McMusing: It's Personal, Not Political
Are we listening to the voices of the survivors and the marginalized?
The following reflection was posted on my personal Facebook page at the end of July before I took a break from social media. I have chosen to share it here also due to the responses from those who commented and messaged me privately. Acknowledging how the pain of survivors is diminished is not political. It is personal for at least 25% of the population.
I grew up in an era/home where politics were generally not discussed. I did not know that my father voted Democrat until he was in his 90s (when Barack Obama was elected president). This was not true for most of his family. I asked him two questions. The first was why he never talked about the fact that he voted Democrat. He said that he wanted his children to make their own decisions. Then I asked him why he voted Democrat and he said that he held the actions and policies of the two parties up to the lens of being most like Jesus and in his mind, the Democrats came closer.
By the time my dad and I had this conversation, I had spent my entire adult life in church settings where being Republican was nearly synonymous with being a Christian—right next to only watching Fox News. It was a great place to survive because I knew exactly what I was expected to do, believe, and think. For the most part, everyone loved Jesus and those who Jesus loved. The rules were often absurd, but I knew what they were. I was comfortable; until I wasn't.
What changed? Me. The me who had become comfortable ignoring my Christian/Wesleyan heritage that was deeply embedded with social justice began to notice three things:
The First Thing I Noticed
As I began to work on my doctorate I realized that I had come to fear "the others." When I sat and had conversations with those I had been taught to fear, I had to dig much deeper to find ways to share how faith mattered in my life with people who were working to care for the marginalized people that Jesus loved. This was my first glimpse of the truth that faith should be about far more than reaching heaven safely.
The Second Thing I Noticed
My dad never told me that I had lost the plot. He believed I would figure it out. One day, while discussing the news, the death penalty came up. He did not believe in it. I had never considered believing anything other than what the world I lived in told me to believe—an eye for an eye. I asked him for his thoughts and his response was that we had no right to play god. How can we know but what God is working in the soul of a person? Who are we to say that we should be in control as to when a life should end?
This conversation was the pivotal point when I began to understand how often we as Christians talk out of both sides of our mouths. It is contradictory to say that God chooses the day we die and then choose the day when someone else dies. It is also contradictory to say that we believe life in the womb is important but life in the prison cell is not.
The Third Thing I Noticed
My most conflicting moment came when video evidence that a presidential candidate supported by Republican Christians bragged about sexually abusing women. Since that moment, I have never wavered in my refusal to support DT and I fully expected the Christians who I had sat beside in the pews of churches for a lifetime to demand a different candidate.
Far from standing firm that this kind of treatment of women is unacceptable what I have watched is a slippery slope to the moral integrity of a candidate becoming irrelevant. I have spent a lifetime suffering and the past ten years healing from what men likely bragged about. I cannot know for certain that someone else I vote for hasn't done something despicable, but I certainly can hold the one I know abused women accountable with my vote.
Maybe the final straw in my need to take a social media break (which I am going to do again in October) was the recent moral outrage over what has proven to be along the lines of " I do not think it means what you think it means." (Princess Bride always applies) It isn't that Christians do not know how to whip up moral outrage. It is just very seldom about the abuse of women. Maybe never. I am trying to think of an instance, tell me if you can think of one.
It is better to take a break than to be confronted daily with the fact that for the most part, the sexual abuse of women is irrelevant to the vast majority of white evangelical Christians who will yes, once again, despite the evidence, vote for someone who has abused women. This is true for many who I love and call my friends. It is hard.
So, for all the women who like me have spent years trying to heal from what was done to us, know that I understand how it feels to have someone I care for deeply tell me that it is a political decision. "I am sorry that happened to you, but it doesn't apply to this."
Yes, it does. I am following my dad's advice and voting for the candidates that come the closest to caring for the marginalized—all of them—including women.
Current Reflection:
Two things happened last week that prompted me to post this as this week’s McMusing. The first was that 5 executions have happened over a week’s span in the US. That’s the most in decades. One of these was in the state where I raised my family. In his newsletter on Sunday, Rev. Benjamin Cremer stated:
“The execution in Missouri of Marcellus Williams was carried out despite pleas from the prosecutors, jurors, the victim’s family, and the office that tried him to stop his execution. The governor of Missouri and 6 Supreme Court justices all rejected this request. All of whom also claim to be Christian and ‘pro life.’”
The second was the launch of the following documentary. What was said by the brave women who speak in this documentary echoed my words in the Facebook post that I shared above. It is not political for these women—or me. Everything in this documentary has been shared with me by the women (and men) who reach out to me. Sexual abuse in the church is not rare. It is an epidemic that has been occurring since I was a child.
This is a half-hour documentary—please take time to watch it.
Thank you Janyne for all of this. You have touched on some topics I've struggled with over the years. We are experiencing beautiful support from some of the "others" we were once taught to fear. I love seeing God's goodness show up in ways I may not have expected at a different time in my life. And as a sexual abuse survivor and the mother of a sexual abuse survivor, I cannot in good conscience vote for a candidate who has bragged about sexually abusing women. It's personal.