Category Archives: Social Issues

20 Things Christians Need to Stop Saying about Sexual Abuse

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Hello readers! We are looking forward to writing regularly again. We’ve missed interacting with you all. Unfortunately, Sarah’s health has continued to decline. Because of this, it may be a while before we’re writing very consistently again.

Given recent items in the news, we have decided to spend some time talking about sexual abuse. It’s an important topic for the Church as a whole. We are disheartened to know that so many Christians feel woefully under-equipped and underprepared to respond appropriately to allegations of sexual abuse. Additionally, many Christians and non-Christians make strong assertions about how they think both celibacy and homosexuality relate to sexual abuse. We’ve shared previously that Sarah is a survivor of sexual abuse. We’d like to use today’s post to kick off a series related to sexual abuse, starting with 20 things Christians need to stop saying about this topic. Over the past few days, we have been engaged in many conversations about the molestation scandal within the Duggar family. While we are not talking about the Duggar family specifically, we’ve heard everything on this list either in response to this scandal or during Sarah’s process of healing from sexual abuse.

1. “Sexual abuse can’t happen in my church or in my family.” The problem with this statement is that yes, sexual abuse can happen in any environment. The vast majority of abusers are people known by the child. It’s much more likely that an abuser will be someone you know and trust than a shadowy figure lurking at the playground.

2. “But he (or she) is such a good Christian and contributes a lot to our community.” If you think a “good Christian” isn’t capable of sexually abusing a child, then you seriously underestimate the power of sin. Abuse happens because few people suspect those deemed by the community to be morally upright. Abusers are people who have regular access to children because they have earned a community’s trust.

3. “It was only touching. That’s not really abuse.” This is equivalent to saying something like, “It was only a knife. There’s no way your life was in danger during that mugging.” No one has the right to minimize someone else’s trauma. What is more, a person might be describing an incident of inappropriate touching as a way of testing whether you are a safe person to share with more openly about other kinds of unwelcome sexual advances. If you have never experienced unwanted sexual touching, you cannot know how frightening it is.

4. “But he’s only a teenager.” / “But he’s an old man who is probably senile.” / “But (insert reason here) and because of that, it shouldn’t be held against him (or her).” Making excuses because of a person’s age or ability level serves no one. Teenagers need to be held accountable for their actions. Those who are otherwise not mentally competent should be protected from finding themselves in situations where they would be at risk for behaving inappropriately. Focusing on the perpetrator and how responsible he/she is belittles the experience of the victim. The victim’s suffering is not contingent on the perpetrator’s age, motivation, sex, etc.

5. “Talking about this will bring scandal upon the Church and our family.” If you have an abuser lurking around because no one is willing to do anything about it, you already have scandal in your church. The victim is not the cause of scandal.

6. “But it happened so long ago.” Trauma is trauma, and the healing process rarely follows a nice, neat timeline. It’s easy to excuse the perpetrator by saying that he/she shouldn’t be held accountable for deeds done a decade ago when you aren’t the person having to live with the lasting consequences of those deeds. Saying that abuse shouldn’t matter because it happened years ago invalidates the experience of the victim.

7. “Everyone makes mistakes.” Abuse isn’t a mistake. It’s often the result of a careful process to select, groom, and gradually escalate episodes of inappropriate contact. Abuse is deliberate. And it’s a crime.

8. “But your abuser is welcome at God’s table. Who am I to exclude?” For the love of all things holy and sacred, do not use the sacred in this way. Would you have a person over for dinner if you knew that person was stealing substantive sums of money from you? Would you willfully see a person on a weekly basis if you knew that every time you saw that person he or she would be berating you with a steady stream of insults? We believe that different Christian traditions should be able to decide who can approach their communion tables, but if a sex offender receives communion as a member of a congregation that should never be held over the head of an abuse survivor. Don’t focus on who is receiving communion. Focus on promoting accountability within your faith community.

9. “You must have done something to cause this.” No, no, no, and a hundred times more, no. This kind of willful ignorance re-traumatizes the victim, prevents other people from coming forward, and allows an abuser to go unchecked for that much longer. No victim ever causes his or her abuse to happen.

10. “If he was touching your breasts, you must’ve been old enough to have breasts and be a temptation to him.” Too often, Christians will go to amazing lengths to contort what happened so that it follows a convenient narrative of the female “temptress”: we sin because we are tempted; the best way to avoid being sinned against is to avoid being a temptation. When considered against the dynamics of how abuse works this line of thinking is, once again, willful ignorance. We will say more about this topic in a future post. For now we’ll say that Christians are generally helpful when a person says, “I have sinned,” but unfortunately clueless when a person comes forward with, “I have been sinned against.”

11. “It couldn’t have happened that way. You’re exaggerating. You’re lying.” Sometimes it’s easier to accuse victims of lying than it is to wrestle with the implications of their stories. People can assert that a victim is lying when, in reality, they are saying, “That couldn’t have happened. I don’t believe that it happened. I don’t want to believe that it happened. That’s absolutely horrible, it makes me sick to my stomach, and I don’t know what to do. I’m not going to think about it.” Never accuse a person of lying when he/she confides in you about an experience of abuse. If you believe the person who is claiming to have been abused, almost every time you are believing the right person.

12. “If you were really abused and it really wasn’t your fault, don’t worry: God protected your purity.” This kind of response misrepresents Christianity on a fundamental level. The goal of being a Christian is not to remain physically untouched before marriage. The goal of practicing Christianity is fully embodying Christ and coming into a deeper union with God. This message tells the victim, “An untouched body before marriage matters more than anything, and I don’t know how to square that with what happened to you, so I’m just going to say that God fixed it.”

13. “You need to be more forgiving.” Christians tend to be full of advice for sexual abuse victims. Advice like this is manipulation. It’s code for, “You just need to get over it. I’m done listening to you.” Unfortunately when it comes to sexual abuse, “forgiveness” is often used to hide the allegations as quickly as possible so that the family and community don’t have to think about the truth anymore.

14. “If you report this, nothing will be done about it anyway.” Authorities can respond to sexual abuse allegations in many ways depending upon the situation. Oftentimes, filing a report with the police is a necessary first step for taking other actions. Victims should be able to report what happened to them to the police if they choose to do so. A Christian should never encourage someone to remain silent.

15. “If you report this, it will only drag your reputation through the mud.” This sentiment is another way to blame the victim. It highlights that reporting sexual abuse can be a humiliating process. The better option would be to work on improving the process and making it less painful instead of steering the victim away from reporting altogether.

16. “You need to have more compassion for his wife and children. If you report this, you’ll be causing them pain.” It’s distressing how many people can think about cases of childhood sexual abuse from the alleged perpetrator’s perspective. Yes, a perpetrator’s spouse and children will experience pain when the truth is revealed. But whose fault is that? It’s the fault of the perpetrator. Reporting abuse can prevent other people from being victimized. Any pain experienced by a perpetrator’s family due to reporting is an extension of the perpetrator’s own sin.

17. “Going to the authorities is spiteful and vengeful. Jesus doesn’t want us to be spiteful and vengeful.” No, going to the authorities is not necessarily about spite and vengeance. It’s about protecting others and seeking accountability. It is irresponsible to use Jesus’ teachings to manipulate a victim into shutting up.

18. “If your parents didn’t report the abuse but you report it yourself, social services will think your parents are the abusers and take you away from them. The state persecutes good Christian families.” And this is just another way to get victims to shut up. Failing to report abuse is a serious matter. Parents who are aware of abuse and don’t report it are breaking the law irrespective of whether they are Christians. The state is not going to pull children away from a family unless the abuser lives in the home. This is a ridiculous lie created for the purpose of scaring children into silence.

19. “God will judge based on truth. Do you think the police will judge better than God?” This sentiment places full responsibility back on the victim’s shoulders. This kind of counsel can help an abuser hide easily and avoid any kind of consequences. The kingdom of God is both “already” and “not yet.” Building the kingdom of God means dealing with injustice in the here and now as well as having faith in divine justice.

20. “You and your abuser are the same because we are all sinners.” This line of thinking is dangerous. It prevents victims from saying, “I have been sinned against.” It normalizes and equalizes abuse as “just another sin” and blames the victim in the process. It is true that we are all sinners, but this is not an appropriate response to someone who has experienced sexual abuse.

It is our hope that more Christians will start thinking about how to help the victim journey through the entirely messy healing process. If someone confides in you about being abused, consider responding with something like, “It really means a lot to me that you would trust me enough to tell me about this. Have you told anyone else? How can we work together to help make sure that you’re safe?”

Stay tuned this week for more installments in our series on sexual abuse.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

Life at the Edge of Schism

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A reflection by Lindsey

I’m blessed to know a large number of Christians passionate about loving LGBT people. While most of my friends in this category would feel comfortable describing themselves as LGBT, I also know many straight Christians who care about having thoughtful conversations as well as Christians who would rather say that they have struggled or currently struggle with same-sex attraction. Over the years, it’s been interesting to see what kind of topics tend to ignite spirited conversations. My Facebook feed is a great place for every sort of news item on the intersection between LGBT people and Evangelical churches. As it stands, I was well-positioned to see the opening of a new church called Blue Ocean Faith Ann Arbor.

Normally I wouldn’t be writing a reflection about the opening of a new church, but the story of Blue Ocean Faith Ann Arbor connects with a surprising number of places on my own spiritual journey. Ann Arbor first bleeped across my radar when I noticed then-Vineyard pastor Ken Wilson talking about a new approach to discussing LGBT people in the church. The blurb caught my attention, and I immediately reached out to Ken because I was so impressed to see a Vineyard pastor making a public declaration that LGBT people should be “welcomed and wanted” by local churches. We reviewed A Letter to My Congregation a few months later while I held my breath wondering what would happen in the Vineyard Church as a whole. The response of most Vineyard churches to questions of homosexuality has been to offer Living Waters programs, arguably one of the best known “healing” programs for people “struggling with unwanted same-sex attraction.” When I saw the announcement for Blue Ocean Faith Ann Arbor, I realized that something had happened. Indeed, Ken’s position on pastoral care for LGBT people had lead to another schism in the church.

As far as I can tell, the Ann Arbor story goes something like this: Ken Wilson had been talking and writing about responding to the shifting pastoral care needs of LGBT people in his congregation. Vineyard USA had tended towards silence on the issue. But then Ken published A Letter to My Congregation. Vineyard USA responded to the book with an 90-page position paper entitled “Pastoring LGBT Persons” that does, to its credit, use LGBT language and refers to LGBT people as persons. The Executive Team of Vineyard USA wrote a letter to the Ann Arbor Vineyard basically asking the church to agree publicly with the position paper in order to remain affiliated with the organization. What seems to have happened is that the Ann Arbor Vineyard now has 1 pastor and the newly established Blue Ocean Faith Ann Arbor has 2 pastors, ostensibly dividing the existing community. Additionally, there are other churches that have jettisoned their affiliation with the Vineyard movement in the wake of the position paper.

The Ann Arbor story hits closer to home than our readers might realize. While I’ve never lived in Michigan, I was a member of the Cambridge Vineyard Church when I attended university in Boston from 2001 to 2005. It’s safe to say that a lot has happened in the intervening decade, both in my life and in Evangelical Christianity. I learned so much about following Jesus and trying to do church with other people while at the Cambridge Vineyard. It was difficult to leave Boston after graduation, but God had other plans. I remember choosing the Cambridge Vineyard halfway through my freshman year because it looked like it was a place willing to have some honest conversations about homosexuality. (The other church I had been attending at that time viewed almost any problem as an opportunity to exorcise demons, which totally freaked me out.) I hadn’t even started coming out to myself, so I had a metric ton of questions. Being at the Cambridge Vineyard gave me reassurance that I could build my faith on the idea of trying to give my life fully to following Jesus. It certainly wasn’t a perfect church community. Needless to say, I was rather pleasantly surprised when I learned that Dave Schmelzer (who was the lead pastor of the Cambridge Vineyard during my time there) is actively working to help Blue Ocean Faith churches.

I’ve spent the last few days reading deeper into what happened at the Ann Arbor Vineyard. In many ways, it feels like a story that might have happened at any church I’ve attended. It’s way too easy to see myself in the story. Coming to faith in Evangelical communities, I’ve always wondered if my life had the potential to cause a scandal that would rock any group I was a part of. In college, I got involved in ex-gay ministries because I viewed my questions about sexual orientation and gender identity as a kind of ticking time-bomb that would eventually explode and destroy my faith community. It’s been an uphill battle to figure out how to think about my own queer experience as anything other than a liability.

So much of the challenge has been encountering church leaders who always felt the need to warn me about impropriety. Truth be told, I couldn’t imagine a person with lower risk factors than myself for living a “scandalous” lifestyle marked by partying and free-wheeling sexuality. When I was in high school, I was the kid who always buttoned the top button and tucked in my shirt. I had no interest in showing skin and still experience regular frustration with shopping for clothes that fit right. I don’t know what would have happened if I had been in an Evangelical church where the leaders committed to helping me follow Christ in an atmosphere of generous spaciousness around questions of who I loved and how to love these people best.

Much of my journey has involved carving out a sense of generous spaciousness for myself. I’ve made the argument time and time again, “Human beings have meaningful relationships with other human beings because that is a part of what it means to be created in the image of a triune God.” When I started to say that all humans have meaningful relationships with other people, I discovered ways to live in rich friendships where the word friend failed to capture the mystery of those relationships. Meeting Sarah showed me how things look and feel different when two people fall into an organic pattern of relating with one another. I’ve been blessed to have some wonderful spiritual directors who have been able to walk with me on my journey. When it comes to the particulars of my relationship with Sarah, we take joy in the fact that we’re figuring things out as we go along.

I don’t know how a compassionate Evangelical pastor would respond to my life with Sarah. I could see this hypothetical pastor asking himself or herself whether it made sense for me to marry Sarah even with our commitment to celibacy. After all, many Evangelical pastors I’ve met over the years would say that in marriage two people seek God’s blessing upon their relationship and formalize their promises to one another in the presence of witnesses. I could see this pastor asking Sarah and me a ton of questions about how we’ve struggled to navigate different facets of health care access. I wonder how this pastor would encourage the two of us to share our commonly held prayer requests with our faith community. I really have no idea how I would handle talking with a pastor who had these sorts of questions, but I do know that it’s an amazing surprise whenever a person decides to let me know that he or she cares about walking with me along my journey. But I wonder if this hypothetical pastor would feel like he or she was teetering at the edge of a schism for even asking thoughtful questions about our relationship and any pastoral needs that might arise when two people are in such a relationship.

Many Evangelical churches do not have any tradition of celibacy lived in community. I wonder if a compassionate Evangelical pastor would investigate different ways Christians have shared life together over the years. Would he or she stumble upon skete monasticism? If so, would this hypothetical pastor feel like he or she could help us discern our vocation as a community of two? Would this pastor perceive that his or her only option would be to pray with us on the condition that all three of us never said a word to anyone else?

Living in community creates some interesting tension points. I’m rather used to feeling like I live at the edge of schism. I’ve been counseled more times than I can imagine to live in silence, to keep quiet, and to stay out of sight lest the issue erupt. That’s part of what it means to be closeted. But I wonder how much longer people can fit into the closet when trying to provide faithful pastoral care to LGBT Christians. I’ve seen families who have gone into hiding with their loved ones. I’m sure there are many pastors who have taken the route of “I will pray with you, but please don’t tell anyone else that I’m journeying alongside of you.” The whole situation reminds me of playing “Sardines” as a youth group kid. After a while, the game turns comical because all of the youth are trying to hide in exactly the same spot. There’s no hiding anymore.

How is it that any, and seemingly all, conversations about providing pastoral care for LGBT people happen at the edge of schism? Lord have mercy.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

Difference, Disability, and the Mystery of the Age to Come

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A reflection by Sarah

Difference. It’s a word that’s being used more and more these days. It is a loaded term. I’m not sure I can count the number of times when I’ve witnessed someone using the word “difference” and someone else reacting with suspicion or outright hostility. Cut the politically correct bullshit. Ten years ago, no one felt shamed when dyslexia was called a “learning disability” rather than a “learning difference.” There is no difference between gay people and everyone else — gay people just want special rights. Celibacy is not a “different” calling — clearly, it shows that a person is uncomfortable with thinking about sex. As we’ve been blogging for the past year, I have noticed that a large number of people find the language of “difference” problematic. Some see it as a sign that the person using this word believes in coddling or extending unneeded additional privileges to someone who is “different.” Others see it as a denial of obvious realities — for example, glossing over hard topics like disability or sexual orientation in attempt to cater to a person or group’s oversensitivity. These folks often see themselves as acknowledging objective reality for what it is while the rest of the world is too concerned with sparing people’s feelings.

Important as I think it is to call a duck a duck, I’m skeptical of these claims more often than not. Decrying use of the word “difference” because of its supposed political correctness usually involves appealing to some objective reality that may or may not actually be objective. It seems to me that the problem becomes even more complicated when folks insist upon language that implies value judgment — gayness means that something is “wrong” regardless of the person’s level of sexual activity because it is contrary to God’s plan for marriage. Physical disability means that something is “wrong” with a person’s body part because body parts have obvious natural functions intended by God. Celibacy means that something is mentally or emotionally “wrong” with the celibate person because this way of life contradicts God’s commandment that we should be fruitful and multiply.

I remember a conversation I had with my paternal grandfather when I was about to enter the 10th grade — what Americans refer to as the “sophomore” year of high school. He asked me if I knew what that word — sophomore — meant. Based on its roots, I had a sense that its meaning was related to both wisdom and foolishness. Grandpa, a brilliant man who had spent his younger years in the U.S. Navy and then worked as a professor of electricity, informed me that the word does indeed mean “wise fool.” I remember the conversation as though it was yesterday. “Sarah,” he told me, “A foolish man will spend his life gathering knowledge and priding himself on how much he thinks he knows. A wise man will spend his life learning how very little he knows, and the world will see his wisdom as foolish.” I always loved and respected Grandpa, but as the average high school sophomore likely would, I dismissed his words as the ramblings of a very old man with severe dementia. Now, what I wouldn’t give to sit down with him and have this discussion all over again…

So much of my life as an adult has been influenced by that conversation. Not that I consider myself particularly wise, but it has helped me to keep in mind that the human ability to know things is extremely limited. No matter how strong my opinion may be on a particular issue, it’s unreasonable to insist that I can know certain things about myself, other people, the world, and God if I actually can’t. When it comes to what God did or did not intend regarding human diversity, I don’t buy the western theological notion that almost everything can be categorized into natural or unnatural, ordered or disordered, good or bad, and right or wrong. To be totally clear, I’m not promoting a moral relativist position. I do believe that objective good and bad, right and wrong exist, and that from a Christian perspective actions and behaviors almost always fit one or more of these descriptors. However, it does not make sense to me that we can know without a doubt how (or if) every aspect of the incarnate human experience can be placed into one of these categories. Yes, I know, our readers who are fans of Aristotle and Aquinas are about to explode upon reading that. In case I haven’t already made it clear in other posts, I don’t always find detailed systematic explanations of theological or practical matters very convincing. Some experiences of life strike me as amoral. They cannot be rightly categorized because categorization drains these human experiences of their mysteriousness. It makes sense to me that discussing many aspects of life in terms of “difference” is a helpful way of appreciating that our minds are finite and we cannot put the mystery of God into a box.

Recently, the most common conversations I’ve engaged in regarding issues of difference have involved disability. These conversations have taken place over several weeks with many different people, and amongst all of them I’ve heard it stated that: 1) Disability is a result of the fall of humanity; 2) Disability means that something is wrong with a person on an ontological level; 3) Disability means that something is wrong, not on an ontological level, but on the level of “x body part isn’t working correctly”; 4) Because Jesus healed people of disabilities in the Gospels, it is obvious that people will be healed of all their disabilities in the Eschaton; 5) The claim that a certain disability is simply a “difference” carries with it the implication that disability is bad, difference is good, and people who don’t use difference language for describing their own disabilities ought to be shamed. Clearly, there is not enough space within one blog post to unpack all of these, but I think it’s important to address the general attitudes behind them. As I see it, many of these bear similarities to the continuous language policing that politically far-right straight Christians engage in with regard to LGBTQ issues.

The term “disability” is not scriptural. It is a human construction based upon what the able-bodied majority sees as normal or deviating from normal. People who have disabilities understand those disabilities in a wide variety of ways. Some view their disabilities primarily as distressing realities that interfere with their pursuits of fulfillment in life. Others view disabilities as nothing more than different ways of being — ways of life that need not be thought of as limited, but can be discussed in terms of advantages or even increase in other kids of ability (e.g. some hearing people who are blind have keener auditory abilities than hearing people who are sighted). There are also people with disabilities who see those disabilities as more of a mixed bag. Some prefer the language of disability while others prefer to use the phrase different ability.

I’m not suggesting that there is a right or wrong way for people to understand their own disabilities, but I do find it problematic when Christians suggest that due to theological, biological, or other truths, the most correct way of understanding disability (or difference in general) is through a lens of “Humanity is fallen and broken, and this brokenness will be redeemed.” For the record, I agree that humanity lives with the consequences of sin’s entry into the world, though I (in accordance with the teachings of my tradition) do not believe that we inherit original sin. I also agree that all of us are broken in one way or another, and that the Eschaton will bring about a restoration of all things to Christ. But the problem is, none of us know exactly what that means, and it isn’t possible for us to know. How do we know that disabilities will be “healed” in the Eschaton? Or that gay people will no longer be gay? How do we know that a disabled/differently-abled person who actually finds joy in that disability/different ability will not be permitted to maintain that aspect of incarnate identity for all eternity?

The purpose of the miracle stories in the Christian scriptures is to show us something about the kingdom of God, where the first shall be last and those who have been exiled will be welcomed to a place at the table. It seems to me that welcoming those who have been exiled and restoring a person’s place in community would require different interventions for different people. It makes sense to me that Christ healed blind Bartimaeus of his blindness because the society of the time made it nearly impossible for blind people to experience any form of human connection. However, it does not make sense to me that one must interpret this scriptural story as evidence that blindness is necessarily a form of brokenness that must be cured in the Eschaton. What if in the Eschaton, some blind people are given a physical sense of sight and others are not? What if at that time, there is no such thing as a “physical” sense of sight at all? Why must a restoration of all things necessarily mean that every glorified body will be “able-bodied” in the sense that we define this term in our earthly lives? There are blind people who would not want to be sighted and deaf people who would not want to be hearing even if there was a magic pill that could make it so. Are we seriously anticipating that on the resurrection day, God will sit down with these folks and say, “You did the best you could with the abilities you had in earthly life. But seeing and hearing are better than not seeing or not hearing, so here you go!”

I probably need to stop writing before I give myself nightmares. The image of God at the end of my previous paragraph strikes me as frightening and cruel. My own reasons for taking a disability-positive approach to my hearing loss are deeply connected to acceptance of myself as a lesbian and as a celibate. If given the opportunity, I wouldn’t want to be straight. I would not want to live a non-celibate way of life. And to my great surprise as I’ve come to accept the change in my hearing status, I’m discovering that I don’t want to be a hearing person again. Other people feel differently about their own experiences of the same circumstances, and I’m not about to deny them their feelings. But when we try to tell other people that something about their ability level, sexual orientation, cultural identity, etc. is necessarily broken or indicates wrongness, we are making value judgments about human experiences that are deeply mysterious. We are being wise fools, claiming to know the full extent of how God intends to redeem humanity at the resurrection. In a sense, we are acting as though we are God. That’s a tendency I struggle with myself in some conversations, so I’m not claiming innocence here. But it is also a tendency that I pray we will see less and less of in churches, and the only method I know for combatting it is reminding myself that no matter how knowledgeable I think I am, I worship an infinitely mysterious God who alone knows the complex needs of each individual creation.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

The Challenges of Allyship

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A reflection by Lindsey

Doing life with people is hard. It’s tremendously difficult, especially when trying to live at the intersections of power and privilege. An ally is a person who sits at these intersections trying to listen, trying to learn, and trying to be present. Sometimes it’s essential to be an advocate for the people closest to you.

I’ll admit, sometimes it’s just plain weird to think of myself as Sarah’s “ally.” The word doesn’t come to mind when I think about our relationship. But then I think about everything I’ve learned from Sarah about life with chronic illnesses, surviving sexual violence, and negotiating rapidly changing ability levels. The more I learn, the harder it is for me to not care. I even find myself incredibly invested in causes I never knew existed before I met Sarah. I want so badly to cast aside my own prejudices and advocate zealously for the dignity of every human being.

Except it’s not that easy.

I can’t turn off my own story. I can do my best to foster compassion, to create space, and to listen, but I’m always living in my own story. So often my story gets in the way. It’s hard for me to look at how power and privilege block what I’m able to see. Most of the time I really don’t want to see from another’s perspective.

In the past several months, I’ve watched Sarah grow towards becoming a late-deafened adult. Along the way, I’ve learned a bit about deafness, the Deaf community, and Deaf culture. It’s amazing how I’m seeing a part of the world that I’ve never seen before. And it’s also hard to realize how I’ve lived my whole life simply assenting to a view that hearing is a superior way of being. In reality, there’s something mysteriously amazing at how deafness enables a different way of experiencing the world, even as my experiences of silence remain remarkably different from Sarah’s.

I’ve been thinking a lot more about allyship lately. As I reflected recently, learning to be who I am as a white person taught me a lot about being who I am as an LGBT person. Sarah also recently introduced me to The Help. And I continue to think about how allies can let our own stories get in the way even when we have the best of intentions.

At a meta-level, The Help already raises big questions about whose story the author is actually telling. Abilene Cooper, a black maid, brought a lawsuit against author Kathryn Stockett on the grounds that Stockett had represented Cooper’s life story without permission. Watching the film adaptation of the book, I found myself asking a lot of questions about being an ally.

To quickly set up my observations, Skeeter Phelan (played by Emma Stone) is trying to make it in publishing. She takes on a job writing a cleaning advice column to gain some more experience. Skeeter doesn’t know much of anything about cleaning, so she gets permission to ask her friend’s housekeeper Aibileen a bunch of questions. She realizes that she would love to write about what it’s like for black women to work as maids in 1960s Mississippi because their perspective hasn’t been heard before. It’s new, it’s fresh, and it deeply connects to Skeeter’s own relationship with the maid who raised her. However, Skeeter jumps into her project with both feet before she realizes what she’s doing. She’s a bit taken aback that the maids she knows aren’t keen on speaking with her. She goes to the courthouse, figures out what she’s doing is illegal, and proceeds more cautiously. Aibileen cautiously agrees to start sharing stories.

I see a lot of myself when I look at Skeeter. She jumps in with gusto before taking any time to listen and learn. Shortly after Sarah had found out that one ear is medically deaf, I saw a story flying around the internet about a “fake interpreter” working at an Ebola conference. I was furious, so naturally I shared the story on Facebook with a guarded statement of “From what I can tell, this interpreter doesn’t seem to be doing a good job. ASL-fluent friends, what say you?” I was definitely not prepared to put my foot in my mouth after I learned the interpreter is a Certified Deaf Interpreter working on a team with another signer. But my friends corrected me, asked me to change something in my initial comment, and took some time to explain to me how Certified Deaf Interpreters work with a hearing interpreter. The hearing interpreter signs an initial English-to-ASL translation to the Deaf interpreter who then polishes the ASL such that it’s more intelligible for native ASL users. As it turns out, using Certified Deaf Interpreters is a best practice. Being an ally means learning, sometimes putting yourself out there, quickly putting your foot in your mouth when you screw up, and listening some more.

Being an ally is not fun, and it frequently means sitting with the discomfort that you are wrong a lot more than you are right. It means working to perfect your “I’m sorry. Please let me know what sort of corrective action I need to take,” muscles. I’ve had to own my story of privilege time and time again as I reflect why I didn’t understand something that should have been so plainly obvious. I’m so grateful for everyone who has had space to correct me when I’ve screwed up, and I’m profoundly humbled by the way folks have responded to me during times when I’ve missed the point entirely.

I’d love to be a part of the solution in making the world more welcoming and more hospitable to people who are different from me. But in order for that to happen, I need to learn how to position my story such that it makes space for other people to share theirs.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.

Author’s note: This post has been edited to remove some unintentionally vidist references that negatively portrayed blindness. If other folks see places where my language has fallen short of my goal, please consider taking to the comment box to let me know what I’ve done unintentionally and suggest some alternate ways of communicating the same meaning.

What “Being White” Taught Me about “Being LGBT”

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A reflection by Lindsey

One thing that I love so much about the Gay Christian Network Conference is that I spend a lot of time thinking about landmarks in my spiritual journey. Portland marks my sixth GCN conference in 8 years. I’ve grown and changed a lot in that time.

This year, I find myself thinking about reconciliation. What does it look like when two Christians with completely opposite life experiences sit down together at the table? How can we find common ground amidst profound disagreement, hurt, confusion, and misunderstandings? What happens when the axes of privilege and oppression intersect?

It’s not the first time I’ve considered such questions. When I was in college, I found a sense of spiritual home in a multiethnic chapter of Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. I quickly plugged in, figuratively and literally, as a freshman by participating regularly in small group Bible studies and playing the electric bass on the worship team. I looked forward to participating in just about every Intervarsity-sponsored activity that I could fit into my schedule as an engineering student. Overall, our fellowship had a decent population of white students, Asian-American students, and international students. We were mostly content to continue on our course… until one day during Spring semester when a group of African American seniors expressed considerable frustration that our group had incredibly few Black students. I remember being absolutely shocked that my friends would feel so isolated, alone, and unseen in what I perceived to be a vibrant and thriving Christian community. Hadn’t the fellowship made a special and concerted effort to attend the university’s Gospel Choir concert? Didn’t we encourage every student leader to create a small group of his or her choosing? Were not all welcome to give their gifts to our fellowship as they saw fit? What were we not doing that we should be doing? Why was I so taken aback?

As I plunged into the questions, I couldn’t help but see the problem: I was white and I had never thought much about it.

I remain forever grateful for how that fellowship challenged me to grow spiritually over the next three and a half years by encouraging me to think about what my whiteness meant to me. I developed a relationship with my white heritage, learning to appreciate the various contradictions found in my own embodied history. I thought about how, as a direct descendant of those who arrived on the Mayflower, I regularly heard the story of my people in my American history class in an incredibly positive light. I began to see how, at so many junctures, my people came out “on top.” My ancestors were the “good people” who braved the American frontier as simple farmers, settling the wilds of Wisconsin. The good-people-of-the-North conquered the impossibly-oppressive-slave-owners-of-the-South in the Civil War. Industrialization continued to pave the way to the American Dream. I lived in towns with good schools where it was reasonably possible to earn a solidly middle class income by putting in hours at the factory. Most of my friends came from two-parent homes and avoided problems with the law provided that they made good decisions. I didn’t have much experience putting myself in the shoes of others who were different from me. And honestly, I had never considered the cost of my privilege until I was at a great university in Boston because of hard-won solid financial aid package.

I don’t think I would have started to ask questions about my own heritage unless my friends would have had the guts to tell me that I was blind to their experience. All of a sudden, I realized that I was missing out on something big and important about following Christ if I didn’t take time to query what it meant to be a Church of every tribe, tongue, and nation. I started by asking hard questions about what it meant for me to be white. In humanizing my history, I connected more with my own humanness. I saw, and still see, so much to celebrate in my history. There was something profound about coming to see my ancestors as flesh-and-blood people who made a lot of mistakes along the way.

It was also in college when I could no longer avoid the reality that I was definitely somewhere on the LGBT spectrum.

I’ll freely admit that I’m a nerd who grew up relatively sheltered. Ellen and Rosie were the first examples of real-life gay people I had ever encountered. The vast majority of adults in my life questioned why it could possibly be important for gay people to “come out.” Why would anyone make a public declaration of his or her sex life? Who could possibly be bothered by something happening behind closed bedroom doors?

Through a long and arduous process, I realized that I had to start thinking about what it meant for me to be LGBT (even though at that time “gay” was the catch-all category). I remember searching on AOL with different whisperings of “I think I might be gay…” Being a sheltered kid from Minnesota whose idea of a really good time involved going night skiing with my family, I was totally taken aback by discussions focusing on gay bars, gay dating, and gay sex. I searched and searched and searched, growing ever more bewildered because I felt trapped between an overarching sense of “This isn’t me” constantly trading with an overwhelming sense of “Oh God, I know that somehow gay describes something about me.”

The world I grew up in felt absolutely heterosexual. Every adult in my large extended family was married or had been married at one time. Nearly all of my teachers were married, unless they were totally eccentric. Each of my friends had a mom and a dad. The vast majority of my friends’ parents were together, but there was a handful who spent the week with their mom and the weekend with their dad or vice versa. Every bit of dating drama I heard about in high school was between a guy and a girl. The world was straight, and no one was thinking much about it…

Except me. I was thinking about it, and it was tearing me up inside that I couldn’t make heads or tails about why I felt so different.

Eventually, I came to understand that difference in a range of ways. Meeting people in the Gay Christian Network showed me so many different ways of being LGBT. I started sharing my life and asking my questions on GCN in 2007. For the first time, I met people who seemed okay with the idea that being LGBT had to fit into my broader senses of who I am. It was okay that my internal world differed significantly from the world I grew up in. GCN gave me space to ask my own questions and seek God’s illumination. I realized I struggled to make sense of marriage because, truth be told, I wasn’t that interested in getting married. Entering a marriage struck me more about conforming to social expectations than living my life. It took a few years before I was introduced to the concept of celibate vocations. When I finally saw people living out a celibate way of life, I dared to risk hope that I would find space to live out my vocation.

I keep getting to know myself better more and more every day. I’ve thought long and hard about faith, sexuality, gender, and my sense of self. I hope I will always have questions about living my life in Christ to the fullest.

The more questions I ask myself, I wonder to what extent people from every marginalized minority probe deeply into their inner universe to make sense of the world around them. I’m grateful that God has shown me the value of searching for my sense of self in my majority identities as well. Perhaps doing the work of reconciliation means listening to minority voices tell you about things you’ve never thought much about before. Learning to appreciate my whiteness gave me the courage to seek God in an effort to appreciate my sexual orientation, gender identity, and vocation. I’m so grateful to be learning still.

Comment Policy: Please remember that we, and all others commenting on this blog, are people. Practice kindness. Practice generosity. Practice asking questions. Practice showing love. Practice being human. If your comment is rude, it will be deleted. If you are constantly negative, argumentative, or bullish, you will not be able to comment anymore. We are the sole moderators of the combox.