Equality vs Equity - The Kingdom of God

Sea of Galilee

I spend quite a bit of time working among diverse people and communities. It is one of the major blessings of my job. I get to learn in ways that I wouldn't if I were around people like me constantly. It can be confusing, though, because often people speak using the same words and themes, but mean different things. I had a relatively wealthy person say to me recently, "Why do some people keep asking for more and more? Why can't we all be equal?"

That word "equal" is what gets many people confused because they mean different things when they use it. Confusion like this can cause people to get angry with each other because they will view each other as ignorant, at best, or lying, at worst. So let's make a distinction here between "equality" and "equity."

Equality is treating everyone equal from this point forward. If I get something, you get something. If you get something, I get something. The problem is that it doesn't take into consideration that people are starting from unequal positions. If you start out with $100, and I start out with $10, and we are both given $1 from this point forward, we may be getting equal amounts of cash, but you started off richer than me.

Equity is treating people differently in order to get to equality, taking into account differing starting points.  If you start with $100, and I start with $10, I would be given $90 before our regular payments of $1. This allows for us to be truly equal, even though the payment of $90 was not given to us both equally.

The Declaration of Independence states that "all men are created equal." We know this isn't true, though, unless we take it to mean that "all men are created equally in God's eyes." Skin color, genetics, socio-economic status, geographic location, surname, and a multitude of other factors makes us unequal from the time we are born. 

Some of us, especially those of us that are white, male, straight, and non-immigrants have historically (and today!) had more advantages than others. Our ancestors enslaved people from Africa and killed most of the members of the First Nations in order to gain economically. Until the beginning of the 1800s, only property-owning white males could vote. In many states, Jews and Catholics did not have the right to vote. Women only gained the right to vote in 1920. Those are a lot of barriers to have to overcome.

This idea of equity is everywhere in the scriptures of my Christian tradition. In the book of James, the author is angry at the rich people in his audience because they have been treating rich converts/guests/members better than poor ones. Rich people got seats, while the poor had to sit on the floor. In order for the Kingdom of God to be realized, the rich had to lose their usual privilege of sitting in seats or places of honor. This is hard.

That's why so many passages in scripture are so forceful against rich people. Here is a passage my preacher shared a couple of weeks ago:

"Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you." James 5:1-6

Another example, this time from Jesus. Pay attention to the second half:

"Then he looked up at his disciples and said:

'Blessed are you who are poor,
    for yours is the kingdom of God.
 Blessed are you who are hungry now,
    for you will be filled.
Blessed are you who weep now,
    for you will laugh.
 
Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

But woe to you who are rich,
    for you have received your consolation.
Woe to you who are full now,
    for you will be hungry.
Woe to you who are laughing now,
    for you will mourn and weep.
Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.'" Luke 6:20-26

In the Kingdom of God, equality is the aim, but it must be done through equity. Everyone must be made equal before they are treated equal. The mission of Christians and the church is to make this a reality on earth. For those of us that are privileged, it means being willing to sacrifice some of our wealth and power so that others can be lifted up. That's what Jesus did.

Injustice in Adoption - An MLK Jr. Day Reflection

Wightman Chapel at Scarritt Bennett

The photo above is of Wightman Chapel in Nashville, on the campus of the Scarritt Bennett Center. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke here in 1957. Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I am at a training at Scarritt Bennett where the participants are of many faiths and many ethnicities. 

A quote from Dr. King has been on my mind lately:

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” ― Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail

I have a colleague that likes to say, "Laws don't change people's hearts. They can prevent lynchings, but they don't change hearts."

One of the biggest misunderstandings about Martin Luther King Jr. Day is that the holiday celebrates the end of segregation and discrimination. That is not it at all. Segregation and discrimination still exist. Violence, physical and otherwise, still exists. Injustice exists in zoning laws, congressional redistricting, church giving priorities, our tax system, and my own personal budget. Justice and the work of God will not be complete until people's hearts are changed.

A way this is personal to me:

My family kept foster children for 20 years. We had over 100 children come through our home. I love babies and I am good with them. I loved having babies in our home. However, one aspect of that experience that always struck me is that the African-American babies always stayed in our home longer than babies of other ethnicities.

It is not inaccurate to say that many potential forever parents were probably racist. They didn't want to adopt a baby that didn't look like them because they thought something was wrong with those babies.

However, many of the potential future parents didn't want to adopt because they knew that they didn't have the personal strength or community support to adopt and raise a child of a different ethnicity. The adoption process forces people to think about what they are doing. One of the early parts of the process, finding a child, is easier if you are open to adopting an African-American child because there are more of them in the system.

There are issues all parents will face when raising kids. However, most of the time they can't predict those issues. Parents who have kids through adoption can foresee some of those issues. In the cases where parents of one ethnicity adopt children of another ethnicity, they can foresee, to an extent, the issues of race in their lives.

This forces parents to ask whether or not they think they can handle those issues. Very often the answer is no. Why do people say no? 

The issue of race is huge for everyone. It is also distant for many white people. So when white people are faced with race in their decision to adopt, they often decide to take the easy route. It is not necessarily that they wouldn't love the African-American child as much as the white one. It is more that they don't feel the strength or support to take on that love.

That is a damning indictment of our communities. People don't feel like their communities are strong enough or kind enough to support them in accepting the challenge to raise a multi-racial* family. They also don't feel like there are alternative communities that can provide that support, or that those communities are just as weak as their own.

This is an injustice. This is a sin. We need to build communities where people can feel the support they need to raise multi-racial families. When a white family adopts an African-American child, they need to have the acceptance and support of their own community, as well as the support of an African-American community to provide opportunities for the child to explore their heritage.

I challenge everyone, especially people who look like me, to spend today thinking about how their own lives and communities help continue this injustice. Have you been prejudiced towards individuals because of the color of their skin, the language they speak, or the way they dress? Have you told potential parents who are thinking of raising a multi-racial family that it will be too hard?

I know I have. I need to do more of the hard work in my communities to make them more supportive of adoption and multi-racial families. I am getting better. I am working towards perfect justice on this because when Dr. King say "Injustice anywhere", that includes in our hearts and minds.

* I say "multi-racial" because I think it is wrong to raise, for example, an African-American child as white when the parents are white. Don't deprive people of their heritage. Don't make the arrogant assumption that their lives will be easier if they are white people who happen to have dark skin. Don't be ignorant about what is problematic with your own ethnicity.

** Don't get me started on the people who think families formed through adoption aren't as real or valid as families formed through traditional pregnancy.

*** There isn't enough space here to talk about why there are more African-American babies in foster care than other ethnicities. Some people may try to steer the conversation in that direction. However, I would say that the reasons behind something shouldn't have a big impact on the actions you take in response to something. Don't try to use the reasons behind something as an excuse to avoid how you can be better in the situation.

Protection from the Wolves

Fargo spoilers below.

I love the movie and television series, Fargo. The writing is excellent, the cinematography is beautiful, and the acting is top notch. But what I love the most about Fargo is the hidden gems that the writers put into the dialogue. 

The TV series is an anthology. Each season is mostly self-contained, with some random connections to the other seasons and the movie. In the first season, Billy Bob Thornton's character Malvo is a psychopathic (different from sociopathic) contract killer. He is traveling through Bemidji, Minnesota, on a job. His car crashes after hitting a deer, his target flees into the cold (and later dies of hypothermia), and he heads into town to get stitched up. 

While he is in town, Malvo causes severe damage. He murders two people, including the chief of police who is a soon-to-be father. It only takes Malvo a couple of days to turn the town upside down. He is a wolf among sheep.

He eventually heads to Duluth for another job. His actions in Bemidji follow him, though. Two small-town Midwestern police officers, one from Bemidji and one from Duluth, eventually catch Malvo's scent. He doesn't like this, and eventually follows the Duluth officer, a widower and father, to his apartment complex.

This is where one of those hidden gems lies. While Malvo is sitting outside the apartment complex, contemplating his upcoming killings, one of the residents knocks on Malvo's car window. The resident tells Malvo to go away. The apartment complex is a community. It cares for each other and protects each other from danger.

Up to this point, Malvo has terrified everyone he has encountered. However, all his encounters have been people who were alone: the man in a bad marriage, the police officer alone in the night. The apartment resident has the courage to stand up to the wolf because he is a part of a community. He isn't really alone. This minor, 2-scene, everyday guy is the only one in the series to prevent Malvo from creating destruction.

Communities can be dysfunctional. They can be abusive and manipulative, cold, unwelcoming, and harsh. When people don't follow lock-step with the wayward and crooked standards of the community, they are thrown out into the wild for the wolves to devour.

But communities can also be extremely powerful and nurturing. They can provide safety and identity. People who are in genuine, loving community with one another aren't threatened by the wolves. They don't fall easily for charlatans or demagogues.

So I wonder how much of the dysfunction in our world is due to there being too many dysfunctional communities, too many outcasts, and too many wolves. How much of the hurt in our world can be healed by forming the right kind of communities, the ones built on love, trust, and justice tempered with mercy.

It starts with us. In our families, our churches, our schools, our social clubs, and our Facebook groups, how are we treating each other? How are we treating those who are different from us? How about those who disagree with us? How do we treat those who are poor or oppressed? How do we treat those that have made mistakes?

The truth is that communities can transform even wolves. We use wolves as a symbol for wilderness or danger but our dogs, the animals many of us love more than people, were once wolves.

Honey vs Vinegar

I was sitting in a meeting a while back where people were talking about an event that we were planning. We wanted to train people to have intentional one-on-one conversations with others, in order to build better communities. 

I made the point that persuasion requires credibility with the audience, an argument that makes sense, and emotional buy-in from the audience. In other words, I said, persuasion requires ethos, logos, and pathos.

These are Greek words that the philosopher/rhetorician Aristotle used to describe successful persuasion in the public sphere. His contexts were the courts, the legislative assembly, and public funerals. He wanted to describe and teach how good public communication worked when trying to persuade groups of people.

I taught these ideas when I was an educator. My graduate degree is in Rhetoric and Composition, which is the study of good written (and often verbal) communication. Students need to learn ethos, pathos, and logos when they write research and argumentative papers, but also as a way to discern when and how outside forces try to influence them. One of the proudest moments of my professional teaching career was when a student came to class and said, "I was watching YouTube last night and I couldn't stop analyzing the ads!"

This framework (emotions, logic, credibility) also applies to communication between individuals. I wrote in a previous post that one of the most powerful tools in community organizers' belts is the one-on-one conversation. A good one-on-one happens when two people establish credibility with one another, make an emotional connection, and when the organizer has a reasonable argument why the other person should take some sort of action.

We as a society have lost the ability to establish credibility with one another, build emotional connections, and establish trust. I have worked in politics for a little while now. I have never convinced anyone of anything on a deep level simply by providing an argument, facts and figures, or graphs.

Deep, meaningful change doesn't happen without trust. Trust isn't built by logic or data. It is built by genuine relationships, sharing of stories, and commitment to action. You cannot truly convince anyone who disagrees with you to change by yelling at them. You may scare or intimidate them. You might be able to apply enough peer pressure to make them act a certain way. But those methods don't create deep and lasting change. You can attract, and change, more people with honey than with vinegar.

Better Together

Photo by Andrew Greenberg

I had to unfriend someone on Facebook yesterday. He was one of my college roommates. He posted that he was happy that the Affordable Care Act is probably going to be repealed. 

Many of us want to maintain relationships past the point of sustainability. Some will say that it was petty to remove my former roommate from my list of Facebook friends. It is only Facebook, right? Others will say that I should have tried to do what I often challenge others to do: fight for those hard relationships. Do the hard work of persuasion.

However, there are limits. Sometimes specific relationships aren't worth the effort. Sometimes I am not the person to do the work of persuasion with a person. In this specific situation, I have not communicated with him in several years. We do not live close together. Any communication between us would have only served to harden his opinion and raise our mutual blood pressure levels. That's because I have a belief that he and I do not share.

I believe that we are all better together. When we share our burdens and joys with each other, the burdens are lighter and the joys are more powerful. I am a person of faith, a Christian, and this idea is central to that faith. I will do to you what I would want you to do to me. I will not do to you what I would not want you to do to me.

There is another idea in our culture, though. It says that the only thing that matters is me, and maybe my family and friends. Everyone else is a danger. Everyone else matters less. My job as a person to is lift myself up at the expense of you and yours. This is the thought of libertarians and those who follow Ayn Rand. I have another word for it: selfishness.

People will tell you that selfishness is part of who we are as humans, and that we can't get rid of it. They say we have to develop systems to manage the selfishness. They rely on the assumption that people's nature cannot change.

They are wrong. People are capable of enormous growth and change. This knowledge is at the core of my faith, and of many other faiths. The book of Deuteronomy gives us a vision of a sacred society in the vision of Israel, especially in Jubilee. At the core of this society is the idea that we are not our own. Our possessions are not our own. They belong to God and to the community. In the book of Acts, we see the early church giving freely of their possession to those in need. The community of Christ gave freely so that the burden of one become the burden of all, and therefore became light. "Many hands make for light work."

Skeptics, especially those within Christianity, will tell you that Jubilee never happened and that the practice of the early church was unsustainable and unscalable. They will tell you that God is showing us the ideal, but doesn't actually expect it to happen on earth. It will happen in the New Earth, where all evil is banished.

I don't believe that. I take Jesus seriously when he says in the Lord's Prayer, "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." Our job as people of faith in this world is to work to make this world more like heaven. We are expected to bring about the kingdom, not to survive until God smashes it down on this world.

If those who resist this, who claim the name "Christian", were being honest, they would say, "But I don't want to do that. I don't want to work towards that world. I'm not there yet." If someone said that to me, I'd hug them, because very few people are willing to say that out loud. After I hugged them, I'd say, "We all have to eat our vegetables, whether we want to or not." To do otherwise would be to surrender to selfishness, to greed, to sin. 

Getting People Involved - Why We Should Party

I had the opportunity yesterday to sit down with Bret Wells and Robert Bishop from the Missional Wisdom Foundation. It was a great conversation overall, but the part where I learned the most had to do with the question "Why do people not get involved?"

This is a problem that ministers, organizers, and politicians all face constantly. Ministers wonder why people don't show up to events outside of Sundays and Wednesdays. Organizers wonder why people who come to meetings don't show up to knock on doors. Politicians (the good ones, of which there are many) wonder why people don't show up to town halls, board meetings, or lobby days.

Bret showed me a framework like the one below. You might be familiar with it, but it was new to me:

The idea here is that the reasons why people don't get involved can be broken down into two main buckets: motivation and ability.

These barriers can be personal, social, or structural. A structural ability barrier would be something like lack of reliable internet. A personal motivation barrier would be individuals' inability to see the value in the activity.

Social motivation interests me. If people lack social circles, in which they are invested, that support taking part in certain activities, then people are much less likely to take part in those activities. This is a "duh" moment for me. This is one of the reasons why we have cliques and "scenes" that hang out in different parts of town, take part in different activities, and generally don't interact with one another. I could be a yuppie who also has an interest in goth-type activities, but since my main social circle is comprised of yuppies, I'm probably not going to go to a goth club.

This is also the reason why young professional groups with a strong socializing component are important for the social justice movement. If young people don't have friends that support their social justice work, they are much less likely to do that work. Young people are particularly needed in this work, but often underrepresented.

Many of us who work in social justice have a level of disdain for including socializing in our programs. There is a limited amount of time, and what seems like an unlimited amount of work to do. We feel the need to use every second to do what we view as the vital work of justice.

In reality, part of that work is to create social groups that value social justice work. If we don't, many talented people will fall between the cracks because they don't feel socially supported to do the work. This is why groups like OFA and PICO make sure to lift up the role of "comfort captain" (aka food provider) as equal to phone bank or canvass captains.

So before you pick up the phone or start printing that walk packet, think about planning a potluck or bar crawl. 

Do Your Research

I recently saw a viral post on Facebook that depicted a comment conversation where a man said that he was going to be fine when Obamacare was repealed because he had his insurance through the Affordable Care Act Marketplace (ACA). The rub is that Obamacare and the ACA are the same.

Obamacare = Affordable Care Act = Healthcare.gov = being a woman is no longer a pre-existing condition = why more services are free = why people can stay on parents' insurance until they are 26. 

It isn't a good idea to trust viral posts on social media. Many times, they are false. However, I think the point of the post is important. Do your research. Even a short trip through Wikipedia is helpful.

Don't rely on once source of information. If you are liberal, read The American Conservative. If you can't handle that, read the Wall Street Journal. Conservatives should read the opinion section of the New York Times and listen to some of NPR's shows. If that is too grating, read the opinion section of the Washington Post.

There is a thing called confirmation bias. It means that we want to listen and read things that agree with what we already believe. When your high school and college instructors taught you critical thinking and research, they were trying to get you to fight confirmation bias. Humans are fallible. We are not perfect. We should have the humility to be open to the possibility that we might be wrong. The world is a big place. It isn't possible for one person to know everything. There is a reason well-educated and/or well-traveled people tend to be more liberal.

If you are so confident in your opinions that you refuse to consider that you are wrong...well, there are words to describe you, but I can't type them here.

Strategy and Humanity

Faith in Texas Planning Meeting

Over the past few months, I've had the opportunity to see firsthand the work that Faith in Texas is doing to make Dallas a more just place. Tonight was a planning meeting for the group to discuss the upcoming legislative session, amongst other things. 

When I started doing political campaigns, one thing I noticed is the attitude that many operatives have that winning is everything. No one ever advocated violating the law. It was ok, however, to push staff and volunteers past the point of burnout. It was ok to speak in unkind ways to others because nothing mattered except for winning. Many talented people have been forever turned off from civic life because of their experiences with political campaigns. That is a shame.

That is why I appreciate community organizing groups like Faith in Texas, as well as the other non-profits across the nation that are associated with the PICO National Network. They manage to balance the need for clear wins and clear progress with the need to humanize the work of social justice. In other words, they believe the ends are just as important as the means. 

This is something that our society doesn't do well. All you have to do is read Facebook or YouTube comment threads to realize that people don't care about how they say something. We are not great at civil disagreement. Don't get me wrong, I believe there is a place for strong, assertive, prophetic speech. However, as I taught my students when I was an educator, the audience matters. You won't change hearts and minds with aggressive speech unless you have a relationship with your audience. Most of the time, honey will catch more flies than vinegar.