it, I feel like there's worse examples to follow: privilege can be used to advocate for the benefit of people without it; privilege (or rather, the protections of it) can be risked in acts of solidarity; the advantages of privilege can be relinquished to resist perpetuating injustice (a small example being when invited speakers decline to participate in events without diverse representation). Having acknowledged himself part of the problem, Nehemiah positions himself as part of the solution.
I also thought about the disturbing aspects of the story. Among the acts of disobedience committed by the community was the intermixing through marriage with the neighbouring people groups – violating Israel's identity as a people 'set apart' for God. The book of Nehemiah is more vague about the practical outworking of their repentance than the book of Ezra, which makes very clear (in chapter 10) that 'foreign wives' and their children were sent away. Where were they sent to – and were they provided for, and treated with dignity? Was such an extreme course of action really necessary? Could the Israelite men not simply have agreed to refrain from any further intermarrying from that point onwards? Most importantly, was it really God's will, as Ezra asserts in verse 11? I don't have answers to any of these questions, but I believe it's dangerous to only raise questions of the Bible that we think we do have answers to. I want to grapple with what it means to revere and obey scriptures that include seemingly uncritical records of abuse and violence [2]. It is also dangerous to treat human characters of the Bible as 'blueprints' for godly living (or, as I am at risk of doing with Nehemiah, to idealise them as social justice warriors!), or to try to translate uncomplicated interpretations of ancient Jewish customs into rules for contemporary society. As it happens, Old Testament laws forbidding intermarriage are among those parts of the Bible that have been co-opted into racist ideologies, where they get wielded as proof-texts against interracial marriage. Just as we need to talk about difficult bits in the Bible, we need to talk about the uncomfortable particulars of our "Christian heritage". Otherwise, not only do we vastly underestimate the goodness of the good news – too big to need protecting even from our darkest truths – we also stand to reproduce systemic harms that are embedded in our culture and our thinking.
Which brings me on to Nehemiah 8, my favourite chapter, in which the entire assembly, "men and women and all who were able to understand" (Neh 8:2) gather to hear Ezra read the Book of the Law of Moses (that is, the Torah).
Ezra opened the book. All the people could see him because he was standing above them; and as he opened it, the people all stood up. Ezra praised the Lord, the great God; and all the people lifted their hands and responded, “Amen! Amen!” Then they bowed down and worshiped the Lord with their faces to the ground. The Levites—Jeshua, Bani, Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodiah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan and Pelaiah—instructed the people in the Law while the people were standing there. They read from the Book of the Law of God, making it clear and giving the meaning so that the people understood what was being read. Then Nehemiah the governor, Ezra the priest and teacher of the Law, and the Levites who were instructing the people said to them all, “This day is holy to the Lord your God. Do not mourn or weep.” For all the people had been weeping as they listened to the words of the Law. [...] Then all the people went away to eat and drink, to send portions of food and to celebrate with great joy, because they now understood the words that had been made known to them. (Nehemiah 8:5-9,11, NIV)What I love about this is the participatory nature of the faith that they are collectively re-discovering and embracing. The Levites gave the meaning so that the people understood. And just as their intellects were enlightened, so were their emotions engaged: first they wept, and then they rejoiced. And then they immediately began to put into practice what they had heard and received, gathering branches to build temporary shelters for the correct observance of the long-neglected Feast of Tabernacles (Neh 8:13-18).
It's a far cry from the top-down systems of control and manipulation that we too-commonly encounter when it comes to religion. Within such frameworks, ignorance of all but the minimal facts is desirable as it makes adherents more malleable, less prone to ask awkward questions; emotions are suppressed and mistrusted as subjective distractions from the objective facts; performance of the right behaviours and assent to the right statements comes to be valued above the internally transformative engagement of mind and heart. And yeah, no, #NotAllEvangelicals, sure. But it's not difficult to see the potential for a five stop Romans Road-type approach to lead to (and, self-perpetuatingly, follow from) a paradigm of this nature. I'm not saying it's wrong to use explanatory aids! But we should (I suggest) be wary of making them our whole story, however reassuringly safe, simple and certain we find them. Because, as I've tried to show, when we mistake the very real comfort of the good news for an invitation to get comfortable – untroubled by gnarly questions or ugly realities, with leaders to do all the thinking for us – we risk implicitly assenting to continuing injustices, including those that systematically privilege white people over people of colour. It's hard to imagine Jesus settling for such a status quo...
[O]n the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:16-21)
[1] This guilt seems to have included (but not be limited to) oppression and exploitation of poor or otherwise vulnerable people within their community (see Neh 5), and disobedience against the laws designed to protect people from poverty (Neh 10:37-39 cf. Deut 14:28-29). Other themes (see especially Neh 9-10) seem to be neglecting to keep Sabbath and Jubilee, failing to look after the temple and those who serve in it, forgetting God's blessing and provision, and mixing with the surrounding people groups, including through marriage.
[2] Phyllis Trible's Texts of Terror is a truly superb resource on this score.
[Thumbnail image cc from Steven Damron on Flickr.]
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