Review: Freshwater Road

December 26, 2014December 26, 2014 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Freshwater Road by Denise Nicholas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It is the Freedom Summer of 1964. James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner have gone missing. Celeste Tyree, a black student at Michigan who grew up in Detroit has gone to be a voting rights volunteer in Mississippi at the urgings of her white boyfriend, J.D.

The novel takes us inside the realities of Sixties racism in Mississippi. The town to which Celeste is assigned has had a lynching within the last five years. While training in Jackson, she is harassed while distributing leaflets and arrested for littering. En route to Pineyville, where she will work, her male driver, Matt, is stopped, searched and beaten by the Highway Patrol while she cringes in fear inside the car. Early on, the home she is staying in on Freshwater Road is fired into in the beginning of the night. She is clearly not welcome.

This is also a kind of Freedom Summer for Celeste. She left for Mississippi without telling her father, Shuck, except by letter which arrived after she left. In the course of the summer she confronts the complicated relationship between her mother and father and has to decide how she will cope with a revealing letter from her mother Wilamena.

Equally, she faces the choice between fear and leading a civil rights effort among the residents of Pineyville, working with the courageous children who attended Freedom Schools and the adults who attempted to register to vote. The tension of the novel increases as events move toward the group of six’s attempt to register to vote.

The book chronicles a journey into adulthood that not only faces the reality of racial prejudice but also the flawed human nature within her own community. Confronting domestic violence and marital infidelity and the limits of what people sometimes are able to do about these things faces her with choices about how she will deal with her own complicated family life.

This novel worked at several levels for me. It opened my eyes further to the vitriolic racism that is a recent memory for many blacks, and still a present reality. It also gave an account of flawed and courageous people facing hard realities. While there are themes of sexuality and violence, these are handled with restraint. Indeed, the narrative “voice” of this novel had a quietness and steadiness that allowed the unfolding tensions of the novel to create their own drama. I understand this is the author’s first novel. All that I read here suggests an author of great promise.

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Justified Anger

November 6, 2014November 6, 2014 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment

We usually assume anger is a bad thing, often because it results in bad things–outbursts, hurtful words that cannot be taken back, or even physical violence. Yet even the Bible seems to allow for the possibility of anger that isn’t a bad thing. The apostle Paul says, “In your anger, do not sin: Do not let the sun go down on your anger” (Ephesians 4:26, NIV). This is anger that is acknowledged and turned into constructive action, not bottled up where it becomes bitterness or explodes in rage.

Twice today I’ve come across the idea of justified anger, both in the contexts of our country’s continuing struggle with racism. The first came up in Edward Gilbreath’s fine new book, Birmingham Revolution, which chronicles the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. leading up to, and following the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Gilbreath discusses the latent anger many African-Americans struggle with in the everyday incidents of racism they continue to experience, whether it is being treated with suspicion in a store, or being stopped by police because one fits a racial profile.

Following arrest during a civil rights march in Birmingham, King was placed in solitary confinement. A guard, perhaps to increase his displeasure, gave him a copy of the local paper with a letter from eight moderate white clergymen, not opposing civil rights but counselling moderation and “waiting”. This indeed got King’s blood boiling, but he turned this into constructive anger in writing what is perhaps the signature treatise of the civil rights movement. In it, he argues that it is never timely for those who benefit from oppression to face action against it. He also argues against the accusation of law breaking that while just laws must be kept, an unjust law demands to be broken because it is out of harmony with moral law.

The second reference to this idea was in a link I came across of an article by a Madison, Wisconsin pastor, who after a talk to a Rotary group, was approached by one of the audience members praising him for not being an “angry black man”. He responds that he is indeed an “angry black man” because of the difference between the image of Madison as a progressive university community and the realities that he and other African Americans experience in this community. He describes a traffic stop in the parking lot of the church he has pastored for 30 years, even though the car they were looking for was red and his was black and the name on his driver’s license matched the name on the church sign. Meanwhile they talked casually to his white associate while keeping him under suspicion. He goes on the describe other ways African-Americans continue to struggle under the continuing realities of racism and challenges Madison in the ways it can address these.

Reading this, as much as I’d love to identify with King and the Wisconsin pastor, the truth is I’m probably more like those eight white clergymen, preferring caution and moderation. But reading these accounts, I begin to get the anger as I see a people who were forcibly brought to this country and then treated as less than human and systematically denied rights that were equally theirs as citizens and subject to continuing suspicion. At one point, Gilbreath describes King’s angriest moment as a fourteen year old returning to Atlanta on a bus from a speech competition to be profanely ordered by the bus driver to give up his seat and stand for 90 miles so that whites could sit. Rich Nathan, a local Columbus pastor describes in his book Both-And a gathering of black and white pastors. The whites were asked how many of them and discussed with their children where to put their hands if stopped by a policeman. None raised their hands. The same questions was asked the blacks in the room. Every hand went up. That occurred in my city, one that similarly prides itself on its ‘progressiveness’ as a university town and state capital.

I’m tempted to want to run around and say and do all kinds of “virtuous” things. No one likes to face the truth that they are identified with injustice. Maybe the best thing I can do as a start is to realize that as William Gladstone says that “Justice delayed is justice denied.” Maybe the best thing I can do, at least to start is to stop defending and just listen and say, “you do well to be angry.”

Review: The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity

July 8, 2014July 8, 2014 / rtrube54 / 6 Comments

The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity by Soong-chan Rah
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There is something wrong with much of American evangelicalism in its current form. Many churches are declining. We have moral scandals. Evangelicalism continues to splinter into weird offshoots like the emergent church and various other post-modern expressions. And many quarters of society hear the term and revile us (I say “us” because theologically this is where I would truly locate myself) because of our over-identification with conservative political stances and indeed for becoming a pawn of conservative interests.

Soong-chan Rah writes that it is not evangelicalism that is on the decline, but rather white evangelicalism that is culturally captive to Western cultural values. Not only is there rapid growth of churches taking place throughout the non-Western world, but because of the immigration of so many of these people groups to the West, they, in many cases, are bringing with them a vibrant evangelical faith, and the churches they are establishing are among the most rapidly growing.

The book consists of three parts. The first describes the captivity of the white church, observing our individualism that makes the gospel and the Bible all about me; our consumerism and materialism that Christianizes affluence; and our continuing racism evident even in Christian publishing circles. On this last, he tells the sad tale of a publisher of Vacation Bible School materials who themed one such set of materials “Rickshaw Rally”, using all sorts of stereotypical and demeaning Asian stereotypes. When criticized, the publishers responded that the Asians shouldn’t take themselves so seriously. In particular, there is the presumption in all this of white privilege–the propensity of whites in organizations and churches to simply consult other whites and do things without consideration or consultation with other cultural groups.

In the second part of this book, Soong-chan Rah explores how pervasive this captivity is as manifest in our church growth and megachurch strategies, the Emergent church, and in our cultural imperialism, our unthinking export of Western ways of doing things around the world. He praises Bill Hybels for his recognition that the Willow Creek model had failed to produce fully-orbed Christian disciples of Christ. And he scathingly criticizes the Emergent church movement as young whites dissatisfied with boomer evangelicalism who are simply creating young white churches reacting against the worst of the previous generation without engaging a broader cultural mix.

He goes on in the third part of the book to prescribe an alternative, which is that the white, culturally captive church needs to learn from and humble itself before the cultures from the Majority world and learn from them. He proposes that we learn a theology of suffering from the African- and Native American churches. He believes the immigrant church can teach us approaches to holistic evangelism from their experience of addressing comprehensively the needs of their own immigrants coming to the west. And he believes second generation people can serve as “bridge” persons between the West and the rest as those who in some ways are in both, and neither, of these cultures–the culture of their parents, and Western culture.

This is a challenging and blunt book which it needs to be. When, in one of his examples, a dying congregation accepts a bid by a white congregation for half the price being offered by a Korean congregation, one recognizes that niceness just won’t cut through the fog and the chains of the captivity he is describing. I believe Rah is spot on in his diagnosis of white evangelicalism and the way forward.

My only question as I read this book is whether the author and those leading the vanguard of this “next evangelicalism” are aware of the dangers of new forms of cultural captivity and privilege to which they could fall prey? Perhaps this is implicit in the incisive critique of these realities in white evangelicalism, but it was not stated. The truth is, these are human conditions present in every culture, not simply white conditions. Culture shapes every form of Christianity, either ordinately or inordinately. Ordinately, this is a thing of beauty as the mosaic of Christians from around the world come together to create a beautiful, God-composed work of art. Similarly, positions of power and influence may be used to effect great good and great service, yet also may be warped to new forms of privilege.

My own hope is to see the dawning of a multicultural evangelicalism where we learn from and humbly submit to each other (beginning with the submission of white churches), and guard each other from hubris and the pitfalls of cultural captivities of every sort and the temptation to privilege in all its forms. May we not simply exchange captivities but move to a greater freedom for all the children of God!

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