KTF Weekly Newsletter: The Adoption Time Bomb, Insurrection 2.0, Firing Faithful Pastors
Hi everybody!
Just a quick request before we get started today: please start thinking about and submitting any topic or guest ideas you have for Season 2 of Shake the Dust. You can either reply directly to this email, or you can write to shakethedust@ktfpress.com. We’re starting to plan, and would love your input! Thanks in advance! Alright, let’s get to this week’s highlights.
Sy’s recommendations:
About 1% of American children have no legal ties to their biological family. This is because of a federal law from the 90s called the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which created a nationwide, one-size-fits-all timeline for terminating parental rights when children are in foster care. This includes children who have no prospective adoptive family. Oh, and the feds give foster care agencies financial incentives to finalize adoptions, but not to reunite biological families. One law maker is fighting for some amount of reform, but many parents and activists are clear that we need to more drastically rethink the system. This PBS article lays out many of the issues at play clearly, and it’s a great place to start learning. You can listen to our foster care episode of Shake the Dust for a lot more information, and you will find several more resources for learning in the show notes there too.
I worked for a federal court for three years. The judges were careful about recusing themselves from cases where they had even the potential of a conflict of interest. They, and even their spouses, did not participate in any public political advocacy. They were following the rule of the federal judiciary’s Code of Conduct. So I was surprised when I learned that the Code does not apply to the justices of the Supreme Court. Then, I learned about Ginni Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas. She lobbies for several Republican causes, promotes election conspiracy theories, has close ties to several January 6 insurrectionists, actively does business with parties litigating in front of her husband, and a whole lot more. This New Yorker article is a long read on all of that, and the accompanying damage to the legitimacy of the judiciary. In our churches which often praise the righteousness of American law, stories like this serve as reminders that a nation’s laws do not define what constitutes a harmful or selfish abuse of power.
This recent interview with Kimberlé Crenshaw, one of the founding thinkers in the critical race theory movement, contains some really helpful insights on her thinking, including good, quick ways to explain her intentionally mischaracterized legal theories to non-academic audiences. But the aspect of this interview you don’t hear often from her is how she got started working against racism as a child when she experienced it in her white, Christian school. She also discusses the influences on her work from her family background, including her minister grandfather and activist parents. Crenshaw is extremely sharp, understands well why CRT has been such a fruitful target for racist attack, and has a wise perspective on our current moment rooted in her thorough understanding of American history. Learning from her is always worth your time.
Jonathan’s recommendations:
When considering the resistance to the expansion of voting rights in the United States, it is helpful to remember that the struggle has always been between the development of a multiracial democracy and the preservation of white, male power and wealth. Steve Phillips makes this tension clear for The Guardian in his article called, “Three Lessons for the Voting Rights Struggle from the Latest Senate Setback.” America’s voting rights story is “encapsulated in the country’s 1790 Naturalization Act, one of the nation’s very first pieces of legislation, which stated that citizenship is reserved to free white person[s] (a law that defined US immigration policy until 1965).” This history is one that followers of Jesus should never forget. Keeping it in mind alongside a vision of the Kingdom of God bars us from conflating the United States and the New Jerusalem.
“The next attempted coup will not be a violent overthrow of the Capitol, but a carefully plotted and even technically legal one, subverting election machinery and exploiting various constitutional loopholes,” writes David Daley for The Guardian. Yes, I know … I know. Two resources from that publication this week. But Daley’s clearly defined and well-referenced “Seven Ways Republicans are Already Undermining the 2024 Election” is the political education that followers of Jesus who desire to see the collective inclusion of historically marginalized, disenfranchised, and oppressed people in our political structures need in heavy doses. The pitchforks of January 6, 2021 are now pens working feverishly in states around the country to ensure that thousands of people don’t have to descend on Washington. Their representatives will already be there.
If you’re like me, you might find it difficult to have empathy for leaders struggling to speak out against Trumpism and for Black lives. One thing that helps me lean into empathy is to remember that there is always a cost to following Jesus. “They Spoke out against the Capitol Insurrection; One Year Later, they’re no Longer Pastors,” headlines David Bumgardner’s piece for Baptist News. Articles like this are helpful for me because I have no interest, attraction, or affinity for White Christian Nationalism, so I don’t often consider deeply the emotions and wrestling of those who do. And for the pastors of those congregations and congregants committed to the marriage of their false faith and political ideology, it is costly to push back. More often than not for pastors and lay leaders, leaving colonized faith can mean being forced to leave your congregation or denomination all together. It is incumbent upon those who are outside of this heretical bubble to cultivate empathy toward those beholden to conspiracy theories, political idolatry, and the like because we follow a God who always runs out to meet us no matter where we are coming from.
Shake the Dust preview
Tomorrow’s bonus episode of the podcast for you lovely subscribers is a conversation between Sy and Jonathan about how we create hierarchies of sin – implying in a million big and small ways that some sins are worse than others. They also talk about how that distortion of Christianity supports systems of control and oppression, how the hierarchy is applied more harshly to marginalized people, and how we can find our way out of this flawed thinking. Don’t miss it!
Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
The KTF team