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.