Whiteness

The Rocks Shall Cry Out! Why not the Dust, Too?

This article is from the forthcoming Moody Center magazine. To learn more about the magazine and Moody Center, subscribe to their newsletter.

“Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. . . . All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken” (Acts 2:2, 4–6).

“Listening to wild places, we are audience to conversations in a language not our own” (Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass 48) 

“Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, ‘Teacher, rebuke your disciples!’

‘I tell you,’ he replied, ‘if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out’” (Luke 19:39–40)


From the moment of birth, children begin the amazing journey toward speech. The process, frankly, remains a mystery to us all, even the most dedicated of researchers. Fresh to the smells, sights, and sounds of the world, most babies simply offer the most basic of speech: the utterance of cries. Yet over time the communicative cries give way to thoughtful attempts to shape words. But from where do these words come? Unlike the disciples in Acts 2, babies do not receive the Spirit of obscure tongues never before known in their communities. Rather, babies listen, process, and eventually repeat. That is to say, their language is a function of their place. People all around them speak, and they speak out of their places and speak the formation of places. In a more modest sense than God’s acts in Genesis 1, people form the world around them through the simple-yet-complex utterances of language. People utter words from a prior place of reception, for we all began as babies. The cycle repeats, bringing forth new communicators taking on the languages of their places and adding to the descriptions of their places, both through the fine-tuning that happens in places and through the interactions that occur between places. We were born to form words drawn out of our places and to utter words that continue to form our places.

What I want to explore is the connection between words and places—a connection taken for granted in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures—and the malformation of places when that connection is lost. Our lives exist in the intersection of words and places, for we are communicative beings taken from the dust of the ground who live in a communicative world and who were brought into being by a communicative God who began it all with a simple, “Let there be!” Places and words are intimately connected. We know places through our acquaintance with the language(s) of a place, and we know each other within those places and through our shared (or differing) tongues. These languages are those of people but also of the earth itself. When we lose the connection between place and words, we are doomed to do violence to both people and the earth. Before turning to the violence, though, we should first turn to what we take for granted: people belong in places.

From the dust of the ground

Often seen as two “tablets” of creation, Genesis 1 and 2 present two different yet complimentary accounts of creation. Genesis 1 provides a genealogy of creation moving from heaven to earth (Gen. 1:1) while chapter 2 moves from the earth to the heavens (Gen. 2:4). The Bible persistently sees “heaven” as the abode of God, while the “earth” is the abode of humanity. The first tablet is the account of God’s movement from his abode into his formation of the abode of humanity, so the account fittingly culminates in the creation of the creatures of the earth as bearers of the image of the heavenly Father on and in the earth. The parallels of the six days of creation further clarify the movement. Days 1 and 4, 2 and 5, and 3 and 6 parallel each other, where the first day in the couplets presents creation through separation (e.g., light from darkness, water from firmament, water from land) while the second day of the couplets narrates God’s formation of places and population amid the same realms (e.g., celestial bodies, fish and birds, animals and humans). The final description is the creation of humanity to be creatures of the earth alongside animals, but the special commission to humanity is to be the presence of God in the earth and amid the creatures of the earth. Humanity was made to be God’s image.

Meanwhile, the second tablet takes up the task of describing the place of humanity, specifically the work of making places and doing so around the presence of God. Humanity was to be a species of priestly gardeners and caretakers, cultivating life in the earth encircled around the Tree of Life, which sat in the middle of the Garden (Gen. 2:9). That life was a life of promise and nourishment: in the Tree, the fruit of God’s lips joined with the fruit of the earth to be a source of life in its fullest for all the creatures of the Garden. Physical and spiritual nourishment were one in that tree at the center of the Garden. The earth received its life from God and was sustained in that life by God’s life-giving presence in her midst. Humanity’s priestly task was to direct all of creation to its fullness in God by encircling it around his place of joining. Humanity was perfectly equipped to the task, for humanity was a creature of the dirt yet received life from the breath of God himself (Gen. 2:7).

Of course, tragedy enters the tale in Genesis 3, where creation is undermined by the priestly humans enclosing creation around the false promise—the lie of the serpent—which brought death. All of creation suffers because the one who belonged to the earth betrayed the earth. The place of life in the presence of God became the place of shame and hiding. The whole earth felt the effect, for her own priest and caretaker enclosed her around death. The same space teaming with life was now the site of two places: the possibility of life through the joining of the earth and the abode of God, the heavens, and the new reality of death through the separation of the earth from God’s presence. An act equally fit for judgment and mercy, God bars the path to the possibility of life. The earth was no longer fit, for the time being, to occupy the place of life. With the fall of humanity goes the fall of the earth because the two belong together. Humanity belongs to the dust of the ground, but now facing toward death, humanity will lose its life and dissolve back merely into the earth, devoid of the breath of God.

The biblical story only just begins with the fall, though. Throughout the pages of the Bible, the people of the earth and the life of the earth remain intertwined. In Genesis 3, the earth is cursed with humanity. In Genesis 4, the earth is stained with the blood of Abel and thus protests by refusing to yield crops to Cain. In Genesis 6, humanity becomes so horrific that days 3 and 6 of creation must be undone—“baptized” according to Peter (1 Pet. 3:20–21)—as the waters submerge the earth and all its life. Throughout the rest of the Old Testament, “wild beasts” signal echoes of the loss of Eden, foreshadowing Revelation, where the lion and the lamb rest together. God provides an image of a new Eden in the giving of a land flowing with milk and honey to a new humanity, the people of his covenant through whom he will bring redemption, yet in their disobedience, they too are sent out of the land and away from the presence of God. Indeed, as Jesus, the last “Adam”—meaning “person of the dirt”—proclaimed in Luke 19, the rocks cry out. Humanity and the earth belong together, so much so that Revelation culminates in the image of a new Eden with a new Tree of Life nourishing the creatures of the earth.

In the contemporary world, our imaginations are not shaped toward awareness of our being creatures who belong to the earth; nonetheless, our daily lives demonstrate this reality. Our lives are characterized by technologies that obscure the dependence: we mostly live and work in buildings with climate control systems that keep our bodies in relatively narrow bands of atmospheric conditions; we traverse space primarily in automobiles, hovering over the earth and with their own climate controls; we board public transportation and walk through cities wearing headphones and earbuds that block our auditory connection to our places. Our food travels great distances by land, air, and sea before reaching sanitized supermarkets with more climate control.

Yet the fact remains that we are creatures of the earth. Our food, from wherever it comes, is the fruit of plants, the meat or eggs of animals, or a factory combination of both through processing. Our growth from womb onward depends upon nourishment from the earth. Our muscles gain their strength from the protein in the food and the gravity of the earth, their energy from the sugar in plants, and their health from the vitamins and nutrients in the sun’s rays and earth’s soil. Despite the environmental systems of buildings and cars, the air we breathe is the air that permeates the earth, a living sign of the Spirit that hovered over the deep and filled the lungs of the first gardeners and first apostles (Gen. 2:7; Jn. 20:22). Our skin bears the marks of the soil in which our ancestors experienced differing intensities of the light and heat of the sun. Our finger nails bear the dirt of the earth that we grasp in our hands. Our bodies take their form at least partially from their terrain: people of the mountains have thicker and stronger thighs, farmers have stronger arms and hands, while ocean dwellers have bleached hair.

Our cultures are constantly changing ways of life in tune with particular places and its particular people. Indians beget Indians in more than genetic ways. Yet Indians of the village beget Indians with different sensibilities than Indians of the city, who are different from Indians in diaspora in the United States. The same can be said of Puerto Ricans. American soil and its places provide new earth in which to learn how to be Indian and Puerto Rican, as do the interactions of Indians and Puerto Ricans on American soil. We bear customs borne of the joining of places, taking customs that reflect local practices into new places, new soil, thereby creating new ways to be in the earth that are both true to the soil that bore us and to the soil of the place in which we set new roots. There is, perhaps, no better image of this exchange than language, for we are creatures of language who become audience to people and places and the earth each with their own languages. In the words of Robin Wall Kimmerer, we become “audience to conversations in a language not our own.”[1]

Name the animals

Contemporary philosophers have noted that language only works for communication because it enables the formation of shared ideas on the basis of generalities that create common expression. For example, take the word “apple.” For speakers of English, the apple is so basic to our perception of the world that we rarely think twice before qualifying it. We simply say things such as “I love apples” or “I hate apples” or “buy some apples at the store.” In fact, whereas we might qualify something much less basic to our lives, such as “I like action movies but not romantic comedy movies” or “I can tolerate salmon but have no interest in catfish,” we usually do not think twice about the simple designation “apple.” No one would assume that “I hate apples” would be a way of denouncing a group of people. Yet, as I learned early in my marriage, a lot more is taken for granted in the simple designation “apple” than my wife or I realized. One day, she sent me to the grocery store with a list, and atop the list was “apples.” As a child, my mother bought red delicious, granny smith, and golden delicious apples, and by my late 20’s, I had firmly settled upon a preference. I had had other apples, but in my mind, the choice was rather clear: in the store, I would look for the red delicious apples and then move on to the next item on the list. I do not recall even noticing other kinds: my childhood, my house, my family had formed the language of “apple” in a specific way. When I returned home, my wife was appalled at my decision to bring those “spongy” things into the house (a decade later, I still don’t know what that means). For my Canadian wife born in a different place in a different family and country, red delicious was not remotely on her radar. She wanted pink ladies! Rest assured that the simple designation “apple” did not appear on a list for a long time thereafter.

A second example will solidify the point. For several years, I taught on a summer study abroad program that took primarily Euro-American college students to Italy, Switzerland, and Germany for two months of immersive learning. In Germany, we stayed in a youth hostel, and every morning, we would begin the day together with an open breakfast. Among the offerings was a bowl full of fruit. Many students were accustomed to eating fruit with their breakfast but were thoroughly bewildered at the offerings before them in the hostel. Rather than the waxed, rotund, symmetrical apples that American chain grocery stores sell, the students encountered small, asymmetrical, unwaxed apples with skin blemishes. Rather than juicy and sweet, the German apples had a much more subtle taste to them. I had one German student for whom everything seemed in order, but the American students could be heard complaining, “What kind of apples are these?”

In both examples, “apple” turned out to bear far more meaning than it initially seemed. For all of its ability to present a general category, the word “apple” gained meaning only insofar as it connected to people in their places. Apart from its connection to places, “apple” means little more than “snow” does to one who grows up in the Sahara and “heat” does to the Alaskan. The ideas of “apple,” “snow,” and “heat” bear little meaningful significance apart from life in places. We receive a hint of this joining of language and place in Genesis 2, where God tells Adam to name the animals. Actually, the situation is more enigmatic, for God first reflects that it is not good for Adam to be alone, and then tells him to name the animals. While the text does not reveal the names that Adam provided, given the close connection between language and place, we can begin to understand the divine rationale. As a gardener and a caretaker of the animals, Adam knew Eden as his home, the way that a gardener or zoologist knows her place today. Naming generally reflects some sort of intimate acquaintance, for it says something about the person or thing being named relative to the one(s) doing the naming. As caretaker, a degree of intimacy between Adam and the animals is taken for granted. His act of naming took place amid the type of acquaintance with the animals that taught him about companionship. He experienced the intimacy that a hippo shared with another hippo yet could not with him. He saw that for all his familiarity, none of the animals could take his own name. After this exercise teaches him what he is missing, God gives him “bone of [his] bone, flesh of [his] flesh” (Gen. 2:23). Adam names her from his intimate understanding of his position within his place. She is like him in a way that the rest are not. Not surprisingly, they are then together to fill the place and serve it as gardeners and caretakers. Word and place belong together, and people are creatures of both.

The rocks will cry out

So what happens when people and words lose the significance of their birth from places and earth? What happens when people forget that ideas are borne out of places rather than supervene over those places? What happens when people miss that ideas are generalities that are communicative shorthand for those practices, discursive practices, and encounters borne of and taking place in the earth? Modern history is marked by colonialism, where the normalcy of one place and its ideas, language, and practices borne of their earth imposes itself as the universal mark of “civilization” upon another. The nature of universal claims is the removal of all local specificity: it is communication in generalities. The “essence” of the apple—that is, what joins competing local understandings of apples—is the idea that is simultaneously no particular apple at all and the core of what unites all apples. The problem here is not that we have the language of “apple” that enables communication. Rather, the problem is the forgetfulness that none of us become acquainted with or know “apple” independently of the particular apples that we encounter. The generalities of language helpfully enable communication, but when we are hungry, we want an actual physical apple. That physical apple—no less than our stomachs—has no interest in universal, general claims. The truthfulness of the apple is in the particular apple before us that can satisfy our hunger.

In colonialism, though, the idea of the apple reins, but as we have seen, the idea is nothing other than the image of an apple that belongs to one group of people in one place. Yet that people has forgotten that their particularity has shaped their understanding of the universal. In that forgetfulness, they impose the “true” idea of “civilization”—goodness, beauty, nobility—upon another. Rather than listening to the language(s) of a place, rather than taste and feel the distinctives of a locale, they impose the developments of goodness, beauty, nobility, and truth of their places upon the other as though the language of their own places were universal. The colonizer often genuinely believed he was doing a good thing, for he was a theological agent of perfecting nature according to the logic of his place. In the process, though, the beautiful truth of Pentecost in Acts 2 fell away.

After Jesus ascended, he sent his Spirit to fill his disciples, and the immediate manifestation was their speaking the languages of all of those present in the court around them. What the disciples learned in that instance—even if it took thirteen more chapters for it to sink in—was that the message of Jesus was capable of taking up the specificities of any language. Everyone present heard in his or her own tongue. Indeed, the beauty of their wondrous news was the transfiguration of all peoples and places. It was the message of the return of the possibility of Eden, where every people and place—with their languages—could now receive life by being encircled around the new joining of heaven and earth. Jesus, the second “Adam” or “dirt-person,” was also the man of heaven (1 Cor. 15), and in him, the heavens and earth met in intimate union again. But the joining did not destroy the languages of people and earth. Instead, Pentecost provided an image of the transfiguration of all the languages. That is to say, the earth in all its beautiful complexity was capable of bearing the presence of God in Jesus the Christ.

Conversely, modern colonialism destroyed places, imposing the conquering nations’ languages, clothing, agricultural systems, conceptions of beauty, and systems of discipline, and they did all of this in the name of Jesus. Note, for example, the way that the world is largely divided among English, Spanish, and French speaking countries, despite some contemporary parallel efforts to form the world according to Russian or Mandarin. The modern colonizers believed that their “Christian civilization” needed to be replicated everywhere in order to bear the infinite. The logic of Pentecost was destroyed, and one by one, the potentially rich mosaic of languages foreshadowed in Acts 2 began to lose possibilities, with languages falling away.

Equally significant was the loss of speaking the languages of the earth itself. Modern colonialism views the earth as commodity, raw material to be shaped. One could refer to this as the McDonald’s effect, where the goal is rarely sensitivity to the language of a place but instead the imposition of a form of maturity upon a place. Wherever we go, we can be sure that McDonald’s is basically the same because its ingredients are produced centrally and exported to its various locations. The earth is terraformed according to the imagination of economic ideas, all of which arose from particular philosophical meditations in a particular part of the world, abstracted for the terraforming process of colonialism. The earth was no longer a collection of people speaking local languages derived from their being in the earth. It was now an idea—a “globe”—that enraptured bodies from the earth and brought them into the imagination of those who had ceased to hear the languages of the earth itself. Local languages began to die: both the languages of cultures and the languages of intricate ecosystems. The earth became raw commodity to be conquered, developed, and sold.

There is a larger tale to tell deep within the wounds. We could speak of the formation of identity. If Eden saw identity intimately binding together in life the heavens and the earth and humanity as creatures of the earth commissioned by the God of heaven, the expulsion from Eden necessarily signals identity formed in ways bound by death. We could speak of the dirt-people’s loss of ears to hear the languages of the earth and the subsequent ravaging of the earth. We could speak of the colonized pulled away from the earth such that bodies no longer received definition from being in and from the earth but instead from cultural markers of distance from the colonizers and their universal “ideas.” We could speak of racial formation amid the same colonizing and terraforming processes, as people who called themselves “white” and named others “black” and others somewhere in between established rules for who could migrate into “whiteness.” All of these are significant aspects of the tale of the modern world. But before we tell these stories, we need to listen. The rocks really do cry out—in distress, in hope of renewal, in worship. Why not the people of the dust, too?

About Ashish Varma

Dr. Ashish Varma is an Indian American theologian based in Chicago, IL. His dissertation work explored theological grounding for virtue ethics. In recent years, his research has sat at the intersection of theological engagement with race and ecology, writing and speaking on both. He is a regular contributor to the God Here and Now substack of Princeton Theological Seminary's Center for Barth Studies. Additionally, he edited and contributed to A Praying People, a collection of essays on prayer (Wipf & Stock, 2023).

 

 



Further Reading

Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983, reprint 2003.

Jennings, Willie James. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. New Have, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Woodley, Randy. Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012.


Footnotes

[1]Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 48.


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The Patriarchy and the PhD: What Female Faculty Experience in the Classroom

Written by J.N.T

He said he thought about killing me. He said it with serenity and certainty. You know the ways your voice might crack and quiver when delivering a shameful confession? His didn’t. It was as though the thought of killing me gave him peace. I smiled. I said, “good thing you didn’t,” and I giggled.

I was alone in a classroom with him. I was standing behind a mobile podium;

I can push it into him and make a run for it.

How many steps would it take me to get to the door?

I have heels on, what if I trip and fall while making a run for it?

Can I use my phone? No, it’s in my purse and not within reach.

I don’t want to die. I have a young son, and the tragic murder of his mother would scar him for life.

“God help me,” I prayed. I slowly removed my heels.   

None of the workshops, trainings, or educational resources I completed prepared me for this moment. I only knew that I was alone with a student who daydreamt about killing me, and I had to “diffuse” the situation. I pretended his words were insignificant, his shouting was normal, and his foul language was ordinary. My words to him were careful, soothing and endearing. Thirty minutes later, he thanked me for listening and walked out. 

It took my mind about twelve hours to register what had happened, and it did so in my sleep. I left that encounter feeling physically exhausted, but not much else. It was as though my brain couldn’t immediately process what had transpired, and it became numbed. Then, in the middle of the night, I dreamt that he came into my classroom and shot me dead. “It was just a dream,” I thought. A few hours later, as I walked into campus, my body started shaking and tears flooded my eyes. My body had finally woken up, and it was terrified.

Women face disproportionately more violence in the workplace as compared to men, and the vast majority of perpetrators are men[1]. This is, in part, due to unequal power relations that position men as the ones with the most power. Women that work in accommodation and food services, retail trade, manufacturing, health care, and social assistance are the most vulnerable to workplace harassment[2]. In most situations, there is a power imbalance where, not surprisingly, the individual with less power is often the victim and the individual with less power in our society tends to be female. This type of harassment that comes from the “top-down” is well-documented and well-researched.

Academic contrapower harassment (ACPH) is a term that I recently came across as I attempted to find solace in research after another male student became hostile, defiant, verbally aggressive, and threatening. According to the article Women Faculty Distressed: Descriptions and Consequences of Academic Contrapower Harassment (2016), ACPH “occurs when someone with seemingly less power in an educational setting (e.g., a student) harasses someone more powerful (e.g., a professor).” In this study, women faculty reported significantly higher levels of stress-related illness, anxiety, difficulty concentrating, and wanting to quit as a result of intimidation, bullying, and harassment from students.

Check, check, check and check.

As I was reading this article, I couldn’t help but notice that the findings resonated almost in identical form with my own experience. My trauma manifested itself through insomnia, low appetite, being hyperaware of my surroundings, and feeling tremendously anxious in the classroom. Violence has this effect on humans. It disturbs your mind, harms your wellbeing, destabilizes your sense of security and contaminates safe spaces.  

Chavella T. Pittman[3] found that women of color experienced significant defiance to their authority as well as threats and harassment from white male students. Although the term academic contrapower harassment suggests that women faculty hold all the power when compared to students, Pittman indicates that female educators of color experience their classrooms with power, as faculty members, and powerlessness, as women of color; meaning that in a patriarchal racist structure, white male students preserve and react to women faculty within the conferred power they possess in broader society. This too echoes my experience at a predominantly white institution (PWI). My student aggressors have all been white males. The students who have made intimidating comments, behaved defiantly in class and submitted appeals to contest a grading decision have all been white and have all been male. In a recent grade appeal request, submitted over Christmas break, a male student who failed to submit nineteen assignments and decided not to take the final exam, emailed me two weeks after the semester concluded, demanding an explanation as to why he failed the course. In his appeal he wrote that I was “non-responsive” to his emails, referring to the fact that I had not immediately responded to the email he wrote to me while I was on Christmas vacation.

Male students don’t often consciously target female professors; they are not telling themselves, “I can harass this professor because she’s a woman”. This behavior, not frequently displayed towards male authority figures, is a manifestation of their socialization. Their status as men has been symbolically and socially elevated to the extent that aggression towards any women seems acceptable, and this narrative is reinforced in Christian spaces. I worked in public institutions for seven years before being employed at a Christian university, and I experience significantly more harassment from evangelical male students. In The Making of Biblical Womanhood (2020), Beth Allison Barr explains that women’s subordination “became embedded in the heart of evangelical faith. To be a Christian woman was to be under the authority of men” (154). Many church traditions ban women from teaching, preaching, and mentoring male adults. I wasn’t raised in the church, so when a pastor at the first church I attended told me that I couldn’t teach Spanish to missionaries because there would be male students in that group, I laughed. I genuinely thought he was joking. My smile soon disappeared after I realized that he wasn’t trying to be funny, and that he preferred to send a group of English monolingual speakers to Latin America with no linguistic knowledge of the Spanish language than to submit his male congregants to the teachings of a woman – a woman with a Ph.D. and extensive pedagogical training. Many Christian students attend these kinds of churches, and these are the messages that have been instilled in them since childhood. It is not a coincidence that evangelical male students undermine their female professors and ground their aggressions in the evangelical faith. After all, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing Christians that oppression is godly. That God ordained some people, simply because of their sex or skin color (or both), as belonging under the power of other people. That women’s subordination is central to the gospel of Christ” (Barr 173). 

Most recently, a student I repeatedly asked to leave the classroom, after he became verbally aggressive, assured me that I was just “being too emotional,” a phrase that seemed pulled directly from the How to be a Sexist Manual. These aggressions are, of course, psychologically disturbing, but they are also very time consuming. I wrote numerous emails, recounted the details of the encounter to several individuals across campus, and had at least six meetings. I spent approximately ten hours actively dealing with this incident, hours that were taken away from class preparation, grading, and research.

Studies have found that women of color faculty have heavier teaching loads compared to male and white female professors, are expected to engage in considerably more nurturing service responsibilities (Pittman 2010), and full-time female faculty earn $18,370 less yearly compared to their male counterparts[4]. Furthermore, research suggests that college students have an unconscious bias against female professors and faculty of color that is reflected on student evaluations. In a 2015 experiment published by the Innovative Higher Education journal,[5] students rated online professors with a male name significantly higher than those with female names, regardless of the actual identity of the professor. Students tend to comment on the personality, appearance and competence of female instructors to a much higher degree than that of their male teachers. Studies have also revealed that students rate white faculty more positively than faculty of color and believe that faculty of color are less credible (Reid 2010[6]; Hendrix 1998[7]). This poses a disadvantage to female professors of color because student evaluations are commonly taken into consideration for hiring, promotion, tenure, and other career opportunities, despite the overwhelming evidence of bias.

Many of the disparities that women of color face in academia and beyond remain unquestioned because they are normal practices of white-centered patriarchal organizations. The institution of higher education was built as a space for white men. Seventy-six percent of all faculty in institutions of higher education are white[8] and at Christian colleges this number is even higher – 83.8% (CCCU 2021). More strikingly, Latinas comprise only 3% of all university professors in the United States (NCES 2018). Universities claim to have a desire to diversify their faculty body, but seem unwilling to make institutional changes that create environments where all faculty can thrive and feel safe.

Academia is supposed to be a place driven by sound research and Christian academics should be concerned with engaging in scholarship that helps human beings flourish. When faculty members and administrators of faith are presented with convincing data, produced by a reputable study, that women are being disadvantaged and disrespected in the workplace, the next logical step is to inquire into what can be done to improve their experiences. However, this course of action is too rational and too unfavorable for patriarchal structures. I witnessed this phenomenon unfold when a group of researchers shared their findings of an institution’s gender climate study.  A white male immediately interjected and asked if these findings were truly representative of the female faculty experience at large. Then, a woman complained that her experience had not been included in the study and therefore, claimed that the findings were incomplete. The whole meeting was spent explaining the research methods used in the study and convincing certain people of the findings’ legitimacy. Actionable steps were not discussed. The study did not fit the ideals of patriarchy and as a result, it was dismissed.  

Women’s accounts are often disregarded, even when the research supports their claims. An absurd amount of time is spent questioning the veracity of their experiences to the point of exhaustion. Men are often not held accountable because women are not believed. In many instances, women prefer not to report workplace harassment because of the tiresome amount of time it will take for the claim to be considered and the fear of being alienated, fired or being blamed as the victim.[9]

“Why does this commonly happen to me?” I said aloud to a supervisor as I shared details of an encounter I had with a student who became threatening. In my heart I knew the answer, but I was seeking some empathy from a female leader. Her response shocked me: “Maybe it’s because you set boundaries.” She theorized that male students often turned violent towards me because I establish firm boundaries, do not let their misconduct go unnoticed and the result is that I escalate the situation. Following this explanation, I (the victim) had done something to provoke the student (aggressor). Victim blaming reinforces sexist notions that women are responsible for men’s violent actions. Admittedly, for a brief second, I entertained this thought. I’m aware of the literature that speaks about victim blaming as a product of patriarchy. I’ve counseled other women on many occasions not to blame themselves for the abuse that was inflicted on them, yet I entertained this notion, if even for a brief second. Why? People tend to be more accepting of these sexist rationales when given by people of authority. If a person that society regards as intelligent, wise, and ethical is making such claims, these statements become more compelling. Consequently, evangelical leaders (men and women) have a higher degree of responsibility to counsel women in ways that do not reinforce misogynistic notions that will retraumatize women. Also, it is often these individuals who have the authority to ensure that the abuser is held accountable.

I was told that the university had to ensure that the student who assaulted me was cared for, and that the institution embraced a non-punitive model of discipline. At this point, I was frustrated, and I replied, “That’s great. And how is the university caring for me? What consequences will this student face for his behavior? How is the university keeping him accountable and deterring him from committing further acts of aggression?” Accountability is not vengeance. Discipline is not assault. Caring for someone does not mean ignoring their wrongdoings. Spiritual language is often utilized as a method to reinforce male dominance and female culpability. Grace is code for “overlook what was done to you,” forgiveness signals “do not seek justice,” and compassion is equivalent to, “brush it off, they were just having a bad day.” The message: if you don’t overlook what was done to you, if you do seek justice and you refuse to just brush it off, then you are not graceful, forgiving or compassionate, so you must be a bad Christian woman.

Aggression against women extends to all spheres of society, and women of color bear the double burden of racism and sexism. Evangelical leaders – both men and women – commonly emphasize female submission and rigid gender roles. We must understand the harm that this messaging is causing in the lives of countless women and realize how this rhetoric is being used to inflict violence on women. Jesus empowered women; he did not come to this earth to “put them in their place,” treat them as inferior to men, or reinforce the gender inequality present in Jewish society. Jesus disrupted gendered expectations, and in so doing, showed the love of God to these women. There are many “sympathetic” leaders who simply shake their heads and cross their arms. They believe that Jesus holds both men and women in the same esteem, but this belief is not acted upon – it does not materialize. What value does a belief actually carry if it is not grounded in action? In my experience, the policies were inexistent, the process was unclear, and the consequences were vague. The policies that did exist were there to protect the “integrity” of the aggressor, rather than ensuring the safety of the victim. Accountability is crucial and institutions must also be held accountable for their inaction.

A female colleague told me, “I don’t have much power,” speaking as to why she had remained silent for so many years about her own experiences. It was the same woman that was now advocating for me. While many of us may not hold significant power in our respective spaces, we do hold collective power. This is an invitation to action. This is an invitation to utilize our collective voice. Por nosotras. Por nuestras hermanas.


Pressure Cooker

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This month we are featuring two pieces by student writers who are engaging theologically with their cultural identity. We are thrilled to give platform to these up and coming voices who will surely shape the trajectory of the mestizo church. -The Editors

When I was a little girl

I would get up in the morning to get ready for school

Amma was already up, 

showered and dressed before the sun 

She had prepared breakfast, lunch and dinner 

before the day had begun

The monotonous routine of the Indian woman

Was the pillar of our household

When everything else was falling apart

The rich spices were strong and bold 

like coffee, the daily aroma functioning as an alarm

Flavors that burnt my nose 

but comforted my heart


The clunky metal pressure cooker was on the stove,

Yet again

Just like me, it was imported all the way from India

And just like me, it existed as a daily functioning member of this household

And just like me, it cooked consumed rice everyday

Not a day went by in my first 11 years of existence

that white basmati rice did not enter my system

The clunky metal pressure cooker became my nemesis

As it’s whistle blew it reminded me of a train

That had the capacity to steal me and take me faraway

Reminding me of how nothing ever felt safe

Amma.

Why do you let the pressure cooker get so hot that it screams?

Surely the rice is cooked now and we can eat.

Day after day, the pressure builds up and the whistle screeches

Make it stop.

And just like the white rice it cooked

The whiteness boiled inside of me

Pressurizing into a pristine product for others pleasure

I bathed in the waters of the pressure cooker thinking it would cleanse me

But now I feel dirtier than ever

pain was the corpse that i buried thinking it was dead

but pain isn’t a corpse it’s a seed

once it's in the ground and nourished

it sprouts up into nasty weeds and surprises you

There is value in my culture and I don’t want to throw it away

Throw it into the melting pot to let it boil and disintegrate 

A one way ticket to a faraway place

The train is waiting. 

The whistle is screeching. 

Next stop--your life long American dream.

Amma, I never was strong enough to open the lid and escape

Why couldn’t I have been strong enough?

Why couldn’t you have been strong enough for me?

Amma. 

Why do you let the pressure cooker get so hot that it screams?

Surely the rice is cooked now and we can eat.

Day after day, the pressure builds up and the whistle screeches

Make it stop.

White rice is not enough flavor for some

But paired with too much and suddenly 

you are overwhelming

A dangerous game people play

When they control their intake

Thinking they can tolerate more spice than they can handle

The aftertaste

Leaves an unpleasant mark on their face

Eyebrows furrowed

Lips puckered

Confusion is uncomfortably sour 

Regret floods in 

as they reach for a glass of water

Foreign flavors to them

But savory memories to me

That train will take them to a museum

Where they can gawk and gaze in amazement

But walk out the minute their eyes get tired of looking

Like a field trip where the kids have to go for school credit

But the minute they get off the bus

They are no longer at school

And therefore, 

done learning

Foreign concepts to them

But second nature to me

But if only that train were taking me to my utopia

Where nothing has to be sacrificed

And I wave goodbye to all my fears as they fade off in the distance

Fear of man

Fear of exclusion

Fear of abandonment

In this faraway land, 

chickappa and chickamma will send me Indian care packages

And I open them up with excitement instead of remorse 

In this faraway land,

I never get tired of eating Indian food

And I never complain

Because this time I won’t have to learn the hard way

What I had when I had it

In this faraway land,

The nuances of my culture are known and understood by all those around me

Like we were watching an old movie we had seen a hundred times

Nobody is even wondering what will happen next

But from memory, they annoyingly recite the next character’s lines 

In this faraway land,

My heritage is defended by my loved ones 

like one would argue their favorite superhero or sports team

And instead of our culture being like a set of clothes we could donate once it didn’t fit anymore

it would be our precious keepsake we tucked away to pass down to future generations

It would be intrinsically woven inside of us

Amma. 

Why do you let the pressure cooker get so hot that it screams?

Surely the rice is cooked now and we can eat.

Day after day, the pressure builds up and the whistle screeches

Make it stop.

You see, the white rice is boiling to be plain and simple

Affordable and safe

I am made into something digestible

Spicy flavors are dangerous and to be placed on the side

Eaten in the tiniest increments only if one so chooses

We put Jesus into the pressure cooker

And cook him into a white, fluffed up rice

steamed of any unnecessary and extra components

Now He is digestible

Culturally gnosticizing the gospel 

Extracting Him of his ethnicity 

A palatable Jesus, 

we take Him in aculturally

Generational sin has the nastiest fruit

Because the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree

the tree that was planted must uproot itself and leave

far away from getting entangled in the same old roots

of the same old trees

and if all i am to you is red on the outside and white on the inside

than you just picked the wrong apple

and there begins your sin cycle

And we produce safety

Because once the rice is cooled down it's safe to eat, right?

Because they are safe,

I have to be pressurized

Day after day

Laughing and playing the same game

To protect myself in this melting pot we call tasty

Give up the charade

It's not a melting pot where every flavor stays the same

But a pressure cooker where whatever was left disintegrates

Washed away

Washed white

White washed

The American pressure cooker

Has lost its taste

And now I am the whistle screaming


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About Shreya Ramachandran

Shreya Ramachandran is a sophomore at Moody Bible Institute, studying Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). She was born in India and moved to the United States when she was two years old. After many life transitions, Shreya is beginning to embrace her identity in Christ as an Indian-American woman. Being mestizo resonates with Shreya, as she has always lived on the borderlands of culture. Shreya shares: “I am blessed by the ministry at WOS, one that deals delicately with the nuances of culture in order to equip the Church and be the Church.”

Jesus and John Wayne Review

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White Masculinity and Theology

It was in graduate school that I first heard the phrase “contextual theologies.” I was intrigued since context - both cultural and historical - is crucial to understanding theology. While reading the assignment, I realized that contextual theologies are essentially theologies with an adjective placed in front: feminist theology, womanist theology, latinx theology, LGBTQ+ theology, liberation theology, black liberation theology, etc. You may notice (as I did) a couple of categories that are missing from these “adjectival” theologies: white theology and masculine theology. The reason is that these are assumed - the “mythical norm” of theologies, as it were.[1]

Since white, masculine voices have been privileged in the field of theology for centuries (or since voices were assumed to be white and male, regardless of the truth of that assumption), any attempt to equally privilege latinx, black, female, LGBTQ+, Asian, Indigenous, or any other perspective alongside those voices is often resisted. “Those'' voices, it is argued, are too influenced by their own subjective viewpoints and focus too much on one or two aspects of theology to be taken as seriously as the other (white and masculine) voices that have dominated for centuries. As if these white, masculine voices are not equally subjective and focused on particular issues.

What Kristin Kobes du Mez accomplished in Jesus and John Wayne is tracing a history of American white, masculine, evangelical theology and to identify the historical, cultural, and political forces that influenced, guided, and focused its theological emphases for decades. In the book, Kobes du Mez draws back the curtain on the assumption that American evangelicalism has developed its theological emphases and ecclesial ethics in some sort of vacuum outside of cultural influence - that it is not just as “adjectival” as any other sort of contextual theology. Kobes du Mez argues that the guiding force behind white evangelicalism for the last 50-some years has been a “militant white masculinity.”[2]

In a fascinating study that follows, Kobes du Mez traces the history of how “militant white masculinity” has always been the guiding force behind American evangelicalism and how it was shaped by and utilized symbols such as John Wayne, William Wallace, and other “rugged, masculine figures,” the Republican party, consumerism, and even the American military as an ideal force for good in the world.[3] Kobes Du Mez takes her readers on a dizzying journey through historical periods of evangelicalism that, despite its comprehensive nature, can only really scratch the surface of white evangelical subculture and all its manifestations. Beginning her history as far back as the 1890s, when the Victorian “model of manly restraint had begun to falter” and the new economy of the early twentieth century demanded a different type of “softer” work than toiling in fields or factories (and as women began to attend college with more regularity), Kobes du Mez records that a call for a new type of more aggressive masculinity emerged.[4]  

Christianity as White, Militant, and Masculine 

Kobes du Mez’s primary argument in Jesus and John Wayne is that this “militant white masculinity” has been the guiding force behind evangelicalism for decades. In so doing, she highlights more effectively than any theology textbook I’ve ever read just how contextual white masculine theology is. Perhaps one of the most devastating moments in her book is when she outlines how white evangelicalism was used to perpetrate segregation through church polity, Christian private education, and through both its constituents’ silence about and active railing against the Civil Rights movement. She does point out that “evangelicals’ response to civil rights varied, particularly in the early stages of the movement.”[5] Kobes du Mez uses Billy Graham as a prime example of one such evangelical leader who even personally removed ropes between white people and black people at his crusades and invited Martin Luther King, Jr. to pray at his 1957 New York City Crusade.[6] However, she also points out that he distanced himself from backing activists when they began to engage in civil disobedience, and that many white evangelicals responded similarly, finding it “hard to accept that the sin of racism ran deep through the nation’s history.”[7]

She argues that this lack of willingness among white evangelicals to continue standing by civil rights activists coupled with their silence about the demand for continued segregationist policies among their fellow white evangelicals had devastating effects. One of these was using private Christian schools to continue segregation and revealing that ultimately, white evangelicalism was more concerned with continuing its own political purposes than fighting for its black brothers and sisters. Kobes du Mez states, “Although blatant defenses of segregation and racial inequality would be rare, many southern evangelicals and fundamentalists who persisted in their unreconstructed views of race would find common cause with more ‘tolerant’ evangelicals on issues like social welfare policy and ‘law and order’ politics that would carry clear racial undertones.”[8]

Millennials from white evangelical spaces will recognize that similar patterns emerged in the genesis of the Black Lives Matter movement. Refusal to support that statement - “Black Lives Matter” - was defended by many white evangelicals because they claimed that the movement had ties to a more liberal political agenda and that the civil rights activists within the movement were anti-police. This movement drew fault lines across white evangelicalism that, for some, resulted in splitting away from the evangelical church due to its refusal to support what they viewed as a basic civil rights issue. These divisions only became more pronounced when Donald Trump was elected as the Republican party’s candidate for the 2016 election. What was not widely recognized, however, was that these patterns had been present in white evangelicalism from its very start. The widespread reception of Jesus and John Wayne by those of us who grew up (or are still part of) white evangelicalism has been a resounding agreement that the book puts its finger on exactly what felt off as we grew up, particularly surrounding issues of race, “family values” voting, and the strong connection to the U.S. military (which is brilliantly outlined in Chapter 12, entitled, “Pilgrim’s Progress in Camo”).[9] 

Where are the Women?  

For me, one of the most eye-opening chapters of Kobes du Mez’s book was Chapter 11, provocatively entitled, “Holy Balls.” While some readers may be drawn to other chapters, this chapter described the period of my life when my faith was becoming my own. I found my heart feeling twisted as I realized how whole-heartedly I had swallowed certain parts of toxic masculinity because I truly believed Scripture demanded that I did, and because much of the Christian culture around me absolutely encouraged me to do so. Kobes du Mez begins the chapter with some less common examples of militant masculinity, such as churches hosting MMA viewing parties and Christian mixed-martial arts groups, but speaks to the heart of what was happening at the time by saying, “As militant masculinity took hold across evangelicalism, it helped bind together those on the fringes of the movement with those closer to the center, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish the margins from the mainstream.”[10]

A poignant example of this collapsing of the margins into the mainstream is the support New Calvinism gave to two “fringe” voices in the early 2000’s: Mark Driscoll and Doug Wilson. Kobes du Mez writes more in-depth about these two men and the way that they were given platforms and endorsements by the leaders of New Calvinism despite many of them expressing discomfort with their crass talk, sometimes violent focus, and even, in one case, denial that American slaves had been treated with brutality.[11] This, to me, was the gut-punch of the chapter. These two men were endorsed by other men who were at the heart of founding various church-planting networks and conferences that were wildly popular among me and my peers during college specifically, and their endorsements meant a great deal. While these organizations and coalitions claimed to hold the gospel message as the most important thing, Kobes du Mez points out that the unifying factor among many of these very doctrine-conscious men was not solely the simple gospel message, but “gender and authority.”[12]

It was both disheartening and a reminder to me of where my place was at all times - out of the pulpit and out of any leadership that was not solely over women or children. Knowing that I wasn’t going to seek pastoral leadership was far more important to these men than my love for Christ, desire to serve the Church, and my passion for theology, and that oft-repeated question made it painfully clear.”

These two examples most brutally highlight her point about gender and authority trumping simple gospel messaging within white evangelical alliances, but so does the lack of female leadership in many churches that ascribe to this New Calvinism. Sure, there are shining exceptions, but the question I was most often asked when I stepped into a new church in the early aughts is most illustrative - “Why do you want to study theology?” which was code for “Do you want to be a pastor?” It was both disheartening and a reminder to me of where my place was at all times - out of the pulpit and out of any leadership that was not solely over women or children. Knowing that I wasn’t going to seek pastoral leadership was far more important to these men than my love for Christ, desire to serve the Church, and my passion for theology, and that oft-repeated question made it painfully clear.

One area of critique that I have for Jesus and John Wayne is the book’s claim to analyze how white evangelicals got to where they are today, while women are conspicuously absent from many of the chapters as perpetrators of this “militant white masculinity” that Kobes Du Mez describes. It was not simply men advocating for patriarchal norms in churches, nor was it only men leading the “family values” Christian Right, but women were crucial in the formation of and enforcement of this “militant white masculinity,” and one place the book falls short is in fully demonstrating that. A notable exception is Chapter Two (entitled “God’s Gift to Man”), in which Kobes Du Mez highlights women such as Marabel Morgan and her The Total Woman course, Anita Bryant, Elisabeth Elliot, and Phyllis Schlafly. Kobes du Mez continually documents Schlafly’s influence among white evangelicals (particularly politically) throughout the book, which is utterly engrossing for anyone (like me) who had not known much about this woman before. However, Schlafly appears to be the sole woman whose contribution to “militant white masculinity” is traced throughout the entire book. While I think it is important to include white women’s culpability in the propagation of “militant white masculinity,” Kobes du Mez has recently announced that she will be publishing a new book about evangelical women called Live, Laugh, Love, and I believe she intends to address much of what she left out in Jesus and John Wayne within that book. I, for one, look forward to reading it. 

Christianity, Consumerism, and a Dangerous “Culture-Making”

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One poignant observation Kobes du Mez makes in Jesus and John Wayne is the way that white evangelicals harnessed consumerism to propagate their cultural message.[13] By doing so, they created their own culture and provided a weapons store for the culture war that consumed much of their recent history. This culture was created through celebrity culture (particularly as pertained to pastors, radio stars, and motivational speakers), radio ministry, Christian television shows, the Christian music industry, Christian films, the Christian book publishing business, and Christian bookstores.

Andy Crouch has written much about culture and culture making. In For the Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts, he describes how Genesis informs our understanding of culture making by demonstrating how God was the first culture maker and cultivator - planting a garden, which Crouch calls “nature plus culture.”[14] He describes the call of those in the Church to create good and beautiful art and other such cultural contributions. Crouch speaks of culture making as a creative, positive endeavor that the Church ought to participate in joyfully, creating art in and for the Church as well as for the world. Through the creation story, he highlights that the problem with culture making occurs when Adam and Eve no longer wait on and partner with God, but “...take and eat, and set in motion the process by which everything that God had originally given as a gift, a sign of relationship and dependence, will be twisted into a right, something grasped from a world presumed to be threatened and threatening, something that insulates us from needing relationship or dependence.”[15]

Culture making, in the form that Kobes Du Mez documents, is dangerous, homogenizing, and used as a battering ram against anyone who stands in its way or disagrees with its narrative. It also robs white evangelicals of the incredible gift of listening to the voices of their many siblings in Christ who could expand, correct, lead, and joyfully participate in culture making alongside them had the culture wars they participated in not eradicated that focus on relationship and dependence.

In this description of the Fall, Crouch illustrates precisely what Kobes du Mez identifies as problematic with white evangelicalism’s attempt at culture making. White evangelicals took the gift of cultural creation given by God and twisted it into a utilitarian tool used to fight a culture war - usually shouting about rights rather than gifts (whether second amendment rights, rights to gather around a flagpole at a school and pray, rights to not have to pay taxes to support people “on welfare,”, rights to defend “traditional family and cultural values,” etc.). By taking that gift of cultural creation and fashioning it into a weapon, white evangelicalism lost sight of the gift of relationship and dependence on other Christians. The reverberations of their culture war drowned out the voices of brothers and sisters who had something to contribute to the conversation about culture, and their warring cost them the opportunity to participate in culture-making alongside them.

This was not the only negative effect; when white evangelicals invited siblings of color into their spaces, they acted as gatekeepers to the culture making of that space. While siblings of color were invited to contribute to the worship teams, lead the youth groups, and act as outreach coordinators, rarely were they given roles of actual leadership to set the priorities of churches and organizations. If they stepped outside of white evangelicalism’s priorities for culture making, they were instructed to “get in line” or get out. Many chose the latter after years of being silenced and abandoned by those in leadership. Culture making, in the form that Kobes Du Mez documents, is dangerous, homogenizing, and used as a battering ram against anyone who stands in its way or disagrees with its narrative. It also robs white evangelicals of the incredible gift of listening to the voices of their many siblings in Christ who could expand, correct, lead, and joyfully participate in culture making alongside them had the culture wars they participated in not eradicated that focus on relationship and dependence.

So, What Now?

Jesus and John Wayne provided for me the context of what was happening backstage during my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. The reason the book resonates so strongly with so many (particularly white) evangelicals is that it gives answers to questions we never knew how to ask. It also articulates what our young minds may not have yet had the maturity to say about the culture wars we lived through, and in many cases, were even used as agents in.

Kobes du Mez successfully articulated a succinct, utterly readable account of the last 50-some years of white American evangelicalism, and whether you agree with her thesis or not, the book’s already astounding cultural impact will force you to grapple with it in your churches, schools, and institutions. And this is a very good thing, because so many of the historical and recent events that she brings to light have needed to be wrestled with for a very long time in a way that accounts for the historical context surrounding them and without making apologies for being bold enough to articulate what was wrong about those events.

Kobes du Mez’s historical account of white evangelicalism and how we got to where we are succeeds in highlighting a theological point: all theologies are contextual theologies. Even (and especially) white masculine evangelical theology, though the way it is often taught in many university, seminary, and Sunday school classrooms over the years may argue otherwise. Just as feminist, black liberation, womanist, latinx, or any other “contextual” theology has a cultural and historical context, so does white theology and masculine theology. More than any theology textbook I’ve read, Kobes du Mez demonstrates the danger of prioritizing one viewpoint as normative, simply by laying out the history.

So, is there hope for white evangelicalism? Kobes du Mez seems to think so, ending her book by saying, “What was once done might be undone.”[16] It all depends on us. If we as white evangelicals and former white evangelicals react to her description and critique of how we got here with defensiveness and a plugging of our ears, we are only doing more of the same. However, if we begin to consider Crouch’s culture making and what Makoto Fujimara has called culture care, perhaps we can find a way forward. Any way forward must involve focusing on relationship and dependence once more - not just including diverse voices at our tables in minor roles, but in submitting to those voices humbly (even if they no longer trust our tables and have built their own). It must also involve putting in the long hard work to earn back trust, and eventually, culture-making together again, joyfully participating in creation with one another and with the God we serve together.


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About Luci Frerichs Parrish

Luci Frerichs Parrish is a Midwestern native living in the South. She lived on the South Side of Chicago for seven years, working in various non-profit and church ministries. She has an M.A. in Theology from Wheaton College Graduate School with an emphasis in Systematic Theology. Her current areas of study include systematic theology, theological aesthetics, and ecclesiology. She is a coffee enthusiast, independent bookstore fanatic, and Pittsburgh Penguins fan. She is passionate about doing theology to serve the local and global church.


Footnotes

[1] Audre Lorde defines the “mythical norm” as “white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure.” Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984), 116.

[2] Kristin Kobes du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York, NY: Liveright Publishing, 2020), 4.

[3] See Ted Cruz’s now-infamous quotation of William Wallace at CPAC 2021 for a relevant current example of this exact point. See also Kobes du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York, NY: Liveright Publishing, 2020), 4.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid, 37.

[6] Ibid., 37-38.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid, 39.

[9] Ibid, 205.

[10] Ibid, 187-188.

[11] Ibid, 202.

[12] Ibid, 204.

[13] Though white evangelicals are certainly not the only American Protestants to do so!

[14] Andy Crouch, “The Gospel: How Is Art a Gift, a Calling, and an Obedience?” in For the Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts, ed. W. David Taylor (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2010), 32.

[15] Ibid, 34.

[16] Kobes du Mez, 304.

Another White Nod to MLK?

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Summer of 2020 inspired more conversation around the topic of performative justice. You need only look as far as social media influencers to see simple evidence of prevalent performative justice in our nation. Who spoke up, who listened, and who is continuing the work of pursuing equality and justice in large or small ways? 

Today is Martin Luther King Day. On this day influencers, marketers, educators, non-profits, and others will promote Dr. King’s ethos of peace, hope, equality, and justice. If you attended primary school in the US, you likely listened to or read King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech and wrote a reflective essay on the themes found therein, year after year. Good students had a proper respect for King; He was an American hero. Your experience in the US church also portrayed King as a man of faith, increasing his validity. Quite possibly, as a white, Christ-following American you will be sharing something from or about MLK on your social media feeds today. You will mention his memory to your young children. You will send a text of solidarity to your friends of color. And then you will move on. 

Performative justice is easiest to succumb to as white people when we are given a set of simplistic actions to justify our beliefs about what it means to be good and helpful. Holidays, monuments, and moments can become rote in both faith traditions and in our nation. Sacred remembrances can turn into mere performances of right action, actions done for self-preservation or gain. 

This was the case in Arizona. A failure to instill MLK Day as a paid state holiday led the National Football League to disqualify Phoenix as a host city for the 1993 Super Bowl.[1] This meant a projected revenue loss of over 200 million dollars for the southwest city; the game ended up going to Los Angeles.[2] In November 1992, Arizona finally approved the state holiday, nearly ten years after Ronald Reagan signed to declare the national observation of the day. I can’t help but wonder if financial gain was the tipping motivation for the state of Arizona to finally support remembering Dr. King and the civil rights movement he was killed leading. 

In his speech The Other America King spoke to the needed repentance of white Americans in this way: 

“What it is necessary to see is that there has never been a single solid monistic determined commitment on the part of the vast majority of white Americans on the whole question of Civil Rights and on the whole question of racial equality. This is something that truth impels all men of good will to admit.”[3]

We have a flawed approach toward inequality and injustice in both our nation and the American church. Our commitment to change, as King said, is limited. When we do take action, Arizona proves that it is often performative--a well placed nod driven by self-preservation.

For white people of faith, Martin Luther King Day is an opportunity to evaluate if the gospel of peace King championed is something we only give nod to on a national holiday. This day is a moment where we should consider our belief of the image of God in humanity, and how that belief informs our ministry structures, educational values, financial decisions, voting, and the voices we include when developing our theology. 

As a white, Christ-following woman, I ask you today, not to share another MLK post on your Facebook page. Instead, take intentional time to listen to King’s The Other America speech, see yourself in the narrative, ask how his words bear truth for our nation today, and reflect on your role in cultivating a culture of justice and unity in the US church. Not falling into performative justice, begins with creating space for sacred remembrance.


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About Emily C. Alexander

A first generation college graduate of a rural working class family, Emily completed her BA in Ministry to Women at Moody Bible Institute. She writes on the rural-urban divide, and issues at the intersection of faith and culture. Her hope is to contribute to the flourishing of the church through thoughtful theological engagement.


Footnotes

[1] https://www.library.pima.gov/content/martin-luther-king-holiday-in-arizona/

[2] https://theundefeated.com/features/when-arizona-lost-the-super-bowl-because-the-state-didnt-recognize-martin-luther-king-jr-day/

[3] https://www.crmvet.org/docs/otheram.htm