Column by Rev. Irene Monroe
 July 19, 2018

A pall hangs over many Americans since Trump has taken office. One sign of this dark cloud has been an uptick in dystopian novels. Classics like George Orwell’s “1984”, Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here,” and my favorite, Margaret Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale,” a drama web television hit on “Hulu” are now all horrifyingly prescient. Our devouring of these tomes is a search for answers to potentially a frightening new normal. 

While I am nervous where we are in 2018 after an Obama presidency, I am also reminded, however, of MLK and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. My looking back at that era gives me hope to look forward beyond this moment. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. articulated his dream of wanting every town and city throughout the world “Building the Beloved Community.” The King Center explains the concept:

“In the Beloved Community, poverty, hunger, and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it. Racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry, and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood.”

During the time of King’s dream of “Building the Beloved Community” Southern states had long systematized a peculiar brand of justice with its “separate but equal” laws that allowed for separate drinking fountains, restrooms, restaurants, hotels, to name a few. The South during the civil rights movement was a place where the entire country could watch African Americans being subdued by blazing-water hoses or being charged by aggressive German shepherds on national television. And at night, when no one was watching, the Ku Klux Klan rode through black neighborhoods to burn their property and/or them, brandishing fire and terror as symbols of white supremacy.

However, racism did not just situate itself unabashedly in the South; it, also, tainted life in the North for African Americans, albeit differently and less visible. And, although segregationist practices directly violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the federal government exerted little to no effort to enforce these amendments -- in either North or South. 

For example, Cambridge is my community, but it falls short of King’s dream. Cambridge, proudly dubbed as “The People’s Republic of Cambridge,” is ranked as one of the most liberal cities in America. And with two of the country’s premier institutions of higher learning -- Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- that draw students and scholars from around the world, Cambridge’s showcase of diversity and multiculturalism rivals that of the UN.

Cambridge is no doubt a progressive city. However, when you scratch below Cambridge’s surface, there is also liberal racism that is as intolerant as Southern racism. Just like Southern racism that keeps blacks in their place, liberal racism does, too. For example, Cambridge’s liberal ruling class maintains its racial boundaries not by designated “colored” water fountains, toilets or restaurants, but rather by its zip codes; major street intersections known as squares, like the renowned Harvard Square; and residential border areas that are designated numbers, like Area 4 (now known as the Port) -which was a predominantly black poor and working-class enclave - that is now gentrified by the biotechnology and pharmaceutical boom. Cambridge’s liberal ruling elite exploit these tensions by their claims not to see race until, of course, an unknown black man appears in their neighborhood. 

Segregation in this city is not only along racial lines but class, too. With Cambridge’s tony enclaves sprinkled with homes at starting prices over a half million dollars, Cambridge has become a city that is predominately white and upper class. Poor working-class whites and white immigrants do not experience the fullness their white skin privilege would abundantly afford them if they too were part of Cambridge’s professional and/or monied class. 

As Christians, we have to be careful not use scripture to tear us away from building MLK’s concept of the “beloved community.” For example, Christians like U. S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions like to smugly recite biblical scripture to promulgate their self-righteous acts of discrimination. In defending Trump’s indefensible policy of separating children from their families - even a child while being breastfed - Sessions cited a passage from Apostle Paul’s epistle to the Romans:

“I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order,” Sessions said. “Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful.”

While clearly, Sessions is no biblical scholar evident in his bastardization of Paul’s message, Sessions knows Romans 13 is nonetheless used as an edit to obey authority. The scripture has been used as a text of terror by miscreant thugs in power throughout history: slave owners,  Nazi sympathizers, apartheid-enforcers, supporters of Japanese-American internment and loyalists opposed to the American Revolution, to name a few. Christians like Sessions are now trying to apply Romans 13 to present-day issues like abortion, taxes and same-sex marriage.

If Apostle Paul were alive today I know he would be apoplectic with rage by how Sessions used his sacred text. Apostle Paul was about building a beloved community, evident in his writing in Ephesians 2: 15, 19-22.

The text talks about the ongoing struggle for human acceptance at a difficult time along the human timeline for the Ephesians. The Ephesians were a people of various backgrounds and nationalities. The two largest and warring ethnic groups in this city were the Jews and Gentiles. The temple the Jews and Gentiles attended was a divided place of worship. The inner court of the temple was only opened for the Jews while the outer court was where Gentile visitors were admitted. The wall of partition in the temple symbolized the temple’s system of segregation. 

When Paul writes in his letter to the Ephesians, “Jesus abolished the Law with its commandments and rules, to create out of two races one new people in union with himself," Paul is referring to Jesus lifting the legal restrictions that maintained a system of segregation and perpetuated a state of hostility between Jews and Gentiles.  

When Paul later pens in this epistle “you Gentiles are not foreigners or strangers any longer” the Gentiles no longer had temporary or limited rights in the community. Gentiles were now allowed every privileged and status the Jews had, like being known as the people of God, and being accepted into the family of God. There was no longer a group of people who were insiders and outsiders, no system of “separate but equal." The belief was if anyone comes into this temple, no group of people is better than another. 

In breaking down the wall of partition that existed in the Temple, Paul had not only broken down the hostility between the Jews and Gentiles, but had reconciled both groups to God as one body known as the church. Walls of partition have always existed in our churches. They are never erected as part of the actual physical blueprint of the church, but the walls are built as the result of our spiritual brokenness within the body of Christ.

In this present administration, we hear a lot from our president about building “The Wall” and making "Mexico pay for it." We shake our heads in absolute disbelief. But we build walls in our community, too, and we have and are paying the price of it. 

For example, I went to see a play recently titled “Allegiance. ” “Allegiance” is both a play and a history lesson of the forcible incarceration of 120,000 Japanese-Americans in 10 U.S. internment camps during World War II, and it is a cautionary warning about today. The play is inspired by the true childhood experience of the brilliant and renown George Takei.

If you’re a Baby Boomer, you may know Takei as Hikaru Sulu, the chief helmsman of the Starship Enterprise. Today we know Takei as one of the country’s leading LGBTQ activists, especially in the fight for marriage equality. What many of us are now learning about Takei is his childhood memories of being incarcerated in the Japanese internment camps - another shameful time in American history.  

"I was 5 years old at the beginning of our internment in Arkansas. I remember every school morning reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, my eyes upon the stars and stripes of the flag, but at the same time I could see from the window the barbed wire and the sentry towers where guards kept guns trained on us,” Takei wrote in a New York Times op-ed “Internment, America’s Great Mistake.”

“Allegiance” is also about the love of family and country, and the deleterious effects racial profiling has on innocent Americans. The play takes you into the harsh day-to-day life of the fictional Kimura family in the internment camps. It reveals some of the daily indignities many Japanese-American families endured - no private bathrooms, housed in horse stables, and if lucky, housed in barracks - in uninhabitable swamplands like Rohwer, AR, and Tule Lake, CA.

Sadly, loyalty to the country for Japanese-American males rested solely on their responses to questions on the “Application for Leave Clearance” form that registered all male citizens of draft age. It was also used for volunteers to serve in an all Japanese-American combat team, which is an essential plot in the play.  Their responses - young and old - on the form would seal their family’s fate in the internment camps. And, these two highly divisive questions were designed to achieve this goal:

Question 27: Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?

Question 28: Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any and all attacks by foreign and domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or disobedience to the Japanese Emperor, or any other foreign government, power, or organization?

A “no-no” response to the questions, as the patriarch of Kimura family gave, sent him to one of the harsher and high-security internment camps, which happened to Takei’s family, too.  

Because topics of race in this country too often is talked about in “black and white" terms, the history of discrimination against other minority groups gets overlooked. Case in point,  the Japanese-American internment is not talked about and not often taught, if at all, in American history books. "Allegiance" is both courageous and dangerous: it speaks truth to power in this xenophobic-stricken political times of building walls, closing borders and banning immigrants of color from “shithole” countries.

Watching the play one can easily see how President Trump’s Executive Order 13769, titled "Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States, "referred to as the “Muslim Ban” is eerily reminiscent of FDR’s 1942 Executive Order 9066. The Order  9006 authorized the immediate incarceration of Japanese-Americans following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

President Trump’s proclivity for racist remarks comes as no surprise with his comment about building a wall along the U.S.- Mexico border, but  I advise Trump read Paul’s letter to the Ephesians in order to “Make America Great Again.” One wall that Paul tore down was bigotry toward  Christians. And in so doing, he was then able to build up his ministry to the Gentiles; and, therefore, build a better church.

Paul’s letter to the Ephesians emphasizes the inclusivity of the church as the body of Christ. These letters to the Ephesians are the earliest evidence of the missionary expansion of Christianity because they were circular letters. As circular letters, they were never intended just for one church and its problems, but they were expected to circulate from church to church in the region. 

Paul’s letter to the Ephesians speaks to us who as Christians must carry on the work of building up the body of Christ by tearing down the existing walls of partition in our churches, communities or anywhere in the world. They remind us that the Christian life is not static but instead requires constant growth. In Paul removing the wall of partition between the Jews and Gentiles in their place of worship, he extends that act to us all by inviting us in communion with one another, so we are not foreigners or strangers any longer.

MLK shared his dream of the beloved community. Paul showed us how to build a beloved community. Where does your community measure up?

~ Rev. Irene Monroe

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About the Author

 

Q: By John
What are your thoughts about where progressive Christianity is going from here? In some groups I find it barely different than other evangelical sects, and other expressions seem to feel completely new-age without hardly a remnant of Christianity.

Dear John,

I very much understand that perspective. Over the past decade I have seen progressive Christianity trend from a more academically advanced group of people, toward a much broader type of “Evangelical Lite,” where the core tenets are to lean Democrat, sympathize with gay rights, and reject the idea of an eternal hell. And while that is all good stuff, if one suggests something like the physical resurrection of Jesus as being non-historical, some still struggle with that and want that person to leave Christianity all together.

As progressive Christianity has absorbed the Emergent label it has inherited even more of a tension between those two macro factions. Mainly, those who still see Jesus as ontologically unique in divinity in comparison to every other human ever to live, and those who don’t. Those who lean very progressive sometimes feel pushed out and unwelcome within this big tent they founded as their sanctuary from closed-mindedness. And some of those who are less progressive want to draw lines within that sanctuary and ensure that other progressives don’t dismantle Christianity to a point that is uncomfortable to them.

I think that path of evolution will continue to take its course. Only time will tell whether progressive Christianity trends toward a huge tent that caters broadly to most left-leaning Jesus followers. Or whether progressive Christianity stays closer to its roots as a theologically progressive leading-edge that champions truth and integrity wherever it may lead. My bet is that the big tent model will prevail, and those who originally labeled as progressive Christians will become more uncomfortable in the growing tent. My hope however is as the new breed of progressives come into the fold they become humbled enough to learn from the veterans who have spent years studying and wrestling with this stuff. And likewise, I hope that those veterans can still see value in the passion that those newer progressive Christians express within their still-somewhat-creedal faith.

~ Eric Alexander

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About the Author
Eric Alexander is an author, speaker, and activist. He is a board member at ProgressiveChristianity.org, and is the founder of Jesism, Christian Evolution, and the Progressive Christianity and Politics group on Facebook. Eric holds a Master of Theology from Saint Leo University and studied negotiations at Harvard Law School, and authored the popular children’s emotional health book Teaching Kids Life IS Good.

 Have you ever noticed that organized religion has historically been a major force in the oppression of women? Have you ever wondered why? The battle over abortion being waged in America today, with the support of both the Vatican and the religious right is simply the latest chapter in this perennial war. Since ‘religion’ is assumed by many to be something that is basically good, its negativity toward women is thought of as proper and justified. So the irrationality of sexism is first hard for some to understand and second even harder to banish. So let me begin by establishing the reality of the sexist hostility that permeates religious traditions. 

Throughout the world, a quick survey will reveal that the more religiously oriented a nation is, the lower the status of women is in that country. In Europe one can document a direct correlation between those countries where people still largely honor and even worship the Virgin Mary and the entrenched second-class status of women in those nations. In most religious systems women are regarded either as less than complete or as actually flawed human beings.

In the United States, during the struggle in the early part of the 20th century to amend the constitution to enable women to vote, the primary opposition came from the Christian Church, with the suffrage movement being condemned regularly from most Christian pulpits. The later defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982 was brought about by the combination of religious forces together with a right wing Republican administration. It is worth noting that the impetus toward equality for women in the Christian West did not begin in earnest until secularism’s rise signaled the decline of religious power.

In the Islamic Middle-East the impact of Shariah law on women reflects the same pious hostility by stripping basic human rights from women. Shariah law says that girls can be married at the onset of puberty and that a man may divorce one of his multiple wives by simply saying: “I divorce you,” in the presence of two male witnesses. The Taliban in Afghanistan acted out these laws with a terrifying severity producing a “Catch 22” situation for women in that women could not become doctors and no male doctor was allowed to treat Islamic women.

In China, where the principal religions were Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, binding the feet of girls and women developed in response to cultural pressure informed by religious rules. This practice kept women weak, out of power and under male domination.

In India, a land shaped primarily by Hinduism the religious custom for centuries called for the widow to throw herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, since the loss of a husband was deemed to be tantamount to a proclamation of the surviving widow’s worthlessness.

How did this universal human negativity toward women develop? Why was it endorsed and thus blessed by almost every human religious system the world over? What is there about women in general and women’s bodies in particular that appears to be so threatening to males that they have to employ religion to help in the process of female suppression? These are the questions I would like to raise and address.

I begin this quest by looking for clues in our human origins. Human life has been on this planet for no more than two million years and no fewer than one hundred thousand years, depending on how one defines human life. I tend to lean toward the more recent number since full humanity to me requires a brain sufficiently developed to become both self-conscious and self-aware, including the ability to live in the medium of time, which allows us to remember the past and to anticipate the future. It also involves the ability to think abstractly so that sounds can be turned into symbols called words, which in turn enables language to develop.

However, there is a huge emotional price that self-conscious, self-aware, time-oriented abstract thinking human beings must pay for these evolutionary advances. That price involves living with chronic unabated anxiety, having to anticipate our own deaths and thus to be forced to wage an unending, but always losing, battle for our own survival. It takes enormous courage to be human and our constant fears force us to seek security in a variety of ways. Our first response is to become deeply tribal in our thinking, since tribal membership gives us a better chance at survival than we have as individuals. The tribe then defines what is needed for survival and forces those definitions on the people. Assigned roles for both men and women are part of that. Tribal religion is always the enforcer of these behavior patterns since it teaches the people to accept our assigned places in this tribal pecking order. That order, we are told, was set, by God. God chose the tribal chief to be God’s earthly ruler. The Divine Right of Kings was born here. In our hard-wired tribal mentality, we learned to fear and to hate those who were strangers with whom we were destined to come into contact periodically. An alien would be outside our organized structures and thus a threat to our tribe. That fear still feeds our xenophobia and our irrational prejudice against those who are different by race, language or physical characteristics.

This same value of tribal survival also compelled our ancestors to define women biologically and to reduce them almost universally to a second-class status. Women were clearly recognized as the bearers of life and as those whose lactating skills insured the life of the tribe’s progeny. Those were essential functions for tribal survival but they were not valued in the same way as were strength and speed, which were the male values that assured survival in warfare and success in the hunt. Women, particularly when pregnant or nursing, were liabilities in this survival struggle. Since they needed to be protected and defended, they came to be thought of as childlike, helpless and dependent. So women were taught from the very dawn of civilization that their role had been defined, handed down and circumscribed by God, who made them the way they were. As dependent, second-class creatures their need to be educated was minimized and that in turn caused them in time to be viewed as incapable of learning. A women’s potential was thus effectively muted. The clear law of nature said that women were divinely fashioned to serve the needs of the male for support, sexual pleasure, comfort and the flattery of ego fulfillment. The male was obviously meant to be the dominant member of the species.

Tribal religion enforced these survival patterns and explained them in mythological language. The sun was thought of as a symbol of the male deity who lived beyond the sky and who ruled the day. The moon became the symbol of women, smaller, less illuminating, dark and even seductive. The sky, as the abode of the male God brought forth powerful male-like things: thunder, lightening, wind and rain. The earth was seen as passive and feminine. It absorbed the fury of the sky god, received the falling rain that came to be thought of as divine semen sent to impregnate mother earth, causing her to bring forth life. Since the woman was defined as subhuman, it is easy to see how polygamy developed. Powerful men laid claim to many wives. Harems were a fact of life. The woman’s destiny was to go from being subservient to her father to being subservient to her husband. She had few rights. It was her duty to obey the dominant male in her life. Her body belonged to her husband whenever he desired it. In most ancient cultures, the husband had the right to punish his wife even to the point of death. She had no right of appeal since nothing he did to her was a crime. It was inevitable that women, who are also driven by the ultimate human battle for survival, would develop survival skills of their own. They would take the only asset that they possessed that
seemed to have value, namely the allure of their bodies and use it to gain some control over their lives. They would flirt, tease, seduce, withdraw, taunt until they achieved power.

Since women were relegated to managing the hearth, they developed the intuitive skills required to allow them to live in close interdependent communities, while the males developed the individualistic skills that enabled them to be successful in their quest for food or victory. The stereotypes that still underlie our sexist prejudices were born in this primitive context. The stronger male almost inevitably translated different as inferior and complementary as unequal.

To make it even more difficult to escape these survival-imposed definitions, tribal religion almost universally asserted that these patterns were God-given, God-imposed and God-ordered. To question them, to undermine them in any way, to rebel against them was to oppose God and all that was holy. Sexism thus came to be thought of as ‘the will of God.’

This is why the feminist revolution is today so viscerally opposed by both the Vatican and right wing religious leaders. This is why Pat Robinson can say on the 700 Club: “The feminist agenda is a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” That is why religion has always been a foe of the female struggle for equality. That is why even today, that male-dominated institution we call the Church believes that its leaders have a right to sit in all male circles, wearing the frocks of their religious profession and to pronounce, in the name of a God called Father, what a woman can do with her own body. This is also why organized religion is so viscerally opposed to homosexuality, leading as it does to persecutions, purgings and constitutional amendments. The religious definition of a male homosexual is that he, though a man, condescends to act like a woman. Sexism is a very complex mixed bag of irrational and emotional elements. However, that is where the religious negativity toward women originates. We must embrace this insight first before we can move on to others.

~  John Shelby Spong

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