Theologian Robert Monson Wants a Softer Social Justice

This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.

I’ve followed Robert Monson’s work for years. Monson is a writer and theologian who focuses on Black theology, contemplation, and disability. He is also one of the first people outside my direct orbit to encourage my writing (not just my reporting), and I’ve always found him to be encouraging, joyful, and thoughtful.

Lately, as I have been reading Monson’s work, I’ve found that he is becoming rather soft. Now, before you think those are fighting words, I’ve thought this because it’s the term that Monson uses to describe himself and his aspirations as a man. He sees softness as an ethic to live into, a way of honoring his personhood and the personhood of others.

His character-marking softness isn’t a lack of boundaries or another word for niceties, as we discuss. Instead, Monson aspires to softness because it grounds him in the work of justice and community building. In his newsletter, on his two podcasts, and in his writing for The Witness: A Black Christian Collective and enfleshed, Monson is applying softness to theology, social commentary, and activism.

In our conversation, we discussed masculinity and softness, Blackness and disability, crying, and why you should love yourself.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mitchell Atencio, Sojourners: Often the first question in an interview is, “Who are you and what do you do?” But I wanted to frame this a little differently: Who are you trying to become and what do you want to do in the world?

Robert Monson: All of those questions are the same for me. I am always trying to become a soft man. That is that’s the light at the end of the tunnel — to be a soft man and to be someone that my ancestors would be proud of. I’m trying to make my ancestors smile.

You’ve already preempted where I was hoping to go with this. You’ve said before that you are “learning to be soft despite the world pushing [you] in a different direction.” What does softness mean and why is it important?

Growing up, “soft” is the last thing that a Black man wants to be called — and probably any man. There was something about the way that masculinity was told to me, preached to me, taught to me, that never fully resonated. The idea that, if you’re a man, you want to be in the woods, killing animals and going on adventures.

That was never me. I stumbled on “softness” because it was a word that I felt I could snuggle up with. It was a word I could see myself in. So, softness for me revolves around an ethic of realizing my own humanity and the humanity of others and that ethic calls me to treat people accordingly. Softness doesn’t have anything to do with volume or tone. It has to do with how I treat myself, in a kind way, and the endeavor that I have to be kind to others.

I’ll add this caveat that softness doesn’t mean that we can’t hold rage at the same time. But even as I hold rage, I have to do it in a sustainable way. [In a way that] my flesh and my mind can sustain, right? It’s an ethic for me.

What’s the relationship between softness and boundaries?

The more I love myself, the more boundaries I have.

The way that I can see that people talk about boundaries, [they describe them as] fortresses to keep people out. But for me, I have boundaries to protect the sacred within, who I am as a person, the amount that I love myself, and the man that I am becoming. And having those boundaries is actually a protection for you too, because having boundaries means there’s only so far I’m willing to go [toward] berating or denigrating you. I recognize that you deserve softness too. The way that I will bless you with softness is by blocking you on social media. I look at that as not a hard boundary, but a soft boundary. Clearly there’s something in our interaction on social media that might be triggering and the best that I can do for you is to block you.

More than any other writer I know, you write about crying a lot. Why is crying a part of your practice of softness?

I wish I was famous for other things that sounded cooler. Crying and tears, for me, are a self-reclamation project.

For so much of my life, I have been in bondage to my own insecurities, my own fears, the self-definition of others, the societal depictions of what a Black man should be. And crying is the act that I undertake to reclaim my humanity.

For me, there’s this release in crying, whether it’s tears of joy or — child, I cry because it’s sunny. I like when the sunlight comes through my window, and I just be crying. I find that the more I cry, the more human I am.

There is something powerful about men, those who present as men, writing about tears, because we write about a lot of stuff that we probably should be silent on. It’s part of my way to reclaim myself, but also to give other people an opportunity to see themselves and reclaim themselves.

Why is softness important for the work we do to combat the triple evils of racism, militarism, and greed?

It’s important because I have to continually remind myself that I’m dealing with humans. Even as I vehemently disagree, and as I vehemently try to divest from and dismantle the works that humans have put up around human flourishing, I still am dealing with other humans. Softness grounds me in that.

Now, what that doesn’t mean, again, because I have to be clear, it doesn’t mean that I don’t denounce wickedness as wicked. It doesn’t mean that I don’t say, “That’s racist.” But how I do that is informed by this praxis and ethic of softness.

I might have to go a little bit slower, because I’m dealing with human beings and not just “things” that I’m trying to crush.

Softness also helps me move at a sustainable pace. I think of the rage that is fueling people after this last election and I wonder if the activists took a moment to check in with themselves and were soft enough to say, “Hey, I don’t have the energy to run right now. I might have to walk for a while.” I regularly see activists burn out because they aren’t soft.

What are the markers, for you? When it comes to being soft in your denouncements, when do you know you’re doing well and when is it more of a struggle?

The latter’s easy, because I do be struggling. I have to say, I have struggled throughout my life of knowing when I’m being a doormat and calling that softness, niceness, or kindness. And that’s not what it is at all. It’s still full of ego, pride, and self.

The perfect image came to mind as we’re talking of Toni Morrison. The way she carried herself, the way she wrote, is an embodiment of softness. Another author I really respect is EbonyJanice. She wrote All The Black Girls AreActivists. She talks about this notion of the “seat of Toni,” and she frames it around softness. She talks about what it means to be a person that speaks from a seated place: Where you’re very clear and what you mean and what you don’t mean, but you don’t rise out of your seat for the ignorance of others.

We see that in a lot of Toni Morrison’s interviews. One of the famous ones, I cannot remember the Australian woman’s name, but she asks her, essentially, When are you going to start writing about white people in your career? And Toni Morrison says, “I have.” And the interviewer says, no, when are you going to — essentially — really start writing the real stuff. You’ve been writing about Black people. When are you going to do the good work?

Morrison, from that seated place, is so crystal clear in calling out the interviewer’s racism. She says to her, “You can’t understand how powerfully racist that question is, can you?”

She didn’t raise her voice. I’m not saying that there are times that we shouldn’t get loud, but I loved watching that interview over and over again as an example of what it means to be seated in your truth and not rise out of it.

I know when I get out of my seat, when I allow that blood pressure to start going [up], when I stop listening to what you’re saying and I’m [only] ready to respond, I already know I’ve “left my seat.” Nothing fruitful will come of that. It never has, at least in my estimation.

How has softness as an ethic, changed how you read the Bible, or how you study God?

A phrase that I use quite often is “the God I’ve come to know.” Because I don’t know who you mean when you say the word God. That word is so loaded for people. And the Bible is so loaded.

For me, softness has developed my ability to hold nuances and multiple truths at the same time. When I come to God, there are multiple things that are true. Do I have a love for God? Yes. Am I ignorant to the ways that God has reportedly been on the throne while some of the worst acts in human history have taken place? No, I’m not ignorant. How do those things coexist? I don’t know. And I don’t try to relieve the tension.

Even if somebody asks me blunt questions, I say, I don’t know.

The God I have come to know is not the homophobic taskmaster that was taught to me in many church spaces. The God I’ve come to know I have met through the ethic of softness as I’ve learned to love myself.

I’ll just say this for the Bible: Do I read this collection of books — this library, so to speak — for inspiration or knowledge? Yeah, I read it every day. Do I also know that it contains some of the worst treatments of humans and worst human interactions? Yeah.

Softness helps me to hold all those things and just say they are all true.

I want to ask what will seem like a silly question, but it’s one that I hold more seriously each day. Why do we need to love ourselves? Some days I feel like I just need to love myself enough to show up and do the work. “Who cares if I love myself? There are more important tasks at hand, like loving my neighbor.

We have to live in this society with other human beings. And the fact that we don’t love ourselves is how we have got into the predicament that we’re in as a society. The way we can vote and not think about one another is proof that we don’t love ourselves. The way that we can argue online is proof that we don’t have a rock-solid center of love for ourselves.

For me, yes, there is intrinsic value that happens when you love yourself. It’s beautiful. It should just be a standalone thing. But! I would say the fact that we have to live on this planet with one another means that loving ourselves becomes the impetus to being able to build community. There can’t be communal ethics, there can’t be community building, without first the love of oneself.

Everyone throws that “community,” “familial” language around. And it’s gonna require radical self-love.

bell hooks wrote a lot about this. The more I spend time loving myself well, the better I can interact with people on a deeper level and have grace for idiosyncrasies.

Your own idiosyncrasies or others’ or both?

I love my idiosyncrasies [laughs] — it’s both, but I would say the idiosyncrasies of others. When I’m really loving myself well, and I’m in that place of healthy introspection, I encounter the idiosyncrasies of others, and I know what it’s like to be loved.

I know what it’s like to be misunderstood. So, I assume maybe there’s something I’m not getting. It allows me to ask questions rather than making assumptions.

You are studying the intersection of Blackness and disability. What have you learned?

For those who don’t have a working definition of disability: Disability is any impairment of the mind or of the body, physical or mental, that inhibits you from engaging in society [in a way that’s] deemed normal.

So, [some things have] been made a disability because of the society that we live in. Is neurodivergence in and of itself a disability? No, it’s actually neutral. America has made it a disability because it doesn’t honor everyone’s way of knowing and perceiving.

Years ago, as I started studying disability, I was unaware of how many Black people are living with disability. I didn’t know that Black Americans have [some of] the highest rates of disability in America.

[According to the CDC, 1 in 4 Black American adults are disabled. Three in 10 American Indian and Alaska Native adults are disabled.]

And that was juxtaposed by how many friends I have who are clearly disabled [but] would never label themselves as that. They’re taking anxiety medicines, they have fibromyalgia, they have chronic back pain. And they don’t like that term “disability” because it feels like their worth is diminished.

It’s important for me to do this work because I want Black people to have a gentle place to land; to know that disability can be empowering when we’re building communities together based upon who we actually are.

The sheer numbers sadden me. I think of America as a disabling apparatus. Take Flint, Mich., for example: People are being disabled. Not of their own free will, but just because they live in a place that has made them disabled. We need resources for them.

Black people are beautiful people to me, and they are often not given the space to be disabled. And that’s important for me to speak about and write about.