Wedding at Cana by He Qi

Accusations of biblical infidelity are a feature of the newest series of rifts in US and global Anabaptism. The affirmation of LGBTQ people’s spiritual gifts and marriages is not a matter of ethics, these groups argue, but of seriousness about the Bible. We are on dangerous ground if we reject what is clear in Scripture, and a cascade of other liberal fallacies follows in the wake. Conservative Mennonites contend that heterosexual unions are the clear and unassailable standard in Scripture. Men and women were created for one another. Humanity is completed in this union.

This theology of human sexuality relies heavily on the teachings about marriage and gender in the epistles and in Genesis. Oddly, for Mennonites, I rarely see conservative Mennonites placing Jesus’ teachings on marriage at the center of their understanding of human sexuality. I suspect the reason is that the gospels are profoundly pessimistic about marriage. Jesus is not married. He has no children. I would go as far as to say that Jesus is anti-family -- he calls disciples to abandon their families, including their marriages, to follow him. He tells future believers to do likewise. Jesus has harsh words for his family when they make an appeal to their kinship-based preferential treatment. As a child, Jesus is separated from Mary and Joseph only to be found in his “father’s house” -- in the temple.

A popular argument from anti-gay conservatives is that there are no models of same sex marriages in the Bible. In reality, there are no pillars of marriage of any kind in the gospels, no moral or ethical exemplars to which we can appeal. Frankly, the entire Bible is a dumpster fire when it comes to stable, monogamous, mutually fulfilling, and holy marital relations. The biggest losers in Biblical marriage are, of course, women. And the women for whom things work out the best secure their futures by any means necessary, including prostitution for blackmail, sexually manipulating a foreign leader, and taking scandalous liberties on a threshing floor.

What we have so far is a deeply pessimistic theology of marriage: no exemplars of marriage in the New Testament (perhaps the whole Bible), no positive teachings about marriage from Jesus, no model of marriage among Jesus’ first disciples, and no theology of marriage presented to us in the gospels. This is the starting point for a biblical theology of human sexuality for Mennonites, who prioritize the teachings of Jesus.

This is a difficult reality because a lot of Mennonites (including myself) are married. And some of us quite like being married. We might even describe marriage as a source of joy and holiness that seems at odds with Jesus’ consistently negative theology of marriage and family. In addition, despite the overwhelming anti-family nature of the gospels, Jesus is incredibly receptive of children – and those children are mostly the product of sexual unions constituted in marriage. We also receive specific teachings about marriage to specific churches in the epistles. So it seems that the first generation of Jesus’ followers did imagine that marriage and children would be part of the life of the church’s life. What are we to do with this conflict?

Let’s go back to Jesus in Matthew 19 and 22. In Matthew 19, Jesus is asked by the Pharisees about the legality of divorce (the Pharisees were a reform movement within Judaism that stressed grace and human freedom, and were concerned more about moral commitments than the rigors of temple practice. Which is to say, the morality of divorce would be an important question for them). This is where Jesus issues the dictum that divorce has no place in the renewal of all things initiated by his ministry, with the exception of porneia (a broad category of sexual immorality; as far as I know, we don’t get a lot of detail from the NT about what this means). Jesus grounds this ethic in Genesis – marriage is a binding union for the course of a lifespan of the shortest living member. God granted exceptions to this binding union because of “hardness of heart.” The time for those exceptions has ended with Jesus.

This is a teaching that (thank God) almost all churches modify to some extent (some churches try to pack a lot into porneia, including physical or emotional abuse, but that’s a stretch). But the real punch of this teaching is what the Pharisees rightly interpret Jesus saying: it is better not to be married. Jesus’ response is “the one who can accept this should accept this.” That’s a curious pronouncement. In Matthew, Jesus is quite intense and unrelenting in the ethical demands he makes of his followers. Now, instead, we hear of refraining from marriage “if you can do it you should,” the alternative being “some people can’t and that’s also a reality of this life.”

The teaching in Matthew 19 on marriage sits within a series of teachings with a similar theme: if you’re considering following Jesus, be aware that this entails a reworking of everything you know. The next teaching concerns children and their central place in the Jesus movement. The next is about money, how a rich man asks to follow Jesus but cannot follow Jesus’ command to give up all his earthly possessions, selling them to the poor to follow Jesus. Instead, he walks away because he has “vast wealth.” It is fascinating that, within this three-part series of teachings, the church has excelled at finding ways around the call to sell all possessions to follow Jesus, but wants to retain at least parts of the total prohibition on divorce (the Adam and Eve bit) to justify the exclusion of gay marriage.

Next we have Matthew 22, where Jesus is encountered by religious leaders (Sadducees) who press him on questions of resurrection (Jesus, likely aligned with the Pharisees, or actually a Pharisee, would be add odds with the Sadducees on resurrection). The religious leaders present a test scenario, a common form of religious study among the rabbis. A woman undergoes a sequence of seven levirate marriages – to whom is she married in heaven? Jesus responds that the woman is married to no one: “for in the resurrection people neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like angels of God in heaven.” In other words, marriage (like that of the woman who underwent levirate marriages) is a relationship that exists in the in-between time and will cease to function in the life to come. As it is, it makes sense that the disciples of Jesus, who live out the reign of God in their collective lives (what we call church) reflect the eternal, non-marital ends of human relationships. It also makes sense that they reject wealth and live collectively, relying on the charity of others. Like Jesus, their mother and their brothers are fellow Christians, not blood kin.

A feature of both the Matthew 19 and 22 teachings on marriage is the assumption that Christians live both within Jesus’ redemption and outside the final realization of that redemption. We live within human institutions, such as marriage and money, in which we will participate. At the same time, there are degrees of intensification of God’s reign. Some people sell all their earthly possessions to follow Jesus, and others devote their lives to God with such entirety that their lives cannot accommodate marriage and children. The gospels and the epistle invite us to categories of good and bad, but also to a holy life beyond the binaries of good/bad and sinful/holy that takes into account the accommodation of our in-between time. Marriage is neither good nor bad, nor sinful nor holy. It is an accommodation made for human beings in the in-between time, between Jesus’ resurrection and the redemption of all things.

I don’t know that Jesus means that most of us are out of favor because we can’t hack it in monasticism. Instead, we live in a world with particular kinds of bodies, imperfect relationships, and a curtailed ability to sustain companionship and care because of the demands of our economies. As it is, we are gifted with the Holy Spirit and one another to discern how the shape our accommodations — intimate relationships, use of money, living in nation states, raising children, eating food, the activity of gendered bodies — can offer life and hope. The epistles, I would argue, are examples of how that discernment looks in particular communities at particular moments in time, and are incredibly helpful for the ongoing to discernment the church engages in every generation the new questions that come before us. More on that next time!

I expected 2025 to be a joyful year, celebrating 500 years since the believer’s baptism that birthed Anabaptism. Instead, this was a difficult and painful year for global Anabaptism. Paul Schrag, in his most recent opinion piece for Anabaptist World, names the state of affairs:

Mosaic Mennonite Conference’s split from Mennonite Church USA.

Mennonite World Conference’s decision not to appoint a Mennonite Church USA member to a representative role after leaders of other Anabaptist denominations objected.

Ethiopian Anabaptists’ withdrawal from hosting the 2028 MWC assembly amid a “crisis of unity” due to controversy over links to North American churches that accept same-sex marriage.

In the Anabaptist household, distrust has spread like a sickness that threatens the body’s health.

A few people with significant stakes in these conversations have written important responses to these happenings, and I especially commend to you Henok Mekonin’s experience and wisdom as someone speaking from within the Meserete Kristos Church (MKC). I honor Henok’s call to respect MKC’s development as a “mature self-theologizing church.” If you’re interested in how Christians beyond the West are theologizing sexuality and critiquing the efforts of Western evangelicals to import culture wars into their indigenous Christian traditions, I commend to you the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologian, which included luminaries like Musa Dube and Mercy Odoyuye, as well as Esther Mombo, Kwok Pui-lan, Joseph Goh, Marcella Althaus-Reid, and Ish Ruiz.

I’ll leave you in these capable hands and instead will turn here to reflections for North American Mennonites in the face of what unfolded in the past year.

US Mennonites have struggled to articulate a theology of sexuality
Mennonite churches, in discerning the Spirit in relation to LGBTQ people, are often stymied in our attempts to articulate a theology of sexuality. I suspect one reason for this is fear that our churches will splinter if we spend too much time working through human sexuality (as you can see, we don’t handle conflict well and often find it easier to walk away).

I often heard from my colleagues that questions about human sexuality in the church brought intense conflict and anxiety. The goal (and I feel this anxiety in my pastoral bones) was to get the congregation across the finish line of a decision without the church falling apart or you getting fired. One way to get through this process in one piece (personally and as a church) was to “agree in disagreement” or produce vague results, just enough lack of clarity to make everyone miserable. In other cases, clarity was reached, and that closed the door to all future questions.

In addition to the pressure of holding a church together, pastors also contend with making decisions about LGBTQ people who are already in our churches. It is strange and painful to decide whether Christians who are already among you ought to be part of the church. It’s an awkwardness paralleled in Acts 15, when Peter speaks about the decision to welcome Gentiles into the fold of Jesus-Judaism: “God, who knows the human heart, testified to them by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he did to us,” and we, like them, “are saved by grace.” In other words, we have clearly witnessed the Spirit at work in these believers, so this feels like a weird conversation.

These are observations, not judgments. Keeping people together is a significant part of pastoral ministry. Not making decisions about a certain group of people as if they weren’t there is an important pastoral ethic. While our abbreviated conversations meant more churches made space for LGBTQ people to marry and become members of the church, the “get to the finish line and don’t discuss it again” anxieties also meant that many pastors felt we couldn’t talk about sexuality anymore, lest the can of worms be reopened. I think this also meant we were less equipped to engage in theological conversations with those in our tradition who disagree with us.

The urgency of our questions and our concerns for the lived realities of LGBTQ people in our communities and churches meant that our decision-making process focused too narrowly on queer folks, bypassing discussions that would place our discernment of sexuality in a broader framework, one that included heterosexuality, marriage, and singleness. For instance, how have our concepts of marriage been captured more by market forces than by attentive regard for the other? What communities and friendships do we need to foster so that all our companionship needs are not placed in one unrealistic spouse basket? How are isolation, stress, and dissolving community bonds shaping the way we think about intimacy and its end? Have we prioritized marriage in a way that isolates or shames single people in our churches?

In other words, many of us have barely considered our biblical theology of heterosexuality before we were in a position to respond to the real and serious pastoral needs of LGBTQ people in our community.

I’m not claiming that if we were better able to articulate a theology of sexuality, we would be better able to sustain difference within our denomination and global church. Many Mennonite pastors in the US lost people in their churches simply by initiating a discussion about human sexuality. I don’t get the sense there’s an appetite to learn from people who have discerned that God is at work among LGBTQ people in our churches.

How did this become THE issue?
A man from my former church often asked me why I didn’t preach more often on restrictions on sexuality (as you can imagine, he wanted me to enforce his idea about human sexuality). I told him that Jesus spends almost none of his time on earth talking about human sexuality, so, as Mennonites who live near the gospel and listen with careful attention to Jesus, we attend to what Jesus attended to. As it is, watching our denomination’s non-binding, Spirit-led decision become the wedge issue in our denomination feels strange and difficult to reconcile with our biblicism.

It may be time for us to examine why this issue has led conferences to leave Mennonite Church USA and for more conservative conferences to refuse representation from an MCUSA member (who also happens to be the previous head of a Mennonite mission agency and an anti-Apartheid activist who was classified as coloured by South Africa’s Population Registration Act) in Mennonite World Conference.

We are quite comfortable forbearing in other areas of our church life. Many of the representatives of Mennonite World Conference, and some churches in MCUSA, hold positions on women’s church leadership and ordination that are hurtful to me. Those churches believe that my pastoral ministry is sinful. Yet, we forbear. I heard from young people attending the MWC conference this past summer reflecting to me on how much effort it took to live into mutual relationship with Colony Mennonites, young people who are part of communities responsible for environmental degradation, which brings disease and displacement to local communities (Colony Mennonites are not members of MWC for structural reasons, but are represented at these gatherings). But they did, listening and sharing from their own lives, and did not walk away. It is very difficult to forbear with US Mennonites who have aligned with the Trump administration, using their faith to justify authoritarianism and racist immigration policies through a tragic misreading of our tradition. Yet, fissures rarely develop in our church about these ethical and theological concerns. Why is this?

Dismissing the other as not Christian
In the US, I see more conservative Mennonites turning differences of discernment about human sexuality into a litmus test for faith. I grew up in evangelicalism and distinctly remember the formation I received -- Christians who were not evangelicals were subpar. They didn’t take the Bible seriously. They didn’t pray to or follow or talk about Jesus in the way we did, so they must not take their faith seriously. As evangelicalism (and evangelical culture wars) becomes more intertwined with conservative Mennonite groups in the US, I’m reminded more of the church of my youth.

I often hear conservative US Mennonites in news reports and on social media stereotype Mennonite Church USA as a singular progressive unit, painting our denomination and the people in it as “not Christian enough.” This is an uncharitable and dangerous way to negotiate difference. I believe those who deny LGBTQ people access to Jesus and the life of the church are wrong. I believe Mennonites who support Donald Trump are dangerous. But I do not claim that they aren’t really Christians, or that they have nothing to do with me. My frustration and sadness come from the fact that, like it or not, we are bound together in faith and tradition.

Many LGBTQ people around the world live in precarity.
Not long ago, I was applying for a travel grant with a Mennonite pastor who is part of the LGBTQ community. The first thing we looked for was a safe place for them to travel. In twelve countries, LGBTQ people can be sentenced to death for engaging in a consensual relationship with another adult. Around sixty countries criminalize these relationships. Even the United States, which tentatively upholds legal protections for LGBTQ people, is a dangerous place for LGBTQ people. Each year, thousands of hate crimes are committed against gay people in the US, and we are only learn about reported crimes. LGBTQ kids are bullied into self-harm and suicide.

LGBTQ people are human beings. They live everywhere in the world. They are loved by friends, parents, siblings, partners, and church communities. They are not issues – they are beloved children of God. If nothing else, I hope that this truth binds us together, that at the very least, as a global community, we can affirm that LGBTQ people, like all people, should be free from the fear of criminalization, murder, execution, and harassment.

These are painful times for the church, and we live in dangerous times in which our anti-violent convictions are more necessary than other. For these and many other reasons, I grieve.

Favorites
We Do Not Part - Kang
The Hounding – Purvis
The God of Small Things – Roy (an older book, but new for me!)

Rich People Problems
Pineapple Street - Jones
The Friend - Nunez
The Dutch House - Patchett

Brittney
The Woman in Me - Spears
Waiting for Brittney - Weiss

Carceral Dystopia
The Dream Hotel - Lalami
Chain Gang All Stars - Adjei-Brenyah

Feminist Dystopia
The Compound – Rawle
I Who Have Never Known Men – Harpmann
The Unworthy – Bazterrica

Real World Dystopia
Small Things Like These – Keegen
There Is No Place for Us – Goldstone

Biotech Dystopia
Never Let Me Go – Ishiguro
Klara and the Sun - Ishiguro

Epic Ocean Peril Love Story (Catholic)
Isola - Goodman

Epic Ocean Peril Love Story (Atheist)
A Marriage at Sea - Elmhirst

Is the Main Character Dead?
Martyr! – Akbar
We Do Not Part - Kang

Percival Everett
James
Telephone

Witches
The Hounding – Purvis
The Antidote – Russell

Generational Stories
The Loneliness of Sunny and Soia – Desi
Mother Mary Comes to Me – Roy
The God of Small Things – Roy
North Woods – Mason
Theft – Gurnah
Behind You is the Sea - Darraj

Competing Narratives
Audition – Kitamura
Telephone – Everett
Trust - Diaz

Least Liked Ending for the Main Character
Horse – Geraldine Books

Saddest Books
Small Rain – Greenwell
Flashlight – Choi
Stay True – Hsu

Most Sex
All Fours - July

Basketball is A Main Character
There’s Always This Year – Abdurraqib

Space!
Orbital – Harvey
Atmosphere – Jenkins Reid
The Three-Body Problem - Liu

A few weeks later, a faculty member I’d met on my visit wrote to say he had an invitation to offer me. Would I like to engage in a debate? I would be in the role of defending LGBTQ people. It was a live event where I would take my position against the claim that being gay is a sin. It would be an Oxford-style debate, which meant I would work with one other debater and there would be a yes or no vote at the end. I said I would consider it. And then I sought out videos of previous debates.

They were perverse. The man who was looking for a debate partner described himself as a Christian apologist. The videos of these events showed the man using arguments to expose “gotcha moments” that roused clapping from the crowd of people who were not there to be persuaded but, it seemed to me, to be entertained. The apologist had a following, and this was a show he put on to build an audience and a brand. The purpose of the debate also was to create a movement, an anti-gay movement, that hardened itself off from people like me by exposing us/me as ridiculous, idiotic, and easily dismissed.

But the more I watched, the more I realized the debates were not producing better or worse arguments. Instead, their real purpose was the formation of a particular emotional resonance. The audience shared the emotion of disgust over queer bodies, queer sex. They shared the joy of watching an opponent look silly, of her being exposed as a fraud. They shared the apologist’s anger at the word of God being taken so lightly. The purpose was not rational argument usurping liberal wishy-washy feelings. I was watching a people formed around a shared experience of emotions.

I declined the invitation.

I have thought about that invitation over the past few weeks since the murder of Charlie Kirk. I have thought a lot about the similarity between the crowds in the youtube videos of the apologists and the many viral clips of Kirk arguing with college students. I’ve returned to Sarah Ahmed’s work on affect theory to make sense of what is happening here: not, as Ezra Klein would have us believe (that Kirk’s horrific death represents the loss of an exemplary form of public debate) but instead that his death has become an occasion to mediate emotions to form a people who will enact social change. Ahmed’s affective theory asks us to shift from the idea of emotions as internal responses that issue outward to “attributes of the collective, which get constructed as ‘being’ through ‘feeling’” (The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2). Instead of asking “what are emotions?” Ahmed wonders, “what do emotions do?”

Ahmed doesn’t offer a theory of emotions. She traces, through examples, the way emotions “shape the surface of bodies.” These collective emotions can foster love for the nation, disgust for certain bodies (queer bodies for instance), or shame over historical wrongs (liberals are just as good at collective emotional being as conservatives). Instead of thinking about emotions as biological responses to crisis, Ahmed asks us to examine emotions as tools for projects of social formation and movement.

We’ve watched this in real time through the emotion of grief. Who gets grieved (a right-wing populist? Forty-seven Gazans shot while standing in line for food? Fathers? Which fathers?) is one question. But we’ve also been confronted with a chilling escalation to this question -- who are we required to grieve. In the past weeks, the Trump administration has forced a collective grief on the nation. Think for a moment about what it means to require someone to feel something, what it means that it is not enough to express rational judgments about Kirk’s murder (we should not kill people or political violence is bad). Instead, the government dictates licit feeling. Joy at the death of Palestinians and Russians is allowable feeling, joy at the death of Kirk results in a swift firing from your job, online doxxing, being placed on a watch list. The former is patriotism, the latter anti-American.

Which lives receive grief, which lives are commanded into a public performance of grief is a political act with political ends in mind. The more people forced to grieve, forced to trade in their emotions, the easier it is to justify the acts to protect the new collective from threat (repression of speech, firing from jobs, labelling people as political enemies). It is no surprise at all that on the heels of Kirk’s murder that Trump made an executive statement labelling anti-fascist and anti-racist movements as terrorist movements.

I am glad I said no to the apologist’s debate, not only because I refuse to put the dignity of human beings up for debate, but also because I could sense that a kind of people were coming to life through the emotional responsiveness of the crowd. What we feel is who we are, and who we are becoming.

Over the past month I’ve seen similar images in the news and across my social media feeds – communities destroyed by ICE’s nightmarish tactics of masked kidnappings. Again and again, images of women being stripped of their children in the streets, images of family members dragged away from one another outside a courtroom, a s school, a hospital.

Some of the most puzzling accounts come from spouses who are interviewed after these tragedies, as they navigate the detainment or deportation of their partner. The remaining partner often looks dazed as they comfort a child. “I thought they were just coming for the bad guys,” is the common refrain of those who voted Trump into office. “I wanted them to deport criminals.” The confusion spreads – their wife had a green card, was in a legal process, held no criminal record, paid taxes. One woman reported, “I don’t think anyone wanted this.”

These reactions often receive an eye roll from those on my side of the aisle. How could you not know? It seems impossible that the people facing these devastating situations didn’t realize this was coming. But even more chilling, if these people wouldn’t vote in their best interest, even when it comes down to being separated from their spouse, what hope do we have of shifting our political winds?

Often the diagnosis that comes my way is this: these people are stupid or cruel. They were simply not educated enough to figure out that they supported a xenophobic narcissist who had every intention of hardwiring the US to white supremacy. That or they harbor a racism so deep-seated that it extends even to their loved ones or, in some cases, to themselves.

I don’t think these theories go deep enough, even though I do think knowing more would be better and that racism shapes us in ways we cannot fully grasp.

How were working class people so wildly duped by a Trumpian economics that was always going to destroy them? Lots of people at various times have asked this question, or in Marxist terms, why haven’t the working classes united to revolt against the bourgeoise? How can things be this bad yet the people who sell their labor to the upper class still align themselves with a politics of their self-destruction?

I’ve been thinking about this with Gramsci this week, the anti-fascist Communist politician whose most significant work is persevered in thousands of pages of notebooks written while he was imprisoned by the Mussolini regime. Gramsci reorients Marxism to political economy, what Michael Denning calls “politics as organizing.” In the Notebooks, Gramsci is asking of Italy the questions many of us are asking now about the US – how did this happen? How did fascism win?

One way forward is to shift from thinking about lack of education to a framework of hegemony, one in which neoliberalism (the indivisibility of economic and personal freedoms) is not just a set of economic principles but an ideological project. For Gramsci, hegemony is a political process in which the dominant class gradually builds consent not through brute force but by reshaping a political conscience — our common sense. This happens by injecting ideology into ordinary life: the media we consume, pledges we take, our educational systems, folklore, parenting, music, and sermons.

One way we can see neoliberal hegemony is in the way our cultural institutions have been captured by the free market by way of entrepreneurship and innovation. On the one hand, we have denominations pushing the church to expand its reach by modeling small businesses, encouraging stewardship practices developed by corporations, and encouraging funding models through services rendered. On the other side, we have divinity schools and seminaries referring to themselves as “communities” or even “churches” when, in fact, these are businesses (we have seen this with acute clarity in the Trumpian crackdown on universities).

Last Sunday, I went to a church where the sermon, on Joshua 1, was a thinly disguised business seminar offering me three steps towards an economic competitiveness fused with Christian triumphalism. The final lesson of the sermon was that I needed to be “ready to compete” because “I’m going to have to knock someone down to take what is mine.” The conquering of Canaan, a complex and difficult part of the Bible but one ultimately about the fidelity of God to a collective, became a blueprint for an individual to navigate market realities.

Another example of how neoliberal hegemony slips into biblical interpretation and church practice comes from a popular church business influencer on the thorny pastoral question: should I know who in my church gives how much? The writer tells the story of how he often believed that his biggest church complainers were the biggest givers – they told him as much! The more one gives, the more they ought to control church life. That is simple economics.

He explains that to fully fund the mission of the church, he needed to encourage his top givers to give even more — if they couldn’t do that they wouldn’t be able to build more campuses and fulfill their mission. He needed to know who those donors were. With hesitancy he asked to the church treasurer to disclose the names of the top donors. None were the complainers.

This could have led to a realization that this church needed to radically change its culture to uncouple giving from influence, to take head-on the business model of services-for-hire. The pastor could have oriented himself around the poorest in his community, elevated people perceived as “poor givers” because of their working class wages to places of prominence and decision-making.

But they needed to build campuses. This meant that the pastor reoriented Jesus’ commitment to an inner circle of poor fisherman to a lesson about favoritism for those with “the gift of giving.” He realized that he didn’t even know all the top givers at his church. He would “lean into” and “invest” in these people instead of the complainers. Just as Jesus had favorites and didn’t invest in people at the same level, so too pastors cannot invest in people at the same level.

This is one example of how the church becomes another site of hegemonic practice, making common sense of market logic: people deserve more of our investment because they pay more; we can identify the level of investment based on how much a person gives. The rerouting of neoliberal economics through Scripture (in this case justifying this way of pastoring as an example of Jesus favoritism towards a few chosen disciples in his inner circle) deepens is logic.

We need more than getting the analysis right (another form of “if we just showed people the data they would understand”). Counterhegemony does, in part, require realization and then for us to build a different set of realities. That doesn’t happen, according to Gramsci, by teaching ideology but through people’s common sense, the way ordinary people make sense of their world (for instance, the lessons learned when a person is caring for a sick relative or the skills needed to construct a barn). Gramsci believed that there was a kind of healthy nucleus to common sense, the kind that recognizes things like fairness, that says people who work the same amount, no matter their race, should get paid for doing the same work. Like, you should be able to work and afford to feed yourself and your family. Gramsci calls this healthy intuition “good sense.”

Sermons are one potential site of counterhegemony. Church giving practices are another. So is refusing to hire police or security guards for worship spaces. So is refusing to take oaths. And while the enormity of this coercion may feel overwhelming, we can also take hope in the possibility of activating a variety of fronts of counterhegemony. We can tell different stories, enact different practices, teach in different ways, distribute our money differently, produced different forms of writing and thinking. The gift of the Gramscian strategy of counterhegemony is that each of us, thank God, has a role to play.

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
This “tragicomic” graphic novel memoir is poignant and hilarious. Bechdel writes about identity and family, growing up in a funeral home and the complex and tragic experience of her father’s death — inconclusive but likely suicide. I don’t often read graphic novels so I enjoyed seeing how this medium shifts story lines, and how the author guides the reader through the order of the text.

Debt by David Graeber
Finally read it! Graeber’s 2011 masterpiece on the evolution of economic relations is fascinating and challenging to many of the conceptions about money we’ve absorbed (first hunter/gatherer, then barter, then money, then credit). Graeber died during the pandemic, likely of a health condition exacerbated by COVID, and this book made me even sadder for this loss.

Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Adjei-Brenyah’s debut novel about the development of the carceral system into a corporate-sponsored gladiatorial sport, complete with tattooed corporate logos on the bodies of prize fighters, walks right up to the line of a kind of literalism that I don’t like in much of our contemporary storytelling but doesn’t quite cross. This is a fascinating book that intersperses real statistics and reports on prison conditions into the narrative, asking us to see the logical end of the US obsession with punishment, spectacle, and vengeance.

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
This book popped up on my Libby app as I was in the queue for several other books and wow, what a wonderful surprise. A fascinating exploration of women’s particular experience of desolation. Thirty-nine women find themselves with little memory of how they arrived in an underground cage guarded by men who refuse to interact with them. They have no idea why they are there, and only fleeting glimpses of their own past. Excellent world-building and the exploration of the a protagonist working to create an identity in the midst of desolation.

Let Us Descend by Jessamyn Ward
The title of Ward’s third novel is a line taken from Dante’s Inferno and the book is much like walking beside the characters to the center of hell in the form of a trek by enslaved descendant of Africans from North Carolina into the deep South. The plot is secondary to developing the inner life of Annis, the protagonist. Beautifully written and excruciating, I read Let Us Descend as reminder of the realities of enslavement our federal government wants to erase from our collective conscience.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
I didn’t want this novel to end. Written in 1997, Roy’s gorgeous prose and storytelling stretch across three generations in Kerala, India when, in the 1960s, the family is fractured by violation of social and caste norms. The storytelling is so consuming that I would have dreams set in the novel during the weeks I read it.

Happy reading!

“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Today, on this Covenant Sunday, when we renew our commitment to God and this church, we hear again one of the most weighty and difficult teachings of Jesus’ ministry.

“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

These words are part of the first teaching of Jesus as recorded by the gospel of Matthew. Jesus has returned from the wilderness, from 40 days of fasting and testing. And in those days, he is met by the devil -- a deceiver and a trickster. Three times Jesus is offered a way out of the path God has set for him. He is tested to see if he will choose power over sacrificial love, but each time he refuses the shortcut that leads to domination.

I want to read in full the last of these tests:

“Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Then Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written,

‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’ ”

Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him.

“All these I give you.” The power of the nations is in the hands of the deceiver, the tempter. Jesus final refusal solidifies for us, and for him, who he will be in this world – the one who defeats death on the cross as a victim of capital punishment. Jesus will not rule through the state – he will die at the hands of the state.

Jesus is then fed by angels, attended to in his need. From there he calls and heals. He calls two working class, uneducated fisherman, the people crushed under the wheels of the Roman occupation. He says, “follow me.” Then Jesus brings the men with him to cure wounds and illness, to cast out demons and to heal those long rejected by their communities.

Only then, after all this has transpired does Jesus speak the first teaching of his public ministry. In this long sermon, putting the life he has lived into words, Jesus tells his listeners to love their enemies.

Last night, the United States inserted ourselves into another war. For the last few days, I’d been refreshing my browser, awaiting news that felt inevitable. Eventually the words materialized on my screen. The United States joined in Israel in an unprovoked attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Yesterday, I was at our Central District Conference annual meeting, preaching on, of all things, apocalypse. I went back this morning and looked over my words. These lines stood out from the page: “We know this much – in the future we are going to be church in an apocalypse. The world will end over and over again in a thousand different ways.” The news last night was an escalation of the world-shattering forces haunting us.

If you are like me this all feels so big, so unruly, so impossible to confront, overwhelming to contemplate. But we are also not the first people to consider what it is like to live as followers of the crucified Jesus in a world thirsty for war. Our collective memory is short and so we live in a nearly constant cycle of wars, wars that never resolve, that we claim as righteous and just, wars we fight in the name of freedom or security or revenge. In a most gruesome and perverse turn of words, this morning the President of the United States claims that dropping bombs is an act of peace.

Of course, the President is not alone. People of God try to find a way around the command to love our enemies. “You have heard it said,” Jesus tells the skeptical crowd, “love your neighbor but hate your enemy.” That isn’t from the Torah. This phrase is found nowhere in the Old Testament. It is instead one illustration of the ways we have, in every generation, attempted to find a way around the difficult and life-shaping work of peace. We bless war, we bless violence. Just this morning the US Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth ended his televised remarks saying “we give glory to God.” Utter perversity.

So here we are, gathered in this place, to celebrate the body of this church that lives in a world at war. Today is Covenant Sunday. Each year we take time to remember the promises to love one another, to care for this body of the church, this living, breathing assortment of gifts that make up the body of Christ.

While we take time once a year for this particular remembering, each time we share Communion is a little Covenant Sunday. We come to the table having made a pledge of love to one another. Here is what we say: “Will you love and serve our neighbors? Will you support and challenge one another, speak and hear the truth, cease what causes harm to our neighbors, and do good to our enemies?” It is shocking that month after month many of you agree to continue to shape yourselves around these promises. They are impossible promises. We speak them into the sea of our failures, even as we float them on a raft of hope.

In the Mennonite tradition, we call this impossible promise peace. The form of life that this peace takes is called pacifism. Pacifism is the language we give to the words of Jesus’ first public teaching: love your enemies. Pacifism is also a word that gets confused and mixed up with other ideologies. It can turn to quietism and retreat and capitulation. Throughout our history as Mennonites, we’ve often seen this mixing up, as our spiritual ancestors removed themselves from the world, attempted to rid themselves of the stain of sin from the world around them.

What we often missed is that peace is not something we are able to secure through our planning or our ingenuity. Chris Huebner reminds us that peace is a gift, a gift given to us by God. People who commit themselves to churches of peace, as we are celebrating here today, are likely to discover that our attention to peace gets us into more conflict, not less. The work of peace demands an end to wars, a risky work of prophesying good news to a forgetful world.

In times of war, pacifism, the way of peace, is tested. Shortly after the terrorist attacks on Sept 11, the theologian Stanley Hauerwas was asked to write a pacifist response to the horrors that unfolded. It was a tender time of national grief. But overnight revenge roared up from the yawning gap of pain and shock. The only way to make sense of the destruction was to destroy. The only way to make sense of the killing was death. George Bush plunged the United States headfirst into a war. He would go on to perpetrate wars in the Middle East, in Afghanistan and Iraq, in which the United States was responsible for over a million deaths.

Hauerwas talks about this reluctance to pacifism, how, if he wasn’t a Christian, he’d have no interest at all in the idea. “In short,” he wrotes, “Christians are not nonviolent because we believe our nonviolence is a strategy to rid the world of war, but rather because faithful followers of Christ in a world of war cannot imagine being anything else than nonviolent.” We have lived so close to Jesus, to the Jesus who lays down the power of armies to go into the world and heal, that we cannot imagine anything else. We refuse the myths of this nation, the forgetfulness of generations. Instead, we choose this life – love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.

We don’t wake up one day perfected in the way of nonviolence. Instead, we test and try our experiments in peace here in the body of this church. We try out what it means to worship with people who are very different from us, who will hurt us, and we discover how to repent and repair without destroying each other. We listen for the Holy Spirit, in our worship, in each other, in the ways we see others beyond the walls of our church working and willing redemption. We say yes to the possibility of being hurt, to the possibility also of being healed.

As it is, I can imagine no better place to be on this morning, no other life I’d rather celebrate than the one we have carved out here. Peace is a way of life, a gift we receive and then learn through practice. And today is invitation, an invitation in a world of war, to continue to receive the gift of peace again.

It's a strange moment to be revisiting the police and prison abolition movement that gained prominence during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Instead of abolition, we got DEI, and now a white nationalist authoritarian government is stripping away even this meager concession. Cities are undoing the bare minimum of police accountability measures passed in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing. At the same time, many of us are still activated to undo both the structure of policing and prisons in our communities, and to break the mindset of the necessity of policing.

Much of the previous writing on Mennonites and policing was predictably bleak (for abolitionists). I won’t rehash my paper but I wanted to write a bit more about something I touch on only in a footnote – the definition of policing. In 2007, Mennonite Central Committee sponsored a conference on Mennonites, peace, and security where the role of Mennonites in the policing profession and in cooperation with the police were central questions. Andy Alexis-Baker points out in a response to these arguments, that the definition of policing becomes so broad that a conversation about ethics becomes impossible.

One example is Gerlad Schlabach’s argument for Just Policing (in the vein of Just War theory). Schlabach, along with those he cites, describe this as a model where police are “forming partnerships with constituents,” where they invest in crime prevention and work with health and human services agencies. In my paper I write about how this distorts the function of police, which is not crime prevention, and ignores the history of policing in the US. But it’s also curious to think we would need the police to do what Schlabach describes as the function of social workers. A coalition in my city worked diligently to introduce a rapid crisis response unit intended to displace the police from the work of attending to the root cause of communal dysfunction and harm. Why introduce a badge and a gun into these vulnerable human encounters?[1]

In another account a Canadian cop named Steve Brnjas defines policing as any form of common life that sets a common expectation and holds people accountable to that standard. At one point he goes as far as to describe a group of students who set limits with a panhandler on their campus as a police force. By this logic, the church is the police. Mutual aid hubs are the police. Transformative justice projects are the police. Parents are the police.

Similar diffusion occurs at the MCC conference. Another presentation makes the case for “nonviolent policing,” in which Mennonites lay claim to the possibility of police nonviolently deterring crime. That is unless policing is, by definition, violent. Once the violence is removed it’s something else – a rapid response team, a social work hub, a robust social safety net, well-funded schools, violence prevention programs. Policing is a gun, a taser, a club, a tank, a machine gun, tear gas, riot gear. Policing is the state-sanctioned use of physical harm and death to enforce the social order of the state.

I’m not worried about this not because I want people to use words the right way (even though I do want that). Theories of policing that attempt to uncouple policing from violence hold us captive to a theological imaginary that makes the police and their guns necessary. Schlabach says it outright – a world without war will require a world filled with police. The early 2000s Mennonite theorizing about police consistently leaves the door slightly ajar to the necessity of state violence. Some of the writing justify this violence (God can work through the violence of the state, we – Mennonites -- can simply not participate), while others seek to mitigate or limit its impact (“just policing,” “community policing”). But at the end of the day, the police will always be with you.

This is very weird for a tradition that was borne out of an apocalyptic movement that preached, in many iterations, the church as a radical alternative to state-sponsored violence. And I think there’s more work to be done here on Mennonites and private property, how the fading of a community of goods gave way to the need for a militarized force to guard property rights (a good place to start would be investigating early US Mennonite settlements and their reliance on US militias and army to establish colonial settlements and eradicate Indigenous communities). But that project, on how Mennonites became white, is for another person.

[1] “Well, because the people experiencing trouble could hurt the responders,” you might say. For some stats on this, see the Durham HEART program. Over two years this program redirected 11,000 calls from police to a rapid response unit. The responders shared that they felt safe in 99% of these encounters.

Painting by Salvadoran folks artist, Fernand Llort

As I worked on my Easter sermon this week, two oligarchs who rule through repression and fear sat for a press conference in the White House. As anticipated, a journalist questioned the men, Donald Trump and Nayib Bukele, about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran native and US permanent resident mistakenly deported to El Salvador and imprisoned in the country’s notorious torture facility, CECOT.

I shouldn’t have watched. The depravity of the men overwhelmed me, not only their lies about Abrego Garcia’s connections to gangs, but their delight – their utter delight – in their power to destroy ordinary people’s lives.

I found it difficult to concentrate for days after the presser. I had trouble sleeping, getting my work done. I’ve lived in countries where activists and ordinary people are regularly disappeared. Now I am citizen of one of these countries. And in the midst of that, I needed to write a sermon about the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the good news of life conquering death.

I am fortunate that the gospel accompanying me through Easter sermon preparation is Luke, a gospel that puts at the center the women disciples. These women are with Jesus as he walks to Golgotha, weeping and beating their breasts. They watch him tortured and nailed to a cross. They stand near by and watch him die. They walk with his body to the tomb. Since the men disciples have fled, deserting Jesus at his arrest, we can guess that the report we receive from Luke is the eyewitness account of these women – “Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them.”

In preparation for Easter, I read one of Herbert McCabe’s sermons, dedicated to Archbishop Oscar Romero, on the Lukan resurrection account.1 In it McCabe recalls the story of Brazilian Dominican Frei Betto, who helped develop the base community model and was imprisoned under Brazil’s dictatorship for four years. During that time Beto recalled that one of his interrogators asked him a question. “How can a Christian collaborate with a communist?” Betto answered: “For me, men are not divided into believers and atheists but into oppressors and victims.”

For Beto, the question at the heart of the gosel is not religious agreement but shared suffering. A resurrected people enter into life with those suffer:

His belief is that God so loved the world that he sent his son, not to set the world to rights but to be one of us; not to rule the world but to suffer at the hands of the unjust and to suffer out of love, out of protest against the oppression of his beloved, to be a victim because he refused to collaborate with the domination of others.

This is why the women play such a prominent role in Luke’s narrative. They come carrying with them the utter despair of what they have witnessed, witnesses to the total powerlessness of God on the cross. “What they discover,” writes McCabe, “is not the return of Christ in power but his absence: an empty tomb. This, the gospel is saying, is the beginning of faith, of real faith: to recognize the emptiness, the absence of the power of Christ in this world.” McCabe reminds us that Beto’s interrogator was likely also a “good Catholic,” but a Catholic who looked for Christ in the Sacrament, the authority of the church, the power of the priest.”

All these beliefs are just caricatures of the Catholic faith if they do not spring from a fundamental recognition of absence- what Jesus called a ‘hunger and thirst’, a desire for what is not there, a hunger and thirst after justice, a hunger and thirst for the kingdom of God. That is how we find the risen Christ in the poor, the oppressed: not in their goodness but in their need; in their hunger and thirst.

And so the women, the dependent, the victims, seek for what is not there; and it is only because they seek, it is only in their seeking, that the risen Christ appears to them. It is only if we have seen the injustice of our world, shared in the horror of a godless world; it is only if we can feel with and understand people who want to say: ‘How can there be a God, if I am treated in this way? Where is the power of God, who is supposed to be good and loving? Where is he to rescue me from the concentration camp, the military barracks, the death squads?’; it is only if we understand all this that we are ready to recognise his presence. It is only when we have said ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ that we are ready for resurrection.

Christopher Levitt uses colored pencil to create a scene of life in prison. His work is titled, "The Painter."

Empathy is back in the news thanks to a spate of rightwing evangelical claims that it is a sin to imagine ourselves in the suffering of another. These evangelical writers accuse liberals of utilizing psychological manipulation to shift Christians towards policies they would otherwise find abhorrent. They caution against emotions leading our politics and blurring the difference between right and wrong.

They understand the power of channeling empathy. On the positive side, champions of empathy claim this affective response will revolutionize our politics. By placing ourselves in the shoes of another person and imagining what it must be like to live as they do, we will begin to see our political lives differently. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” Jesus announces in the gospel of Matthew. Empathy makes the case for action concrete because, while we may not be able to muster up feelings for another, we don’t want bad things to happen to us.

I have not read the evangelical books, nor am I planning to. But according to reviews, the authors are attempting to stymie any intervention into the death-dealing politics of their GOP bedfellows. They recognize affectual power and want to stop it. This isn’t a great argument. The writers end up swapping out one form of emotional manipulation for another. God’s wrath and eternal judgment become the grounds by which to cut ties with policies that are good for “sinners” (immigrants, queer folks, Black people, recipients of USAID).

Yet I sense discomfort as progressive Christians respond to these claims by encouraging us to more expansive empathy. Curious about my hesitancy, I reread Saidiya Hartman’s chapter on empathy in Scene of Subjection. In it, she discusses the writing of a white abolitionist named John Rankin who utilized a “fantasy” of empathy to rouse white people to rise up and act to end slavery. Rankin wanted to “bring slavery close” to white people by closing the gap between enslaved and slaver. To do so, he invites his white reader to imagine if they were enslaved. Rankin imagines if his children were whipped, his wife sold. What if he watched on in humiliation and despair?

Despite his attempt to describe the terror of slavery as a call to action, Hartman describes how Rankin’s imaginative enslavement, “unleashes a Pandora’s box and, surprisingly, what comes to the fore the difficulty and slipperiness of empathy.” Rankin’s attempt to project himself into the experience of a slave turned the feeling away from the actual experiences of enslaved people and towards himself. The suffering of enslaved people becomes another site of exploitation; the Black body in pain can only be acknowledged to the degree it can be imagined by a white person. “Can the white witness of the spectacle of suffering affirm the materiality of black sentience only by feeling for himself?” Hartman wonders.

Empathy relies on making the other an object to such an extreme degree of voyeurism that it becomes possession. In order to be moved to action we must be able to imagine our own suffering, displacing the unknowable and personal terror of the one who suffers. Reliance on empathy for political action turns suffering into spectacle, the other to object. It doesn’t take long before suffering is made to compete in a macabre attention economy (trauma porn). Whose suffering is most horrific, most visible, most inhabitable?

Empathy is made slipperier by the limits of our imagination. What to do when multiple social forces are calling for our empathy? In an essay for The New York Review of Books, Namwali Serpell recalls a speech given by author Karl Ove Knausgaard, imploring authors to utilize empathy in their writing to nuance lazy generalized historical accounts. He gives an example: “If we allowed that remoteness to dissolve, what we would see would no longer be the very image of evil, but a boy growing up in Austria with a violent, authoritarian father and a mother whom he loved. We would see a sixteen-year-old so shy he hadn’t the courage to speak to a girl with whom he was in love…”

He is, of course, talking about Hitler.

Serpell writes that in his autobiography Knausgaard offers us a window into the complexity of empathy, who receives it and how. “Many readers feel that his last book is at its worst when he eschews empathizing with his ex-wife, clearly under severe mental duress, because he’s too busy writing about… Hitler.” Serpell asks: “Who gets to have our empathy? Hitler or one’s wife? The living or the dead? Those near to us or far? Those who resemble and agree with us, or those who don’t? The one or the many?”

Last week I learned that Elon Musk, the Trumpian visage of the angel of death, survived a horrific childhood. The podcast Know Your Enemy featured two episodes on Musk and how we arrived at the terrible misfortune of Musk’s misanthropy unleashed upon the world. Like the podcast hosts, it wasn’t difficult for me to draw the lines between the battered child Musk and the narcissist starving children to death in the Sudan and giving a Nazi salute to a cheering GOP crowd.

The point of the podcast was not empathy, but historical context, perhaps to give us some ledge to grasp as we watch one unelected billionaire kill decades of medical advancements, damning generations of people to deaths by what could be preventable and curable diseases. Yet here I was, imagining the child Musk before his abusive father who once, when young Elon was beaten so badly by bullies that he required hospitalization and years of surgeries, sided with the child who beat his son.

What does empathy offer us in this collision of realities – an abused child who becomes an adult who terrorizes on an epic scale? How does imagining myself being raised by Errol Musk shape my politics? The answer is it does nothing. (I know people deeply damaged in childhood who do not go on to be responsible for mass deaths due to cancelled vaccine programs.)

Tempering my feelings towards Musk (disgust, rage, indignation, loathing) is, in a way, an exercise in self-reflection and personal betterment. It would be better of me (supposedly) to feel otherwise on behalf of the child Musk was. Ironically, I have utilized Musk’s childhood abuse as a self-improvement project. That does nothing to change devastation experienced by veterans who are losing life-saving physical and mental health care, or to prevent child abuse?

If empathy offers so little, what is the purpose of face-to-face meeting? Or traveling to Palestine to see the daily humiliations under occupation? Of leading worship inside prison walls, hearing the stories of immigrants? How do we move beyond empathy’s pull towards subject and object, with the empathizing subject looking with pity on the object she will possess?

I recently spoke with a student who preached at the women’s prison in my city for the first time. She described the awkwardness, the incoherence of being an outsider preaching to incarcerated people. She wanted to ameliorate this feeling or at least make sense of it. And I reminded her that this incoherence is not the arrangement of worship but the institution itself. Preaching in the prison isn’t an exercise in community or creating empathy with those who are imprisoned. I want to bring my church members into prison so that they hate it, that they want to tear apart the walls.

I thought about the intro to Scenes where Hartman asks questions that offer us a way to slip past the haunting of empathy:

Are we witnesses who confirm the truth of what happened in the face of the world-destroying capacities of pain, the distortions of torture, the sheer unrepresentability of terror, and the repressions of the dominant accounts? Or are we voyeurs fascinated with and repelled by exhibitions of terror and sufferance?

We bear witness. We are willing to return again and again to confirm the truth of what happened.

Scenes was written in 1997, and I recently read Hartman’s reflections on her first book, twenty-five years after its publication (the essay accompanies the newest edition). She writes that while the sections on empathy, social death, and violence received the most attention, she “tried to account for extreme domination and the possibilities seized in practice.” This is also a part of what we witness in prison, “ways of living and dying, of making and doing” that refute the state’s attempt at social erasure.

Perhaps, Hartman writes, what might drive our politics past subject/object is attending to “the vision of what might be” that is waiting to be discovered – in narratives of the enslaved, at Aida Youth Center in Bethlehem, in the women who give their testimonies at the end of each of our worship services, who add their voice to the sermon and affirm or reject what is offered from the pulpit. We look at the incomprehensibility of pain, the impossibility of knowing it, and witness that, somehow, here is what might be.

Months before the Nov 2024 election, I began to prepare my church for the possibility of a second Trump term. I knew that ascendancy of Donald Trump to the highest office in the country would bring pain and difficulty to our church and our community. Already, in the first few weeks of office, those predictions have come to pass.

The trans people in my church worry about their future as the federal government attempts to enforce gender binaries based on dubious biological claims and restrict medical care for trans people. We are a church that includes first generation Americans and people with unsettled immigration status. Our concern for their wellbeing grows as the new administration targets both undocumented immigrants and those who have arrived in this country through designated legal channels. We watch the threat of authoritarianism grow with an unconstitutional executive order aimed at ending birth-right citizenship. As a church with Latine, Black, and Asian members, we are horrified to see Trump’s appointees roll back civil rights protections and purge government agencies of those committed to anti-racism and those charged with non-partisan accountability.

During these terrible days, Raleigh Mennonite has been a place of refuge and safety. We return to one another, week after week, to find the place where we can find comfort and strengthen, provide materially for one another, plan our resistance to rising authoritarianism, and work to protect those in our community who are in the crosshairs of the Trump administration.

The Mennonite tradition has given us theological and ecclesial resources that guide us in our collective work as an outpost of the body of Jesus. We have clung to the witness of our spiritual ancestors who refused to enact violence against their enemies even as they took a bold stance of resistance against the state-church. We’ve held fast to the stories of Anabaptists whose radical call for peace challenged the authoritarian regimes of their countries, often leading to their own suffering.

But there is another strain within Anabaptism -- the survivalist tradition.

In late 2024, the Washington Post published an article revealing the most Republican names according to public election data: Andy Byler, Steven Stoltzfus, Elmer Stoltzfus, Jacob Stoltzfus and Benuel Stoltzfus. These are ethnic Anabaptist names, names that come from Pennsylvania and Midwest Amish communities. They constitute the most reliable Republican bloc in the United States.[1]

This may come as a surprise to those outside the Mennonite church who associate our tradition with either non-participation or in the “transformative tradition,” a form of life that acts as a living witness to Jesus through intentional works of peace and justice. The Amish buck both expectations.

While the idea of an Amish Super Pac may be baffling based on our theology, a recent Anabaptist World article offered insight into the Trumpism among my co-religious. It’s likely that most people who call themselves Anabaptists in the US voted for Trump in this election. In their article, Levi and Daniel Miler explain why.

The authors acknowledge the complexity within our religious community. Some people vote and some do not. All are bound by “common theological threads such as the centrality of Christ, the Christian community and reconciliation in interpreting scripture.” But for the Millers, the economy, not the teaching of Jesus, was the primary beacon that led them and other Mennonites towards Trump.

They cite their belief that government spending is the cause of rising inflation, how this, in turn, makes people poorer and unable to afford for their basic needs. Inflation is primarily caused by supply chain issues, energy price volatility, and corporate greed (companies charging more for products). Certainly the government stimulus efforts during the pandemic worsened inflation – but those efforts also stabilized the US economy. The myth of Big Government taking away the ability of free markets to reward those who are willing to work lives on in Amish country.

The Miller next talk about voting for “character,” which may surprise Christians who are stunned by Donald Trump’s status as a convicted rapist and felon, a man who had an affair while his wife was pregnant, who mocks disabled people, and jokes about grabbing women’s genitals. But, for the authors, if Trump falters, he has at least brought in JD Vance to represent the kind of moral Christian character the Millers would like to see guiding our country – a man who managed to pull himself up by his bootstraps and become a wealthy success.

The Millers mention the good of free market economies twice in their assessment as to why many Mennonites voted for Trump. They seem to believe that the free market will work for those who work hard. They don’t account for how the free market has led to the accumulation of vast wealth among a very few at the expense of most people, or how the insatiable appetites of these markets have led to the destruction of our planet and the climate disasters we are already experiencing (Mennonite farmers are one of the primary sources of Brazilian deforestation). They don’t share my concerns about the racialized nature of our economy, and how systems that benefit white people continue to disadvantage those who don’t look like most white ethnic Mennonites.

The final reason the Millers suggest Mennonites voted for Trump is their new appreciation for Christendom. Anabaptists faced terrible persecution in our emergence but, the writers explain, we now experience a Christendom that provides safe passage for Christians like the Millers. “Christendom,” they write, “has provided us some stability on traditional marriage, family and sexual norms.” In other words, instead of being a minority, struggling for survival, these Anabaptist now enjoy their status as the center of the social order, with the power of the government at their back.

I know that many people were angry that Anabaptist World published this article, but for me and my community, this article was a warning about what happens to us as a people when we pursue survival at any cost. Our Anabaptist history is one of radical commitment to the gospel, but it is also one in which white, ethnic Anabaptists responded to the trauma of persecution and displacement by aligning themselves with the sinful and deadly interests of the state.

Even though our church has very few white ethnic Mennonites, we participate in networks that help us to repent of this corporate history. We are members of the Repair Network, which works to undo the legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery in the Mennonite church. Following their displacement and persecution in Europe, European Mennonites emigrated to the Americas. They were welcomed with open arms as hardworking farmers who stayed out of government business. While claiming non-resistance and refusing to bear arms, these communities were more than willing to claim the lands of Indigenous peoples who were eradicated or displaced by the US military. We are part of the Repair Network both to atone for this sin and to discover the ways we can thwart colonialism in the present.

The rise of the Third Reich in Europe was another time when ethnic Mennonites assured their survival by racializing their identity. Nazis saw Mennonites as an ideal Aryan race to study and quantify. Nazi race undertook extensive documentation of Mennonite’s “pure German blood.” Many Mennonites in Europe embraced their racial purity status.

By 1933 the United (Vereinigung) Mennonites stopped asking for conscientious objector status from the German government. In 1934 the Danzig Mennonites removed pacifism from their confession of faith. Many Mennonites readily swore oaths to Hitler. Ethnic Mennonites under the Third Reich wanted to survive and they embraced Christendom’s favoritism, first accepting the protection of Nazis and eventually aiding their terror by serving in every branch of the military, running concentration camps, and swearing oaths to Hitler. Ethnic Mennonites shifted their theology from voluntary membership in a visible church to a blood-bound nation. They reiterated conspiracy theories about the Jews, scapegoating their historic trauma onto this vulnerable and persecuted people.[2]

Despite being outside the fold of ethnic Mennonites, I am vigilant in my commitment to learning from the disasters of white racialization of Mennonite identity. I am wary of uncomplicated Mennonite histories that glorify suffering without an account of the ways ethnic Mennonites secured their survival. (Healing Haunted Histories by Ched Myers and Elaine Enns is an excellent guide for those who hold both historical trauma and traumatization in their family line.) The history of ethnic Mennonites is a history of receiving the spoils of whiteness even as these communities fenced themselves off from active participation in the violence required to realize their (white) economic and social gain – from colonization of the Americas to relying on the police to protect their private property. I pay special attention to these contradictions when they appear in the guise of righteous pacifism.

The Millers wrote for explanation, and perhaps in hopes of empathy. Instead, I receive their assessment of Anabaptist Trumpism as an alarm to which we must heed if we are to recover witness to the peaceable kingdom in our tradition. In response, I’ve redoubled my commitment to those who refuse the seduction of nationalism. I have pledged myself again to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to put myself in the place where Jesus is, among those whom the Trump administration seeks to destroy.

[1] My friend David Lapp Jost reminded me that the preponderance of these names in PA and OH does not necessarily translate to huge numbers of Amish coming out to vote for Trump. Reliability as a voting bloc means consistency over time, not necessarily vast numbers. In addition, he reminded me that many people have these names and no longer attend Mennonite churches or are part of Amish communities but may have been absorbed into conservative evangelicalism. This is strangeness of Mennonite identity. Are people with historic roots in the Mennonite church who now attend non-Mennonite churches still Mennonites? This is a question with different answers depending on if you ask from the direction of ecclesiology or sociology.

[2] David also mentions that German Mennonites didn’t cede their religious identity overnight. He writes, “most Mennonites in Germany were no long pacifists by the Franco-Prussian war, 70 years before Nazi Germany. It was a small, rural dissident body that remained. There were essentially no pacifists already by 1914. I think it’s important, because it’s not as much about being wooed by the strongman as it is about ‘wanting to be like the other nations,’ so to speak.” Great insight!

“The Women’s Strike of August 1970 used bipartisan collective activism and shared goals to prompt the passage of Title IX in 1972, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in educational institutions. (Warren K. Leffler / Courtesy of the Library of Congress)”

I suspect that we will be hearing a lot more about unity and healing in next four years of the Trump administration. In May, the Festival of Homiletics is themed on “Preaching to Heal the Divide.” After the Trump assassination attempts, I saw a raft of services and prayers directed at healing our divided nation. The same directive followed the election in November. Democratic and Republican politicians alike implore our country towards unity and healing.

I also know that unity and healing are not neutral terms. When we see attempts to heal divides a few questions follow. Which divides? Towards what end? Who benefits from this healing? Who loses out?

I had this on my mind a couple weeks ago when our church hosted the first of four skill-building workshops to prepare for the Trump administration. The first was titled “how to talk to people you might disagree with.” The training also assumes a deep divide in our nation, and that there’s something we can do about it.

The difference is found in the subtitle of the training: “…because we’ll need to build a bigger and broader base to defeat authoritarianism.”

Talking to people with whom we disagree is a strategy for building a better world. We know this because movements by ordinary people have successfully faced down authoritarian regimes repeatedly by utilizing a multiplicity of non-violent, coordinated tactics. To be successful, we need to be invitational, especially to people who experience buyer’s remorse about the vote they cast in November.

In other words, talking to people with whom you disagree is a movement strategy.

One of the tactics we learned was shifting our language towards opening conversations around self-interest. We talked about what we notice in statements like, “We just really need to educate them. They keep voting against their own interests!” This way of communicating our outrage infantilizes people and further marginalizes them from getting involved in progressive grassroots movements.

Next, we looked at the strategies used by deep canvassing, a form of public engagement that seeks to sway people’s opinions, a different kind of canvassing than the kind that bolsters the base. In this kind of engagement, we learned to connect with people around our shared values, to utilize personal storytelling (“can I tell you why this issue matters to me?”), to non-judgmentally solicit the views of the other person, and to use follow up questions to explore differences and commonalities.

Instead of seeing the election of Donald Trump as a net negative, we discussed the opportunities that will come with disillusionment. We have the opportunity to organize around Trump’s failure to fulfill campaign promises, and the realities of policies that seemed good on paper but inevitably lead towards trauma and pain in our local communities.

We then moved on to reframing the structures of our difference. Rather than “left/right” we learned to shift towards “up/down.” A small number of people in our country control and harness the vast majority of wealth and opportunity. When those economic divides are racialized, those in power divide and disrupt our ability to amass a movement. We learned Race-Class Narrative Architecture. We watched a clip of deep canvassing by the Los Angeles LGBT Center as they attempted to shift anti-gay prejudice after California banned same-sex marriage.

This training was designed to help our congregation work towards unity and healing. We want to be a part of the unity of our nation – unified in having affordable food, clean water and air, good education, fair waged-work, and access to affordable health care. We want healing – healing of the divides between laborers, between social classes, between people who have been racialized and set against one another.

While this training focused externally, on bringing people in, I’m also aware of the dangers of division within our movements. We know this will be strategy that the Right employs over the next four years – the Christian Zionist/White Nationalist Esther Project wrote that one of their goals is to “exploit fissures” in anti-genocide movements for Palestine. Dividing movements is a well-worn technique of authoritarians throughout history.

Those of us on the left have been more than willing to oblige. One of the books I’ve returned to in preparation for the new administration is adrienne maree brown’s “We Will Not Cancel Us.” It’s an intervention for transformative justice in the ways we approach one another when we don’t live up to the hopes we have for the world around us. I am holding fast to her invitation:

· Can we hold each other, as the systems that weaken and distort our humanity crumble?

· Can we release our binary ways of thinking of good and bad in order to collectively grow from our mistakes?

· Can we be abolitionists with each other?

· Can we be principled and discerning in movement conflict? (pg 15)

brown initially published the essay as a blog on her website. She was working through the questions of accountability and growth from mistakes among people in her movement circles. She noticed how COVID-19, our separation during a fearful time, increased call-outs with little room for growth and change.

I especially like this book because it’s a kind of show-and-tell. She writes about the initial wave of feedback after publishing her thoughts, about the encouragement and thanks she received from others who felt seen in this piece about the quickness by which we turn on one another.

But the second round of feedback was different. This time she was hearing critique. She describes her feelings: defensive, hurt, misunderstood. “And finally, curious: what am I not seeing? Not hearing? What do I not know? What can I learn?”

In the print version, brown goes on to describe what she was learning and how she incorporated that learning into her writing. Some of the language she used, particular and exact to her experience, had been weaponized against others in her community. She would be aware of that and align her metaphors accordingly. She learned and was held accountable in public, and she allowed readers to participate.

A few years ago, I realized that I was finding myself in organizing spaces whose primary form of working through the trauma of racism and capitalism was to punish those inside the organization. These committees and orgs couldn’t come to what brown calls “collective clarity on what we mean by conflict, what we mean by harm, and what we mean by abuse.” It was easier to hurt internal allies than to develop strategies to confront the structures of power around us. I stopped participating in this kind of work because I realized that when we fight each other – they win.

When we fight together – we win.

I’m praying – and working, organizing, protesting, canvassing – for the unity of our race and class disparities. I’m committing myself to movements that are moving us towards the healing of our broken systems and the failed promises of this nation. We’re going to need each other more than ever in the next four years. Will you join us?

Onward!

Keeanga-Yamhatta Taylor

Before Karl Barth took an academic post and wrote Church Dogmatics he pastored in the town of Safenwil where the town’s economy revolved around two textile factories in which workers labored for 12 hours a day earning barely enough to eat. Only six months after his arrival Barth realized that “shrugging one’s shoulders over taking a conscious position on practical matters…absolutely doesn’t work for a pastor.” He began to teach on labor policy and invited other pastors to consider social issues in the community. He became known as The Red Pastor of Safenwil.

Looking back on that time, Barth wrote:

In the class difference that I saw concretely before me in my congregation, I was touched for the first time by the real problems of real life. The result was that for some year…my only theological work was reduced to the preparation of sermons and classes which I still did quite carefully. What I really studied were factory acts, insurance business and trade unionism and the like, and my attention was claimed by violent local and cantonal struggles, which were cause by my taking positions on behalf of the workers.[1]

Jesus was a worker and so were the factory workers in his congregation. Jesus’ ministry was to the poor and oppressed and here were the poor and oppressed. Barth concluded that the good news was a material reality that made material demands.

I’m thinking about this intersection of real-world problems and theological concerns with renewed vigor as we are fast approaching a new Trump era. And in that vein, I’m thinking about the statements faith communities make to clarify and organize their resistance against tyranny.

Not long before the election, I noticed that a group of evangelical leaders published a statement called “Our Confession of Evangelical Conviction.” It contains veiled references to Trump, though he is not named in the document: “We reject the stoking of fears and the use of threats as an illegitimate form of godly motivation, and we repudiate the use of violence to achieve political goals as incongruent with the way of Christ.”

At other times the writers dig into theological commitment. They give their allegiance to Christ alone. They value every person as made in God’s image. It has the feel of the Barmen Declaration. No ideology and politics, just theological truth around which we can organize our lives.

Confessions like these have a “stand the test of time” feel to them, and there’s a lot to appreciate about a sustained witness that remains unchanged regardless of the state of the world. “Preach as if nothing happened” Barth told the Confessing Church preachers as he was exiled from Germany – but we also know how that worked out.

At the same time, I’m in a tradition that frequently and intentionally shifts our confessions of faith to respond to new questions before us. One of the exercises I give to our new church member class is to look at three different versions of Mennonite confessions of faith to see if they can imagine how particular historical events shaped the theology of the church at that time. In the Schleitheim Confession, Anabaptists are clear about their non-participation in government affairs:

Shall one be a magistrate if one should be chosen as such? The answer is as follows: They wished to make Christ king, but He fled and did not view it as the arrangement of His Father. We shall do as He did.

By 1963 this section of the confessions look different: “In law enforcement the state does not and cannot operate on the nonresistant principles of Christ's kingdom.” A new question arrived, perhaps inspired by the images plastered across television screens of cops using firehoses on Civil Right. Should Mennonites participate in policing? No Mennonite cops in 1963! (To our detriment, the language falls out of in 1995 where we see positive language that leaves the interpretive door open: We may participate in government or other institutions of society only in ways that do not violate the love and holiness taught by Christ and do not compromise our loyalty to Christ.)

I like these pointed and practical theological declarations about our material condition. They offer clarity and urgency in times of upheaval. This week I went back and read Thomas Müntzer’s “Fundamental and Just Articles of all the Peasantry and Tenants of the Spiritual and Temporal Lords, by Whom They Consider Themselves Oppressed.” I wanted to root myself in the kind of confession that emerges when Scripture is read through the eyes of the working class.

While Müntzer’s turn towards armed rebellion through the Peasants’ War has led many in my tradition to distance Müntzer from Anabaptism, I think of him as one of our people. His interpretation of Scripture finds its end in firm and present political realities, for instance, a form of taxation called the small tithe. He explains his reason for rejecting this tax in the articles: “And we will not pay the small tithe at all, for the Lord God created cattle free for Man’s use; we consider it to be an unjust tithe which has been invented by men. Therefore we will not pay it any more.” God does not execute a tax on human use of creation and neither should the state/church. Müntzer takes a theological reality – the use of creation – and derives a political commitment.

In confronting feudalism’s enslavement, atonement provides the conditions for freedom – rather than subject to arbitrary feudal lords the people are subject to God’s laws. Müntzer condemns “how the lords treat us as property” because “Christ redeemed us all by shedding his precious blood, regardless of whether it is a lowly shepherd or the highest in the land, with no exceptions.” Does this mean they are not to be obedient to these lords? No, but in contrast to deference by rank, we ought to “humble ourselves before everyone.” The universal character of redemption forms a way of life, a politics.

I spoke at a church a few weeks ago, a church working out its post-evangelical identity. At the end, someone asked about the first steps to activating congregational life towards justice. How do they pick the issue they want to work on? The best I could offer was to try doing what Jesus told us to do. Get people out of prison. Feed people who are hungry. Collectively organize your property and money. Pronounce woe upon the rich. That seemed like a good place to start, and this is the place I pastor from.

I got the sense that my biblical literalism surprised some in the audience. After all, they’d spent a lot of time deconstructing their biblical literalism to arrive at a more temperate and open theological vision. I was suggesting they go backward! I suppose that’s correct. Many of the most interesting political theologies I know emerge from centuries of close biblical alignment, and often these forms of life were horrifically repressed by the state-church. Anabaptists believed, literally, that Jesus’ command to love our enemies required us not to kill. The Diggers occupied the Commons because they took seriously that all the believers in Jerusalem held common property. Quakers opposed slavery because Jesus’ redemption unites all people in kinship. It might have done the Confessing Church well to simply say, as Mennonites do, that we do not swear oaths to anyone, including Hitler, because we let our yes be our yes and our no be our no.

What does our reading of Scripture say about labor organizing? About each person having access to housing? How can we move from “welcoming the stranger” to a rejection of the Trump administration’s campaign of mass deportation?

At this moment, we need robust and materialist theological imaginations. Consistently, these imaginations develop not in attempts at theological unity across broad spectrums of often incompatible theologies (see Barth’s chilling analysis of the Confessing church --“The Lutheran Church slept and the Reformed Church kept awake”) but through people who live within communities of people for whom the good news of Jesus was written. Perhaps more than a new Barmen Declaration we need Fundamental and Just Articles of all the Peasantry and Tenants of the Spiritual and Temporal Lords.

(In other news, I’ve migrated to BlueSky, @melissaf-b.bksy.social) - hope to see you there!)

[1] Tietz, Christiane, '“The Red Pastor”: Safenwil, 1911‒21', in Victoria J. Barnett (ed.), Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict (Oxford, 2021; online edn, Oxford Academic, 20 May 2021).

Two days before this week’s catastrophic election, I was asked to do a Q&A with a church that utilized my book as the basis of a sermon series on Jesus’ teaching “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.”

We talked about what it meant to be an enemy to a political “other,” spiritual truth and religious hypocrisy, and I did an introduction to Anabaptism. But then we got to a question that I found intriguing:

Whoever wins, half of the nation will think the other half is their enemy whatever the results. How do we engage with people who voted differently than we did?

I could hear that question ringing into the future. I hoped Harris would win. I left everything on the court to assure Trump would not be elected. And I know this is a racist, sexist country mired in forgetfulness. I asked our intern to plan a post-election prayer service for our church a month ago, sensing this outcome was possible.

I also found the question difficult to answer. When I speak to churches, it isn’t unusual for me to hear them describe partisan factions, both of whom believe they are correct, as the source of our division and animosity. These partisan structures then show up in the church and replicate the exterior divisions. What we need is a way to bring these groups together in worship and conversation under the banner “Jesus is Lord,” which will reveal a new form of life called the church that is neither left nor right.

I think some of this is true but I want to dig down a bit on this claim, and I suggest it would be good idea for all of us to do so before Jan 20, 2025 – the day Donald Trump, an authoritarian, convicted felon, sexual abuser who incited a riot on the Capitol, promised to mass deport both legal and undocumented migrants, to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency, end the healthcare of millions of Americans (including my family!), arrest his political opponents, encouraged the murder of journalists, draconian discrimination of trans people, and deploy the US military on US citizens through mass arrest and imprisonment becomes the duly elected President of the United States of America.

Since 2016, the center-right, both inside and outside the church, produced an astounding number of organizations to foster dialogue between the “right” and the “left.” Braver Angels, People’s Supper, Colossians Forum, Untying Knots. And I’ve been skeptical about these movements from their inception. I believe in “understanding where people are coming from” but I am not convinced that interpersonal relationships are enough to dismantle the structural power that keeps enmity in place. But I find it more distressing to describe multi-racial, coordinated efforts working towards community safety and protection in a white supremacist country as “siloed” and “only listening to people who believe what they believe.” At my most honest, I think many people who participate in these programs want to soothe the emotional toll of loving people whose politics they find unconscionable.

I saw a similar sentiment growing in white churches after 2016, an interpretation of “Jesus is Lord” that preserves unity without making political claims or taking action in the world that could splinter these difference. I believe these churches have the best intentions in mind, but I am also wary. I want to turn to the lesson of the rise and fall of the Confessing Churches in Germany as a warning as to why this model of church life will not be enough to sustain our witness in the years to come.

The Confessing Churches were a minority movement in the German church that formed out a shared desire to resist the Nazi regime takeover of the German Church. Members of these churches gathered in Barmen, Germany to affirm the Barmen Declaration, a statement of shared convictions that countered the Nazi platform of “positive Christianity” and heralded an Aryan church.

The Confessing Church has been a significant source of symbolic resistance to churches at odds with tyrannical governments. But it’s also important to be honest about the result. The movement didn’t last long. The churches divided into factions. While several pastors remained outspoken against the Nazi regime, one by one, the confessing churches were absorbed into Christian irrelevence. How could this happen? What went wrong?

Victoria Barnett wrote about the rise and fall of the confessing church, and her assessment of what this happened is instructive for us here on the doorstep of a second Trump presidency. She explains that one feature of Barmen was repudiation of the Nazi state’s interference in the church’s business. Barmen declared independence from all “ideological and political convictions” and instead pledged to hold to the historic confessions and Scriptural truths of the Bible. They also took the step denounce the state’s overreach of power, a specific counter to the Third Reich. But Barmen did not condemn Hitler or even name him.

Barnett describes Barmen as a “potential” statement of political resistance that went mostly unrealized because the statement was read by the participating churches in two directions. The first was a retreat from the politics of the world to a church of inward spiritual fortitude. The second way to read Barmen was as an outward challenge to the state. The “inward” position made what Barnett calls a fatal mistake of believing the church could simply go about its business of being faithful in the midst of Nazi Germany, yet this became the most widespread interpretation of the declaration.

One of the people at the margins of the majority interpretation was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. By the time Bonhoeffer returned to Germany from his post in London, the churches of Barmen were crumbling over the inward/outward interpretation. Even the radical churches who formed a counter to the Confessing church at the Dahlem synod were first and primarily committed to keeping their church from splitting and avoiding confrontation with the state. These churches opted for behind the scenes, diplomatic solutions in the shadows of the gas chambers. In the end almost every pastor trained in the illegal Confessing Church seminaries became a Nazi soldier. The Confessing Churches could not shake their anti-Jewish theology. Barnett describes the Confession Church record as “a shameful, tragic, sickening picture of cowardice and complicity in state violence.”

This returns me to Bonhoeffer, who, ironically, was not present at either Barmen or the Dahlem synod. Bonheoffer eventually turned his attention to secular interventions against Hitler but, according to biographer Charles Marsh, he only did so after the failures of the German churches to effectively organize against the Nazis. Because the Confessing Churches were more interested in securing their autonomy than countering Hitler, Bonhoeffer felt he had no choice but to look to those who were actively working to resist the Third Reich. Even then, he was deeply conflicted about that decision, never coming to resolution about the conflict between his pacifism and the perceived need to eliminate Hitler.

In the years to come, churches will need to be clear and committed to our convictions about the Gospel – with sustained urgency. One reason for this is that the coming years will require significant, consequential, and likely illegal actions to assure that vulnerable people in our communities are protected from the Trump administration. What will guide us in these days? A desire to hold the church together and avoid state confrontation, or the realization that “Jesus is Lord” will lead us towards coordinated and organized resistance of the powers that work against God’s beloved? I am planning a life, and counting the costs, for the latter.

I’ve been thinking about Mercy Amba Oduyuye this week, returning to her work and recalling the legacy she left in theology and in the lives of all women, but especially African women. Oduyuye was a Ghanian Methodist, born in 1934. I became familiar with her work through the Concerned Circle of African Women Theologians (“The Circle”), which affirmed women’s lives were an interpretive framework for religious experience and practice. This Pan-African collective attended to the ways that religion shaped women’s freedom and oppression.

Oduyuye has been especially helpful for me in interrogating essentialism, otherizing, and the power of representative politics in the Western Church. Oduyuye came to mind this week following the publication of a The Widening of God’s Mercy by father and son biblical scholars Richard and Christopher Hays. From the reviews, the book is a case for LGBTQ inclusion in the church that traces similar terrain as other evangelical books (like the one written by David Gushee).

The book was not written for me (we’ve had access to this kind of biblical reasoning for decades) but I am grateful it was written. Richard Hays is writing as penance for decades of anti-gay New Testament scholarship, having trained thousands of students who pastored thousands of churches to believe God was against LGBTQ folks. I once had a person leave my church after reading Hay’s anti-gay chapter in The Moral Vision of the New Testament. His teaching had consequences – real, serious, and deadly consequences.

This has been a challenging publication week for evangelicals and other conservatives for whom Hays was a prominent ally in excluding queer people from the life of the church. One of those people is Preston Sprinkle, who has devoted his life to a kind of “compassionate” anti-gay theology. He has the same problems with this book that he has with any inclusive theology, so no need to recite the reasons here. But I want to pull out one of those well-rehearsed objections today: that people in the Majority World reject LGBTQ-inclusive theology:

The global church is growing exponentially in the Global South, Southeast Asia, China, the Middle East, and elsewhere in the majority world. Almost all of these churches believe that sex difference is an essential part of what marriage is and that all sexual relationships outside this covenant of marriage are sin. The Widening of God’s Mercy implies that all these non-western Christians are not listening to the Holy Spirit, who is allegedly opening up fresh ways to read Scripture. 

The ethical viewpoint advocated for in The Widening of God’s Mercy is held primarily by a relatively small number of (mostly white and affluent) modern Christians living in the West. Is the Holy Spirit really speaking much more clearly to western Christians than those in the majority world? 

Sprinkle implies that LGBTQ-inclusion is the product of lascivious, wealthy, white Christians who believe that the Holy Spirit is speaking to them and not to Christians in places like Africa and Asia. This is a common reaction from people in majority positions of power in the Western church, and a place where I would like to suggest we need to exercise a lot more care and intention. I’m limiting my scope to Africa in this article because of my own familiarity and experience.

I want to be clear that “progressive” Christians have not aided themselves in dismantling accusations of xenophobia and racism in relation to theology in the Global South. Let us not forget Katharine Jefferts Schori explaining how Episcopalians are better educated than other Christians and thus have lower birth rates which makes them better stewards of the planet (astounding in many ways). White, wealthy Western church ignorance, racism, and colonization is rampant in theology and practice. But unlike Sprinkle who thinks this is a “progressive issue,” both ends of the theological spectrum in the Western church are enveloped in marginalizing voices beyond our borders and using those who agree with us to further entrench the power of the church in the West.

I suspect Mercy Oduyuye would be deeply uncomfortable with Sprinkle pitting “most Africans” against LGBTQ+ people. She spent her life resisting this logic and instead returning us to the God of liberation. Oduyuye was committed to the decolonization of theology in Africa. Her theology protested the negative judgment of African religion and culture by colonizing missions. “This colonization has not ended,” she reminds us, “In fact new forms of Christianity are arriving in Africa with even more trenchant antipathy for Africa’s indigenous religio-culture.” In her theology, Oduyuye utilizes idioms, stories, and symbols from Akan tradition and incorporates them into her theological work, a process known as inculturation (or indigenization). (I’m leaning heavily on Reimagining Christianity and Sexual Diversity in Africa in this post.)

At the same time, Oduyuye recognized the marginalization and oppression of women in both her African culture and Christianity. Both are diverse in their relation to gender, and both require analysis that leads to the work of liberation. She called this process “African feminist culture hermeneutics,” the transformation of both African and Christian cultures. Oduyuye talked about the way women formed a “church within the church,” utilizing the image of the “hearth-hold” of her culture to describe the home-place carved out by African women in patriarchal churches.

Oduyuye would utilize the same household imagery for LGBTQ Africans. She discussed this in a chapter by African theologian John Mbiti. Oduyuye is critical of Mbiti’s encouragement of social norms of heteronormative marriages and procreation. She critiques the link between bearing children and immortality in African culture by showing the ways that women have been on the receiving end of harm through this cultural expectation. She talks about women’s victimization because of their childlessness, and the ostracization of gay men. Oduyuye’s essay comes from a personal place – she was a childless, married woman who speaks about her embarrassment and shame around neighbors and in-laws, how her worth was tied to motherhood.

Oduyuye is not alone in this work. For the past two decades, The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries (TFAM), founded by Dr Yvette Flunders, has worked towards the inclusivity of LGBTQ+ people in the Black church. Dr Flunders’ ministry expanded to HIV advocacy across the continent of Africa but took on new urgency in 2009 when Uganda introduced its Anti-Homosexuality bill. It was from Flunders that I learned about how legislative efforts to criminalize LGBTQ people in Africa are tied to the political advocacy of US evangelical Christians who fund these efforts (see the World Congress of Families). These groups portray LGBTQIA inclusion as neocolonial while at the same time pushing these interests through Western money and influence. Flunder’s organization partnered with Bishop Joseph Tolton to form TFAM Global, which works to combat this form of Western influence by promoting “pan-African justice” through the power of Spirit’s anointing and movement.

There are many other people and organization that are expansive in their LGBTQ inclusion through theology, activism, and art across the continent of Africa and in diaspora: Musa Dube (also a member of The Circle), Marc Epprecht, Desmond Tutu, Achille Mbembe, Jean-Blaise Kenmogne, Ecumenical HIV and AIDS Initiative and Advocacy, Cosmopolitan Affirming Church, Chinelo Okparanta, Unoma Azuah, Ezra Chitando, Esther Mombo, Bishop Christopher Senyonjo, Jean-Blaise Kenmogne, Godfrey Owino Adera.

I am grateful for each of these voices. Oduyuye has been helpful for me because she both stand within the tradition of Pan-African culture while naming the multiplicity of local and layered cultures within her own experience and community. That makes it more difficult (and more egregious) when Westerners use “African culture” to establish a dominant paradigm (“this is what Africans believe”) or to deal a deathblow to an LGBTQIA affirming theological position. From her we are learn that we cannot disappear LGBTQ Africans from our theological concerns. We discover that African theology is a living, breathing tradition with debates, movements, and theological concerns in conversation and contention. African theologians deserve our respect and critical engagement, not essentialism and weaponization.

Mercy Oduyuye Reading List

Hearing and Knowing: Theological Reflections on Christianity in Africa (1986)

Daughters of Anowa: African Women and Patriarchy (1995)

Introducing African Women’s Theology (2001)

Re-membering Me (2019)

The Theology of Mercy Amba Oduyoye: Ecumenism, Feminism, and Communal Practice by Oluwatomisin Olayinka Oredein

Interview with Prof Oduyuye from The Shiloh Project

We’re in a political season where we’re once again being asked to choose between Trump and a fresher-faced Democratic presidential administration. All around me I hear rhetoric that reminds us of how people think about voting and their role in the electoral process. On one side I hear people talk about voting for “the lesser of two evils” which is often countered by “not voting for evil at all.” On the other side I’ve got folks who are very, very excited for Kamala Harris many in the vein of identity groups like “Christians for Harris” and “Evangelicals for Harris.”

I’m in a different place.

I’m preaching about hope in times of political disaster this fall, gearing up for what will likely be an intense and terrifying season in the US, either by the election of a white supremacist tyrant or his reaction to losing. I chose Isaiah as the book I’ll preach from because it captures so much of the anxiety and political instability people around me are feeling.

But it is also a text that provides an orientation towards the state:

Even the nations are like a drop from a bucket,
   and are accounted as dust on the scales;
   see, he takes up the isles like fine dust. (Isa 40:15)

The writer of Isaiah has little regard for the power of the nations in the scope of salvation history. “All the nations are as nothing before him; they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness.” I’d bet that for Isaiah, calling nations evil is giving them too much credit. This is remarkable because this part of Isaiah is directed against Babylon, the regional superpower that pillaged and destroyed Jerusalem before sending Israel into exile.

The traditional Anabaptist application of this text is non-resistance towards governance. You don’t participate in elections because these are powers that have nothing to do with you and nothing to do with God. But I think there’s another possibility. We orient ourselves towards state power in the same we orient ourselves toward any other significant and provisional part of our lives. When I vote, I think about who offers me more leverage to shift the powers, however provisional, towards the world I want to see come into being.

That decision takes place with a particular set of cultural and historic factors. I live in a country with a government somewhat in proximity to democracy, and that affords me a particular set of tools for accountability and social change. I am afforded a certain set of rights, like right to assembly and free press. I appreciate the broadest interpretation of these rights because they give me more to work with. I am leery of candidates who want to strip those rights down either by exercising a broad presidential immunity or by installing Justices who undermine those rights. One party has a better track record than the other.

I have also lived through the nightmare of a Trump presidency and I’d prefer not to do it again.

In the second year of Trump’s presidency, I sat in the conference room of a local nonprofit learning how to document ICE stops in our community. I’d answered the call to be a part of a network of responders who drive to a location where someone reported an ICE stop. We were trained in how to record the incident while shouting resource information to the person being detained.

I can still feel the terror and despair rushing through me when I think about those days. I remember the Muslim ban and the airport actions, the people who stopped planes from taking off with migrants, the people who stood around an ICE vehicle to stop their friend from being dragged to deportation. Many of these people were arrested, jailed, and charged with federal crimes. All the people they risked for were eventually deported or refused entry. Some of these returned to their home countries and were killed by the people and forced they tried to escape.

I remember the people who spent years living in churches to stave off arrest and deportation. I remember the churches in North Carolina who spent years sheltering people as sanctuary churches, how they provided food and laundry and work and a stipend and community and how they built showers and bedrooms into their churches. I remember the people who spent years sleeping in the same building so those living in shelter were not alone at night.

I remember the vast expansion of child separation at the border under the Trump administration, the flagrant violation of the 72-hour holding rule, how, at one point, half a million traumatized children were alone in cages at the border. I remember feeling a kind of desperation overtake me, like I needed to get bolt cutters and get in my car and start driving. I wondered about what kind of person I was that I didn’t start driving the moment I saw those pictures cross my screen. I am still haunted.

The Biden administration didn’t offer the swift overhaul of the immigration system that I longed for. Biden followed in the footsteps of Obama, The Deporter in Chief, and shifted from blocking border access to vastly increasing deportations. Biden’s administration continued family separation, though not at the level of the Trump years. But other things are also true. People came out of sanctuary churches, some won their cases. Biden brought refugee resettlement up to 125,000, far less than needed, but substantially better than Trump’s historic low of 15,000. I was very glad when the Biden administration reached a settlement with the ACLU over child separation lawsuits.

I am certain that the changes we saw are the result of persistent organizing from Latine-led organizations, coalitions, and nonprofits who put immigration and refugee concerns in front of us day after day. The outrage and anger that followed, the collective work of people who refused to let this normalize held the Biden administration accountable. I am grateful for the ongoing work from these organizations and activists who wouldn’t let “at least it’s not Trump” dilute the issues facing migrant people.

In the past decade, both major US political parties have shifted their politics in response to activists. For the right, that has meant draconian, racist, anti-gay, misogynistic laws at every level of governance. On the left, Biden was also pushed away from the center (thank you, God, for Bernie Sanders). Climate agenda? Left organizing. Broad consensus around a ceasefire? Left organizing. Chuck Schumer going all in on cannabis legalization? Left organizing. Student debt cancellation? Left organizing. Infrastructure bill? Left organizing.

I like tools. And I have not yet been convinced by those who see the future of the US built in the ashes of accelerationist politics and democratic sabotage. You’re welcome to convince me by activating structures of care and communities of accountability that can hold people in safety during the decimation of the current substandard offering we have. But I’m not there yet.

At the heart of Christian belief is that the superpowers who rule over us are passing away like vapor. Until then, I’ll vote in the direction of having the most tools in my toolbox to live in these terrible times. I want politicians in place who I think can be moved. I want strikes, protests, organizing, lobbying, resistance. I want to pressure our government towards the politics I want.

I don’t have spare hope to put in our electoral politics. But I do have hope for people organizing, for people in the streets.

Dance at the Gay Activist Alliance Firehouse, 1971 (Diana Davies/ The New York Public Library)

When I was in New York a few weeks, I took the subway across town to Greenwich Village on a pilgrimage to see the Stonewall Inn. I blinked into the sunlight and looked around. Stonewall Inn is easy to miss, so easy to miss that I walked right past it and then had to double back when I checked the map on my phone. Stonewall still operates as a gay bar, and it was the morning – closed for business. Currently it’s covered in scaffolding, one among a block of indistinguishable bars and shops. But I stopped for a minute to pay homage, to remember how this little, unassuming place remade history.

In 1969, the bar was raided by NYPD as part of their frequent attempts to disrupt and endanger the lives of the gay community. This was an awful decade following many awful decades for LGBTQ people. The FBI used surveillance to create lists of “known homosexuals,” and the police would publish these lists, which led to gay people being fired, harassed, and assaulted. Bars and clubs refused entry to queer folks. Cities would humiliate gay people through sweeps of beaches, restaurants, parks, and bars.

Stonewall was one place where queer folks, drag queens, and trans people were not shunned, bullied, or hated. They could be themselves, a safe space in a world that was deeply unsafe.

But Stonewall wasn’t just a bar. It was a dance club. After visiting I read more of Stonewall’s history. One theory as to why Stonewall was targeted by the cops, despite being owned by the mob who frequently paid off the NYPD to leave the bar alone, was because this was a public place where LGBTQ folks were able to dance with abandon. They could hold each other in public.

The artist Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt was one of those dancers. In an interview I read he talked about what this place meant to him: “Being able to dance with someone of the same sex changed everything in the way you felt about yourself. Because you were having an affectionate moment, you felt totally humanized."

When the police arrived to shut down the bar on a hot night in June, Stonewall became the site of the first public resistance to the sweeps. Lanigan-Schmidt explains, "It was totally spontaneous. We were angry that we couldn't dance."

Dancing with abandon in a way that gets you in trouble with the authorities shows up in Scripture. In 2 Samuel, we catch up with David, the young ruler who has unseated the powerful warrior, King Saul. David has just recovered the ark of the covenant, this fancy box that travels along with God’s people. It’s important. It carries signs of God’s faithfulness in the past and is the promise of God’s faithfulness in the present. David is moving it to a new home and he is dancing.

One of my favorite images of David dancing before the ark of the covenant comes from a medieval psalter where David is in the middle of a back handspring. I like this picture because it gives us a sense of how wild this scene must have been. David, we learn, is dancing with all his might, accompanied by 30,000 marchers. There are shouts of joy! There are horns! They eat an amazing meal, including raisin cake.

Then we hear the perspective of Michal, the daughter of Saul who appears to be in a miserable marriage-as-alliance with David. Michal is unimpressed: “How the king of Israel has honored himself today, for he has exposed himself today to the eyes of the female slaves of his slaves, just as surely as one of the rabble shamelessly exposes themselves!”

In other words, David’s dancing exposed him -- his linen ephod shook open. There’s a sexual shaming to Michal’s scathing critique. Scantily clad David is seen by the aristocratic daughter of Saul turning circles with the lowest slave girls. This is not what kings do, this is also not what real men do. Michal describes David as man who has emptied himself of worth, an empty man. The only people whom the lowest of the low, the slave women of slave women, expose themselves to is one another. David is dancing like, and looking like, a slave girl. David has gotten himself into gender trouble.

The real man, the real soldier, the real ruler is not David but Michal’s father, Saul. And she is disgusted by what she sees in her husband – his body getting mixed in, indistinguishable from female slaves.

The genealogies of Jesus in the New Testament want to tie both Joseph and Mary to the house of David. The recorders of the gospels are clear -- the line of David runs down to Jesus. And today we see flashes of what this might mean, why its significant to the people who told these stories about Jesus to one another.

Jesus also finds himself failing again and again to meet the standards of elite men of his time. His body is leaky, it leaks power and blood. That’s characteristic of women, who are porous and weak. Jesus is never married, doesn’t produce children, which means he doesn’t put on display his sexual potency. He won’t fight back, doesn’t organize his followers to overthrow a military regime. He is blindfolded, whipped, stripped, and crucified. Even his risen body will bear scars on his hands and feet. Jesus dies as an emasculated criminal, an outsider. He is, as Michal said, emptied out of his manliness.

David has some words for Michal. He reminds her, in no uncertain terms, that God anointed David, chose David, and it was before this God that David danced like a girl. “I will play before the Lord,” David tells her. He switches the word here. He will play before the Lord. This isn’t the kind of play as in playing an instrument. David is goofing around, being silly, laughing. “If you think this is dishonoring, just wait,” he tells Michal. “I will make myself so foolish even I shock myself. But those slave’s slave girls you talked about? I will find honor in their sight.”

Michal idealizes another form of masculinity – seriousness, control, lack of emotion. David turns the tables on this idea. God doesn’t give a prize for our somberness and our earnestness. God desires a life that is filled up with joy, a joy that only makes sense to people like slave girls, who have carved out their joy in the midst of trauma and hardship.

This is not the first time slave women have danced in the story of David. After David kills Goliath, the same women from today’s story come out to greet David and Saul. They sing a mocking, hilarious song about how much better of a warrior David is than the king. It’s the first sign of who David will be, and it leads Saul to keep a close eye on David.

“It’s not more truthful to be serious,” the writer Adam Phillips writes. There’s a truth that emerges in this moment before the ark, an unserious truth. Before God, in total surrender to the joy of God’s presence, David stops being a manly man. The barrier between slave women and king dissolves. Everyone in the dance becomes fully human as God intended them to be.

“Being able to dance with someone of the same sex changed everything in the way you felt about yourself. Because you were having an affectionate moment, you felt totally humanized."

I thought about Stonewall this week, about the people in our church who once couldn’t get married, couldn’t share spousal benefits, weren’t protected from being fired from their jobs for being gay, about the threat that still exists to LGBTQ people we love, fellow Christians in our congregation.

We need organizing and federal protections and legislation. And there is dancing, there is unseriousness, there’s losing control, the kind that creates gender trouble for us to get into. There’s also the playfulness that creates forms of solidarity that tell us something about who God is and about who we are as God’s people, about what it means to live, even for a brief instance, in the promise of the reign of God.

William Grill, Cumulus

Last week I gave up.

I don’t spend much time thinking about giving up, about the times I throw in the towel. On my CV starting dates announce potential. I began this work, started this project, joined this board. We assume the timeline is marked by natural endings – you’ve completed your term. Better yet, you’ve moved on to something more prestigious, that earns better pay. You must explain to an employer a gap in work history. It isn’t enough to say, “I didn’t want to do it anymore, so I stopped.”

I don’t feel good about giving up. In this case, several people tried to talk me out of it. This is the work. I heard wonderings about the fate of the project. I felt myself wanting to back out of my giving up. I made excuses that I thought would be acceptable. So this week I went back and read Adam Phillips’ essay on giving up (from his book on the subject).

We tend to think of giving up, in the ordinary way, as a lack of courage, as an improper or embarrassing orientation towards what is shameful and fearful. That is to say we tend to value, and even idealise, the idea of seeing things through, of finishing things rather than abandoning them. Giving up has to be justified in a way that completion does not; giving up doesn’t usually make us proud of ourselves; it is a falling short of our preferred selves; unless, of course, it is the sign of an ultimate and defining realism, of what we call ‘knowing our limitations’.

I think about the thing I gave up last week and how I said, “I can’t do it anymore,” which, of course, I could have. I could have kept going even though this thing made me anxious, even though I’d lost sleep over it, even as I’ve struggled with my capacities, even though the project has turned towards a politics of feeling bad. I could have kept on. That’s what I do most of the time for no other reason than that going on is what we do and that my personal destruction is the cost I pay (to whom?). Already, as I write this, I am trying to justify myself. Maybe I’m writing this as a justification.

Who do we believe we have to justify ourselves to, Phillips asks. In part, to ourselves. “Heroes and heroines are people who don’t give up; they may sometimes turn back but they ultimately persevere.” But heroes share this in common with their foils: tragic heroes and villains. They also will never give up, and it is this perseverance that marks their tragic end.

Donald Trump will never give up. Joe Biden will never give up. The debate we saw a few weeks ago was tragic and frightening because we watched two elderly men who cannot quit because their hubris created a cul-de-sac of their lives. The kind of self you must construct to get to the position of President is the kind of self that is chained to its own potential, its own necessity.

Giving up is the opposite of being stuck. It is the ability to change your mind, to see, as Phillips explains, quitting as “a way of succeeding at something else.” There is a kind of giving up that comes down to not trying hard, not working at it, not persevering. But there’s also the kind of giving up that comes to the realization that there’s something preferable that is worth the giving up.

I ought to be more introspect, or at least more attentive to giving up because I am in a religious tradition in which the centrifugal force is giving up. Jesus gives up his life. He doesn’t want to – he chooses to. He gives up because life is something precious to give up. Terry Eagleton, in his book Radical Sacrifice, talks about the early heretical sect of the Donatists who were obsessed with eternal reward and would demand that armed travelers they met on the road kill them. Donatists would threaten these travelers with violence if they would not. They would throw themselves off cliffs and into water for their heavenly prize. “There is no merit in casting off what you find pointless in any case. Giving up drinking bleach for Lent is not generally considered a sacrifice,” Eagleton writes. “An abundant life is not an easy one to abdicate.”

In contrast, I suspect that most of us are formed by a kind of Winston Churchill ethic, the kind we hear in his speech to school children during World War II: “never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.” It’s a war time sentiment and an ethic that becomes corrosive and debilitating if we look at our lives like they are a battlefield. Instead, the question we might better ask is, am I giving up for the right reasons? Who determines the rightness? What is on the other side?

Perhaps part of my need for justification (still writing this!) is that I recognize giving up is also political. I might give up on trying to quit smoking but that decision participates in markets, shifts the wellness of bystanders, participates in factory labor and trade policies. In the political worlds I often inhabit, the actions of the individual are considered inconsequential (it doesn’t matter how hard it is – never give in!). That’s the problem with liberalism, a problem I don’t want to have – that everything is reduced to social relationships, to interpersonal exchange. Giving up because something is bad for you is suspect (interestingly this is true for some versions of church and some versions of leftism).

I’ve continued to find myself drawn back to the work of prison abolition because of the narratives of giving up that refuse to negate individuals or institutions. In the work of imagining a world beyond state surveillance and punishment, not giving up on people requires giving up on particular institutions. In order to create a social world where, as Paolo Freire wrote, it’s easier to love, we are building within our communities the capacities for that love: accountability, honesty, joy, freedom. Grinding out commitment in collectives that refuse this form of life, no matter what their stated goals, is the sort of space we ought to give up on.

There’s a politics to feeling bad in this way, to the grinding out no matter what. Sarah Ahmed, in the context of Australia, describes one form of this politic: “The shameful white subject expresses shame about its racism. In expressing shame, it ‘shows’ that it is not racist; if we are shamed, then we mean well. The white subject that is shamed by its racism is hence also a white subject that is proud about its shame. The very claim to feel bad (about this or that) also involved a self-perception of being good.” This is the source of Robin D’Angelo’s popularity in creating collective spaces of shame around “white fragility.” White women prove we are not racist by feeling proud about feeling bad about our racism, and that is the service that D’Angelo provides (for a hefty fee). 

It would seem, or so I believe, that giving up on linking feeling bad with justice is correct. Ahmed pushes the point – assuming that every injustice produces bad feelings is bad politics (I talked about this in my piece on trad wives). Not giving up on abusive relationships can feel good to people who have been trained to never give up on marriage. Being “happy” while experiencing harm doesn’t mean we throw up our hands at this self-assertion (if they’re fine, it must be fine), it leads us to ask “what kind of political and personal formation creates this vision of suffering? Should we keep doing it?”

Keeping at it while suffering and utilizing the suffering as an explanation for why to keep at it forms a circular and deadly logic. I think Ahmed is right that we should be suspicion of and eventually give up on ideologies that indulge in this politics of feeling bad:

Political struggle is a struggle because what we struggle against can dimmish our resources, our capacities for action, our energy; it can even take our lives. This is why justice has to leave room for feeling better, even it is not about feeling better… Feeling better is not a sign that justice has been done, nor should it be reified as the goal of political struggle. But feeling better does still matter because it is about learning to live with the injuries that threaten to make life impossible.

Giving up is, in part, an assessment of the politics of feeling bad. It requires work and patience to sort out, and that work is political-as-personal. It’s part of changing and growing, recognizing our capacities, all of which creates the grounds for the world we want. Or at least I hope.

As it is, my original plan for this Substack has evolved. I wanted a place to land my theological frustrations and to offer, perhaps, better offerings. Instead, I write what I want, sometimes about theology but also Barbie, trans protections, socialism, Palestine, writing, abolition, and why I hate the New York Times. I give monthly recommendations. Mostly writing when I want and what I want to write that I don’t think finds a place in the publishing spaces I’m connected to.

Things change, so has this space, and despite my terrible track record with nomenclature, I’m giving it another go.

Let’s call it The Leavings, a place for writing that has no other home.

Thanks for reading.

-M

I recently met with two women who are planning to write a book together. Like me, they are both pastors. Like me, they are both mothers. Like me, they want to write. They asked me, “how do you write?” which I took to mean “when do you write?” Women ask me this question often. Men do not. For women, finding time to write seems impossible and I agree.

This week I am on vacation, and I am spending some of those days in New York City. This is a recommendation of my therapist to whom I admitted that I spend the week when my children and spouse are visiting grandparents in Iowa cleaning. I hate clutter and during this week away I mercilessly rid the house of whatever has accumulated over the previous year. Last summer I painted base boards and caulked bathrooms.

I receive no joy from these tasks. I do them because I do not like to live in chaos and this calm week gives me free range over the house. No one asks me to find their missing shirt/computer cord/book/water bottle. There is one to drive to the skatepark/friend’s house/pool/practice/rehearsal.

I am here to force myself not to clean my house. I have somethings I want to write, a book that’s been growing in me that I vowed, during a writer’s workshop last December, I would complete this year. Half the year is gone, and the manuscript has not changed. Instead, I’ve written chapters for other people’s books, endorsements, sermons, and articles. These smaller projects take less time and require less than the work of sitting with the hundreds of pages in a book project.

This year I went as far as to investigate hiring a cleaner to clean my house, perhaps just once during this week I typically set to cleaning. The quote came back at $450. I realized that this was likely what a fair wage looked like, but not one I could afford. If I went lower, was I investing in someone’s desperation, bilking them to get a week of leisure? Was I ready to ask someone to clean my toilets so I could have space for creative labor? I couldn’t answer the questions, so I abandoned the idea.

What if you left? My therapist asked. And so I did, to the Mennonite guest house in Manhattan where there is no attic tempting me to unload its contents.

On the subway I listened to Terry Eagleton give a lecture called “where does culture come from?” I’ve recommended it on this substack before. I wanted to hear it this time in Eagleton’s own voice, especially this line, which was on my mind in my escape from housekeeping:

The only good reason for being a socialist, apart from annoying people you don’t like, is that you don’t like to work. For Oscar Wilde, who was closer in this respect to Marx than to Morris, communism was the condition in which we would lie around all day in various interesting postures of jouissance, dressed in loose crimson garments, reciting Homer to one another and sipping absinthe. And that was just the working day.

Eagleton’s essay is about the material conditions that create culture. He is a Marxist so the answer is labor. “You can’t have culture in the sense of galleries and museums and publishing houses,” he reminds us, “unless society has evolved to the point where it can produce an economic surplus.” An artist gets to make art because someone else (Monsanto) is feeding us.

Another development: we live in a world where art is a commodity, a shift from a time when gentry created salaried position for painters, jesters, musicians, sculptors. There are few writers today who make a living as a writer, even fewer sponsoring patrons. Amazon’s book ventures assured that our work is now available at rock bottom price. Marketing gave way to influencing and assured that virality would precede (and is required for) the kind of contracts that can afford a writer time to actually write. The rest of us think and write in the cracks of our labor in and out of the home.

It worked. I wrote while I was here, and one of the book sections I worked on is about the Diggers, the proto-communist movement that followed the English Revolution. Owners of the manors had recently developed a system of enclosure to shift common land rights to private land rights. During this period, over half the land in England was turned from common to private property through the consolidation of lots and acts of Parliament. Prior to this change, commoners farmed, fished, gathered fuel and water off the common land rather than entering into a tenant relationship with the owner. These were ancient land right claims, thousands of years old. The formed their own courts, governing by consensus of the community.

The landowners who held rights to the land grew unhappy with the arrangement. In reading about the Diggers, I can trace the early lines of capitalism in the arguments for enclosure. One of the primary objections to this arrangement from the lords of the manors was idleness. Commoners grew only what they needed and then “busied themselves with a dizzying calendar of saint’s days, solstices, and pagan cultural festivals.”[1] They worked roughly half the year – “the festival calendar discouraged excess production.”

The prior system ended and now we have capitalism. You work because your time is money. If you want to have leisure, you pay for it. If you want to write, you pay for it. My friend is a professor and she explained to me the process of “buying back” classes through grants to write her books. I had once thought that this was an expected part of the job – you produce writing on the clock. That seemed like the beauty of the system. Instead, I learned you can only meet the requirement if you do the additional work to pay the university to have someone else teach your classes. It was a dizzying discovery.

Someone I know recently sent me information about a grant that offers something like this to pastors. Here is a grant to study, to write, to learn, funds which can be applied to pay other people to preach your sermons, or to take what would otherwise be unpaid leave, to pay for childcare. I wondered if they would pay for housekeeping.

I appreciate the effort, but I know this isn’t compatible with church work as I know it where pastoral presence and conflict and community organizing blur the lines of work and person over and over again, often with egregious effect (although I can’t think of what can be done about it, or if I would want something done about it if I am honest with myself).

Today I am reading about Virginia Woolf in a book by Eula Bliss. Woolf once wrote, “how any woman with a family ever put pen to paper I cannot fathom.” Indeed. I learn that once when Woolf’s cook was in the hospital, she wrote nothing for two weeks. For centuries the world was organized along service: either you were a servant or you were served. Woolf, who is white and wealthy, managed to make it work. I don’t know if Woolf made a living through her writing, but I know it didn’t matter. She didn’t need to.

And then there is Zora Neale Hurston. I first read Their Eyes Were Watching God when I studied at a university in Kenya. The class was African American and Caribbean literature, and it was taught by a Fulbright Scholar. I wondered if Hurston could ever have imagined this scenario as she was dying of heart disease in St Lucie County Welfare Home in 1960.

Hurston was immensely accomplished: an anthropologist and writer, attended Howard University and graduated from Barnard. She was friends with Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. She taught at NC Central College and established the school of arts at Bethune-Cookman College. She was remarkable and vastly underpaid. Her largest royalty was $943.75. She spent her final years cleaning hotels in Florida. You either were a servant or you were served.

I am going home soon, and the house will be a mess. But there won’t be time for anything beyond the normal routine of herding children through chores and washing dishes while the other adult starts bedtime routine. I’ll have to forgo my hopes for more. Time is money and I’ve used up what I own.

[1] https://globalcapitalism.history.ox.ac.uk/files/case26-enclosingtheenglishcommonspdf#:~:text=Before%20enclosure%2C%20common%20land%20was,as%20they%20pleased%20with%20it.