Soul (and Brain) Food: December Edition
Out with the old year, in with the new! But what remains the same? All the deep reads shared on the Sisterhood Facebook page. Here’s what you might have missed amid the travel and the gifts and the Christmas goose.
First, a message from our founders: “2018 is here. None of us can afford to sit on the sidelines. Let this be the year we go forth in action with great love. Blessed new year, sisters. Resist and persist.”
“There’s a strange irony in America when it comes to poverty. The states with the highest poverty rates are in the south. And those same states have the highest rates of voter suppression of black people. Through this racialized voter suppression, politicians who support policies that hurt the poor get elected. While a larger percentage of black people are living in poverty, in raw numbers, there are actually more white than black people below the poverty line.
So-called white evangelicals are omnipresent in the poorest areas of our country, and they say the least about systemic poverty, which is the foremost issue in authentic Christian religious theology. After our denominations splintered over the moral question of slavery and the nation stood on the brink of civil war, Frederick Douglas said, “Between the christianity of this land and the christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference.””
“For Hatmaker, politics gets rooted in relationships, including those with gay friends. “You cannot talk in a sterilized way about an issue when the issue is a friend,” she says. On race, too, “our friends and neighbors of color have been banging this drum forever.” Through adoption, she is a mother to two black children. Her son, she says, first experienced racial slurs after the 2016 election. “When I see legislation and leadership and government harming people, when I see language that’s being normalized and the effect that is going to have on my neighbors and on people who are typically marginalized, I will not sit by,” she says.”
The real story here is about black women’s hard work and political initiative — not the intrinsic virtue of black womanhood. To laud the latter is to diminish the former and take for granted what efforts are actually required to win difficult elections. Democrats can’t afford to take the wrong lessons from any of their victories. Or their failures.
What should be clear by now is that offering racialized platitudes is not enough. Superficial hot-sauce-in-my-bag-style messaging is no substitute for the substantive material benefits reflected in the progressive platform, like a higher minimum wage, universal healthcare, and heightened consumer protections. Nor is the deft use of terms like intersectionality sufficient — especially when that intersectionality excludes class concerns.”
“But what those critics don’t recognize is that the nationalistic, race-baiting, fear-mongering form of politics enthusiastically practiced by Mr. Trump and Roy Moore in Alabama is central to a new strain of American evangelicalism. This emerging religious worldview — let’s call it “Fox evangelicalism” — is preached from the pulpits of conservative media outlets like Fox News. It imbues secular practices like shopping for gifts with religious significance and declares sacred something as worldly and profane as gun culture.”
p.s. if you don’t already subscribe to Impolite Company: The Podcast (Amy Sullivan and Nish Weiseth’s podcast), what are you waiting for? It’s thoughtful, hard-hitting, well researched, and often funny. Be sure to check it out.
“When it comes down to it, we’re all human,” she said. “And our humanity has to speak, and we have reminded them about their commitment to economic access and some sort of hand up for those who are poor.”
“If someone forces you to bake a cake for a gay wedding, bake for them two.
Christians, our Jesus said to not only follow the law, but to rise to a higher standard of love. Christians should be the FIRST people baking cakes — for everyone who asks us. We should be known for our cake baking. People should be saying, “There go those crazy Christians again, baking cakes for everyone. They just won’t quit!” Then, when we share the reason for our wild, all-inclusive love, people will want to hear it. “Let your light shine before others,” said Jesus, “that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” (from 2015)
“God did not wrap himself up in flesh, humbling himself to the point of birth in a stable and death on a cross, eating, laughing, weeping, and suffering as one of us, so that I can complain to management when a barista at Starbucks wishes me ‘Happy Holidays’ instead of “Merry Christmas.” The incarnation isn’t about desperately grasping at the threads of power and privilege. It’s not about making some civic holiday ‘bigger and better.’ It’s about surrendering power, setting aside privilege, and finding God in the smallness and vulnerability of a baby in a womb.”
