Rev. Cody J. Sanders2013-05-22T18:22:25-04:00Rev. Cody J. Sandershttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=rev-cody-j-sandersCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Rev. Cody J. SandersGood old fashioned elbow grease.Renewing a Queer (Religious) Agendatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.15041972012-05-14T12:17:06-04:002012-07-14T05:12:04-04:00Rev. Cody J. Sandershttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-cody-j-sanders/United Methodist Church took a vote on the legitimacy of our lives and the citizens of North Carolina took a vote on the legitimacy of our love. We didn't fare too well in either church or state.
Whether our lives are deemed "incompatible with Christian teaching" or our loving relationships are deemed sub-par to straight marriages, the message is clear: there are some among us who do not believe queer people should exist.
Religion is often at the forefront of these arguments -- in both affirming and denouncing the legitimacy of queer lives. Faith played a role in President Obama's evolution in understanding and affirming same-sex marriage. And faith certainly played a role in the decisions made by Methodists and North Carolinians.
As we continue to consider the role of religion in our thinking about queer lives and loves, the following are a few of my own developing commitments toward a renewed queer religious agenda:
I am not willing to have the same biblical arguments anymore.
There is far too much to say about queer lives than can ever be said if we must always start back with argumentation over the same seven passages of Scripture.
I am always willing to point those genuinely interested to the appropriate biblical resources. We are, after all, the beneficiaries of at least two generations of astute biblical scholarship on questions of sexuality and the Bible. So if I am to take seriously that someone is adamantly opposed to the lives and loves of queer people based on the text of Scripture, then I should expect that person to engage in serious, scholarly study of the matter.
But what convinces me that these arguments lack seriousness and are largely ineffective exercises is the evidence that those wishing to have them seem not to treat the Bible with enough seriousness to be honest about "what the Bible says." Otherwise, there would be ample recognition that what we now call "traditional (heterosexual) marriage" is the result of many shifts in social norms and dramatic evolution in biblical understanding. Indeed, what we now call the heterosexual norm of marriage based upon mutual love and affection, rather than upon gender hierarchy and contractual transmission of property, would be utterly unrecognizable to Christians in centuries past.
I am not willing to compare myself to animals in order to justify my sexuality.
For those not satisfied to stop at "what the Bible says" about "homosexuality," there comes a typical recourse to what is "natural." For example, Tami Fitzgerald, head of Vote FOR Marriage NC, sums up the supposed point of the amendment, stating, "The whole point is simply that you don't rewrite the nature of God's design based on the demands of a group of adults."
And there are always well-meaning persons lining up to counter these arguments with scientific evidence for the "naturalness" of "homosexuality," the genetic markers for sexual orientation, and all of the best that science has to offer in favor of queer lives.
But I'm going to draw the line here. Because -- allow me to be candid -- if you need to know that caribou and dolphins have gay sex in order to recognize the legitimacy of long-term, committed same-sex relationships among humans, then something is very wrong.
We should be suspicious about the seriousness of these arguments as well. Because just like "what the Bible says," "what is natural" is an effective rhetorical placeholder for "the way I prefer the world to be organized." We have a long human history of justifying unequal and often violent gender relations, race relations and sexual relations through appeals to the "natural order" of things. So while many have taken delight at the display of queer folk justifying their lives and loves through self-comparison to insects and orcas, that game must come to an end.
I am not willing to leave queer "rights" up to (competing understandings of) God.
Another effective rhetorical placeholder for "the way I prefer the world to be organized" is a nod to the Divine will. And while many use "God's design" to argue against rights for queer folk, many others invert the argument to argue for God's design supporting gay rights. But neither of these ways of drawing upon one's understanding of God is an appropriate way to argue for or against rights -- those things we decide upon in legislatures, interpret and uphold in courts, and sometimes put to popular vote.
American philosopher, Richard Rorty, in his 2003 article, "Religion In The Public Square: A Reconsideration," helpfully argues:
It is one thing to explain how a given political stance is bound up with one's religious belief, and another to think that it is enough, when defending a political view, simply to cite authority, scriptural or otherwise ...The believer's fellow citizens should not take her as offering a reason unless she can say a lot more than that a certain ecclesiastical institution holds a certain view, or that such an institution insists that a given Scriptural passage be taken seriously, and at face value ... What should be discouraged is mere appeal to authority. (Journal of Religious Ethics 31(1), p. 147)
We must hold our conversation partners accountable to justify the appropriateness of public policy through more than an appeal to their understanding of the Divine. We should ask the uncomfortable questions: Who is privileged and who is disadvantaged by any given notion of "God's will" (or "what the Bible says," or "what is natural")? For whom is this or that a good thing to believe and act upon? How does this belief support or challenge oppressive and violent power relations that become frozen in institutions and public policy?
I am not willing to prattle on when lives are at stake.
I will not stop talking with others about religion and queer lives. I will accept invitations to speak publicly when they come and converse with those in coffee shops when the books I am reading are intriguing to them -- all because I believe in the efficacy of conversation and debate to change individual minds and institutional policy. But these cannot remain abstract conversations detached from the reality of the queer lives at stake.
So long as our queer children are bullied in their schools, so long as our queer teenagers kill themselves after years of suffering public torment, so long as our queer neighbors are victimized by hate crime violence, we must give attention to the ways our Christian tradition and religious rhetoric perpetuates suffering and death in the lives of queer people. From the Crusades, to the lynching tree, to queer hate crime murders -- we must hold our conversation partners accountable to say what they will say before the shadowy spectacle of the violence and death toward which some beliefs inevitably lead.
I am not willing to overlook the glairing interconnectedness of oppressions.
These debates about religious belief and public policy are not just about queer lives. North Carolina's Amendment One is itself a helpful reminder of this fact. An amendment specifically targeting queer lives would also have deleterious effects on other vulnerable populations, eroding the protections against domestic violence for unmarried couples (i.e., primarily targeting women victims of male violence) and detracting from the best interests of children in decisions about custody and visitation rights.
But more importantly, the power to define reality according to "the way I prefer the world to be organized" cuts across oppressions, serving the insidious ends of racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, classism, etc. Oppressive understandings of reality -- supported by appeals to "God's will," "what the Bible says" and "what is natural" -- place some in higher, privileged positions opposed to myriad "others" in lower, targeted positions, making some ever vulnerable to the oppression, injustice and violence of those with the power to define reality for the rest.
The great Mennonite theologian, Gordon Kaufman, explains this relation well, stating:
In such a society power and knowledge are ordered so as to move from their source on high down through the hierarchical layers of society, each higher rank having authority over those below and the whole structure legitimated by the divine king ruling over all. Those who know (or believe they know) what God wills, have inside information on the ultimate ordering activity in the universe, and feel authorized, therefore, to carry out whatever course of action seems required to implement this. To 'serve God' is to try with all the resources at one's disposal to impose this order on whoever or whatever appears disobedient or rebellious. ("In Face of Mystery," p. 77)
Right now, this hierarchical ordering is evident in the ways certain persons who "know the will and order of God" impose this order through institutionalizing heterosexuality as the only legally and religiously legitimate way to live and love. But after gay marriage debates come to an end and the inevitable day arrives when gay marriage is legalized across the land, our queer religious agenda will not be over. Nor should it be so narrowly focused in the present.
We must take our passion for increasing freedom and decreasing suffering forward, recognizing that our fight is not for the betterment of queer lives only. Our struggle is for the well-being of those made vulnerable to oppression, injustice and violence whether due to race, religion, gender, immigration status, sexuality, ability or class. Our work will not be over when the Methodists embrace us and North Carolina marries us. All oppressions are insidiously related and our queer religious agenda must develop the complexity of thought necessary to bring these connections to light and to work across the lines that have been constructed to divide us.
I am not willing to forfeit religion to those who believe they own it.
It is understandable that many queer folk have had to leave our churches, our denominations and our faith traditions to forge new paths. Religiously inspired abuse and rejection has driven many away. Some have found new churches, others have taken uncharted spiritual journeys and still others have distanced themselves from all things religious.
But as queer as it may sound, many queer people find their religious identity to be as important to them as their sexual identity. And while many wish not to admit it, we've been serving as your ministers and your musicians, your Sunday school teachers and your deacons all along.
We must not allow the conversation-stopping trump cards of "God's will," "what the Bible says" and "what is natural" to unquestioningly dictate what is appropriate in the way of public policy. And we must stand just as doggedly against forfeiting our queer place within our religious traditions under pressure from those within who believe we do not belong and those without who believe it is time we gave up the fight for religious inclusion. A queer agenda indeed.]]>Oppression, Injustice, and Violence: Let's Stop Changing the Subjecttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.13869212012-03-29T18:00:14-04:002012-05-29T05:12:01-04:00Rev. Cody J. Sandershttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-cody-j-sanders/around) matters of oppression.
From the shooting of Trayvon Martin, to debates raging over LGBT rights from Alaska to North Carolina, to the persistent foregrounding of economic disparity between classes in political campaigns -- all invite our sustained attention to concerns of oppression, injustice, and violence. But sustained attention quickly turns to simplification and distortion in much popular rhetoric concerning matters of oppression.
Perhaps we want to believe that oppression is an "evil" that happens to Others elsewhere. So we've developed ways of changing the subject when it seems we're getting too close to oppression, injustice, and violence where "we" live.
Perhaps we are uncomfortable with the complexities of oppression. We prefer simplicity. We've become adept at tricking others (and ourselves) into self-induced myopia--a practiced nearsightedness that prefers the comfort of the surface of social exchanges rather than the complexities of the structures, institutions, norms, habits, and symbols that rest beneath the surface.
Whatever the reason, our popular rhetoric about issues of oppression, injustice, and violence exhibits a range of tactics, tools, and tricks we regularly employ to change the subject. While these rhetorical tactics may preserve the comfort of some, they also serve to justify and perpetuate oppression, injustice, and violence through systematic avoidance and distortion of these realities in our public discourse.
Many of these tactics, tools, and tricks of popular rhetoric are easily observable in our talk about the most current events that point toward realities of oppression, injustice, and violence.
Problematic Tricks in Our Talk About Oppression
Preservation of the status quo. We have become adept at getting around realities of oppression and injustice by simply appealing to the "way things are" in comparison to the ills of the "way things used to be." Thus, the typical movement is not toward the introduction or re-institution of overt prejudicial structures (e.g., racial segregation, criminalization of "homosexuality," etc.) but toward shoring up the current status quo. Those wishing to return to a bygone era of blatant prejudice ("the way things used to be") are easily dismissed as "racists," "sexists," etc. We give less thought to how "the way things are" carries with it all manner of legal, political, and institutionalized inequalities, popular prejudicial understandings of difference, and day-to-day violence against those who deviate from the dominant "norm."
Perhaps one of the current notable exceptions, in which strong political movements are pushing beyond shoring up the status quo to the institution of stricter prejudicial structures, is seen in ongoing debate over immigration laws.
Blaming the victim. The status quo is best preserved by shifting the blame for injustice and violence away from perpetrators who may be influenced by larger social realities (e.g., racism, classism, etc.) to those most intimately affected--the victims. It is an insidious slight of hand that lives large in recent media coverage of the shooting death of Trayvon Martin: You only thought racial bias had something to do with a young, unarmed Black man being shot to death in a gated community, but it was really his choice to wear a hoodie or the fact that he'd been suspended from school that are the key factors in his unfortunate death. This is a very effective strategy of distraction from the interplay of social narratives about (racial) difference and interpersonal acts of violence.
Victim-blame that works to cover over structures of racism in racially biased violence serves also to protect patriarchy from critique when women are blamed for their own rape and sexual assault. It serves to insulate heterosexism from scrutiny when LGBT victims are blamed for their own hate crime murders with a "gay-panic defense" or when authorities chalk the murder of an LGBT person up to "risky behavior" and fail to conduct a thorough investigation. Victim-blame is also at work when we attempt to downplay structural class inequalities by insisting that if the poor would just grab those bootstraps and begin pulling we wouldn't have a problem (i.e., the Meritocracy Myth).
Personalizing the political. When it becomes clear that there are actual victims who may, in fact, be innocent, larger issues of structural injustice can still be ignored if one can shift the focus to concerns of personal prejudice. One timely example of the personalization of the political involves the upcoming vote on Proposition 5 in Anchorage, Alaska, that would amend the current Municipal Code "providing legal protections against discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, national origin, marital status, age, physical disability, and mental disability to be amended to include protections on the basis of sexual orientation or transgender identity." But what's the need for such a change in policy when, according to one anti-Prop. 5 group, Anchorage is already a "very inclusive, friendly and respectful place to live and work"?
Appeal to personally held attitudes is often quite effective in preventing a thorough examination of systemic, institutional structures that privilege some and disadvantage others. So as long as the citizens of a city hold friendly and inclusive attitudes toward their LGBT neighbors, we don't need to worry so much about their being denied housing or fired from a job based on sexual orientation or gender identity. That sort of thing wouldn't happen here, anyway.
Homogenization of difference. After all, if we just recognized that we're all human it would help us get beyond the pesky divisions based on our differences. This is perhaps the most well meaning rhetorical movement made in popular conversation, but it nevertheless serves to distort our views regarding the politics of difference. This attempt to cover over difference with the rhetoric of "sameness" can be witnessed in appeals to a "color blind" society.
If we can focus the conversation on the problem of human beings killing human beings, we no longer have to concern ourselves with how a person's race, or gender, or sexual orientation made that person a target for violence in the first place. And we don't have to be exposed to the troubling reality that much of this violence has an instrumental purpose--disciplining those who live outside of a gendered, or sexual, or racial, or religious norm and sending the message to others that they are liable to become victims too. This instrumental violence sends a clear message that keeps certain people out of certain neighborhoods and keeps closets full of LGBT persons who are taught through violence not to "flaunt it" in public.
The privileged masquerade as the persecuted. But "we're all just the same" doesn't work when some groups keep insisting that our differences do matter, both to our sense of "identity," as well to our ability to see how our embodied differences become sites of significance in understanding how oppression is structured, injustice institutionalized, and violence practiced. But if we've gotten this far in conversation then it has become clear that we have to face the reality that some are actually privileged and advantaged by laws, social norms, and the practices of institutions while others are targeted and disadvantaged. So this move attempts to turn the tables on the matter of who is really being targeted.
A prime current example is the religious (read: conservative Christian) rhetoric wavering between extreme triumphalism and persecution consciousness over a supposed "war on religion." A good example of this is Pastor Dennis Terry's recent introduction of Rick Santorum at an event in Louisiana. The message: Christians in America are being marginalized by the gays who want rights, the Muslims who don't worship Jesus, the "secularists" who don't want (Christian) prayer in public schools, etc. (persecution consciousness). So if you fall into any of these categories, you can "get out" of (Christian) America (triumphalism).
The erosion of unearned privilege may very well feel like a diminishment of one's "rights." It is a difficult lesson to learn that one group doesn't have the "right" to dominance over the lived realities of all others.
Pitting targeted groups against one another. But if all else fails, pick a couple of targeted groups and "let's you and them fight." There is no end in sight for the usefulness of this historic tactic. One timely example is the new strategy of the National Organization for Marriage (recently exposed to the public) to wedge Black and Latino voters against LGBT persons over issues of marriage equality.
In the end, the payoff of this strategy is not only a distraction from the realities of oppression, injustice, and violence that affect the lives of the targeted groups involved. But it just might demonstrate that all this talk about "oppression" and "rights" just ends up in a big ol' mess that could have been avoided if we had just agreed to change the subject.
Of course, effectiveness depends upon targeted groups being unable to see through the strategy, and if it's one thing the experience of oppression teaches any group it's to look beyond the surface of things to ask who is really benefiting from the status quo.
Some Necessary Tasks toward Anti-Oppressive Action
When we each look at our lives with an intersectional lens--seeing race, class, gender, ethnicity, age, sexuality, dis/ability, religion, etc. as a part of our composite "identity"--it becomes difficult to view ourselves and others as purely privileged or purely targeted by oppression. We must examine our lives for our own complicity in varied forms of oppression, injustice, and violence--examining our explicitly held attitudes and beliefs, as well as, taken-for-granted assumptions and unquestioned routine actions that perpetuate bias based upon class, gender, race, sexual orientation, age, etc.
Beyond examining our own lives, individuals and groups working toward anti-oppressive ends must become increasingly more comfortable and far more skillful at addressing concerns of oppression, injustice, and violence in ways that expose the common mechanisms that run throughout the experiences of targeted groups. Breaking out of the silos of our work toward various forms of justice will help to expose the reality that very few benefit from an oppressive status quo.
Lest anyone reduce my message to the idea that "all experiences of oppression are the same," I will be clear: they are most certainly not. We must guard against this simplification by acknowledging the multiplicity of our own "identities" such that the oppression, injustice, and violence that each experiences based upon one particular embodied difference (e.g., race) is mitigated and/or exacerbated by myriad other identity markers (e.g., class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, age, etc.).
The personal experience and material effects of oppression for a straight Black female will be different from a disabled poor White male, which will be different from a transgender Latina, which will be different from a wealthy bisexual man, and so on. We must not be reductive in our understandings of the varied experience and effects of oppression--all are disadvantaged by discrimination, some face persistent insult, others are targeted for assault, and more than we care to admit are killed.
Despite these varied experiences, the mechanisms of oppression have common identifiable characteristics. Up close, the tightly woven fabric of oppression may exhibit unique features from swath to swath, but a step back will reveal the thematic semblance interwoven throughout.
Finally, it would behoove us all to be attentive to the rhetorical simplifications and distortions that we encounter in day-to-day conversation on matters of oppression, injustice, and violence. When we become so attentive, we may be surprised by the statements that come from our own lips. We must begin holding ourselves and those whom we regularly engage accountable for conversational distractions from the realities of oppression, injustice, and violence, whether these occur in the office break room, in our churches, around the dining room table, or on Facebook.
To be sure, not everyone who employs these conversational distractions intends to perpetuate oppression, injustice, and violence. And, to be sure, some do.
]]>Baptists and Sexuality: A Time of Ferment?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9136572011-08-03T08:06:38-04:002011-10-03T05:12:01-04:00Rev. Cody J. Sandershttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-cody-j-sanders/
Earlier this month Australian Baptist pastor Nathan Nettelton voiced his support for marriage equality for same-sex couples on a national television program of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. He went so far as to state his willingness to conduct same-sex weddings, should the opportunity arise. Fearing that Nettelton's views might be construed as representative of the majority of Baptists in Australia and around the world, the Australian Baptist Ministries quickly issued a statement asserting, "Marriage is not for same sex couples."
Also this month, Journey Fellowship -- a Baptist congregation in Owensboro, Kentucky -- learned that its local Baptist association plans to take a vote on the expulsion of the congregation for providing meeting space to the local chapter of PFLAG (Parents, Families, & Friends, of Lesbians and Gays).
Last month, the behemoth conservative Baptist denomination -- the Southern Baptist Convention -- had delivered to the door of its annual convention a 10,000-signature petition calling on the group to apologize for its mistreatment of LGBT people. Not surprisingly, an apology was not forthcoming. But the president of the denomination's flagship seminary, Albert Mohler, made a rather surprising statement, saying that the SBC is guilty of practicing "a form of homophobia" of which the SBC needs to repent. Though -- in case there was any confusion on his stance -- he was quick to add that homosexuality is still a sin and there remains a need to "minister to a very militant community of homosexuals."
Finally, the Cooperative Baptist fellowship, a large moderate Baptist denomination, and Mercer University, one of the world's largest Baptist universities, are collaborating an on upcoming event titled, "A [Baptist] Conference on Sexuality and Covenant" to be held in Atlanta in April 2012. This will be the first sexuality-focused event of this magnitude from the CBF -- a denomination with a personnel policy prohibiting the hiring of "a practicing homosexual."
While the messages regarding LGBT persons are certainly mixed, what makes me hopeful about these instances is the fact that in the first three cases cited above, the message about the "sinfulness" of homosexuality or the need to disassociate with those who think otherwise only followed some very public expression of support, affirmation, or hospitality toward LGBT people from another Baptist entity. A Baptist anti-gay marriage statement was issued because of a very public profession of support for same-sex marriage from a Baptist pastor. A Baptist association poises to expel one of its member churches because of its hospitality toward a PFLAG group. And Al Mohler's reiteration of "sinfulness" of homosexuality followed his own rebuke of Southern Baptists who practice homophobia.
In the example of the Cooperative Baptist/Mercer University sexuality conference, I am heartened by the very fact that this conference is not a reactionary move, but a very intentional event aiming to open up much-needed conversation within the CBF and wider Baptist world on issues pertaining to sexuality. In a time when healthy, sustained religious dialogue on sexuality is routinely foreclosed upon by reactionary position statements and movements to expel congregations from denominational bodies, the CBF/Mercer conference offers the gift of space for healthy, respectful, and prayerful dialogue.
While there are Baptist groups and organizations regularly advocating for the inclusion, full affirmation, and greater rights for LGBT persons, the above instances are signs of hope from less likely places: a pastor speaking his conscience about same-sex marriage on national television to the astonishment of his denomination; a small Kentucky congregation practicing hospitality to its local PFLAG group; a seminary president who, despite his stained-glass voice and theological bravado, seems to be considering more appropriate ways to speak about sexuality; a denomination peculiarly silent on issues of sexuality now clearing its throat in preparation for dialogue.
While the name "Baptist" is often associated with harsh dogmatism and ever-narrowing circles of inclusion within certain Baptist denominational bodies, the above instances are hopeful contemporary expressions of the rich heritage of Baptist diversity and dissent. The history of Baptists evinces the centrality of "soul freedom" -- the belief in every person's capability (and responsibility) for reading, interpreting, and understanding the Scriptures for him or herself -- and the autonomous freedom of the local church to embody a contextual iteration of Christ's presence in its community. Whereas a monolithic Baptist anti-LGBT posture may be the image conjured in the minds of many, I, for one, am impressed and heartened by these events that both hearken to the very best attributes of our Baptist heritage and hasten a hopeful future for Baptists willing to (re)engage questions of sexuality.
I certainly don't wish to over-interpret these small, hopeful expressions. I don't imagine they point to the beginning of a Baptist wave of affirmation for LGBT persons or an imminent Baptist repentance for the mistreatment of gays and lesbians (after all, it took the SBC until 1995 to denounce racism and apologize for its role in supporting slavery).
The one interpretation I am willing to make: these events and others like them point to a time of ferment in Baptist life around issues of sexuality. It only takes small, mundane signs of hope to point to a future in which change is before us. Movements toward affirmation, inclusion, and rights for LGBT people will not be smooth and success is not a given. These movements come in fits and starts, progress by successive approximations toward justice, and take place amidst turmoil and agitation. But mundane and unlikely hope is hope nonetheless that change is coming -- even for Baptists.
Rev. Cody J. Sanders is an ordained Baptist minister and a Ph.D. student in pastoral theology and counseling at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, Texas.
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