Compassion for the Oppressor

Protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, peacefully oppose a line of police. Source

I've been using Tumblr for the past eight months or so, and one of my favorite Tumblr pastimes is heading over to the Yo, Is This Racist? page for some cathartic rage/laughter at racism and racists. Yo, Is This Racist? is run by a man named Andrew Ti, who answers questions about whether things are racist (the answer is yes, almost always) and lets people know that he thinks racism is terrible in a variety of colorful ways.

It's a bit of a guilty pleasure for me, though, because while it can be both fun and cathartic to laugh at racism/racists, Andrew Ti's whole framework for addressing racism strikes me as flawed and potentially harmful. More troublingly, I think it exemplifies a large strain of online social justice activism that's grounded in some deeply problematic ideas.

Ti's driving principle seems to be that you shouldn't coddle racists, because "they have had plenty of chances to learn not to be racist." Racists, in other words, should be confronted with their racism. They should be told, "That's racist, and it's not okay."

This is a great principle. Racism should be challenged and opposed at every opportunity. Trouble is, Ti takes it a step further: what he means by "not coddling racists" is, in fact, yelling at racists, insulting racists, and generally letting racists know that they are worthless. He also uses "racist" to mean not only unrepentant white power enthusiasts, but also anyone who has any racist opinion, or who doesn't understand what white privilege is. He ends up yelling at a lot of people.* 

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Where does all this come from? I'm not in any position to psychoanalyze Andrew Ti, but his attitude is part of a broad consensus around two big ideas that have emerged lately in online social justice activism:

1. It is good to be hostile toward or denigrate opponents of social justice.
2. People who don't know the basics of social justice are willfully ignorant.  

Idea 1 is rooted in the distinction between the anger or violence of the oppressor and the anger or violence of the oppressed. This distinction is valid. As one Tumblr user has noted, "A cornered mouse will bite a cat. This does not reclassify the mouse as a predator or the cat as prey." It is why I reject terms like "reverse racism" or "reverse sexism"—they imply an equivalence between people who benefit from a system of oppression and those who are oppressed by it.

If you are the victim of a system that conspires to devalue your life and make your very existence a challenge, your anger at that system—and at those who create, benefit from, and perpetuate it—is understandable, and it is justified. There is such a thing as righteous anger; there is such a thing as justifiable outrage.

But some activists have moved one step beyond this principle, from "anger is justified" to "anger is a virtue." In other words, it is positive to express anger at the oppressor in whatever form; open hostility, rage, and denigration aimed at the oppressor is beneficial and fitting for the oppressed. While this idea may be older than online activism, it gets a uniquely prominent and virulent expression online, where anger and denigration flow all too easily.

Idea 2 seems to be more uniquely an online phenomenon. Social justice activists who work primarily online, writing articles, maintaining social media pages, and the like, regularly deal with people who don't seem to know the first thing about misogyny/transphobia/racism/homophobia/etc. People see something the activist wrote, and they write an email, send a tweet, post a comment, asking a basic question the activist has answered before, maybe a dozen or a hundred times. In an era when so much basic information is a mere Google search away, it can be extremely frustrating to be continually responding to people who are completely ignorant of the subject you're passionate about.

It's easy, then, to make a small logical leap and conclude that your questioners are not simply naive but willfully ignorant: that is, they don't actually care about the activist or their ideas; rather, their questions are simply an expression of hostility toward the activist. And many times, this will in fact be the case, though often it will not, and a genuinely ignorant or naive person—who didn't realize at all what they were stepping into, didn't know what phrase to Google, and really wanted an answer to what they thought was an easy enough question—will end up caught in the crossfire of the activist's hostility. A hostility that, by the logic of idea 1, is a virtue.

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I'm concerned about these ideas, not primarily because I worry about activists hurting people's feelings,** but because I think they allow activists to sacrifice effectiveness for a feeling of superiority.

What's missing from this ideological framework is compassion for the oppressor. Jesus' radical statement, "Love your enemies," sounds trite today because we've heard it over and over, in church and outside it. It's been abused: when oppressors preach it to those they oppress, what they mean is "Tolerate our abuse of you. Accept your situation. Love us in spite of our oppression. Obey."

Yes, that sentence was partially just a setup for a They Live reference. Source

That's not what compassion for the oppressor is about, though, not at all. Compassion for the oppressor means refusing to let anger or rage about oppression turn into hate for the oppressor; it means standing up against abuse without the intent to enact retribution on one's abuser; it means actively trying to convert the oppressor into an ally by demonstrating respect for them; it means, as bell hooks put it in an essay about Dr. Martin Luther King, "commitment to love as political praxis."

It's the only effective means for turning an enemy into a friend. Compassion for the oppressor is vital for dismantling oppression and replacing it with something better.

Importantly, this commitment to compassion was, for Dr. King and for most people who have adopted it, a fundamentally religious notion; in bell hooks' words, it is a "love rooted in spiritual commitment to the Divine."

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One other prominent characteristic of this type of online activism is unfamilarity with and/or disdain for organized religion. And when I say organized religion, I mostly mean Christianity.

Andrew Ti and his readers have criticized members of the New Atheism movement for their racism and sexism, but Ti's stance toward Christianity is wholly of the New Atheist school. The distinguishing factor between New Atheism and its classical forbears is intentional ignorance and dismissal of religion; as one commentator put it, "atheists used to take the idea of God seriously; that's why they mattered." Like a good movement atheist in the modern school, Ti dismisses the Bible as a "transcript of some horny, racist teenager’s Dungeons and Dragons game" and seems to think Jesus wasn't real. These are not the hallmarks of someone who has taken much interest in studying the Bible, much less any historical or critical scholarship on Jesus, Christianity, or Christian scripture.

On one level, this disdain for Christianity is understandable: as the primary religion of the oppressive elements of American society (and, often, one of its tools for oppression), it's easy enough to conflate Christianity with oppression itself. That's all it is though: conflation. A mistake. Christianity is not inherently oppressive; it is not a form of oppression. Its use as a tool of oppression is a historical accident, not an inherent characteristic of the religion itself.

Dr King with John Lewis, Reverend Jesse Douglas, James Forman, and Ralph Abernathy. March 1965. Source

And this is easily demonstrated, because the absolute reverse is so often true. Abolitionism and women's rights in America were primarily Christian movements, driven by itinerant frontier preachers like Charles Grandison Finney. Dr. King was a preacher first and an activist second; his Christianity drove his activism, not the other way round. The Moral Mondays movement is grounded in Christian faith; many of its leaders are ministers, and its based is comprised, in large part, by church members. Pastors and lay people at my former church in Chicago are active in protests on behalf of the poor and the environment.

We can, of course, push this beyond mere Christianity: the activism of Malcom X would never have occurred without his contact with and adoption of Islam. Thich Nhat Hanh's peace activism during the Vietnam War era and beyond is inalterably Buddhist in character. But in the United States, Christianity is the primary religion from which social justice movements have drawn their power; it is Christianity from which compassion for the oppressor, love for the enemy, has welled up into the hearts of American activists and enabled the kind of activism that creates lasting change.

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Attacking and alienating Christians is in fact a severe tactical error on the part of social justice activists. Even if secular activists advocate compassion for the oppressor apart from any religious notions, they will miss out on an opportunity to incorporate an enormous segment of the American population that has already absorbed the need to love their enemies if they dismiss Christians out of hand. What's more, any American social movement that does not get at least some Christians on board is likely to fail, for purely demographic reasons:

Source

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I've been following the protests against the death of Michael Brown, police brutality, and police militarization in Ferguson, Missouri, with close interest this week. Over the last year or so, my private concern about the interlinked issues of police militarization, mass incarceration, and the curtailing of American civil rights (especially those of people of color) has grown steadily, so it was encouraging to see a serious move to push back against these forces in the form of these now nationally publicized protests. Though of course it is disheartening that it took killing a child to make it happen, and that Americans are being teargassed by officers sworn to protect and serve them.

Protester in Ferguson removes a teargas canister before it can do more harm. Photo by Robert Cohen.

What concerns me about the situation is the looting and the fighting back; not that those are the real story of what's happening in Ferguson, but that those are what many people already perceive as the story. The true narrative in Ferguson encompasses the tragic death of a black teenager, the apparent attempt to cover up or excuse police responsibility for it, and the outrage of the community who have long felt less than protected by their own police force.

So much in the American heart wants this story to be about black violence and rage already. The stereotype of the angry, criminal black man is worn deep into the American psyche, and for many Americans it will be the first thing to spring to mind when they hear about a young black man killed by police and the protests have sprung up in response. I believe it will take a serious commitment to loving one's enemies to steer this narrative away from that image, to scrub the angry black person stereotype out of Americans' minds and replace it with the flesh and blood and bullet wounds of Michael Brown. It will require serious, committed compassion for the oppressor to overturn systemic racism and replace it with something better. I hope to God it's enough. I hope to God it happens.

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*On balance, I'm not sure this is the worst thing in the world. Going overboard in opposing racism is probably superior to keeping quiet on the matter. Also, Ti is quick to point out that he's not actually an expert on race and there's no real reason to listen to him. Additionally, his podcast is a more nuanced space than his Tumblr, and I do actually recommend it.
**Heaven knows that people on the receiving of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are having more than their feelings hurt, after all. These things maim, scar, and kill people.

What Is Faith? What Is It For? A Conversation

Video Summary:

James Alison says faith is relaxing in the presence of someone you're certain is fond of you. Lutheran idea: faith is trusting God's promises, not intellectually assenting to a set of theological propositions.

Faith is not given to individuals in sufficient quantities, but communities. Similar to how an individual might not believe every line of a creed, but the church as a whole does. In organizing her faith community, the statement of faith required of members will be participating in the liturgy and sharing the eucharist.


David Shay: My initial reaction to this was that it was awesome to hear something that made sense to me about faith, but that I haven't articulated myself before in this way. I've seen a lot of these concepts in books on orthodoxy that I've read, especially the idea of things being based more in the community, the body, not just the individual. What were your thoughts, Dave?


Dave Mantel: I did a quick word study on that 1 Corinthians passage she mentioned, where Paul is addressing a "y'all,"--the community responsibility for faith, rather than the individual--and it doesn't normally get translated that way, but it could be, which is cool. I think a lot of times with this kind of stuff most people will translate something a certain way because it's always been done like that. So that stuck out as something I really liked.

But there was something I'm not sure I know how I feel about, where she talks about the creed, and how not everybody has to believe everything, as long as it all gets believed in the end--that's okay. I can see how that would be encouraging. But I don't know where I stand with that kind of thinking yet.


David Shay: I get that, but don't think we can take what she's saying in this video as "the rules" of faith. It's kind of a catch-22; the way she's presenting it, you almost can't say you disagree, because what she's saying is "Exactly!" and you'd be like "But I don't agree with that" and she'd say "I know, exactly, but we both love Christ and believe he's God." And that's kind of why a lot of what she said makes sense to me. Which brings us back to the first part of what she says, which is that faith is relaxing in the presence of someone you're certain is fond of you. Most of the time we only talk about the rules and the function of us being in love with the Creator, and we don't focus on the relationship with the Creator; what are the emotions that you feel, what are the unwritable things that happen to you; that sense is something that would be nice to bask in.


Dave Mantel: I understand what's being communicated, but I have a problem with the way that it's being put. I think it's really cool--there's two ways to think about this: one is that you don't have to have 100% faith in every doctrine all the time, and that's okay, because faith isn't about having all the right ideas all the time; and the other way is this, that there are a lot of extra rules... Rob Bell has a similar problem in his book, Velvet Elvis, where he talks about "flexible doctrine," and he uses the example of the virgin birth, and I'm like "That's not a good example!" because the virgin birth important to all of Christianity, but if you were talking about something else- things that are really side issues that not the whole Church agrees on (I view the content of the creeds as main issues, not side issues)- it's okay to wrestle with those things during different seasons. James?


James Davisson: I have to admit that my initial gut reaction to this video was almost entirely negative. For whatever reason, my brain reacted to the sentence "James Alison says faith is relaxing in the presence of someone you're certain is fond of you" with the same kneejerk dislike I usually reserve for people proclaim inghow much they love eating organic produce while they do yoga. Liberal white people sitting around in a room agreeing with each other; I just reject the surface quality of this whole thing. Once I was able to get past that emotional response, I was able to get on board with a lot of what she was saying.

In fact, what I did with it was try to find someone more "orthodox" who might agree with or support her position, and what I came up with was something I remembered C.S. Lewis, that I think goes along with her second idea that faith might not require belief in every line of the creed:

The Resurrection and its consequences were the “gospel” or good news which the Christians brought: what we call the “gospels,” the narratives of Our Lord’s life and death, were composed later for the benefit of those who had already accepted the gospel. They were in no sense the basis of Christianity: they were written for those already converted. The miracle of the Resurrection, and the theology of that miracle, comes first: the biography comes later as a comment on it.

To me, that sounds like Lewis saying something similar, that the essence of Christian faith is belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the impact that it has on humanity; everything else is commentary on that.


Dave Mantel: This goes back to our last conversation: what is the point of all this? What is it for? The end result of this conversation should not be "Do we all think the right things?" but "How does this help our relationship with God and each other?" So whatever we conclude should be in relation to those two things; not about doctrine, but relationship.


David Shay: Let me jump on that, relationship: I think that might be the cheesy part that James hated so much. My struggle with faith is that, when I look for someone who "has it going on" with their faith, it can be tought, I'm not actually sure I believe there's someone who actually knows who God is. I get emotional at church, but I'm just like a secular person in line at the Chiptole, or getting gift cards at Target; we live a very mundane life outside of church, outside of our practices. What is it actually like, though, when we analyze our lives and know we're dwelling beside the Creator; how does it make things different, what is the answer? It's not entirely to be found in what you believe, in doctrines, nor only in how you treat people, because we all know really nice people who don't believe in God. It's found in something else, I can't put it into words, but it's found in something that has no need to be proven to others; it's simply dwelling with God and letting God change you. I think we've lost touch as Christians because we're trying to prove too much to others, that what we believe makes sense, and we've forgotten to relate to God and each other. That's the obsession of the individual; all of us just trying to better our own lives instead of contribute to a community.


Dave Mantel: That's where I get sometimes; I get wrapped up in "head knowledge," in having the right ideas and telling other people about them. It's not something that changes my life; I'm not letting it. It's not expressed in loving other people, and that's the trap I get stuck in sometimes.


David Shay: Right. She says that maybe faith isn't for the individual, but I think it can be--there are people who have just, crazy amounts of faith, overflowing faith.

I know people who I admire as Christians, with very different theological views from me. I know a guy, he's very Reformed, and I am not, and I admire him, and I look up to him because of these weird moments we've had, like this time we were out with a group of people at camp in the woods, and it's midnight and crickets and animals are going off, and he says "Let's just stop for a second--y'all hear that song?" And we just stand there, silent, but the woods aren't silent--I think that sort of thing is more the point even than what this person even gave a sermon on earlier that evening, that is how the Kingdom of God can work. And that sounds pretty tree-huggish, wishy-washy, I get it, because I can't tell someone that story and it really hits them, necessarily, but I think that experience of community, faith, and God, that happen within that story, is an important thing. This person's theology that's different from mine, that's not as important.


James Davisson: Couple things. I question too what's important about Christianity and what sets us apart from good, secular people. And what does that is that we live in the age where Christ has come and changed things, and we can spread the word about that, and we can further his Kingdom even change the world for the better because of that story and the knowledge we have about it. And we too often look to the distant, end-of-time future, rather than this immediate future that we have the power to shape, as Christians. 

This other thing I was reminded of in listening to your comments was this item we've been meaning to talk about, this blog post called Twelve Myths Too Many Christians Believe, and the first myth is "Christianity is a relationship, not a religion." The idea is that we say things like this because we're uncomfortable with admitting that Christianity is a religion, because then maybe it's just one religion among many that are all equally right/wrong, the slippery slope of pluralism, etc. I'll quote from the post:

[I]it is entirely possible to believe that there are more religions than one while still holding to the perspective that yours is the right one. I feel that it is important to keep in mind that Christianity is indeed one religion among many because it will help us to see the Other as real – someone with beliefs that they hold as dear to them as we do ours. Naturally we think Christianity is the best religion available; if we did not, we would hold to a different one. Further, we believe that our particular church or denomination is the best expression of that faith; if we felt otherwise, we would go elsewhere. We must, however, allow ourselves to remember that there are others who do feel otherwise and are not idiots.

David Shay: My response is that God is not a religion, nor is Christ a religion; I think that our desire to know God is what created a religion. I think my biggest issue is that people don't acknowledge God as real, they acknowledge God as a figure, someone they know about that they read about in a book. But you have to experience God in the world.


James Davisson: I've heard some Christians speak on the idea that some people are given the ability to have faith, and some are not. Which is something that seems to be borne out in reality; cognitively speaking, there seem to be people who are and others who are not able to experience God, in terms of brain function. What do you guys think about that?


David Shay: I wonder about that; I wonder if it's something that appears outside of western societies. But it's an interesting question; what can you do? You love them, you share with them in experiences that you maybe see as spiritual and they maybe see as a good time. Go to a concert that you think is a spiritual experience and that they see as fun. And just believe what you believe; believe that the concert was spiritual and you shared it with someone who didn't feel that way.

Example, Erica and I went to a Sufjan Stevens concert and we all sang together, a capella, Come Thou Fount, I'm sure the theater was not filled with just Christians, but we all sang that song; people sang and closed their eyes, and I believe it glorified God. I don't know what the non-Christians would say about it, but I can say that I think it was good.



Dave Mantel: I've had similar experience; I was a Thrice farewell show, and there was a song where the bridge was "We are the image of the invisible," and I looked around and thought of the people singing along "Do you believe in that, or know what you're singing? Because it's true." That was one of those moments where I thought, this is interesting, it's a moment that glorifies God, this primal acknowledgement of God.

I think this ties into our other conversation about salvation and evangelism; if it's not about believing the right things- if someone is not predisposed to believe in or desire a deity, how do we interact with them? We have to live differently, not to make them conform to a doctrine, but to bring them into contact with the invisible.


David Shay: I think we've come full circle! Because that sounds a lot like "relaxing in the presence of someone you're certain is fond of you." James, I want you to agree.


James Davisson: I mean, just after that sentence, I was like "I'm mostly on board," but before that I was like "Shut up!" That sentence just sounds so...homeopathic and new age-y to me.  My gut reaction, not my actual analysis.

My Theological Progress

by Dave Mantel

I remember my first crisis of faith. I was about 11 years old, sitting on my bedroom floor, when I asked my mother, “How do we know this stuff is real?”

I was raised in a pretty conservative household and had a pretty sheltered upbringing. Luckily, when I asked this question, my parents didn’t call for an exorcism or send me to some kind of camp for lost sheep. As I look back, I see how lucky I was. There are really two ways modernist Christians deal with doubt and questions of the faith, one: by reprimanding the doubter and reminding them that all the answers are found in inerrant scripture, or two: encouraging questions because all the answers are found in inerrant scripture. My mother’s response was the latter. She gave me some books that I don’t remember reading—probably something by Lee Strobel—and we called it a day.

I think probably the first time I heard that there was another view of scripture other than the two extremes of “inerrant” and “completely false” was in one of my first college courses at Olivet Nazarene University. We were going over the Nazarene statement of faith, and they read their view of scripture: that it was “inerrant in all things pertaining to salvation.” That caught my attention right away. This was in pretty stark contrast to the belief of my upbringing, even though most of the wording was the same. There was that “inerrant” word again. But the clause was that it was only applicable to things pertaining to salvation. I would come back to that idea many times over the next few years.

As I began to fully embrace college life and adulthood, I began reading some of the more “controversial” literature popular with some of my friends—books like The Irresistible Revolution, Jesus for President, Velvet Elvis, Love Is An Orientation, The Way of a Pilgrim…you get the idea. Not exactly controversial (though I guess they are in some conservative circles). As I started to read these books written by Christians who had worldviews that were so different than the one of my upbringing, I began to have more and more questions about the beliefs that I held.

I won’t bore you with the details, but as I started to ask more questions, I found that many of them didn’t seem to have black and white answers—even in this inerrant scripture I had been pointed to for so many years. It’s not that people couldn’t find answers. There were plenty of answers to the questions I was asking, often accompanied by a slew of references and verses as support. The pattern I began to see, though, was that sometimes there were two, or three, or more, completely different answers for the same questions, using the same inerrant scripture as reference. What was I supposed to do about that? Start verse counting? “OK, well, you have 37 verses to back up your point of view while the other side only has 23, so you win the Bible!”

Even more confusing was the fact that on many of the issues I was having my key conflicts with, I began to discover different whole sects of Christianity that had their own traditions and interpretations of the  issues, some for thousands of years, that differed greatly from my conservative, evangelical upbringing. Yet, they all still claimed Christianity as their religion, and they all claimed that their particular view on these issues is the correct and "orthodox" one.

Why do I bring all of this up; tell you this anecdote of my spiritual adolescence? Because I believe it’s not just my story, but the state of an entire generation of post-evangelical Millennials who have a lot of questions that they’ve been carrying around for a long time, but maybe have no idea what to do with them. Or maybe you’ve just grown weary or bitter from carrying these burdens for so long with nowhere to put them.

At this intersection of the modern/post-modern generations within Christianity, it is important for us to remember that many of the “answers” that have been spoon fed to many of us since birth are relatively new constructs, the idea of the complete inerrancy of scripture, for example.

That’s not to say that we should start throwing our babies out with all of our bath waters (side note: you realize that must have been a thing in order to become a colloquialism like this, right? Think about that.) There are many things that can and should be held to as orthodox within the Christian faith. However, those things might not necessarily be what you think they are—especially if you’re a protestant evangelical in the West. Believe it or not, 100-year-old traditions may seem long to you and your church plant, but compare them with Catholic or Orthodox traditions which are based on literally thousands of years, you hopefully begin to gain a little perspective.

So how do we, the post-modern, post-evangelical, Millennial generation get our stuff together and figure out what’s what? You may have seen this coming:

We need to ask more questions.

Shocker, I know. But this is so important. The modern evangelical old guard, if you will, the Pat Robertsons, the Mark Driscolls, and the John Pipers of the world, they will tell you that questions and doubting are not beneficial to your faith, that doubt will destroy your walk with the Lord and lead you straight to hell. They will tell you to fact check them, until you actually do, and then they will either reprimand you or blow you off. And this is all from a place—an indoctrination—of “We already have all the answers. If you’re asking questions, you are not a good enough Christian.” Shaming the very thing that I believe can transform the Church to be looked at as something more than the current homophobic, bigoted, child molesting, hateful, hypocritical thing we are now.

So start to ask questions. Do your homework. Start to refine your questions into scalpels that can help cut out some of this rotting offal that’s been sitting here for decades. Don’t be afraid of criticism, or Church history, and don’t be afraid of the questions. God is not scared by our little questions. There is nothing we can ask or look in to or seriously contend that God can’t answer. Don’t be afraid of the mystery, the unknowing. Some things are not meant to be answered. Some things don’t even have an answer. We must learn to be OK with that. And we must begin with ourselves.

And finally, don’t be afraid of doubt. Rob Bell says in his new book, What We Talk About When We Talk About God,

“For many people in our world, the opposite of faith is doubt. The goal, then, within this understanding, is to eliminate doubt. But faith and doubt aren’t opposites. Doubt is often a sign that your faith has a pulse, that it’s alive and well and exploring and searching. Faith and doubt aren’t opposites; they are, it turns out, excellent dance partners.”

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Photo sources:
Photo 1: http://www.flickr.com/photos/starfire2k/3631902258/ 
Photo 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Descent_of_the_Modernists,_E._J._Pace,_Christian_Cartoons,_1922.png