beset by religion

Below is the scripted version of my remarks at the campus event organized by our local chapter of SDS today. 

I'm speaking today as someone who--y'all may not know this about me--in a former life, was a preacher. So today, I'm gonna preach.

To the people in this crowd who are religious believers of some sort, and to people not among this crowd--maybe over there on the sidewalk somewhere--who identify as religious believers. And to people here who do not identify with any particular set of religious beliefs or tradition.

On the role of religion and religious belief, in the public square, in this political moment.

I saw a yikyak post last week (and yes, I repent), and it said something like: "don't y'all give up on religion just bc you've been wounded by bad religion in the past"

It's absolutely true that religion is often a tool wielded by oppressors.

And it's also true that in every place and every time where religion is being used to oppress and harm, we also find religion and religious belief present on the side of the oppressed.

The question is not whether 'religion' is itself good or bad but whether your religious beliefs are properly oriented to the good and y'all this is the thing that drove a Younger Me into the study of theology because as a devout, and I mean deeply devoted, preacher's kid from Middle Tennessee who'd spent her whole life in the church, in college I was haunted by the question, what if the gospel, the definitive "good news," what if the gospel...isn't good for people? What happens when the good news isn't good?

See, I was starting to see, now that I was in college--now that I was no longer a child, and like the Apostle Paul, could no longer continue to think like a child--now that I was in the world and growing up, I could see that the things I had been taught to believe (and taught to teach others to believe) were causing harm to people. Weren't good news. Were promoting condemnation and judgment, not care; were promoting indifference to suffering, not action; were promoting exclusion, not inclusion; ignorance, in the name of piety, not curiosity or truth-seeking or wisdom. I was taught to be concerned with being "correct," and with making sure other people were too. And I was beginning to see that this concern was the wrong concern; that this concern was harmful, not life-giving.

In this moment, in this political time and place, religion is on all sides. We are beset by religion. Self-identifying white evangelical Christians voted for the current President in overwhelming numbers. This is a statement of fact. In this moment, this political time and place, 'religion' is publicly and loudly allied with the oppressor.

And yet it is also true that in this moment, this political time and place, people of faith--self-identified Christians and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and Jains and Baha'i--are protesting and resisting and organizing and calling out the abuses and lawlessness and callousness and moral affronts of this government, not in spite of their beliefs but because of their beliefs, because their religious beliefs are properly oriented to the good.

So I want to say two more things: the first being, how do you know, if you're a religious person, whether you're the good kind or the bad kind? If your beliefs are truly good news, or bad news? How do you even know if you are wielding religion as an instrument of oppression? And the first thing to say in response to that is, well, are you even asking that question? Have you considered the possiblity that you might unwittingly be the bad guy, you might be the villain of the story? Or are you 100% convinced of your own righteousness? See that, right there, is your clue: You Might Be a Villain If... you are 100% convinced that of course not. The second thing I want to say in response is specifically Christian, from the book of James in the New Testament canon. James has a simple answer to this question. It's this: "religion that is pure and undefiled before god is this: visit the orphans and the widows in their affliction." And, "if you truly 'love your neighbor as yourself,'" then you're good but "if you show partiality"--to the rich over the poor, to your friends over you other neighbors, to the powerful over the helpless, to the citizens over the not-citizens--then, James says, "you sin." 

Y'all, it's just not that hard, it turns out. 

Are you loving your neighbor? Taking care of your neighbor? Or are you refusing to even recognize that person as a neighbor and instead calling them "illegal" and standing by while they get dragged by masked men into unmarked cars to be stuffed onto airplanes to be sent to countries they've never belonged to for crimes they never committed?

In that parable we call the "Good Samaritan," when Jesus was asked that famous follow-up evasive question--by a lawyer, naturally--attempting to find out the exact minimum of moral effort required of him to be properly neighborly, so he could do that and nothing more, Jesus flipped the script. He asked the lawyer instead, "who was the neighbor to" that man left for dead on the road. And the answer, grudgingly given, was "the one who cared for him."

Be the one who cares. That's how you know.

Finally, a word to those folks here who don't ascribe to religious beliefs of any particular sort: keep this space a big tent, keep this space a cyborg coalition, of every kind of believer and non-believer who has arrived, in their own way and for their own reasons, at the conclusion that this political moment, this time and place, demands their voice, their protest, their action, their care. Don't let's alienate each other over side quarrels when the moment demands joint action and solidarity. It is a mistake to think that you cannot ally for the common good with someone who's arrived at their understanding of the good from another path than yours. In the end, it's simple. The message is the same for the believer and the non-believer: just be the ones who care. Together, let's be the ones who care.

it's a birthday today

There's not much I can say about this, because unlike OG rudetruth, I am now aware that my kids do not appreciate being mentioned by me on social media and certainly refuse to be pictured in any way, ever, for any reason, no thank you very much MOM.

So, to acknowledge this moment of celebration, here's what I will be baking today:

America's Test Kitchen Gluten-Free Chocolate Layer Cake, with the trued-and-true fantastic ATK Chocolate Frosting Recipe

Mom's cheesecake, which calls for 3, yes, 3 blocks of cream cheese

(some kind of dinner? but clearly, this is optional and does not really matter.)

Pictures forthcoming...

Weekend Review(s)

 Blob: A Love Story, by Maggie Su and Sinners, written, directed and produced by Ryan Coogler

So, this past weekend, I finally opened up a book lent to me by my colleague, whose description of it at our regular staff meeting a few weeks ago started with, "I have feelings about this book, but I don't know if I love it or I hate it, or maybe both. I need someone to read this so we can talk about it." Sold!

We (me + spouse, not aforementioned colleague) also finally achieved a date, although frankly, it was more effort than it should have been, but that's okay. So we managed (after a couple tries) to successfully get tickets to Sinners, at the newly renovated Epic Theatre in St. Augustine--which is very definitely much more swank than it used to be. Yippee!

What to talk about first??? Let's start with the book, since I finished it on the way to the theatre (I had about 20 pages left, and I just couldn't wait till bedtime).

My borrowed copy of Blob: A Love Story is now in the hands of to its next office recipient, because my initial comments about it intrigued her enough to snag it as I was returning it to its actual owner. So this review is going to be casual rather than careful, since I no longer have a copy for reference, and that's too bad, because Blob merits a careful review. For instance: I enjoyed it from about page 2, but I knew I was really in love (it is, after all, a love story) when I hit the sentence: "My parents, those level-headed mousekillers, would know what to do." That's a paraphrase, and I can't give you the page reference. But it's there, and it's...perfection.

Maggie Su can fucking write.

The main theme of Blob is the desperate, ugly, uncomfortable, inevitable stretch of time that all of us must--somehow--navigate in order to become, well, an actual person. For Bob (the eponymous Blob), this is literalized. For our narrator and protagonist, this is externalized in her efforts to make B(l)ob into a person; her failures, visible to her because externalized as this bizarre person-making project, eventually and finally make manifest her own necessary grappling with person-becoming-hood. I don't know how to say more without spoilers. 

Or you could say: Girl meets Blob, tries to make Blob into Ideal Boyfriend, fails, learns that Love isn't Coercion, and in Respecting the Other learns to respect herself.

Or, you could say: wow, that girl really just needed some competent academic advising. But perhaps that observation is a bit...particular to my specific locatedness in the world. 

Sinners.

I had no notion, really, of what we were walking into. I am late to the genre of scary movies (a deficit of growing up CofC), so I am not going to say anything insightful along these lines. And I don't know that I can avoid spoilers here, and I think I probably need a second viewing at least to really catch all the things. But a first viewing is enough to show you that something weird, interesting, complicated, historical and multi-faceted is going on with this story.

Mainly, what I want to capture here is a sense of the after-movie conversation we had in the car and walking around the grocery store on the way home. We started with the observation that the (spoiler) vampires in the movie appear at the door with a strange, insipidly harmonized and repetitive Irish-y folk song, and that Irish music (much more musically interesting and compelling) shows up again in the vampire gathering. This is a symmetrical contrast to the visually and musically stunning scene in the Juke, where the musical ancestral spirits are conjured by the talents of the human geniuses playing and communing. The contrast is of the celebration of multiplicity and diversity (humans in the Juke) to an assimilated univocality (vampires). But it would be a mistake to collapse vampirism onto white culture simpliciter (represented through the Irish). Instead: we ought to read the assimilation of Irish distinctiveness into the vampiric assimilative univocality as tragic, a commentary on the rootlessness and existential restlessness of an unmoored identity that finds its only definitive reference point as endless, insatiable desire for dominance. The vampires are code for Whiteness, absolutely, but a Whiteness that, as a void, erases Irishness along with erasing everything else. 

Further: this vampiric Whiteness is not just simple racism, as if the vampires are just the monster symbolic form of the Klan. Because the Klan is there too--as itself. Klan racism is battled straightforwardly in the last scene of the movie--vicious, brutal, direct racism is confronted directly. As a separate battle. So...the vampires aren't Klan. They're a different kind of racism. An assimiliative, inclusive, kind of racism. A tokenist, "fellowship of love," spiritual-rationalized kind of racism. Soft white supremacy, as contrasted with direct brutal violent white supremacy. Maybe, DEI-correct white supremacy.

Anyhow, these are first draft uncensored thoughts. I'd love to hear your responses to the movie when you see it!

fake inspiration

fake news   intelligence  inspiration

Look, it's just fake. It's artificial, all right, but it ain't intelligence. It doesn't even fake intelligence all that well for all that long. Can it fool you, if you're half-reading a thing and don't care very much about it? Sure, but that's YOU doing the work, covering for IT. There's only one intelligence in that exchange, and it's yours. And you're only half tuned in.

I used to use a nifty little thing named "Inspirobot" in class sometimes, back when I taught stuff where this was relevant. It's still around, and I still find it amusing, so I built it a little home in my sidebar there, and you can check it out. It's a brilliant internet timesuck and it is well prior to ChatGPT or Claude or any of those things.

I would ask the students to do an in-class writing exercise responding to these inspirational quotes and explain what they mean. And the students would diligently write paragraphs explaining these quotes. Until they stopped being able to make any kind of sense of them. Then we would talk about meaning, and how it was being generated, and by what/whom. 

Because back then, no one was tempted to think Inspirobot was actually doing the inspiring.

rebirthing

My final blog posts on rude truth were meditations on the birth doula training I was finishing in 2015. So I thought I'd pick up where I left off (sort of), with the theme of rebirth. Welcome back to rude truth, again, nearly a decade later.

I might've gone with a new title altogether, since this is a new start and all. Plus, a year after I started the OG blog, Philip Roth used the phrase for his 2006 title and ever since I've felt a little odd about competing with a famous author person in google searches. But I still love it, goddammit, and the Emerson snippet that is its inspiration. (I assume this is also Roth's allusion but to be honest I have never actually read that book so I don't actually know. But surely it has to be.)

I also find the practice of speaking rude truth difficult, and always have, and it doesn't hurt to keep this in front of our eyeballs as an aspiration. Especially now.

Changes: well, I'm older, my kids are older, my back lowkey hurts a lot and perimenopause is a helluva constant companion, I've given up on the tenure-track thing but I'm lucky enough to have a job that keeps me in contact with academia and students, I've gotten divorced and remarried, and divorced, and astonishingly happily remarried, I haven't been to church but once since Covid, and don't really practice as a birth doula but use my DONA training in some way every single day. Rebirth has been a long and twisting negotiation through shifting circumstance, but I came through it okay. 

(I don't know if I'm the baby or the mother, there.)

A decade or so ago, I was still envisioning work within the Churches of Christ on gender justice as my life's project, and assuming that at some point I would find myself teaching theology in a Church of Christ school, or perhaps some other university, but still, orienting my scholarly work around contributing to the Church of Christ world in some significant way. I never actually intentionally "left" the CofC, as so many of my smart and principled friends have found it necessary to do. Instead I just gradually became aware that somewhere along the line, the CofC world had withdrawn from me, and I from it, and there was nothing much we had to say to one another that made any sense any more. It was a weird sort of break up, a very millenial ghosting type of thing. 

So I'm a theologian-at-large, and maybe even exile, who doesn't really do theology much anymore, but perhaps this is what blogs are really good for, yeah? The truth is, I don't know why I'm cranking up the old thing now. I don't have a coherent project in mind, unlike the old days. I'm not searching for one, either. 

But perhaps this is exactly parallel to the very beginning: in 2005, I didn't want an audience, and didn't have a project, other than my blog was a desperate reach for a mechanism to help recover the ability to speak aloud what I was thinking, when the competitive atmosphere of doctoral seminars had produced a kind of paralysis in me. It's difficult to speak the rude truth into any space, but when the spaces you're inhabiting make it much easier to keep quiet, you need a place to practice. That was the original point. And maybe that's all a blog is really meant to be.