“Judas, An Imaginary Character We Have All Met”

 “Judas, An Imaginary Character We Have All Met”  April 2, 2023- Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

Remove the passion narrative from any thought of it being a historical account and ask yourself, “What does Mark (I’m calling the first author of the passion narrative “Mark” because we know of no earlier source) want to tell us in his version of the last days and the death of Jesus?” If Judas represents Jerusalem’s Temple/Priesthood version of Judaism, and the blood kin of Jesus, both nuclear family and nation, then what does his role as betrayer play? 

https://chqdaily.wordpress.com/2012/06/29/spong-breaks-down-literary-myth-of-judas-iscariot/

Taken from a report in the Chautauqua Daily on a lecture delivered there in 2012 by Bishop John Shelby Spong 

I will beg your indulgence for those of you who already know this too well as I dust off my undergraduate philosophy degree to air it out for a moment. The foundation of Greek philosophy rests on the shoulders of these three guys from the 5^th century before the common era. Socrates was a teacher in Athens who never wrote a book or, as best we can tell, ever really had a formal job. But he was a mentor to Plato who was a friend and witness to Socrates’ execution. And Plato wrote a lot and was a formal teacher. His most famous and most prolific student was Aristotle. 

We have several references to Socrates in other Greek writings but we only really know about him because Plato made him famous by using his name in the thousands of pages of dialogues that he wrote.

Socrates was executed by the government of Athens, evidently because his constant question was a threat to the established order of Athens and so he was sentenced to death by being forced to drink poison. Plato’s first writings may have simply been an attempt at telling the story of the unjust execution of Socrates, and so, what he wrote were stories of events and conversations. He listed the people who were there and gave an account of what was said. We call these “dialogues” because it isn’t quite a novel, it has some action in it but it is mostly an account of conversations.

Plato had established a writing style that he went on to use to write dialogues that he used as textbooks for his students. His dialogues examined the meaning of important concepts, but he wrote all of them, using Socrates as the main character. There may have been a certain loyalty to history when Plato originally wrote about the trial and execution of Socrates, but Socrates quickly became a character used to give voice to what Plato wanted to say. In your undergraduate philosophy class, if you were fortunate enough to have taken that class, you were told that Plato used Socrates as an “interlocular” – that is, a fictional character used to voice an idea or a perspective. 

Reading Plato tricked a lot of us into becoming philosophy majors because his dialogues were pretty easy to read and they taught us how to critically examine an idea through vigorous debate. I doubt that there is a lawyer in America today who didn’t have to read Plato’s Republic in law school as an introduction to a rigorous definition of justice. Sadly, this also makes them think that they now understand Greek philosophy. 

None of Plato’s readable writing style seemed to rub off on Aristotle whose writing is dense and extremely difficult to read…. As is almost all of the rest of philosophy. The people who hear me quoting Soren Kierkegaard so often that they decide to buy one of his books and read it for themselves, come to look at me with a kind of loathing as if I had tricked them into feeling stupid. 

All of which is to say that turning a historical figure into an interlocular in order to use that person’s fame and credibility to teach an important point was a common literary technique for centuries before Jesus was born. Look at the book of Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah initially presents itself as being the preaching of a single prophet, but it covers a 120-year long period of the history of Judah. I’ve been preaching for 45 years, and I can tell you that I don’t have another 75 years in me. There may have been a historical prophet named Isaiah but there were at least two more preachers who used his name and reputation as an interlocular to carry their water.

The writers of the New Testament gospels wanted to tell us something about the teachings of Jesus and, possibly more importantly, they wanted to tell you about the religion that grew up around his name. They were not giving straight forward historical accounts but, one or two or three generations after he was dead, they used Jesus as an interlocular to convey their message. And in doing that, they used some characters in dialogue with Jesus who may or may not have been based on actual historical characters. There probably were historical disciples named Peter and James, for example, because there are references to them from sources outside of the gospels. 

His parents may have been named Mary and Joseph but if they were, the words attributed to them in the gospels are almost certainly fictional representations of older heroes from Hebrew scriptures. 

The oldest and, in many ways, the most reliable source of insight into the history of Jesus, oddly enough, comes from the only contemporary of Jesus to write any part of the New Testament, albeit someone who never actually met him, and that was the man we call the Apostle Paul. 

If I knew a couple of dozen people who were actually interested in doing a Bible study, I would use the late Marcus Borg’s book, the Evolution of the Word, in which he puts the books of the New Testament in the order in which they were written so that you can see how the Jesus story evolved into the Christian religion. 

If you read Paul’s authentic letters first, you see that he went to Jerusalem and actually met Peter and the brother of Jesus, James. He talks about Jesus having been crucified on a cross by the Roman government. He talks about people having seen visions of the resurrected Jesus. He even mentions the last supper which took place on the day that Jesus was betrayed. What Paul does not say is that he was betrayed by one of the twelve. He does not mention anyone named Judas. In fact, he says that when Jesus appeared after his death, that he appeared to the twelve, they were all still there, no defections, suicides, or instantaneous deaths as described in the gospels and the book of Acts. 

Paul also doesn’t mention Mary or Joseph, an empty grave on Easter, or any other miracle beyond the fact that very many people seemed to have visionary experiences of Jesus after he was dead. 

The gospels, all of which were written after Paul was dead and probably all of the eye witnesses of Jesus’ generation were dead, are passionate accounts that are written to inspire faith but we have to acknowledge that they are not historical and that many of the characters in the gospels are entirely fictional literary creations who are invented to represent a message, an idea, a truth, a truth about life if not a truth about history. 

 Bishop John Shelby Spong points out that the Greek spelling of Judas is the same as the spelling of Judah, the name of the nation which literally meant “Jew.” Imagine how differently we would have read the gospels if the person who betrayed Jesus had been named “Christian.” That would have made Sunday School a bit more sobering, wouldn’t it? But that is closer to what the Gospel of Mark was suggesting. Not that some evil person who lived two thousand years ago betrayed Jesus, but it was his people, his family, his friends, his religious community, and we can’t be sure that it wasn’t us!

It isn’t easy for those of us who grew up in a Christian church to do, but if you can let go of the notion that the gospels describe a historical account of the last days of Jesus and accept that Mark is constructing a drama, a drama that we have always called the “passion narrative” then we can ask what it was that he really wanted to convey by telling the story in a way that has Jesus’ death being directly caused by a character that represents the nation, the religion, the family and friends of Jesus?

On the face of it we can say that Mark is trying to answer one of the most obvious questions one would ask of the early Christian movement, “If Jesus was God’s son, how and why was he killed?” Mark’s answer is to portray Jesus as a kind of “everyman” who was murdered by a trusted friend, a fictional literary device friend who represents organized religion, family drama, and false friends…. Which is something we have all experienced.

You can read the gospel passion story from the perspective of Jesus, or Peter, or even Judas. What makes the passion narrative so compelling, what made Mark’s telling of the last days of Jesus’ life so powerful that Matthew, Luke, and John copied his version and influenced art, theater, movies with this theme of betrayal is not because it is an accurate description of what happened to Jesus centuries ago but because almost all of us have had a Judas in our lives, someone we loved and trusted, maybe even someone we stood up in front of a church filled with family and friends and swore an oath that we would love one another until the day we died, but then they changed… they cheated on you, lied to you, lied about you, they betrayed you, with a kiss!

Or the church that nurtured you as a child, where the most important and influential people in your young life taught your Sunday School classes, led your youth groups, sponsored you to go to church camp, choir trips, and retreats, and then, when you were just 14 years old, you told them who you really are and they condemned, every last one of them . . . or if they didn’t directly condemn you, they stood back in silence and if anyone asked about you, they just said, “Well, I guess I never really knew him.” 

I got a letter from a young soldier more than a decade ago. He had grown up with a single mom, living in a broken down trailer park, and he was convinced by a recruiter that military service was the way for him to get an education and build a resume that would allow him to rise out of poverty and to alleviate the suffering of his family while he would become a hero to his nation. He brought all of hype about patriotism, brotherhood, and fighting for freedom and liberty.

He wrote to me from Afghanistan and said, “This war is nothing but America recruiting the children of the rural poor to come and murder the children of the rural poor in Afghanistan. None of our prisoners even know why the United States is here. They have no idea why we are at war. My country didn’t make me a hero, they made me a murderer.”

Mark didn’t write to glorify crucifixion, he wrote in a way that allowed all of us who feel like we have been crucified, betrayed by those we loved, lied to by a nation, a church, forgotten by a family, to realize that even though we may feel that our lives are over, that life can never be the same, we can never be happy again, we can never feel love again, and, at least for me, I can remember standing in my house and saying out loud to myself, “I hope that I never trust another person for as long as I live.”

This is not just figurative or metaphorical. There were 46,000 suicides in America last year and there were more than a million more who attempted suicide but, you know, you can die from a broken heart as well. I wonder how many of the 700,000 fatal heart attacks last year were really caused by stress, depression, hopelessness …. Literally, a broken heart. 

Mark gives us word in the face of a broken heart, when you have been crucified at work, when your home has been destroyed and you only get to see your kids every other weekend, when your hopes for ever being happy again have been dashed, and the word he gives to us is resurrection. Forget about all of the heaven and hell mythology or imaginary talk about souls and spirits and ghosts. When you life has been broken and the shattered pieces are lying all around your feet, heaven is not the issue…. Tomorrow is the issue. 

Mark doesn’t tell us anything about Jesus’ dead body appearing alive again to various people . . . that part of the story was created generations later, but he does give us this amazing account of women coming to a graveyard because, so far as they knew, Judas, religion, Rome, the government, they had all conspired to kill Jesus but they are met by a messenger who says simply, “He is not here. He has gone on ahead of you.” 

I realize that most people who have been raised on the Jesus story have always interpreted the passion to mean that you, if you play your cards right, will go to heaven when you die. I suspect that nothing that I have said or will say will persuade people to let go of their hope for pie in the sky in the by and by. But for me, and frankly, for the academic Biblical community, the gospel is not about going to heaven. It is about salvation.

Salvation, in the Greek New Testament, is “sotoria” and to be saved, the verb form, is “sozo.” These words mean to be made whole, to be restored, and so, when the gospels say that a blind man had his sight restored or a leper had their skin healed, they were “saved” because they had been made whole again. Jesus didn’t send the blind man or the leper to heaven, but according to the gospel narrative, he gave them back their whole selves… not in an imaginary world in the clouds but right here, right now, in the only life we know anything about. 

Therefore, the word faith, in Greek, is pistu, and I know a lot of people think that faith means making yourself believe something that is obviously not true but the word can more accurately be read as “courage” or “resolve.” The passion narrative tells me to take heart, to have courage, to be resolved to live on. 

Being fired was horrible but no matter what malice was intended, it will only kill me if I allow it to. I’m still here. Ending a toxic marriage was horrible, expensive, and demeaning, but it didn’t have to be the end of all hope of love. I have been betrayed by false friends, and slandered by a thousand critics but that doesn’t mean that I have to turn my life, my joy, my reason for living over to them. 

I won’t ask our musicians to sing it for us here, but I am still fairly persuaded that one of the best Easter songs was performed by Chumbawamba, “I get knocked down but I get up again, you’re never gonna keep me down.” And I hope that the same is true for you!

 

“The Plight of the Progressive Church”

“The Plight of the Progressive Church”   March 26, 2023      Dr. Roger Ray   

click here to see the video

"The town where I grew up has a zip code of E-I-E-I-O." — Martin Mull

Soon it will have been 20 years since I was a fellow at Harvard Divinity School. That was a wonderful time in my life, my first time to sit in a classroom as a student since my grad school days in the 1980’s. As I was preparing to leave, the  late Harvard chaplain,  the Reverend Peter Gomes, surprised me by calling me aside to privately say “good-bye.” He said, “I have enjoyed having you in my class this year, but I realize that none of this was new to you.” I hadn’t expected to have personal conversation with Professor Gomes, and I just nervously said the first thing that came to mind, “No, it was all familiar material, but I think that I was finally ready to hear it in a new way.”

 

Please forgive me if I to take too much of your time giving you my personal life story but suffice it to say that, like you, I have not always been the person that I am today. I grew up in rural Kentucky, the youngest child of a working class family that had been shaped by their own rural Kentucky childhoods; barely surviving the Great Depression, World War II and the massive technological changes that took them from dirt roads, horseback transportation, and oil lamps into what we call the modern world with the arrival of cars, electric lights and appliances, telephones, television, air conditioning, and finally a strange child who went to college, and then went to college again, and again, and again.

 

I presided over their funerals early in this century, extolling their ability to adjust to so many massive changes in the world they inhabited. But the other side of that coin was the things they had been unwilling to change. 

I spent many Sunday afternoons of my childhood in the living room of the old plantation house of my family’s former slave plantation listening to my father and his siblings literally still grieving the end of slavery and mourning the poverty that the Civil War brought to my family for many generations. They were convinced of the inferiority of the black race, but their prejudice didn’t end there. They also despised Asians, and Jews, and Catholics, and any non-British foreigners, as well as anyone who used drugs or drank alcohol or who smoked. For their entire lives, it was as if the Civil War was just last year, and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor had been that morning. Their hatred and judgement were intense and life defining.

 

My college career nearly ended when I came home during my freshman year and shared with them the emotional trauma of having my gay English professor make a sexual pass at me. I had never even heard of homosexuality prior to that day but I sure heard a lot about it after that . . . and it wasn’t good. 

 

Sadly, many of my family members and high school peers have never ventured very far from that world. My initial escape from that tiny mental cage came to me through the Christian faith that had me reading the Bible, and what it showed me was that the culture of my hometown was Christian in name only; with a hypocrisy that was obvious to me and apparently invisible to almost all of my peers.

 

My second salvific influence was education. I earned a degree in philosophy without really understanding any of it. But, like the gospels, the things that I read in those years eventually revealed themselves to me as I grew older and changed more. 

 

I took my largely traditional faith to seminary with me at Vanderbilt where, through a masters and doctoral program, virtually everything I had been certain of was revealed to be theologically and historically, as well as ethically, false. 

 

I can credit the faculty at Vanderbilt with exposing us to the best of religious scholarship while leaving us some room to hold onto enough of traditional Christian language to be able to keep our jobs as ministers in the more liberal Christian churches around the country. I think now that it was a mistake, but we were taught how to keep a foot in academic theology and another foot in the church that needed to believe that their pastor believed in the supremacy of the Christian religion, and that the Bible, for all of its human frailties, was still somehow, the word of God. At funerals they needed for us to assure them that heaven was real and hell, though real, was not a threat to the people that we love, the people who shared our narrow world view.

 

I managed to straddle that fence for almost 30 years, focusing on mental health, opposition to war, promoting poverty projects, and fighting prejudice, still clad in religious vestments and surrounded by the hymns, symbols, and rituals of Protestant Christianity. 

 

What finally broke me out of that compromise was when I was fired in 2007. The multiple traumas I experienced in that year destroyed any loyalty I had felt to institutional religion. My denominational judicatories revealed themselves to be dishonest in ways that would have shamed the mafia, and the church members who were offended by my public conduct of same sex marriages, protests of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and, in the mix were people who took moral stances against my decision to drive a convertible and to live in a loft downtown rather than a suburban neighborhood. It was an ecclesial dumpster fire that would have embarrassed Charles Darwin. 

 

Some very sincere friends who were outraged by this miscarriage of justice were determined to put me back into a pulpit. Many of them sacrificed tens of thousands of dollars that they arguably could not really afford to donate, to employ me and buy a small church building to keep me in the ministry.

 

Still, even after all of that, our first services looked a lot like the last services I had conducted in my former denomination. I followed the lectionary, wore vestments, I even did a few baptisms. But we were trying to figure out what it meant to be an entirely honest spiritual community that owed no fealty to denominations or traditions. 

 

It took me years to demythologize my own language, to move beyond trinitarian holidays and songs, to fully embrace an interfaith approach to spirituality. We initially described ourselves as being “progressive” Christians. We named our church, “the Community Christian Church,” and we even tried to grow into a traditional church with Sunday School classes, youth groups, a choir, and holiday special services. 

 

But the council of churches initially lumped us in with the Unitarians and wouldn’t let us join because we were not “Christians,” even though we supplied more volunteers and donated goods than any other church in town. Years later they changed their minds and extended an invitation to us to join but by then I felt it necessary to ask the director of the Council of Churches to come and stand in our pulpit and tell us why we should join…. Something he declined to do.

I had eventually come to agree with the published essays of our critics, who insisted that we are not really Christian. We abandoned our original name and began to call ourselves the Emerging Church and I became a member of a Unitarian Church. Most of us have Christian roots but we are decidedly without theistic beliefs or practices. We have no sacraments, no holy writ, no authority beyond our appeal to critical thinking and testable reality. 

 

There is an apocryphal saying attributed to Harriet Tubman that claims that she said that she could have freed a thousand more slaves if only they had known that they were slaves. She didn’t say that but, folks, maybe she should have.

 

Almost all of us were brought up in bondage, a mental prison from which only a few ever escape. Most of us have to keep kicking at the darkness of ignorance, mythology, guilt, fear, and prejudice for our whole lives. I have often tried to sum up this process of gradual escape by quoting the comedian, Martin Mull, who said "The town where I grew up has a zip code of E-I-E-I-O."

 

For all of the things we inherited from our families of origin and the culture in which we were nurtured, almost all of us also know that there were many very dark and ignorant things we had to overcome. My parents never got over being embarrassed about my adoption of an Asian child and they found my friendships with gay people to be too painful to even acknowledge and, frankly, I don’t feel obligated, even posthumously, to forgive them for that. Sure, they didn’t know better, but the fact remains, they could have known better and therefore they should have put their backs into it and tried. 

 

They never read any of the books I have written because they knew that they would be uncomfortable with what I said. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. 

Mythology, superstition, prejudice, can only survive in intentional darkness. We can understand a child being afraid of the dark, but it is shameful when an adult is afraid of the light. 

 

But, folks, this is not just a problem among conservatives and the untutored. Liberals can be bigots too. I was scheduled to speak next month in a Unitarian church in my home state, a church where I have spoken before, and I church that I have really wanted to help to grow and survive. But I canceled that engagement after I heard a recent recording of a service from that church in which a member delivered a sermon that was advertised as being an appeal for unity and tolerance but the body of the message was a very personal slanderous screed condemning me, in part, she explained, because my sermons are politically divisive but also because I was dismissive of my hometown when I said that the zip code there is e-i-e-i-o.  She breathlessly talked about how embarrassed she would have been if any of her rural relatives had been visiting on the Sunday that I said that. 

 

I didn’t cancel my engagement simply because these things were said but more because absolutely no one had pointed out to her that her sermon on reconciliation was really just a summary condemnation of me. Apparently, the only way to be an honestly spiritual person was to be just like her. In her mind, sermons should avoid political topics like opposing illegal wars, poverty, racism, denying health care, housing, and employment to poor people, and keeping gay and trans people deeply in the closet. She didn’t mention a word about how the prejudices of my native land had kept black people poor and engaged in menial labor, kept gay people deeply hidden in closets, or allowed our government to pursue illegal wars without challenge. She was only upset that I mentioned these things unfavorably.

 

In short, she wants to have a very liberal church that either endorses or, by silence, tacitly approves of all of the failures of fundamentalism with all of its moral indifference and irrelevance. And in as much as progressive churches would rather be polite than prophetic, then they should decline and close because they are morally irrelevant.

 

The worship chair evidently sent me the video to warn me not to step out of line again. You may recall me having said a few times in the past that I hope to live my life in a way that will cause the Westboro Baptist Church to come and demonstrate at my funeral. I want racists and homophobes to be made uncomfortable by my sermons. The last thing I want to do is to make people who perpetuate war, poverty, gender discrimination, and hypocritical piety to feel normal and acceptable. 

 

We obviously are not invested in incarnational Christian theology but at the root of the gospel narrative is the fairly reliable historical reality of the execution of Jesus by the Roman government and you can’t possibly believe that he was crucified for being a moderate, right? If he had avoided “politics” and just told people to love one another, he would have been a useful friend to the Roman government, not a victim of state murder. 

 

Being loudly and clearly opposed to oppression is not a political opinion that is the same as being in favor of oppression. The anti-slavery movement of the 19^th century was not on the same moral footing as the pro-slavery advocates. 

One was right and one was wrong. Those of us who worked for the civil rights of the gay community are not the same as those who opposed gay rights. One was right and the other was wrong. Being liberal doesn’t mean that you have abdicated from making moral judgements. 

As Elie Wiesel said, “Neutrality always serves the oppressor and never the  oppressed.” Therefore, we must choose sides, and if you are a preacher, you had better make it painfully clear which side that you are on. It is not our goal to shame or embarrass bigots and racists, but it is our goal to make it plain that the ground they have staked out is unacceptable. 

 

People try to dismiss progressive preachers by saying that they are too political or too divisive. We are all subject to being dismissed by being labeled as being too woke, or too liberal, or saying that we are socialists as if advocating for a living wage or universal healthcare makes us somehow the same as Stalin in the early Russian communist revolution. How you deliver universal healthcare or eradicate poverty may involve politics but if you are defending a healthcare system that leaves millions of people out of access to healthcare or an economic system that leaves people working two and  three jobs and still sleeping on a park bench, then I submit, that’s not a political issue, that’s a moral issue and the church damn well better be talking about it.

 

Of course, that’s just my opinion, but it also has the added luxury of also being true.

 

Moving a Balloon, Moving a Rock

Moving a Balloon, Moving a Rock: On Patience & Praxis 

by David Ketchum 

March 19, 2023

Watch the video HERE

        My reflections of late have turned back to patience, a reflection that arises again and again out of the personal, relational, structural, and cultural turmoil of the last many years. So many of the issues we face are intractable, with roots as deep as hundreds and thousands of years. And while history reminds me that there have always been people who were there to fight against oppression and insist on humanity’s potential for wisdom and compassion, it also reminds me that human lives have been consistently characterized by injustice and oppression. Our progress is at once remarkable and incomplete, and we carry the urgency of our own brief lives. And so, we also carry both a necessary patience and a necessary impatience, like oil and water in our hearts. 

        Reactivity, that impulsiveness that acts with no time - and sometimes no regard - for wisdom, is the obvious choice of obstacles when it comes to patience. But that has not been my preferred vice when it comes to trying to embody peace and justice in my own life and in community with those around me. I'm fairly slow and steady, and that seems to be a deep habit that isn't changing anytime soon. Instead, I've noticed that the real danger for me when it comes to losing my patience is despair. This makes sense to me. In the face of terrible odds and intractable systemic injustice, some of us lose ourselves in the moment and do something rash that we might regret. Some of us, lose ourselves in the grief and simply begin to fade away. Some of us may do a little of both, shaking our fists as we drown in tears.

        In the past, I conceptualized this kind of impatience as passivity, but I don't personally find that nearly as useful a category of reflection as despair. It's not simple indifference; it's the hollow feeling that threatens to engulf me that is most akin to mourning. And this reflection has also helped me move forward. Reflecting on my experience in this way, I can understand I have a need to grieve and that honoring that need is a radical act in itself. As part of these acts of healing, I've inclined my ear again to Elsa Tamez. She wrote that: 

“The situation of oppression and pain tends to make people feel depressed, to dehumanize them, to destroy not only their bodies but also their spirit, to make them see their oppression as normal and natural.” (The Scandalous Message of James: Faith Without Works is Dead, 74)

        These words will be recognizable to anyone who belongs to a marginalized community. We are meant to come to believe that change is not only impossible; it is unnatural. Oppressive systems want us to believe that oppression is the natural order of things, and that this natural order is good. Each of Tamez’ categories plays an important role: depression, dehumanization, destruction of the body and spirit, and the normalization or naturalization of oppression. 

        Reflect on the APA’s list of symptoms of depression, but not only for its psychological impacts, but also its impacts on us as people for change. Depression can often make it difficult for us to sustain social justice movements, including: “Loss of interest or pleasure in activities once enjoyed”; “Loss of energy or increased fatigue”; “Feeling worthless or guilty”; “Difficulty thinking, concentrating or making decisions”; and “Thoughts of death or suicide”. These mental and emotional states are further exacerbated by dehumanization. As I’ve discussed before, 

“[I]t is important to notice how dehumanization paves the way for social rejection and social control. Because of the stakes involved, human beings generally don’t want to reject someone they care about. Dehumanization makes it much easier. So whenever we notice dehumanization going on, we should also pay attention to the social rejection that might be coming in its wake. This is why governments have created propaganda that dehumanizes their enemies at war and it is why you hear people like Donald Trump using dehumanizing language to describe the folks that will suffer from his policies. 

“If you can get the public to believe the victims of oppression are somehow less than human, then that public is much more likely to tolerate violent policies. And if you are involved in the oppression, dehumanization makes it easier to live with yourself. After all, you don’t think you are harming actual people. As Brian Resnick put it, ‘Dehumanization is a mental loophole that allows us to dismiss other people’s feelings and experiences. If you think of murder and torture as universally taboo, then dehumanization of the “other” is a psychological loophole that can justify those acts.’”

        This is the destruction of body and spirit that Tamez included next. That is the end goal of dehumanization: exploited, commodified, objectified, cast aside, ridiculed, institutionalized, forgotten, left for dead, or killed. This is why we often have to recite terrifying statistics, share tragic stories, and say the names of those who have suffered. It is both necessary and it takes a toll. It takes a toll because the grief and rage, once perceived and understood, are perceived and understood everywhere, all the time. This is what James Baldwin was speaking to with regard to how racism and white supremacy suffuse every part of our society: 

“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time … . And part of the rage is this: It isn't only what is happening to you. But it's what's happening all around you and all of the time in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference, indifference of most white people in this country, and their ignorance.” 

        But carrying this grief and rage is also necessary because we are resisting that fourth element, the normalization and naturalization of oppression. Oppression and injustice are normalized in our society to the point of invisibility. This is why people say we are being anti-American by simply telling the truth about history, because violence and oppression - such as the enslavement of African people, displacement and attempted genocide of Indigenous peoples, exploitation of immigrants, and destruction of ecosystems in order to accumulate power and wealth – is built into our history, systems, cultures, and even memories. It is so normalized that we cannot even see that all these social problems people grow up thinking of as normal are actually symptoms of a sick society. Yet resisting this normalization can be unsettling, and the impacts of depression are further intensified both by 1) a lack of resources and access to appropriate medical and mental health care and 2) the continued exposure to injustice. As Vikki Reynolds observed, 

“We can start to think we might be crazy (depressed, angry, obsessive, defiant, maladapted...) Hopelessness can make us think we can't do anything about injustice. Political awareness can be paralyzing, overwhelming, and spiritually painful. Individualism makes us think we're alone, that no one thinks like us.” 

In response to these four obstacles – depression, dehumanization, destruction of body and spirit, and normalization of injustice, Tamez encouraged us toward a praxis rooted in hope, patience, prayer, and integrity. Two of these especially stand out to me. First, Tamez insists on cultivating "militant patience, that is, of steadfastness, of resistance, of heroic endurance, all the while practicing justice." And, importantly for me, she concludes that those who practice in this way "do not fall into despair, but rather wisely recognize the opportune moments." (The Scandalous Message of James, 74-75) This is an approach to patience that actually works for me, and that I can carry into my days. Patience as resistance folds patience into praxis. Waiting is not passivity, but strategy. We practice justice in whatever ways we can in the conditions we find ourselves in, while we pay attention for those “opportune moments” to act decisively. 

Similarly, Tamez also reframes integrity within the context of praxis, as consistency between what we believe and what we do. This is in resistance to the contradictions within oppressive systems, which compliment themselves for belonging “to the community of faith but show favoritism against the poor, who ought to pay the workers’ salaries but withhold them, who speak ill of others behind their backs, who see others in need but do not come to their material assistance.” (ibid, 75) If we are people who would embody peace and justice, then our integrity must include solidarity. Returning to Vikki Reynolds’ wisdom,

“Our resistance to this political violence, degradation, heartbreak, and terror is to hold each other in sacred and revolutionary love, and to work for justice: that's what solidarity is. Solidarity is belonging.”

This belonging includes uprooting our internalized oppression and dominance and together, patience and solidarity as praxis help us overcome the four obstacles Tamez named. By practicing radical care in community, we normalize relationships, organizations, and cultures that rely on compassion, wisdom, generosity, and mutuality, instead of exploitation, alienation, coercion, and violence. Instead of destroying body and spirit, we normalize healing and growing body and spirit. Instead of dehumanizing one another to cope with or accommodate injustice, we connect with our common humanity and commit to mutual care. And instead of creating conditions where depression, anxiety, rage, and despair characterize our everyday lives, we create conditions where everyone has the opportunity to thrive, and to recognize and access medical and mental health care when we do need it. Because, as Reynolds wrote, “A socially just world is a mentally well world.”

The joining of patience and integrity can also help maximize our impacts. This is both through the making the most of those “opportune moments” and through intentionally aligning our actions with our values. This brought to mind a lesson that Daniel Hunter shared from the 2006–2010 campaign to stop a $650 million casino development in Philadelphia. Rather than focus solely on policies and legislative goals, Casino-Free Philadelphia connected with community members to emphasize the predatory nature of these developments and their detrimental impacts on communities. Hunter described the choice through an image: 

“Politicians are like a balloon tied to a rock. If we swat at them, they may sway to the left or the right. But, tied down, they can only go so far. Instead of batting at them, we should move the rock: people’s activated social values. When we move the rock, it automatically pulls all the politicians towards us — without having to pressure each one separately.” 

        This analogy can help us develop the resources and skills we need to move the rock, while paying attention to identify those opportune moments to move it. Hunter likened this to being “careful about our yardsticks” - 

“A lot of the time when we’re talking about politicians it’s about do we get the legislation we want or not; do we get a bill introduced or not; do we get the bill passed or not; and all of those are a politician’s yardsticks. It’s dangerous for us to align ourselves with those yardsticks in terms of identifying whether or not are our movement is winning. At the end of the day I think we can sneak bills through from time to time, but if we build the social context they move much more quickly.”

Building that social context loops us back to our praxis, such as Tamez’ emphasis on patience as resistance and integrity as solidarity. Hunter focused on the contrast between “espoused social values” and “activated social values,” which in turn connects us to community and solidarity. Reflecting on how many people “believe in a bunch of things that they don’t do anything for,” he asks:  

“do people have a hook where they can see how to activate their value? Do they have something that they get to do that allows them to give expression to it, and not only expression but actually to make it happen in some way. … We’re taught so much that our contribution is an individual task – that’s why I think the movement building dimension, community building, is so important. Moving the rock is not an individual thing, it’s a social thing. If we’re seeing the rock individually we remain confused and we’re unable to see the ripple effect of our actions. Seeing ourselves in this social context rather than just as individuals is so important to movement building.” 

        If we want to create social justice movements that can both make a difference and don’t burn themselves out, it is very important that we are strategic about how and where to spend our energy. Insights like those from Elsa Tamez, Vikki Reynolds, Daniel Hunter, and our own communities can help us understand the lasting obstacles to the change we seek, and how we can more intentionally participate in the personal and collective healing and growing we need.

“Don’t Say Gay (Or Trans)” in Missouri

“Don’t Say Gay (Or Trans)” in Missouri

David “Katya” Ketchum March 12, 2023

Watch the video HERE

Before getting into a bird’s eye view of the current crop of proposed and passed legislation targeting gender and sexual minorities, I feel the need to repeat some of my words from 2018, slightly edited to fit today’s focus on legislation: 

“Here at the beginning, I want you to know that I am wonderfully happy about my gender and sexuality. I love – I really love – being genderqueer. I love belonging to the transgender family. I’ll be focusing on painful and difficult experiences [today] as we continue to call [our communities] to accountability, but I don’t want there to be any confusion. There is so much joy in my life. There are so many incredible, beautiful, fantastic people I’ve met and you are so important to me, and to our community. I am so grateful for the time and life we’ve shared together. I am so grateful for you. The joy and life and love we share are why I am willing to stand here and assert our humanity … . I am angry, to be sure; but I am angry because all this suffering is unnecessary and cruel, and I am so exhausted from feeling and seeing my transgender siblings suffer so much. I hope that, in the anger, you also can hear this love.”

 

March began with thousands of people flocking to the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which Christopher Mathias aptly described as “creepily obsessed with trans kids and showcased the GOP’s alarming and intensifying anti-trans rhetoric.” Highlights included former Trump advisor Sebastian Gorka, who is allegedly a “member of a Nazi-collaborating political order in Hungary,” claiming that Democrats are “mutilating boys and girls” and “sacrificing them on the altar of their transgender insanity.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene announced that she is re-introducing her failed “Protect Children’s Innocence Act,” proclaiming that it “will make it a felony to perform anything to do with gender!” The president of the right-wing website Judicial Watch, Tom Fitton, labeled gender-affirming care “a demonic assault on the innocence of our children.”

But Gorka, Greene, and Fitton were outdone by The Daily Wire’s  Michael Knowles, who declared that: 

  “The problem with transgenderism is not that it’s inappropriate for children under the age of 9 … . The problem with transgenderism is that it isn’t true. … If [transgenderism] is false, then for the good of society... transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely, the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.” 

 
Again, the crowd erupted with clapping and cheers. 

        The rhetoric coming out of spaces like CPAC reflects the growing movement centered around transgender people and their needs, a shift in focus that we’ve been watching for many years now. As transgender people, and our related vocabulary and needs, have grown both more familiar and more acceptable to the general public, we have also become an easy target for those who can exploit popular fears and misunderstandings. So it is that we also live in a time where every year, year after year, we brace ourselves for the barrage of legislation aimed at denying and banning our very existence. And it happens again and again, year after year. 

However, the frequency and intensity of these attacks has been increasing, and this year is a case in point. Last week, for example, Tennessee gobbled up the headlines as Gov. Bill Lee signed two bills into law that targeted transgender folks in particular, becoming, as James Factora summed it up, “the seventh state to pass such a ban on care, and the first state to ever pass a ban on drag.” House Bill 1 bans transition-related care to minors and can be used to strip healthcare providers of their license for providing care. It also allows patients who received care as a minor “to sue providers within 30 years after the patient turns 18.” House Bill 9 bans performances of “male or female impersonators” in a public place that “could be viewed by a minor.” Penalties include 11 months in prison and/or fines up to $2,500, with repeat violations classified as felonies “punishable by up to six years in prison and a fine of up to $3000.” The Trans Formations Project explains, the broad wording “effectively criminalizes just existing as a trans person in any performance, educational industry, or in public! If you’re wondering how, it’s simple. This bill defines simply being trans (or crossdressing as a cis person) as sexual.” 

Missouri led the way early on, proposing 31 anti-lgbt bills in January. (For those keeping count, Oklahoma passed that number in February, with 34 proposed bills.) Those bills are in different stages of the legislative process, and most will probably not make it out of committee. However, Missouri lawmakers were recently in the news for discussing House Bill 634, which has been dubbed Missouri’s “Don’t Say Gay” Bill. It aims to prohibit instruction that includes sexual orientation or gender identity, going even further than Florida’s ban by extending the prohibition all the way through grade 12. (Florida’s ban allows for “age appropriate” education on those topics starting in grade four.) 

The language is terribly vague, lending itself to prohibiting even the promotion of heterosexuality, something that  Rep. Phil Christofanelli (a gay Republican) pointed out in a now famous video clip of him questioning the bill’s author, Rep. Ann Kelley: 

“‘I’m just going to read you the language in your bill,’ Christofanelli said, pointing to a section that stated no classroom instruction ‘relating to sexual orientation or gender identity shall occur.’ / ‘You mentioned George Washington. Who is Martha Washington?’ Christofanelli asked. / ‘His wife,’ Kelley answered. / ‘Under your bill, how could you mention that in a classroom?/ Christofanelli continued. / Kelley replied, ‘To me, that’s not sexual orientation.’ ‘So it’s only really certain sexual orientations that you want prohibited from introduction in the classroom,’ Christofanelli shot back.” 

Missouri lawmakers have also been busy debating Senate Bill 49, the “Save Adolescents from Experimentation Act”, which would ban state and local government employed health care providers from providing gender-affirming health care to minors, as well as banning state and local facilities from providing gender affirming treatments like puberty blockers and hormone therapy. In a recent email update, PROMO’s Executive Director, Katy Erker-Lynch appropriately called out these lawmakers’ “audacity to debate trans kids’ very right to live and exist”: 

“They spread lies about the parents of trans youth, about the physicians who provide best practice care, and about the larger LGBTQ+ community. … this legislative session continues to push us into unprecedented times — over 30 explicitly anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been prioritized by this legislature—seeking to use transgender bodies as political pawns to push their political agendas forward. The fact that these bills were dignified by voting them out of the Senate Committee should be appalling to any person paying attention and a wake up call to those who haven’t been listening.” 

If you have had a difficult time keeping track, it can be helpful to know that the anti-trans legislative tactics have taken on a few predictable forms. The Trans Formations Project has provided six broad categories to track those attacks: 

•  Bathroom bills typically deny transgender folks from accessing their appropriate public restroom. However, “They increase danger without making anyone any safer and have even prompted attacks on cis and trans people alike.” 
• Healthcare bills substitute discriminatory health practices for “professional and scientific consensus” around lifesaving, gender-affirming care. They often include criminal charges against healthcare providers and child abuse charges against parents. Notably, “intersex children are typically exempted,” meaning that invasive medical procedures (that coincidentally conform to cisgender-heteronormative expectations) can still take place without the knowledge or consent of the child. 
  
  
• Public performance bills usually target drag performances, which is egregious in itself, but they are also often worded in such a way that they ban transgender and gender-expansive people from performing in public at all. Three important elements to these bans include: 1) a loose definition of “drag” as a “public performance with an ‘opposite gender expression’”, 2) labeling those performances as inherently sexual, and 3) asserting that the performances are therefore inappropriate for children. Again notably, cisgender-heteronormative gender expressions remain acceptable. 
• School bills often use the language of “parental rights” to force educators and schools to: “misgender or deadname students, ban instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity, and make schools alert parents if they suspect a child is trans.” They also typically make it difficult for trans youth to access  “life-saving affirmation and support” at school.
  
  
• Sex Designation bills create further obstacles for transgender folks to access identification and documents that match their gender identity. 
• Sports Ban bills “are often one-sided and ban trans girls from playing on teams consistent with their gender identity.” Some versions have also included “invasive genital examinations.” 

        There’s also a miscellaneous category, but variations of these six tactics have been increasingly repeated across the nation. If you look closely, you’ll also notice that there is a lot of repetition in the proposed bills. There’s a very good reason for this, as conservative legislators have learned that proposing an anti-lgbt, especially an anti-trans, bill has become a major political tactic. Greg Razer, Missouri’s only openly gay State Senator, recently explained that: 
 

“What happens is, there might be eight members of the House of Representatives who all want to go home and say they filed the bill. And so, they all filed the identical bill. And then at some point in the process they mesh all those together and make one bill that’s called House Bill 40, 72, 137 — they’ll list all the numbers. So they can all go home and say, ‘I kicked a trans kid in the face.’”

Both positive and negative reinforcement is at work here. On the one hand, transgender folks have become a preferred target, so it is easy to try to leverage proposing and supporting anti-trans bills as a way to seek votes. But there’s also the negative side, in that failing to support these bills can also be used against them in a future campaign. 

As Senator Razer put it, “if it is brought to a vote, then how do they vote no? Because somebody on the right is going to primary them. And run the ad: ‘Voted to support gender affirming care for transgender kids.’” That pressure is real, and I fear that transgender lives and care are not important enough for even sympathetic lawmakers to feel compelled to risk their political ambitions and careers. Transgender lives – the wellbeing of people like me – are not important enough. We are part of the acceptable losses. We are necessary casualties in their culture war, the holy sacrifices on their altars raised to the delusions that transgender people and our basic human needs exist as a tool of some “evil-doer who is seeking to kill and destroy us and our children.” (And yes, these words are the direct quote of another Missouri State Senator.) 

There is much more to reflect on in how this is unfolding, but I’ll limit myself to one more aspect of this debate. In late February, Missouri senators held a press conference about the SAFE Act that included Chloe Cole and Luka Hein. Both Chloe and Luka transitioned as teens, including receiving gender affirming top surgery, and then later retransitioned. Both are critical about the way they received care and the failure of their medical providers to give them the care they needed. Hearing their stories is important as medical providers continue to improve standards of care for young people; everyone should have access to the care they need. 

However, what I see happening is that anti-trans lawmakers and social commentators are using the voices of Chloe and Luka to silence all other trans voices and deny us both basic care and human rights. For example, a study published in August 2022 by the American Academy of Pediatrics followed 317 trans children and youth for five years. Over that time, retransitioning occurred but was uncommon; around 7% of participants retransitioned during those five years. Obviously, standards of care need to be continuously improved so that this number is even lower. However, it is inappropriate to universalize the experience of 7% of trans youth receiving gender affirming care at the exclusion of the 93% that received the correct care. This is especially important because the impact of that care is literally life-saving. In another study published in February 2022, researchers found that trans youth (13 to 20 years old) receiving gender-affirming care (such as puberty blockers and hormone therapies) “was associated with 60% lower odds of moderate or severe depression and 73% lower odds of suicidality over a 12-month follow-up.” 

        This is not an aberration. More and more studies, collectively representing the experiences of more than 30,000 trans and gender-diverse youth, demonstrate that gender-affirming care translates into better mental health, while restricting access to that care is associated with worse mental health outcomes, including depression, self-harm, and suicide. For these very sound reasons, professional medical organizations have overwhelmingly published both policy statements and standards of care, including: the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the Endocrine Society, the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association. As Heather Boerner wrote in Scientific American, “All of those medical societies find such care to be evidence-based and medically necessary.” But anti-trans lawmakers silence all of these researchers, medical providers, and transgender voices in favor of elevating the voices of those whose experiences more neatly fit their prejudices. I am not in favor of silencing people like Chloe Cole and Luka Hein, but their voices cannot be allowed to silence all others. Everyone deserves access to the care and support they need. 

        Another aspect of the retransitioning narrative is the way the anti-trans movement obscures the variety of reasons why a person may choose to retransition. A 2021 study that included more than 17,000 people who accessed gender-affirming care found that only 13.1% had ever retransitioned. Even more significantly, 82.5% of these respondents experienced at least one external factor, “such as pressure from family and societal stigma,” that motivated the retransition. Internal factors, such as uncertainty about their gender identity, was a much less common factor, even though the current discourse focuses on these rarer cases. This is very convenient, because it hides the fact that the major motivation for retransitioning is the stress that transgender people experience, such as bigotry and discrimination. 

        The end result is that both the public rhetoric and constant stream of bills, even when they do not become laws, create an atmosphere that is dangerous for gender and sexual minorities. Just to look at one risk factor, more than 80% of trans folks have considered suicide, and more than 40% have attempted suicide. Trans youth are at the highest risk. A 2020 study of suicidality among trans youth found that “School belonging, emotional neglect by family, and internalized self-stigma made a unique, statistically significant contribution to past 6-month suicidality.” And now we are witnessing a cultural and legislative movement that specifically aims to make it more difficult for trans youth to feel like they are safe and belong at school, that empower families to emotionally neglect their gender-affirming needs, and that promotes internalized self-stigma through the constant denial of their identities, rights, and care. Our society is collectively and persistently creating the conditions for a very painful and wholly preventable tragedy. The words and actions of anti-trans media and legislators are and will continue to contribute to the deaths of transgender people. 

I don’t know how to end this reflection, which has become something of a lament. My best guess is to return to advice I gave back in January 2018. I concluded with four lessons, including this invitation:

“while we can and should support and agitate for reform in order to minimize harm, we must devote as much time, energy, and resources as possible into building community. We have to earnestly and intentionally cultivate practices, habits, and structures … that rely on and embody mutual care, respect, and justice. … We have to make justice and love normal.”  

And I concluded that: 

“I titled this talk ‘We Are Not the Fragile Ones,’ because victims are often spoken about in ways that patronize and condescend. The world knew it could break us, and they were right about that. Too many of us have had to live lives that were not ours, just to survive, locked away in a straight, cisgender world. And more - too many of us are wounded, and too many of us are dead. But I’d like to point out that it is oppressive systems that are brittle, and that it is people in positions of power and privilege who usually feel the most threatened and reactive to movements for justice.  

 

“Those of us with these stories, we are not the fragile ones. We are not the ones who need a gay panic or trans panic defense. We are not the ones who think that our families will disintegrate if we accept people’s gender and sexuality as they are, rather than as we say they should be. And we are not the ones who justify cruelty and violence out of a fear of divine judgment. I offer my reflections as an imperfect tribute to all my comrades, to all my friends at the margins, who live as exiles amid these fragile, brittle egos. I offer my love to all of us fabulous and resilient and wounded people who, together, are creating a new and beautiful world.”