Michele Bachmann, Mike Pence, Mike Huckabee (Credit: AP/Reuters/Susan Walsh/Michael Conroy/Joe Skipper/Photo montage by Salon)
"As Indiana peddles its "religious freedom"
garbage, it's time to call the religious right's trash what it really is"-Brittney Cooper
Just in time for Holy Week, the State of Indiana has passed a new
Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
The law explicitly permits for-profit corporations from practicing the
“free exercise of religion” and it allows them to use the “exercise of
religion” as a defense against any lawsuits whether from the government
or from private entities. The primary narrative against this law has
been about the potential ways that small businesses owned by Christians
could invoke it as a defense against having to, for instance, sell
flowers to a gay couple for their wedding.
Any
time right-wing conservatives declare that they are trying to restore
or reclaim something, we should all be very afraid. Usually, this means
the country or, in this case, the state of Indiana is about to be
treated to another round of backward time travel, to the supposedly
idyllic environs of the 1950s, wherein women, and gays, and blacks knew
their respective places and stayed in them. While the unspoken religious
subtext of this law is rooted in conservative anxieties over the
legalization of same-sex marriage in Indiana, Black people and women,
and all the intersections thereof (for instance Black lesbians) should
be very afraid of what this new law portends.
Last year, the Supreme Court ruled in the
Hobby Lobby decision
that corporations could exercise religious freedom, which means that
corporations can deny insurance coverage for birth control. Now this
same logic is being used to curtail and abridge the right of gay people
to enjoy the same freedoms and legal protections that heterosexual
citizens enjoy.
And given our current anti-Black racial climate,
there is no reason to trust that these laws won’t be eventually used for
acts of racially inflected religious discrimination, perhaps against
Black Muslims or Muslims of Arab descent, for instance. Surely this kind
of law in this political climate sanctions the exercise of
Islamophobia.
As a practicing Christian, I am deeply incensed by
these calls for restoration and reclamation in the name of religious
freedom. This kind of legislation is largely driven by conservative
Christian men and women, who hold political views that are antagonistic
to every single group of people who are not white, male, Christian,
cisgender, straight and middle-class. Jesus, a brown, working-class,
Jew, doesn’t even meet all the qualifications.
Nothing
about the cultural and moral regime of the religious right in this
country signals any kind of freedom. In fact, this kind of legislation
is rooted in a politics that gives white people the authority to police
and terrorize people of color, queer people and poor women. That means
these people don’t represent any kind of Christianity that looks
anything like the kind that I practice.
To be clear, because I’m
an academic, I get static often from folks who wonder how I could dare
ally myself in name and religious affiliation with the kind of morally
misguided, politically violent people who think it reasonable to force
women to have babies they do not want and who think their opinions about
whom and how others should marry matters even a little bit.
I
often ask myself whether I really do worship the same God of white
religious conservatives. On this Holy Week, when I reflect on the
Christian story of Christ crucified, it is a story to me of a man who
came, radically served his community, challenged the unjust show of
state power, embraced children, working-class men and promiscuous women
and sexual minorities (eunuchs). Of the many things Jesus preached
about, he never found time to even mention gay people, let alone condemn
them. His message of radical inclusivity was so threatening that the
state lynched him for fear that he was fomenting a cultural and
political rebellion. They viewed such acts as criminal acts and they
treated Jesus as a criminal. And all who followed him were marked for
death.
This is why I identify with the story of Jesus. And
frankly, it is the only story there really is. This white, blond-haired,
blue-eyed, gun-toting, Bible-quoting Jesus of the religious right is a
god of their own making. I call this god, the god of white supremacy and
patriarchy. There is nothing about their god that speaks to me as a
Black woman of working-class background living in a country where police
routinely murder black men and beat the hell out of black women, where
the rich get richer while politicians find ever more reasons to extract
from the poor, and where the lives the church imagines for women still
center around marriage and motherhood, and no sex if you’re single.
This
God isn’t the God that I serve. There is nothing holy, loving,
righteous, inclusive, liberatory or theologically sound about him. He
might be “biblical” but he’s also an asshole.
The Jesus I know,
love, talk about and choose to retain was a radical, freedom-loving,
justice-seeking, potentially queer (because he was either asexual or a
priest married to a prostitute), feminist healer, unimpressed by
scripture-quoters and religious law-keepers, seduced neither by power
nor evil.
That’s the story I choose to reflect on this Holy Week.
The Christian lawmakers seeking to use the law to discriminate against
gay people are indicative of every violent, unrighteous, immoral impulse
that organized religion continues to represent in this country. I have
said elsewhere recently that it is a problem to treat racism as if
it will simply go extinct.
But as I watch the religious right engineer pain and obstacles for
queer people in America’s heartland, I find myself wishing that this
particularly violent and vicious breed of Christianity would die off.
I
cannot stand in a church and worship on Sunday alongside those who on
the very next Monday co-sign every kind of legislation that devalues the
lives of Black people, women and gay people. I am a firm believer that
our theology implicates our politics. If your politics are rooted in the
contemporary anti-Black, misogynist, homophobic conservatism, then we
are not serving the same God. Period.
And more of us who love
Jesus, despite our ambivalence about Christianity, the Church or
organized religion, need to stand up and begin to do some reclamation of
our own.
I am heartened to say that there is a generation of
young people of faith rising up, spurred on by the Ferguson events of
last summer. A group of young seminarians at
Union Theology Seminary in New York City have been at the fore of effort to
#ReclaimHolyWeek.
I spoke with one of the organizers, Candace Simpson, who told me that,
“#ReclaimHolyWeek is a way for us to challenge and disrupt the sanitized
stories we share during Holy Week. We refuse to pretend as though the
main story of Jesus’ resurrection was that he ‘died for our sins.’ We
need to be better in discussing the ways Jesus represented a threat to
his empire, that his teachings disrupt power structures. We pretend that
we would be mourning at his tomb, but it is clear in the ways we blame
victims of the system that we are not as moral as we pretend to be.”
They will spend this week protesting various forms of state-sanctioned
violence against Black and Brown people.
What this vocal
contingent of the religious right is seeking to restore is not religious
freedom but a sense of safety in expressing and imposing dangerous,
retrograde and discriminatory ideas in the name of religion. I continue
to support the free and unimpeded expression of religion. And I am
hopeful that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence’s call
for “clarification of the law”
amid a massive backlash will actually force the Legislature to
explicitly ban discrimination based on gender and sexual orientation.
Then perhaps the law could do what some legal scholars
claim it was meant to do, namely, protect freedom of religious expression for religious minorities in the U.S.
Alongside
that, I maintain that another kind of reclamation needs to occur. We
need to reclaim the narrative of Jesus’ life and death from the
evangelical right. They have not been good stewards over the narrative.
They have pimped Jesus’ death to support the global spread of American
empire vis-à-vis war, “missions,” and “free trade,” the abuse of native
peoples, the continued subjugation of Black people, and the regulation
of the sexual lives of women and gay people. Let us mark this Holy Week
by declaring the death to the unholy trinity of white supremacist,
capitalist, hetero-patriarchy. And once these systems die, may they die
once and for all, never to be resurrected.
Brittney Cooper is a contributing writer at Salon, and
teaches Women's and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers.
Brittney Cooper is a contributing writer at Salon, and
teaches Women's and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers.
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