Election Reflection:  Race and Gender

Carla Bailey, Senior Pastor

October 12, 2008

Of all the four Election Reflection sermons I am delivering this month, this one concerning gender and race is, at one and the same time, the most difficult and the easiest to write.  I am a professional woman whose career and life choices have been impacted by sexism.  And I am the mother of two brown skinned children, both of whom have experienced the razor slices and aching punches of racism.  So, it could be said that these issues are too close to my bones for me to offer any cogent, theological reflection with the academic detachment necessary to preach effectively.  Oh well. 

Let me begin by telling you some stories – vignettes – to get the thinking cells revved up.  In the early 1980’s, I was serving as an associate pastor in a large church in Minneapolis.  It was the time when many of us in religious professions were exploring images and language to expand our communities’ understanding of God.  In prayers and sermons, we tried out words that seemed a little blasphemous – Mother God, God who nursed Israel at her breast, God in labor, birthing creation itself.  We prayed to Sophia – Wisdom – the feminine side of God.  We envisioned Sophia claiming her rightful place beside God, his woman partner.  I was part of a Minneapolis group called Feminists in Faith, a wonderful group that included women rabbis, nuns, witches and Christian clergy.  We met monthly and tried to write as a group – a process that often resembled the children’s game telephone but without the laughter.  I remember one particular such effort during which two of the nuns pushed the rest of us to consider whether we could find any woman images of God that did not involve pregnancy, birth, or milk-filled breasts.  In other words was the ability to bear children the only significant difference between the male and the female.  Soon after, I decided to leave the group, but that challenge stayed with me, especially because it was about that same time Warren and I decided to adopt our children.

Another vignette – sixteen years ago, when I was publicly introduced to the Indiana-Kentucky Conference as the search committee’s choice for conference minister, Warren and our children were with me in Indianapolis.  The night before the annual meeting of the conference, the Board of Directors had quite a conversation about how the introduction, scheduled for the next morning, would best occur.  I was to make a presentation, then questioned by the gathered clergy and lay delegates from all the UCC churches in the conference.  I would then leave the hall and the delegates would vote.  Sometime within those events, my family would be introduced.  That was when the discussion among the directors of the conference became interesting.  Should my family be introduced at the very beginning, before my presentation?  Or after the questions but before the vote?  Or should I bring my family out on stage after the votes had been cast?  I thought this was a conversation about what would work best for my very young children, their emotional comfort at the ages of four and six in being introduced to a crowd of four hundred strangers.  I suggested the earlier the better so their father could then take them back to the hotel for a swim.  It turns out the conversation wasn’t about the comfort of my children but whether their brown skin would adversely affect the votes of the delegates.  Better to introduce them after the vote, perhaps while the ballots were being counted.  In retrospect, I should have resigned my nomination as conference minister before the vote was taken.  It was the first of many mistakes I made during those three painful years.

As you know, groups of volunteers from our church travel to Mississippi every year to work for Habitat for Humanity.  Over the years, we have built some strong relationships with our Mississippi friends.  One of those friends, Carl Fuller, was here a few months ago to speak to us about new efforts to move our building efforts to another Mississippi community.  While he was here, John McCain announced his choice for vice-president, Sarah Palin.  Well, Carl said, we’ll see which one is hated less, a black man or a woman.

In 1959, the white journalist John Howard Griffin took a drug to darken his skin, spent hours under ultra-violet lights, stained the light spots that still showed, shaved his head, and traveled through the racially segregated states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, passing as a black man. Sepia Magazine financed the project in exchange for the right to print his journal entries as a series of articles.  Griffin’s journal later became the book Black Like Me, published in 1961.  After the publication of the book Griffin was hanged in effigy in his hometown and threatened with death.  Griffin himself, a native of the south, was shocked by the treatment he received as a black man, which simply could not compare to the privileged position he held as a white journalist.  And he was shocked again at the betrayal many of his white friends felt after he published the book.  It was one of the first books I read about race relations and it made a lasting impression. 

It reminds me of another journalist’s experiment with cross culture immersion, Barbara Ehrenreich’s dive into the world of the minimum wage.  Between 1998 and 2000, Ehrenreich left her financially secure life behind and lived in Key West, Florida, Portland, Maine, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, working and trying to live safely on minimum wage.  Her book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, was published in 2001 and provided a troubling glimpse of the lives of the working poor.

In both these books, journalists Griffin and Ehrenreich went undercover to expose some dirty secrets about our American culture.  But both Griffin and Ehrenreich were play-acting, able to stop their dangerous experiment at any time and return to the relative ease of their real lives.  They entered cultures at some risk to their own personal safety, but then they left those cultures to live again in the cultures they, and we, understand like fish understand water.

Barack Obama is a black man, running for president.  Think for a moment about all the things you have heard about him that have nothing to do with his intellectual abilities for the job.  It’s fortunate he is generally an affable guy since the country wouldn’t tolerate an angry black man.  Is he too black?  Or not black enough?  What about that fist bump with Michelle – was that some sort of black code?  How would all the black employees at the White House – the servers, housekeepers and butlers - deal with a black first family?  And Trinity United Church of Christ, that black church in Chicago, can a white person be a member there?  But wait, he’s Muslim, isn’t he?

Sarah Palin is a woman running for vice-president.  Think for a moment about all the things you have heard about her that have nothing to do with her intellectual abilities for the job.  She is the mother of five children, the youngest just six months old, often seen in the care of her oldest daughter, who at the age of seventeen is going to be a mother herself.  Shouldn’t Sarah Palin be home taking care of her family?  And did you know that designer eyeglass sales have doubled in the last four weeks?  And where does she get those sexy suits?  And how does she walk in those heels? And who does her hair?  And did she just wink at the camera during the debate?  And when she’s vice-president, how is she going to have time to go to her future son-in-law’s hockey games?

Our American culture is a living thing.  It has emotions and arms and legs and teeth.  It can be hostile and unforgiving.  It can slap you down, step on your ambitions, and make greed an honorable thing.  It is as shallow as a dimestore novel and as influential as a tsunami.  Our culture tells us what to think about race, gender, beauty, vulgarity, justice, courage, and cowardice.  And it is the thing to which religion must speak if religion is to mean anything at all ever.

In 1951, eight years before John Griffin went black, and three years before I was born, H. Richard Niebuhr published Christ and Culture, a sophisticated analysis of the relationship between Christianity and the culture in which it swims.  Niebuhr wrote, “A many-sided debate about the relations of Christianity and civilization is being carried on in our time… The debate is as confused as it is many-sided… So many voices are heard, so many confident but diverse assertions about the Christian answer to the social problem are being made, so many issues are raised, that bewilderment and uncertainty beset many Christians.  In this situation it is helpful to remember that the question of Christianity and civilization is by no means a new one; that Christian perplexity in this area has been perennial, and that the problem has been an enduring one through all the Christian centuries.  It is helpful also to recall that the repeated struggles of Christians with this problem have yielded no single Christian answer, but only a series of typical answers which together, for faith, represent phases of the strategy of the militant church in the world.  That strategy, however, being in the mind of the Captain rather than any of the lieutenants, is not under the control of the latter.  Christ’s answer to the problem of human culture is one thing.  Christian answers are another.”

Race is a cultural construct.  There are different surface features of human beings – shades of skin tone, eye shape and color, hair texture.  Gender is a cultural construct as well.  There are differences in plumbing between men and women, to be sure, and levels of particular hormones, but role definitions, responsibilities, and personality preferences are culturally prescribed.  And culture is not the authority to which I choose to give my devotion and my loyalty.

The Christian life is so counter-cultural it is a little frightening.  Niebuhr has brilliantly described the options available to Christians as we relate to our culture, concluding with the one that is most difficult but most faithful – that is Christ as the transformer of culture.  It recognized culture as a given – not an enemy nor a panacea but a reality – again, the water in which we swim.  It is not appropriate for the Christian to withdraw from the culture, or to bash it as with fists against a rock wall.  Neither is it appropriate for the Christian to adopt the positions of the culture as Paul suggests when he said, “I have become all things to all people so as to win the more.” And it does not work to simply rail against the culture, like those who listen to hate radio to have something to yell about on the drive home. 

Our work as Christians is to be continually transformed by Christ and to seek that continual transformation of the culture in which we live.  That requires, first of all, knowing who Christ was.  We need to become better scholars of the gospels – pure and simple.  What did Jesus mean when he said, “let the one of you without sin cast the first stone.” Or, “I have come not to condemn the world.” Or, “come and dine with me tonight.” Or “leave the dead to bury their own dead.” Or “Peter, put away your sword.” Or “Do you see that woman? With her one mite, she has given more.” Or, “the one who dips his hand into the cup with mine will betray me.” Or, “shake the dust from your feet”. Or, “Peter, do you love me?”

If you have not yet decided who will receive your vote in November, think about the cultural construct of your questions and then think whether your decision ought to be guided by those cultural constructs.  Actually, if you have decided already, you might ask the same question.  Why am I voting for this candidate?  Why am I not voting for that candidate?  I don’t imagine such a question will change your mind one way or another, but it might make you a more thoughtful citizen.  Better, it might make you a more thoughtful Christian.  Amen.