progressive christianity part 1

i’ve been reading a bit recently about how “progressive
christians” define themselves. partly trying to figure out if i
am one, partly looking for the roots of why the christian social
justice organizations that i hae worked for have been so self
congratulatory in their work and white in their makeup.

the center for progressive christianity has 8 points that they
give as defining progressive christianity.  my first reaction
looking at them is that they are quite close to my approach to
keeping the faith and at the same time are clearly articulated
assuming that progressive christianity is a white/ privileged
movement.

the 8 points:

By calling ourselves progressive,
we mean we are Christians who…
1.Have
found an approach to God through the life and teachings of Jesus.

2.
Recognize the faithfulness of other people who have other names for
the way to God’s realm, and acknowledge that their ways are true for
them, as our ways are true for us.

3.
Understand the sharing of bread and wine in Jesus’s name to be a
representation of an ancient vision of God’s feast for all peoples

4.Invite
all people to participate in our community and worship life without
insisting that they become like us in order to be acceptable
(including but not limited to):

believers
and agnostics,
conventional Christians and questioning
skeptics,
women and men,
those of all sexual orientations and
gender identities,
those of all races and cultures,
those of
all classes and abilities,
those who hope for a better world and
those who have lost hope

5.
Know that the way we behave toward one another and toward other
people is the fullest expression of what we believe.

6.
Find more grace in the search for understanding than we do in
dogmatic certainty – more value in questioning than in absolutes.

7.
Form ourselves into communities dedicated to equipping one another
for the work we feel called to do: striving for peace and justice
among all people, protecting and restoring the integrity of all God’s
creation, and bringing hope to those Jesus called the least of his
sisters and brothers

8.
Recognize that being followers of Jesus is costly, and entails
selfless love, conscientious resistance to evil, and renunciation of
privilege.

it
is points 4, 7, and 8 that i am thinking of specifically when i say
that these are articulated in a way that assume and centers whiteness
and privilege.

4
talks about inviting all, but without insisting that they will be
like us. whenever there is an us, even if you don’t have to become
like it, that us is the center and others may be invited but they
will always be others. From the work I have done in progressive
christian organizations i would say that the center is: white, upper
middle class to wealthy (possibly downwardly mobile), peace movement
liberal, middle aged, college educated, mainline protestant.

7
progressive christians are the ones who bring hope to the least of
these, not themselves the least of these. i fear that matthew 25 may
have been one of jesus’ most unfortunate teachings at least as i have
seen it play out in the lives of white, liberal christians (an
accusation, but also a confession), who are always serving people who
are less than themselves.

8
centers privilege by centering it’s renunciation. it is true that
everyone is privileged in some ways and oppressed in others,
but centering how you deal with privilege means centering people for
whom privilege is a primary experience of life. means maintaining the
margins and center of the wider culture.  went to the link to the
study guide for this point hoping that it would be expanded in a way
that the resistance to evil took precedence and muted this focus on
the privileged. certainly if a struggle for justice and against evil
was central, could be a sidenote that just received overemphasis here
. unfortunately giving up the idea that we are special becomes the
meaning of this point, which is not even a good definition of privilege.

i do think that a central task for christians is to deal with and let go of christian privilege, but to assume that all christians share a primary experience of privilege in their other identities

i do appreciate how these eight points are very concerned with focusing christian identity in action for justice and the questions and process of questioning instead of acceptance of a set of doctrinal assertions.

episcopalians and reparations

this october the episcopal church is to have a service celebrating a day of repentance for it’s role in trans-atlantic slavery. looking to see if the apology will have concrete action for reparations or just words. every diocese has been instructed by a resolution to research it’s history of how it supported and benefited materially from slavery and racism.

hoping that Byron Rushing’s quote, in this article, “”This weekend is not a one shot deal,” said Rushing. “It is the beginning of finding ways for the Episcopal Church to address the issue of slavery both from its theological aspects in that it is a sin, and was a sin, and from its political and economic aspects as part of the formation of what we know as the United States of America because you can not define America without a discussion of slavery in the invention of America.” bears out.

christian supremacy/ islamophobia on cnn

it’s a bit old i know

the whole interview is special but no need to subject everyone to it’s entirety

playing in the dark

just borrowed playing in the dark by Toni Morrison from Maia. fascinating enough that it will require a reread in the near future. she writes about how american literature has required the backdrop of the unfree and unenlightened other in black people to define and create the free and independent (white) individual.

thinking about how this same structure works in relation to the missionary enterprise and the pure chosen people of the church. how necessary it is to have the heathen and the damned to define the godly and saved and how racially linked they are in white american christianity. I remember growing up with stories of africfan missionaries and the imagination of them spreading the light of the gospel in the darkness of africa, racially loaded terms for sure and I definatly remember them being passed on exactly as such. remembering too the way that judgement was passed on people who made survival decisions outside of middle class morality that was so clearly equated with christianity. morality that allows for damage done to others at a distance where there is no face allowed to those who are hurt for your benefit, but not for more immediate, and less consequential, slights like shoplifting or fudging an application for assistance.

ave maria

Ave Maria, of the third world, full of grace, all you who know pain, know the anxieties and the subhuman condition of your people, the Lord is with you, with all who suffer, who hunger and thirst for justice, who know neither letters nor figures.

Blessed are you among women, the women of the roads and pueblos, of furrowed faces, of brawny muscles, of calloused hands of forlorn eyes, but with hope.

Blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Because without him, our life and the struggle for human dignity has no meaning.

Sancta Maria, all of you holy, a thousand time holy, by your lives,by the times you carry water, that you smudge your face at the hearth, trusting and hoping in God. He has made you Mother of Goid.

Pray for us sinners, for it is our fault, in one way or another by our egoism and envy, that you joined with the rest of the women and men of the poor, the third world, suffer misery, totalitarian governments,economic repression,wars and blood and hatred.

Now, so that we change, so that there will be a conversion of heart and of all men and women towards your son, our brother.

And at the hour of our death, so that the Lord have mercy on all who have offended him in our brothers and sisters, in the men and women of a world which is struggling desparately for life.

Amen

This prayer I swiped from Megan Mckenna who swiped it from the oral tradition of South America. I think maybe it shows the beginning of where a proper white theology might start in meeting god in the oppressed and being responsible and judged by god through the oppressed… or is it just more white exoticism? I believe that where i stand before god is where i stand before the oppressed, and I know that not one person oppressed by my privilege asked for the role of being the face of god to me.

chosenness and judgement

I think that part of the core of approaching theology from the perspective of privilege and taking seriously the claims of the various liberation and political theologies that god sides with the oppressed is to learn to look at the powers that be and our connection with them as a people who stand under judgement.

chosenness is a powerful biblical theme and has translated itself into the sickest expressions of genocide and history when it is taken on as a mantle by people already privileged and in power (think slavery, manifest destiny, inquisition). no doubt in the bibllical narratives the chosen are often the poor outcasts and slaves, but even there when they are not you get divine genocidal mania (the conquest narratives and the whole of the book of joshua). when white folks appropriate liberation theologies born in anticolonial struggles and say god is for the poor and so am i so i am with god we jump the necessary recognition that if god is for the poor and we benefit from their exploitation then god is necessarily against us and we stand under judgement.

the question becomes how to repent and defect completely from our privileged identities to side with god and the poor. there can be no questions of charity or somehow “pulling the rest of the world up to join us”  we are damned. in racial terms the question for me is how can a blue eyed devil be redeemed. of course oppression is not only racial and it is not only whiteness that is damned all social and identity categories that rest on oppression are damned if god stands with the oppressed.

priveleged folks talk about being allies in the struggle. i think that theologically this is inadequate there is no possibility of reaching out from a damned position (privilege) and joining the people of god. an ally gets to try to be a “good” straight, white, wealthy, western, christian…… but if god is for the oppressed those things don’t exist. can our demons be exorcised? or do we try to be allies and just do damage control?

full quiver

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christine-wicker/full-quiver-theology_b_111239.html

From the Huffington Post an article about a rather clear modern version of christian white supremacy (and overt patriarchy).

I was just doing a few minutes on google.

Al Mohler’s blog has articles in the same month about the problem of the falling birthrate in europe ( and how this spiritual problem will advantage countries like India with higher birth rates and more young peopleas the “population bomb will reshape the world map”) and the “nazi” eugenics of technology to ensure that an embryo does not inherit the breast cancer gene. Is he again worried that those who can afford this technology will be the white european elite? The second article imo raises some interesting and important questions about choosing what life is valuable, but I don’t trust the context at all (stem cell=baby, unimplanted embryo=baby, etc)

benevolent white christians enslave blacks for their own good

Pat Buchanan’s contribution to a national dialogue on race from his blog. It’s every bit as filthy as you would guess, but also flows quite logically from an exclusive (christian supremacist) view of truth and salvation.

http://www.buchanan.org/blog/?p=969

First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

GIMME THAT OLD TIME (TRIBAL) RELIGION

Just an article I found this morning
GIMME THAT OLDTIME (TRIBAL) RELIGION

I admire a good ghost story, especially a “true” one. I read tales of the paranormal. I watch those ghost investigator shows on television. And I’ve been known to take ghost tours in cities that I visit. I am intrigued by the idea of unknown realms beyond our comprehension. I love that glance-behind-you-and-make-sure-the-closet-door-is-shut chill that lingers for days after hearing a particularly delicious spooky tale. And I am fascinated by the places where history and the paranormal meet, like Gettysburg, Pa. But one aspect of ghost stories—true and otherwise—that I am not so fond of is the demonization of the traditional spirituality of people of color.

I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard reputed hauntings attributed to Indian burial grounds, angry shamans or the mere fact that “y’know where your house sits used to be Native American land.” (Cue ominous music…duh, duh, duh, DUH!)

Not as popular, but too common, is the “slaves were here” explanation. Watching a DVR’d episode of Ghost Hunters the other night, I heard a woman at a historic house that was once a stop on the Underground Railroad explain a supposedly haunted room by sharing the accepted lore about the space: (paraphrase) People say some slaves got in here an sacrificed an animal. (Cue ominous music…duh, duh, duh, DUH!)

Why do we never hear this?

Worried homeowner: I just don’t understand what is happening. Furniture is moving about the house. My wife hears disembodied voices in the laundry room. Our little Billy is interacting with a shadowy figure in the backyard and the dog refuses to go into the basement.

Ghost expert: Well, Mr. Homeowner, we’ve done some research and…some Episcopalians once held a church service right on this very land! (Cue ominous music…duh, duh, duh, DUH!)

What? Not scary enough for you?

As a black woman, I am sensitive to the ways that traditional African or African-influenced religions get a bad rap in American pop culture. I say this, even as someone who was raised a Christian.

The words Voodoo and Santeria conjure up all kinds of nasty images, thanks in part to racist Hollywood depictions of the faiths. Even I once bought into these beliefs being spooky and satanic. It wasn’t until I took a fascinating class on radicalism and the black church, taught by none other than Rev. Jeremiah Wright, that I learned the truth about African religions and how people of the Diaspora adapted them, using them for spiritual strength and to spur the battle for freedom and civil rights.

Voodoo is a religious tradition originating in West Africa, which became prominent in the New World due to the importation of African slaves. West African Vodun is the original form of the religion; Haitian Vodou and Louisiana Voodoo are its descendants in the New World. Read more.

Santeria is one of the many syncretic religions created in the New World. It is based on the West African religions brought to the New World by slaves imported to the Caribbean to work the sugar plantations. These slaves carried with them their own religious traditions, including a tradition of possession trance for communicating with the ancestors and deities, the use of animal sacrifice and the practice of sacred drumming and dance. Those slaves who landed in the Caribbean, Central and South America were nominally converted to Christianity. However, they were able to preserve some of their traditions by fusing together various Dahomean, baKongo (Congo) and Lukumi beliefs and rituals and by syncretizing these with elements from the surrounding Christian culture. Read more.

You may not agree with these belief systems, but I maintain that they are no more frightening than the Celtic polytheism that influences a lot of modern New Age belief and indeed some of traditional Christianity. Why is New Ageyness seen as benign, if not a bit silly, while African-based traditions on the other hand are viewed as dark and demonic?

Oh, I know this is a little thing. Ghost stories are meant to be harmless fun. I take them in that spirit. But it rankles when I see drumming, gyrating, chanting, scantily-clad Africans, bathed in firelight, used as shorthand for impending evil in some film. And it annoys me that the tour guide at the Underground Railroad stop mentioned above would assume slaves were summoning ghosties with their dark tribal religion, instead of, say, gathering spiritual strength for what must have been a harrowing journey to freedom.

File this under minor racial annoyance…another dull ache.

A conversation

So i am involved in what i think is an interesting conversation on the blog Holy Digression