Church

Voices of Witness Africa

andrea — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Voices of Witness Africa honors the truth and plight of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Anglicans in Africa, who have often been excommunicated by the Anglican Church. This is an admirable task for the producers of this film, since their target audience is Anglican bishops at the Lambeth Conference, a meeting of bishops which happens once every ten years. The producers must work not to overly offend the church bishops that they are trying to win over. However, this tension to represent various sides of the issue leaves the film with a sense of having been diluted to be palpable.

Producer/director Cynthia Black, an Episcopal priest herself, conceived of the thirty minute film after a successful response to the first Voices Of Witness film released in 2006, which featured LGBT Episcopalians from the Los Angeles area and was premiered during the General Episcopalian Convention in Columbus, Ohio. A short preview of Voices of Witness Africa was shown twice at the 2008 Lambeth Conference, supposedly to a standing-room-only audience.

Interviews range from LGBT people who are afraid to show their faces and sitting in shadow to retired Anglican Reverends who dare to openly support the cause—all offer an explosive and potentially deeply moving perspective. I saw pain in their eyes—pain from the persecution within their culture, their families, and yes, the church that they love. I kept waiting for the pain to be expressed. It never really was and, in that, the film itself doesn’t feel to match the bravery and courage of the individuals that it is featuring, who are in many cases risking life imprisonment and even death to tell their stories.

This movie feels like a tentative first step into the stormy waters of a growing advocacy for the Church to become more progressive or risk perpetuating the sense that it is living in the dark ages. You can feel in the people interviewed how their love for a God that is lovingly accepting of them and a church that represents that acceptance is what drives them to talk about it.

The film proceeds at a dizzying pace with a frenetic quality that makes it difficult to really be moved by the poignancy of what is being shared in only thirty minutes. More time for the stories to unfold of these fascinating, inspiring, and bright souls and more shots of the individuals in their daily lives would have enlivened the experience. The DVD includes a twenty-seven page study guide with suggested exercises for discussion groups and a full movie transcript—which seems excessive given the short length of the film itself.

Although this is undoubtedly a film made by Anglicans featuring Anglicans for Anglicans, this doesn’t mean that those of us who are not practicing Anglicans (or even Christians) won’t be touched by the experiences and perspectives of the film. Yet, we also may not feel as compelled by the desire to win over a church that has not kept its promises to listen to their suffering and persecuted parishioners. Instead we may wonder—isn’t it time to go beyond just an advocacy for “open listening” from the Church, and to demand sweeping change and progressive reformation that could pressure the political and judiciary systems to end the persecution of LGBT parishioners?

Written by: Jillian Vriend, November 3rd 2010

No Silent Witness: The Eliot Parsonage Women and their Unitarian World

mandy — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Cynthia Grant Tucker

Oxford University Press

Group biography is notoriously difficult, for all the reasons that biography itself is hazardous, compounded by the number of people brought to center stage, and, in this case, the geographical and temporal sweep of the subject matter. To make a single life a coherent narrative with episodes that build systematically and climax, with a psychologically complex yet recognizably unified character, and with a sense of thematic consistency is to fashion something that life is not.

For projects such as Tucker’s to succeed, the author must create at least the illusion of a shared experience among a group of women traversing the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the American landscape from Boston to St. Louis to Portland. They are connected genealogically—Abigail Adams Cranch (1817-1908) and William Greenleaf Eliot (1811-1887) and their descendants—and they are bound by their often contentious, often radical, and often underestimated participation in the history of Unitarianism in the United States.

In portraying the “full-throated wives and daughters” of the men who were most prominent in the Unitarian Church in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the author offers some sharply focused details about the challenges women faced and the different types and degrees of oppression they suffered as they struggled to be heard as members of their religious communities. As almost all nineteenth century memoirs and documentary accounts reveal, women’s lives were inevitably consumed by disease, the death of children, and the constraints placed upon them by marriage. That some of these women could become religious leaders, advocate for women’s suffrage, and defy even the expectations of their own congregations is a remarkable testament to their courage and resilience.

No Silent Witness is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the development of American liberal theology in its opposition to Calvinist Protestantism. But the author’s resistance to chronology and the multiplicity of characters that appear in this panorama mitigate against the reader’s strong desire to spend time with some of these women, to get to know them as they negotiated roles for themselves as ministers’ wives, and even, in a couple of instances, as preachers themselves.

One of the troubling through-lines in the narrative is Unitarian resistance to women’s influence in the church. Instead of celebrating the remarkable creativity and energy of the women who were such a central part of the early success of the Unitarian movement, leaders of the movement self-consciously sought to “masculinize” it by purging women preachers, downplaying women’s contributions, and appropriating rhetoric from the cult of masculinity that has loomed so large in the American lexicon. The result of this strategy was a near-catastrophic decimation in the church’s numbers by the turn of the century, with a large number of women permanently alienated and finding new homes in other emerging religious traditions or in a more liberalized “mainstream” Protestantism.

In the twenty-first century Unitarian Universalism (the name reflecting the merger in 1961 of two liberal theological traditions) is a relatively small liberal religious organization proud of its historical commitment to social justice and its rejection of doctrinal dogmatism. It is now, as in its formative days, a spiritual home for powerful and unorthodox women committed to social justice and to breaking taboos against women’s religious leadership. No Silent Witness is a helpful corrective to the tendency to romanticize Unitarian history and to offer hagiographic accounts of the early Unitarian leadership. Although this book is ostensibly about the contributions women made, it is also about the resistance they faced from their preacher-husbands and fathers and from their own congregations. Not surprisingly, the narrative is replete with the sort of fractious theological and denominational disputes, rivalries, and even scandals that seem inevitably a part of human experience and which we erase from our historical memories at our peril.

One editorial correction must be made for any subsequent printing of this book: the author writes about ministers’ wives complaining about being “gypped by their husbands’ low pay.” This is a stunning racist slur in an otherwise thoughtful and erudite book.

Written by: Rick Taylor, October 23rd 2010

Sons of Perdition

admin — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Directed by Tyler Measom, Jennilyn Merten

Left Turn Films

Exiled boys from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS) have been making news and showing up on the pop culture radar for a while. From John Krakauer’s exposé Under the Banner of Heaven and HBO polygamist drama Big Love to the conviction of former FLDS sect leader Warren Jeffs for accomplice rape last year, extremist Mormon sects are becoming increasingly well known outside of the regions they dominate and beyond the realm of religious scholars and the excommunicated.

Sons of Perdition—named for a verse in the New Testament referring to traitor Judas Iscariot, as well as the LDS Church belief that anyone who leaves the church will be unable to receive the glory of God in the afterlife and suffer eternal punishment—follows, with unprecedented access, former FLDS youth from Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona as they navigate the larger world post-expulsion. In many cases, young people are desperate to leave the compounds—colloquially “the Crick”—where they grew up with multiple mothers and dozens of siblings. But knowing what you don’t want doesn’t mean you’ll be prepared for life beyond indoctrination.

The film profiles several religious refugees from the Crick in St. George, Utah, about thirty minutes from the compound, where many exiles live in group houses and tiny apartments as they try to navigate the bizarre world beyond their sheltered, faith-infused lives. In these extraordinary circumstances, it is possible to see just how great a distance thirty miles can be. St. George, where most of the youth set up camp, is where Warren Jeffs’ trial took place. For the exiles and allies living there, while they are often still connected to home, trying to help siblings and mothers escape their abusive lives, it is also a world totally removed from everything they have ever known.

Most of the youth have never attended proper school, only taught math and religion on the compound. At seventeen, Joe has never seen a comic book, can barely read, and so genuinely confused about world history, he mixes up the names of Bill Clinton and Adolph Hitler. Joe’s sister doesn’t know the name or location of the nation’s capitol. Bruce, who is fifteen, is genuinely amazed to discover that Catholics believe in Jesus. All of them believe that by leaving the Crick, they will go to hell when they die.

Young women, a commodity in polygamous sects, seemingly fare a bit better as they’re less likely to be exiled. But, that doesn’t mean their struggles are any less difficult in other ways. Many of the girls have been married off as early as thirteen and have children to bring along—or in the case of Joe’s twenty-four-year-old sister Sabrina, her four children were left behind. Trying to escape with too many young ones in tow simply isn’t feasible. At one point, after trying to help their mother run away several times, Sam calls his own father’s actions—continually impregnating his wives, forcing them to stay with him and their children on the compound—“modern day slavery.”

If the boys have coming-of-age rituals to emphasize their freedom—drinking, drug use, trying to get into public school to meet hot girls—the girls have their own rites of passage; namely, having their long hair cut and styled at the mall and casting off their floor-length skirts in favor of pants. A sympathetic couple that takes in many of the ex-FLDS youth frowns on delinquent behavior, ultimately forcing the young people to find their own way. This is the only part of the film that feels truly cruel on the other side of emancipation; it’s tough enough for Sam, Bruce, Joe, Sabrina, and their friends to cope with turning their backs on all they’ve ever known. To be doubly turned away from their second chance at a family and home life seems strangely intolerant and shameful.

For people unfamiliar with extremist sects and fervent religious believers—anyone, for example, who found Jesus Camp to be shocking rather than a bit obvious—Sons of Perdition will amaze and startle you. Whether or not you’re knowledgeable about the ways the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints enslave women and pit boys against men before casting them out forever, this educational film will break your heart.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, July 22nd 2010

Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical

admin — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 17:01:00 +0000

Edited by Hannah Faith Notess

Cascade Books

Jesus Girls is a truly beautiful array of humbling feelings and bittersweet experiences, from fears of generational sin to tales of exchanging the pants off your own body with those from a hitchhiker. Divided into sections—community, worship, education, gender and sex, and story and identity—many of the stories were first printed in publications like Geez Magazine. To be clear, the writers are both reformed Christians and current believers.

Trained to tell the story of one’s life as personal “testimony,” editor Hannah Faith Notess instead describes her “un-testimony”—a reverse conversion of sorts, though admittedly usually a less linear, much more complicated, character-filled than a come-to-Jesus testament of personal awakening. Notess explains that whereas Jesus and your sinning self are the primary roles in evangelical conversion narratives, experiences of conversation—in either direction—never happen in a vacuum and are often heavily influenced by our own church communities.

Notess also made a special point to emphasize women’s voices in this collection. “Even in evangelical circles that approve of women’s leadership, it seems, too often women are only called upon to speak on ‘women’s issues,’” she explains. She also points out that in many evangelical traditions, women are taught to be silence in church congregations, even while their testimonies are often just as—if not more—powerful than men’s stories of conversation and salvation.

The collection is based largely on stories of North American evangelism, and while many types of evangelical congregations are not included, that is hardly a weakness of this book. Some of the stories are more interesting or personally relevant than others, and some—like Anastasia McAteer’s “Exorcizing the Spirit” or an essay about swimming lessons—are admittedly startling amidst tales of DC Talk CDs, test-run mission trips to India, and those stiff paper candle skirts that catch candle wax. Perhaps because accounts relating to gift subscriptions to Brio magazine and Jack Chick comics so excite me, a few of the more serious accounts failed to seize me altogether.

Several of the accounts feature women under ten regularly choosing to accept Jesus into their hearts or experience voluntary baptism. As someone who did both of these things during the same developmental periods of my life, these stories were comforting in the normalcy. There are also stories of a different kind of acceptance, like protestant Angie Romines’ desire to be in her story’s namesake, the “Catholic club,” or Kirsten Cruzen’s story of surviving life as a child of missionaries—“a missionary kid, an MK.”

Most comforting for an agnostic such as myself—if also most disturbing—are stories of early confusion, like Shari MacDonald Strong’s account of her inability to grasp women’s supposed original sin at only five years of age. Despite her love of greater knowledge and the Bookmobile, by her teen years, she has been effectively desexualized and demoralized by her church. Later, codependent and abusive relationships stem from so little self-esteem, personal empowerment, and knowledge of the opposite sex. No doubt many feminists who grew up in a church—myself among them—have had to navigate similar quandaries.

Some essays offer engaging, seemingly unintentional contrast as well. Stephanie Trombari details her battles with mental illness that led her to Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship, a “tent revival meets United Nations” faith healing community. And in Carla-Elaine Johnson’s “Family Time,” nurse-type attendants standing around the sanctuary to take care of anyone who “fell out” during rhythmic “stomping.” Depending on whom you believe, faith will either make you collapse or find true healing in concepts like “emotional health gospel.”

One writer tells of having an abortion at nineteen, a devastating event that nevertheless made her move “from pro-life or pro-forgiveness.” After living through myriad scandals including adultery, suicide, and her church splitting in two, unable to choose one of two pastors, Paula Carter writes, “I worry that people who grow up in the church learn to deny their own humanity.” It became clear to her that the church people were simply unable to live up to their own standards. With a bittersweet sentiment that made me laugh out loud, Carter wrote, “It is hard for me even now to reconcile the expectations of church and the reality of being alive.”

From the very real experience of being called to ordination to the confusions of the trappings of faith—as in, the belief that the right music and the right books will yield a saved self—Jesus Girls is a joyous, if sometimes harrowing, exploration of what it means to grow up female, evangelical—and sometimes, even feminist.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, January 1st 2010