Most Beautifully Various

Thomas Bayes was the Presbyterian pastor who came up with the equation underlying all modern probability theory, but he was also a Nonconforming Christian.

That meant a very particular thing at that particular place and time in human history.  In reading his short essay on God's goodness, I did find myself wondering about how that might have formed and shaped how he thought.

His faith meant that during his lifetime, he was legally a second class citizen of England.   He had chosen not to swear fealty to the state religion of his time, and that made him ineligible for public benefits and public office.

But that also made him free.  As a Christian, Bayes didn't have to hew to any particular and mandated patter of belief or worship.   Having attended a Free Church myself for a while as a kid living in England, I suddenly have a clearer idea of just where that came from.  That peculiar PresbyBaptiMethoCongregationalism of my youth comes from the very corner of Christianity that Bayes inhabited.

It also meant that his view of dogma, doctrine, and orthodoxy would have been shaped by a deep awareness of being different.  Of being outside of the acceptable norm.  And from that place, openness to the new and the different is considerably easier.

As I worked through his 1731 essay on God's goodness, his openness to the creative power of difference surfaces repeatedly.  He resists, in particular, the idea that there is only one way to be Good.   That, from his Nonconforming perspective, seems both oppressive and limiting, and too much like the state religion that tried to enforce a single order.   He writes things like this:

"If the universe were to consist of one uniform sort of beings, however happy they might be, 'tis evident that they could not in some respects enjoy so great happiness as they might by variety..."

As for Creation itself, he sees variation and difference as amazing things, and a necessary part of a loving God's creative power.  As he describes it:

"..a most happy universe is so far from being unbeautifully uniform, that it must be most beautifully various..."

From that place, seeing chaos as creativity and possibility wouldn't have been much of a stretch.  I think Bayes would have liked the multiverse.

The Challenge of Diversity

This last Saturday at the meeting of National Capital Presbytery, I sat and watched as an impassioned but civil debate unfolded between conservatives and progressives.  The issue:  something we Presbyterians call 10-A.  Long and short of it, 10-A replaces language that was placed in the Presbyterian constitution back in the 1990s, language that explicitly forbids the ordination of gays, lesbians, and any sexually active unmarried person.  It replaces it with language that asks leadership to use confessional and scriptural standards to assess the calling of a leader...and that, as they say, leaves things open to interpretation.

It passed, of course, because NCP is a very progressive place.  What was interesting to me, particularly given my current coursework, was the "diversity dynamic" at play.  I sat near the back of the room, with a young Asian American Elder from my church.  Well after the start of the meeting, a little cluster of Ghanaian Presbyterians entered the room.  They were from a Ghanaian immigrant fellowship, one of the congregational startups in the DC area.  Their pastor, I knew, was one of those folks who is...with his culture...radically opposed to gay and lesbian ordination.  He'd brought the maximum number of elders to the meeting.  When he rose to speak, his rich warm fluid West African voice spoke of bafflement at how such a thing could be.  He also spoke, circuitously but clearly, of the division that this decision would bring, about how African Christians could not stand with a church that did not call same sex orientation sin.  Honestly, he's right.  It wasn't an idle threat, but a statement of unfortunate fact.

And when 10-A passed, and the time came to share in the Lord's Supper, he rose...along with many of the conservatives who'd spoken against it...and gathered his followers, and left.  I'm sure 2 Corinthians 6:14-18 was humming fiercely in their ears.

Well, he tried to take his group.  One Ghanaian stayed, sitting quietly, still in prayer.  The pastor came back, and spoke a few quiet but frustrated-sounding words to the young man.  But he said something softly back, and the pastor went off again, seeming a bit miffed.  The young man didn't take communion.  But neither did he leave, not until the worship was over.

I've been reading lately a great deal about diversity and multiculturalism in the church, and how to be a leader in a diverse community of faith.  The two books I've cranked through in the last two days have been smart, thoughtful, and potentially useful after a bit of translation.  They're a bit...um..."academic," meaning I can't imagine the flow of academese doing anything other than putting a truly diverse audience to sleep.  Liberal academe thinks it's talking the talk, but it has no clue how to really speak across the boundaries.  Not the boundaries of race, but of class and culture.  The common tongue is not our strength.

But what I haven't encountered...not yet...is an acknowledgment that sometimes you'll encounter cross-cultural dynamics that ain't all sweetness and light, or joyously constructive dialectic, or in which the expectations of the "dominant culture" within a community clashes with values that a leader is not willing to set aside.

Some of those expectations are stylistic.  Within my own church context, which is still strongly formed by the Korean evangelical tradition, I've been told for years that I need to be more authoritarian, more emotionally effusive, less deliberate and inclusive, and less intellectual.  I'm still told that.  Well, I will be for the next six months, at least.  I've modified my style somewhat, but there's only so far you can go before you start violating your own sense of personal spiritual integrity.  Ah well.  Perhaps the next pastor will be more prone to screaming tirades when crossed and shouty-weepy sturm-und-drang preaching.  Might help.  Who knows?

But there are differences that go beyond style.  There are church cultures that insist women should radically submit to men's authority, forever perpetuating the curse of the Fall in a community that claims to have been redeemed.  There are cultures that don't see the new thing that God is working in the church for those who were created with same-sex orientation.

A leader in such a context needs to ask themselves:  If those things are alien to my faith, how do I maintain a sense of integrity and still lead people who live out their faith and proclaim the gospel in ways that radically and fundamentally differ from the grace I have experienced in Christ's teachings?

That can be done, of course.  The font of God's love is limitless, if only we seek to drink from it.   But if a community is to function, there are boundaries to how much tolerance can be expressed.  A thing cannot easily take its antithesis into itself.  

For all of my disagreement with their position, I understand why those who rose to leave the meeting, be they African or just deeply conservative, left.  The bonds of community no longer felt like they were sustainable.

White Like Me

As I dig into the reading for the second of my upcoming doctoral classes, I find myself doing so with a tiny bit of trepidation.  The course I'll be taking is on Leadership and Diversity, and to be frank, I'm a tick concerned.  Not with the relevance or importance of diversity within the church.  Not at all.  Congregations that are monocultures tend to be drab and authoritarian, and poor reflections of Christ's command to really love those who aren't you.  I'm both tolerant of and can enjoy difference, in both form, organizational culture and theology, so long as that difference doesn't include fundamental violations of the Great Commandment.  That tends to trouble me.

What makes me a bit leery is my fear that this course will make me...once again...feel like a conservative.  I'm not, of course.  Open and inclusive?  Yup.  Affirming of women?  Eco-friendly?  Uh huh.  But there are strains of academic leftism that leave me gnashing my teeth.  Things can get so monomanaically focused on race and gender that the central message of the Gospel...and of theology itself...seems to fade away into nothing.  This bugs me, for some reason.

So diving into this class, I hit the book that I could tell would annoy me the most first.  Just to get it out the way, if you will.  The book is White Like Me, by antiracism activist Tim Wise.  As a Honkey-American, I could just smell how difficult it would be to read, and I wasn't mistaken.

The entire book is a screed against white privilege, by which Wise means the inherent advantage that individuals of European background have in the United States.  It's not an imaginary thing, of course.  Being "white" often means being materially advantaged, particularly in the American South.  It also means that you pretty much never need to work against the specter of racism in day-to-day life.  There is no such thing as Driving While White, for instance.    We are not yet a truly post-racial culture.

But for all of the ways in which race needs to be challenged as a way in which we value one another, I found Wise's critique off.

His tendency to see race as primarily black and white was understandable given his life in New Orleans...but that is no longer the reality of race in America.  Racial dynamics in this country now include growing Latino and Asian communities, as well as communities of African, Afro-Caribbean, and Middle Eastern immigrants.  He sorta kinda gets at the multivalent character of ethnicity in 21st century America, but only sorta kinda.  It feels dated.

Wise also seems so focused on race that he's oblivious to class.  "Privilege" in our culture is often mediated by race, but it is also profoundly mediated by socioeconomic status.  While my WASPiness has certainly conferred advantage, what's more significant is that 1) I come from a stable extended family unit, 2) both of my parents have graduate degrees, 3) both parents were engaged and interested in my education and upbringing, and 4) money was never a significant worry for my family when I was growing up.  For all of our proclamations about social mobility, class divisions are self-perpetuating, creating cultures that reinforce status and privilege.  There is often a magnifying interplay between ethnicity and socioeconomics...but Wise just doesn't seem to get it, or glosses over it.

But my biggest struggle reading Wise is that he comes across as profoundly graceless.  Maybe it was that the last book I read was Martin Luther King, Jr.'s reflections on the bus boycott in Montgomery.  Dr. King's measured, intelligent, gracious, and faith-centered tone was nowhere to be found in White Like Me.  Wise is all leftist truculence, snarky, personal, and bitter.  He's all rage, all the time.  The world is full of idiots, none of whom see how racist they all are.  Conservatives and moderates and liberals who don't share his rage are all equally useless.

As, frankly, are the ethical teachings of Christianity.  In one of the few sections where he overtly mentions faith, he describes a fight he's picked with some Christians over the depiction of Jesus as white.  When they try to say that color doesn't matter, he lays into them...and then lays into their assertion that faith leads people to try to transcend race.   "I mean, the Golden Rule has been around for like, forever, and hasn't done much of anything to get rid of racism," he snarks.

Having just read...from the source...how profoundly Dr. King's Christian faith and the faith of the African Americans in the Civil Rights Movement influenced their actions, and how that very ethic was the foundation of King's understanding of what he did, it's clear that Wise doesn't have a clue what he's talking about when it comes to Jesus and race.

It's good to have him out of the way, then.  The other books look considerably more relevant.

Diversity

Following on my post from the other day reflecting on something Carol said over at tribalchurch, why diversity?

I mean, yeah, leftys and lib'rals tend to go on about how important it is to be inclusive.  We could klatch endlessly about the liberation of transgendered Guatemalans living with dwarfism.  Sorry, "little people."  Or, oops, that's gente pequeña.  Or transexuales poco de Guatemala.  So hard to keep track of the lingo sometimes.

The reasons to care about difference, though, need to go well beyond simply wanting to include everyone because it's inclusive, even though that word makes us feel as warm and tingly as a hot brimming cup of fair trade Ethiopian Yergacheffe.

Here, I think Christian progressives tend to fall back on the language of secular liberal academe, and we do so to our failing.  To my eyes, the deepest justification for diversity comes from within Scripture.  The great narrative arc of the Tanakh, the Gospels, and the Epistles rings out with stories of how vitally important it is that we be open to the other.

Yeah, I know, you can spin it the other way.  You can get all Ezra and kick out all them apostate furrin' wimmen and their mudblood children.  If you're a social conservative in a strict constructionist sense, there are plenty of opportunities within the tradition to stand firm against the creep of "syncretism" and/or those voices that seem to chip away at the authority you know is your birthright.  You can use the Bible to keep those loud whiny women in their place.  You can scripturally shout down those uppity colored folk.  But just 'cause it's the truth that affirms you in all you've been taught doesn't mean it won't wither to writhing embers in the hellfire of God's inexorable love.

From within the core metrics of our faith, there are some key operating assumptions about hearing the voices of folks different than us.

First, there's the Exodus presumption in favor of the stranger.  At a bare minimum, those who are different and those who are outside of the boundaries of our culture and our should be met with welcome, grace, and kindness.  Why?  Because our mythopoetic memory is of having been strangers and slaves in the land of Egypt. When we cried out for deliverance, it was the cry of the oppressed other that was heard by the Lord.   This is our story.  If we approach the other...any other...without a heart of compassion, then we have failed to understand the essence of the Biblical narrative and our place within it. 

Second, there's God's tendency to consistently use those who ain't part of "us" to school us, save us, or whup our behinds when they needs a whuppin'.  The prophets through whom God spoke stood outside of the structures of human culture and power.  They lived in the wilderness because those in power tended to drive them there, preferring instead the saccharine comforts of those who told them what they wanted to hear.   God goes so far as to use even those who aren't part of the faith at all.  When Israel forgot about covenant and justice and mercy, and got to be all about power and privilege, Babylon was an instrument in God's hands.  When Israel wept, helpless and lost and broken by the rivers in Babylon, Cyrus of Persia was an instrument in God's hands to save them.  God is not part of our culture.  God is not part of any society.  God is not "us."  With us, yes.  Working in us and through us, maybe.  But if the Biblical narrative is to be ours, then we must live into the truth that God is present and active even in those who are radically other.  If we want to hear our Creator, then we have to listen and be present with the other. 

Finally, there's Christ's redemptive work.   Yeah, that.  Jesus reaffirms and radicalizes the Exodus favoring of the stranger.  The teachings of Jesus of Nazareth are oriented towards deep and God-centered engagement with the other, and in particular the other who is ostracized, hated, or powerless.  It is that baffling love for not just friends, not just family, but for the stranger and the enemy that makes Christianity a tradition that is 1) ever and always fundamentally countercultural and 2) worth following.

That isn't to say that Wuvvy Sparkleberry Jesus sprinkles lollipops and daisies on everyone.  Those who have worldly power, be it coercive or economic, well...Jesus has words for them.  Those words aren't easy ones.  Why?  Because defining ourselves in terms of society or the gun or the dollar turns us into adversaries of one another and of God.  Those forms of power make us approach others not in love, but with the intent of alienating them, or subjugating them, or profiting from them.

The more deeply we engage with those that worldly power declares other, the tax-collectors and the centurions and the lepers and the unclean, the more we manifest the Kingdom.

That, it would seem, is reason enough to make diversity a priority for Christians.

A Question of Diversity

With the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, I'm seriously stoked. Who'd have thought my 200-to-one bet would come in? I mean, dang. I had to argue a bit with my bookie about her cat's name, but Puddles Q. Puddleton still counts.

Given this potential new addition to the Supremes, there's a great deal of chatter in the media and the blogosphere about the role of diversity on the court. The whole event is highly charged, crackling with allegations on both sides of racial bias. Racism is, in the strange spin calculus of America's binary political system, the primary charge being leveled against Sotomayor by her opponents. Given the rather tenuous and troubled linkage between the conservative movement and Latino culture, this seems a rather foolish approach. The most effective counterspin seems pretty straightforward: "So she's proud of her culture and her heritage, and that makes her racist? Being proud to be a Latina makes you racist?" I guess the Latina vote in Florida and Texas just aren't important any more. The GOP seems so deafened by the din in it's increasingly small echo-chamber that it's walking right into that one.

The charges that she's an "intellectual lightweight" aren't going to help them much either. So...she's a Latina, ergo she could only have gotten where she is with the help of bleeding heart liberals, ergo she must be una muchacha estúpida. Again, I'm not sure that conservatives grasp the whole concept of getting la gente to vote for your candidates.

The piece that most interests me in this whole media maelstrom, though, is the rather odd spin this puts on the religious makeup of the Court. If Sotomayor is confirmed, the Supreme Court will have a Catholic supermajority. Of the nine justices, six will be Catholic, two Jewish, and one Protestant. This little oddment hasn't really made it past the radar of the faith-blogosphere into the broader media, but it's interesting. There was a time when the idea of having a Catholic in a position of leadership was a radical thing. Now, people seem utterly unphased by the idea that one of the three branches of government...the one in which people have lifelong appointments....is two-thirds Catholic in a nation that is majority Protestant.

As my tinfoil hat is quite effective in keeping the transmissions from the Illuminati at bay, I don't worry too much about some great Catholic conspiracy to take over the nation. What I do find myself wondering is what factors have lead to this seemingly random and utterly disproportionate weighting.

This seems mostly a construct of interesting dynamics within the conservative movement. Given that two of the last three administrations have been conservative, and that the conservative wing of the Court (Roberts/Scalia/Alito/Thomas) is entirely Catholic, I find myself wondering: is there something about conservative Protestants that makes them steer away from careers in law and government?

In stark contrast to the vigorous intellectual life that is encouraged in certain quarters of the Catholic church and Catholic systems of education, the American evangelical movement has been typically charged with a strong anti-intellectualism, favoring instead an emotive approach to faith. I'm not sure that this is all that is at work here, as within fundamentalism in particular the life of the mind can be surprisingly active. It is constrained within presuppositions about Biblical inerrancy, sure. But it's amazing how much intellectual capital one can expend defending that worldview.

What I think is more significant is the conservative Protestant understanding of the role of the state. Moving in step with cultural conservatism, the evangelical movement has woven into itself a deep distrust of government and the federal government in particular. This doesn't mean that evangelical Conservative Protestants are averse to practicing law. Some of the most intensely fundamentalist souls I've interacted with have been lawyers. Folks who get off on the structures of the law can find the legalism of a literalist faith deeply affirming. Even Jesus noted that tendency on occasion.

But given the deep distrust of government that defines Protestant conservatism, finding evangelicals whose calling is to federal civil service might be something of a challenge.