Moving Toward Radical Inclusion- Part 1

Column by Rev. Irene Monroe on
July 12, 2018

Radical inclusion must not be intellectualized but instead connected deeply with our need for personal healing which requires us to heal our “isms.”

Since September 11 America has changed radically. We have become a country where partisan politics rule the day, that we can no longer agree to disagree and shouting matches laced with expletives has taken the place of civil discourse. And this ugliness has imploded on us.

To build a huge tent of radical inclusion, we must challenge ourselves to hear each other and to understand not just our oppressions but those of others. Understanding the intersections of oppression allows us to develop relationships and allies.

“We don’t socialize together. There are very few places where black and white socialize together, which is the basis of relationships and friendships, the basis of understanding,” Earl Fowlkes told the Washington Blade last year, explaining why Pride events are segregated. Fowlkes is executive director of the Center for Black Equity, a national D.C.-based group that advocates for African-American LGBT people and helps organize Black Pride events in the U.S. and abroad.

“And until we start doing that and creating those spaces to do that we’re going to have misunderstandings and a lack of sensitivity toward issues of race.”

We must address deep-seated biases that impede authentic, respectful and enriching relationships as a Christian body. I am reminded of Paul’s letter to the Galatians in chapter 3 verse 28 where he wrote: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female for we are all one in Christ Jesus.”

But the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., reminds us that “it is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o’clock on Sunday morning.” We see that still in 2018.

Segregated churches began in the 1800’s. Richard Allen, born in 1760 in Philadelphia, was the slave of a Quaker master. As a free black in the 1780’s, he converted to Methodism and became an itinerant Methodist preacher. Allen could not sit in the all-white historic St. George’s Methodist Church. In 1797 Richard Allen founded Mother Bethel African Methodist Church, the first black Methodist Church in Philadelphia, and in 1816 Richard Allen led African Methodists into a separate denomination after many years of struggle against white control. The African Methodist Episcopal Church is now the oldest black denomination in this country.

Radical inclusion is an ongoing process that allows us to see, along this troubling human timeline, those faces and to hear those voices in society of the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the dispossessed. And radical inclusion can only begin to work when those relegated to the fringes of society can begin to sample what those in society take for granted as their inalienable right. And sometimes for that to happen, it must start with Christians who understand the biblical mandate in Matthew 25:35 where Jesus said: “For I was hungry and you gave Me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave Me something to drink, I was a stranger and you took Me in.”

With today’s nativist spirit of patriotism and isolationist rhetoric to “Make America Great Again,” we close our doors and heart to refugees. Evangelical Christians, in particular, fail to see Jesus and his parents, Mary and Joseph, were Middle Eastern refugees. Soon after Jesus’s birth Mary and Joseph fled with their newborn to Egypt as refugees fleeing from violence, as undocumented immigrants crossing the border from Mexico into the U. S. are today. And oddly, this isolationist rhetoric fails to recognize that the first group of settlers in America were refugees- the Pilgrims

In “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center,” African American cultural critic bell hooks states that she begins her analysis at the margin because it is a space of radical openness, and it gives you an oppositional gaze from which to see the world, unknown to the oppressor. It is at the margin where you can see injustice being done. It is not only a site where you can honestly critique the oppressive structures in society that keeps us wounded as a people, but it is also a site that can heal us as a people — both the oppressed and the oppressor.

In other words, it is not enough only to look outside ourselves to see the places where society is broken. It is not enough to talk about institutions, churches, and workplaces that fracture and separate people based on race, religion, gender and sexual orientation, to name a few.

We must also look at the ways we as an individual and a community are both the oppressed and the oppressor. We must look at ways that we manifest these bigotries, how we are the very ones who uphold and are part of these institutions and workplaces. Often, we find that these institutions and workplaces are broken, dysfunctional and wounded in the very same ways that we are. And the structures we have created are mirrors not of who we want to be, but who we sadly really are.

We cannot heal the world if we have not healed ourselves. So perhaps the most significant task, and the most challenging work we must do first, is to improve ourselves. And this work must be done in relationship with our justice work in the world.

In “The Old Man and the Sea,” Ernest Hemingway said that the world breaks us all, but some of us grow strong in those broken places. Jesus invites us to become strong in our broken places – not only to mend the sin-sick world in which we live in, but also to mend the sin-sick world that we carry around within us. And we can only do that if we are willing to look both inward and outward, healing ourselves of the bigotry, biases and the demons that chip away at our efforts to work toward justice and diversity in our churches.

I know that the struggle against racism is only legitimate if I am also fighting anti-Semitism, homophobia, sexism, and classism – not only out in the world but also in myself. Otherwise, I am creating an ongoing cycle of abuse that goes on unexamined and unaccounted.

When suffering is understood as an ongoing cycle of abuse that goes on unexamined and unaccounted for, we can then begin to see its manifestation in systems of racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism in our everyday lives. With a new understanding about suffering and how it victimizes the innocent and its aborts the Christian mission of inclusiveness, Jesus’ death at Calvary invites a different hermeneutic than its classically held one.

As an instrument for execution by Roman officials during Jesus’ time, the cross’s symbolic nature and its symbolic value can both be seen as the valorization of suffering and abuse, especially in the lives of the oppressed.

For those of us on the margins, a Christology mounted on the belief that “Jesus died on the cross for our sins” instead of “Jesus died on the cross because of our sins” not only exalts Jesus as the suffering servant, but it also ritualizes suffering as redemptive. While suffering points to the need for redemption, suffering in and of itself is not redemptive, and it does not always correlate to one’s sinfulness. For example, the belief that undeserved suffering is endured by faith, and that it has a morally educative component to it makes the powerful insensitive to the plight of others, and it forces the less powerful to be complacent to their suffering – therefore, maintaining the status quo.

Trans issues in our churches are not addressed enough. However, trans activism is taking afoot in DignityUSA, an organization that focuses on LGBTQ rights and the Catholic Church. And their voices want to be heard in Catholic dioceses across the country that will eventually inform and impact the Vatican. They must be heard in our Protestant churches, too. Of the many breakout sessions at the DignityUSA conference in 2017, I wished Pope Francis could have sat in on “Trans Catholic Voices,” because his transphobic pronouncements have been hurtful. Francis compared transgender people to nuclear weapons. His reason is that transgender people destroy and desecrate God’s holy and ordained order of creation.

“Let’s think of the nuclear arms, of the possibility to annihilate in a few instants a very high number of human beings,” Francis stated in 2015 in an interview with the National Catholic Reporter “Let’s think also of genetic manipulation, of the manipulation of life, or of the gender theory, that does not recognize the order of creation.”

During the “Trans Catholic Voices” breakout season an African American transwoman pointed out that Francis statements about transpeople deny them of basic human dignity and perpetuates violence against them. The life expectancy for black trans is 32 years old.

In her closing remarks, the African American transwoman in “Trans Catholic Voices” asked for help from advocates and allies in the room that nearly brought me to tears.

“Trans lives are real lives. Trans deaths are real deaths. God works through other people. Maybe you can be those other people.”

As Christians, we fail to realize that our gift and our struggle are that we are a diverse community within ourselves, and our diversity should not dilute our commitment and love toward one another, but rather our diversity should teach us more about its gift of complexity, and by extension teach the larger society.

The Kwanzaa principle of Umoja- unity-must take root in our self-understanding of who we are and what we decide to be as both a people and a Christian community. In understanding the interconnectedness between himself as the individual and himself as the community, African historian John Mbuti said, “I am because we are; and since we are, therefore, I am.”

We must cure ourselves of our indifference to each others’ oppressions. As a community, we must all pitch in. The belief among us that one oppression – ours – is more significant than another persecution sets up a hierarchy of oppression and keeps us fighting. The moral and spiritual challenge before us is that united we can stand as a Christian community or divided we can fall as a petty people.

Our job, therefore, is to remember that our longing for social justice and radical inclusion is also inextricably tied to our longing for personal healing.

~ Rev. Irene Monroe

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About the Author

The Reverend Monroe is an ordained minister. She does a weekly Monday segment, “All Revved Up!” on WGBH (89.7 FM), a Boston member station of National Public Radio (NPR), that is now a podcast, and a weekly Friday commentator on New England Channel NEWS (NECN). Monroe is the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail, Guided Walking Tour of Beacon Hill: Boston’s Black Women Abolitionists (Boston) – Detour

Monroe’s a Huffington Post blogger and a syndicated religion columnist. Her columns appear in cities across the country and in the U.K, Ireland, Canada. Monroe writes a column in the Boston home LGBTQ newspaper Baywindows, Cambridge Chronicle, and Opinion pieces for the Boston Globe.

Monroe stated that her “columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African American, queer and religious studies. As an religion columnist I try to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. Because homophobia is both a hatred of the “other ” and it’s usually acted upon ‘in the name of religion,” by reporting religion in the news I aim to highlight how religious intolerance and fundamentalism not only shatters the goal of American democracy, but also aids in perpetuating other forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, classism and anti-Semitism.” Her papers are at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College’s research library on the history of women in America. Click here to visit her website.

Question & Answer

Q: By Kevin

Has humankind invented God to look after life after death? One can say this in connection with many of the Gods in the Bible and elsewhere in man’s evolution, but is there a Creator of the Universe? If so, after studying the cosmos, one must conclude that it must be entirely different from what we have assumed, so far. If so, this might explain why we have produced such a cruel world with most of us thinking only of our own survival. But, again, there are so many examples of selflessness and good!

A: By Toni Reynolds

Dear Kevin,

I think there is something of a God vs. Science question beneath the ones you’ve posed.

I do think that humans created stories, and rituals to articulate their experiences of/with God. All in attempt to better understand their relationship to their experiences. I am not convinced that humans invented God, most definitely not just so that God could oversee the afterlife. Through those rituals and applications of the stories, I think the civilizations before ours were deciding about the intricate ways in which God works here and out there in the cosmos you speak of. In these ways we got many of the stories found in the Bible as recorded observations from generations as they studied their relationship to God and the people around them. Today, we are more comfortable using the framework of science to explain and relate to phenomena. Experientially, I think the authors of religious stories had a similar project to yours and simply used a different toolbox to work out potential answers.

I don’t quite know what to conclude about the Creator after a study of the cosmos. It seems to me that even among the specialists there is quite a range of conclusions to be drawn about such divine architecture…I would love to know more about what you conclude yourself, as well as how that conclusion informs the way you see the world at work on any given day.

The unknown details of the Creator don’t shift my thoughts when it comes to your final piece about the production of cruelty in our world. When bad things happen it can be easy to say, “what a cruel world we live in” without interrogating the ways we are organized and, therefore, enabling or altogether creating the catastrophes we recognize as “cruel”. Though God has made this world, and us in it, I do not think God should get credit for making or even allowing the evils we experience and perpetuate. We are creators here too. We are not separate from God; blame can’t go on one side and us, blameless on the other. Our decisions have consequences and we can no longer shove the responsibility into the hands of God and fain ignorance. God cannot force us to act in accordance with the rest of nature--partnering with other organisms to live symbiotically. As humans we get to choose to do that, it is no fault of the Creator when we don’t. We can make a better world than this.

If there is a creator God, and I truly think there is, I imagine that creator God is wondering how we could stray so far off the pattern of creation, blame God for the woes, and seriously expect tomorrow to be better without changing our bad habits.

You are right, there are so many examples of selflessness and goodness. I hope we can grow those examples so that they become general traits of society, instead of just fringe examples.

With you in making more examples of goodness,

~ Toni Reynolds

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About the Author

Minister Toni Anne Reynolds is committed to singing flesh onto the bones of the Christian tradition by incorporating recently found texts of the ancient world into liturgy, sermons, and poetry. Toni’s Christianity forms a holy trinity with the psychological medicine of Tibetan Buddhism and the eternal Life found in Yoruba traditions. Balanced in an eclectic faith and focused in theology, Toni’s ministry offers a unique perspective on life, theology, and spirituality.

Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

Troy D. Perry - One of God's Original Saints

 Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
November 9, 2005

It all began on October 6, 1968. On that day, twelve people gathered in a house in Los Angeles in response to an advertisement in a four-page magazine for homosexuals called “The Advocate.” This ad was addressed to gay men and lesbians who might want to be a part of a Christian Church in which they did not have to hide. The advertisement, signed by the Rev. Troy D. Perry, gave a specific address where this first service of worship would take place. Of the twelve who gathered on that date, two were a heterosexual couple, the other ten were homosexuals. One was African American, one Hispanic; seven were males and five were females. That was the founding moment for what came to be called The Metropolitan Community Church, which now has 330 congregations located in 22 countries. Troy D. Perry, then a 28-year old Pentecostal preacher, is now a world figure, the recipient of numerous honorary degrees, a person from whom presidents and presidential candidates have sought advice, a friend of Desmond Tutu and a religious leader invited to meet with John Paul II on one of his visits to the United States.

On October 30, 2005 in the National Cathedral of the Episcopal Church in Washington. D.C., the place from which presidents have been buried, Troy Perry’s successor, The Rev. Nancy Wilson, was installed as the second Moderator of the Worldwide Fellowship of The Metropolitan Community Church. That setting and transition was in itself symbolic of the remarkable journey made by this incredible man, whose story needs to be told and whose contribution to the life of the Christian Church needs to be recognized.

Troy Perry was born in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1940, the oldest in what was to be a family of five children. His mother was a Southern Baptist; his father a member of the Pentecostal Church of God, though that membership might have been compromised by his father’s profession. He was, what we called in the South in those days, ‘a bootlegger,’ one who made illegal whisky available to those who were willing to pay for this service. Even as a young child, Troy was deeply drawn to the church and yearned to be a preacher. In Southern evangelical circles, the call to preach was far more important than any academic preparation designed to equip one for that duty. It was quite enough to be “open to the Spirit.” Troy was a gifted boy who spoke well and by the age of 13 he had achieved a reputation of some significance. He preached to his classmates before school every Wednesday with more than a little interest being expressed by the crowds of students and faculty that gathered. Soon, he was given a preaching license by the Southern Baptists and became known in his expanding Bible Belt orbit of North Florida, Alabama and South Georgia as “the Teen-Aged Evangelist.”

Like so many people of that era in the South, Troy had no idea what a homosexual was but he knew he had attractions toward other males his age. Fearing that there was something wrong with him, he consulted a written source provided by his church, which informed him that homosexuals were “sick people who wore dresses and molested children.” Since neither was true of him, he breathed a sigh of relief. Later when his fears did not go away, he turned to a Pentecostal preacher and was told that all he had to do was to get married and his fantasies would disappear. Troy responded by marrying that man’s 18-year-old daughter. It lasted five years and produced two sons. When the marriage ended, Troy went into the army. Vietnam was to be his destiny. As part of his medical examination, he was asked to check whether or not he had “any homosexual tendencies.” The question, he said, came right after cancer and tuberculosis. He checked ‘yes.’ Nonetheless, he was taken in, given top security clearance and became a computer expert. He served well, was given an honorable discharge and began to work for Sears. In time, he became a division manager. However, his heart still drew him toward his pastor’s calling, so back to being a Pentecostal preacher he went. By this time, however, he was quite sure he was a homosexual and had had gay liaisons. The church he was serving, however, was quite sure that homosexuality was sinful, depraved behavior. One survived in that atmosphere only by being dishonest. Hiding never works and Troy was discovered, banished from that church and his license to preach revoked. It was for him a moment of great despair. With the help of his first partner he coped with that rejection. When that relationship broke up, his depression was so deep that he slashed his wrists in a suicide attempt that failed. From somewhere, he says, in that moment of darkness, he found an overwhelming sense of God’s love for him. That, he concluded, was the heart of the Gospel – God loves me. He noticed when he read the Bible that even those who forsook, denied, betrayed, tortured and crucified Jesus were still the beloved of God. Aided by this conviction he began to form a new consciousness. His logic went like this: God loves me. I am gay. Therefore God must love gays. “The Lord is my shepherd, he knows I’m gay” became his theme. He still felt a great desire to preach but the churches with which he was familiar were not open to him in his new found honesty. Their fear and hostility toward homosexual people expressed itself in mistaken attempts to turn them into heterosexuals and, if that failed, to assure them that hell was their destiny. Troy understood that sexual orientation is not a choice for anyone; it is part of our identity to which we awaken. Mental health begins, he believed, in self-acceptance not self-rejection. So coming to the conclusion that there must be others just like himself who yearned to practice the faith in which they had been reared, Troy asked himself the question that would change his life: Could there be a worship community in the Christian tradition for those who are honest about their homosexuality? That was the moment when he placed the advertisement in “The Advocate.”

To issue a public call for homosexuals to gather at a specific address was a bold act in 1968. Hate crimes were quite normal in that day. To sign that advertisement with one’s real name and to provide one’s telephone number was thought foolhardy even by Troy’s friends. Having no idea what a vast audience was waiting for this catalyst, he accepted the risk. There are today MCC churches in every major city in America and Canada; some of them bulging at the seams with members. Interestingly enough, their strength is primarily in the South, by which I mean that stretch of states that once constituted the heart of Dixie, from Texas to Florida. The MCC conducts an annual conference each year to which as many as ten thousand are in attendance. Today their pastors are trained in accredited seminaries like The Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Union in New York City, Harvard Divinity School, the Divinity School of the University of Chicago and the Vancouver School of Theology among others. This Church continues to grow and is beginning to attract young gay people who feel alienated from those churches that condemn what they know they are.

I first met Troy Perry in 1991 when the Episcopal National Convention and the MCC National Conference were both meeting in Phoenix. My book, “Living in Sin?” had come out in 1988 and had placed me in the national eye since in that book I called for the State to make homosexual unions legal and for the Church to give these unions the blessing we bestow in marriage. I also challenged the Church to be honest about its gay clergy whose name was and is legion. Acting on this conviction, I ordained to the priesthood in December of 1989 America’s first openly homosexual person living in a publicly acknowledged, committed relationship. The hostility I absorbed was overwhelming. Hate mail poured in; abusive telephone calls, even death threats, were plentiful. The House of Bishops in September of 2000 had voted to disassociate themselves from me for this action by a slender 78-74 margin, with two abstentions, one of which was my own. I honestly did not know how to vote on whether or not I wanted to associate with myself! Prior to this vote, I had carried this battle to the airways of this nation with appearances on CBS This Morning, the Phil Donahue Show, the Oprah Winfrey Show, and even Bill Buckley’s Firing Line. Despite the rejecting anger that engulfed me, I felt compelled to see this battle through. When I prepared to go to the General Convention of my Church in1991 in Phoenix, I was sure the debate would be intense and that I would be abused again in speech after speech. When Troy heard that I was in town, he invited me to speak to his National Conference. Christine and I had dinner with him prior to my talk, at which time I could not help but be aware of the heavy security around him. One manifestation of this was his insistence that we ride in separate cars to the hall where his delegates gathered. When we arrived Troy led Chris and me onto the stage, but before any word of introduction had been spoken, the entire assembly rose as one and gave us a sustained, indeed a thunderous, ovation that lasted for ten literal minutes. It was like having all of our wounds bathed with healing love. We stood there teary eyed, taking it all in. If what we had done meant that much to this many, it was worth all the hostility we had absorbed. From that day to this, Troy has been a close friend. We have dinner with him when in Los Angeles. We consult on the phone on various strategies and opportunities and I have spoken in MCC churches in five countries. I was touched when he asked me to speak at his retirement.

Troy Perry made the Church more whole, inclusive and yes more Christian. MCC had to be formed to show the rest of us how unwelcoming we had been to some of God’s children. Troy knew full well that when Christians sang, “Just as I am without a plea, O Lamb of God, I come,” they had to mean it. He knew that Jesus had said: “Come unto me all of ye,” not “some of ye.” I will always be grateful for the existence of The Metropolitan Community Church and for Troy D. Perry, its enormously talented founder and first moderator.

~  John Shelby Spong

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