“Instead of struggling to take over and redirect the master’s tool, we call for investing the resources now poured into policing directly into community initiatives whose core missions are about helping, healing, and sustaining people, not controlling them. Instead of a one-size-fits-all blueprint, abolition allows communities to imagine and build a world that centers community needs, taking into account local cultural traditions and existing programs and resources.”

Read the full piece at Forge.

I’ve seen the pictures of the mural all over social media in recent days, and it’s very bad in the way that most white (especially evangelical) efforts to deal with race without doing any deep work to get past whiteness are very bad. But what I didn’t realize until recently is that it was created as part of a larger art project on Lake Street in Minneapolis, run by a group called Source. In the past I used to interact them with whenever I would visit Minneapolis before living here. Its director has been a friend of mine for some time, although we don’t interact much these days. Our most recent conversation was a short one when we disagreed about the Minneapolis Uprising in early June.

I write this because I have had a relationship with Source and with Peter in the past, and while we’ve both moved in different directions since then, we have cared for each other, presumably we both still do care for each other, and I want to try to speak through that relationship. I think Source could do better, but not from the analysis they currently have or the goals they’ve articulated for a project like this. I have tried to write this with language that I think they could understand, although it has been a while since I was in the evangelical world. I leave things unsaid that I might have said in a different context, and say things that I might not have said, or in ways I might not have said them, in other contexts.

I also write this because I disagree with how reconciliation language and imagery are used, especially by white Christians (certainly it’s not only Christians who do this; it is part of our cultural discourse every time a police officer hugs a person, plays a sport with a person, distributes ice cream, or any other basic kindness in contrast to their overall harmful role in society). They are harmful and they need to be critiqued and Christians especially should hold ourselves accountable for this.

As an aside on this topic, I’ve saved various posts about this over the years. I was thinking about two of them in particular. In 2016, just after Philando Castile was killed and, around a Dallas protest in response, five police officers were tragically killed, my friend Ebony Johanna Adedayo wrote Your Vision of Racial Reconciliation is Inadequate. In 2017, Erna Kim Hackett wrote Why I Stopped Talking about Racial Reconciliation and Started Talking about White Supremacy. I was also thinking about my friend Mark’s Facebook post earlier today about this mural.

So I’m hoping to articulate the problems I see with the mural and the surrounding project Source took on, partly on as an individual organization acting in the ways it did, but more importantly as part of a bigger ecclesiological and societal whole that has the same problems. I’d also like to point to better ways they could move faithfully in the world.

• It doesn’t see racial injustice as systemic but as personal. That is, it’s between the cop (whether it’s Chief Arradondo of Minneapolis, another Black cop, a white cop or whoever else the cop might be in any given mural) and the protestor. If they can love each other as individuals, there’s no problem. I don’t get the impression that Source views other issues of injustice this way (and if it does I disagree with that as well), and I think that gives room to move differently about this issue. Racism isn’t primarily a personal issue any more than other issues Source might choose to engage. All justice issues have personal implications, but they are not addressed solely or even mainly in individual ways.
• It doesn’t see policing as systemically racist and unjust, regardless of people’s personal intentions. Chief Arradondo is not a bad dude. But that’s also not the point. His role as chief of police, as head of a violent system, is bigger than whatever he may intend.
• It’s focused on individuals and how they feel about each other rather than how they are impacting each other. Arradondo, again, is head of a system that has a 2020 budget of $193.3 million, and it gets more money every year. This doesn’t change based on whether he likes Black people in general, or Black protestors in particular, enough to hug them.
• It tries to get to reconciliation without telling the truth about, much less stopping, the harm that is happening. I think especially for Christians this is very key. It’s good that people want reconciliation and peace. But to seek reconciliation without telling the truth about policing and systemic racism, and also without stopping the violence of policing as a system, is not reconciliation. The Truth & Reconciliation processes in places like South Africa and Canada, though imperfect, are illustrative of how this works. Change in actions happens before there is space for people, especially people with power imbalance, to find healing of relationships, new relationships, etc.
• It lacks a power analysis between Black folks (in the mural’s case, Black protestors) and the police. The police have the power of state violence on their side, and protestors do not. Whatever their tactics are, whatever I might think of them, they’re not equal to the violence and power that the police have to use against people. This means, for me, that we don’t stand in the middle between two equal sides, we’re asked by the message of Jesus to stand with the people who don’t have the power to oppress.
• Usually this impetus for reconciliation comes from a place of silence in the face of systemic injustice. So in this case, for a lot of white Christians they start to care when there are riots but they didn’t care when police were killing, abusing, criminalizing, Black folks in the streets regularly. They didn’t show up for any of the previous injustices but now they want reconciliation.

These problems are very similar, in my view, to the way Christian pacifists have to engage the military, war, soldiers, and other parts of the military industrial complex. We can love soldiers as individuals, offer them paths out of the military whenever that’s possible, engage them as humans. But none of that changes the facts of the military system and the actions it engages in.

It reminds me of early churches who would accept soldiers as converts, but they’d have to leave the military. They didn’t just have to be nice soldiers. I know not all early churches practiced that way, but certainly early church fathers wrote that way. I believe we should treat police officers in a similar way, but it’s also much more demanding on us because while we don’t live in a war zone we do live in a city, like all US cities, where the system of policing is oriented against Black people, Indigenous people, immigrants, poor people, and so on as part of the broader system they fit within. That doesn’t mean police can’t individually do good things, just like soldiers in Iraq might build a house or whatever, but the systems are fundamentally unjust and their individual feelings of affection, if they have any, don’t change that.

There’s a lot of good work for people of faith to do in this context without offering a vision of reconciliation that doesn’t change the systems. I think Isaiah is out there doing good work, Center for Prophetic Imagination is doing good work, MARCH is doing good work, among other faith-rooted organizations from Christian traditions. But it requires a different stance than the one Source appears to be taking. I think it’s important that we have serious conversations about that.

The first time I voted for him was in 2008, because that was the first time I voted.

In 2009, I met him. I was a small part of organizing a rally in Atlanta in the Invisible Children days, and we asked him to come speak, and he did. He said brilliant things to us for a couple minutes, and then stayed to talk and take photos with everyone who wanted to.

In 2010 something pushed me to educate myself about the Black-led Southern Freedom Movement. I started with reading all of MLK’s collected works. Lewis’ influence is all over them. I wrote a little about that at the time.

We visited the King Center in Atlanta several times while we lived there. I wrote a little about that at the time, too (I’d write it differently today, of course). His influence is tangibly present there, more so because it’s more than a museum but an advocacy for nonviolent social change. Still more so because you know that Atlanta is his city, still the city he fights for.

I remember when Occupy Atlanta started. I wasn’t part of that because we had just had a baby and we were in survival mode. I followed it online though, and I remember how absurd it was that they tried to shut Lewis down when he came to speak there. You don’t shut John Lewis down. Not anywhere, but especially not in Atlanta. He’s earned the right to speak anywhere, human though he certainly is.

When we moved on to these movement years, I have often thought of him. Of the ways he seems to root for us to struggle on, even when he clearly sometimes disagrees with us on things. He clearly knows we’re on the same road and that’s a big deal.

I learned to disagree with him on votes he took and process what it means to do that, as minor a thing as that sounds.

I think it’s a beautiful thing to have lived on the earth, lived in Atlanta, been in the same spaces, even so briefly, and to still live on the earth and be in the movement, with John Lewis.

Update: I don’t often make additions to posts I write, but I have been thinking a lot about these particular articles on Lewis. The above things are moments in my life. Important moments, and shaping moments. But these are articles about his life, his work, his views on his work and the work of others. They’re some of my favorites, and I want to celebrate them.

• Sarah Jaffe interviewed Lewis and asked him about the Dream Defenders in 2013. I was transformed watching them from Georgia as they organized in Florida.
• Angus Johnston wrote about how he had to tone down his March on Washington speech because it was too radical.
• I regularly think about this Democracy Now! interview with him where he talks about how on the bridge at Selma he felt like they were trees planted by the water, even as they thought they would die.

I’ve known Joanna for several years now; her work with both Jesus Radicals and The Iconocast have been deeply formative for me, and I’ve been deeply fortunate to know her a little, and it’s out of that context that I read this book.

The interview falls into several sections: the Southern Freedom Movement, Mennonites, the black community, nonviolence, whiteness, and building community. It concludes with a couple of articles/presentations Harding wrote as appendixes, which I’d never read before and are themselves brilliant.

This is a short book, but there’s a depth in it that I think makes it well worth the read. I wanted to draw out a few things that were especially relevant to me. At one point, Harding is talking about what it meant when, during the Black Power movement, he asked some white Mennonites what it meant to them when they saw an afro on the cover of Ebony magazine. They felt rejected because the woman wasn’t trying to look like white people.

I don’t think we’ve moved on very far from this. Anyway here’s how he reflects on it:

It seems to me that there was a sense in which, in so much of our engagement over these years – especially these post-WWII years – there’s been that larger cultural struggle for very often very good-hearted, well-meaning white persons to assume that when people of color, or in particular African Americans, go into themselves they are rejecting whites.

And there was a great danger – and I think some of it still exists – of, again, well-meaning whites not understanding that there is something that can be, in the best sense, suffocating about that kind of approach – that “We want you so badly, and would you please come to us and let us come to you on our terms.” And once you suggest that there are maybe other better, more healthy terms, that’s frightening because the agenda is no longer set by you. And so much of the fear, I think, that is deeply engrained in white America is the fear of not being able to set the agenda anymore and having to work out some kind of collaboration – real collaboration that would require everybody to make adjustments.

Relatedly, later in the interview they discuss a time Harding asked a class he was teaching what they thought might be “the gifts of whiteness.” Joanna asks him what he said in response, and he offered his own thoughts:

I’m not sure all that’s involved myself, Joanna, but my assumption is that at this point in history, in the light of especially the last five hundred years or so, what whiteness has meant in that context and particularly in this country – what whiteness has meant and done and not done… Those who carry that identity, at this point, have a very special opportunity, for one thing, to recognize the great destruction that has been wrought by those who have carried a banner of white supremacy. But then to figure out how to undo at least some of the damage and how to create something new out of the chaos, and how to then join with others in a way that white foreparents did not know how to do – that all that is part of what it might mean for whiteness to be seen as a gift in the struggle to overcome white domination.

I find a great deal of responsibility in this, but also a great deal of hope. There’s a space between those things where we can live, where I think we’re called to live.

One of the other sections I found powerful was the discussion on nonviolence. Harding remained a lifelong advocate for nonviolence, but he did it with an empathy for revolutionaries and other oppressed people across the world that, often, white pacifists fail to hold. Joanna asks him about the challenge that CORE and others offered to nonviolence during the freedom movement. The whole discussion is powerful, and has a sustained relevance, for me especially read alongside some of Harding’s speeches that are printed in the book’s appendix, but here’s one of the things I appreciated:

For [Martin], the philosophical base was always there and the religious, spiritual base was always there. But a lot of the language and teaching and organizing had to do with simply the strategy of, “How many guns do we have?” and, “What kind of craziness is it to submit all our women and children and grandparents to the results of our pulling out weapons that are no match at all in number and firepower to our oppressors?”

That was always a part of the argument, coming out of a sense of community. And at the same moment these were not either/or. He was – we were – challenging people to transcend the opponents and not to let the oppressors set the conditions for the struggle.

“You’ve got guns. I’ve got the light of freedom. I’m gonna let it shine.”

On a certain level that’s absolutely ridiculous, but on another level it gets to the truth we say we believe in and where the truth ought to be found.

Speaking of the appendices, as I said there are several of Harding’s speeches printed in the back of the book. I had never read any of them and found them all to be incredible. But my favorite was “I hear them… calling (and I know what it means)” from 1972. In it, he reflects on the communities that have shaped his life, and on the concept of calling. The part that most resonated with me was this:

Callings are strange things. I think I’ve heard a fair number in my time, perhaps fewer than I was supposed to – or maybe it was more; I’m not certain now. Sometimes they proved to be nothing more than echoes bouncing off from other lives (lives I sometimes thought were mine) and passed on their way. Others puzzled me, and led me into ways I do not yet understand. Some I understand and fear. A few – perhaps more than I know – I have followed as far as they led; and some are still moving. Still moving, preparing to join themselves to the sounds of the new summons, and I suspect there are yet borders to cross.

I have a lot of complexity and/or baggage around the word calling that in some ways is “processed” and some ways is not. Reading these thoughts resonated with all the ways I feel that word, and it was so very life giving for me to read it that way.

I mostly don’t devote a lot of time to the debate, but in recent years as I’ve been trying to introduce the process of user-centered design to people who are decidedly outside the world of design (ministers, activists, etc) I’ve come to realize that I do have an opinion, and that I think there’s value in referring to people who interact with our stuff as users.

Design strategy

One of the pieces of the design process that I really like doing, and also that I like talking about with others, is design strategy. It is so easily forgotten, overlooked, or ignored, and indeed it is difficult, but I’ve found that designs will fail without it.

When I’m talking to people, I describe one of design strategy’s key insights like this:

Design strategy is how you holistically consider organizational needs, user needs, and the medium in which they interact.

Maybe that doesn’t feel particularly groundbreaking, but most things that are put out into the world indeed don’t consider all three of these things, much less in a holistic way. Design strategy recognizes that users and the organizations interacting with them don’t necessarily have the same needs, but that they need to be considered together.

Calling people users can help you focus on them, and not you

Many organizations are comfortable thinking about the people they serve in distinct ways. But also, they may like to refer to them in terms they feel are less utilitarian than “user.” Businesses may like to think of them as customers. Non-profits may say members. Publications may refer to them as readers.

I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with any of these words (though I think how you feel about some of them depends on your analysis of capitalism), but when it comes to design I think they fail to recognize that people’s interaction with a design, with an organization, is bound to specific parts of their lives.

Organizations tend to center themselves when they build things. This is understandable. They devote their existence to whatever it is they’re creating in the world. They’re probably passionate about it. It probably demands a large portion of emotional capacity that people intimately involved with it have to give. It is understandable that when they talk about whatever they’re creating, they default to talking about themselves.

But this is insufficient. People who interact with organizations are doing that, by definition, as a smaller part of their lives. If they’re reading your publication, for example, they’re doing it for a moment in time. They’ll go do something else after they finish, and they’ll probably not think of you again until they come back. They will likely devote more emotional energy to other parts of their lives.

The amount of time between interactions varies, of course, based on what organizations do. But it’s important to articulate that users are interacting with you – they’re using the thing you put into the world – for specific moments in their lives, for specific reasons, specific goals that are important to them and may not be the same as yours. These things should be important to you. You need to know about these things to design something that works for them.

To center a user is to center their needs, their context, who they are, even when those things don’t overlap with yours.

Calling people users can remind you that they’re different from you

I’ve found that articulating a separation between creators and users is often where many non-designers (activists, for example) balk. This is understandable. It can be uncomfortable for organizations that want to impact the world, to impact humanity, to think of themselves as different from it, in that sense.

I think in general these organizations are already different from the people that interact with them, even if they don’t want to be. For example when it comes to the church – the church depends, in many ways, on a separation between clergy and laypeople. Each has fairly specific roles, specific relationships with the other, specific things that separate them, specific expectations placed on them. This varies across traditions, but it is nearly always there.

When it comes to design, it’s not necessarily role, relationship, external separators, or expectations placed on people that separate creators and users. It is context. It is the realization that as an organization builds something, as it puts something out into the world, it does this with people usually having spent lots of time, lots of energy, lots of knowledge, having done lots of work, in order to put that thing into the world. As I mentioned above, people in organizations put their passion into putting something out there.

This is how you create anything. But doing this work creates a separation from the people who haven’t done it. I want to be clear: this isn’t necessarily (though sometimes it is) a separation of skill, capability, power, or anything outside the confines of a single designed experience. The people who didn’t design it don’t have the knowledge of everything that went into designing it. They don’t know the intentions, they don’t know the goals, they don’t know the process that created it. All they can see is the result, and this by nature separates them from the people who did the work to create the result.

I’m a fan of one of Jared Spool’s favorite statements, “design is the rendering of intent” because all of this is true. Design is how organizations put their intentions into the world, how they enflesh them. Organizations imagine something, and then they take steps to make it real, to make it exist. These steps they take are what create a separate context between them and their users. Users haven’t taken all those steps. They don’t know what went into them; all they know is the result.

How good, how specific, how intentional, how impactful each of these steps is dictates how closely the experience users have will come to the experience the organization wants. But there’s always a distance.

I thought it might be helpful, in the context of the last several days, for me to investigate my journey through, and away from, that fascination into something I think is more faithful to the way of Jesus, while recognizing just how complicated and interconnected it was, as a friend brought up in this tweet. The framework of conservative eschatology is somewhat complicated because it is so interconnected, and it is complicated to move away from it.

Anyway, starting in 1997 a band that was one of my favorites for years spent almost a decade doing a 3-album (technically 4, but the 4th never got officially released) gothic opera about eschatology that took a goth artist’s (though a Christian goth artist) look at all of this, and I found it beautiful and fascinating for a long time, even after I no longer held to any literal view of all of that. I don’t listen to those albums much anymore (though I do listen to their other albums), but reflecting on it, I do think it helped me create some artistic distance from the eschatological framework I had in my mind, and I think that was a good and life-giving thing.

Another thing that I think helped create distance for me was the intimacy of Pentecostal experience. It was simply less interesting to focus my attention on timelines for the end of things than it was to engage the presence of God where I was, and especially where I felt like God was. I have long had a drive – one I think I still have, though maybe tempered a bit – to follow the edges of what God is doing, and try to be there myself. Sometimes this passion results in good things for me, and sometimes it doesn’t, but feeds into more negative qualities I possess. In any case, I notice that this kind of focus on the present of where God is doesn’t have the effect it had on my eschatology for everyone – for some people it seems to intensify their own identification with eschatology, which is interesting – but it did to some extent for me. But maybe only because of the rest of this.

I think perhaps the main thing that began to put all that aside for me was 9/11 and its aftermath. I’ve spoken about this before, here and elsewhere. I was 18, a freshman in college, and the whole series of events beginning on that day turned me into a pacifist, and began the political journey to attempt to turn against empire in all its manifestations that I’ve remained on ever since. While I wasn’t alone in rejecting the official US response – I had professors and friends who shaped me and went together with me in this – the broader context where I was, being white Pentecostalism in the South, took the whole series of events and fully baptized the retaliation, the war, and anything the administration did as it waged it, the more extreme the better (and of course that’s why you shouldn’t be surprised they do this with Trump as well). Once I wrote about a specific event that happened along these lines in 2003, in a public Facebook post.

Realizing that people I believed heard from God in general – some pastors, leaders, people in my church, public figures, friends, and so on – still responded to these events in a way I believed was very far from God gave me a kind of open skepticism I hadn’t previously had. I probably didn’t immediately apply this to eschatology. I certainly don’t remember doing that immediately, but combined with learning how to read the Bible critically and in its various contexts to the extent that academic Pentecostals do (which is more than you might think, depending on what you know about them), engaging with people I knew were faithful outside the circles I was in, and especially combined with a deepening engagement – academic and otherwise – with the life of Jesus and the implications of the cross and resurrection that I hadn’t really had to that extent before, the importance of a literal eschatology dropped for me, and continued dropping.

It dropped further when the dissonance between a literal eschatology that was fine with bombing all of the Middle East into oblivion because it might fit with one interpretation depending on your exegesis, and a literal eschatology that separated the sheep and the goats based on what they did for the poor and marginalized that fit with another depending on your exegesis, helped me realize that the American empire was screwed by one of those eschatologies and that was maybe why it liked the other one so much.

At some point during college and shortly after, I began to come across the world of other eschatologies like those of Barth and Moltmann, the ongoing debates in theology around inclusion and exclusion, and even a deeper engagement with that non evangelical favorite of evangelicals, CS Lewis. I was encouraged during college to read folk like Dallas Willard and their specific engagement with the kingdom of God as it is in our midst and as it forms us, with Bonhoeffer and others like him, and later learned the existence and legacies of Christian universalism that dated back to Origen, and so many other things that came up in that college and surrounding setting. Different readings of Revelation and the prophets, of course, created new spaces for me to exist within. And as the Emergent movement, of course even with all of its weaknesses, became a driving influence on my thinking, it became really important for me to admit that I didn’t know a whole lot about any of this with any certainty, that the plurality and vagueness around the last things was important because it helped us better engage the world around us, and that was a good thing. And grace became ever, ever more important. And to be clear, in the years since then, liberation theology and especially James Cone created utterly new spaces for eschatology in my life and thinking. But this is all mostly before that.

The nation of Israel weaves its way through all of this. White Pentecostals are often like white evangelicals with regard to Israel, though sometimes they are worse, as they can attach their focus on supernatural things to their engagement with the issue. My college, at one point after I graduated, maintained a campus of its own in West Jerusalem. I’ve never been to Israel myself (or out of the States at all), but I’ve known many people who have been there. The people in these circles where I was spent time only in certain regions, engaging with history tours and archeology tours and Bible sight seeing and such; they always came back talking about those kind of things and how powerful they were for them. They would go and get baptized in the Jordan, and they’d find that to be a powerful experience (which maybe it is, I don’t discount that).

But eventually (primarily through Emergent and some of the Anabaptist folk in those circles) I came to know people who went to Israel in other contexts – to engage with Palestinians in solidarity, with Israeli peace workers, with nonviolent resisters. I read people like Jim Wallis who spoke about the occupation for what it was. I read people who went on trips for these reasons instead. The people I knew who went there in this kind of context came back with utterly different stories, and that became much more compelling and real to me, at the same time that the world in general kept getting bigger, as I was able to see the struggles people had that weren’t mine.

But as I think is obvious here, the reason those things – peace work, nonviolence as resistance, and from there a gradual and powerful realization that the two sides of Israel and Palestine are not standing on equal footing fighting with each other, and thus the solution is never a balanced “both sides need to come together” – became compelling is that my eschatology and its relationship to my spirituality, and especially my politics, in a broad sense, evolved over time, as I’ve said here.

I think to understand how evangelicals and Pentecostals view Israel, the Middle East, Muslims, global politics, global justice, and so on (and the two groups don’t necessarily view them the same way, though they often do) one has to understand that eschatology. One has to understand how that eschatology applies to Jewish folk (many of these Christians anticipate mass conversion and/or mass persecution of Jewish folk as a sign, and/or result, of the end times). One has to understand how it relates to Muslims (often, they are just viewed as intruders in the way of a literal third temple being built in Jerusalem). This issue and all its related issues are places where eschatology, spirituality, other parts of theology, and politics mesh in really tight ways.

And finally, if evangelicals or Pentecostals are to recognize, and come out of, the toxic soup that all of this particular meshing creates for everyone, especially for marginalized people, it’s much more complicated than getting them to care about Palestinians (which in itself is complicated because of the often inherent racism). If they let themselves care about Palestinians, they will begin to see the holes especially in things like their eschatology, and that is very dangerous for them. I think for some people this happens. I do think seeing the Other as human and valuable, and especially if we can see them as marginalized and oppressed in a way that somehow involves us, is always a possible disruption that can happen for anyone, and when it does it is powerful and it reaches into everything. This has happened for me on other issues. But by that same logic, though it is equally difficult, if they can let themselves see the holes in their eschatology (and the more specific and literal any eschatology is, the more holes I believe it has), they can start to care about Palestinians and Palestinian oppression (and to be clear they can also start to care about Jewish folk as more than targets of evangelism).

I do think it can be important to recognize steps like the ones I remember going through in this process, not because they’re the same steps anyone else would necessarily go through, but because they illustrate how complicated and interrelated this stuff is. But at the same time, I hope they illustrate how one can follow the path that faith leads them on and go through steps like these. I didn’t follow these steps because I thought they were unfaithful to God, I followed them precisely because I thought, and think, they were faithful.

First, I am against guns. I want that to be an unequivocal statement. I’m against the weapons of violence, whether they are held by the State or by others, and it is a core value of my theology and my politics to look toward that Kingdom of God where such weapons are made into tools of farming and food, whether they are pistols, AR-15s, drones, or bombs.

I’m also against the NRA. I believe it is a horrible organization, a death cult, a group with blood on its hands. I believe its supporters have given themselves over to all kinds of idolatry and evil, that they need to be resisted and the politicians that support them need to be resisted.

I support the recognition that gun violence, wherever it occurs and whoever it involves, is always political. It has political causes and it will have political solutions.

Those things aren’t the complicated parts, for me.

Policy

What is complicated

I’m much more skeptical of generic gun control policy than I used to be. I have come to believe that unless it is intentionally anti-racist, gun control will be racist. It will rely on criminalization and surveillance of communities of color. Unless it is intentionally anti-xenophobic, it will be xenophobic. It will rely on no-fly lists that just happen to be full of Muslims.

Unless it is intentionally based on defending victims of domestic violence it will harm women, and especially Black women, and especially women who feel they have no option but to defend themselves from domestic violence because the State isn’t taking care of them. Unless it is explicitly pro-trans it will ignore trans people who are murdered. Unless it is explicitly pro-Native, it will ignore the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. And so on. Not to mention the explicit violence of the police, of prisons, of the military. So my default position toward gun control proposals these days is a bit of skepticism.

But beyond that, I seek to be open, to listen to people who advocate for specific policies, try to evaluate the policies in light of things above, and it does cause complexity for me. I’ve listened to the Parkland students, to their school newspaper, to the Broward County youth who organize with Dream Defenders, I’ve read the main March For Our Lives platform. I realize that there’s a range of perspectives that advocates have, even within the Parkland school itself.

For example, the Parkland school newspaper has two policies on its list that I think are toxic (see the link for details on what they mean by these policies):

• Change privacy laws to allow mental healthcare providers to communicate with law enforcement
• Increase funding for school security

But the march itself does not have these policies, and some students I’ve heard have endorsed additional policies to these. Other students have come alongside the Dream Defenders, who rose up in Florida after Trayvon Martin was killed, and they have endorsed other policies. Chicago students have their own analysis, and it’s quite radical. It’s not a problem for me that this movement has folks with different perspectives, but it does make the march complicated, especially knowing who will have their perspectives amplified.

What can be done

There’s of course nothing I can do in an immediate sense about the platform, either of the march or of the Parkland students. But I think what I can do is point people I know, whether they are students or people energized by students, to move the analysis they have. I can point them to organizers, to thinkers, to resources, that can help them engage with people of color, with radical politics, with radical policies around gun violence. I can point them to people who have thought through the implications of gun control policies, and how they can themselves be weaponized against already marginalized and criminalized people. It’s not easy to see this, when our whole lives have been built around not seeing it.

I think there may be students, especially, who will be radicalized by this moment, as many people in my generation were by 9/11 and the Iraq War. I didn’t have a great analysis back then, I just knew I didn’t want a war as a response to a terrorist attack. I think many people now, especially if our political leaders continue to refuse to act, and especially if people begin or continue to listen to organizers like the Dream Defenders, can come to a different analysis of gun violence and what can be done about it.

The response

What is complicated

More than anything these students have or haven’t done, the response to this moment from everyone else is complicated. On one hand, I like that people are showing up. That a mass of people who have probably never been in the streets marched yesterday. That they took a tool – direct action – which is used by people who have been failed by all the systems that exist, and they acted. That is a good thing.

Many of the marches around the country, both yesterday and the day of the school walkouts, had radical speakers. Many had radical, young Black organizers as speakers and some had them as leaders. I’m thankful for this.

But the overwhelmingly positive response to this march, to this moment, has been striking. A few things I’ve been struck by:

• The New England Patriots, owned by a man who is a Trump supporter, sent a plane to take the Parkland students to DC for the march.
• The Guardian US literally gave editorial control of its coverage of the march to the aforementioned Parkland student newspaper. They called it a takeover!
• There’s a countless, absurd number of adults who have been saying some variation of how the kids will save us. (Just check Twitter and Facebook for that one, I guess)
• The march received hundreds of thousands of dollars from celebrities like Oprah, and the unequivocal endorsement of people like Barack Obama. (See this Teen Vogue piece, which mentions other issues as well).
• The articles about all the free stuff companies were making available to the attendees of the march.
• The overall acceptance of protest as an acceptable way to engage, and the willingness to cover it immediately and positively.
• Nobody has been called a thug.

None of these things happen at Black Lives Matter marches. It’s not even necessary, at this point, to recount the ways this does not happen.

What can be done

I think this stuff can only be called out. It brings the overt racism out where people can see it. Some of the Parkland students have, themselves, called this out and I believe it will be essential as we move on.

Many people have done great work to tie this issue of school shootings to school funding, to domestic violence, to police and military violence, to all the issues I mentioned earlier and more that I haven’t remembered, and this must continue. Gun violence must not be allowed to be an issue that is isolated to largely white schools and the students that attend them.

The church

What is complicated

I mostly move in mainline church circles these days. It isn’t controversial for mainline churches to favor gun control. Many churches, including countless Minnesota churches, marched yesterday when they have never showed up for Black lives, when they didn’t show up for Jamar Clark, or Philando Castile, or even Justine Damond.

Many churches here didn’t show up for Native organizers in Minneapolis to support water protectors, have never shown up for the annual missing and murdered indigenous women march, and have not been willing to see their complicity in any of these things. But they’re willing to show up for gun reform because it might be their kids, in their schools, and because it doesn’t cost them much. Most of their members won’t be offended.

Further, many churches and people of faith have talked about this march, this moment, as the time when the church recovers its legacy of spiritual protest. As if it lost this legacy at some time in the past, maybe after the imagined masses of white Christians showed up to march with Martin Luther King, or maybe just because it forgets that the Black church has always tied together protest and prayer, spirituality and activism.

What can be done

Of course people of faith must continue to call this out, as many have. When we protest as white people of faith, as part of our faith, we step into a tradition that the vast, vast, VAST majority of us have always opposed in this country, even as some of us have found the Spirit leading us there and found the Kingdom of God manifesting when we got there. But that tradition didn’t die when King did, and it certainly didn’t revive for the first time in 2018.

More specifically, I believe there’s a lot of room for churches and people of faith to engage in liturgical protest around this issue. As an example, we have a local organization, The Center for Prophetic Imagination.

This group is organizing an outdoor Tenebrae service, a Maundy Thursday tradition in which candles are gradually extinguished leading to Good Friday. For this version, folks will meet outside in a park that is close to several churches, and will remember Jesus’ public execution by the State, and at the same time will remember Jamar Clark, Philando Castile, Justine Damond, and the 28 children killed last year by police.

This service will point toward police abolitionist organizations, especially our local MPD150, that believe a world without state-sponsored gun violence is possible, indeed that it is connected to a world without gun violence like that which we see in schools.

I wanted to read this for several reasons. First, Jonathan has been an influence on me for many years. In the early days of the Iraq War he was doing resistance and solidarity work there that I followed from afar, then he returned to the States and became a leader in the New Monastic movement. I was never directly a part of New Monasticism, but as part of the broader emerging church movement its proponents deeply influenced my own theology and spirituality, and have continued to do so. Jonathan, specifically, had powerful stories of submitting to and learning from the black church. I’ve read and been influenced by many of his books over the years, sometimes using the daily prayer book to which he contributed, and by meeting him several years ago at Cornerstone Festival. In recent years Jonathan has continued to follow the lead of black freedom activists such as William Barber II, as I’ve tried to do as well.

The other reasons relate directly to my own story. Jonathan was raised in the Southern Baptist church in rural North Carolina. I was also raised there. I left the denomination as a young teenager, and at this point I don’t live in the South, but I don’t discount how deeply the history of white Christianity, and Southern Baptists specifically, in North Carolina have been passed down to me and have shaped me. I don’t pretend that I’m not also a man torn in two, in many of the same ways Jonathan recounts.

He says:

I saw in a way I’d missed before how the diagnosis of a divided faith is the beginning of the good news Jesus offered to nearly every religious person he met during his time here on earth.

In the book, Jonathan does what I think is a great job tracing how this divide came to exist in American Christianity, and specifically in the South. More importantly, he uses this to explain why the overwhelming majority (81%) of white evangelicals supported Donald Trump, and why this wasn’t a surprise to people of color, especially black people, and those who were willing to listen to them. He explains how the gospel we’ve inherited had to make such a distinction between bodies and souls, pretending Jesus doesn’t care about black bodies so they could be enslaved, segregated and lynched, mass incarcerated, and so the white ones could be defended with violence and politics ever since, even as our own souls were disconnected from our bodies, from our ability to feel and humanize and change.

None of these things are hidden from people who want to see them, but most of us white Southerners like to pretend we’ve moved on from the theologies that fed those things; we like to ignore that the work to get past that has not been done in our churches, in our hearts.

In one place he says this:

Because even though slavery ended in 1865, most white Christians went on reading the Bible and seeing the world around them exactly as they had before.

And in another, this:

White supremacy doesn’t persist because racists scheme to privilege some while discriminating against others. It continues because, despite the fact that almost everyone believes it is wrong to be racist, the daily habits of our bodily existence continue to repeat the patterns of white supremacy at home, at school, at work, and at church. White supremacy is written into our racial habits. In short, it looks like normal life.

While tracing these histories, he spends time examining them through the message of Jesus, and through the years of black led freedom movements that have always been there to resist white supremacy.

There is nowhere you can go to find the pure, peaceable, and unadulterated Christianity of Christ. The slaveholder religion has infected us all. But that is not to say that all forms of faith are created equal.

Toward the end of the book, there’s a wonderful section that looks at the practices of monasticism that Jonathan and others integrated into the new monastic movement as a way white people can turn away from whiteness toward the freedom Jesus offers. He looks what these practices can look like: listening to black people who lead this movement instead of relying on ourselves to solve the problems, or on the false notion that proximity to people can free us from racism; staying put to grapple with our fragility, to lament, and in general to give ourselves to the work; and constantly taking steps away from white supremacy.

I found the book to be a great way of articulating what has caused the situation in which white Christians find ourselves, how we can be honest about what we’ve inherited in our faith, but also how we can use what our faith offers us, both in systemic and individual ways.