Why Ben Carson is Incorrect about being PC

"Speak out for those who cannot speak."—Proverbs 31:8

Ever since Ben Carson spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast with President Obama present, February 7, 2013, it has felt like open season for columnists to turn their frustrations and rage towards politically correct language and all things liberal: climate change, affirmative action, diversity, etc... 

Victor Davis Hanson, for example, is one of the more recent critics.  Last week, Hanson's editorial, "When Racial Preferences Become Payback" argued that the politically correct language game that now speaks of "climate change," once upon a time "global warming," points to a problem in liberal agenda items.  That is, they are making it  impossible for true diversity to thrive.  In his view, political correctness is so (purposefully?) ambiguous that it hides contradictions.  When he turned his focus to political correct language concerning people groups, he concluded, "It is well past time to move on and to see people as just people."

I live for the day when people are seen just as people.  The problem here is that Hanson assumes that because President Obama, and other high profile racial minorities, have achieved notable places in US society then racial discrimination against minorities is a thing of the past.  Of course, he's right that these individuals can no longer be seen as tokens given the number of successful minorities in plain view.

But it is a popular fallacy, and a fallacy only, that minority status is determined by population size.  In truth, minority status has everything to do with power and almost nothing to do with population size. And he's just wrong when he implies that class never factors into preferences.  Not only does class factor into preferences, higher income people often receive preferential treatment, if not for the mere fact that, by definition, they have more access to resources.  And contrary to the opinion of some who cry out against so-called "reverse-racism" most special programs exist for impoverished people on all sides of the color line rather than for those singled out solely for their racial identity. 

Still, in a nation that disproportionately criminalizes African Americans—as Michelle Alexander argues in The New Jim Crow—, a nation that can indefinitely incarcerate people on suspicion of illegal immigration (See Arizona), and where police can shoot unarmed minorities and keep the media away (See Flatbush protest), the issue of of diversity training, or better-yet "cultural competency," is very important. And even more, we must continue to press for laws that insure civil rights for minorities. In the 2012  national and local elections many states tried to make it more difficult for minority districts to exercise their voting rights (even right here in my own city of Harrisonburg, VA).  

We need legal protections for all people because the worst discrimination is systemic and institutional. Laws can't stop people from disliking minorities, but laws can protect the less powerful from an even greater deterioration of their quality of life.  

If liberals are ambiguous, then it's even truer that comments like Hanson's hang their arguments on tenuous connections.  Attacking the language of climate crisis, climate change, or global warming has almost nothing to do with racial preferences, except that people like Hanson try to make some connection between political correct language and a hypothesized liberal conspiracy to hide a destructive agenda.  Language is only a game when it doesn't describe a reality but obscures it.  There are legitimate problems that need helpful language to describe them, that's true of systemic/institutional racism and our destruction of the environment. Ultimately language has less to do with political correctness than with the need to search for language that will lead us to better solutions to the problems we face.

Requiem for Missions

He said to them, "Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation.” —Mark 16:15


I am calling for a moratorium on missions.  That’s simply a fancy way of saying, stop.  It’s time to lay to rest our mission strategies and ideas.  Stop traveling the world in the name of Jesus.  Stop planting churches in foreign mission fields. Stop sending our children on short-term missions trips.  Stop fixing houses.  Stop. I realize this is a strange call for a professor of missions to make.  But I’ve never shied away from being strange.  After all, the Bible calls Christians a “peculiar people.”

To be clear, this call has little to do with being strange and everything to do with the good news, or the gospel.  For too long, Christian missions in North America and coming from North America have either indirectly ushered violence into societies or have been a direct cause of it.  Take Christopher Columbus for example: the Italian explorer for the King and Queen of Spain was sent as a Christian missionary to find a new path for trade in commerce.   Here's a passage from his journal:

"Your Highnesses, as Catholic Christians, and princes who love and promote the holy Christian faith, and are enemies of the doctrine of Mahomet, and of all idolatry and heresy, determined to send me, Christopher Columbus, to the above-mentioned countries of India, to see the said princes, people, and territories, and to learn their disposition and the proper method of converting them to our holy faith."

I'll save my comments about his Islamophobic speech for another post. Instead of reaching India, Columbus found a people of whom he reported, "would be good servants and I am of opinion that they would very readily become Christians, as they appear to have no religion."  In 500 years time, Christian missionaries have moved far from physically enslaving the objects of their missionary zeal. Coming from a capitalist culture, US American missionaries too often define a successful missionary trip as one that makes better capitalists of the people they seek to convert.  In other words, our Christian missionaries try to make people in distant lands slaves to the global economy just as we overly indebted US Americans are.

Cultural violence and economic enslavement sound nothing like good news to me.  So until Christian mission activities can really declare that we have good news to share, then we need to stop.

I’m not the first and will not be the last to make this call.  Howard Thurman, the twentieth century African American Christian Mystic, said that Christian missions is “the very heartbeat of the Christian religion.”  And so it is understandable when he complains that the missionary impulse is “an instrument of self-righteousness on the one hand and racial superiority on the other.”

Similarly to Thurman, it’s not the concept of missions that I object to.  Rather, it’s that missions have become vessels of self-righteousness, racial superiority, Western expansion, environmental terror, and global capitalism.  Mission means to be sent and Christians follow a God who is a sending God which means that God’s people must be a missionary people.  So the question is, "How then shall we live?"  I propose that we live by the following values for our Christian practice:

1. God is already at work.  God sent Jesus and left the Holy Spirit which is ultimately why we aresent as well.  God sent first and the Holy Spirit is moving throughout the world making a church as Spirit moves.  We are those who partner with the Spirit in declaring the Good News that God is making peace, justice, righteousness, and joy a possibility right here, right now!

2. Local mission is the only mission.  You are in a missionary space in the place you stand.  By valuing foreign mission over local mission, Christians have devalued local regions, place, space, and land.  It’s no coincidence that Christians have trouble valuing the land when Christian missionaries participated in removing the very first nations peoples who believed that the land was sacred.  But if we are to be faithful in missionary practice then we must begin to see that every Christian is sent from God’s commonwealth, not the United States of America, which makes the very local space in which we find ourselves a missionary space.

3. Every moment is a missionary moment.  Likewise, we do not wait to go on a mission.  If we are truly citizens of God’s reality, then while we live between now and the last days every moment is a missionary moment.

4. Good news should really sound like good news.  If the people who hear your good news don’t believe it is good news, then perhaps it is not.  If the people you encounter cannot declare that the news you bring is good, then don’t declare that it is.

5. Not all poverty is degrading.  We have a tendency to define poverty and wealth by capitalist standards that value material wealth over relational wealth.  In other words, we US American Christians imply with our values that we are sent from the United States, rather than the commonwealth of God

6. Promote partnerships not programs.  Paternalism, or the belief that we know better than the people we are in ministry to (and we usually think of ministry to people rather than with them), will rarely if ever meet the mark of loving our neighbor, because love implies a reciprocity in which the object of our affection has the opportunity to declare his or her needs and desires.  Programs are constructed for, rather than with people.

I’m sure we could add more, but we need to start somewhere and these six values are a good place from which to start.  It's time to lay the old values to rest and begin again.

Hope Beyond Hope

I Peter 1:3 "In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope"

I just heard news that a young person who used to attend our Washington, DC youth group took his own life.  As you can imagine, I am saddened and deeply troubled.  In addition to my profound sadness, I am infinitely enraged at the conditions that too many young men, who live perpetually with their backs against the wall, endure.

We used to preach and teach that all the kids in our program had a living hope and a future.  But, I can only imagine that the circumstances of their lives told them a different story every day.  They lived with failing schools, the threat of police violence, family members in prison,  health issues and no health care...  Back in the day the kids weren't all smiles.  Still, when we would talk about the future, I remember seeing their faces light up with hope.  But, today this young man's smile can only seen in pictures and in the minds of those who will choose to remember him.

It's difficult to refrain from asking why would any young person would choose this response to the circumstances of their life.   Aren't there other alternatives?  Apparently, this young man didn't think so.

It's not often that I hear about an urban youngster taking his or her own life.  Unfortunately, I hear more often that their lives were tragically taken, either by disease, prison, or violence.  Out here in the suburbs, however, I don't hear much about urban youth at all.  It is in such a disconnected society, as ours, that creates a context in which this ultimate expression of despair is made possible.  Can we Christians proclaim a hope that does more than pay lip service to a positive future for people who have the courage to struggle against injustices everyday?  Can that hope be more than hot air in a four-walled sanctuary tucked away from the cares of the world? Rather, can it be a tangible manifestation of God's vision— a vision that transforms the circumstances in which too many urban boys, girls, men, women, students, employees, homeless, hungry, immigrants, veterans, find themselves?  If not, then we must find a hope beyond hope! 

Creation Care in the Clutches of Capitalism

Whoever says, “I abide in him,” ought to walk just as he walked. —1 John 2:6

I used to hate those bumper stickers that asked, “What Would Jesus Drive?”  As a poor urban dweller, I felt bad that I couldn’t afford the hybrid vehicle that usually accompanied the sticker.  Happily, I sold my car, in the name of Jesus, and purchased a bike that I ride to work most days.  Then, I spent a few hundred dollars winterizing myself with wind and rain resistant gear.  Money well spent.

There’s something that happens when you change a central aspect of your lifestyle, like the way you travel to work, that inspires you to ask profound questions.  I think it was the especially cold rainy mornings when my face was suffering the bombardment of sleet and the wind chilled me to my bones that caused me to ask, “Why am I doing this, again?”  Perhaps it was self-righteousness or simply the need for motivation that drove me to conclude repeatedly, “David, you are caring for God’s Creation.”  It’s rather a self-aggrandizing notion to believe that the pedals you are pushing are furthering God’s work in the world. It was moments like these in which I believed I had finally left my impoverished urban past and arrived at middle class Christian stability.  I was high on my noble rides to and from campus.  I began to amass texts that would further confirm the righteousness of my commute when I came across a quote, from Sallie McFague’s A New Climate for Theology, that gave me pause:

“A single return flight between New York and London produces 1.2 tons of greenhouse gases per passenger, the equivalent of a year’s allowable emissions if emissions were rationed fairly among all of the planet’s human beings... Many people who would not drive, let alone own, an SUV think nothing of flying all over the world for pleasure or business or even to attend conferences on global warming!”

I was undone!  Though I pedal my bike uphill against the wind for Creation Care and to support the sustainability of simple living, I realized that one flight could cancel all of the changes I’ve made.  Here’s the problem: I can’t stop flying.  McFague is right.  In order to be a cosmopolitan Creation Caring Christian you must fly all over the world.  Which means we do not ask suburban middle class Christians to consider changing their lifestyles to address the climate crisis in one of the most significant ways, living locally.  

In reality, I have more to learn from my city dwelling origins about Creation Care than most of the lifestyles of the middle class cosmopolitan Christians I’ve encountered.  This is for the simple fact that cosmopolitan Christians do more to pollute the earth than most city folk.  Cosmopolitan Christians are quintessential capitalists who consume in order to conserve.  If we want to save on energy use, then we purchase new light bulbs.   If we want to reduce our carbon emissions, then we purchase a new car. 

City folk living below the poverty line, on the other hand, commune in order to conserve.   Admittedly, many native urban dwellers are not overly conscious of creation Care responsibilities.  Still, even in their lack of awareness they often live more sustainable lives than the suburban cosmopolitan Christian who rides his bike to work, composts her food waste, and sports the “What Would Jesus Drive?” sticker on the family car bumper.  That’s because many native urban dwellers do not own cars, they ride the bus or the train.  Their world is communal and local.

My suburban world is not naturally communal or local.  Suburban Christians seek to be cosmopolitan.  We are cultural tourists.  Between our vacations and our short-term missions trips, our world is global.  We celebrate our mobility.  Consequently, our Creation Care values are disconnected from our Cosmopolitan lifestyle.  While our bumper stickers, like duct tape, might make us feel like we’re solving a problem, they are only making us feel better about our complicity in the crisis.  So I’ve found one more reason to hate those “What Would Jesus Drive?” bumper stickers.  Besides the fact that I can't fit bumper stickers on my bike frame, they too easily allow those of us middle class Christians—major transgressors of global pollution—to believe that we don’t need to change our cosmopolitan ways.   Perhaps that's the point of capitalist driven caring.  Thus, instead of asking how Jesus would travel,—a more open-ended question—asking what Jesus would drive easily becomes a way to make a commodity of Creation Care.  I suppose the problem is that it would be difficult to capitalize on Jesus' mode of transportation.  He walked.