Dividing Us Over Common Values

God created humanity in God’s own image,
        in the divine image God created them,
            male and female God created them. (Genesis 1:27, CEB translation)

You are all God’s children through faith in Christ Jesus. All of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:26-28, CEB translation)

After this I looked, and there was a great crowd that no one could number. They were from every nation, tribe, people, and language. (Revelation 7:9a, CEB translation)

For weeks now, I have been haunted by two conversations. Here is the first one, roughly as I remember it:

Man: I am so glad that DEI has been done away with. As someone who used to supervise and hire people, I would hate to be told I had to hire someone just to meet diversity. Quotas especially are a problem.

Me: Well, yes, quotas have certainly caused some issues, but don’t you think everyone should have a fair shot to work?

Man: Exactly! I ought to be able to hire whoever is best for the job. Whether they were man or woman or black or white doesn’t matter. I want the best person for the job. And I regularly did hire minorities and women because they were the best qualified people. And I was supervised by minorities and I learned a great deal from them too. But the law shouldn’t make me hire someone just because they have a different ethnicity.

Me: Okay, but my family was part of a landmark civil rights case in this state that argued that my dad was fired because he hired two black guys and the company retaliated against him.

Man: And that is wrong! They should be held accountable.

Just two days after that conversation, I had this one with a leader from a different church than I serve, a church that knew they were getting a new pastor.

Woman: Well, we just met with the District Superintendent.

Me: Oh really? This time of year that only means one thing. New pastor.

Woman: Yep. And I’ll tell you what, when it came time to tell the DS what we wanted in a pastor, I said what everyone in the room was thinking. We don’t want a woman. No offense. We just don’t do well with women leading our church.

Me: How many women have you had? Just one?

Woman: Oh no, we have had three. One was a disaster. One wasn’t great, but she was just close to retirement, so ok. And one was great! But that was a while ago. Who we are now, we definitely don’t want a woman.

In the weeks since both of those two conversations, I have been sitting with their weight. But I have also been thinking about the values behind them. And I have been thinking about the relationship between the values they reveal and the laws of the land. And finally, I’ve been thinking about what my faith tells me about all of this.  So let’s just dive into this muck, shall we?

I want to start with the conversation with the man, because I think it is the most instructive for all of us as to who we are as a people broadly. In general, I truly believe that whether you are someone who celebrates or mourns the disavowing of diversity, equity, and inclusion, I think for the most part that we all share the same value: fairness. I think that the man expressed a very commonly held belief that people are inherently good and would always choose to do right by people and truly hire the best person for the job. I believe a great number of Americans fall into this category. I also believe that they think DEI practices actually force them to violate their value of fairness. They believe that DEI laws and policies make people have to favor some people over others.

There are others, however, who view DEI laws and policies as actually enforcing the value of fairness. These people see how some populations are unfairly disadvantaged by poverty and systemic racism, sexism, ageism, and ableism. Without the teeth of laws and policies, discrimination will continue to run rampant and unchecked. Those with power who are not like the man I was in conversation with will continue to maintain power and continue to shut the doors on people for completely arbitrary and unfair reasons.

You see that? Neither of us want a world that is unfair. We just disagree about how to create a fair world.

And here I sit, a person with lived experience that reveals what happens when laws and policies exist, and when they do not.

Let’s start by looking at when the laws were there.

When my father was fired after 21 years with the same company, he was not surprised. That is because the threats had been heaping on him ever since he hired the first African American salesman in the company’s history, and he was on his way to hiring another as the Assistant Warehouse Manager. My dad was fired, the paperwork to hire the warehouse man was stopped, and then when the new manager came in, the sales regions were restructured to eliminate one region, which just so happened to be the black man’s region. The company worked hard to cover their tracks on why all these firings had taken place, even going so far as to replace my dad with someone older than him so he could not sue for age discrimination. They did not know that he could sue for racial discrimination due to association.  So here this 50+ white guy sued the company for racial discrimination. Surprise!

What followed, however, were 3 grueling years of legal battles that nearly bankrupted my parents. We did make it to court, and the evidence of the company’s wrongdoing was blatantly evident. But behind closed doors, the company threatened my dad, whose health had deteriorated from all the stress, to settle or they would literally turn up so much pressure from appeals that it would kill my father. That was their stated goal! Dad trusted that the public trial would put the company under scrutiny, which thank God it did, and caved in to the settlement, which basically covered not much more than 3 years of legal fees.

But at least we had the law on our side. And the law did take over where we left off. At least to some extent.

And now for when the laws don’t exist.

My profession is one that, no matter what administration is in power, I can be legally discriminated against thanks to separation of church and state. Because there are a few verses in the Bible that say that women should be quiet in church and shouldn’t teach men (never mind all the verses where women lead, deliver sermons, fund Jesus’ ministry, etc.), Christian churches have the legal right to argue that it is against their beliefs that women serve as pastors. So there are several denominations that bar women from such leadership based on their religious beliefs.

I am thankful to serve in a denomination that believes otherwise. I am also grateful to have served under bishops who are brave enough to counter discriminatory attitudes and to appoint women to serve in churches of all sizes. I am also deeply grateful to currently serve a local church in which not a single person has directly questioned my leadership because of my gender. It is one of two churches I have served where that has been the case.

But that does not mean I haven’t faced discrimination. I have regularly been barred from participation in community events with other pastors. I have been compared to a talking donkey. I have been called a demon and an abomination. And I have had people walk out on my preaching with no shame – in fact, with an air of righteousness. And my experience is not unique. Ask any woman pastor. We all have stories.

And from that second conversation, you know that I have been told, to my face, by a well-meaning United Methodist, that she and her church want nothing to do with me. Just because I am a woman.

That’s not what she thought she was doing. But that is what she did. And it hurt me deeply, because I thought she was an ally. She is not.

She is one of the people in this world who do want to have the right to discriminate against people for whatever reason they justify in their mind. And those people do exist. They are people who do not actually believe in fairness. And some of those people are using fear to divide those of us who do share that value so that they can create a country where unfairness reigns. And here is how they are doing it.

They are convincing some of us that DEI policies actually enforce unfairness, even though that is contrary to their very purpose. And they are creating fear in those people that such unfairness means that they will be victims of discrimination. (Sidebar – they should be afraid of discrimination. As someone who regularly experiences it, discrimination is soul wounding and causes you to question your own worth. No one should have to experience that.) Then they are also characterizing people who are fighting for diversity, equity and inclusion as people who are only interested in harming them and taking away everything from them.

Then those who are fighting for DEI laws and policies are being told that the people who oppose those policies are all evil Nazis who are only interested in oppressing people. Certainly such people do exist, ones who are only interested in preserving their privilege and power, but I do not think that is true of the majority of people who are uncomfortable with DEI policies. I truly believe that they are people who share the exact same value that pro-DEI people are fighting for: fairness. It is just that their life experiences have caused them to view how fairness is achieved in different ways.

Maybe if we stopped fearing each other and had some conversation around that shared value, we could find ways forward for all of us.

And I do believe that commitment to fairness is rooted in how so many of us understand our faith. We do follow a God who created all of us in the imago dei – the image of God. We do truly believe that all of us reflect something of the holy.  And we also believe that God’s grace extends to all people, just as the passage in Galatians affirms. That God chooses us all (at least that’s what we believe in Methodism – other denominations may differ). All nations are invited into God’s heart and Good News. Ultimately, we all want a world where everyone understands themselves as a beloved and loved child of God, and everyone gets to live their unique giftedness out. That is the heart of what so many of us believe.  And that theology is reflected in American values of democracy as well. The best of who we are is a manifestation of the best of what we believe. Can we see that reflected in each other? And can we work toward that together?

That’s who we really are.  That’s who we really want to be. Let’s quit listening to the voices that are trying to tell us otherwise and find ways to work alongside each other to know the fullness of the reality of God’s vision for who we can be: a whole earth glorifying God, serving alongside one another and thriving together.

Amen.

Image found at Unsplash, entitled “The Meaning of Love” by Aaron Blanco Tejador.