Page 860 – Christianity Today (2024)

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The first time I was kicked out of a women’s restroom, I was ten years old.

At halftime of a high school basketball game, I walked into the restroom with several girlfriends and faced a trio of teenagers who blocked my entrance to a stall and told me to leave. A girl in a cheerleader outfit said boys who wanted to venture into women’s restrooms were clearly perverts and that I should get out. I backed out of the door and stood in the hallway, waiting for my friends to emerge, my facing burning with shame.

The high school girls had decided that, because of my short curly hair, my Toughskins jeans, and my Converse shoes, I was definitely a boy. I was also apparently a pervert, slyly slipping in to women’s restrooms to, I suppose, watch girls relieve themselves. This was the first but definitely not the last time my right to use a woman’s restroom was challenged by folks who decided I was not welcomed—and, that I had nefarious intentions.

For at least a decade, I was routinely mistaken for a boy and regularly banished from bathrooms.

The “bathroom wars” are now all over the news. The Target Corporation has issued a formal policy allowing LGBT persons to use the restroom that corresponds with their gender identity, North Carolina has passed a law (known as HB2) requiring people to use the restroom that corresponds to their birth gender, and several states are now suing the Obama administration over its directive stating that public schools must allow transgender students to use the restroom of their choice. Stories of men policing restrooms and a grocery store security guard assaulting a transgender woman trying to use a women’s restroom have only fueled the debate about whether public restrooms will ever be safe.

Yet lost in the polarizing arguments about gender identity and access to bathrooms is the fact that bathroom watchdogs have been active for generations. Such vigilantism leaves long-lasting emotional scars for those who are told that they do not belong in a bathroom because they do not look the part of a boy or girl, man or woman.

Some people might argue that the now-and-then mistakes over someone’s gender are worth it in order to keep restrooms safe from perversion. But our mistaken efforts to judge based on appearance have long-term impact on people who don’t fit our stereotypes and cultural norms.

For at least a decade, I was routinely mistaken for a boy and regularly banished from bathrooms. P.E. teachers and coaches assumed I was sneaking in to women’s locker rooms, or—even more inexplicably—trying to orchestrate an athletic advantage by playing on girls’ athletic teams.

As a first-year student at a Christian university, I was sometimes kicked out of women’s dorms, including my own, because people assumed I was transgressing “floor hour” rules. I could catalog a hundred times and more when I was humiliated by people who interrogated my gender-ambiguous appearance, to my face or behind my back, but almost always within hearing distance: Is that a girl? Is that a boy? It’s so hard to tell.

The most mortifying confrontations occurred when I was with others, like the time when, at 18, I was at the state fair with friends, wearing platter-sized earrings and trying hard to appear feminine. A clump of teenage boys approached the group and announced I was the ugliest guy they’d ever seen. I wanted to die—literally, not figuratively—and after this and other encounters, I wondered how hard it would actually be to drive my car off the road and end my life.

Some might wonder why I didn’t just try to be more feminine to preserve myself from heartache. My wildly curly hair was hard to control unless it was cut short. I wore my brother’s hand-me-downs because my dad was not fairly compensated as a pastor. I was a late bloomer with a flat chest and an athletic build and I felt more comfortable in jeans and tennis shoes. I was also opinionated and loud, traits girls were not supposed to embody.

Even now, entering a public restroom still causes me anxiety, and I struggle at times to accept who I am, as God created me.

I believed—and still believe—I was being the girl God had created me to be, regardless of how I looked or dressed. Yet because I didn’t conform to cultural dictates about how girls were supposed to act, appear, or feel, I wasn’t accepted as the woman I am. Few places outside my home felt truly safe for me. At any moment, someone could confront me with questions about who I really was. Even now, though I am a mother, a wife, a professor, and a writer who should be wholly past this mortification, entering a public restroom still causes me anxiety, and I struggle at times to accept who I am, as God created me.

I understand that people have principled reasons for disallowing transgender men and women into public restrooms corresponding with their gender identity. They want to protect their children from predators and are afraid that men, especially, will somehow use these rules to gain access to girls. I share the desire to protect children from assault and, as a mother of two boys, I’m deeply unsettled by the idea that my own kids could be the victims of predators.

Nonetheless, I believe that bathroom bans are not the answer. True predators will continue to find ways to abuse children. As has been pointed out time and again in this debate, if we truly want to protect children from sexual assault, we need to focus not exclusively on public spaces like bathrooms but also at private spaces, like our homes, our cars, our churches. About 86 percent of sexual assaults take place with people our children already know. Of course, because this reality is so scary, the specter of assault so close and familiar, it seems far easier to control the doors to our public bathrooms and locker rooms.

Of course, Christians differ in their views on sexual ethics and gender ontology. But even as we hold our different convictions, we can all agree it’s important not to target others based on narrow gender constructs that exclude people like me. Because when someone hears she is not feminine enough, not girlish enough, not pretty enough to really be a girl, what she will hear is that she is not enough, period. And that message seems in its own way abusive.

Melanie Springer Mock is a professor of English at George Fox University. In 2009, she won the university’s Faculty Achievement Award for Undergraduate Teaching, and in 2015 she received the school’s Faculty Achievement Award for Undergraduate Research and Scholarship. She is the author or coauthor of four books, including, most recently, If Eve Only Knew: Freeing Yourself from Biblical Womanhood and Becoming all God Means for You to Be (Chalice Press, 2015).

In this series, D. L. Mayfield considers the day-to-day ministries we often overlook.

When you are very young, you pick flowers constantly. You shred the petals, one by one, to see how they float as they fall—the patterns of the red and white and pink and yellow teardrops. You blow the fluff of the dandelion as hard as you can. Eventually, someone tells you to stop picking and touching and plucking. Stop spreading weeds. Use your eyes, not your hands. Soon, flowers begin to lose their interest.

When you are older—first a teenager, then a young adult—you never notice flowers at all. Your life is a blur of yourself and your hurts and your joys and the next day and the next. Flowers are a luxury, or for those who are old and bored and sitting down. You see stiff and perfumed roses at prom, at weddings, at funerals, on the church altar. But they are only ornaments, like a cake decoration.

It is only when life has become both slow and hard that it starts to happen. Driving in your car, you see an abandoned lot full of bright purple cone-shaped flowers, and you gasp aloud; the sight is so colorful that it shocks you out of your stupor. You walk to the nearest corner market to pick up some eggs and find honeysuckle hanging over the edges of a chain link fence; you stop, breathe deeply, inhale and smile without realizing why. Or on the way to school, you notice houses with neatly trimmed roses—so many different colors, like stained glass—and you inwardly bless the people who planted them, a gift just for you and your eyes at that very moment.

One day, when you are older and tired and in the very thick of surviving—jobs, bills, children—you plant flowers in a row alongside the more practical and stoic tomatoes and cucumbers. You feel silly as you do it. What is a flower, after all, in the face of suffering? It has no real purpose. It cannot undo all that is wrong with the world.

But when they start to bloom—shyly at first, and then all together in a chorus, a harmonious hymn—you see it: the unexpected way they bring pleasure, just by being themselves. Your daughter sticks her nose close to the blooms, and then looks up at you. “Go ahead and pick it,” you tell her, and you watch as her eyes grow wide.

Go ahead and pluck it, and cradle it, you think. And later, let it float to the ground, forgotten. That is why it was grown—to be small and extravagant, a testimony to the ways God is at work in the world.

Why do contemporary audiences love superheroes? One answer seems obvious: they make us feel powerful.

As beings made in the image of God, we long for justice. As fallen creatures, however, we often lack the means—or bravery—to bring that justice about. Comics, movies, and TV shows about caped crusaders and teams of mutant heroes provide us with something we crave: an imagined space where we can explore what it’s like to uphold righteousness with reckless abandon, even in the face of cosmic evils that dwarf those dogging us in the here-and-now.

Well, as of a few weeks ago, there’s yet another new superhero on the block—only this time, he’s toting a Bible and sporting a clerical collar.

On May 22, AMC presented its pilot for Preacher, the latest project from Breaking Bad co-producer and writer Sam Catlin. Based on the late-‘90s comic of the same name, Preacher follows Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper), a small-town Texas minister with a sordid past and a disillusioned faith. By the end of the pilot episode, Jesse joins the superhuman ranks when a mysterious, celestial being (called “Genesis” in the comics) possesses him, giving him god-like abilities.

Early reviews have been mostly positive. Preacher looks to be fresh spin on an old formula, taking the superhero story’s concerns about justice and power and projecting them into the life of a church’s world-worn shepherd. It’s also grim, gritty, and violent. Like Breaking Bad before it, Preacher isn’t afraid to portray the troubling, taboo, and degenerate. (Flannery O’Connor fans will feel right at home.) Christian audiences are likely to wonder, then: is Preacher just a churched-up Game of Thrones with basic cable boundaries and a God-shaped absence? Or will its treatment of the body of Christ and the ones who lead it be rich and honest enough to make it worth watching?

The final answer to that question will probably only come in the long run, but the pilot gives some early hints of promise. While it raises some interesting issues, the first episode mainly focuses on establishing the backdrop against which Jesse’s journey will unfold. And, as with most superhero tales, it wants us to see its protagonist as essentially powerless from the start.

Before Genesis possesses him, Jesse is—by his own admission—a “bad preacher” in search of absolution, a “drinkin’, fightin’, swearin’” mess with a cryptic, violent past. His failing country church can’t even afford to keep the air conditioner on, let alone keep up with the megachurch up the road (which, it turns out, just added a Starbucks to their lobby). As far as God’s concerned . . . well, whatever love Jesse may have had for him once, it’s chilled considerably.

Nonetheless, he aims to serve his people, and the struggles he faces are familiar ones for ministers: the first pastoral act we see him perform on-screen is amending a crude re-lettering of his church’s sign. During the Sunday service, it’s clear that none of his bored congregants—with the exception of sincere organist and young widow Emily Woodrow (Lucy Griffiths)—care much about what he has to say. But there may be good reason, as Jesse himself seems to think God has turned his back on him.

Despite his ministerial failures, Jesse’s thirst for righteousness is admirable—though it sometimes leads him to abandon the high road for the low. For instance, when a young boy asks him to address his father’s abuse of his mother, Jesse tries to play it straight, deflecting the boy’s plea to “hurt him” by reminding him that “violence makes violence.” But when the situation goes south, Jesse’s own sins resurface: the father provokes him into a furious barroom fistfight, which ends in the preacher snapping his opponent’s forearm in half across his leg—as sure a sign as any that despite his desire to change, Jesse’s outlaw past is still close on his heels.

Amid his spiritual darkness, however, there are still glimmers of hope. Perhaps his most shining moment in the pilot is his conversation with Eugene Root, the sheriff’s teenaged son whose face was horrendously disfigured by a past suicide attempt. Eugene also expresses a sense of God’s distance: “I used to pray to him, and I would hear him talk back,” he says. “But now it’s just—it’s just real quiet. Do you ever think that there are some things so bad even God won’t forgive?”

Jesse’s reply contradicts his own doubt—or reveals his hope. “No,” he insists. “No matter what you’ve done, if you need him, he has to be there for you. That’s the whole point. God doesn’t hold grudges.”

While we might not be able to relate to Jesse’s careless approach to holiness, his concern for his people makes him a compelling antihero to cheer for. He’s less a preacher, perhaps, than a doubting man’s pastor, a wandering shepherd to some very lost sheep. We want to see him empowered. Jesse may be a simmering pot ready to boil over, but something about him is reminiscent of the Old Testament prophets, calling heavenly fire down on the heads of the wicked, the abusers, the workers of injustice.

If there’s an area where Preacher disappoints, though, it’s in the thinness of its vision of the faith. For all its pious window dressing, the show’s Christianity is noticeably Christ-less. There’s talk of forgiveness, sure—everyone seems to be longing for it—but not of grace. From the pulpit, Jesse preaches about humility, but his sermon comes across as a moralistic pep talk and little else. In the face of evil, the choice before the characters seems clear-cut: either sit back and allow the wicked to prosper, or take up your cross and use it to beat the devil out of them.

Its theological shallowness and brutal violence might make it a hard sell, but Preacher still has a lot of promise. Its greatest success is in acknowledging humanity’s smallness, our inability to achieve the justice we so desperately crave. What remains to be seen, then, is whether Catlin and his team will walk the well-trodden path of the “great power, great responsibility” superhero arc, or whether they’ll take a narrower road that acknowledges the insufficiency of even our most superhuman efforts.

There are already hints of that message in the pilot’s conclusion: after his possession, the effects of Jesse’s first (unknowing) use of his powers during the show’s final moments are ruinously grotesque. Like the show itself, he’s too wracked with sin and doubt to slip easily into the role of “hero of the faith.” But will the God of Preacher ever appear to mend him?

Episode 2 of Preacher premieres June 5 on AMC.

Ugandan Martyrs Museum

Today tens of thousands of Christians in Uganda will dip themselves and their children into a lake where executioners reportedly washed off the blood of dozens of martyrs.

It’s an annual ritual to remember 45 Catholics and Anglicans who were killed by sword or fire by Ugandan king Mwanga between 1885 and 1887. (A Ugandan film released May 30 retells the story.)

Twenty-two of the martyrs were Catholic. Those men were beatified by Pope Benedict XV in 1920 and canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1964. Their shrine in Namugongo can seat 1,000 and has been visited by three popes, including Pope Francis.

Last year, 500 Catholic pilgrims from Kenya spent more than a month walking 300 miles to reach it for the annual Martyrs Day. The June 3 observance draws millions of pilgrims across East Africa.

The other 23 martyrs were Anglican. While there is also a shrine to the Protestant martyrs, it’s nothing like its Catholic counterpart.

In fact, the Protestant presence is so small that originally Uganda president Yoweri Museveni said he thought there were only Catholic martyrs. He criticized Anglicans for not popularizing their martyrs more, and told them to follow the example of the Catholics.

“Mobilization and promotion is something that you need to work on. I am sorry, but you do not bring it out very well,” he told Anglican clergy last June 3. “I want you to be international. Where I have been (Catholic shrine), it is more exciting and I used three languages because they made theirs international.”

As CT reported last fall, the Anglicans are working on it, and one day the swampy site symbolizing religious freedom may prove better than gorillas for Uganda’s economy.

The Church of Uganda has expanded its small shrine, adding several buildings and a statue of the executioner, who later became a Christian. There are plans for a three-story museum that will hold artifacts of the history of the Anglican church in Uganda, a retired Anglican archbishop told allAfrica.com. This year, the shrine drew about 200,000 campers, reports the Anglican Communion News Service.

But in general, Protestants don’t do religious tourism the way Catholics do. For Catholics, shrines are sacred places which are “by reason of special devotion frequented by the faithful as pilgrims.” For Protestants, the term carries implications of worshipping something other than God.

Indeed, when Rebecca Kadaga, Uganda’s recently reelected Speaker of Parliament and a Christian, visited a shrine for her ancestors to tell them about her political victory, she was soundly rebuked by the Anglican church.

“We value our ancestors because we are connected to them,” Church of Uganda archbishop Stanley Ntgali said in a statement. “But, we must always trust only in God. We no longer need to go through the spirits of the dead because Jesus is our hope and protector.”

Kadaga’s visit was “confusing” and “might cause others to stumble,” Ntgali said.

Kadaga defended her visit as cultural.

“I am a Christian. I was born and raised in a Christian family,” she wrote. “I am also very proud to be a Musoga.”

Her clan believes that the spirits of the dead continue to reside among the living, and she wanted to “share my success with my ancestors and clansman, and I do not comprehend how that is deemed to have contradicted my standing as a Christian.”

However, she also defended her visit as promoting tourism. The site where Kadaga’s clan was founded was tapped by the president as a tourism site, she said.

“I also know that there are those to whom the Uganda Martyrs are simply family members,” she wrote. “I am sure they too visit the shrines in Namugongo not because they are martyrs, but because they are family/ancestors. Should we criticize them for paying tribute to their ancestors?”

The pressure to make much of religious sites stems from the success of others. The World Tourism Organization estimates that between 300 to 320 million tourists visit religious destinations each year.

Religious tourism has been a boon for the Middle East, with destinations like Jerusalem, Mecca, and Medina. Mecca, the world’s most popular religious site, hosted 14 million pilgrims for Ramadan in 2015. Jerusalem was the most popular destination for Israel’s 3 million visitors in 2015, and more than half of those tourists were Christians. The Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee were also in the Top 5 Israeli tourist locations.

Pope Francis’ visit to Uganda last year for the 50th anniversary of the canonization of the Namugongo martyrs drew 3.5 million people.

“Tourism is one of the major drivers of developing economies, and faith-based tourism is one of the products we have seen grow in numbers and impact on the Uganda economy,” tourism minister Maria Mutagamba told East African Business Week.

Plans for the upgraded Anglican shrine were announced in 2014, the same year Uganda’s tourism board unveiled the Martyrs Trail. Visitors can follow a trail of locations where those 45 young men were tortured and killed—from Uganda’s first Anglican church to Mwanga’s palace to Namungongo, where the Catholic and Anglican shrines stand.

“Tourism is the real oil for East Africa,” wrote one analyst for allAfrica.com. “The potential is so huge, and with the proper conservation and management structures it is a resource we can exploit for so many years to come. Religious tourism is an area that has not been taken as serious as wildlife tourism and yet the potential is enormous.”

In November, CT reported on Pope Francis’ visit to Uganda and how Protestants were following Catholics on martyr tourism.

Have you heard the Good News? 🙂

Sites from The New York Times to The Washington Post to Forbes are reacting to a new emoji-studded Bible translation—the latest effort to make the Holy Book appeal to young readers.

“Bible Emoji: Scripture 4 Millenials (sic)”—now available for $2.99 on Apple’s iBooks—comes from the Twitter account @BibleEmoji, which replaces select words in Bible verses with corresponding smiley faces or other small icons used in text messages and on social media.

This version follows other lighthearted 21st-century translations such as the LOLCat Bible and the Lego Brick Bible. But for all the hype over this particular digital-era adaptation, the emoji Bible actually doesn’t contain that many emojis. It’s a King James Version (KJV) with 10 to 15 percent of the text swapped for emojis; about one or two symbols appear in each verse.

(The KJV is the most-read version of the Bible by far, and despite the popularity of the NIV for new purchases of the Bible, remains the most-searched version online. It’s also in the public domain in the United States, so changes can be made without seeking permission or paying a fee.)

This distinctly 21st-century twist on the Bible brings up the age-old issue with Bible translation: Should translators stick to an “essentially literal,” word-for-word translation, or should they aim for “dynamic equivalence,” or thought-for-thought?

The emoji Bible goes with the former. A translator program substituted 80 icons that directly represent 200 different words in the text: a tree for a tree, water droplets for rain, and a smiley face emoji with a halo for God. It is also written in all lowercase and makes some “text-friendly substitutions,” like changing “and” to “&.”

The replacement isn’t always smooth. For example, “strangers” ends up with an anger emoji in the middle of the word.

“I think it can be fun for those who know Scripture well, to sort of have a game reading it,” said the anonymous creator, who goes by the smiley face emoji wearing sunglasses. He said he chose the format, which resembles pictures dropped in the middle of KJV verses, because it retained the readability of the text.

“The ‘emoji’ Bible looks like my four-year-old's learn-to-read books,” tweeted Benjamin Reynolds, New Testament professor at Tyndale University College and Seminary. “It's just missing Diego and Thomas the Train.”

The emoji Bible’s literal translation doesn’t reflect the non-literal ways users often employ the icons. For example, thanks to music producer DJ Khaled, the popular key emoji represents advice, tips, or “keys to success.” The “100” emoji isn’t just a number; it represents authenticity and keeping it real.

“The book doesn’t take enough liberties. It gets boring and repetitious,” wrote Jana Reiss, blogger and author of Twible, which summarizes each chapter of the Bible in 140 characters or less. “I’d rather see an emoji Bible that really takes the time to explain the text and lets readers have some fun understanding it.”

Still, any emojis in the Bible—even direct and literal substitution—take away from God’s Word and words, according to some critics.

“Ah… Dear Millennials, please insist on using WORDS to translate the Bible, not emoji. Please. It’s important,” tweeted Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

This isn’t the first time yellow smiley faces have met biblical text. This quiz shows examples of Bible stories told through just emojis, and a low-profile Kickstarter project from 2014 sought to create 5,000 new emojis specifically to use in an all-emoji Bible.Especially in the past year, emojis have become a huge cultural force, with billions of the tiny icons texted and tweeted across the globe. The “face with tears of joy” emoji was declared 2015’s word of the year.

This iconic shorthand also gets incorporated into Christian expression. Emoji appear in about 3 percent of Bible verse tweets without images and about 13 percent of Bible verses tweets with images, according to analysis of the “emojipocalypse” by Stephen Smith at OpenBible.info. Popular emojis accompanying Bible verses—often as reaction, rather than transliteration—include prayer hands (No. 1), praise hands (No. 3), hearts, an open book, a pointed finger, an angel, and fire.

These religious-themed options actually rank among the most-misconstrued emojis, according to computer science researchers at the University of Minnesota. NPR reported on their findings, indicating that praise hands rank No. 2 on the list of most-confusing emoji, and prayer hands rank No. 6. (One reason is that the emojis look different on various platforms; what looks like two hands pressed together on Apple devices turns up as a grey—almost alien-looking–figure on Microsoft.)

Created in largely secular Japan, where Christians make up just 1 percent of the population, these emojis didn’t originally connote the religious meaning they do to many Americans now. Alternate meanings for what we see as prayer hands include “please” and “thank you” (a sign of respect in Japanese culture), as well as high-fiving. The “person raising both hands” emoji—often used as shorthand for “praise the Lord”—also represents magic and Festivus miracles, according to Emojipedia.

An additional number of religious-themed emojis debuted last year. Many of them were symbols of other faiths (a synagogue, a menorah, a mosque, and a Shinto shrine, for example), but Christian additions included a cross, a dove, and a symbol for a house of worship.

The new editions have yet to become popular enough to rank in Smith’s running count of trending Christian emojis.

Back in 2013, Her.meneutics discussed how emojis affect the Christian call as stewards of language. Last year, CT put its first emoji on the cover of the magazine, representing shame.

MarchforLifeCO / Flickr

“Do your kids ever complain about going to church every week?” my friend asks.

She and her husband were raised in small countryside churches in the south of France, and while they were never zealous for the faith, they dutifully attended mass on Christmas and Easter until recent years. My friends accept the seeming inevitability of spiritual lapse. Sunday worship, hardly exhilarating in its own right, stands to compete with birthday parties, competitive sports, and the luxury of sleeping late.

Remarkably, our five children don’t complain. This isn’t to say that our 13-year-old son doesn’t occasionally look bored during the sermon. It isn’t to deny that our twin eight-year-old boys wiggle distractedly during prayer, asking in loud whispers, “When is this going to be over?” On any given Sunday, our children may be more or less engaged in the 90-minute liturgy that moves us from a call to worship to a final benediction, but they do come willingly.

Everyone is a worshiper, and every habit is a liturgy. This is the central premise of James K. A. Smith’s research in the last several years, whose work David Brooks highlighted in his recent New York Times column, “Putting Grit in Its Place.” Brooks laments that our educational system, with its emphasis on grade-point average, forges “grit”—the mindless perseverance for extrinsic reward. But grit can only get us so far. Citing Smith’s research, Brooks reminds readers that what really motivates human beings is desire. Our lives are oriented by our vision of the good life.

Smith’s research has been important not only for my work as a writer, but also as a parent. He argues against the Enlightenment idea that “thinking” is most fundamental to human personhood, illustrating instead that the human being is primarily a desiring animal. In other words, human beings do not act according to their deepest held beliefs; instead, they do (and are) what they love. The formation of longing is the business of parents and educators, pastors and politicians. We can’t simply teach our children, our congregation, or our citizenry to know the right thing or to act in right ways. We must help them to love right things.

The trick is that the only way to cultivate right desires is to practice our way into them. This isn’t a new idea, even if behavioral and sociological research seems newly interested in the power of habit. Ancient wisdom characterized virtue as the acquisition of good habits. To develop the character of courage, self-restraint, cool judgment, and determination, one needed an everyday training regimen that routinized “good” behavior and eventually educated the impulse—or, as we might say, formed the right desires. To become a kind person, for example, was to choose kindness a thousand times, against the will, enabling one to choose it willingly on the thousandth-and-first time.

To assert that desire is the fundamental human mechanism—and habit the “hinge of desire,” as Smith writes—can cause us to take inventory of our lives in new ways. As parents, for example, we are helped to examine our lives through the realm of liturgy. What do our family habits say about the things we love? Do we spend our money, time, and energy in ways congruent with our values? Or, is there an unintended education of longing in our busyness, our over-consumption, and our digital addictions? Moreover, what do our personal habits reveal to our children about the things we cherish?

Our children have been asked to skip birthday parties and forgo sports leagues to keep church attendance as a family priority. We have no illusion that our faith will inevitably become theirs; nevertheless, we have hoped to maintain a habit that cultivates the desires that we as parents deem important—love for God and love for neighbor. At the very least, weekly worship is one concrete way of saying that there is more to being human than getting into the right college, that there is more to being happy that keeping busy. Clarinet lessons, math tutoring, basketball practice, and dinner from the drive-thru cannot be our only family habits. Because everyone is a worshiper, and every habit a liturgy.

The following exchange took place between Anderson Cooper of CNN and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in the March debate in Flint, Michigan:

Cooper: “Senator Sanders, are you intentionally keeping your Jewish faith in the background during your campaign?”

Sanders: “I am very proud to be Jewish, and being Jewish is so much of what I am. Look, my father’s family was wiped out by Hitler in the Holocaust. I know about what crazy and radical and extremist politics mean. I learned that lesson as a tiny, tiny child when my mother would take me shopping and we would see people working in stores who had numbers on their arms because they were in Hitler’s concentration camps. I am very proud of being Jewish, and that is an essential part of who I am as a human being.”

Once again we are in presidential election season. The candidates are, each in their own way, projecting what they want the electorate to know about their faith. We Americans are used to this quadrennial exercise. This election cycle, however, is exceptional.

Senator Bernie Sanders has advanced further in the presidential campaign than any other Jewish citizen before him. (In 2000, Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut was the vice presidential candidate on Al Gore’s ticket.) Some have commented on how little has been made—and how little Sanders has made—of his Jewishness. Yet many others are trying to understand the relationship of Judaism and Jewishness to Sanders and the positions he advocates. Judaism, and membership in the Jewish people, fit no category of faith and religion familiar to most Christians. Ironically, Sanders’ own untraditional relationship to his faith and faith community actually presents an opportunity for America to learn some unique, aspects about Judaism and the Jewish people.

Judaism Is a Family

Judaism is not just a religion. Judaism and Jewishness are an indivisible amalgam of God, Torah (the scriptures), Mitzvot (commandments), land, language, and familial peoplehood. In the main, one is not born a Christian; one becomes a Christian by affirming the Christian faith. While one can convert to Judaism, for the most part, one is born a Jew. Irrespective of what a Jew believes or practices, a Jew is a Jew. Every Jewish person is a child of Abraham and Sarah and a member of that first family of believers.

Judaism is a family that became a faith and remained a family. One of the consequences of this is the unconditional love of one Jew for another Jew, no matter their depth of religious faith. It is still a family despite growing differences in various Jewish beliefs and practices.

Senator Sanders is a Jew of a particular genre, the product of a specific time and place.

Senator Sanders is a Jew of a particular genre, the product of a specific time and place—New York in the post-World War II years. This has shaped him and many like him, and therefore, has shaped today’s American Jewish community. This requires a short review of history.

By the end of the 19th century, approximately one million Jews lived in the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which in 1795 was gobbled up by the Austro-Hungarian, Prussian, and Russian empires. That population grew to about five million during the 19th century. This growth took place largely in czarist Russia in the midst of a collapsing and oppressive economic and political order. The Jewish people suffered severely in these societies and under these conditions—both economic hardships and continued anti-Semitism from a largely Christian population.

Essentially two schools of thought emerged among the Jewish population. One focused on “there”—the Land of Israel. This solution involved establishing a nation-state where Jews could determine their own destiny. This movement is known as Zionism.

Another group reasoned that their problem was not so much a Jewish problem as it was universal problem. That problem was capitalism, which oppressed workers. A socialist revolution would solve the universal oppression, and thus the two great Jewish problems. It would not only deal with their oppression, but the early socialist leaders believed socialism would allow them to assimilate into European society without having to convert to Christianity. On top of that, socialism drew upon the universal Jewish impulse to do Mitzvot, to relieve human suffering.

Many of these Jewish socialists made their way to the US. New York became one of the world’s largest concentrations of Jewish people, with a heightened sense of Jewish ethnicity, many with a particularly secular bent influenced by Jewish socialists. These Jews were shaped by the received Jewish tradition, but they often transformed the particularities of religious Judaism into political and philosophical universal aspirations.

Sanders’ Secular Jewishness

Sanders, growing up as he did in Brooklyn, was raised in this specific Jewish environment. But in what ways has this slice of Jewish life affected his worldview and, if elected president, would it affect his policies? Of course, only God knows the heart and soul of another human. Still, we can see following:

Sanders is intellectually honest about his secular Jewishness.

Sanders is intellectually honest about his secular Jewishness. Some candidates in the past 50 years have felt obligated to increase their Christian bona fides during the campaign season. Sanders has felt no need to enhance his Jewish bona fides. Sanders identifies as a Jew, but it appears that for him this is an ethnic and historical identification, not a religious or a faith ontology. He rarely references Jewish teachings, practices, or traditions.

Still, in his public statements, Sanders identifies with some of the great 20th century dramas of Jewish history, especially the Holocaust and the founding of the state of Israel. He is the grandchild of Polish Jews. Members of his family were murdered by Nazis. This imbues him with deep convictions about democracy and compassion for those who are suffering and oppressed. The Jewish identification with liberal democracy is historically natural. It has deep roots in the Scripture, “Do not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt” (Ex. 23:9).

Sanders, the Jew and public official, has been shaped by these events and ideas. One can sense this just by reading the titles of his position papers on his campaign website: “Income and Wealth Inequity,” “It’s Time to Make College Tuition Free and Debt Free,” “A Living Wage,” “A Fair and Humane Immigration Policy,” among many others.

Still, while he does not appear to take part in Jewish religious practices, in no way does that alter his status as a member of the family of the Jewish people. This is something that is hard for many Christians, especially evangelicals, to understand. We are not merely a faith or a religion. We are a family. Our family life entails belief in God, responding to God’s revelation at Sinai, and God’s commanding voice summoning us to a life of justice, holiness, purity, and righteousness. Irrespective of how an individual Jew responds to that, they remain a member of the family.

His type of Jewishness, commonly called “secular,” has only been possible in the last 200 years of Jewish history. He looks, talks, and behaves differently from many other American Jews, older and younger than he. But a Jew he remains.

Yehiel E. Poupko is Rabbinic Scholar of the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago.

The music swells. They gaze into one another’s eyes. The clouds burst and a rainstorm begins, and they don’t care that their white shirts are getting all wet and see-through because they are sharing a passionate kiss.

Somehow you know that kiss will last forever . . . because they have fallen in love.

Yuck.

This is how Hollywood imagines love. How do you define it? Your answer will have a powerful impact on your marriage.

There’s a reason most Hollywood love stories end with declarations and kisses and don’t often show the happily-ever-after that supposedly comes after couples walk down the aisle. Happily-ever-after is a myth. Hollywood love doesn’t hold up in real life.

We need a better definition of love. Fortunately, God has given us one. The best-known Bible passage about love is 1 Corinthians 13:4–7:

Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circ*mstance.

These verses show us three important truths about love.

Love Is an Action

This passage doesn’t say anything about how love feels. It’s about how love looks and behaves. Hollywood’s version of love feels great. And when we operate on the assumption that love is a great feeling, we set ourselves up to bail out. Once people who fell in love lose that great feeling, they diagnose themselves as having fallen out of love.

God’s version of love is completely different. Sometimes it feels great; sometimes it feels terrible. Sometimes it doesn’t feel anything at all. Those feelings are irrelevant to the question of whether we love. Love is something we do regardless of how we feel.

When people stand at the altar and say they’ll love one another for better or worse, they aren’t promising to feel happy even when life is at its worst. This isn’t an agreement to stick together as long as they both feel happy. These vows are supposed to mean that they’ll love one another at their worst, regardless of how they feel.

Of course I want my husband to feel great about me and around me, but I also want him to behave lovingly toward me when I don’t deserve to be loved or when I feel unlovable. That’s what we all want. That’s what love looks like.

The ultimate example of this kind of love is Jesus. Talk about people who don’t deserve to be loved! None of us deserve God’s love, but we have it anyway. Romans 5:8 tells us, “God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners.”

God didn’t wait for us to deserve his love before he gave it to us. He didn’t wait until we made him happy. He sent Jesus to take the punishment for our sin, and he let us hand out the punishment ourselves.

Jesus didn’t stay in heaven and yell down to us that he loved us. He loved us through his actions. Jesus didn’t have to show his love this way. He chose to do so. And so can we.

Love Is a Choice

We tend to talk about love as if it were some kind of disease. We catch it accidentally, then after a while we just might get over it.

My first crush felt like love, but it wasn’t. And it certainly didn’t fit the standard of 1 Corinthians 13. It was not patient, kind, protective, or unselfish. It certainly did not endure; I think it may have lasted two weeks. That was more like the disease kind of love—something we catch unwittingly, live with for a while, then get over.

Real love is completely different. It’s no accident. It might begin as a surprise, but true love requires a choice. In fact, to love someone for a lifetime requires many choices, sometimes daily choices, and sometimes minute-by-minute choices to behave in loving ways even when we don’t feel like it.

Again, Jesus is our example. Philippians 2:5—8 tells us, “You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had,” then goes on to point out how he stepped away from his privileges as God and became a completely humble human out of love for us.

Jesus didn’t swoon or get carried away on an emotional high, unable to stop himself from falling for the people walking around on this earth. He didn’t see humanity across a crowded room and get swept up in emotional fervor against his better judgment. He willingly chose to give up the privileges of being God and made himself a servant to humanity, sacrificing himself in the worst kind of death so we could know God’s love.

Love Comes from God

When you read 1 Corinthians 13, I hope you feel inadequate. I know I do. I hope you’re aware that you can’t live up to the standard outlined in that passage. None of us can pull it off. Try as we might, we just don’t have it in us. By nature, we are not easily patient. We are not always kind. We are not perfectly humble, unselfish, forgiving. We do tend to keep a record of wrongs.

Does this mean our marriages are doomed to fail? Absolutely not! Every marriage has hope of success when we live in God’s grace, power, and love. The Bible’s description of love is the way God himself loves. God sets the standard for us. And for those who live in relationship with Jesus, God begins a process of changing us and making us more like him. He gives us the power to love as he does.

First John 4:7—10 tells us the source of true love: “Dear friends, let us continue to love one another, for love comes from God. . . . This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.”

Our power to truly love comes from being loved by God. And loving this way is the most convincing proof that we belong to God. What better way to start than by letting God’s love for us change us, fill us, and overflow into our relationship with our spouses?

God’s Holy Spirit gives us the ability to love our spouses as we should. Without this power, we aren’t capable of meeting God’s standard. And even with the Holy Spirit in us, we often choose not to love God’s way. We choose our own way, and the results are never truly good. That’s where God’s forgiveness comes in—and the forgiveness of our spouses. That’s where God’s grace and ongoing transformational work in us come in.

When we’re loved, we know how to love. When we’re truly loved at our worst, or when we have nothing to offer in return, we trust that love enough that we feel we can offer it to others. This is a simple picture of what it means to be loved by God. When we accept his love for us, we receive so much love from God that we have plenty to give away. We need to keep accepting this love, choosing to believe God when he tells us he loves us more than we can imagine.

Do you want a more loving marriage? Be a more loved person. Bask in God’s love for you. Live in gratitude for his grace and offer your life to him. The more we choose God’s love and love God in return, the more we have what we need so we can love our spouses. And when we love our spouses through our actions, we increase the chances that they will love us too.

Amy Simpson is an inner strength coach, a popular speaker, and the award-winning author of Troubled Minds: Mental Illness and the Church’s Mission and Anxious: Choosing Faith in a World of Worry (both InterVarsity Press). You can find her at AmySimpsonOnline.com, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, and on Twitter @aresimpson.

“Who are you?” When someone asks a question about my identity, the first response that comes to mind is “I am a black girl from Orangeburg, South Carolina.” Long before I became a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, a US Marine, an author, or a minister of the gospel, I was a black woman. And the root of this knowing was in the heritage of my family, the soil of Orangeburg, South Carolina, and the waters of the Edisto River.

Orangeburg is a community filled with black people and culture, the home of two historically black colleges and universities: South Carolina State University and Claflin University. There I tailgated at college football games and enjoyed HBCU homecomings that included the “battle of the bands” and step competitions. Little girls played in the backyard with their cousins and devoured home-cooked meals made at the hands of their big bosom mothers, grandmothers, and aunts.

During the summer months, we would run through the sprinklers in our bathing suits and swim caps (because there was no way we were getting our hair wet). We would spend countless hours enjoying the sunshine on those hot summer days in June, studying the moss hanging from our trees. Sometimes we would sit inside and watch TV as we listened to the violent summer rain.

On Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights, we would go to church. Sundays were for worship; Wednesdays were for Bible study, Vacation Bible School, or hanging in the back room until mom finished choir rehearsal. These precious times were filled with sacred artifacts: pews, wooden floors in old Baptist churches, the sides of brick store fronts or white slab buildings with small crosses that showed passersby who we were and to whom we belonged. We belonged to Jesus. Our simple songs clearly proclaimed this truth.

These small churches most likely had dirt or gravel parking lots and a small cemetery off to the side, the tombstones surrounded by uncut grass and ant hills, with fading names above the birth and transition dates of those who had gone on before us.

When I heard about the pain and suffering Dylann Roof inflicted on the families of Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, DePayne Middleton-Doctor, US Senator and Reverend Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel L. Simmons Sr., Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, and Myra Thompson by murdering them in the sanctuary of God that is Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, I was not shocked because of the reality of the deaths that took place on June 17, 2015. These things happen every day.

I was shocked because I have family members who knew people who died in Emanuel AME Church on that Wednesday night. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton was a graduate of South Carolina State University. I was stunned by the overwhelming history and mystery wrapped up in this racially motivated massacre that took place in 2015.

This was too close to home.

The Black Lives and Charleston

What happened in Charleston was another instance in the long history of the American narrative that says, “Black lives do not matter. Black lives are not sacred. Black lives are not made in the image of God.” But they do, and we are.

On any given June summer night in South Carolina, one of my family members can become a victim of a racially motivated murder. There is no safety inside or outside for a black life: not even in the church, and not even in 2016.

I love going to Bible study during the week in a black church. It could have been me, slain over the breast of my grandmother on that Wednesday, as she exhaled her last. My daughter could have been left without her mother. This pain and this suffering crosses generations.

A few weeks ago, my eyes were drawn to a friend’s profile picture on Facebook. She is a fellow Christian, an Asian-American, and she wore a T-shirt with pure white letters stating, “Black Lives Matter,” with “Imago Dei” printed in red dye under the statement. I smiled and hit the “like” button.

She and I have shared our suffering of being double minorities—both ethnic and women—in white evangelicalism. Her understanding of the sacredness of black lives is what caused her to rock that attire, and in turn, my understanding of the sacredness of Asian lives causes me to listen well, read or share Asian-American stories, and sometimes write about them.

I had to have that shirt. I wanted to make a statement. When it arrived in the mail, I read the back of it silently and deliberately over and over again:

Imago dei (Latin for “image of God”); a theological term, applied uniquely to humans, which denotes the symbolical relation between God and humanity. The term has its roots in Genesis 1:27, wherein “God created humankind in his own image.” Humans are in the image of God in their moral, spiritual, and intellectual nature. Black lives are made in the image of God.

When I say “Black Lives Matter,” this is what I mean: black lives have worth and value because they are created in the image of God. Too often, when this statement is made in evangelical circles, a disclaimer is offered, a judgment made, or justification given when what is most needed is a “yes” or an “amen.”

When my friend stood in the gap as a sister in Christ and proudly wore that T-shirt, she wore it in solidarity for people like me. This simple act affirmed that she is open to hearing, learning, and loving well, even if she doesn’t fully understand my history or struggle. Her T-shirt advocacy on that day affirmed that she sees me as human—an image bearer of God whose life has value and purpose.

Somebody Say Something

As a believer, I am firmly committed to the gospel as the good news of reconciliation. The cross makes it possible for me to live in right relationship with God and with others. For this reason, I am a member of a multi-ethnic church. I was so thankful to hear my pastor, a white man, name the sin of racism and proclaim the kingdom of God on the Sunday following the Charleston massacre. I desperately needed him to do that.

But I was grieved by the virtual silence from white brothers and sisters in the evangelical community. When several African Americans raised the question across social media as to whether or not white congregations mentioned Charleston on Sunday, the response was an overwhelming “no.” I cried. My emotions ran somewhere between sorrow and righteous anger. I wondered, “Why aren’t more white believers and pastors saying something, anything about this?” Their silence communicated that somehow, this was not a loss for the entire body of Christ: that somehow, there was a lack of compassion or understanding to weep with those who weep (Rom. 12:5). My African American sisters and brothers were weeping. A united family grieves together.

I’ve heard plenty of talk about race, racism, racial structures, white supremacy, and the abuse of power and oppression in the church. I am all too familiar with the tendency to remain silent when a racialized culture does not negatively impact your family. But aren’t we family?

Why didn’t this seemingly seismic event ignite real and courageous change, conversations, and actions in the evangelical church? Why aren’t local churches and congregations taking advantage of this opportunity to lead and show the world a better way?

Within the last year, I’ve meditated on the words of Jesus’ prayer:

I pray also for those who believe in me through their [the disciples’] message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one—I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. (John 17:20b-23)

Whether or not we embrace this suffering, these stories, these voices, and these lives is not merely a matter of our individual or political preference. It is a matter of evangelism and a testament to our gospel witness. What our congregations say or don’t say about black lives sends a message to the world about Christ.

But God is raising up people who are seeking out the rich traditions of storytelling, songwriting, and oral histories. History does not always report what is factual or true. History is as you tell it. We have a responsibility now to tell the truth. And I am so glad to be among the black voices, writers, poets, musicians, and advocates of justice who are rising to document this history and tell our own stories.

By claiming our identity in Christ, by raising our voices, by telling these stories, we are standing on the shoulders of our ancestors and affirming that all of our lives matter. For many years, within the four walls of a black church in South Carolina, we sung the words to the old Negro spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen”:

“Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. Nobody knows but Jesus. Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. Glory, hallelujah.”

In reflecting on Charleston, we all have an opportunity to enter into this suffering, to consider our American history and how we might truly live as reconciled people in the kingdom of God. We cannot forget the names, stories, and sacrifices of these fallen. We cannot forget the long and tragic history, or those shoulders on which we stand. We cannot forget the deliverance we have received from the Lord, time and time again, when all seemed hopeless. We will remember the fundamental truths of who we are, and we will remember our intrinsic value, forever sealed by the purposes of God and the blood of the Lamb. We will write, sing, and proclaim our history.

We will remember Charleston. It’s too close to home to forget.

“Mother dear, may I go downtown
Instead of out to play,
And march the streets of Birmingham
In a Freedom March today?”

“No, baby, no, you may not go,
For the dogs are fierce and wild,
And clubs and hoses, guns and jails
Aren’t good for a little child.”

– from “Ballad of Birmingham” by Dudley Randall

Some 60 years ago, the burning of black churches was a common form of racial violence; according to civil rights historian Taylor Branch, at the height of the civil rights movement, a black church was bombed or burned every week. Most historians agree that back then, opponents of black civil rights saw the burning of black churches as a way to reinforce pre-Civil War power structures, some of which had been legally dismantled with the abolition of slavery. The law may have granted black people their freedom, but racial violence reinforced the idea that white people still controlled where, how, and even whether they lived.

And yet, even in the ostensibly “post-racial” United States of the 21st century, the image of a burning black church was no less chilling to black Christians last June than it would have been in 1954. After a white shooter opened fire during a prayer meeting at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, five predominantly black churches across the South were set ablaze. Local law enforcement suspected arson in three of the fires.

That shouldn’t be surprising, said the Reverend Sharon Ellis Davis, an affiliate professor of pastoral care at McCormick Theological Seminary. “I think people don’t understand that trauma is something that exists when you wake up in the morning, when you turn on the news,” she said. “Trauma is a living experience, and not a lived experience—especially with people who know they are being targeted, and that any particular day and any particular hour, it could be them.”

The trauma many black Americans experience after any instance of racial violence—whether they were attacked directly or not—is real, psychologists say, and it can manifest itself as ongoing feelings of anger, depression, anxiety, or even guilt. “In general,” said Davis, “the African American community is impacted when they hear about these crimes because they understand that collectively, it is an attack against African American people. It’s a collective traumatic experience.”

In addition to that collective trauma, racial violence against black Americans can also trigger intergenerational trauma, said Alex L. Pieterse, an associate professor of race psychology at the University at Albany. According to Pieterse, “When a black American or a person of African descent responds to or experiences one incident of racism—because of the cumulative history of racism—they are responding to that event, but also responding to the history associated with racist events.”

In fact, Pieterse noted, stories of racial violence are even passed down from generation to generation. That’s why, for example, many black millennials are familiar with the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 and the bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four black girls in 1963, despite being born 30 years after these crimes occurred.

“But, mother, I won’t be alone.
Other children will go with me,
And march the streets of Birmingham
To make our country free.”

“No, baby, no, you may not go,
For I fear those guns will fire.
But you may go to church instead
And sing in the children’s choir.”

Attacks on black churches are unique among traumatic racial experiences because of the role such churches have traditionally played in black communities in America. After all, in the 19th century—when the first black churches emerged in the Jim Crow South—black theologies and black self-identities were nearly inseparable. Eschewing the white God who (so they’d been taught) had ordained and orchestrated their enslavement, black Americans sought to forge a church that better articulated what it meant to be both black and made in the image of God.

“Historically, the [black] church has always been a base of activism, even a form of resistance,” Pieterse said. “So acts of violence perpetrated at the church are more than symbolic—they’re targeted.”

There’s limited research on the specific effects of church arson as a form of racial violence, but anecdotally, most experts have come to the same conclusion: the burning of a church is often catastrophic for black communities.

In 1999, three years after 145 predominantly black churches were burned in the United States, Carolyn S. Carter—then an assistant professor of social work at Arizona State University—wrote about the burning of black churches for the National Association of Social Workers’ academic journal. “Because of the important functions associated with churches in African American communities,” she noted, “residents were often devastated by church burnings.” According to Carter, members of an attacked church often felt “immobilized” and commonly expressed emotions ranging from sadness and embarrassment to shock and outrage.

A church arson can be particularly trying for pastors of attacked churches because, in addition to whatever personal trauma they may be experiencing, they must also meet their congregations’ dramatically increased need for leadership during the building reconstruction process. Larry Bates, a religion psychology professor at the University of North Alabama, is one of the few scholars who has attempted to study the psychological effects of church arson. His 2007 study of church arson survivors in Alabama was too small to be conclusive, but based on the interviews Bates and his research team conducted, the period after a church arson is full of unexpected stressors for pastors.

“The pastors were just overwhelmed with interviews and trying to deal with building needs,” he said.

He added that the rebuilding process often creates division among the church body’s members, which pastors then have to mediate. “Some major plans have to be made about what the [new] building is going to be, and often, people have different ideas about the direction the church ought to go,” Bates said. “And at those times, you’re kind of forced to make that decision right then.”

She has combed and brushed her night-dark hair,
And bathed rose petal sweet,
And drawn white gloves on her small brown hands,
And white shoes on her feet.

The mother smiled to know her child
Was in the sacred place,
But that smile was the last smile
To come upon her face.

All of this—the direct or collective trauma and the vocational stress for pastors—is only exacerbated, Davis said, when racial violence takes place in a setting where crimes against people of color aren’t taken seriously. “How do you begin to heal from something that people won’t even name?” she asked. “People will find all kinds of words for an attack on a black church: a horrific event, a terrible thing that happened, an evil that’s present. But the word that many people want to hear—at least the one that I want to hear—is terrorism. Because that’s what it is.”

The day after last spring’s church massacre in Charleston, Anthea Butler, an associate professor of religion and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania, penned a piece for The Washington Post criticizing the language used in the news when white people commit violent crimes. The Dylann Roofs of the world, she argued, are almost always humanized after committing crimes, no matter how heinous. These killers’ actions are identified as the result of mental illnesses or past abuses—a hastily crafted media narrative that downplays their crimes and the actual motivations behind them.

This language matters when talking about church arsons and other forms of racial violence, Pieterse said. To acknowledge a crime validates the victims’ pain and says that what happened to them was real, that it mattered. “I’ll give you an example,” Pieterse said. “I think part of what has been helpful for the Jews as a group of people has been the collective response to the trauma of the Holocaust. It’s been validated. In some countries in Europe, to question the Holocaust is a criminal action. But in the case of black Americans, there hasn’t been as rapid a response to acknowledge the trauma. And I think that’s one way people can be helped.”

Another way victims can be helped is by being given the space to feel what they need to feel in the aftermath of racial violence. People will find the appropriate emotional space they need in order to preserve their sanity, said Sharon Ellis Davis. To try and prematurely talk them—or yourself—out of their feelings risks re-traumatization.

“As pastors, sometimes we’re so busy wanting to pacify people with words about grace and loving your neighbors that we don’t let people just be mad,” she said. “Sometimes people just need to be angry.”

For when she heard the explosion,
Her eyes grew wet and wild.
She raced through the streets of Birmingham
Calling for her child.

She clawed through bits of glass and brick,
Then lifted out a shoe.
“O, here’s the shoe my baby wore,
But, baby, where are you?”

Not everyone responds to racism in the same way. “There’s a lot of heterogeneity that exists within how people respond to race, how they make sense of their experience as a racial being,” Pieterse said. “You can talk to two black Americans, and one will say, ‘We’ve made so much progress!’ while the other will say, ‘The progress is just symbolic. At our core, we’ve made very little progress.’ An important piece is not to treat people as a collective but to recognize that variation occurs even with people responding to the same event.”

Bates saw that variation when he talked to survivors of Alabama church arsons. He told The Local Church that he was surprised to find that while many victims felt the expected devastation and despair, some saw an attack on their church as part of God’s plan, or even a sign of God’s favor. “Several of them said, ‘This must mean that my church is special, or we wouldn’t be asked to undergo this test. Therefore, this must mean that something great is going to come out of this,’” he said. “I wasn’t really expecting that kind of response.”

However victims respond, though, experts say it’s essential to realize that an attack on a black church in the United States is a loaded event with far-reaching effects within black America. It’s not an attack on that particular church; it’s an attack on black Americans everywhere, shaking them at the very core of their identities.

Yet Ellis Davis believes such attacks also put church leaders in a prime position to dig into the ministries of reconciliation and justice that Christ has called them to, even as they put a spotlight on the racism that still exists in the United States.

“My job as a pastor is to dispense hope—to turn people toward their faith and not away from it in these times—and to pray,” she said. “But not the kind of prayer where I’m just going to pray about it. A prayer that calls us into action to do the kind of advocacy and justice-making that we need to do.”