[Oe List ...] 11/11/2021, Progressing Spirituality: Rev. David Felten: “White Too Long” – A Conversation with Robert P Jones, Part 2; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Nov 11 06:11:33 PST 2021
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"White Too Long" - A Conversation with Robert P. Jones, Part 2
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| Interview by Rev. David Felten
November 11, 2021The following is Part 2 of a series drawn from an interview with Robert P. Jones, author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity on September 9th, 2021. It has been edited for length and focus. Read Part 1 here.
___________________________
David Felten: You've already talked about having been brought up in the gauzy kind of unreality of the Southern Baptist Church. What burst your bubble?
Robert Jones: It's been a long journey. Things began to seep through cracks in the façade and eventually, the whole thing shattered. When a professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary said that the beginning of our denomination was all about the theological defense of slavery, that moment shook me. And then I had a professor who had us read black theologians like James Cone and Howard Thurman. Their Christianity indicted the kind of white Christianity I'd grown up with, giving me a very different way of thinking. It was not just about personal piety, but justice, which had been pretty absent in the Christianity I'd grown up with.
David Felten: But your religious upbringing was not just about the absence of justice. It was about the preservation of long-standing racial prejudices. Your statistics show a direct correlation of being a white Christian in America and white supremacist leanings. That’s scary.
Robert Jones: Yeah, the data is disturbing. I culled public opinion data from the Public Religion Research Institute (which is the organization I founded and currently run) and used fifteen public opinion questions that were essentially about denials of systemic racism in the country. One example would be, “Do you believe that the killing of African Americans by police are isolated incidents or are they part of a pattern of how police treat African Americans?” Other questions referred to the removal of Confederate monuments and flags — all kinds of other things. Then I built the responses into an index where zero is holding the least racist attitudes and 10 is holding the most racist attitudes. What I found was that white Christians of all stripes score fairly high on this index.
David Felten: And you were surprised?
Robert Jones: Given our history, it may not be that surprising that white evangelicals and the more Southern conservative group of white Protestants scored eight out of 10 on this composite index. But what was surprising was the other two groups of white Christians, white mainline Protestants (like United Methodists) and white Catholics (who have their own history of being persecuted in this country) scored seven out of 10 on this index.
David Felten: Did you take into account the responses of non-Christians?
Robert Jones: I think that’s the lynchpin to understanding the role of Christianity here. Whites who are not Christian — who claim no religious affiliation — only score four out of 10. In other words, if you take your average white person in America and add “Christian,” it moves them up the racism index, not down.
David Felten: When I heard you speak recently, an audience member said that it sounded like what you were saying was the most effective way to eliminate racism in America is to encourage white Christians to stop going to church.
Robert Jones: Even when I controlled for all kinds of other variables and tried to isolate just the role of attending church, the frequency of church attendance for white mainline and white Catholics made no difference. But for white evangelicals, it was actually the opposite. The relationship between white evangelical identity and holding more racist attitudes was stronger among those who attended more frequently than it was among those who attended less.
David Felten: So what practical suggestions can you offer to curb this phenomenon for those of us who are still in predominantly white Christian churches?
Robert Jones: Well, out of my own personal experience, one suggestion is to know your own history and story better. We are living with a mythology of who we are and where we've been and what role we've played. If you pick up the glossy histories that churches publish about themselves (where the founders are all great people and did no wrong and were saints and all of that), those are not accurate histories. They’re at best partially true. Then every white church in America needs to ask itself, why is our building where it is? Why are we located where we are? Were we in a part of the city that was zoned all white at one point? Were we part of a racially-restricted neighborhood covenant? If we're out in the suburbs, where did we move from? If we were founded out in the suburbs, why did we plant ourselves in the suburbs rather than in the middle of the city? Were we following white flight out to the suburbs?
David Felten: In other words, if we’re honest, many of these decisions are driven by elements of systemic racism and a grounding in white supremacy.
Robert Jones: Yes, and because it’s not just what is taught, but what is seen, I think another thing to do would be a visual inventory. Is there a white Jesus in your stained glass or in the church narthex?
David Felten: Ahhh, the infamous Warner Sallman.[i]
Robert Jones: Yeah, is that there? And if it is, what is that teaching the next generation? What do the children's Sunday school materials look like? The illustrations in those? Is it a white Jesus with children on his knee? And that children's Bible that so many of us have seen? What can we do about that?
David Felten: And one of my favorite parts of your book is the story of the healing and emotional experiences people had when the white and black congregations partnered together.
Robert Jones: Yes, real partnerships with churches of color are a must.
David Felten: One last question. Your previous book, The End of White Christian America, details the declining membership and influence of evangelical mainline churches across the U.S. So, six years later, what would you want to update?
Robert Jones: I think the trends I outlined have continued. Six years ago, white Christians in the country crossed into non-majority territory, declining from 54% to 47% of the population. Since then it's continued to slide, from 47% to 44% — not quite a percentage point a year.
I’ll tell you one thing I’m less optimistic about. I ended that book saying that, as these trends continue, white Christians would have no choice but to accept the changing demographics in the country and become more welcoming and hospitable fellow citizens with the rest of the country. But that book was published in 2016, prior to the entire Trump era, and I think we've actually seen more of a digging in.
David Felten: A hardening.
Robert Jones: Yeah. Instead of smaller numbers motivating people to reintegrate into a more diverse country, among white evangelical Protestants particularly there’s been a hardening and a kind of doubling down—even to the point of openly advocating violence--that I didn't quite anticipate.
David Felten: The image of a wounded, cornered animal comes to mind.
Robert Jones: That's not far off the mark.
David Felten: So you would not shy away from saying that at least part of the reason for the division in the country and the growing hatred, animosity, and suspicion of one another is at least in some part, if not in large part, due to the fear of a predominantly white supremacist Christian culture becoming a minority.
Robert Jones: I've written that thesis on a number of occasions almost word for word. I think that's exactly right. It's one of the dangerous things we're living through right now. And we needn't look any further than January 6th where we saw this toxic stew of Christian symbols, Trump flags, Confederate flags, white supremacy, and antisemitism. Christian symbols were very prominent. The Confederate flag got a lot of press as it got marched through the chamber, but right in tandem was the Christian flag that many of us have hanging in our sanctuaries — that white flag with a blue canton and a red Latin cross in the corner. That flag was carried alongside the Confederate flag and all these other symbols of white supremacy by the violent insurrectionists on January 6th.
David Felten: And the response from churches was the sound of crickets.
Robert Jones: Yeah. The fact that there wasn't a massive outcry from white Christians across the country about that — a renouncement — particularly from white evangelical circles, tells you what a dangerous time we're in. And again, remember that white mainline Protestants voted nearly 6 out of 10 for Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020. All the press covers is that white evangelicals voted 8 out of 10 for Trump. But white mainline Protestants voted 6 out of 10 for Trump AND scored 7 out of 10 on the racism index we used in White Too Long. So, there is plenty of work to do in the mainline churches.
____________________________
Read online here. About the AuthorsRev. David M. Felten is a full-time pastor at The Fountains, a United Methodist Church in Fountain Hills, Arizona. David and fellow United Methodist Pastor, Jeff Procter-Murphy, are the creators of the DVD-based discussion series for Progressive Christians, “Living the Questions” and authors of Living the Questions: The Wisdom of Progressive Christianity. A co-founder of Catalyst Arizona and also a founding member of No Longer Silent: Clergy for Justice, David is an outspoken voice for LGBTQ rights both in the church and in the community at large. David is active in the Desert Southwest Conference of the United Methodist Church and tries to stay connected to his roots as a musician. You’ll find him playing saxophones in a variety of settings, including appearances with the Fountain Hills Saxophone Quartet. David is the proud father of three reliably remarkable human beings.Robert P. Jones is the CEO and founder of Public Religion Research Institute[ii] (PRRI), and the author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, winner of a 2021 American Book Award. He writes a weekly #WhiteTooLong newsletter dedicated to the work of truth-telling, repair, and healing from the legacy of white supremacy in American Christianity: robertpjones.substack.com*** Get your FREE copy of White Too Long!***
Three signed copies of Robert P Jones’ White Too Long will be given away to three lucky readers of ProgressingSpirit.com. Just add a comment with the hashtag #whitetoolong to the comments below or on the Progressive Christianity Facebook page and you’ll be entered in the drawing to win![i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_of_Christ
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Question & Answer
Q: By Michael
What are your thoughts on the existence, activity and power of the individual soul/spirit after death? Do these individual souls still exist and do they have any power or inclination to relate to us? If God is indeed Being, Life and Love, do not all human souls melt back into this Absolute after death? In a larger sense, if the individual spirits of the saints remain intact, does not the soul of every human endure eternally as a unique spirit?
A: By Rev. Lauren Van Ham
Dear Michael,This is a wonderful series of questions in this season of All Hallow’s Eve, Dia de los Muertos, All Soul’s, and All Saint’s Day. It is of concern, perhaps, for our egos to know whether or not we remain “ourselves” after death. Cultural expressions from around the world, and Earth-centered origin stories provide some imagery that I find inviting and helpful.
In his great work, The Labyrinth of Solitude (1961), Octavio Paz spends an entire chapter explaining what Dia de los Muertos means to his people, and also why the holy-day is so important:
“The opposition between life and death was not so absolute to the ancient Mexicans as it is to us. Life extended into death, and vice versa. Life, death and resurrection were stages of a cosmic process which repeated itself continuously. Life had no higher function than to flow into death, its opposite and complement; and death, in turn, was not an end in itself: man fed the insatiable hunger of life with his death… To the ancient Aztecs the essential thing was to assure the continuity of creation; sacrifice did not bring about salvation in another world, but cosmic health; the universe, and not the individual, was given life by the blood and death of human beings.”
In this description, each of us might feel less focused on whether or not we endure as an individual soul and find comfort, instead, in the service our death gives to the collective cosmic process, or "Absolute Love", as you’ve beautifully described it.
But you have also asked about a soul’s “inclination to relate to us.” We know about ancestral encounters. They’re real. The lives you and I are living right now are the foundations for the kind of ancestors we will be one day. Will we be called upon? I call upon ancestors (biological and chosen) when I am needing the sort of wisdom they wielded during their embodied experience on Earth. In this way, God as "Being, Life and Love" appears to me in a way I readily recognize and put to use: as the whimsy that was Jim Henson, as the courage that was Harriet Tubman, as the solidarity that was Cesar Chavez, as the loving, resourcefulness that was my paternal grandmother and so on.
Perhaps then, we return to the One Love, and "high-beam" our specific gifts of motivation or comfort when called upon. As a massive family of ancestors – the souls we remember and the souls we one day will be – we are unique and we are inseparable, serving the continuity of creation. May it be so.~ Rev. Lauren Van Ham
Read and share online here
About the Author
Rev. Lauren Van Ham, MA was born and raised beneath the big sky of the Midwest, Lauren holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, Naropa University and The Chaplaincy Institute. Following her ordination in 1999, Lauren served as an interfaith chaplain in both healthcare (adolescent psychiatry and palliative care), and corporate settings (organizational development and employee wellness). Lauren’s passion for spirituality, art and Earth's teachings have supported her specialization in eco-ministry, grief & loss, and sacred activism. Her essay, "Way of the Eco-Chaplain," appears in the collection, Ways of the Spirit: Voices of Women; and her work with Green Sangha is featured in Renewal, a documentary celebrating the efforts of religious environmental activists from diverse faith traditions across America. Her ideas can be heard on Vennly, an app that shares perspectives from spiritual and community leaders across different backgrounds and traditions. Currently, Lauren tends her private spiritual direction and eco-chaplaincy consulting practice; and serves as Climate Action Coordinator for the United Religions Initiative (URI), and as guest faculty for several schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
Examining the Meaning of Resurrection, Part VI:
Seeing Through a Glass Darkly
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
July 7, 2011Something happened at the first Easter. Some insist that it was an event that occurred on a single day. Others suggest that an experience was identified with that day making it a symbol of a breakthrough to a new consciousness. Theologians and biblical scholars alike still debate whether it was an internal or external happening, the result of sight or insight, but something clearly happened. We can measure the results even if we cannot identify the cause. Enormous shifts in attitudes are discernible, even measurable. We learn from Mark, the earliest gospel, that when Jesus was arrested, “all the disciples forsook him and fled” (Mark 14:50). In view of the fact that the disciples were heroes by the time this gospel was written, the inclusion of this negative report on their behavior in a time of crisis rings as an authentic memory that simply could not be expunged from the public record. The disciples clearly deserted Jesus. The gospels even developed a biblical rationale for this desertion, something that does not happen unless the charge was real. At some point, however, something brought them back and, more than that, they were brought back with convictions that were so unshakable that the Christian movement was born. If the tradition is correct, its leaders were willing to die for the reality of their new vision. What can account for so dramatic a change?
The disciples were Jews, taught from the crib to recite the Shema: There is one God, nothing other than God can be called holy or worshiped without idolatry becoming their reality. Something in their experience with Jesus of Nazareth, however, convinced them that this Jesus was somehow related in a powerful way to what they called God. What does it take to create so vast a shift in the deepest religious convictions of these Jewish people?
Whatever the Easter moment was, it came within one generation to be identified with the first day of the week. Jewish people for whom the observance of the Sabbath was a defining characteristic, found themselves gathering on a new day for worship identified with this Jesus. The Sabbath was not abandoned so much as a new holy day was added alongside it. What does it take to create a new holy day or to relativize in that creation the most unique, defining practice of one’s ancestral faith tradition? Something must account for that, but what was it?
None of this demonstrates that a literal resurrection occurred, but it does suggest that an experience, which could not be denied, called Jesus’ followers into a new place, a new understanding of God, a new consciousness and a new sense of the presence of the divine. When they tried of necessity to place that experience into human words, they called it “resurrection.” The Greek word, which they chose to stand for “resurrection,” however, was an inadequate word, for it literally means only “to stand up” (anastasis). That was as close as human language could take them to what they were trying to describe. They looked for other words. They called it overcoming death. They symbolized what they were trying to describe by suggesting that the veil in the Temple, which separated the faithful from the Holy One, had been split from the top down. One gospel writer, Matthew, likened it to the experience of an earthquake. Paul saw it as the breaking of those barriers that inhibit our full humanity from developing. Mark said that the impact of the life was so great that even a Gentile soldier at the foot of the cross pronounced him “Son of God.” Matthew tells us that all he heard the risen Christ say was: “Go into all the world.” Go, beyond your fears, your insecurities and your xenophobia. Go to those you have defined as different, as subhuman, and tell them that the love of God embraces all people regardless of how diverse. Out of Jew and Gentile, male and female, bond and free, there has been created a new humanity. Luke hears this death-conquering Christ tell them they must be witnesses to his life-changing power in their homes, i.e. Jerusalem; in their immediate countryside, i.e. Judea; in the land of their deepest prejudices, i.e. Samaria, and unto the ends of the earth where a universal humanity will be known. People filled with the spirit, says Luke, will discover that there is no barrier of language or ethnicity that will divide them. John tells us that the death of this Jesus was his moment of glorification and that in the powerlessness of death in which the human drive for survival is at last escaped, God will be revealed and eternal life will be entered.
The biblical writers tried in a wide variety of ways to find adequate words to make sense of their life-changing experience. As the years went by words that the original users knew were inadequate came to be regarded as literal and objective descriptions of reality and in time these descriptions became more and more miraculous and less and less transformative or real.
When Paul wrote between the years 51-64, it is of interest to note that he left not a single narrative detail of what resurrection meant or how it dawned. He gave us only a list of “witnesses” who were, he said, the ones who “saw,” however, he never tells us what it was that they “saw.” The earliest Gospel, Mark, written in the early seventies, relates no story of Jesus appearing to anyone. There was for them just a promise that it would be in their homes in Galilee, among the familiar things of their lives that they would “see’ him. When Matthew wrote in the mid eighties he became the first to describe Jesus appearing to the disciples after Easter, but he did so in terms of a Jesus who was transformed and newly clothed in the image of the heavenly Son of Man, borrowed from the book of Daniel, one of the most highly developed images of the Jewish messiah found in the Hebrew scriptures. Next Luke, who wrote in the late ninth decade or maybe in the early tenth decade and John, who wrote near the end of the tenth decade, both made the risen Jesus quite physical, making it hard not to think of what happened to him as a bodily resuscitation. Here was, they said, a physically deceased body reversing the death process, restoring destroyed cells to life and destroyed brains to thinking. These last two gospels make the resurrected Jesus eat to make obvious a functioning gastrointestinal system, to speak to make obvious a functioning larynx and vocal chords, to walk, to make obvious a functioning skeletal system, and to interpret scripture, to make obvious a functioning brain. Yet as crude as theses literalizations are, both writers also attached to these descriptions of the raised Jesus the power to materialize out of thin air and to dematerialize into thin air, to walk into a room where the doors are barred, to breathe on the disciples in an act that imparted the Holy Spirit and even to ascend into the sky of a three-tiered universe in order to return to where God was thought to be. Such language is literal nonsense, but it pointed to a real experience that words could never embrace.
In this series of columns exploring the resurrection, I have tried to isolate the evidence that points to the reality of the experience. The meaning of Easter dawned in Peter, who then opened the eyes of others so that they too might see what he had seen. It happened in Galilee in places that were part of the memory of Jesus. The dawning of this reality did not occur all at once, but rather it grew slowly over a period of time, perhaps as long as a year. It was more like the birth of a new consciousness than it was a sighting or a vision. It is noteworthy that in the gospel narratives no one sees the risen Christ except believers. Surely there was an internal, subjective quality to Easter that must have been more real than any possible external, objective quality. Does this mean that Easter was not real, but merely a figment of someone’s imagination? I do not think so for reality is so much more to me than objective data.
The impact of Jesus’ life on his followers was so intense it simply did not fade after his death. They kept awaking to new dimensions of what he meant. No act of human cruelty could destroy his life, no barriers could withstand his love. Jesus embraced the outcasts, whether lepers, Samaritans, Gentiles or the woman caught in adultery. His life could not be contained within the boundaries of religion. He allowed the touch of the woman with the chronic menstrual flow; he proclaimed that all religious rules had no value unless they enhanced human life. His followers found in him a life that reflected the Source of Life, a love that reflected the Source of Love and the being that reflected the Ground of Being and so they said “all that we mean by the word “God” we have experienced in him.
His call was to enter a new consciousness, to become free of the boundaries inside which we feel we must live if we want to be secure; to recognize that beyond self-consciousness, there is a universal consciousness that we can enter and experience what Paul called “The glorious liberty of the children of God.” There we escape the uniquely human struggle to become and simply begin to be. That was resurrection. That was Easter and it was Jesus who opened this new dimension of life to them. In the power of his example, undiminished by his death, they entered that vision and experienced resurrection. In that moment, they began to see that God lived in them and that they lived in God and nothing was ever the same thereafter.
None of this happened on the third day. That time measure is not to be literalized. The dawning of a new insight never occurs quickly. Jesus was the door, the way into life, they said, and they followed him into an unending new consciousness. Of course it was real. Of course it cannot be reduced to words. Of course in time the inadequate words they employed were literalized in an attempt to preserve them forever. Literalizing truth, however, always destroys truth, compromises truth and even falsifies truth. “Behold I show you a mystery,” Paul exclaimed. I wonder why we cannot allow the mystery to remain a mystery. “We see through a glass darkly,” Paul also said, but we do see and what we see is that when we have the courage to walk beyond the limits of life, we walk simultaneously into the mystery of God. That is where Easter begins.~ John Shelby Spong |
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