Moving Toward Radical Inclusion- Part 1

Radical inclusion must not be intellectualized but instead connected deeply with our need for personal healing which requires us to heal our “isms.”

Since September 11 America has changed radically. We have become a country where partisan politics rule the day, that we can no longer agree to disagree and shouting matches laced with expletives has taken the place of civil discourse. And this ugliness has imploded on us.

To build a huge tent of radical inclusion, we must challenge ourselves to hear each other and to understand not just our oppressions but those of others. Understanding the intersections of oppression allows us to develop relationships and allies.

“We don’t socialize together. There are very few places where black and white socialize together, which is the basis of relationships and friendships, the basis of understanding,” Earl Fowlkes told the Washington Blade last year, explaining why Pride events are segregated. Fowlkes is executive director of the Center for Black Equity, a national D.C.-based group that advocates for African-American LGBT people and helps organize Black Pride events in the U.S. and abroad.

“And until we start doing that and creating those spaces to do that we’re going to have misunderstandings and a lack of sensitivity toward issues of race.”

We must address deep-seated biases that impede authentic, respectful and enriching relationships as a Christian body. I am reminded of Paul’s letter to the Galatians in chapter 3 verse 28 where he wrote: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female for we are all one in Christ Jesus.”

But the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., reminds us that “it is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o’clock on Sunday morning.” We see that still in 2018.

Segregated churches began in the 1800’s. Richard Allen, born in 1760 in Philadelphia, was the slave of a Quaker master. As a free black in the 1780’s, he converted to Methodism and became an itinerant Methodist preacher. Allen could not sit in the all-white historic St. George’s Methodist Church. In 1797 Richard Allen founded Mother Bethel African Methodist Church, the first black Methodist Church in Philadelphia, and in 1816 Richard Allen led African Methodists into a separate denomination after many years of struggle against white control. The African Methodist Episcopal Church is now the oldest black denomination in this country.

Radical inclusion is an ongoing process that allows us to see, along this troubling human timeline, those faces and to hear those voices in society of the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the dispossessed. And radical inclusion can only begin to work when those relegated to the fringes of society can begin to sample what those in society take for granted as their inalienable right. And sometimes for that to happen, it must start with Christians who understand the biblical mandate in Matthew 25:35 where Jesus said: “For I was hungry and you gave Me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave Me something to drink, I was a stranger and you took Me in.”

With today’s nativist spirit of patriotism and isolationist rhetoric to “Make America Great Again,” we close our doors and heart to refugees. Evangelical Christians, in particular, fail to see Jesus and his parents, Mary and Joseph, were Middle Eastern refugees. Soon after Jesus’s birth Mary and Joseph fled with their newborn to Egypt as refugees fleeing from violence, as undocumented immigrants crossing the border from Mexico into the U. S. are today. And oddly, this isolationist rhetoric fails to recognize that the first group of settlers in America were refugees- the Pilgrims

In “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center,” African American cultural critic bell hooks states that she begins her analysis at the margin because it is a space of radical openness, and it gives you an oppositional gaze from which to see the world, unknown to the oppressor. It is at the margin where you can see injustice being done. It is not only a site where you can honestly critique the oppressive structures in society that keeps us wounded as a people, but it is also a site that can heal us as a people — both the oppressed and the oppressor.

In other words, it is not enough only to look outside ourselves to see the places where society is broken. It is not enough to talk about institutions, churches, and workplaces that fracture and separate people based on race, religion, gender and sexual orientation, to name a few.

We must also look at the ways we as an individual and a community are both the oppressed and the oppressor. We must look at ways that we manifest these bigotries, how we are the very ones who uphold and are part of these institutions and workplaces. Often, we find that these institutions and workplaces are broken, dysfunctional and wounded in the very same ways that we are. And the structures we have created are mirrors not of who we want to be, but who we sadly really are.

We cannot heal the world if we have not healed ourselves. So perhaps the most significant task, and the most challenging work we must do first, is to improve ourselves. And this work must be done in relationship with our justice work in the world.

In “A Farewell to Arms,” Ernest Hemingway said that the world breaks us all, but some of us grow strong in those broken places. Jesus invites us to become strong in our broken places – not only to mend the sin-sick world in which we live in, but also to mend the sin-sick world that we carry around within us. And we can only do that if we are willing to look both inward and outward, healing ourselves of the bigotry, biases and the demons that chip away at our efforts to work toward justice and diversity in our churches.

I know that the struggle against racism is only legitimate if I am also fighting anti-Semitism, homophobia, sexism, and classism – not only out in the world but also in myself. Otherwise, I am creating an ongoing cycle of abuse that goes on unexamined and unaccounted.

When suffering is understood as an ongoing cycle of abuse that goes on unexamined and unaccounted for, we can then begin to see its manifestation in systems of racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism in our everyday lives. With a new understanding about suffering and how it victimizes the innocent and its aborts the Christian mission of inclusiveness, Jesus’ death at Calvary invites a different hermeneutic than its classically held one.

As an instrument for execution by Roman officials during Jesus’ time, the cross’s symbolic nature and its symbolic value can both be seen as the valorization of suffering and abuse, especially in the lives of the oppressed.

For those of us on the margins, a Christology mounted on the belief that “Jesus died on the cross for our sins” instead of “Jesus died on the cross because of our sins” not only exalts Jesus as the suffering servant, but it also ritualizes suffering as redemptive. While suffering points to the need for redemption, suffering in and of itself is not redemptive, and it does not always correlate to one’s sinfulness. For example, the belief that undeserved suffering is endured by faith, and that it has a morally educative component to it makes the powerful insensitive to the plight of others, and it forces the less powerful to be complacent to their suffering – therefore, maintaining the status quo.

Trans issues in our churches are not addressed enough. However, trans activism is taking afoot in DignityUSA, an organization that focuses on LGBTQ rights and the Catholic Church. And their voices want to be heard in Catholic dioceses across the country that will eventually inform and impact the Vatican. They must be heard in our Protestant churches, too. Of the many breakout sessions at the DignityUSA conference in 2017, I wished Pope Francis could have sat in on “Trans Catholic Voices,” because his transphobic pronouncements have been hurtful. Francis compared transgender people to nuclear weapons. His reason is that transgender people destroy and desecrate God’s holy and ordained order of creation.

“Let’s think of the nuclear arms, of the possibility to annihilate in a few instants a very high number of human beings,” Francis stated in 2015 in an interview with the National Catholic Reporter “Let’s think also of genetic manipulation, of the manipulation of life, or of the gender theory, that does not recognize the order of creation.”

During the “Trans Catholic Voices” breakout season an African American transwoman pointed out that Francis statements about transpeople deny them of basic human dignity and perpetuates violence against them. The life expectancy for black trans is 32 years old.

In her closing remarks, the African American transwoman in “Trans Catholic Voices” asked for help from advocates and allies in the room that nearly brought me to tears.

“Trans lives are real lives. Trans deaths are real deaths. God works through other people. Maybe you can be those other people.”

As Christians, we fail to realize that our gift and our struggle are that we are a diverse community within ourselves, and our diversity should not dilute our commitment and love toward one another, but rather our diversity should teach us more about its gift of complexity, and by extension teach the larger society.

The Kwanzaa principle of Umoja- unity-must take root in our self-understanding of who we are and what we decide to be as both a people and a Christian community. In understanding the interconnectedness between himself as the individual and himself as the community, African historian John Mbuti said, “I am because we are; and since we are, therefore, I am.”

We must cure ourselves of our indifference to each others’ oppressions. As a community, we must all pitch in. The belief among us that one oppression – ours – is more significant than another persecution sets up a hierarchy of oppression and keeps us fighting. The moral and spiritual challenge before us is that united we can stand as a Christian community or divided we can fall as a petty people.

Our job, therefore, is to remember that our longing for social justice and radical inclusion is also inextricably tied to our longing for personal healing.

~ Rev. Irene Monroe