For those of you who know me, you might know I’m a deacon at my church in Seattle. It’s a non-denominational Christian church and my role is really to minister to the material, social-emotional, and practical matters of church members who might be in a season of need. I don’t preach or teach. I basically run errands and coordinate volunteers so that the pastors can do that.
I as raised in the Catholic Church and while I appreciate their teachings on social justice, I couldn’t remain a practicing member considering their handling of the child sexual abuse scandals, their positions on homosexuality, female ordination, conception, and abortion.
Anyone who has read my memoir, Two Years of Wonder, will also know I attend multiple meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous each week. I attend AA as a “friend of AA,” someone who has never struggled with addiction, but practices the 12 Steps as a spiritual practice. I find the tenants of AA have helped me profoundly with my depression and anxiety. I also have found a deep connection with the recovery community. It’s in the rooms of AA with recovering addicts, drunks, sex workers, that I have met some of the “best” Christians in my life—although I know they would eschew any such label themselves, since so many folks I meet in the recovery community are also “church hurt” and are understandably skeptical of institutional religion (something I took on in my first novel City on a Hill as well as my short story collection Bunny Man’s Bridge).
So my approach to religion is more informed by AA’s approach to spirituality than anything else. In that I mainly, “take what works, and leave the rest.” This would earn me the label “Cafeteria Catholic,” back in Catholic circles. If I were still Catholic, I might care.
That said, it’s been saddening, yet not shocking, in recent weeks to hear so many folks who call themselves Christians using justification from the Bible to rip migrant children, seeking asylum, away from their parents to be placed in modern day concentration camps. Now, you can consider me a post-modernist skeptic of the Bible. I look on it as a historical document, written by MEN with all the biases and cultural blind spots that come with that. Although I recognize there are some profoundly progressive notions in the Bible on a number of issues, including gender, these have historically been glossed over by scholarly analyses, until recently done by men (that is the subject for another blog post).
But for those who still refer to the Bible as their go to, citing it, erroneously, as stating that we have a moral obligation to follow laws (as some politicians have recently, cherry picking a line from Romans 12) I decided to include the following counterpoints—from the Bible—highlighted recently by Pastor Tara Beth Leach. I think its also interesting to point out that the author of Romans, Paul, wrote many of his most famous epistles from jail, as he was constantly, willingly, purposefully, breaking the law—and was ultimately executed for it. Strange that this is the writer conservative Christians turn to in order to justify their own legalistic position to throw people of color in jail.
· In Exodus we see the midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, deliberately refused to enforce the law of the land. Pharaoh had explicitly commanded them to kill all male Hebrews. Recognizing this command as outrageously morally perverse, they courageously refused to do it (Exodus 1:15-17).
· Moses’s mother, Jochabed, illegally hid her son for three months instead of drowning him in the Nile as Pharaoh had ordered (Exodus 1:22-2:2).
· The wise men disobeyed Herod’s order to tell him where Jesus was; they broke the law and returned to their own country (Matthew 2:7-12).
· Mary, mother of Jesus, and Joseph, did not give their child up to Herod but fled as refugees to Egypt (Matthew 2:13-15).
Let’s face it. Very righteous people in the Bible broke the law, often in order to protect children and families. Think on that.