Matt Tebbe on how supremacy systems work

Father Matt Tebbe, on Facebook today, with a wonderfully clear explanation of how supremacy systems work:

In supremacy systems - and white conservative patriarchal religious organizations run on supremacy logic more often than not - any opposition or questioning or exposing of how abuse works is considered ’extreme'

Within supremacy logic:
Opposing abusive logic and people is equal to and commensurate with the harm and indiscretion of abusive logic and people. Both are considered ’extreme’ and this is because: supremacy systems are anxious systems, and anxious supremacy systems rely on the majority of people a- fawning, b- freezing, c- fleeing or d- fighting along with the supremacy ideology.

But facing that ideology and calling it ‘wrong’ is a deep violation- a transgression- of how supremacy systems work. Because supremacy systems run on domination, control, conformity, submission, obedience, unquestioned authority.

I mention this all to say: I know that many who follow along and read my Facebook have also been labeled or called ’extreme’ for attempting to oppose injustice or advocate for yourself or call attention to abuse or speak out about wrongdoing. This is one artifact of supremacy systems: it’s considered ’extreme’ and ‘uncouth’ to explicitly, plainly, directly name and identify specifically abusive behavior.

But I want to say: opposing injustice isn’t extreme, beloved. That’s how love works. And i guess we could say that love seems extreme in systems that have chosen to run on logics other than love.

Take heart, good people. Love is the right kind of extreme to be when opposing injustice.

Matt has a gift for identifying and naming the systems that drive so much of our American lives. He’s worth a follow.

Belatedly catching up on Star Trek Discovery Season 5. What am I watching again?

We’re way behind on TV watching, but last night Becky and I started in on Star Trek: Discovery, Season 5. We’ve enjoyed Discovery thus far, so of course we’re gonna watch it through the final season. And while I still love the characters and want to see another season of story with them, I’m not sure I love this format for a Star Trek series.

Maybe it’s because I’ve recently been watching Star Trek: Deep Space 9 for the first time and enjoying the long seasons full of individual episode stories, but the first two episodes of Discovery make clear that it’s about a single story arc over the season. And the story and directing moves feel clunky and obvious. There’s the need to re-introduce each of the characters while they narrate a little bit that you need to remember about their backstory. There’s the whole “get the band back together again” trope that brings Tilly back to the Discovery crew. There’s the “one last job” trope for Saru. (Also, I love Doug Jones, but feels like his makeup crew slipped here - I don’t remember his teeth and lower lip being visible underneath the facial prosthetics in earlier seasons.) Episode 1 sets up the quest and gives us the lovable rogues who are ever so briefly positioned as villains before one of them is immediately revealed as Book’s family… it’s just too much.

Historically, Star Trek has kept most of its drama on ship or in very limited location shots because big cinematic production is expensive. With computer animation getting cheap, Discovery has moved a huge amount of the action onto planetary surfaces. Episode 2 has Burnham and two other characters riding high-speed speeders (a mash-up of a snowmobile, a jet ski, and a Return of the Jedi-style speeder bike) across a desert planet to escape an avalanche. It’s really more Star Wars than Star Trek at that point. The desert village and market could just as easily be Mos Eisley as anywhere in a Star Trek universe.

And then there are the musical cues. I don’t remember any previous Star Trek shows leaning so hard into orchestral scores. This is much more movie scoring than traditional TV scoring. And while composer Jeff Russo weaves hints of the Star Trek: The Next Generation theme motif in wherever possible to make clear that this is Star Trek, all the things he has the strings and horns doing make it clear he’s been listening to John Williams’ Star Wars sound tracks quite a lot.

In the end I’m gonna watch it because dang it, it’s Star Trek, but I’m ready to go back and finish up DS9, where I can be sure that I’m watching Trek and not some Star Wars universe show on Disney+.

Lamb of the Free by Andrew Remington Rillera

I have a small handful of theological books in my past that I look back on as turning points - books that spoke to me at my particular place and time, opened my eyes, and set my thinking about God in a new direction. The first of those is NT Wright’s Surprised By Hope; the second is Ilia Delio’s The Unbearable Wholeness of Being. I’ll give it a week or two before I inscribe this in stone, but I’m inclined to think that Andrew Rillera’s Lamb of the Free is the next one. Let me try to explain.

In the Protestant church (at least), there has been much ink spilled over the years to systematize atonement theories, that is, to organize all the teaching about Jesus’ death and how it works to save us into some sort of coherent, synthesized framework. In the conservative evangelical world of my first 40 years as a Christian, the predominant, nay, the only acceptable atonement theory is penal substitutionary atonement, usually abbreviated PSA. PSA says that each of us, as a sinner, deserve God’s punishment, but that Jesus died in our place, taking that wrath upon himself. The children’s bibles usually summarize it as “Jesus died so I don’t have to”.

Rillera says that PSA fails to pay attention to how sacrifices worked in the Old Testament, and as such then horribly misreads the New Testament (particularly Paul and Hebrews). This may be the book that inspires me to go back to where I always get bogged down in the Bible In A Year reading plans, and do a close reading of Leviticus.

Rillera starts right off the bat in chapter 1 by making the assertion that

There is no such thing as a substitutionary death sacrifice in the Torah.

He notes that “for sins that called for capital punishment, of for the sinner to be “cut off”, there is no sacrifice that can be made to rectify the situation”, and that far from animal blood on the altar being a substitute for human blood, human blood actually defiled the altar rather than purifying it. Neither was that animal sacrifice about the animal suffering; to maltreat the animal “would be to render it ineligible to be offered to God”, no longer being “without blemish”. Already you can see the distinctions being drawn between this close reading of Levitical sacrifices and the usual broad arguments made in favor of PSA.

Lamb of the Free takes 4 chapters - a full 150 pages - to review OT sacrifices. I’m not going to try to summarize it here. But I have a new understanding and appreciation for paying attention to those details now! Then in chapter 5 he turns the corner to talk about Jesus, and summarizes his arguments thusly:

(1) According to the Gospels, Jesus’s life and ministry operated entirely consistent with and within OT purity laws and concern for the sanctuary.
(2) Jesus was a source of contagious holiness that nullified the sources of the major ritual impurities as well as moral impurity.
(3) Thus, Jesus was not anti-purity and he was not rejecting the temple per se.
(4) Jesus’ appropriation of the prophetic critique of sacrifice fits entirely within the framework of the grave consequences of moral impurity. That is, like the prophets, Jesus is not critiquing sacrifice per se, but rather moral impurity, which will cause another exile and the destruction of the sanctuary.
(5) But, his followers will be able to experience the moral purification he offers.
(6)The only sacrificial interpretation of Jesus’s death that is attributed to Jesus himself occurs at the Lord’s Supper. At this meal Jesus combines two communal well-being sacrifices… to explain the importance of his death. However, the notion of kipper [atonement] is not used in any of these accounts…

There’s a lot there, and Rillera unpacks it through the second half of the book. (I was particularly enthusiastic at his point (2), as it dovetails neatly with Richard Beck’s Unclean, where Beck argues that Jesus’ holiness was of such a quality that indeed, sin didn’t stick to him, but rather his holiness “stuck to”, and purified, other people’s sin and sickness.) Rillera says that Jesus’ death conquered death because even death was transformed by Jesus’ touch, and that Jesus came and died not as a substitution but rather as a peace offering from God to humankind. (His unpacking of Romans 3:25-26 and the word hilastērion was particularly wonderful here.) Jesus’ suffering under sin and death was in solidarity with humankind, and uniquely served to ultimately purify humankind from death and sin. (Really, I’m trying to write a single blog post here and summarize a 300 page book. If you’ve gotten this far and you’re still interested, go buy the book and read it. If you want to read it but it’s too pricy for you, let me know and I’ll send you a copy. I’m serious.)

I’ll wrap this up with a beautiful paragraph from a chapter near the end titled “When Jesus’s Death is Not a Sacrifice”. In examining 1 Peter 2, Rillera says this:

First Peter says that Jesus dies as an “example so that you should follow his steps”. In short, Jesus’s death is a participatory reality; it is something we are called to follow and share in experientially ourselves. The logic is not: Jesus died so I don’t have to. It is: Jesus died (redeeming us from slavery and forming us into a kingdom of priests in 2:5, 9) so that we, together, can follow in his steps and die with him and like him; the just for the unjust (3:18) and trusting in a God who judges justly (2:23; 4:19). This is what it means to “suffer…for being a ‘Christian’” (4:15-16). It does not particularly matter why a Christ-follower is suffering or being persecuted; it only matters that they bear the injustice of the world in a Christ-like, and therefore, a Servant-like manner.

There are a dozen other bits I’d love to share - maybe in another post soon. But for now, I’m thankful for Andrew Remington Rillera and his wonderful work in Lamb of the Free. I’ll be thinking about this for a long time.

Lego and a weird credit card payment

A month or so ago I ordered a Lego set that my kid fell in love with. It was super-popular and backordered, so I paid for it via Apple Pay and figured it’d show up when it showed up. (Having a Christmas present bought early isn’t a bad thing!)

While I was gone on a trip, I got the shipping email from Lego, and by the time I got home the package had indeed arrived. (Lego cat is now built, and will probably end up going to college with the kid. They love it.)

Yesterday I got an email from Lego with my invoice that said that my payment mechanism had failed, and to please contact them at their 1-800 number to resolve the payment difficulty. The email looks legit. The 800 number they list is the US customer service number that is listed on the Lego website. I checked my credit card bill and indeed, I’ve never been billed for it. A quick online search reveals that this has happened to other people and was indeed legit. So all in all, I think the request is legitimate.

Best I can guess, Lego validated the Apple Pay payment at the time I made the order, but then by the time the order shipped and they actually tried to charge it, Apple Pay had expired that number. OK, I can call Lego and give them payment information. Mostly I’m amazed that Lego shipped me a $100 order without confirming first that my payment went through. Who in the world does that these days? Real customer service! Guess I’ll take it.

Not made for omniscience

This from Fr. Kenneth Tanner got to me in a way that lots of words about social media intake haven’t quite.

The firehose can be addictive - to feel like you know everything that’s going on, to see people’s reactions, to opine myself. But it can also be overwhelming in a negative way. There’s so much. To really engage where I’m at, I need to be more careful about how wrapped up I let myself get in the rest of it.

More mess at The Village Church

A small bombshell dropped in the Neo-Reformed evangelical world with today’s episode of the The Bodies Behind the Bus Podcast (BBTBPOD). BBTBPOD, which centers stories of those harmed by abusive evangelical church situations, today released an interview with a former chair of the elder board at The Village Church (TVC) in Denton, Texas, originally a campus and then a full plant from The Village Church in Flower Mound, Texas, pastored by Matt Chandler. Chandler is a big name in the Neo-Reformed world. His sermon audio has been very popular; he took over leadership of the Acts 29 church planting network when Mark Driscoll got out of hand, and has authored numerous books.

Today on BBTBPOD, former TVC Denton elder chair Chris revealed that in 2007, leaders from TVC hired Steve Chandler, Pastor Matt’s father, to work as a custodian at the Denton campus, knowing full well that Steve had a history that included confessed child sexual abuse. This history was not made known to Steve’s supervisor or the staff of the Denton campus until 2009, at which point “safety standards and protocols” were put in place. Steve worked in that role, with full access to the building at all times, until 2012. It was not until 2019 that this information was revealed to TVC membership at a members’ meeting. The statement given to the church at that members’ meeting largely lionized Steve, praising him for “steward[ing] his testimony for the edification of the church”. Steve was reportedly given a standing ovation by the membership at the end of the meeting.

That TVC would hire a known child sexual abuser is horrifying. That they would not inform that person’s direct supervisor or insist that safety protocols were immediately in place is, at best, wildly irresponsible. That when it finally came to light, the statement presented to the church served to lionize the offender and ignore the victim is tragic and infuriating. That all this would be done to provide employment for the father of the celebrity lead pastor is awful. That the church leadership would handle it that way in 2019, in the midst of all the other sex abuse scandals churning under the surface in the Southern Baptist Convention (later coming to light in 2022) is inexcusable.

Why am I writing about this here? While I’ve been out of the evangelical church for 4 years now, I spent most of my adult life in it. I was a Driscoll fanboy for a long while, and when he clearly got out of hand, I became a Chandler fanboy. I wrote positively about it when Chandler took over the reins of Acts 29 back in 2012. I have friends who have been members of TVC. So I write this with some feeling of responsibility both to own up to my own responsibility, and to sound the warning to any who still might hear me and read this far.

The Village Church is not a safe place. Its leadership has demonstrated through several well-documented cases that it cannot be trusted to responsibly handle instances of sexual abuse and misconduct. Matt Chandler himself took a leave of absence in 2022 for vaguely-specified misconduct involving “frequent, inappropriate messages” with a woman not his wife. At each instance TVC’s first move has been to protect the church’s reputation rather than to protect the victim. I am personally convinced there is a direct line that can be drawn between the determinist and patriarchal theology that TVC, Acts 29, and similar Neo-Reformed churches teach and their awful handling of abuse. These churches do not deserve our support or our participation. Those who love Jesus should be praying for the truth to come to light, for justice for the criminals, and healing for the victims.

A couple recommended reads: Trusting your Heart, and Christianity as an MLM

A couple posts came through my inbox while I was traveling the last few days which I want to pass on and feel like they have some parallels:

Katelyn Beaty asks “What if you can trust your heart?”

I have written before about evangelicals’ love for playing the Jeremiah 17:9 card. This tactic is regularly used to push people into submission to their leaders’ arguments even when their internal compass says something isn’t right. Beaty calls out this unease with feelings so prevalent in Reformed evangelicalism, and says we need to pay attention to our whole selves, our gut instinct as well as our rational thought.

…I’ve only grown in the belief that our gut is always speaking and deserves to be listened to. “Gut intuition” is distinct from emotions more broadly. But both are pre-rational, something we feel in our bodies before we have the words to articulate them. And I wonder if that’s why a lot of the evangelical world has trouble honoring them: we’ve inherited a mind-body dualism that says that mind is good and the body is bad. And, of course, that the body is the realm of women: messy, “irrational,” “crazy,” prone to quick changes and fluctuations, etc. This is all Plato, not Jesus, folks…

I can’t tell you the number of stories I’ve heard that someone’s “off” feeling about a person, place, or institution proved to be disastrously true, that they should have spoken up sooner but stuffed their feelings in the name of loyalty to a leader or cause. And I wonder if we’d have fewer church scandals if Christians honored intuition as a worthy source of truth — even as a place where the Holy Spirit is speaking to or through us, if only we would listen.

I think she’s onto something there.

Second is Katharine Strange’s post on ‘Christianity vs. Therapy’. In reviewing Anna Gazmarian’s Devout: A Memoir of Doubt, Strange discusses evangelicalism’s long-standing beef with psychology and therapists. Many evangelical churches are strong on Biblical Counseling, a movement which trains laypeople to exclusively use Scripture to counsel people, a movement which is strongly antagonistic to professional psychotherapy. (Oh, do I have thoughts on this. But I’ll save them for another post.)

Strange pulls at another thread in suggesting why evangelicalism is so opposed to therapy, and it resonates with my own experience:

But I think a large part of the problem boils down to the way that Christianity is “sold” in this country. As I’ve written about before, there’s so much pressure to convert our friends and neighbors that what we often end up presenting to the world is a kind of “prosperity gospel lite”—Jesus as cure-all. Being both Christian AND a person with problems is bad for the brand.

This “multi-level marketing” version of Christianity leads to a religion that values a mask of perfection over authenticity. Belonging, in this case, means cutting off parts of ourselves, whether that’s our sexuality/gender expression, our personal struggles, or even the fact that we experience basic feelings like sadness, irritation, envy, etc. It’s toxic positivity as a ticket to sainthood. Churches that buy into this methodology create lonely people even in the midst of community (for what is belonging without authenticity?) They also have a tendency to thrust narcissistic and authoritarian types into leadership because these are precisely the kind of people who are best at never letting the mask slip. Such environments can easily erupt into abuse, religious trauma, perfectionism, and scrupulosity.

While I knew MLMs were largely fueled and run by religious people, I hadn’t ever really thought about the idea that evangelicalism is essentially selling Christianity as a sort of MLM, by MLM principles. Now I can’t unsee it.

Am I coming or going?

I looked at the calendar today and it said July, and I thought surely that has to be a mistake. July already? Where has the time gone? Then I reviewed. Since the beginning of May, here’s what my weeks have looked like:

  • NHD State Competition in Des Moines + one day work offsite
  • Two days of work travel to Minnesota
  • Three days of work travel to DC
  • Three days of vacation for HS graduation activities
  • Memorial Day holiday week
  • Three day work offsite
  • Full week of vacation - NHD nationals in DC
  • Half week of vacation - DC trip
  • Full week in the office (finally!)

Now this week is a holiday-shortened work week and then I’m gonna be out of office Monday/Tuesday next week for college orientation in Nebraska. Then I have five, count ’em, five regular summer work weeks before taking Anwyn to college for move-in. Then high school starts for Katie, we’re down to just one kid in the house (oof) and it’s fall.

I am not ready for this.

Worth a watch: Thelma

Thanks to a couple online recommendations (for sure Jeffrey Overstreet, I don’t remember who else), Becky and I took the two younger kids along to see Thelma this afternoon.

Grandma gets scammed, and decides to take matters into her own hands. It’s a delightful movie. Moves briskly, treats its characters respectfully, is both heartwarming and hilarious. June Squibb turned 93 while making this film, and she uses that age and experience to great effect here. Richard Roundtree co-stars and their chemistry is just perfect.

Grab a loved one, go see Thelma, and prepare for a fun 100 minutes.

Some quick thoughts as I synthesize Beck and Delio this morning...

Richard Beck has a post this week addressing “intellectual problems with petitionary prayer”, or to put the question another way: how does prayer “work”? He critiques a vision of God sitting at a distance from the world and being convinced to reach in and intervene in a Creation that otherwise ticks on autonomously. He calls this the “magic domino theory” - the idea that prayer is to get God to reach in and tip over the magic domino that knocks over other dominos to make things happen.

Beck’s latest book, as I understand it (having read his posts about it but not the book itself) argues for a re-enchanted view of the world. In this post he builds off of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ line that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God”:

God isn’t at a distance. God’s energy and power suffuses creation. Creation isn’t ticking along autonomously, like a machine. Creation is alive and exists in an on-going radical dependence upon God. We are continuously bathed in God’s sustaining light and love, and should God ever look away from us we would cease to be.

Now I love this, but I am also internally screaming “but what does this really MEAN?” After a lifetime in fundamentalist evangelicalism being told to accept a broad disconnect between the reality of creation and the “mystery” of God in it, I need something more tangible.

This is where I appreciate being able to read Ilia Delio alongside Beck. Delio, I think, would agree with Beck’s vision of creation being imbued with God’s presence. But she would then start to talk about what that permeation might actually mean at a level of quantum mechanics. And this is so helpful to me because even though, to adapt Arthur C. Clarke, sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic, I need to at least conceptually be able to ground that “magic” (or to use Beck’s word, “enchanted”) view of God’s interaction with creation in the real, scientific world somehow.

And even though my understanding of quantum physics is quite limited, Delio’s push to bring theology into discussion with modern cosmology has been a key to my ability to stay within the stream of Christianity. I couldn’t deal any more with the disconnected, capricious, judgmental God that evangelicalism gave me. But that we could personify “God” as a conceptualization of the mysterious relational charge running through the fabric of the universe? That somehow uniquely enlightened and enlivened Jesus of Nazareth? That’s an approach that can unite my head and my heart as I (like everyone else) try to grapple with the mysteries of life.