After Coming Out, Sacred Wilderness, America’s Comfort Women
KTF Weekly Newsletter
Hi everyone,
Please remember to send in your suggestions for our upcoming season of Shake the Dust—both guests and topics—to shakethedust@ktfpress.com. Some of our favorite episodes have been the result of guest suggestions, so we want to hear more! And now, on to this week’s recommendations.
Jonathan’s Recommendations
I believe, like author, professor, and journalist Issac Bailey, that all of us played a part in the death of Jordan Neely. In this op ed he names the poverty and neglect that large sections of our society accept as we pass by the people we don’t pursue or prioritize. Bailey wants us to remember those we walk by on commutes. He asks us to take stock of what we have done and are doing. We need a radical interrogation of our inaction in connection with Neely’s tragic death in the times in which we find ourselves. This piece prods me to be more like Jesus in places I have been numb and complacent; and I pray it does the same for you.
It is widely known that Japan forced South Korean and other Asian women into sexual exploitation during World War II. What we hear less about is how the Korean government facilitated the practice of sexual violence against Korean women by American soldiers following the war and made hundreds of millions of dollars doing it. Korean society called these women both “dollar earning patriots” for the country’s fledgling economy and dismissed them as “whores for the west” who were a necessary evil. The government forcibly tested women for venereal diseases and quarantined those in need of care in horrible conditions, prioritizing protecting American soldiers instead of protecting the women from rape and abuse. New York Times journalist Choe Sang-Hun tells the stories of these women beautifully and photographer Jean Chung provides amazing images to bring those stories to life. The stories of these women need to be heard and I hope Americans stop and listen.
I am guilty of judging and dehumanizing police officers as were many of those who sat in Sunday service with me last month as we heard the testimony of a man in our congregation, James Francis (starting around minute 54 in this video) who is a Black campus police officer and police trainer. He talked about what it’s like to be a law enforcement officer trying to follow Jesus. He watched the tapes of Eric Garner and George Floyd again and again; and then gave trainings to his colleagues about what they should do in similar situations. He gained the respect of his superiors for pursuing reforms while his peers rejected him as “soft.” He struggles to follow Jesus while working to change in an institution that is profoundly broken. James embodies the tension of being faithful and obedient with where God has called him while struggling to reconcile his faith and this work. I hope you will listen to his story and pray for him. Every officer he trains, he prays for and commends them to resist brutality by reporting it. A similarly extensive interrogation of our own work would make us better ambassadors in our contexts.
Sy’s Recommendations
Last week, Longreads published this essay by a theology PhD candidate at Yale named Samuel Ernest. It’s about his experience of trying to process who exactly he was after coming out as a gay Christian. Ernest writes about finding some freedom in admitting who he was publicly. But he then lost his sense that he knew himself because that freedom was making him too comfortable and confident, a state that he was slowly learning didn’t fit into his theology which required people’s lives to conform to clear, restrictive behavioral boxes. He writes beautifully about how he eventually learned that the grace of God is liberating and ever unfolding, permitting us to learn gradually who we are, even in ways that don’t make sense to us at the time. And none of this need make us anxious. Whatever you think of where Ernest lands on narrower theological questions doesn’t so much matter. His main point is this: “[F]aith may lead to unobvious lives, in which a person’s particularities are preserved, not obliterated. Being somewhere unexpected does not mean one has been hewn from the body of Christ, but that Christ’s body is found … somewhere unexpected.” Amen. (Content warning for language and sexual content).
Finally, a long bullet on some preliminary thoughts on a controversy that blew up on Twitter this week. A lot of white current or former evangelical Christians who advocate for spiritual abuse victims have turned on (former Shake the Dust guest) Kyle Howard recently. He called out (or bullied, depending on who you ask) the board of an all-white advocacy organization for survivors of spiritual abuse, Sacred Wilderness (SW), for being dismissive of BIPOC and for alleged mistreatment of its two and only employees, a white married couple Kyle was counseling. SW had a third party investigate what happened and released the subsequent 51-page report. I’ve read the whole thing and did not draw the same conclusions as the white folks on my Twitter timeline, or the white report author, who firmly takes SW’s side. I have not at this point read anything that the couple or Kyle said about the matter outside their words quoted and summarized in the report itself. One notable thing to me in this situation is this: disagreements between the board and the employees focused on SW’s addressing of issues surrounding the white church survivor community’s general failure to take the perspectives of BIPOC and other marginalized groups into account. The employees were quite articulate about the whiteness pervading the community and the harms it causes. But neither the investigator nor the board understood what the employees were saying to them on this subject, or at least they interpreted the employees’ words in a self-serving way. One of a few examples: the employees wanted to know if a guest speaker at an event who was a white former pastor was going to talk about his own past complicity in systems of spiritual abuse and urge white survivors to expand their view to consider the ways churches have abused BIPOC for a very long time. They wanted SW to make it a core value to address these issues and vet the speakers they platform on whether they have the relevant expertise to talk about these topics. Sounds amazing, honestly. Both the board and the report though have reduced this concern to the notion that the employees expressed concern about having a speaker who was 1. A former pastor, and 2. white. So a legitimate and nuanced point the employees made was met with an accusation of anti-white prejudice. Whatever you think about how any individual behaved in this affair, we are dealing with some real entrenched whiteness here, both from the board and the investigator/report author. This is the very thing the employees tried to address. That should give the white people piling on Kyle some significant pause.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
The KTF team