Love Your Neighbor. Period.

“I am offended….” the letter to the newspaper in my small East Texas town began. The writer is offended because she believes her rights as a Christian are being taken away. This is a common reaction among some to America’s increasing pluralism: too many Christians are taking offense and becoming defensive when they are asked to move over and make room. Like fish swimming in the stream of the dominant religious culture, they are oblivious to all the ways Christianity continues to be privileged in this nation.

Many of us have been pondering our white privilege in these days since #Ferguson. Nicolas Kristoff’s recent reflection cites grim statistics that should challenge any white person to think twice about the realities of race in America. Jon Stewart uses his power of influence well when he calls out institutionalized male privilege in a recent interview with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. Similarly, those of us who benefit from being part of the dominant religious culture would do well to think more deeply about that privilege and our appropriate responsibilities within this multicultural American community.

I am a Christian minister and I have spent years nudging Christians into all sorts of bigger circles. I am an American and I am fully committed to nudging this land that I love into the larger circle of respect for all people, whether they are religious or not. My Christian faith demands this of me. 

This “parable” may help: a devout, good-hearted Christian family gathers around the dinner table. Mom and Dad and the children are a pretty homogenous group where common values are assumed and conversation is grounded in shared experience. Then the children grow up and they start bringing their spouses and partners to the family table. Now conversations are more challenging because the values and experiences are more diverse. Then those children start having children; toddlers and teens dramatically change the dynamic of how a family functions. Then grandpa moves in and everyone adjusts once more. A healthy family will celebrate this widening circle. They will keep adding leaves to the table. They will keep pulling up more chairs. They will make room for each other. But yes it’s hard, on so many levels.


For me, as a Christian, authentic faith circulates around this one center: love God and love my neighbor. For me, part of what it means to love God is to let God be God and part of what it means to love my neighbor is to remember that God is God and I am not. So I don’t get to judge my neighbor or fix them or change them. I am simply called to love them. “Love your neighbor. Period.” 

There are many (many!) of us Christians who seek to live out our faith with this kind of love and welcome. There are many Christians who are not the least offended or threatened when the eclectic mix of our American neighbors are included in our larger “family” circle. (Maybe we are the ones who ought to be writing letters to our local newspapers, articulating an alternative vision of an inclusive, grace-full faith.

But right now, our American family is struggling to make room for each other. Too many people are taking offense; too many people are on the defense; there is plenty of raw passion. What we need is more compassion - especially as we become more and more aware that too many people in our family do not have an equal seat at this table and an equal voice in this conversation. Those of us who have been endowed by our culture with any sort of special privilege have special responsibility to do what we can to keep nudging the circle wider. Whatever our advantage/our privilege/our power of influence, let us re-commit to stand and speak with integrity, authenticity and humility for all our neighbors.

For Stewart/Gillibrand interview (see The Daily Show website September 9, 2014)

White Privilege? Who Me?

Growing up in the South - a woman who was taught to stay in her place – it was men who enjoyed all the privileges of power. Within the male/female hierarchy, I certainly was not encouraged to believe I had any special privilege. It took stepping out of my “place” and looking at my life from a whole new perspective to be able to see that – yes, even while living within all the various limits of my Christian White Southern Woman Box - I was still a part of the dominant culture; I still live with unearned, undeserved privilege. Just because I didn’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there. Like gravity, the invisible status quo of our culture tends to keep all of us in our “place” until we figure out how to see it, name it and stand firm against its insidious hold on us.

Everywhere I turn across the Internet these days, I’m reading other people who are saying the same thing. Many of us are becoming more and more aware of the favors society gives us just because of the color of our skin. It’s embarrassing. Jim Rigby posted on Facebook how he, like me, was “taught a white version of history, a white version of beauty, and was saved by a white savior. I could not see my racism because it was the lens through which I was looking at everything else.” The very next day Jim blogged (with his tongue firmly in his cheek): “How do you know America is post-racial? Because a bunch of white people will come onto your Facebook and shout down anyone who would suggest otherwise.”

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor-in-Chief of RogerEbert.com and a TV critic for New York Magazine. He tells a story of a very stupid fight he started outside a bar, and then the undeserved wink and nod he got from the Dallas police as the Hispanic guy went off in handcuffs. Matt knows, because he has taken the lens off, that different rules apply to him than to so many others.

Since #Ferguson, numerous writers who are gifted and burdened with privilege have been wondering what to do. Bree Ervin at Everyday Feminism suggests six things parents can do as they teach and model for their children. Rachel Held Evans says we are “not as helpless as we think” even though racial reconciliation is a “hard discouraging road.”  Janee Woods wrote a much shared reflection on “12 Things White People Can Do…” When the Public Religion Research Institute published survey results revealing that most white people don’t have very many friends of color in our social networks, the blogosphere came alive with discussion. Surely figuring out how to burst that particular isolation bubble and to start living in a larger world, start living in the real world, would be one thing we all can do.

So are we favored white folks going to sit by and continue to allow America be what America has been? Or is this the time when we finally step up and really work for a more equitable America? Working to change entrenched systems is not quick or easy or flashy or fun, as Sojourners reminds me again and again. But when enough of us take our blinders off and open our eyes to the reality of our culture - the reality in which we are all too often complicit – then and only then can we truly be partners and allies in this effort for a just America.

I can’t stop the culture from gifting me with undeserved privilege, but I can find ways to increase the privilege and opportunities of others who live within my sphere of influence. I can’t change the fact that my skin is light, but I can stand against the insidious notion that white is the ideal and cultural norm. It is not; I am one of many and when I embrace that, when I celebrate the rainbow of our shared humanity, I am bigger and wiser and better. It’s really quite nice to be out of That Box.