The cross and radical activism

The idea that Jesus chose, out of his own free will, to go to the cross is a favorite among abusive church leaders. What better way to get people to submit to you than to compare the God they worship to a lamb led to slaughter? Over and over and over I’ve heard Jesus’ submissiveness unto death used as an excuse to abuse or to silence those who wish to call out abuse.

I want to propose a different perspective and I want to start with a woman named Alice Paul.

In 1917, women in the United States were not allowed to vote. Alice Paul and a group of other women wanted to change that. These women boldly picketed the White House with banners that called out the hypocrisy of the man in the White House–Woodrow Wilson–who was so quick to send troops overseas to Germany to fight for “liberty,” but who was ignoring the fact that women here were not even treated as real citizens (sound familiar?).

Though their peaceful protests broke no laws, these women were arrested and sent to prison under the false charge of “obstructing traffic.”

Incarcerated without reason in the “land of the free” (a land in which she–as a woman–already lacked the rights of a full citizen), Alice Paul asserted her autonomy and her humanity by fighting back the only way she could.

A photograph of Alice Paul (c1920 by Harris & Ewing)

She stopped eating. 

Alice Paul went on a hunger strike as a way to protest the unjust conditions she was facing.

The 2004 movie, Iron Jawed Angels, depicts this true story (with some obvious dramatizations of course). During one scene, Alice Paul (played by Hillary Swank) is sent to a psychiatric ward because she refuses to eat. The doctor examining her asks about her hunger strike.

Alice: The hunger strike was a tradition in old Ireland. You starve yourself on someone’s doorstep until restitution is made and justice is done.

Doctor: Doesn’t sound like a very effective method.

Alice: A stinking corpse on your doorstep? What would the neighbors say?

We live in a world of violence, of poverty, of rape and war, of oppression and abuse.

We also live in a world of willful ignorance and pride.

People are starving and dying  at our doorsteps (metaphorically speaking), but we’re great at ignoring it. Sometimes it takes radical activism (like some literally dying on our doorstep) to change things.

Alice Paul offered up her life in order to fight injustice. Though she survived the hunger strikes (not every hunger striker does), she still willingly put her body at risk. She was willing to starve on the doorstep of injustice. In doing so, she put the United States to shame, uncovering its disturbing hypocrisy (a hypocrisy that continues today).

She gave herself up willingly.

Was this an act of passive submission?

What do you think?

Those who use the story of the cross to convince oppressed or abused people to stop fighting for justice are missing the point of radical activism. Sometimes, in the face of unrelenting oppression, brave, radical activists stand up and take control of their lives and bodies…

…by giving them up.

When Alice Paul, and Hana Shalabi, and other hunger-strikers stopped eating, it was not an act of submissive, obedient defeat.

 It was a powerful assertion of bodily autonomy in a world that tried to deny their humanity.

 It was a bold act of love by people who were willing to lay down their lives for their friends, their freedom, and their people.

It was a stance that forced oppressors to open their eyes, uncover their ears, and stare into emaciated face of the injustice they had caused. 

The cross of Jesus doesn’t mean that we suffer in silence while we are abused and oppressed. It does not mean that we “turn the other cheek” when we notice others being abused and oppressed. As I wrote earlier this week, we must start to see the cross is a middle finger to the world’s oppressive power structures.

God, as symbolized in the crucifixion, is with the victims who are oppressed. God is also with those who stand up and fight oppression.

The cross is a symbol of both the evils of oppression and of the radical activism that opposes oppression.

We should not have to live in a world where the only way people can gain power and assert their humanity is through hunger strikes. We should not have to live in a world where people are detained in prisons without charge. We should not have to live in a world where people are put to death by crucifixion or lethal injection.

Jesus’ radical activism points us to a new world.

Anyone who tells you that the cross means you have to stop fighting oppression is missing the point.

Crucifixion and Liberation

[Trigger warnings for abuse, rape, and violence against oppressed groups]

Image by Aaron Douglas

I recently wrote a blog post for Rachel Held Evans in which I talked about how many popular images of God are abusive. Someone left this comment:

I read something once -and it has troubled me since – that God requiring Jesus to die on the cross ‘for our sins’ was the equivalent of child abuse. I would love to hear some opinions on this matter.

A few commenters jumped in to say that since Jesus IS God, it was a personal choice and therefore not abusive and, well you know the rest. I’m sure you’ve heard justifications for this theology many times. My opinion on the matter was that penal substitution is still a terrifying theology about an abusive God.

I’m guessing many people that I know (including some of my readers) would be shocked to hear that I do not believe that God had to die because humans were just so evil and God was just so wrathful and required a blood sacrifice. I even know many self-identified progressive Christians who would probably assume that I wasn’t really a Christian if I told them I didn’t believe that Jesus died in the place of wicked human beings in order to save us from our sins.

I take a more, shall we say, literalist viewpoint.

God didn’t kill Jesus. People in power killed Jesus. 

My friend David Henson recently said on Facebook:

If atonement is literally at-one-ment — being at one with — perhaps it is God that experiences atonement in the crucifixion by being with us and being at one with us in death.

I would take this even further. Christ didn’t experience just any death, but a death reserved for those who challenged the oppressive power structures of the time. Jesus’ teachings of liberation threatened Rome. But even more so, they threatened the religious leaders of the day: spiritually abusive leaders who had turned their backs on Judaism’s message of justice and mercy and had twisted the teachings to oppress others.

Jesus stood with the oppressed. He healed on the Sabbath. He advocated for the poor. He spoke out against the abuse of women.

And those in power killed him for it. They silenced his message (but it couldn’t quite stay dead, could it?).

Maybe this is the real message of the cross. That the God of all creation loved the oppressed enough to become one with them, even in death–the ultimate tool of oppressive forces. 

I think of an article about the book The Cross and the Lynching Tree, by liberation theologian James Cone. Cone makes a comparison between the crucifixion of Jesus and the lynching of black people throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

The cross and the lynching tree interpret each other. Both were public spectacles, shameful events, instruments of punishment reserved for the most despised people in the society. Any genuine theology and any genuine preaching of the Christian gospel must be measured against the test of the scandal of the cross and the lynching tree. Hengel asserts: “Jesus did not die a gentle death like Socrates, with his cup of hemlock. . . . Rather, he died like a [lynched black victim] or a common [black] criminal in torment, on the tree of shame.”

I don’t think many white people like this comparison (as a white person myself, it is challenging and sobering). So white theologians shy away from this comparison, as obvious as it seems. Instead, they embrace a spiritualized version of Christianity in which Jesus is nothing but a sacrifice, meant to save us from some abstract idea of inherited sin. Where Christ’s life of healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, raising the dead, touching the untouchables had nothing to do with his death. Where the promise of liberation and justice  given by the Old Testament prophets to the oppressed in Israel is not considered part of the gospel. Where the only real result of Christ’s death and resurrection is that we are free from our sins (though we still sin), and go to heaven when we die (maybe–if we ask nicely).

If we did embrace the similarities between the cross and the lynching tree, it would open the doors to comparing Christ’s unjust death with the many other injustices that go on in our society.

The wife who is raped and beaten by her husband, and then told by her church to stay with him.

One of the transgender people that are murdered every three days. 

The Muslim people who are bombed by the United States just because some people who looked like them happened to be terrorists.

The people in poverty who starve to death because they cannot afford food, or die slowly from illness because they cannot afford healthcare.

The woman on the street corner in Detroit who was forced into prostitution at age 11.

The young black man who is shot in the back of the head because he looked threatening.

The young woman from Steubenville who was gang-raped and then shamed for it.

The gay, black mayoral candidate who was beaten, set on fire, and killed in Mississippi.

Christ is crucified again and again as injustice goes on and on. 

But the cross means, to the oppressed, that God is on our side.

As James Cone says,

The cross is the most empowering symbol of God’s loving solidarity with the “least of these,” the unwanted in society who suffer daily from great injustices. Christians must face the cross as the terrible tragedy it was and discover in it, through faith and repentance, the liberating joy of eternal salvation.

The cross can empower those who are suffering. It can give us hope. But as James Cone continues,

But we cannot find liberating joy in the cross by spiritualizing it, by taking away its message of justice in the midst of powerlessness, suffering, and death. The cross, as a locus of divine revelation, is not good news for the powerful, for those who are comfortable with the way things are, or for anyone whose understanding of religion is aligned with power.

The cross cannot just mean that we are “saved from sin,” and “going to heaven.” Our speaking about the cross cannot just sound like those cliched platitudes that Christians often tell those who are hurting. The cross that Jesus reclaimed from the Roman Empire has fallen back into the hands of oppressors, becoming a tool of white supremacy, of patriarchy, of heterosexism and transphobia, of the military and prison industrial complex, of those who wage warfare on the poor. 

But I want to reclaim it, like Christ did.

If we are to find liberation in the crucifixion, then the cross must stand as a middle finger to oppressive power structures.

The cross of Jesus reveals the ugly truth behind oppressive power, and then the cross mocks that power through the resurrection.

The cross of Jesus calls those of us who are oppressors (most of us–myself included–are oppressed in some contexts and oppressors in others) to humility, repentance, and a new way of living.

The cross of Jesus tells the oppressed–in a world that tries to convince us that we are not even human–that we are not only made in God’s image, but that God came to earth to be made in ours.

The cross of Jesus tells the oppressed that we can take up our crosses and our protest signs and join together, armed with the power of love, to defeat the powers that rape, abuse, and murder us.

The cross of Jesus tells us that they can kill our bodies, but that doesn’t mean they win. 

On equality, humility, and privilege: A response to Matt Appling

When I first began blogging, one blogger that I both read and respected was Matt Appling of “The Church of No People.” He was even on my blogroll for quite awhile. I start with this because I want you to know that I once thought like he did. I was raised to think like he did, and I’m sure he was raised in a similar way.

I want you to understand, before I write this response, that I do so with as much understanding and empathy as I can sum up, because I’ve “been there.”

But I want to write this response because all the understanding and empathy in the world cannot neutralize the harmful effects of the teachings that it seems both Appling and I have received our whole lives. I want to write this response because I’ve been hurt badly by these teachings. I’ve probably hurt others with these teachings.

What teachings am I talking about here?

The idea that Christ-like humility means that it is wrong to stand up for our rights.

Matt Appling, in particular, takes up issue with bloggers who fight for equality. In his first post on the subject, he describes those who blog about equality as a “nearly deafening cacophony of noise and disparate voices.”

He continues (emphasis mine):

Every day, someone is marching on, demanding equality where some perceived inequality exists: between the sexes, the races, the classes, whomever.  And the people who feel slighted or abused cheer them on, anxious to finally feel that their injustice has been righted.

He then explains why he does not stand with their struggle for equality. He doesn’t believe in it. Why? He quotes six “reasons,” which are really just out-of-context Bible verses having to do with humility, putting others first, and taking up a cross to follow Christ.

In a follow-up post, he claims that he was talking about himself–as a privileged white male–yet his calling out other bloggers and his statements about “perceived inequality” and those who “feel slighted or abused” are never mentioned. He continues to assume that legitimate struggles like classism (he mentions the “1%”) are just silly complaints, comparable to those complaining about “soda sizes in New York.” He also goes on to pull the whole “people over THERE have it so much worse” line, saying (emphasis his):

But complaining about your own rights being infringed on while millions of people survive in slums under tyrannical dictators, that is what strikes me as coming from an egregiously oblivious position of “privilege.”

I want to take a moment to talk about where Matt Appling gets the concepts of equality, humility, and privilege wrong.

Matt Appling, by admission, is a “middle-class, white, American male.” He believes that no one is oppressing him or abusing him. That’s good for him!

So when he says he doesn’t believe in equality? He says it as someone who apparently has no understanding of what it’s like to not feel fully human, not feel fully a part of society. 

Perhaps his angle was meant to mean “I don’t need to fight for equality for myself because I am already treated as human,” which would be fine. However, he makes claims about groups that he doesn’t understand when he talks about those who complain about the 1%, about those who “perceive” racism/sexism/classism or “feel” abused.

That’s the problem with privilege. When one is privileged, one assumes that he/she is the norm. One assumes that everyone else has the same experiences as him/her. 

One assumes, as Matt does in an older post, that “There is no war on…blacks…or women…at least in America…just a lot of stupidity.”

In this post and in his two more recent posts, he not only dismisses the idea of equality for himself, but appears to do the same for black people and women. For those involved in class struggle. For those who “feel” hurt and abused. He chooses to ignore the readily available statistics and stories of the rapes, beatings, murders, and abuses that happen to oppressed groups on a daily basis…yes, in America. Because there is no war on him, because he does not see, understand, or experience war, he claims that there is no war.

He claims being Christ-like. He calls this humility.

But this is not humility. It is the epitome of pride. 

I’ve written on humility before.

I’ve written about how this idea that humility means we stop fighting for our rights turns the concept of humility into a “twisted tool of oppression.” I don’t believe Matt Appling means to be an oppressive person. I don’t believe he really wants to bring women down or hurt people of color. But he is buying into ideas about humility that are being fed to him and to the rest of the church by a culture of domination and oppression. 

Ideas that are used to neutralize struggles for liberation. To silence victims and survivors. To protect the powerful who already have all the rights they could ever need.

Regardless of Matt Appling’s intentions, his words have consequences. His vision for humility dismisses the very real, often life threatening oppression that people face as “just a lot of stupidity.”

I propose a different kind of humility.

One that means listening to the experiences of those who say they have been hurt by racism, sexism, and classism, instead of assuming that their oppression is only “perceived.”

One that means believing abuse survivors instead of assuming that they only “feel” abused or want to “put themselves in the role of the victim.”

One that means considering the fact that just because I have not been oppressed in ____ way doesn’t mean that this oppression is not happening.

I want a humility that affirms the struggles of those who fight for justice rather than trying to shut them down with Bible verses.

I want a humility that inspires privileged people to join those who are less privileged in their fight for justice, instead of one that inspires privileged people to say “I don’t believe in equality.”

We need to stop eating this harmful, oppressive version of “humble pie.” We can do better. 

On being a female body at a Christian college

[I wrote recently about learning to love my body for Lent. Part of that loving so far has involved some deep contemplation about where the fear and hatred come from. And I’ve realized something.

Part of my body hatred, and by extension part of my self hatred, comes from the fact that oppressive people have used my female body  to justifying oppressing me.

I hate my body and myself because, deep down, I blame my body (and thus myself) for the ways in which I’ve been hurt by others.

Two examples stick out clearly in my mind. Both from experiences at my former Christian school, Grace College.

It was the first week of my freshman year. We had a meeting for everyone in our all-women dorm to go over the basic rules. Don’t burn popcorn and set off the smoke alarm. Be in before curfew. No sex, drugs, or rock and roll (okay, maybe rock and roll was okay. Just not during quiet hours!).

During this meeting, the husband of our Residence Director came in to talk to us ladies about, you guessed it!

Modesty.

He started out by telling us to never let any Christian man blame us for their sins. Then he proceed to…well, blame us for his sins.

He told us of his own porn addiction and of the porn addictions that other men on campus have talked to them about. He was blunt, and even made subconscious hand motions while talking about masturbation.

And what was his point?

“When you wear those tight jeans, your brothers in Christ go home and masturbate to you. Your selfish clothing choices make it hard for your brothers in Christ to break their addictions. Thanks to God’s grace, it’s been weeks since I’ve looked at porn, but it hasn’t been months. And the way women on this campus dress doesn’t help.”

I talked to many women who were present in that meeting who expressed that they left feeling ashamed and dirty. I know that every time I passed that man on campus from that day on, I wanted to turn invisible. I’d tug my skirt down and pull my jacket over my chest, and I’d resist the urge to get sick to my stomach thinking about him masturbating to me, and it being my fault.

My body was shameful. It was dirty. It could ruin lives and marriages just by existing.

This is the first thing I learned about my body at Grace College.

It was the second semester of my freshman year. We were required to attend chapel three times a week, so there I was. This week we were learning about relationships between men and women, how they were often broken in this world, and how we could fix them.

We did this by learning our roles.

And we could learn our roles, not just from Scripture, but from our bodies.

The speaker told the Biblical story of King Joash (and I’m still to this day not sure why). “Joash drilled a hole into the box,” he said. “Joash femaled the box.”

According to this man and his strange desire to associate being female with having a hole drilled into you, the reason men and women can’t get along is because men and women (mostly women) are rebelling against the nature revealed to us by our bodies.

“Men are supposed to give the life-bearing seed of the gospel to all the world,” he said, while making disturbing hand motions from his crotch to the audience. “Women are supposed to receive that seed.”

The moral was that female people were trying too hard to give when they were made to receive and weren’t letting male people to what they were meant to do (which is apparently to spiritually ejaculate on everyone).

Female bodies were not built to give life (apparently child birth doesn’t count and we’re just the incubators) but to be fulfilled in receiving life.

It wasn’t patriarchy holding me back, according to this man. It was my body. This is why I could not be a pastor, or a spiritual leader in my family. This is why I could not speak my mind too loudly or be too bold. Because I had a vagina, and vaginas are not for giving.

But I fell for it for years and years. I saw myself as stuck in this body with its sinful breasts and its useless vagina.

I saw my body as a prison.

And in seeing my body as a prison, I blamed myself.

Oppression is tied to bodies. It often happens in bodies and to bodies. It often comes from other bodies. And oppressive people use the bodies of the oppressed to excuse it.

Loving my body for Lent means recognizing that it is not my body’s fault when I am treated as “less than.” Loving my body means recognizing that others have used it to tell me I am “less than.” Loving my body means recognizing that those people were lying to me about my body.

Loving my body means affirming that they don’t decide what my body means. They don’t decide what I mean.

[Note: Though I learned some harmful things at Grace College, it was also at Grace College where I began the process of loving my body. That may be a post for another day]

 

On privilege and taking the stairs

Many people think we shouldn’t talk about privilege. Usually, those people who say we shouldn’t talk about privilege have quite a lot of it. But (speaking even as a relatively privileged person), speaking about privilege is important, and I think the concept of privilege is often misunderstood.

So, I want to share an illustration that helped me understand the concept a little better. I’ve based this illustration off of an example of privilege given by one of my Women’s Studies professors–Ami Harbin–during a lecture.

Image via Zorger.com

Imagine you’re an able-bodied person. You are in great shape and everyday you take the stairs to your second story apartment. It’s good exercise, after all. You don’t even think twice about taking the elevator.

Then, one day you invite a friend over to your apartment after work. As you and your friend cross the apartment complex’s lobby, you go straight to the stairs like you always do.

But what if your friend is not as able-bodied as you are? What if she has a disability that prevents her from climbing the stairs? What you do without thinking twice puts your friend in an awkward position.

She might feel forced to reveal personal medical information to you that she might not be comfortable discussing. She might have to worry that you will accuse her of overreacting or of faking her disability. She might be afraid that if you suggests taking the elevator you will see her as lazy. She might consider taking the stairs anyway to avoid any embarrassment and risk dealing with pain or injury.

All the while, all you are thinking is that the stairs are such good exercise.

Sometimes the privileged purposefully and deliberately hurt and step on the toes of the less privileged. But usually? We’re just going about our lives, doing what we always do.

It’s not wrong to live in a second story apartment. It’s not wrong to take the stairs because they’re good exercise. Nor is it wrong to be lucky enough to have been born with a body that can take the stairs.

But it’s privilege that lets an able-bodied person walk toward those stairs without a thought of what might be going through his/her friend’s head.

This illustration can be applied to many forms of privilege. It can be literally applied. In fact, it is based on a true story. But there are many “stairs” that we privileged people take that may be good for us, but that cannot get everyone where they need to go, either because they are not opened to everyone or because not everyone has the ability to take them.

Privilege often builds an invisible wall between the more privileged and the less privileged. When we are the privileged ones, we don’t always notice it.

We take the stairs without thinking twice, we hold hands in public with our significant other of the opposite sex, we use the bathroom that matches our gender.

But the less privileged notice these invisible walls because they are constantly running into them.

Unless we have the self-awareness to pay attention to the invisible walls that separate us from those who do not have as much privilege as we do, we risk leaving our friends behind or putting them in uncomfortable situations–even hurting them.

Some have told me that calling out privilege is divisive. I ask you, if your friend asked you to take the elevator with her and you refused because you wanted to take the stairs, who is being divisive?

It’s not calling out privilege that divides us. It is privilege that divides us. And it is refusing to acknowledge the invisible walls of privilege that keeps us divided. It is the elevators that we refuse to take. It is the words we don’t listen to and the things we don’t notice that keep us divided.

I write this to myself as an educated, able-bodied, white, cis, Christian person who’s engaged to a man. I write this to my friends as a woman. Let’s all be self-aware, acknowledge our privilege, and listen. This will bring unity, not division.

It won’t be their world anymore: Universalism with boudaries

I really don’t know what I believe about the afterlife.

Ever since I gave up the idea of an eternal hell, I’ve found myself able to embrace many different theories with some comfort.

As a Christian, though, I find particular comfort in the idea of a future Kingdom of God.

I am inspired and energized by the hope against hope that what’s next is some kind of Kingdom ruled by a Love and by a just God.

However, this idea has a lot of baggage surrounding it–mainly the idea that anyone who isn’t a Christian doesn’t get to take part.

I don’t buy that. That’s one reason why I’m a Universalist.

But when I talk about my faith like this, people often want to know, do I think everyone, even oppressive people will be a part of the Kingdom, since I don’t think it’s going to be just Christians?

If you know me or have read my writing, you know that I’m passionately against oppression, so I thought I should address this.

I’m going to start by saying that I believe in justice. I’m going to continue by stating the fact that rejecting the idea that only Christians can get into heaven does not mean that I am rejecting justice.

A world where a Muslim woman cannot take part in the Kingdom of the God that she also worships because she doesn’t believe that Jesus was God is hardly just. A world where an atheist that believes in love is rejected from a Kingdom of love is hardly just.

And a world filled those who have dedicated their lives to oppressing others, but happen to believe in Jesus could hardly be a just one.

The idea that Christians “go to heaven” and non-Christians do not is not even just in the first place. Not even close.

So we have a hypothetical afterlife. You don’t have to be a Christian to get in. This afterlife is one where people are free from oppression and sadness, where love is what reigns.

What about the oppressors?

Obviously, anything I say about the afterlife is speculation, but based on my knowledge of the Bible and my desire for justice, here are some thoughts as to how a Universalist view point can fit with a belief in justice.

When I think about the Kingdom of God, based on the glimpses of it that I see in the Old and New Testaments, I see a world free from oppression, from poverty, and from war.

Swords are turned into plowshares, tanks into tractors, assault weapons into wind turbines.

The mighty are brought down from their thrones and the powerless are exalted, and they meet somewhere in the middle on a plain called equality.

Can those who, in this life were oppressors enter this kingdom?

I’d say yes.

But…

It won’t be their world anymore.

This will be a world where Love has already won. This will be the world beyond the barricades.

This will not be the world that tells rape victims that they should have been dressed more modestly. This will not be the world that tells LGBT people that who they are is a sin. This will not be world of Gulags and gaschambers and lynching trees. This will not be the world of genocide and force sterilizations. This will not be the world where people protest the firing of football coaches that cover up the rapes of children. This will not be the world where pastors can say that women should stay with abusive spouses for a season. This will not be the world where people care more about the feelings of abusers than about the safety of survivors.

This will not be that world.

This new world will belong the peacemakers, the poor, the persecuted, the hungry.

This will be their world.

I don’t like the idea that the oppressed go to heaven and the oppressors go to hell (or are annihilated or whatever) because most people fall into both categories. We are hurt by the world and we help the world hurt others.

I believe that we will all get a second chance–both at freedom from oppression and at freedom from our sin of being an oppressor–in this new world.

But there will be boundaries.

There will be no rape culture. There will be no excuses for abusers. There will be no injustice. Those who wish to abuse won’t get the chance and they won’t find protection in this new world.

Those who are still in love with an unjust world might exist in the Kingdom of God, but they will not find heaven there.

I don’t know what will happen to these people, but I definitely don’t think they have to be eternally tortured or destroyed in order for justice to happen. I think we need to get beyond an idea of justice that requires “redemptive violence,” though I’m still not sure what this would look like.

Obviously no one can know what actually happens after death and this is all speculation, but this vision for the future gives me hope. This is how I reconcile Universalism and justice, and this is a world that I work toward even now.

A quote for today…

I’m having trouble today, writing words. When I try to set the words free through my fingers, fear reigns them back in. So, today, I’ll share the words of Audre Lorde until I can gather my own.

Your silences will not protect you…What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language.

Next time, ask: What’s the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it’s personal. And the world won’t end.

And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have discovered your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.

 

Photograph: Robert Alexander/Getty Images/via The Guardian

 

Their caricatures of me aren’t me.

Language is powerful, and so, when we find ourselves with enemies, we use their own language against them. Oppressive people do this to me often.

They tell me I must tolerate their hateful, abusive religious beliefs.

They tell me that speaking out against their slurs is taking away their free speech. 

They say I must coexist by remaining friends with people who actively work to take away the rights of my other friends.

They call me a bad pacifist when I get angry (even if I do not act out in violence). They tell me that to be anti-war, I must stop fighting altogether.

They say that if I love someone, I should forgive them and give them chance after chance, regardless of whether or not they change.

But I won’t give up these concepts that easily. I am not the “anything goes” liberal that they try to caricature me as. I am gifted with discernment. I have a clear picture of what I know is right and wrong, and I use these words and concepts within the context of that picture.

I am not tolerant of injustice.

I don’t respect free speech when it’s hate speech.

I won’t coexist with bigots and misogynists.

Just because I am anti-war does not mean that I will not non-violently fight back in society’s wars on women and other oppressed groups.

It is not love to allow someone to continue to abuse or oppress me or others.

By twisting my words, they try to paint me as “wishy-washy,” “limp-wristed,” too weak or cowardly to take a stance against evil. But I think they do that because, deep down, they know I’m not too weak or too cowardly. I think they hide behind my own words because they know their caricatures of me aren’t me.

 

All of who we are

When I first started dating my now-fiance, I had just recently begun calling myself a feminist. I had just recently begun to look at the way the world around me privileged men and say, “Hey! This isn’t right.”

Thanks to my new found worldview, I saw Abe as having privilege over me. I expected him to be aware of that privilege, and I expected him to be extremely careful not to use that privilege in ways that might hurt me. I thought that he, as a man, was more privileged than me, as a woman.

I was right.

But I was also wrong.

There came a point in our relationship where I had to realize that I had, without even realizing it, been racist toward Abe many times. I had believed stereotypes about Asian people. I had both told and laughed at jokes directed toward Asian people. I had made ignorant, generalizing statements about them.

I was using my privilege to hurt him. I was contributing to his oppression.

Just because Abe had privilege over me, didn’t mean that I didn’t have privilege over him. And while Abe was working hard to recognize his own privilege and to make sure he did not contribute to my (or any other woman’s) oppression, I was sitting back, assuming that my status as “woman” somehow excused me from looking at my own privilege.

Abe does not fear, even in the back of his mind, being raped any time he walks alone at night. That is something I fear nearly every time I head to the parking lot after my night class.

Abe has that privilege over me.

But I never have to fear being suspected of terrorism at the airport. Because of Abe’s skin color and facial hair, that is a legitimate concern for him.

I have privilege over Abe.

Once, during a discussion about a bill being passed in Arizona that limited reproductive rights for uterus-owners, I joked that I was glad I didn’t live there (not that things are all that much better here in Michigan–our representatives can’t even say “vagina,” apparently). This was a concern that non-uterus-owning Abe did not have to share because of his privilege.

But, the discussion continued, and eventually moved in the direction of Arizona’s immigration laws. Abe stated that he wouldn’t want to live there either. “I’d probably get pulled over all the time because people can’t tell what race I am.” I didn’t have to share this concern with him and I never will.

We live in a world of binary thinking where you are a man or a woman. You are black or white. You are oppressed or you are an oppressor.

But the line isn’t as usually clear as we like to pretend it is.

I can be oppressed and I can be an oppressor. I can be both at the same time because I am white and I am a woman. Neither of those two parts of my identity are more important than the other. If I ignore my whiteness and only claim my woman-ness, I ignore the ways in which I perpetuate white supremacy.

Fellow women, just because we are oppressed does not mean we cannot also be oppressors because of our age, our race, our sexual orientation, our health, our class, or our weight.

Recognizing ourselves as potential oppressors does not belittle the hurt we may have endured because of our status as Oppressed. Yet, the hurt we’ve endured because of our status as Oppressed does not excuse the hurt we may have caused others because of our own potential to oppress.

We can embody both identities fully.

But none of us are free while any of us are oppressed, so let’s look at who we are for a moment. ALL of who we are.

Picture by my mother, Carolyn Moon

A follow-up on complementarianism and rape culture

{trigger warning for rape}

This is a follow up to my recent blog post, “Complimentarianism’s ugly relationship with rape”

I recently wrote a blog post in which I proposed that complementarianism benefits from rape culture. This post got me called a slanderer, a totalitarian communist propagandist, and even got me compared to a rapist lurking in the dark corners of the internet waiting to attack innocent men like Douglas Wilson and call them rape advocates against their will. This follow-up post is not for those people. Anyone who would compare calling out rape apologism to rape itself is beyond my ability to reason with. I’ll leave those people in God’s hands for now.

However, I did have several commenters who respectfully disagreed with me and gave me reasons why rather than simply attacking me. This post is for them. In it, I hope to explain my train of thought as clearly as possible, because I still stand by my point and believe I have good reason for doing so.

I’ll begin by explaining what I feel gives me the right to analyze complementarian culture and to draw conclusions from that analysis. I spent over 20 years of my life as a complementarian. I was told that if I went to a non-Bible college I might get raped. I was taught an abstinence-only education that led me to think I had to apologize when my 320 lbs. ex-boyfriend held my head down and forced me to perform fellatio on him. I experienced these things and countless others. I heard the Bible stories about rape victims taught in a way that implied the woman should not have let herself be alone with a man. I saw the harm complementarian teaching did to me and to others. I sat through countless sermons by countless complementarian preachers. I now am pursuing (and nearly finished with) a degree that gives me the basic skills needed to recognize systems of domination, to analyze patterns that occur within them, and to understand and deconstruct the ideologies that allow these systems of domination to function.

I understand fully that I cannot make an empirical statement about the personal opinions of all complementarians when it comes to rape and rape culture. Nor was that the purpose of my blog post. But I do have the education to analyze certain structures of society, and I do have a deal of  experience in this particular part of society that I feel gives me the right to analyze it. I cannot draw conclusions about whether or not every complementarian leader is a rape apologist. But I can make the claim, with some authority, that complementarianism as a system benefits from rape culture. By that conclusion, I can logically proceed to the idea that every complementarian leader also benefits indirectly from rape culture. 

Let’s talk about rape culture…

I’ll take a few moments here to explain rape culture. It really is beyond the scope of a single blog post to explain rape culture fully because of how deeply it permeates our society, but I’ll do my best. If you’d like to learn more about rape culture, I’d suggest starting here.

In the United States (and in much of the Western world), we live in a society that relies on domination in order to function. No, I’m not just talking about complementarians here. I’m talking about our society as a whole. Americans can call the land that they stand on “America” because of the domination the founders of this country exercised over Native Americans. Our very foundation is laid on domination, and it’s not an uphill climb from there.

The continued genocide of Native people that still occurs today…

Slavery, lynching, and racism…

The exploitation of the working class, here and abroad…

Our wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan…

The oppression of women, LGBT people, non-Christians, and children…

Our society has benefited immensely from the oppression of certain groups of people, and therefore, our society often works to perpetuate oppression.

One of the tools our society–all of it–uses to perpetuate this oppression is rape culture.

Rape culture is used, not just as a way for men to control women, but as a way for people in power to control many of the oppressed groups that our society benefits from taking advantage of. Slave masters would rape slave women to keep slave populations in line. U.S. soldiers in Vietnam raped Vietnamese women as a way of demoralizing their enemy. Even our prison system largely maintains its power using the fear of rape.

Though the majority of Americans are not the ones committing these rapes, and the majority of Americans do not actively approve of this rape, those in power benefit from each rape that occurs. The more people fear rape (or fear seeing the women in their lives raped), the more control those in power have over them.

Thus, rape culture is born.

Our comedians joke about rape. Our billboards use it to sell vodka. Our movies romanticize it. Our courts dismiss it. All the while, victims are terrified of reporting because they know we live in a world that doesn’t take rape seriously.

To put it another way, I’ll borrow Beverly Tatum’s “moving walkway” analogy. Her analogy is about racism, but I took the liberty of applying her analogy to rape culture, because I believe it fits with any system of domination.

Rape culture is like “a moving walkway at the airport.” (Tatum) Rape culture is pulling us along as a society of domination. Those in power can stand still on that walkway, ignore the floor moving under their feet, even turn the opposite direction and insist that they despise rape, but unless they are actively running in the opposite direction–away from victim blaming, from rape jokes, from the idea that some groups of people are meant by nature to rule over other groups of people–it continues to pull them along. 

Complementarianism as a system of domination

I’m going to argue now that complementarianism is one of many smaller systems of domination that operate within our larger system of domination. Though I’d guess most complementarians would shy away from the word “domination,” it shouldn’t be too difficult to convince you that, regardless of what nice-sounding words complementarians would use to describe themselves (and indeed, some skip the nice words and go straight for “conquering and colonizing”), the ideology of domination is inherent within complementarian beliefs. 

Complementarians aren’t shy about the fact that their belief system states that one group of people (men) are naturally meant to rule over another group of people (women). The rhetoric may very from “servant leadership” to “conquering and colonizing,” but the basic idea is the same: something inherent in men makes them more fit to lead, to preach, to make decisions, to run a church or a family or even a country than women. Something inherent in women makes it their job to submit to men (depending on how strictly complementarian one is, women must submit to at least their husbands and fathers. Most complementarian churches require female congregants to submit the leadership of the church to men, and some complementarians believe that women should not be in any positions of leadership over men even in society).

So, if the fear of rape benefits systems of domination, and complementarianism IS a system of domination, logically, complementarianism benefits from rape culture. 

And, like in our larger society, though every individual may not advocate rape, because the fear of rape is so effective at controlling people, many complementarian leaders use it, perhaps not even consciously. Some complementarian leaders–Douglas Wilson, Mark Driscoll, and others–are jogging, even running down the moving walkway of rape culture, demanding that wives don’t deny their husbands in bed, attributing rape to a punishment from God upon feminism, etc. A (hopefully) small minority are actually raping women, as we learned recently when the story of Jack Schaap broke (trigger warning on that link).

The rest? It seems to me that they’re standing there, reaping the benefits of rape culture, occasionally making comments about women’s clothing or participating in subtle victim blaming. Some may even have turned the other way.

But if any complementarian leaders are actually running in the opposite direction–trusting victims, affirming a woman’s bodily autonomy, condemning the systems of power that perpetuate and feed off of rape culture–well, they’re being too damn quiet about it. 

Image found at http://mislabeled.wordpress.com/2011/04/05/the-real-bull-honkey-on-campus-sexual-assault/