A Cup In Common?

By Dr. Amy Laura Hall
Associate Professor of Christian Ethics
Duke Divinity School

Do not touch ANYTHING. No, No. Stop it. Put that down. It has germs. Wash your hands. Wash them really, really well. Scrub!

Go hang out in the bathroom at your local children’s museum. This is what you will hear. Again, and again, and again. This was true way before H1N1. Go outside the bathroom, and stand by the drinking fountain. You will hear a related liturgy. Do NOT put your mouth on the spigot. Stop it. You are too close. Don’t lick the metal! It has germs.

Do we have a cup in common? After whom am I willing to drink?

A beloved friend whose family owned a Drug Store during Jim Crow told me a story about the Lord’s Supper. It wasn’t explicitly a story about the Lord’s Supper. But it was, in a way. When his parents made the decision to integrate the soda counter, they changed to paper cups. They were already going to lose white customers when those customers had to sit elbow to elbow with their African-American neighbors. But they figured they might not lose as many if people could drink their soda without wondering whether the cup was sufficiently washed free of their neighbor’s germs. (Photo Credit: UMC.org)

There is a line in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead that seared me. (If you are white, don’t read Gilead unless you are willing to go on and read Home.) Robinson has a Black character aver that “all white men are atheists, the only difference is that some of them are aware of it.”

Paper cups are a sign of unbelief. Lord, help our unbelief.

Several years ago a student in one of my large classes had most of us suspecting ourselves of atheism. We had been talking about our fears of germs, and about the ways that our parishioners are afraid of a cup in common. Stan then gently explained how his congregation who used a common cup dealt with the revelation that a member was HIV positive. “First, we prayed and fasted.” Ok, well, that left out about half of the room. (Prayed and fasted? His congregation prays and fasts when faced with conflict?) But then he went on to explain that the congregation decided that they would continue to use the common cup. Only they would make sure that the HIV positive member was invited to partake first.

Bingo. Nope. Never mind. I did not sign up for that sort of faith. Thank you very much. People shook their heads in disbelief. Stan told us that the others in the congregation realized that their germs were much more dangerous to their loved one than their loved one’s germs were to them. The last shall be first. Maybe this sounds beautiful in an anthem, but it is really, really hard to sing.

Now, if we get going on a conversation about biology, about the technical specifications of particular germs, about the composition of the wine or the Welch’s, we’ve missed a chance to get a clue.

This cup of blessing which we bless, is it or is it not, a sharing in the blood of Christ?

A Recession-Proof Gospel?

Dr. J. Kameron Carter
Associate Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies
Duke Divinity School

The NY Times ran a front page Sunday article recently that is well worth pausing over: “Even in Recession, Believers Invest in the Gospel of Getting Rich”. It was occasioned by the “Southwest Believers’ Convention” held in the Dallas/Ft. Worth, TX area this summer in August.

The article conveys many of the things already known about the prosperity “gospel of getting rich” as preached by the likes of Kenneth and Gloria Copeland (the focus of the article), Creflo Dollar (who participated in the Convention held in Ft. Worth), and others. It told of the lavish lifestyles of these preachers, their private jets, multiple cars, etc etc etc.

This alone did not give me pause, for it has been much documented and talked about.

What did give me serious pause, however, and what did ultimately prod me to put fingers to keyboard, is the image, the photograph, that appeared on the front page of the Sunday article. For we all know the saying: a picture’s worth a thousand words.

Along with this front page article is a picture of what appears to be an African American, elderly woman. (If she’s not African American, she certainly appears to be a woman of color). She contrasts starkly with the Copelands, whose photos are on the Times website version of the article.

There is not only a racial difference at work, but more noticeable are the class distinctions that are at work. The Copelands have the look of the professional, managerial class; they are polished; they exude Christian leadership. In another photo on the Times website, Copeland walks across the front of the altar, passionately gripping the bible. By contrast, the woman on the frontpage of the photo looks to be from the underclass. Nowhere near as polished looking, her clothes are common. You only see an image from the back; never her face. She is placing perhaps her last “piece of change,” as my momma used to say, on the altar steps at the Convention.

This image struck me, for though I am a Christian theologian teaching at Duke University Divinity School, I’ve not forgotten where I came from. During my early teen years, I first started attending regularly an old Pentecostal church with -- you guessed it -- my grandmother, a woman at least representationally not unlike the woman in the Times photo. My old church was filled, and still is filled, with “saints” like this.

This brings me to the deeper questions inside of the Times article on what seems to be the recession-proof “gospel of getting rich”.

And that is this: On the other side of the prosperity gospel of getting rich are people I know, people exploited by smooth, silver-tongued Christian leaders. It’s easy to say, Yup, that’s the problem with prosperity preaching. Yup, that’s what can happened when you’re not a seminary-trained minister. You abuse the bible, etc.

But the deeper questions are these: What are the ways that others from the polished, managerial class, even Christian leaders who disavow the get rich gospel, use the gospel and exploit others to get paid and to establish their kingdoms, all in the name, as it were, of doing good?

Inside of the Times article is a frightening truth that Christians of all stripes -- seminarians, pastors, teachers; all of us -- must face: There’s more than one way to be a smooth talker and to use the gospel as a vehicle to get paid, and to hide the fact that this is what’s happening right inside of our Christian talk.

But here’s the last question: What does it mean that disproportionately it’s people like the black woman pictured on the front page of the NT Times who are the hidden, voiceless ones on the other side of the get-rich gospel? Yeah, as the saying goes, everybody's trying to paid; to which I would add that, for some folks, the Gospel is their cash cow.

But what does it mean that the exploitation to get paid "in Jesus' name" falls disproportionately on non-white, female bodies? Why is she the sign of exploitation?

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Why Obama Can't Win When He Wins

By Dr. Brian Bantum, Divinity '03
Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

On Friday October 9, 2009 it was announced to much surprise and bewilderment that President Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. This announcement was met with a fury of support as well as disbelief. “He hasn’t accomplished anything yet,” was a refrain repeated by Facebook statuses and opinion articles alike. One CNN report framed Obama’s accomplishment in this way, “Unlike his predecessors, Obama was chosen not for substantive accomplishments, but for inspiring "hope" at the start of his term.”

I am not sure President Obama deserved the prestigious award any more than Al Gore did in 2007. I am not sure you could point to Gore’s documentary as a turning point in environmental policy. But both Gore and Obama represented something. Each posed a significant question to the world through their candidacy or their advocacy. But what is so interesting to me here is not the question of whether the peace prize was deserved or not, but how the question of representation is so central to this issue and to the reality of our modern world.

The Obama presidency has come to exemplify the complication of minority identity in the modern world. On the one hand the arrival of dark bodies into a place of power is met with the inflammation (or explosion) of resistance (see a sign to “nigger rig the Obama healthcare plan”) or more explicitly “you lie” from a now emboldened southern congressmen. But Obama also faces a surreal elevation of his capacities and possibilities that are difficult to imagine any one achieving. Obama is trapped within these violent refusals or violent incorporations. He is quickly becoming bound within the tragedy of modern racial representation.

Obama’s presence within the walls of American power has seemingly coalesced a people who have long felt themselves under threat. For many the “American Way of Life” is under siege from a President who ironically personifies the “American Dream.” Congressman Joe Wilson’s donations have ballooned since his comment and represent a marked discontent for this particular president. But this resistance is more than a disagreement about policy. Cries of “socialism” could be seen as a simple euphemism for the racial estrangement some people now feel from “their” country. And now without a perceived ally in the White House, but even worse a “foreigner,” all that is left is to persistently undermine Obama’s progress because his progress can only mean the devaluing of “American” identity. These objections have little to do with Obama personally and have everything to do with what Obama represents.

But on the other hand Obama suffers from the elevation of post-civil rights yearning to claim some movement forward, perhaps even some easement of a burdensome white guilt. Many are so elated to have finally turned a corner in American racial politics that they will endorse his presidency a success just by virtue that he is a black man. Yet, this claim has little to do with Obama and more to do with how many hope to represent their own place in the world. They support a black president and therefore are progressive, forward thinking people, unlike other backwards-looking people. While the committee of the Nobel Peace Prize undoubtedly admired Obama, were they really seeing the man and his accomplishments or what they hoped for him and for themselves? Through these means of unequivocal support Obama comes to represent an ideal of Americanism or global citizenship.

But what is lost in the midst of these movements of refusal or assumption is who Obama is. People cannot extricate themselves from the veneer of his race to see how his ethnicity, his life, his relationships all participate in actually animating his decision making. Instead his blackness has been co-opted into a representation of his foreignness or refracted into a statement about white (European) hope.

Sadly, this is the predicament of minority existence in the modern world. We, non-white people are either refused because of our racial demarcation through perpetual interrogation of our qualifications, our intentions, our methods. Or we are quickly subsumed into a hope for a multicultural university, or institution, or church, or world. Our pictures become parts of marketing campaigns and we are invited to every lunch. But we are not heard, we are not made a part of these machines. We are used. We are represented and then deployed for a purpose that often has more to do with the one’s representing than the one who is represented. Our lives become represented for us rather than being heard for the complicated realities that they are and in that particular story we come to find hope and the possibility of change.

This reflex of co-opting representation is not new but sadly it is a mark of our human condition. The representation and deployment of bodies for those of us who claim the name of Christ must see this within the optics of theological representation and transformation. In Christ’s birth God was represented to us, shown to us. This presence was not for our redeployment but for our transformation. We consume Christ’s body to become something different. Instead we consume Christ in order to re-create ourselves. As we co-opt Christ into our world, our hopes we re-deploy Jesus to serve an agenda that has little to do with Jesus and everything to do with us.

The representation of Obama as facilitator of peace or as an evil foreigner has little to do with Obama and everything to do with how we must begin to think about ourselves anew when confronted with people of difference. For Obama (and all people of color) this is the tragedy of modern identity. We, people of color, become deployed within worlds of white assumption or refusal and are repeatedly left for dead in the encounter.

If we are to imagine a way forward we can no longer represent others for ourselves. We must enter into the life of God “represented” to us and as us. Jesus was bound between expectations of what could and could not be. His death and resurrection assumed these refusals and accommodations into his own body so that we might imagine ourselves in the life of another. Obama is not Jesus. But this violence of representation to him arises out of a condition of sin that Christ came to overcome.

Instead, we see in the vilification and the “heroification” of Obama a tragic reiteration of our human condition. In capitulating to an economy of representation and distancing we all make real personhood impossible.

I pray that Obama (or his work for us) does not die simply to sustain our hopes about ourselves.

Who's Coming to Dinner?

By Dr. Amy Laura Hall
Associate Professor of Christian Ethics
Duke Divinity School

"What if this is just like the Tawana Brawley case?" I asked. Syndi turned and looked at me, with obvious surprise, and appreciation. "Exactly! I bet this is going to be exactly like that." She was staring at me like I had become, instantly, a different person. We had been friends for two years, but the recognition in her face was something I'd never seen. This was not at all what I had expected. I had steeled myself for an argument, only tentatively asking the question. It took me about three minutes to get a clue. The moment was a horrible intersection, a cross of misunderstanding. I was saying exactly the opposite of what she thought I was saying, and the question she heard coming out of my mouth had initiated, for a moment, a kinship that I hadn't even known was missing, until I saw it all over her face. After a pause, I said, "No, I am so, so sorry. I meant, what if she isn't telling the truth?" Our friendship really never recovered, on either side. I hadn't known what we were missing until, for about three minutes, I caught a glimpse of true friendship. The person she had suspected me to be had now been confirmed, and nothing I could say would quite make up the difference.

Syndi and I were both undergrads and residence advisors at a school in the South. We dealt with vomit, sorority girls passed out on the bathroom floor, pre-med students freaking out in the middle of the night -- all the things that forge a bond between students paid to take care of other students. But the rift that went through our campus that year felt unsurpassable to both of us. A student was suffering deeply from tragically racist images written all over her dorm room, repeatedly. Students and faculty were talking about the case in classrooms and late at night in dorm hallways. To many African-American students, the repeated, hateful scrawl just made more obvious what was subtly written all over the school -- a sense that Black people had better watch their backs. The happy race-diversity veneer was about half an inch thick. As one editorialist put it, Atlanta may be a city too busy to hate, but, give white Southerners a bit of time, and they will remember how.

Now, here, if you are reading this and wondering whether or not Tawana Brawley or this suffering undergrad were fabricating tragedy or actually surviving it, we've missed a chance to get a clue. The moment was like a Rorschach test. Like the end of Do the Right Thing. Like watching a guy from South Carolina shout "You Lie" at the President. Like the Duke Lacrosse case. Forget the whole "Who is my neighbor?" abstraction. These sorts of moments ask "Who is your kin?"

The cover of a recent issue of Newsweek had a huge baby face with words across its forehead blaring "Is Your Baby Racist?" The article is complicated, but the basic gist is this. Even babies note differences in skin color. No big shock to me there. (The title of the book discussed is "NurtureShock.") The take home message of studies on race and parenting is worth a good, long, potentially painful moment of truth. Quoting the article, "It was no surprise that in a liberal city like Austin, every [white, volunteer] parent was a welcoming multiculturalist, embracing diversity. But according to Vittrup's entry surveys, hardly any of these white parents had ever talked to their children directly about race." These parents wanted their kids to "grow up colorblind," and used lots of phrases like "everybody's equal," but the kids heard it mostly as blah, blah, blah from mom or dad. As one mom explained, after years of repeating the "equal" mantra, her kid finally asked, "What does equal mean?" He hadn't a clue. Kids note difference, early, and droning on about equality matters not a hill of beans.

Integrated education "gives you just as many chances to learn stereotypes as to unlearn them." It continues, "Those increased opportunities to interact are also, effectively, increased opportunities to reject each other." As anyone who has gone to an integrated school can tell you, we are not "All in this Together" dancing in beautiful diversity with perky costumes. Racial issues in the wider culture are pointier, stickier, puce rather than pink, in school hallways. Ask any middle schooler who trusts you enough to be honest.

Sometimes our children are our best mirrors. My youngest and I were sitting for over an hour waiting for a new tire. I had no nifty bag of tricks, only the cheesy magazines stacked on the little table next to the two chairs. We played every game I could imagine with the pictures of perfume ads and advice on how to cook a better casserole. She came up with a new game, "matching weddings." She proceeded to go through and match up which man would be right for the woman in the perfume ad. Which guy should woo this woman in the mom-skinny jeans? There weren't many men, so she ended up pairing some of them twice. But polygamy wasn't worrying me. What shouldn't have surprised me but did was that she spent a good deal of time trying to make sure everyone was matched, Black with Black, White with White. This trumped other considerations. Uncle Ben ended up with Halle Berry. Thing is, it didn't seem to matter a fig that my little one is bi-racial.

"Mom," she said, her voice rolling her eyes and then some, "Who do we know who isn't matched that way?" Huh. Pause. I named one couple we know moderately well. She looked at me again like I was stupid. "Mom, he doesn't look Black, and they aren't really our friends. I mean, they don't come over for dinner or anything." Bingo.

Of course children note race. Of course they are watching us for cues. One of the studies in the article involves a Black Santa. Read it online just for this page alone. A group of white school children are thoroughly befuddled when their teacher reads a new version of The Night Before Christmas. Some of them shift uncomfortably when they see the family in the book is Black. But the class is sent aflutter when the teacher turns the page and Santa himself is Black. "A couple of the white children rejected this idea out of hand: a black Santa couldn't be real. But even the little girl [who was] the most adamant that the Real Santa must be white came around to accept the possibility that a black Santa could fill in for White Santa if he was hurt." Yep.

In the next week's issue, Newsweek ran responses to the article. In the age of Twitter, they now feature a little box with responses in only six words, in this case on "the roots of racism." Sandy Davidson from Youngstown, Ohio wrote the six words: "Religion taken out of our schools." I am not sure exactly what Ms. Davidson means here, but I am willing to take a cue. (One might argue that a book about Santa comes pretty close to religion in school, but, I digress . . .) The article, as I read it, begs for another kind of family, and a particular truth that Christianity is supposed to quicken in me and my little ones. Saying "God made everyone, red and yellow, black and white," is all well and good, but it probably doesn't mean much if almost everyone at your church is white.

The good liberals of Austin can repeat "equal" until their faces turn Obama blue, but their kids are watching who comes to dinner. And guess who, it turns out, isn't coming to dinner? My eldest was the most clued in during the first three years of her life, when we were going to a church whose children were predominately African-American. The year she was three, she told everybody proudly that she was an African-American cat for Halloween. She had been held, loved on, scolded, and taught by African-American women, women who adopted her even though they were not very sure about her grad student mom. This was one of the few things I have done right by either of my children. We all came up and ate what we explained was Jesus' body and drank what we explained was Jesus' blood. At Mardi Gras, we danced around together in purple and green beads. In that place, it was easy to believe that Jesus is Black.

I hope and pray that both my precious girls will grow up with a clue. I've put them in schools where they have to get a clue, and fast. Yes, school matters. Yes, words matter. But what I am pretty sure matters loads more is how we break our bread, and with whom. May it be so.