Smart people saying smart things (9.1)

Peter Goodwin Heltzel, “Cross the Sea and Cleanse the Temple”

Naming the idols of colonization and whiteness is the beginning of transforming Christian theology in the Americas today. Through the long, hard work of dismantling these idols, Christian theology can begin the process of living into a new prophetic, intercultural future. As [Willie James] Jennings reminds us in his final chapter, “Those Near Belonging,” in order to push ahead, we must recover a lost wisdom — the liberating reality of Israel, the covenant people of God. Since Jennings sees supersessionism as one of the primary problems with western colonialism, a theology of Israel becomes vital for the realization of a more prophetic Christian theology today.

Mary McClintock Fulkerson, “The Colorblindness of a Diseased Social Imagination”

Willie Jennings puts this huge problem right up front in his book The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race with an opening story illustrating obliviousness akin to my own, as he describes white Christian male missionaries coming to his house to invite his African American family to their church. The missionaries’ ostensibly “kind” sharing of the gospel illustrates a deeply troubling racism typically performed as ignorance of and the inability to respect the worlds of persons of color such as Jennings’ family, who were already deeply involved in another church. The missionaries illustrate, as Jennings says, “a wider and deeper order of not knowing, of not sensing, of not imagining,” found in whites and Christianity per se. Indeed, regardless of the ostensibly “nice” missionary intent, the behavior is an example of a “diseased social imagination.”

The gap between ostensible non-racist beliefs and actual practices is clearly ongoing, as sociologists such as Edgardo Bonilla-Silva’s work on “color-blindness as the new racism” illustrates. Most Americans define racism as an individual, malicious act against a person of color and define “race” as something only persons of color have. Since whites typically do not want to be designated as racist, this gets many of us (ostensibly) off the hook. However such color-blindness ignores the ongoing effects of social/institutional racism by reducing racism to an individual intentional act. And it clearly ignores the notion that “whiteness” is a race that comes with privilege, something very few whites even acknowledge, much less do something about.

Sarah Stillman, “Get Out of Jail, Inc.”

The industry aims to shift the financial burden of probation directly onto probationers. Often, this means charging petty offenders — such as those with traffic debts — for a government service that was once provided for free. These probationers aren’t just paying a court-ordered fine; they’re typically paying an ever-growing share of the court’s administrative expenses, as well as a separate fee to the for-profit company that supervises their probation and enforces a payment schedule — a consolidated weekly or monthly set of charges divided between the court and the company. The system is known as “offender-funded” justice. But legal challenges to it are mounting, amid concerns about abuse, corruption, and the use of state penalties to collect private profits. In a wide range of cases, offender-funded justice may not result in justice at all.

Bryce Covert, “Why America Gave Up on the Fight for a Family Friendly Workplace, and Why It’s Starting Again”

[Pat] Buchanan “connected Catholics with Evangelicals,” who had “never worked together like this, partly because there’d been strong animosity between the two groups,” said Sally Steenland, director of the faith and progressive policy initiative at the Center for American Progress (CAP). “It was very organized, it was well funded. This was not unprompted, spontaneous grassroots action; it was the religious right leading the charge.”

Those groups played on anxieties being kicked up by women’s changing roles. “It was the end of the era of a one-income family,” Steenland said. “Women from all ranks were going into jobs who had never been in jobs before. … In some cases the religious right exploited it, but in other cases it was just a genuine anxiety.”