"American Spirits and Concepts Called Heritage" - Monday Moment - June 19, 2023

Happy Pride and Happy Juneteenth, friends! Last week I reflected on the first verse of “American Spirits” by Drumming Bird. This week I want to turn to the second verse:

“I was born in a city built on homes of the Cherokee

And named after Muskogee words to describe

We hijack the narrative, say that it's heritage

Tell them how good it is that history's white

Leave out the stolen land, replace it with Dixieland

And everyone claps their hands and sings its delight

You can face it or just forget, I ask for a cigarette

You hand me a silhouette smoking a pipe.”

Today is Juneteenth, the celebration and remembrance of a proclamation freeing slaves in Texas on June 19, 1865. While slavery would remain legal in some places in the United States for another six months, Juneteenth represented one of the last points when chattel slavery was still permitted in the US. The Rev. Jim Wallis has called slavery “America’s original sin,” an appropriate metaphor for the abhorrent treatment of Black people from at least 1619 to 1865.

For those of us who are white and those of us raised in intensely white supremacist environments—intentionally white supremacist or not—we have been trained to think that with the end of legal slavery in the United States, life for Black people was set right and the sins of the past were forgiven. In fact the well-known 19th century abolitionist William Llyod Garrison and many of his fellow white contemporaries literally closed up shop, convinced that their work was done. You see, what we weren’t taught in school about these “good” white people is they may have hated the institution of slavery, but they didn’t see Black people as their equals. Black people should be free, they thought, but they shouldn’t have the same rights as white people. So as Reconstruction languished in the American South and laws called Jim Crow took more and more rights away from now free Black people, the “good” white people looked away, comforted that at least Black people were free.

White nationalist groups often discuss their ideals in terms of “heritage not hate.” They claim that they value a return to a white America which they believe is their heritage. They continue to slither their way into schools, libraries, churches, and other public and private institutions. Currently, Ohio is considering House Bill 103 which proposes to create a social studies curriculum based on the American Birthright Standards (read: white nationalist). These standards teach a “heritage” at is white, embracing all the errors and outright lies that “heritage” continues to promote.

Clearly, these and many other mechanisms of racist America persist to 2023. Indeed, as a white Queer man, I could reasonably forget about Juneteenth because it gets lost in Pride Month. Even as a Christian who centers my activism and advocacy on the teaching and model of Jesus, the church remains, as Dr. King said, the week’s most segregated hour. For the white Queer community, Juneteenth should be a reminder that Queer liberation cannot be achieved in a vacuum. None of us can be free until we all are free. If we want the Queer community to be free then we must address racism, ablism, sexism, classism, and all other forms of oppression with the same tenacity that we fight homophobia, transphobia, and heterosexism.

How is your heritage presented in schools? Do people like you dominate the pages or appear predictably in small groups?

Let us pray: God who knows no race, sexual orientation, or gender, but who lived as a brown-skinned, refugee, and religious-minority on earth, bless the many times we screw up and fall far short of your expectations. As we celebrate Pride Month, bless us with the wisdom to remember that our liberation is collective and communal. Homophobia will never dismantle racism, classism will never tear down transphobia, and silence will never do anything but build complicity. Give us the strength to tackle our own prejudice so that we can fight it in the world. We ask this through you, our creator and guide. Amen.

Blessings on your weeks, my friends! Remember to keep your Pride flags up as you continue aspiring to be allies with the groups different from you!

Faithfully,

Ben

"American Spirits and White Jesuses" - Monday Moment - June 12, 2023

[Content warning: Mention of suicide]

Happy Pride, friends! Rarely does a song touch me as deeply as "American Spirits" by Drumming Bird did when I first heard it several weeks ago. The song tells the story of a man deconstructing both his faith and what he's been taught about America. He sings:

I was raised on a Jesus who was white and prestigious.

Said he never would leave our little country behind.

Said the pledge of allegiance, said I'd never smoke weed.

And that my Bible, I'd read it, when I couldn't decide.

But the sermons were telling me Hell was a felony.

And heaven's the guilty plea that keeps me alive.

So my friend went and shot himself, the Jesus he asked for help.

Was probably somewhere else, said, "Son, get in line."

This lament searching for answers could be any of our voices. Almost everyone raised in American Christianity from at least the 1950s, was raised with the white Jesus, so altered not just to fit the appearance of the “average American,” but to attempt to recreate Jesus in the model of white supremacy. That Jesus took on the hollow personality of his creators to the point that when the singer's friend reaches out prior to ending his own life, the response was silence.

That church and the Jesus many of us were raised on further compelled us to "admit and repent our sins" or risk not going to heaven. Drumming Bird here calls heaven "the guilty plea that keeps me alive." It was as if we were on trial and facing the death penalty. Only if we pled guilty could we hope to avoid death. But that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was that we were innocent. Many of the "sins" that we were proverbially charged with were not sins. We were told that we were “intrinsically disordered” for being LGBTQIA and sinners if we “acted on it.”

Last week I was honored to have a short essay published in Red Letter Christians (click here). In that piece I reflected on finding Jesus during Pride Month. Too often we Queer people look around and wonder where Jesus is, when Jesus is already right there with us. The maximum toxicity of the white, straight Jesus is that he's absent from the lives of marginalized people; that he's somewhere else helping someone else. Quoting Psalm 22, Jesus too wondered where God had gone as he hung on the cross: "My God, my God! Why have you forsaken me?"

Where do you find Jesus where you expect him? Where do you find Jesus where you don't expect him?

Let us pray: Jesus, you know our want for God. You even know how it is to feel abandoned by God. Bless us as we make sense of what religion has taught us, both the lies and the truth. Guide us as we walk this path, particularly when we get stuck. We ask this in your name. Amen.

Blessings on your weeks, my friends! Let me know if there is anything I can do for you.

Faithfully,

Ben

"Homophobic Chickens" - Monday Moment - June 5, 2023

Happy Monday, friends, and Happy Pride Month! Pride Month is a fascinating exercise in community dynamics, performative allyship mixed with capitalism and corporate greed, and public politics. Beginning promptly at 12am on June 1 and ending at precisely 12:01am on July 1, the United States becomes awash in rainbow. Even before Pride Month began, Target was already engulfed in controversy when they pulled part of their “Pride Collection” due to consumer outrage. The message was clear, the corporation wasn’t interested in supporting the Queer community, it was interested in driving profits on the back of the LGBTQIA+ community. Let’s be clear, it’s not just for-profit companies that will change their colors to the rainbow, governments will fly Pride flags and illuminate their buildings in color. Moderate to progressive churches, synagogues, and other places of worship with also decorate in rainbows and preach LGBTQIA+ sermons.

This might be a strange moment to mention a company I refer to as “homophobic chickens”—that’s Chick Fil La for anyone who doesn’t know me well—but I respect their commitment to their values, warped, homophobic, and transphobic though they are. Chick Fil La is a family-owned, privately-held corporation that doesn’t operate on Sundays and requires its employees—many of whom are teenagers and young adults—to attend etiquette classes. You can go to Chick Fil La locations and receive a down home experience packaged in a major fast-food chain. Several years ago, when they were the butt of every joke because of their obstinate opposition to marriage equality, they didn’t let up. From a marketing and economic standpoint, you could argue that they understood that their customer base either support their messages or didn’t care about those messages. Unfortunately for those of us who boycotted their restaurants, they didn’t lose much business.

Why do I mention the “homophobic chickens?” Because they prioritized their values over consumer pressure to do otherwise. The same cannot be said for the vast majority of the corporations that will spend this month pandering to us through well placed marketing “demonstrating” their commitment to the rights and lives of Queer people and allies. While strategic brand analysis was probably not a consideration in first century Palestine, Jesus similarly ignored what people wanted to hear or even what they wanted him to do and spoke his truth in a world that wasn’t always ready to listen.

As people of faith and as American consumers, we need to judge those people, those preachers, those churches, those brands, and those corporations to whom we give our attention, our loyalty, and our money to this Pride Month and beyond. We need to ask ourselves how people and companies and churches show up outside of Pride month. Do the colors and the rainbows go away? Do the statements about affirmation and inclusivity fall silent?

Which brands support your values even after Pride Month is over? Who will you invest in during Pride?

Let us pray: Jesus, you preached the truth regardless of what others thought about you or your message. You carried your message so far that the state put you to death in a failed attempt to silence you. Teach us how to advocate with that tenacity and to stand up to messages that only have profit and greed at their cores. Help us live into the truth that Pride is all the time and that our mission of creating heaven on earth is greater than 30 days of performance. Amen.

Blessings on your weeks, my friends! Please let me know if there is anything I can do for you.

Faithfully,

Ben