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Nov 18, 2024
Sep 14, 2024
We Should Be The Safest Place On Earth
By Jeff Brumley
Racial disparities continue to plague Black Americans in part because of the persistent perception that they are, by nature, threats to law and order, said Jamila Hodge, CEO of Equal Justice USA.
“We have won many legal battles — the abolition of slavery, Civil Rights and ending Jim Crow — but we have never won the narrative battle, the narrative that justified slavery, that Black people were not human, that Black people needed to be controlled, that Black people were violent. Those narratives persist because we have never won that battle,” Hodge said during a recent keynote address to the Christian Community Development Association annual meeting in Cincinnati.
Hodge, whose presentation was preceded by a panel discussion about eliminating the death penalty, also explained how anti-Black narratives laid the groundwork for an unjust criminal punishment system deliberately constructed and maintained to control African American and other marginalized racial groups.
“I’ll just run through a few statistics. One out of three Black men can expect to be incarcerated (in their lifetimes). One out of six of our Latino brothers can expect to be incarcerated, and we can compare that to one out of 17 of our white brothers,” she said.
Pre-trial detention rates are three times higher for Black people who are also much more likely to endure traffic stops by police and more likely to be searched during those encounters. “And we all know from the death-penalty arena that more than 40% of Death Row is Black.”
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, whites, at 42%, comprise the largest single racial group on Death Row. All other ethnic groups, including Blacks, combined account for 58% of condemned prisoners in the U.S. But as a percentage of their ethnic population, Blacks and other non-whites are disproportionately represented on Death Row.
It all began with the ratification of the 13th Amendment banning slavery in 1865, Hodge said. Many states responded with laws enabling states and municipalities to easily convict Blacks for vagrancy and other minor offenses, and in turn lease them to private companies and farms as forced laborers.
The modern U.S. criminal legal and prison system emanated from an era seeking to continue the subjugation of Black people, she explained. “When we understand that history, those statistics and numbers I just went through have a very different meaning.”
A modern-day example is the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola, she said. “It is a prison set on a plantation, and men still do similar work out in the fields for pennies. They have their names taken away, they are given a number, and they are exposed to significant violence.”
The same system is at work in nationwide efforts to prohibit teaching about slavery in public schools, which is part of a deeper attempt to rewrite history and to mask the true nature of the criminal legal system, Hodge charged. Meanwhile, Black and marginalized people continue to be funneled into the nation’s $300 billion maze of courtrooms, jails and prisons at the expense of health care and social services.
“I want to be clear that we are a country that incarcerates more than any other industrialized nation in the world,” she said. “We are No. 1. We have 4% of the world’s population, but 20% of the world’s incarcerated population. If incarceration is supposed to make us safe, we should be the safest place on earth, and that is just not the case.”
And it is the poor who stand little chance of finding true justice in that unjust system and even less so in death penalty cases, Ohio death row exoneree Derrick Jamison said during the death penalty panel at the convention.
“A lot of my friends died. They didn’t die because they were guilty. They died because they were poor,” he said. “How are you going to defend yourself if you’re going up against (prosecutors) who have millions of dollars, and you’re from the neighborhood? When you’re poor, your family can’t help you. Nobody can help you but God.”
The panel hosted by EJUSA also included Demetrius Minor, national manager of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, and Allison Cohen, executive director of Ohioans to Stop Executions.
Minor acknowledged supporters of capital punishment can find Scripture passages that seem to endorse the practice. But he urged them to focus on the teachings and compassion of Jesus instead of what federal and state laws allow.
“So many times, people forget that Jesus is not an American and that when we stand before him on that glorious day, he’s going to judge us according to the word of God and not according to the Constitution. Look at things in every area of life through the lens of the word of God.”
People of faith who condone capital punishment should also consider the flaws in the system itself, Minor said. “Do you trust the state of Ohio to get it right? It’s one thing if Jesus himself administers punishment. But now you’re talking about leaving the scope of justice in the hands of fallen men who are imperfect, who have impure motives. If we get it wrong once, that’s once too many.”
Debates about the effectiveness, expense and equity of capital punishment have been surging in Ohio during the ongoing death penalty moratorium enacted by Gov. Mike DeWine in response to lack of lethal injection drugs, Cohen said. “It’s given us an opportunity to talk to lawmakers about how the death penalty really works, about how it’s unfairly applied, about how it’s racially biased, about how it threatens innocent life, about how it harms the families of murder victims.”
One result of that dialogue is several bills to ban executions in Ohio that are moving through legislative committees.
Currently, 27 states still have the death penalty but only Alabama, Florida, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas have executed prisoners in 2023, figures from the Death Penalty Information show. Seven states, including Virginia in 2021, have banned capital punishment since 2009, while California, Oregon and Pennsylvania have joined Ohio with gubernatorial holds on executions.
Cohen said Ohioans are ready for an outright ban on capital punishment: “I have seen a huge shift in the way Catholics and other Christians, and people of all faiths, talk about the death penalty as they have learned about the way it really works.”
One of the ways the death penalty really works is through the conviction of innocent people, said Jamison, whose 1985 capital punishment was overturned 20 years later due to perjured testimony and police misconduct.
Spending two decades on Ohio’s Death Row was terrifying, he said. “I was in hell watching my friends die. Jesus Christ was executed at the age of 33. Why are we still killing people? You know, they’re making too many mistakes with the death penalty.” - Baptist News
A New Vision Of Mary Magdalene And Jesus
I awoke Easter Sunday morning to the following quote on X from Jacqui Lewis: “The first resurrection was proclaimed by women, and the church repaid them with centuries of lies that God didn’t want us to preach. For Jesus’ movement of love and justice to live, the crucifying realities built within the church must die. This morning the tomb is empty.”
A brand-new morning had broken like the first morning. With it we are invited to see with new light a fresh theology of the body, of the resurrection and of the woman who first saw Jesus in the garden.
Many are becoming awakened to this new dawning, to see with new eyes Mary Magdalene and Jesus in the garden. We might wonder why we have not noticed the lies until now.
As Lewis proclaims, we have been lied to. Misled. We can unpack centuries of this history of lies and only scratch the surface, but it is in our collective faith DNA and challenging to untangle. I provide a brief survey of the confusion about Mary Magdalene here.
For our purposes today, I focus your attention on one lie from art history. Before you dismiss art as irrelevant, remember it existed as a primary and powerful tool of communication along with writing even after the invention of the printing press. Since a considerable number of people could not read or write, art was highly sought after by all kinds of people even if just for viewing. Religious art, often controlled by the church, communicated ideas effectively. Images spread.
Case in point is the Noli me Tangere paintings of the risen Christ and Mary Magdalene. Noli me tangere is a Latin phrase that means “touch me not” or “stop clinging to me,” the words of Jesus to Mary after she recognizes him in the garden on Easter morning (John 20). Hundreds if not thousands of works of art have focused on this exact moment. Titian (pictured here), Rembrandt, Giotto, Peruginu, Hans Holbein the Younger and Botticelli (shown above). The paintings vary but hold common two basic postures: Jesus stands tall, sometimes turning his body away from Mary and often holding his hand up in warning: Do not come near or touch me further. Mary kneels in submitting to this order in adoration to the risen Jesus. She sometimes reaches for Jesus but cannot touch him. The setting is a garden or the empty tomb where Mary has confused Jesus for the gardener, causing many artists to portray Jesus holding a gardening tool.
Ask yourself what might these images of Noli Me Tangere have taught us about Mary Magdalene. Taught us about women? Taught us about Jesus?
Could this visual representation be one of the contributions to the prohibition of women preaching the good news of the risen Jesus?
I believe choosing this exact moment to illustrate the Magdalene speaking with the risen Jesus diminishes the power of the story in full. In this moment, Jesus is portrayed denying a woman, pushing her away, warning her. She is not worthy to touch him, yet later the male disciple Thomas is invited to touch the hands and wounds of Jesus so he may believe.
What must we deduce? Mary is submissive in almost all the paintings, on the ground weeping, seemingly confused. She does not even recognize her own teacher but thinks he is the gardener. This woman must be forgettable. Her role must not be important. It becomes inconsequential that she is the first to see the risen Lord and commissioned to tell the news of his resurrection.
This is the lie we have been told repeatedly in powerful long-lasting images. When we think of Mary, we picture her in this skewed way.
It is not enough to realize we have been deceived. It is not enough to feel the gaping hole in our faith; we must fill it with beautiful new pictures that guide us to a fuller knowledge of Jesus and his relationship with Mary Magdalene.
I offer in contrast a new image for your consideration by artist and iconographer Kelly Latimore.
Mary Magdalene and Christ the Gardener is inspired by the same verses in the Gospel of John chapter 20 that inspired the Noli Me Tangere paintings centuries earlier. Latimore writes on X: “It’s no accident that the Gospel writer of John has Mary mistaking Jesus for the gardener. … This is Jesus continuing to show us that resurrection and new life and our hope of heaven happen here on the ground. In the dirt, loving where it hurts in the humus of humanity.”
This new painting pulls adeptly from art history, tradition and religious iconography and tells us a fresh story, one my eyes have been waiting to see. Instead of focusing on the confusing and misleading symbolism of “stop clinging to me” Latimore gives us so much more.
Jesus kneels on the ground, in the dirt before Mary who stands great-hearted above him. Flora encircles the man and the woman. At their feet are three seedlings sprouting from the earth, hopeful and green. Jesus motions, cups one of the seedlings in his right hand to show Mary and looks up to her. She returns his gaze, her left hand on her heart, her other hand grasping her alabaster jar. We see the signs of the coming morning; the stars linger in the sky as the sun dawns over the hill. The folded headcloth, no longer binding Jesus, is left in the hollow stump of a tree that is the empty tomb. At the left hand of Jesus, a discarded garden axe, stuck into the earth.
The writer of John’s Gospel is purposeful in pointing to the darkness of the coming dawn of the garden and the man mistaken for the gardener. We are to be reminded of the first day of creation, a new momentous beginning with new male and female actors that bring forth a new creation.
Jesus is the tree of life, the tomb is transformed in Latimore’s imagery, “a shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse, and from his roots a bud shall blossom” (Isaiah 11:1). Jesus encompasses countless symbols and is the man, the vine, the tree, the land of promise and the gardener. Mary is woman, the earth, the mother and the bride. She recognizes the gardener as she should, then recognizes him further when she hears him speak her name, he is whom her soul loves.
She does not need to cling to Jesus because she is related to him — bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, beloved. Body and blood related through the Supper and the Cross, they are one.
Mary’s appearance at the tomb with Jesus is the crowning of the recreation of God through Jesus. It is with woman that new life dawns.
It is right that Mary stands in Latimore’s painting, a reversal of Noli me Tangere and in keeping with the reversal of hierarchy in the Gospels. Mary Magdalene, with all of humanity, is healed and free to go forth in bright new light to be the living water that springs from her tears shed at the tomb. Her tears watered the garden. May they bring new life to us all. -Baptist News
Evangelicals Are Teaching False Doctrine
I've spent my life around evangelical theology — and most of it is exactly the hypocrisy Christ warned us about
By Nathaniel Manderson
was raised by a pair of wild hippies, so my heart has always been committed to liberal ideology. As a Bible-believing Christian, however, I was surrounded by evangelical theology throughout my youth, in various churches, Bible camps and so on. When I decided to enter the ministry to attempt to change that conservative theology, I attended an evangelical seminary. It was clear on my first day on campus that no reform was going to occur.
If I happened to mention voting for Al Gore, I was told by my classmates that God keeps a record of my voting history and that I had voted for a man who endorses baby-killing and tearing down the American family. Honestly, I was just hoping that President Gore might help save the planet and not make up a reason to go to war in Iraq. Anyway, in my 10 years in ministry I had even less luck making any changes, which is why I left the formal ministry a couple of years ago.
The truth then, and even more so now, is that we cannot separate Republicans, and now the Trumpists, from the evangelicals. I have seen my fellow "Christian left" types attempting to reform the God vote — in fact, I've done it myself — but I feel we have been too timid in our approach. Stronger language and a pure rejection of evangelical theology is needed. From a purely Christian point of view, the evangelical leadership are false teachers teaching a false doctrine. Trumpism cannot be defeated without first facing down evangelicalism. Jesus Christ, who these people claim as their savior, himself provided a warning against these religious hypocrites in Matthew 23:
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people's faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.
The only real threat to Christianity is Christianity itself. Leading evangelical pastors like Franklin Graham and Robert Jeffress made a passionate plea for Christian voters to ignore Trump's shortcomings as a man because he stands with the Christian church on all things that are right and true. Apparently, that means Christians must shut the door to all LGBTQ people, abortion providers, liberals, immigrants, Muslims and anyone who happens to mention taxing the wealthy.
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.
Many of the false American evangelical teachers demonize and look down upon the people in poorer countries. I have seen these "missionaries" in places like Haiti building their churches and making sure "proper doctrine" is followed. It is this type of modern-day colonialism that has provided foreign governments the religious authority to enact terrible anti-LGBTQ laws and restrictions on reproductive rights for women.
Woe to you, blind guides! You say, "If anyone swears by the temple, it means nothing; but anyone who swears by the gold of the temple is bound by that oath." You blind fools! Which is greater: the gold, or the temple that makes the gold sacred?
False teachers have always believed that their financial wealth means favor with God. I have seen many Christian leaders give praise to God for their big homes, nice cars and million-dollar sanctuaries. This belief that God has blessed them with great stuff prevents them from ever understanding the need to fund programs that provide equality in the education, health care, justice and economic systems.
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices — mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law — justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.
These false evangelical leaders may have stayed within the law, but they know nothing about being merciful. They could never understand the message to reach out to undocumented immigrants because of God's call to treat the foreigner as native born — because we were once foreigners ourselves. They only understand the language of rules and law without mercy and grace.
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence.
Many of these false evangelical leaders have spent a lot of time and money making sure their public image is clean. Ideal marriages, wonderful children, kind and loving people who are financially affluent and pay their taxes. Christ reminded his followers to be careful of such a well-crafted persona. Behind the curtain there are many filled with hypocrisy and wickedness.
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, "If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets." So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets. Go ahead, then, and complete what your ancestors started!
Many of these current evangelical leaders love to quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his message of love and forgiveness. Many would like to forget that most conservative Christian leaders rejected Dr. King's message while he was alive, and some believed he was a communist. It is no mystery to me why there is no picture of the great Rev. Billy Graham marching with Dr. King. These false evangelical leaders expose themselves again as they reject the Rev. William J. Barber II's message about honoring and uplifting the poor, which is far more clearly based in Christian doctrine than anything they preach. These false evangelical Christian leaders never understood Dr. King's message to follow Jesus into those places in America where poor people struggle and suffer and too often die, and they never will. -Salon
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