Jordan Neely, Conversion Therapies, Christian College Cancel Culture
KTF Weekly Newsletter
Hi everyone,
We’re going to get right into it this week. Here are this week’s highlights as we seek to leave colonized faith for the kingdom of God.
Jonathan’s Recommendations
I am grateful to be part of a faith community that does not shy away from controversial topics. But as we dove into a ten-week series on sexuality, I found myself feeling anxious about what specifically would be said from the front about LGBTQ+ Christians. I was exceptionally grateful for this past Sunday’s sermon, which starts at about 31:00 in this video. Our congregational Pastor, Andre Grey, did not insist on policing our behavior and sexual practice, but invited us all to faithfully wrestle with Jesus as Lord over our sexuality and spirituality because they are bound together. He also explicitly confessed the church’s hypocrisy, naming of our perpetration of and complicity in unjust actions against queer Christians. Leaving colonized faith must include faithful engagement with our sexuality free from harmful and destructive, man-made ideologies, and I pray we would all find communities to do that with.
She put a Jemar Tisby quote on her syllabus and got fired. Taylor University, a Christian college in Indiana, dismissed Professor Julie Moore because of vague accusations that she made students read too much about race from a progressive standpoint. She taught about the lynchings that happened miles away from her classroom, challenging students to engage with the world immediately around them. And she received consistent praise from her students and promotions from her colleagues. Professor Moore, just like Professor Samuel Joeckel at another Christian university recently, lost her job for teaching about racial injustices that are endemic to our country and context. The article I linked above is from Dr. Tisby himself, and he includes Professor Moore’s entire account of what happened. It illuminates the lengths at which institutions will go to hide their hypocrisy, cover their intentions, and protect themselves at all costs. This story sits at the controversial institutional intersection of Christianity and Academia. That intersection has become an embodiment of the dynamic the Apostle Paul describes when he says we “wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12). May Jesus fit us with His armor to stand where there is fierce resistance.
A former U.S. Marine choked a man named Jordan Neely to death on the subway this week in New York City. Neely was having a mental health crisis and shouting. Eyewitnesses say there was no physical provocation of the unnamed assailant, who police have not arrested. I spent many of my formative years in ministry with our unhoused neighbors. I feel a mix of rage, grief, and despondency. The question often arises for me: What am I supposed to do about this? There won’t be one answer for everyone. But in this short piece on my Emotionally Healthy Activist page, I invite readers to slow down and process emotions before reaching to act in response to another white man killing another Black man while many, many people just watch. I want us all to honor the image of God in Jordan Neely through our time processing and discerning how Christ is coming to you. There is no doubt that God invites us to seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly after Him. The difficulty is in figuring out what that mercy looks like, and in which direction justice lies.
Sy’s Recommendations:
We don’t often talk about the same story, but I want to say something extra about the Jordan Neely case Jonathan mentioned above. This short Twitter thread includes a good point that should be obvious: it takes intention to kill someone in a choke hold. Neely clearly fought the man choking him, and then went still. The man proceeded to keep cutting off air for several minutes. Neely was subdued. But that wasn’t enough for his attacker. Ordinarily we call these actions and the intent they imply murder. But the reality is that we find certain people’s deaths acceptable. And as Imani Barbarin points out in this video, the fact that we keep blaming shootings and terrorist attacks and every other horrible thing on mental illness only solidifies the statistically false perception that people with mental illness are more violent than the rest of us. But When we perceive symptoms of mental health conditions as indicators that the likelihood of violence has suddenly increased, then those symptoms can become legal justifications for homicide. Even if the killer is eventually tried and convicted, the NYPD has made it clear whose lives matter to them absent cell phone cameras and public pressure. I do really suggest looking at the resources found at the link in Jonathan’s highlight above. They will help you if you are going through anything like the cycle of anger and grief that I am. May God be with you as you process.
Jonathan has mentioned the excellent writing of CNN correspondent John Blake before in this newsletter. Blake now has a book out that is a memoir on his journey with racial justice and Christian faith. It’s an extremely well-written and compelling story, an everyone can read an excerpt here. One main point of the book, captured in this piece, is that segregation is killing us as a nation, and we never properly addressed it. He writes about the progress people have made in relationships across racial lines when people find themselves working together toward common goals in scenarios where white people are not placed in positions of power. One of those scenarios is his own relationship with his racist aunt that changed dramatically when they had to work together to take care of his mother as she aged and dealt with schizophrenia. And you will be able to hear a lot more about Blake’s remarkable story when he appears as a guest on the upcoming season of Shake the Dust!
I’ve pointed you before to the excellent Substack publication God is my Special Interest, which covers faith and neurodivergence. One recent entry I thought was particularly fascinating and helpful for us was this piece about applied behavioral analysis, or ABA. ABA is one of the most common ways we currently treat autism. It’s also despised by autistic activists as an abusive process that only punishes autistic people for engaging in behaviors which are harmless, but which make bigoted non-autistic people uncomfortable. More than that, as the piece explains, the creator of ABA also helped create gay conversion therapy. James Dobson later explicitly picked up on this work of forcefully stamping out differences, and gave us the famous evangelical parenting manuals that left so many scars (figurative and literal) on Christian children in my generation. Drawing these connections, not to any biblical teaching, but to politics and ideologies, helps us undermine the pretend authority with which we so often seek to control people and behaviors we deem deviant.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week.
The KTF team