The Reconstruct

In the first few moments of Exhibiting Forgiveness, La’Ron (John Earl Jelks) is beaten after he defends a store clerk in a convenience store robbery. The violence, like most of the violence in the film, is just out of view. Soon the scene shifts and Tarrell (André Holland) wakes from a nightmare. His wife Aisha (Andra Day) reassures Tarrell that he is safe in the beautiful world they are building for themselves as artists and parents.

I contain multiple identities. On the one hand, I am a Black man whose ancestors were enslaved, then pushed into ghettos, and now exploited through the unjust prison labor system. On the other hand, I am living on the stolen land of the Duwamish people. I can’t escape the colonial history of the U.S. and its reverberating effects.

There are times when I try to convince myself that, because I am a Black person living in the U.S., it’s not my responsibility to wrestle with the legacy of colonialism and how I might be a beneficiary of that history. However, after my conversation with author and activist Patty Krawec, I am convinced that I need to view myself through a more complicated lens.

In Against Me!’s song “I Was a Teenage Anarchist,” Laura Jane Grace sings, “I was a teenage anarchist / But the politics were too convenient.” The song is a catchy tune that has stuck with me, even if I’ve outgrown the punk-rock-emo scene. But unlike Grace, I have not outgrown my anarchistic impulses.

Popularly, anarchy is associated with “chaos,” but I think of it more in terms of avant-garde jazz, where everyone is working together in their own unique way to create a sort of consensus.

So, when I recently heard of a new book focused entirely on the nexus between anarchism and Christianity, I had to investigate.

Two queer pastors, Anna Blaedel and M Jade Kaiser, were having dinner together in 2017, when they posed a question to each other in the spirit of meaningful fun: What would it be like if they could create a public space for conversations about and liturgical resources for transformation, at the outer margins of Christianity and beyond?
 

Travel back in time with me to the early 2000s: Celebrities were openly fat-shamed in tabloids, and supermarkets were overrun by all things “low” — low-calorie, low-fat, low-carb, low-sodium, or low-sugar. Diets like Atkins, paleo, keto, raw foods, and juice cleanses abounded. TV shows like “The Biggest Loser” and “My 600-lb Life” were used to paint fat people as lazy, undisciplined, and disgusting.

It goes without saying that we’ve got plenty of dread to spare this year. Since President Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020, former President Donald Trump and his allies have falsely claimed that the election was rigged. Millions of Americans agree. Meanwhile, many other Americans fear how far Trump could take his authoritarian impulses in a second term. As our political culture becomes more tightly wound, the nuts and bolts of our democracy seem to be coming loose. For the average citizen, it can be hard to verify every claim we see circulated in partisan media or online. Despite election law being clear that a party can choose its nominee at convention, for example, many Republicans claimed it was “too late” for Biden to step down from his reelection campaign.

“To me being Christian means f---ing s--- up,” Layshia Clarendon told ESPN’s Katie Barnes. “That’s what Jesus came to do. It means disrupting and fighting for the most marginalized people.” During the 2020 WNBA season, they helped lead players in protesting police violence against Breonna Taylor and other Black women. Clarendon helped launch the WNBA’s Social Justice Council, alongside players like Sydney Colson, Breanna Stewart, Tierra Ruffin-Pratt, A’ja Wilson, and Satou Sabally. Clarendon signed on to the Athletes for Ceasefire in Gaza, and they launched a foundation to provide grants that help transgender people access health care and other services.

As I remember it, I was first introduced to Jamie Grace’s career while listening to a Christian radio show in 2011. At the time, she was a 19-year-old college student majoring in child and youth development, recently signed to a major Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) label, and was less than a year away from being nominated for the 2012 Grammy Award for Contemporary Christian Music Song. She was a Black woman in an industry largely made up of white men; she was open about her diagnoses of Tourette syndrome, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder at a time when I wasn’t aware of many people who were; and she was a very skilled guitar player, songwriter, and singer. As such, it seemed obvious that she had a bright future in an industry that needed new energy.

Over nearly three decades, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — a self-described “preacher, author, and community builder” — has often played Baruch to Rev. William J. Barber II’s Jeremiah. Through efforts like the Moral Mondays movement and the Poor People’s Campaign, the pair has worked to articulate what they describe as a “Third Reconstruction,” reflected in an agenda that unites the nation’s poor to confront “the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation.”

"A lot of psychologists, sociologists, and theologians talk about the fact that forgiveness is really for the forgiver and not the person being forgiven. But that’s not true in a lot of our American narratives [where] forgiveness is actually for the person who did the wrong, so they can be “healed.” We’ve lost the victims in that conversation."

Last week, the University of Michigan announced that it would begin selling alcohol at its football games.

For decades, alcohol sales had been largely limited at college football events, but in 2019 the Southeastern Conference began allowing its schools to sell alcohol at games. Now, more than 80 percent of the top football schools sell alcohol on game day.

In the U.S. church, opinions on alcohol seem more polarized than politics. On the one hand, many conservative and fundamentalist faith traditions treat all alcohol consumption as a sin, some going so far as to suggest that Jesus turned water into nonalcoholic wine. On the other, progressive and moderate faith traditions incorporate alcohol into church with events like beer-and-hymns, theology-on-tap, and “pub churches.”

Anyone who has spent even a second in a prison knows it’s hell. Growing up in church, I noticed people who participated in the church’s prison ministry were both respected and feared. Respected because they were doing what the writer of Hebrews admonishes believers to do regarding those in chains: Remember them as though you were in prison with them (13:3). But they were feared because many of them had actually been in prison. Rather than the prison system or the criminal legal system being classified as barbaric, it was the prisoners who were typically understood to be barbarians.

Joe Ingle has spent a lot of time in prison. Ingle is a writer and death row minister who has been active in prison ministry since the ’70s. A native of North Carolina and a graduate of Union Theological Seminary, Ingle has dedicated his life to being present with and advocating for the 1.9 million people incarcerated in the U.S., especially the more than 2,300 incarcerated people on death row.

Brenda Salter McNeil is an ordained minister in the Evangelical Covenant Church, associate professor of reconciliation studies at Seattle Pacific University, and the author of multiple books on the topic of racial reconciliation. McNeil is acutely aware of critical attitudes toward racial reconciliation and is seeking to emphasize the importance of reparations and intersectionality in her new book, Empowered to Repair. I sat down with McNeil to talk about reconciliation, Obama, and Black support for former president Donald J. Trump.

If you’re the type of person who discusses politics online, you’re likely to have heard of Godwin’s law. In 1990, Mike Godwin, a First Amendment lawyer, invented this rule to address a common occurrence: The longer online debate drags on, the more likely someone commits the fallacy of reductio ad Hitlerum — i.e., the comparison of someone or something to Adolf Hitler or the Nazis.

Invoking Nazis, as Godwin suggests, is a lazy way of ending a debate. I also think it’s usually motivated by a shallow understanding of history and an insensitivity toward Holocaust victims.

But there’s gotta be times when referencing the Nazis is warranted, right? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as U.S. politics continues down the path of polarization and a segment of Christians unabashedly preach a message of domination. We need a sharper critique of Christian nationalism and the Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump that’s deeper than simply labeling the former group as “Nazis” and the latter individual “Hitler.” But where do we begin?

I was in high school, visiting my grandparents’ church in Peru, Ind., and the theme for the Sunday school class was “money.” The teacher was quick to bring up a verse that has always sounded like it would be a better fit in Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack than the Bible. “The love of money is the root of all evil,” the teacher said, summarizing and abbreviating 1 Timothy 6:10. “It’s not that money itself is evil. Objects, in and of themselves, cannot be evil,” he explained. “It’s a matter of the heart.” That logic sat weirdly with me and so I raised my hand to respond. “Don’t we believe that idols are objects and that they are evil? Also, doesn’t the Bible teach us to resist temptation? So wouldn’t it make sense to resist the temptation of money to avoid all the evil that comes with it?”

I originally met educator and grassroots theologian David Leong in 2016 after I emailed him on a whim, telling him I was coming to visit friends in Seattle and that I’d like to meet him for coffee. I had just read an advanced copy of his book Race and Place, about churches in urban contexts, and was impressed by the conversational tone it took when addressing issues like race, class, and gentrification.

Jonathan Brooks is now the lead pastor of Lawndale Christian Community Church in the Chicago neighborhood of North Lawndale. The major theological conviction of LCCC is to love God and love the neighborhood, which is predominantly Black and has experienced years of government disinvestment. The way the church community puts into practice its theological convictions is by working with neighbors to improve the material circumstances of all who live there.

I love documentaries. I try to watch a minimum of one per week. I am especially drawn to documentaries like Born in Synanon — a documentary about a rehab community that eventually became a cult — because it wrestles with questions around race and religion. These two subjects are endlessly fascinating to me.

So, when I heard about Faith in Blackness, I knew I would have to see it. In October 2023, one of the executive producers, Josué Perea, invited me to a screening at the University of Washington. The documentary explores the relationship between AfroLatine spirituality and how that spirituality shapes a person’s identity and understanding of the divine.

Michael Wear’s book makes the argument that for Christians to engage in politics responsibly and approach political conversations openly, they must focus on spiritual formation, discipleship, and centering Christ in all that they do. Politics “shapes us spiritually,” Wear writes in the book. And he hopes Christians will place their political action under the authority of Christian discipleship.

Tran won’t settle for simply critiquing racial capitalism or popular anti-racist enterprises that steer clear of economics. Tran believes that Christian theology offers an alternative story to the economy of racial capitalism, an alternative that finds its locus in what he describes as the “divine economy.”

“Something I often heard was that ‘there’s not enough Black Catholics.’ [That] the numbers of Black Catholics are not big enough to justify doing a survey into this community. But that was in complete contradiction with what I was seeing when I was at these rallies and with people who were engaging with the Black Lives Matter movement.”

When I was living on the West Side of Chicago, friends and family would often say that they couldn’t comprehend why I would want to live in such a “dangerous” area. The exchange would usually go something like the following: “I can’t imagine why you’d want to live in Chicago, considering all the gun violence.” “Are you worried about me being shot by the police?” “Well, no. The criminals are the ones who are shooting people.” “The police shoot people too. And there’s a reason the ‘criminals’ are resorting to violence.”

I would then go on to explain the antecedents to Chicago’s gun violence: racial segregation and systemic disinvestment. Beginning in the 1950s and into the ’70s, white Chicagoans fled the South and West Sides because they couldn’t imagine being neighbors with Black people. Because of this, these areas became predominantly Black, and the city has refused to invest resources into these neighborhoods to reverse their poor conditions. The South and West Sides are still suffering from disinvestment today, and this disinvestment is a major contributor to gun violence.

As we officially enter the season of primaries, advertising campaigns, and debates, faith communities are as central to the election process as they ever have been. Even with the nationwide decline in religiosity and trust in institutions, religious leaders and congregations are central community builders for millions of people in the U.S.

While I was attending seminary, I came across a book outside of our assigned texts that would help transform my thinking on LGBTQ+ inclusion in the church. The name of the book was Our Lives Matter: A Womanist Queer Theology, and the author of the book was womanist theologian Pamela R. Lightsey.

Up to that point in my life, I had been taught that being a Christian while also proudly identifying as a member of the LGBTQ+ community was impossible. But Lightsey’s Our Lives Matter challenged those preconceived notions as she argued for full LGBTQ+ celebration within the universal church. I began to realize that my discrimination was not only hurting LGBTQ+ people, it was also hindering my ability to imagine a world in which all people could be free. The lesson I took away from that book was this: If we don’t have the capacity to imagine a world in which LGBTQ+ people are free to be fully themselves, then our imagination of liberation is truncated.