One Voice for Change is for Our Daughters (And Our Sons)

Today is the first day of the Pepperdine Bible Lectures. One of the things that One Voice for Change, which I’ve blogged about over the last couple of days, is advocating for is the inclusion of women as keynote speakers at such events. I want to affirm that stance as an appropriate and proper stance. There needs to be women included as keynote speakers beginning in 2014. The time is now.

“The time is now.” I’ve been asked why I keep using that phrase when talking about 1V4C. Here’s one reason: Our churches will continue to die, numerically and spiritually, if we do not follow God’s leading and affirm the gifts and callings of all of our fellow Christians. Any Church that does not follow where the Spirit leads is a Church that cuts itself off from the One who gives life.

I can’t count the number of people I know who have left, or who are considering leaving, churches of Christ because they have had a daughter. Indeed, after my initial blog post on this topic complete strangers reached out to me on social media to say that they left churches of Christ for exactly this reason. They often leave quietly, because they still have a love for the Church and its people, but they do leave. These people consistently say that they refuse to raise their daughters in churches that treat them as “less than”: less than their brothers, less than their friends, less than their callings, less than their worth to God, less than they are treated in the world. Many people who have remained in churches of Christ for years refuse to stay when staying would mean raising their daughter in such an environment.

Our churches form us. They train us how to see and live in the world. And too many of our daughters have been formed to believe that they are not worthy of being in a position of spiritual leadership simply because of their sex. They are being mis-formed into believing that they do not bear God’s image in the same way that males do. They are being mis-formed into believing that their words are less significant than the words spoken by men. They are being mis-formed into believing that their gifts are not meant to be used in public.

And it’s not just our daughters. Our sons are being mis-formed as well. They are being mis-formed into believing that their sex makes them superior to their sisters. They are being mis-formed into believing that there is something inherently wrong about women’s voices being heard in public. They are being mis-formed into people who will silence and subjugate women in the future. Martin Luther King Jr. once said that Jim Crow hurt white people as well as black people. Just as it wrongly taught black people that they were “less than” and inferior to whites, Jim Crow wrongly gave white people a false sense of superiority, entitlement, and led them to believe that they had a right to treat others unjustly. Jim Crow, in short, taught white people to be sinners who regularly hurt other people. Sadly, many of our churches and institutions teach men to be sinners who hurt other people (their sisters) as well.

Our daughters and our sons are being mis-formed by our practice of silencing our women. It is because of them that I insist that the time is now. It is not tomorrow, next week, next year, or twenty years from now. The time is now. Our daughters (and our sons) must see women leading in their churches (and speaking at events like lectureships) if they are to be formed into people who can recognize and affirm whomever God chooses to call. If they do not they will continue to be mis-formed. And people will keep having daughters (and sons) and rightfully choose to have their children formed elsewhere.

A chance to win $10,000: Or, the abuse of the Bible by Creationists

Joseph Mastropaolo is offering $10,000 to anyone who can disprove a literal interpretation of the Genesis account of creation in a formal debate/minitrial. My question, of course, is which Genesis account? The one in Genesis 1:1-2:3 where God creates the universe in six days with humans being created after all the plants and animals? Or the one in Genesis 2:4ff where God creates one human before God creates the plants and animals and a second human is created after the plants and animals? Oh wait, did I just disprove a literal reading of BOTH accounts in just a couple of sentences? Do you think I can get my $10,000 in cash?

I’ve long said in private that the thing I am most ashamed of in my time in ministry is teaching a bunch of impressionable teenagers “creation science” over a summer. Discovering in college that the first two chapters of Genesis contained two different creation stories started me on a long journey to rejecting fundamentalist/literalist readings of scripture. The Bible is a theological collection of texts. It is not a history textbook and it is most definitely not a science text book. I believe that Genesis 1-2 contains much theological truth about God, humans, the universe, and social life. For example, we learn that God’s creation is good, that humans are created in God’s image, that humans are called by God to be good stewards of the earth, that humans are created for community, and many other things. I also believe that attempts to use these beautiful, ancient, and sacred texts as science/history proof-texts is a gross abuse of the texts.

And for me, this is the takeaway: This version of Biblicism is an abuse of scripture to further political agendas and causes people to expend energy fighting fights that scripture is unconcerned with the faithful fighting. But those who espouse this version of Biblicism have convinced many that theirs is the only faithful way to read the scripture they abuse. In this way, those who insist that this is the way Christians should interpret scripture and expend their energy are our contemporary world’s false prophets. I speak this word out of my own experience. They once convinced me to spend my time arguing with science teachers instead of serving them. And they convinced me that my faith was more tied to my belief about the dating of the earth than about loving my neighbors. This was all wrong on a pastoral level and is also wrong on a theological level. There is no one “biblical account” of creation in scripture. There are at least two. And that teaches us that scripture is theology and not science. Those who insist we read it as science misunderstand the purpose of scripture and are misleading millions.

Book Review: A Faith Embracing All Creatures

(A Faith Embracing All Creatures is the second book in The Peaceable Kingdom Series being published by Cascade/Wipf and Stock. I reviewed the first book in this series, A Faith Not Worth Fighting For, here.)

“The Peaceable Kingdom Series is a multi-volume series that seeks to challenge the pervasive violence assumed necessary in relation to humans, nonhumans, and the larger environment.” Each individual volume is set up in such a way so that each chapter is a response to a commonly asked question skeptical about the topic at hand. Each chapter is written by a theological scholar or engaged Christian practitioner versed in the topic. In this way, the series is one of the best examples of “public scholarship” that I am aware of. It brings some of the best thinking on pressing issues into the hands of “everyday” readers. For this, I applaud the editors and publishers.

The second volume in the series sets out to answer questions about and argue for the Christian call to “embrace all creatures.” The primary focus of most of the essays is advocating for Christians to eat a vegan, or at least vegetarian, diet. However, other instances of human-animal interactions (such as laboratory testing) are mentioned as well. The primary thrust of the book’s argument is that God’s eschatological kingdom is one which will know no violence – including violence against animals. The Church and Christians, called to embody this kingdom in the here and now as much as possible, are thus called in their discipleship to reject violence against their fellow breathing creatures. Faithful kingdom discipleship is discipleship that rejects violence of any kind.

The book begins in Genesis 1 and the question of human dominion, proceeds through questions about the covenant with Noah, animal sacrifices in the Old Testament, and Jesus eating fish and lamb. If God called on humans to sacrifice animals or if Jesus ate animals, for example, why are Christians supposed to abstain from eating animals? These are the kinds of questions that Christian vegetarians and vegans often face and that the authors attempt to answer. The advocates of Christian vegetarianism are meeting meat-eating Christians on their own terms.

In my opinion, the chapters that address specific biblical texts generally fail to convince. For example, in chapter 9 Annika Spalde and Pelle Strindlund take on the story of Jesus healing the man possessed by a “legion” of demons who then, with Jesus’s permission, leave the man and enter into pigs which commit mass suicide. “Clearly,” skeptical Christians say to Christian vegetarians, “this shows that Jesus values human life more than animal life. Indeed, here Jesus views animals as mere property that can be killed at a moment’s notice. How can you then affirm that humans shouldn’t kill animals for food when Jesus “killed” a multitude of animals in this story?”

Spalde and Strindlund, in my opinion, do a wonderful job of presenting an anti-imperial reading of the text. Naming the demon(s) “Legion,” for instance, is clearly an allusion to the Roman imperial army. Also, several of the Greek words in the story (such as apostello, agele, and epetrepsen autois) are words that had military connotations. And the pigs in the story act in ways quite unnatural to pigs; for example, rushing forward in unison rather than in multiple directions. Clearly, something out of the ordinary is up. For Spalde and Strindlund, then, this story is best read (metaphorically?) as a story of Jesus challenging imperial violence. They say, “That Mark and the other authors depict the destruction of animals is unfortunate. Yet it is also the case that no moral lesson regarding our relationship to animals can be derived from this text since it is really about Jesus’s interaction with a powerful military regime…This text is about a person possessed by a military spirit, whom Jesus freed; God Almight versus imperial might – that is the structure of this text” (107).

While I find this interpretation intriguing and plausible (and exciting!), it is clear that Mark and the early church also understood this event to be something that actually happened. And most Christians today will read it in the same way. Jesus gave permission for demons to kill pigs. Likewise, God did command ancient Israel to sacrifice thousands of animals, Jesus as a Jew who spent much time in Galilee likely did eat fish, and occasionally lamb, etc. There may indeed be reasons for these actions that point to a deeper meaning, but these animals were harmed according to God’s action, most Christians believe. The interpretive moves taken to explain away these likely historical facts are, in the end, unconvincing.

However, those places where the authors bring out themes in scripture which support a contemporary vegetarian diet are compelling. Specifically, the authors collectively argue that 1) the dominion given humans in Genesis 1 is to be a dominion exercised in a spirit of servanthood rather than dominance, imitating the loving and sacrificial dominion of God and lordship of Christ, 2) God clearly cares for animals and we are called to care for them as well, 3) the kingdom of God will be one where wolves lie with lambs, and natural predators no longer eat their prey, so that should be modeled in the here and now, and 4) it appears that Adam and Eve had only a vegetarian diet before the fall and the killing of animals for clothing and food only comes after sin enters the world. All of these are compelling themes which, if nothing else, teach us that we should treat animals with more compassion and care than we currently do.

And here is where the volume is at its most compelling: In chapter 11, titled “Are We Addicted to the Suffering of Animals?” John Berkman paints a picture of factory farms that is deplorable. This picture is not new to those familiar with this field or who have watched Food Inc. or other such documentaries. Simply speaking, the mass production of animals for food in developed countries is inhumane. This, in conjunction with the negative effects such food production has on the poor around the world, is a compelling reason for Christians to remove themselves as much as possible from the system to maintain some semblance of moral purity.

About five years ago my wife and I began lessening meat in our diet for exactly these reasons. First, we stopped buying red meat. Then we stopped buying chicken breasts. Then ground turkey. Now, we only buy fish on occasion, and usually from local vendors, and we typically only eat meat when eating out or at the home of another family. We are now calling ourselves “social meat eaters.” We have done this for a combination of reasons, but one dominant one is the gross amount of injustice tied to the factory farming of animals. This stance, for us, has meant a drastic reduction in meat consumption, but we still do partake at holidays, celebrations, and as an act of hospitality to those who host us. (Interestingly, there is a chapter in the volume that argues that Christian hospitality does not require accepting the gifts of others when in their home, but actually requires hospitality to those who enter your home – including animals.)

Unfortunately, there is relatively little space in the volume outside of Berkman’s essay devoted to these issues – though they are the most powerful argument for contemporary vegeatarianism. Also unfortunate is a lack of elaboration upon a few statements made by ecologist and evolutionary biologist Mark Bekoff in the preface. Bekoff says that “Once we realize the common bonds of compassion we share with other animals…[we will make] different choices about who (not what) we eat and buy, how we educate, entertain, and amuse ourselves, and how we conduct research” (xi). He says that animals “are rational, sentient creatures who care as much about their lives as we do our own” (xii). I wish more had been said about this topic.

And it is here that we find the greatest weakness in the book. In its laudable determination to answer the questions many Christians are actually asking it focuses disproportionately on questions of biblical interpretation. This approach is not compelling, however, because these are the wrong questions. The average person will not find several of the arguments made throughout the book convincing because to ask such questions is to read the Bible differently than the authors in the text. It is clear that the “biblical world” is one that assumes the owning, killing, and eating of animals. There may be, and I am convinced is, a biblical move in the direction of compassion and care for all of God’s creatures, but it is not one towards a principled veganism. To imply that there is such an ethic in the Bible seems to be imposing modern concerns upon an ancient text. This weakness in the book exposes a broader weakness in some strands of Christian theology and ethics; simply speaking, the Bible doesn’t have an answer for everything we face in the modern world.

The factory farming of animals didn’t exist in the world of the Bible. The links between the food industrial complex and climate change, global poverty, and obesity in wealthy countries were unthinkable. The production of animals too big to walk because they are so overfed and pumped full of steroids was centuries away. The Bible is not all we need when doing ethics. We need the Wesleyan quadrilateral or the hermeneutical circle or Ernst Troeltsch/H.R. Niebuhr’s triadic approach to faith, history, and ethics. We need more than the Bible to tackle the ethics of how humans treat animals. In short, we need to take seriously historical experience, the natural and social sciences, and other forms of knowledge available to us. The authors recognize this, and several incorporate such analyses into their chapters. However, these detours from the questions that drive the text are too brief to convert the unbeliever.

In my opinion, questions of social justice should push American Christians to limit their meat consumption and to challenge the existing system of food production. It is unjust, unhealthy, and inhumane. However, this doesn’t necessarily lead one to totally abstain from eating meat. If one can find and afford sustainable and humane meat, cheese, and eggs, I see no reason why eating them should be avoided from a social justice perpective. Indeed, we should encourage Christians and others to participate in these alternative and local forms of food production and economic systems. The case for totally abstaining from eating animals, it seems to me, rests on Bekoff’s claims about what we have come to know about animal rationality and emotions and our “bonds of compassion” with them. I am not well read in the science that is beginning to show that animals are more “human” than we have imagined, but I know that it exists. An accessible summary of that research would have been more compelling than an essay arguing that Jesus might not have eaten lamb at the last supper.

Still, taking seriously the eschatological vision of predators lying with their prey and God’s loving care of all creation are important biblical themes that Christians should more seriously consider. And many of the passages Christians point to to justify their harsh treatment of animals, like Genesis 1, are misused when used that way. These are important corrections to much popular understanding of the Christian faith. However, I am unconvinced that the Christian faith requires a plant-based diet for all Christians across time and culture. If this is not the case, then the contextual argument for contemporary vegetarianism/veganism in the developed world must be made by answering different questions. Berkman’s essay is a step in this direction. To find answers to similar questions one must look elsewhere.

Book Review: The Sacredness of Human Life by David Gushee

David Gushee is an excellent ethicist. His work on the Holocaust and Evangelical ethics are standards in their respective fields, and his social activism on combatting torture and climate change and advocating for human rights places him in the esteemed tradition of Christian social ethics in the United States. His newest book continues this legacy of top-notch scholarship in Christian ethics and makes an important contribution to studies in theology and human rights.

The Sacredness of Human Life is an ambitious book. It traces the roots of modern human rights throughout the Christian scriptures and Christian theology. Importantly, Gushee emphasizes that these roots lie in the sacredness, rather than mere dignity, that humans possess. This sacredness, in an account compatible with Nicholas Wolterstorff’s account of besowed worth in his important Justice: Rights and Wrongs, flows primarily from God and not from anything inherent in human beings themselves. Thus, he again joins Wolterstorff in rejecting “capacities approaches” (claims that some human capacity, like reason or the ability to govern, are the image of God) to grounding human rights in the image of God. Gushee says,

…I reject their claim that there is something intrinsic or inherent about biological humanity that makes it valuable or constitutes it as the image of God. I claim that humanity’s sacred worth is an ascribed status willed by God and communicated through God’s actions, commands, and declarations, one of them being God’s revelation that all human beings are made in the image of God. We can’t go looking for something in humanity that in and of itself gains us value and worth – the sacredness of human life is God’s decision, to which we human beings must accede and by which we must orient our lives. (p. 46)

Thus, Gushee rejects the assumptions in arguments about abortion around the “personhood” of a fetus. He says “all distinctions between human beings and persons are purely speculative, lack groundng in biblical revelation, and have proven hugely dangerous,” and therefore rejects any “distinction between biological human life and personhood” (45). This is sure to be one of the most controversial portions of the text.

In general, this portion of the book is compelling and well-argued. I maintain that the attempt to ground human rights in the imago dei is an appropriate one, even though I also reject capacities approaches, and am seeking to do so by drawing on social triniarian theology in my dissertation. However, Gushee’s critiques and reticence are well-founded.

In tracing the history of Christian thought related to these themes Gushee is careful not to paint too rosy a picture of Christian history. He is clear that while profound resources for the grounding and pursuit of human rights go “all the way down” in the Christian tradition, there is also a history of the Christian violation of the rights of many humans – often those whose skin was of a darker hue. Therefore, he joins the chorus of those scholars after R. Scott Appleby who have highlighted “the ambivalence of the sacred” in human social life. Indeed, even in those instances where Christians have justified their violations of human rights through appeals to their scriptures and theological doctrines there have often been others who were leaders in challenging such violations.

From here Gushee marches through the history of western philosophy and engages thinkers as diverse as John Locke, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Adolf Hitler. In tracing this history Gushee highlights the important contributions of the Christian tradition to the development of modern rights, supports the thesis that much of modern rights discourse and practices are feeding on the cultural capital of the western Christian tradition, and insists that abandoning these resources is a dangerous proposition. However, he does not do this in any triumphant or Constantinian way. Rather, it is with a humility learned through serious engagement with the history of Christianity’s sins. However, it also recognizes the sins of modernity and insists that the Christian tradition still has much to teach us and contribute to social life.

Gushee then applies the belief that human life is sacred to a variety of challenges facing us today: abortion and end-of-life care, the death pealty, nuclear weaons, modern warfare, and global women’s rights, for example. And then he bravely addresses the challenge of whether a strong commitment to human sacredness is part of he problem in the climate and environmental crises we are facing around the world. In the end, Gushee insists that a commitment to the sacredness of human life can go hand-in-hand with deep commitments to environmental justice and care, but the ambiguity of such a position is present throughout the chapter on the topic.

In the end, the book covers far too much ground to be done justice in a review on a blog. However, it can be said that this is an excellent text which merits reading by all who care about Christian theology and ethics, human rights, and creating a just world. It is a first-rate piece of scholarship that is, for the most part, accessible to the informed lay reader. And it is useful in mobilizing action in support of human rights locally and globally. I believe it will join Gushee’s Kingdom Ethics as a standard in the field.

On Love and Justified Violence

It is common in Christian ethics for defenders of pacifism or principled nonviolence to ridicule “Constantinianism” and certain strands of just war theory which in practice seem to provide cover for quite unjust violence. And, while I am in agreement that certain defenses of war and violence should be ridiculed, I do not find these positions to be the most compelling conversation partners. Rather, it is those defenses of violence by Christians that wrestle seriously with the implications of the Christian call to love and justice – rather than the necessities of politics – which pose the greatest challenge to principled stances against the Christian employment of violence (in war, self-defense, or defense of others). An example of this can be found in a conversation between Christopher Dowdy and Jeffrey Baker over at the Common Objects blog. In a dialogue about Newtown, gun control, and domestic violence Prof. Baker says,

First, I agree that humans have a right to self-defense, but it is not rooted where the author suggests. Rather than some vague sense of the intrinsic value of human life (which certainly exists), the right to self-defense as a Biblical, Christian matter is rooted in love, love which certainly arises from the imago dei, but which organizes the idea. Love must be the organizing principle of all Christian ethics, so if I kill the home-intruder because I hate him because of his crime, I have not acted righteously. If I have killed him because I love my family, then I have not. If I have defended myself from assault because of my love for my family and thus value my ability to provide and care for them, because I love and respect myself to resist abuse and degradation, then I am acting righteously. This is the root of a morally justified right to self-defense. 
This goes to your bigger question.

Our moral rights and responsibilities do not arise from the promotion of our own profit or our own property. Such a position is rooted in selfishness and self-interest, which is plainly antithetical to the teachings of Christ. Our moral rights and responsibilities flow from those two great commands, and love is the way to square these issues rightly. I may defend myself and my home, but I do it rightly only if I am acting from love for those I love as I love myself, not from my own self-interest and not from hatred of the assailant. 


Second, French errs by failing to grapple with some other hard teachings. Jesus taught the people to turn the other cheek, to walk an extra mile, to love and pray for their enemies. He then quite deliberately did not defend himself against unjust violence. We cannot rightly claim an unfettered, pure, divine right to self-defense without at least wrestling with these ideas. There is tension here, but there exist very real, righteous reasons not to defend oneself. 


Third, French lacks any imagination, and the argument fails that a right to self-defense necessarily means a right to automatic assault weapons, high-capacity clips and dense ammunition. If this were so, he must then oppose any and all regulations on weapons, and he is arguing for the right to bear Sarin gas, STINGER missiles, IED’s, anti-personnel land mines, high-caliber machine guns and tanks. He may well believe this, but society and the Rule of Law cannot sustain it. If his proposition is not so, then his line is arbitrary and absurd. He is discounting the promotion of self-defense by law enforcement, non-lethal weapons, security systems, neighborhood watches, baseball bats, dogs, situational-awareness and other creative, practical steps. 


Simply, abridging access to certain classes of weapons is not an assault on the divine right of self-defense, unless that divine right only applies to very, very specific circumstances where such a weapon may have some real utility. Those situations are rare, and none of those situations would preclude defense by other means.

Which Dowdy responds to by saying,

Basing the rights claims in love is an intriguing way to talk about a countervailing self-defense rationale. Your framing of it here really sounds a lot like Timothy Jackson’s argument on limited use of deadly force in terms of love for the offender, but you’ve taken this and said that it’s actual love for the self, one’s prior commitment to one’s own integrity, that grounds the right to self-defense and its analogues, if I’m understanding you. I am sure others would go quite a bit farther and say that love disqualifies all sorts of violent action in self-defense—Luther, for example, certainly seems to say this in places; it’s only defense of others (and that by political authorities) that love really authorizes…

As a defender of Christian nonviolence, it is this type of defense of violence which I find to be the most compelling and the most difficult to refute.

For the whole conversation go see Pt. 1 here and Pt. 2 here.

On Feminism, Sexualization, and What it Means for the Church to be Countercultural

My friend and scholar Dr. Jeanine Thweatt-Bates has published an essay in the newest issue of New Wineskins magazine. In it she addresses everything from feminist interpretations of the Bible to the way that churches sexualize young girls through the ways they talk about virginity to what it would mean for the Church to finally be countercultural in regards to the treatment of women. It is well written and highly provocative. Please go check it out.

On feminist readings of scripture:

Last Sunday I taught the 3rd, 4th and 5th graders a lesson on the Ten Commandments. We read them in their entirety from Exodus 17, and they read smoothly (mostly) all the way through the last one, the one that commands us not to covet our neighbor’s donkey, slave, or wife. It’s not that that’s the only difficult commandment to explain to 3rd-5th graders (age-appropriately defining “adultery” on the spot was an unexpected challenge). But what was so difficult about this last verse was the smooth way it equates all these categories of property that Thou Shalt Not Covet. Your neighbor’s stuff: donkey, slave, wife. This time, the difficulty wasn’t that the kids demanded an explanation, like they did when I had to explain adultery wasn’t some ancient form of kidnapping. It was worse: my kids didn’t notice anything wonky about talking about a wife as a form of property.

The problem wasn’t the text. The problem was the text wasn’t a problem.

One of the things perceived as “dangerous” about feminist theologies is the way that they generally insist on reading the biblical text critically. Rather than taking for granted that this last commandment suggests, first, that God’s okay with treating wives as property, and second, therefore we should too, feminist theologies suggest that biblical texts at times contain genuinely problematic elements that we ought to identify as problems, in order to be faithful readers of the text and faithful followers of Jesus. And while this strikes many in the Churches of Christ as dangerous in some slippery-slope way, it’s not at all new. We do this pretty much automatically when confronted with those vengeful bloodthirsty imprecatory psalms. We’re not about to go dash babies against rocks because God apparently seems okay with that in a biblical text—because it’s obviously problematic. To read that text faithfully, we have to identify that as a problem. So why is that so hard to do when it comes to women—women’s status, women’s roles, women’s callings, women’s gifts, women’s voices?

Here’s my thesis. It’s hard because the attitude that women are basically the property of men (fathers, husbands) so explicitly stated in the tenth commandment is still more or less the prominent attitude in our culture today. It’s hard to call it a problem in the text, in the church, because it’s hard to see the problem, at all. Fish in water.

On sexualization in the church:

I’d rather highlight something that bothers me even more than the silencing of women in our assemblies. That is, the way in which our churches participate in the wider culture’s sexualization of women and girls—the way in which our churches participate in teaching that the ultimate value of women lies in being a desirable object.

As a mother of two girls (6 and almost 2), the issue of early childhood sexualization has been a concern of mine for a few years now. There is excellent work being done on this…Bringing attention to the ways in which toys, clothing, and media construct a seamless transition from “little princess” to “little diva” to “sex object,” starting with pink onesies and ending in thong underwear, these authors aim to educate parents and others about the ways children are being sexualized in our culture.

What do we teach them, these little princesses, in our Sunday Schools? Are we giving them the tools to resist the powerful messages that they are supposed to be cute, quiet, sweet, cooperative, helpless…sexy but virginal, desirable but out of reach, flirty but untouchable?

No. We’re not. Instead, we’re teaching them an inverted version of the world’s message of sexualization. Recently Rachel Held Evans asked, “Do Christians idolize virginity?” In short, yes. Instead of available objects of sexual desire, we teach girls to be unavailable objects of sexual desire. Symbolized by promise rings and pledges and whatnot—that pink God’s Princess Bible is the innocent beginning of a very dangerous lesson. What we don’t do is teach our girls—and boys!—that there is any possibility for women to be something other than an object of sexual desire. Available (for shame!) or unavailable (praise the wise virgins!), they remain objects of desire.

On what it would mean for the church to be countercultural:

That’s not countercultural.

What would be truly countercultural would be teaching our children that they are all, every single one of them, created in the image of God, and that no one created in the image of God can be reduced to an object of someone else’s desires. What would be truly countercultural would be a community demonstrating the reality of the equality of male and female in Christ.

God calls us—our sisters, our daughters, our mothers, our women—to more than being the pure objects of the male gaze. God calls women to embody the divine image. This means we must teach the children in our churches to see girls, and women, as more than objects of desire, but as agents of God’s will and work in the world. And when the church finds the courage to affirm and value women’s agency in the church and in the world—that, finally, will be truly countercultural.

You can read the entire article here.

Justice Work is Kingdom Work: My Response to Scot McKnight

Recently Scot McKnight (New Testament professor, blogger, and popular author) addressed those gathered for the National Conference on Youth Ministries. In his address he made a stark distinction between “Kingdom work” and “social justice” and called on the youth ministers gathered there to direct their youth toward the former rather than the latter. I first heard about his address through Twitter as people live-tweeted the event. My initial reaction was something like, “That’s interesting, and I think I get what he’s saying, but it sure seems like he’s overstating his case and talking to the wrong group of people…”

A few days later I was approached by The Christian Chronicle to respond to his remarks. And, after reading the entirety of his address, I became less charitable and more critical. The Chronicle has since published the article about the event, and included a link to Dr. McKnight’s full address and my full response on their blog. For convenience I’ve included my full remarks below. However, I encourage you to read his full remarks as well as my response. I’d love to hear what you think about the exchange.

Peace.

I hear what he’s saying but think he’s speaking to the wrong audience. There may, indeed, be Christians for whom a commitment to social justice has replaced a commitment to a local church or the Church at large. However, I think he’d be hard-pressed to find a significant number of those people within the churches of Christ. Rather, the historical lack in the churches of Christ has been deep commitments to those aspects of the faith that go beyond what is done in Sunday worship. The people he has in mind, it would seem to me, would be certain streams of the mainline churches rather than members of the churches of Christ. Even our most social justice oriented ministries tend to remain deeply tied to the life of a local church or churches. For instance, Made in the Streets, a ministry that serves homeless children living in Nairobi slums, attracts college students from colleges and universities across the United States who see serving with the ministry as a way to serve the kingdom through a justice ministry. However, life at MITS revolves around the life of the Kamulu Church of Christ as much as it does the ministry center in the Eastleigh slum. I simply do not think the problem Scot identifies is one which is widespread in the fellowship of the churches of Christ.

My second thought is that Scot is right, he really has no idea what social justice is because he seems to think that it is only, or primarily, about politics. Rather, most social justice ministries tend to exist in the civil society sector, and are often tied to churches. And he is simply wrong that “social justice…compassion…and peace” are “not kingdom work” (p. 2). How one can read Luke 4:14-30 or Matthew 25:31-46 and not discern that a part of kingdom discipleship is doing justice and compassion and peace is baffling. And, if they are a part of kingdom discipleship it is hard to see how they are not a part of kingdom work.

The idea of social justice arose when Christians in the industrial age who ministered in poor congregations, like Walter Rauschenbusch in New York’s infamous Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, tried to apply the biblical vision of justice, best encapsulated in the OT in the notion of shalom and in the NT in Jesus’s phrase “the kingdom of God,” to the social structures (like exploitative employers and conditions in the slums that grew around industrial age factoreis) that made and kept them poor. In ministering to their congregations they realized that traditional ministries of mercy, like soup kitchens, were insufficient to serve the people in the congregation. In the biblical vision of shalom these ministers found the resources to work for fair and just working conditions, for example, for their members. In creating a society that was more just these ministers embodied Jesus’s claim that in the kingdom the poor receive good news and the oppressed are set free.

Scot claims that working on behalf of the homeless is not kingdom work, but that Bible studies, Sunday worship, and especially Eucharist (the Lord’s Supper) are kingdom work. Why this stark bifurcation? I agree with him that the latter things are kingdom work but I see no reason for thinking that the former is not. I would agree that kingdom work is not confined to the former, but I know very few Christians who would say serving the homeless is kingdom work but observing the Lord’s Supper is not. Again, I’m not sure who he’s talking about, but these people don’t really exist in the churches of Christ.

And this is where Scot gets into big trouble. He says, “Your commitment to the local church is the sum total of your kingdom commitment”. And it is here that he overstates his case. If he wants to push those Christians who have replaced a commitment to the local church with work on behalf of the homeless then he is in the right. If he wants to say that serving the homeless in a nonprofit or through local politics is inherently not kingdom work he is horribly mistaken. Allow me to share a story: At a church I once worked at there was a clothing bank for the homeless staffed by church volunteers. However, the church shut the bank down because the volunteers got tired of cleaning the room because “those people just throw stuff around and don’t show respect for the room.” Now, in Matthew 25 Jesus makes it pretty clear that clothing the naked is kingdom work, and when churches choose not to do that kingdom work because it is inconvenient those Christians who rightly see this call of Christ are right to do it wherever they can. It is not just “good work” as Scot says, clothing the naked is clearly kingdom work.

Finally, Scot is right that Jesus is more than a prophet and that prophetic Christianity “is not enough.” However, he is wrong that prophetic Christianity “is a cloak…[for] western liberal politics.” Sure, there are times when this may be the case. However, occasional abuse does not warrant total dismissal of the prophetic strand of the Christian tradition. Prophetic Christianity is not in all times and in all places nothing more than progressive politics. At its best it is much more than that; at its best it is the annunciation of the Kingdom of God breaking into the world in all places. Yes, in the Church, but not only there.

So, when he says that “work in the world can never be kingdom work” he is badly mistaken. Christians find God calling them to work in all kinds of places and to heavenly vocations not located in the act of preaching or teaching Sunday school. Teachers, counselors, service workers, nonprofit employees, parents, and even politicians can follow God’s call on their life in their daily work. And answering this call is not merely good work; it is kingdom work. I doubt that Scot thinks that people have no God-given vocation outside of the church, but it seems in this presentation that that is the case. If so, I worry that Scot’s vision of the Kingdom is far too small to match the size of the Kingdom of God which encompasses all of creation and all of life. For, as Scot says, where Jesus rules there is kingdom. And, as we Christians confess, Jesus is Lord of all creation.

[In a follow-up email] The one thing I would add to what I already sent is this:

Inasmuch as Scot identifies a phenomenon that is true (which I, again, am doubtful of in churches of Christ), the appropriate response, it seems to me, is not to claim that justice work is not kingdom work. Rather, it is to push local churches to be the spaces in which it is possible for Christians to do that kind of kingdom work rather than, in the example of the homeless ministry I mentioned, forcing discipleship-oriented Christians to look to places outside of the church to do that work. The problem, in short, is more a problem of churches not doing all that kingdom work is than individual justice-seeking Christians mistaking what and where the kingdom is.

On church attendance and interracial dating

Yesterday, I wrote about the ways that the racial segregation of our churches contributes to the political polarization of Christian public discourse. And I’ve written in the past about the need for white Christians to attend non-white churches. Then today I found this over at the Christianity Today blog.

The notion of Sunday mornings being “the most-segregated hour in America” may be longstanding. But recent studies took this idea further and examined how those who attend church most often are least likely to ever have dated or married someone from another race.

Except for one Christian denomination.

In a recent blog post, David Briggs at the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) notes how researchers at the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR) found that “being in a church with few or no members of another race makes a difference in choosing romantic partners.”

Using data from the 2007 Baylor Religion Survey, Samuel Perry of the University of Chicago found that about 50 percent of those who attend church only once a year or never said they had dated a person of another race, whereas only 27 percent of those who attend church weekly or more said the same.

“Segregated churches breed segregated lives,” said Perry, according to Briggs. However, he also found that those who pray and read the Bible more often were more likely to date outside of their race. (Perry’s findings will appear in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.)

Meanwhile, another SSSR report from Joshua Tom and Brandon Martinez at Baylor University found that religious affiliation (whether Christian, non-Christian, or religiously unaffiliated) made no statistically significant difference in whether someone was in an interracial marriage—except for Catholics. They were twice as likely to be in such a marriage, especially if they attended services more frequently. The likely reason: the growing Hispanic population.

The racial segregation of our churces affects us in ways big and small all the time. Overcoming this hurdle can go a long way toward overcoming the racism that still permeates so many of our lives.

The Surprising(?) Update on the Chick-fil-a Story

Campus Pride has suspended their campaign against Chick-fil-a. Chick-fil-a has ended its financial contribution to the groups that Campus Pride has identified as hate groups against LGBTQ people. Shane Windemeyer (Executive Director of Campus Pride) and Dan Cathy (President of Chick-fil-a) have a burgeoning friendship defined by honesty and respect. And they both still disagree strongly about gay marriage.

This is how politics (and theological disagreement) should work in public life.

Race, Politics, and American Christianity

Back in 2003, when the US went to war with Iraq, I was working in youth ministry at a primarily white church in the working-class city of Tacoma, WA. I have a vivid memory of sitting in a worship service during that time in which the preacher delivered a sermon in which he declared that John the Baptist was a patriot and, therefore, we should be patriots as well and support the war effort. More specifically, we were told that President G.W. Bush was God’s appointed for a time of trial and, therefore, we should not question but support his decisions.

Back in 2007, when Barack Obama was running for president, I was working in young adult ministry at a primarily black church in inner-city Los Angeles. The Sunday after the election, on which I was blessed to preach the sermon, many people proudly wore shirts bearing the image of President-elect Obama, and prayers were offered calling upon God to protect the soon-to-be president and to give him the wisdom required for such a position. In addition, several references were made to the “miracle” which had just occurred which many in the audience thought they would never see come to fruition – namely, a black man elected as president of the United States.

Leading up to that election I had a long conversation with my mentor from the church in Tacoma in which he professed his admiration of Sarah Palin and disbelief and inability to comprehend how a Christian, let alone the majority of a congregation, could vote for Obama in light of his position on abortion. For him, there was no way he could conceive of a justifiable reason to cast a vote for someone who supports abortion in any way. We talked about the ways that race influences politics and the complicated nature in which theological beliefs are translated into political policies and stances, but for him there was still no way that he could make sense of a “Christian” vote for a Democrat.

On a recent post in which I strongly criticized celebrity pastor Mark Driscoll’s statement on the day of the most recent inauguration, a commentor stated that “there is no hope for…conversation” between himself and those who (like me) maintain that Pres. Obama can be a Christian in light of his politics. A few days later I learned that on the Sunday following the inauguration, a man prayed at that church in Tacoma that God “please show Jesus to Obama.” Like Driscoll, this man apparently believes that Obama can not possibly be a Christian because of his political stances.

Finally, like many people out there, I’ve heard many friends from this church (and others with a similar racial composition) loudly criticize recent attempts at stricter assault weapon regulations using theological language and/or linking this political issue to abortion. Of course, I’ve also heard members of the church in inner-city LA voice their support for such legislation. Importantly, many of the members of the church in Tacoma are hunters and many of the members of the church in LA have had friends and/or family killed or injured by gun violence.

The irony here? The man who was the minister at the church in LA while I was on staff there has been invited to speak at the church in Tacoma on multiple occasions. Indeed, if you were to compare the “official” theological beliefs of both congregations they would be nearly, if not totally, identical. They make the same confessions of faith and participate in the same liturgical practices on Sunday mornings. They would, on most occassions, refer to each other as brothers and sisters in Christ.

However, there are many in the church in Tacoma, including those in leadership, who would declare that a Christian should never vote for a person who supports legalized abortion of any kind (or the legalization of gay marriage, for that matter). Indeed, there are probably some who, like the commentor on my previous post, believe that to vote in such a way is to prove that one is not actually a Christian. And, while many at the church in LA believe that Christians sholud not have an abortion when facing an unplanned pregnancy, I never heard anyone there equate it with murder (as is often done by members of the church in Tacoma) and know that the vast majority of the congregation usually votes for Democratic politicians in local and national elections.

What explains these different political stances and actions even though there is much theological agreement between these Christians?

Lived experience.

As much as many want to deny it, race greatly influences the ways that people experience life in America. Of course, it is not only race which leads to these political differences (inner-city LA is quite different from Tacoma and its suburbs in a variety of ways), but race is a strong contributing factor to these differences.

Indeed, the Pew Research Center has demonstrated that race is a consistent factor in how abortion is viewed politically and morally, even among Protestants. White Protestants view it as morally wrong and believe it should be made illegal at significantly greater percentages than black Protestants. Based on the voting patters of white Protestants, especially Evangelicals, and black Protestants, it is safe to assume that these racial disparities continue across a range of political issues.

There are a variety of reasons for these disparities, but one (in the case of abortion) is surely the history of black women not being able to control their bodies throughout slavery and Jim Crow. It should be no surprise, and is totally understandable, that many black women in America don’t trust others (especially white men) to determine in advance what should be done with their bodies. White men have raped, killed, abused, and degraded their bodies for centuries, and many black women have not forgotten it even as most white people have.

In short, race impacts the experience of every American Christian. And these experiences directly influence the politics of many of the Christians in our churches. There is no straightforward way to translate the vast majority of Christian beliefs into political policy and to hold any political position as a sign of theological orthodoxy, as is increasingly becoming the case among many white Evangelicals, is a grave mistake. And, though many would not say it in this way, there are many Christians who write off a significant portion of other Christians who are racially different than them because of their politics. In a world of increasing racial segregation (through the creation of primarily non-white urban ghettoes and primarily white suburbs and rural communities), people are still attending churches that are racially monolithic. This reality creates the environment in which people come to believe that their political beliefs (greatly influenced by racial experiences) are THE Christian political position and begin to use politics as a measure of Christian faithfulness and orthodoxy.

In this way, there are some who attend the church I served in Tacoma who are willing to call those who attend the church I served in LA fellow Christians on Sunday and (unknowingly?) dismiss them as non-Christians every other day of the week because of who they voted for. To overcome this contradiction we must admit the complexities of political life and recognize the way that experience shapes our politics (and, in many ways, our theology). In addition, we must work hard to live in racially and ethnically diverse communities of faith so that we actually know people who confess Jesus as Lord and vote differently than us. Otherwise, our politics can become, in practice, theologically racist because we will become ready to exclude people from the faith who vote differently than us. And, as it will turn out, those who are different from us politically tend to fall as much as, if not more so, along racial lines than denominational or theological ones.