Chapter Three: Strangers and Kin
There are no commensurate discursive structures that spectacularize or rank whiteness in the way in which people of color are ranked and spectacularized. Further, in the absence of any white ethnic differentiation, whiteness becomes homogenized. Although apparently absent, it nonetheless orders the hierarchy, establishing itself while disappearing at the same time. It would seem that white managerial masculinity travels everywhere, with the ability to normativize itself in its apparently silent movement as lawful benefactor in ‘our community.’
—M. Jacqui Alexander, “Anatomy of a Mobilization”168
We function not just as agents of our own imaginings, but as the objects of others’ exclusions.
–Leti Volpp, “The Citizen and the Terrorist”169
Arizona was the wrong place for Mennonites to be in July 2013. Following the 2010 passage of Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070, widely regarded as a racialized attack on Latinos,170 a number of Latino Mennonites began a concerted effort to challenge the choice of location for the 2013 MCUSA convention, which had already been chosen by denominational leaders.171 The threats of Arizona were hardly abstract for Latinos. SB1070 put all racialized bodies in danger, and undocumented bodies in particular, and Latino Mennonite congregations had a substantial undocumented presence.
While denominational leaders put forth a considerable public display of concern and consideration for the petitions of Latino leaders, those petitions were ultimately to little avail. In 2011, MCUSA leaders announced that they would proceed with the
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168 M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 139. 169 Leti Volpp, “The Citizen and the Terrorist,” UCLA Law Review 49, no. 5 (June 2002): 1575. 170 “Arizona’s SB 1070,” American Civil Liberties Union, accessed March 18, 2015, https://www.aclu.org/arizonas-sb-1070. 171 Paul Schrag, “Executive Board Receives Conflicting Advice on Phoenix Convention,” The Mennonite, October 1, 2010, http://www.themennonite.org/issues/13- 10/articles/Executive_Board_receives_conflicting_advice_on_Phoenix_convention.
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Phoenix location, citing the potential financial loss of cancellation or rescheduling as a primary reason for their decision. In response to the situation, however, conference organizers made the Phoenix convention into a highly visible assemblage of immigration- related thematic material, choosing as the convention theme the phrase, “Citizens of God’s Kingdom.” In the opening delegate session of the convention, on July 2, 2013, MCUSA moderator Richard (Dick) Thomas announced that the convention would be different from other MCUSA conventions because of its Phoenix location and week-long focus on immigration. In deference to the overwhelming absence of Latino Mennonites, who mostly boycotted the convention, the moderator’s stage on the delegate floor contained an empty chair, a deliberate symbol that Thomas pointed out. “It's a time for us to unite around our core values and to celebrate the diversity among us,” he said.172
What does “core values” mean in such a context? What does “diversity” mean? What does “us” mean? What is Thomas actually saying when he uses these words and phrases; what power relations are invoked or obscured? Furthermore, what kind of work is the theme “Citizens of God’s Kingdom” doing in this setting? Political, legal, and queer theorists have all argued that the construct and political ideal of the citizen is reliant on the opposing figure of the stranger in order to give it meaning and coherence. In the United States, citizenship is inseparable from the gendered, classed, and raced discourses that grant legitimacy to particular bodies over others.173 Mennonites have multiple traditions of critique aimed at confronting the violent work done by citizenship and
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172 MCUSA Delegate session, July 2, 2013, Phoenix Convention Center, Phoenix, AZ. 173 Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000); Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Shane Phelan, Sexual Strangers: Gays, Lesbians, and Dilemmas of Citizenship (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001); Volpp, “The Citizen and the Terrorist.”
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nationalism, and deliberate distance from any nationalist identity has long been a hallmark of Anabaptist theology.174 But these theological traditions, which are themselves plagued with the intellectual limitations of masculine dominance, exist in tension with the managerial priorities of denominational leaders.
Denominational leaders, in turn, must balance the historically anti-nationalist bent of Anabaptism with a sizeable faction of Mennonites whose sexual politics are informed by the U.S. religious right, which for four decades has traded profitably in what Lauren Berlant has called “a nationalist politics of intimacy.”175 In right-wing U.S. discourse, “normal intimacy is considered the foundation of the citizen’s happiness.”176 I observe Mennonite leaders negotiating these competing theologies by attempting to broker peace and compromise through the language of “welcoming the stranger.” While welcoming the stranger may appear to subvert the violent power structures that make the citizen possible, I argue in this chapter that the Mennonites’ experience with Phoenix as a convention site made clear the limitations of citizenship as a egalitarian discourse. Even within the theological imaginary of “God’s kingdom,” the citizen extends welcome to the stranger from a seat of power; the stranger must then deal with the effects of that power.
What is the appropriate response to that welcome? Subservience? Gratitude? Suspicion? Challenge? Refusal and departure? Mennonites whose bodies and experiences place them in marginalized collectivities must contend with the consequences of these various alternatives. They must also contend with the matter of how to interact with one
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174 Gerald J. Mast, J. Denny Weaver, and Greg Boyd, Defenseless Christianity: Anabaptism for a Nonviolent Church (Telford, PA: Cascadia Publishing House, 2009); J. Denny Weaver, Becoming Anabaptist: The Origin and Significance of Sixteenth-Century Anabaptism, 2nd ed. (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 2005). 175 Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City. 176 Ibid, 8.
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another when the powers above them require that they compete for a contingent and incomplete “welcome.” In being forced to make such choices, their interactions with MCUSA echo the same interactions that they have with the political and economic hierarchies and apparatuses of the United States. In church as elsewhere, Mennonites of color confront what Lisa Lowe has called “the constitutive contradiction of liberal democracy: in a political system constituted by the historical exclusion and labor of racialized groups, the promise of inclusion through citizenship and rights cannot resolve the material inequalities of racialized exploitation.”177 In church as elsewhere, LGBTQ Mennonites must contend with the degree to which “heterosexuality is a prerequisite for modern citizenship,”178 and movement politics that are substantially shaped by the linkage between homonormative respectability and political enfranchisement.179 In church as elsewhere, all of these historically marginalized Mennonites must contend with discursive patterns that place disproportionate blame for strife and division on their bodies, their voices, and their claims to truth.
This chapter continues the work of the previous chapter in tracking the ways in which MCUSA has come to function as a modern liberal institution. My particular focus here is on the manifestations of managerialism as a raced and gendered performance, deeply informed by Mennonite cultural practices but also related to the gendered
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177 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 23. 178 Phelan, Sexual Strangers. 179 See Lisa Duggan, “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism.” In Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson, eds., Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2002), 175-194; Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Michael Warner, The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
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corporatization trends in other institutions premised in social good. Ambiguous unity language, selective de-politicizing of difference, and paternalism are all tools in play here, endowed with added authority by the theological fluencies of those who use them. In this story, straight, white, male bodies do the work of extending welcome, assigning meaning to history, and granting or denying legitimacy to marginal bodies and voices. My purpose is not to assign malevolence, but rather to understand how, in this setting, the benevolence of those whose citizenship goes unquestioned can itself cause harm.
With all this in mind, my story picks up four days after Thomas’s opening session remarks.
Mennonite Church USA National Convention, July 5, 2013, Phoenix Convention Center
From my fieldnotes:
I hadn't made it to a Pink Menno hymn-sing all week, which was pretty ironic, considering how much writing I have done over the past few years about the hymn singing in Pittsburgh. From what I was hearing, it wasn't feeling as raw or as bold as it did in Columbus and Pittsburgh. Patrick had said to me during our interview that they were pretty sure that people were getting “comfortable” with the Pink Menno presence. They were predictable: they sang nice hymns, and then they dispersed. Pink Menno had its own separate events. They weren't shaking things up anymore. The flip side to feeling more accepted than they had in Pittsburgh was the suspicion that in fact people had just gotten used to them, and that as long as they continued to behave in these predictable ways, they'd be allowed to continue just as they were.
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But I did join in on Friday morning, because what came next was the delegate session in which they were presumably to shake all this up. Ruth and I arrived and went over to stand by Adam. Those of us singing were forming a sort of oblong, oval corridor near the entrance to the delegate session. It was a big group—I would say at least 40 people by the time all had joined. We sang out of the pink songbooks, of course, and Patrick led. I could hear Patrick’s tenor floating easily above the others: clear and full, with flawless pitch—a songleader’s voice.
After one of the songs Ruth leaned over and wiped her eyes on the sleeve of my cardigan. “Those are holy tears, Steph,” she said, mostly sarcastically, but with an edge of something else. My throat was tightening too and I just kept fighting it back. I didn't want to cry. I didn't want to let my heart get tangled into whatever was about to unfold. Or maybe I just didn't want to deal with indignity of crying, even though I would hardly have been the only one. I was wearing a pink camisole under a green cardigan with a black skirt. And pink and rainbow bracelets. Not neutral. But I wasn't wearing a bright Pink Menno t-shirt and preparing to do whatever they were about to do on the delegate floor.
We finished singing, and Patrick called over the t-shirt-clad people who were participating in the action. The rest of us filed into the delegate hall. “And it's all downhill from here,” said Ruth, her voice full of battle fatigue and here-goes-nothing, before she headed off to her table. I sat down in the bleachers with my notebook and cell phone recorder turned on and realized that my heart was pounding out of my chest.
Pink Menno had a plan, and the plan was to interrupt a delegate session. At Mennonite conventions, generally speaking, this was not done. Delegates had arguments,
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and they could be heated, but there were protocols for managing delegate arguments. There were not, however, protocols for managing the slow, methodical, silent entrance of approximately seventy people in Pink Menno t-shirts, entering in pairs, some holding hands, and their gradual distribution, over the course of the next five minutes, throughout the delegate hall—not in the bleachers, with the spectators, but on the floor, amidst the tables that held the delegates. As they wove through the tables, I watched a number of pastors I knew from the inclusive pastors network, already seated at delegate tables, stand up in solidarity. Some of them were also in pink. I recognized a well-known Mennonite restorative justice expert in the bleachers near me in a Pink Menno shirt, and saw her rise and walk onto to the delegate floor, where she stood next to Cindy Lapp.
When I listened to my audio recording of the event later, there was no audible indication of what was happening. As Pink Menno members silently entered the delegate space, the delegates themselves were busy reading the resolutions that they were planning to vote on (none of which pertained explicitly to sexuality). Ruth Harder, the pastor I referenced in my field notes, told me later that it took a long time for some of the delegates to realize that anything out of the order was happening. As silent as the Pink Mennos were, however, their visual presence was clearly going to be impossible to ignore for the duration of a two-hour delegate session.
Among the pink-shirted, those who did not identify as queer carried signs with large, black-and-white studio photographs of LGBTQ Mennonites, part of an exhibition called “Strangers No More” that had been on display all week in the Pink Menno hotel
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room.180 Many of those who were queer made that queerness visible in the signs they carried. Each sign bore a quote from a talk or sermon given by various Mennonite leaders throughout the week. Beneath each of these quotes was a “BUT”:
“You matter, you're an equal” --Rachel Schwartzendruber Miller, Tuesday evening worship
BUT
I can't be ordained as a pastor in the church.
“The call of the kingdom is wide” --Ervin Stutzman
BUT
I can't get married in my home church.
“I'm going to be calling on you to let them into my house.” --Ervin Stutzman, Wednesday service
BUT
I can't work at my Mennonite college.
“It doesn't matter who you are, what you look like, or how you identify yourself—you are a beloved child of God.”--Rachel Schwartzendruber Miller, Tuesday evening worship
BUT
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180 The photographer for the project was Jacklyn Wells. See Harnish, Darian, “Strangers No More Project,” Pink Menno Campaign, June 3, 2013, http://www.pinkmenno.org/action/strangers-no-more-project/.
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I am a person of color and queer.181
It was another kind of haunting, silent this time rather than audible, declaring in explicitly spatial terms the truth about delegate sessions and queer people. In this forum that forged the Saskatoon/Purdue statements, the Confession of Faith, and the Membership Guidelines, rhetorical weapons to erase queer bodies, queer bodies were refusing to be erased. As he wove through the delegate tables, one pink-clad young man carried a chair above his head, an empty chair with a Pink Menno t-shirt stretched across it. The empty chair representing absent Latino Mennonites was still on the moderator’s stage; the symbolism of an empty Pink Menno chair would escape no one. He reached the foot of the stage and stood, silently, the chair still aloft in his hands, waiting.
My heart kept pounding, knowing that some people would perceive the empty chair as an attempt to score in a competition for legitimately marginal status. The misery of the entire setting swamped me for a moment, the violence of having to campaign to be a category worthy of representation by an empty chair.
While all of this was happening, Katie Hochstetler was making her way to the microphone on the delegate floor. Like the others, she wore a Pink Menno t-shirt. As Thomas introduced the resolutions and asked for delegate comments on them, she stood quietly at the microphone, holding a copy of her prepared statement, waiting for Thomas to acknowledge her presence. At one point, a gray-haired white man in a short-sleeved button-down shirt stood up and walked to the microphone. His business was routine; he was speaking as a delegate about a resolution that was part of the parallel fiction still at work in the room, the fiction that this was a normal delegate session in which seventy
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181 MCUSA Delegate session, July 2, 2013, Phoenix Convention Center, Phoenix, AZ.
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people in pink t-shirts were not standing silently around the room carrying placards and an empty chair. As he approached the microphone, Hochstetler stepped aside to make room for him. He took the microphone, but he also took her hand, holding it in solidarity throughout his short, unrelated statement. (Hochstetler did not know the man; later she located him on Facebook to thank him.)
Thomas, from his podium on the stage above her, finally turned his attention to the Pink Menno presence. “You know, one of the things I realized as moderator is that I serve as moderator for every person in this church,” he said. “I love every person in this church. And this church has wonderful diversity. This church also has wonderful core values. And I think we need to unite around our core values that start with Jesus at the center. I think that uh, Pink Mennos have not necessarily felt that, uh, maybe they've been heard at the point that they would. And so I think that they are ready to read a statement to us and I would welcome that at this point.” There was a pause, and then applause. “And if you'd state your name and congregation, I think it's Katie and I forget the last name and I might be wrong on Katie.”
Hochstetler stepped to the mic again. “My name is Katie Hochstetler and I'm a delegate from Faith Mennonite Church in Minneapolis, MN,” she said. The camera focused on her, so that everyone could see her from the projection screens, and she read her statement, her voice clear and level.
We come to you as Mennonites who are burdened by our church’s practices of exclusion, silence, and violence towards gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer people. We carry with us not only the faces of lgbt sisters
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and brothers, but also their hopes and dreams of a church whose language of welcome and justice matches its actual practices.
It is right that as a church we carefully and prayerfully examine the meaning and disparities of race and citizenship as it is practiced in our country and in our church. We seek to understand the ways that our prejudices and privilege have hardened our hearts to the suffering of immigrant people. We repent of the ways that we have contributed to the diminishment of others by our votes, indifference or blatant support of injustice. Lives matter to God, and the cries of the marginalized do not go unnoticed.
We call upon the Mennonite Church to repent for its harsh and unwelcoming treatment of the sisters and brothers, parents, teachers, leaders, friends and family among us who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer. As Pink Mennos, we refuse to allow our leaders to pit marginalized groups and people against one another in the name of unity or convenience. We reject the premise that our church is incapable of understanding the insidious connections of oppression and privilege as they are played out on the bodies of immigrants, women, children, people of color, lgbt people and the many who are excluded from full participation in our church and society. We bear witness to the pain and loss that accompanies the violence of rejection, exclusion, silencing, condemnation and complacency. We affirm MLK, Jr.’s jailhouse words that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Today we bring before you our faces, our yearnings, our bodies, our dreams, our faith, and declare that we refuse to be strangers to one another. As
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followers of Jesus, we cannot, and will not rest until the Mennonite Church abandons its exclusionary impulses and embraces the width and breadth of God’s welcome, so that all may participate fully and God’s kin-dom is made whole.182
When she finished, Thomas spoke. “Thank you for the statement,” he said, and then paused, as a number of delegates were applauding Hochstetler. Then he continued:
I think we hold in trust the documents of our church, and those documents include the commitment to dialogue where we disagree. And so those, there are occasions that we need to stop and do that. There are times when we need to hear a word, as we just did today. I'd ask us just to reflect, in a period of silence and prayer, on what we heard, about how God's speaking to us about marginalization of [pause] persons. What God's speaking to us about God's word, what God's speaking to us about God's will and God's way, that we all may be whole. Let's reflect and pray together.
For two minutes then, there was silence. I spent those two minutes watching Dick Thomas, who was still on the stage behind the podium, his face made larger on the projector screen that hung next to him. First, he rested his head in his hand. Then he rubbed his forehead with his hand for a while. He rested his chin on his hand briefly, set his hands on the podium, and finally, he prayed out loud. As he prayed, speaking slowly, every phrase conveyed an impression of weighty deliberation.
God, listen to your children praying...We’re all in need of the wholeness that you bring, as a church. God, you know the divides that are among us. You know the
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182 Pink Menno, “Strangers No More Statement for Phoenix 2013,” Pink Menno Campaign, July 2013, http://www.pinkmenno.org/2013/07/strangers-no-more-statement- for-phoenix-2013/. Katie Hochstetler and Carol Wise co-authored the statement. Emphases mine.
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way we read Scripture differently. You know the way we love you. The way we love each other. The hopes and the yearnings that we have for our church to be the kingdom good news that you want it to be in the world. And God we confess that we fall short, of the fullness of your grace, the fullness of your glory, and the fullness of your shalom. ... God, we’ve talked a lot about justice and your kingdom at this convention. And now we’ve had brought before us another kind of question. And I pray, God, that we walk again in yearning for wholeness, and caring for justice, and listening to each other, in the way that you listen to our prayers. And we pray this in the name of Jesus. And all God’s people said Amen. It was not a prayer that would alter the course of anything, and not everyone chose to say Amen along with him, though many did. But it did a noteworthy kind of work. Listening back later to the language that Thomas used to navigate the situation, I noted the ambiguities: “core values,” “wonderful diversity,” “hold in trust”; “commitment to dialogue where we disagree”; the loosely cohered sea of words in which “justice,” “wholeness,” and “kingdom” floated without anchors of specificity. Before a theologically disparate delegate body, confronted not only with Pink Menno’s sincerity but with their savvy, tactical checkmate, Thomas could use that language to crack open a door for queer Mennonites in the institutional wall. A small gift, that cracked door, bestowed in that moment by a benevolent, straight, white, male body: unquestionably belonging, unquestionably a citizen of every kingdom and kin-dom intersecting in that room.
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The kin-dom in pink
Straight white men don’t have a lot to gain from everybody else realizing that they’re in it together .
—Katie Hochstetler183
The Pink Menno delegate action was more than a show of visibility. At that moment, Pink Menno needed more than a show of visibility; as Patrick Ressler told me in an interview done the day before the events I just described, Pink Menno had become part of the convention in a way that was becoming uncomfortably institutional, despite the denomination’s executive persistence in not recognizing them or BMC in any official way. Not only their visibility but their audibility had become rote; as I wandered around the convention center that week, I heard a number of people observe that Pink Mennos were the only ones at the convention doing traditional Mennonite singing.
“Traditional Mennonite singing” was, of course, what white Mennonites were used to singing in church. Pink Menno organizers were not unaware of this uncomfortable Eurocentric undertone, particularly in convention contexts in which Black and brown musicians were providing much of the worship music inside officially sanctioned worship spaces. In Phoenix, the danger was even more palpable. In a space from which Latino Mennonites had been effectively dismissed, Pink Menno singers faced the distinct danger of merely becoming a reliable space for white, “ethnic” Mennonites to feel comfortable.
In the delegate hall, singing to drown out the proceedings would have doubtless been more intrusive, harder to ignore. But silence may well have been the more subversive choice, given that singing was what people had come to expect of the mostly, not entirely, white group in pink t-shirts. A silence punctuated with symbols, a silence
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183 Katie Hochstetler, interview with author, October 22, 2013.
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that served the pain of Stutzman’s “haunting the church” comment back to Stutzman’s own institution. That comment already lived in queer Mennonite infamy,184 that diagnosis of their ghostliness from a mouth so firmly situated at the nexus of heterosexuality and white paternal power that it could pronounce with beneficent confidence what was best for its church.
Ghosts were not supposed to speak, and so they spoke. But more important was what they said. At a Pink Menno-sponsored seminar earlier that week, Carol Wise described the current state of the queer movement as “unapologetic,” a contrast from what in the 1980s and nineties had sometimes felt like humiliation and begging. Pink Menno’s action on the delegate floor had to do two things: effectively gain entry into a veritable fortress of gatekeepers, and then, once inside, de-legitimize the gates.
They did so in part through a theological intervention, one that took gentle aim at the very themes that propped up the Phoenix convention. What they said about those themes mattered. It mattered particularly at a moment in which their bodies—bodies that two years ago in Pittsburgh, some leaders of color had read as colonizing—were occupying a space to which they were not invited. It was also a space that many of them had accessed through the privileges of citizenship, the money for plane tickets, the safety of whiteness. “Citizenship” appeared only once in Hochstetler’s statement, in connection to marginalization, race, and repentance, an acknowledgment that Pink Menno brought experiences of privilege as well as oppression to the table. Crucially, the statement did not use citizenship as a theological metaphor. The dominant theological discourse of the
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184 Tim Nafziger, “Haunting Straight Mennonite Moderates: The Christian Tradition Of...,” Young Anabaptist Radicals, May 9, 2011, http://young.anabaptistradicals.org/2011/05/09/haunting-straight-mennonite-moderates- the-christian-tradition-of-confrontation/.
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convention constructed a “kingdom of God” in which “citizens” welcomed “strangers.” In contrast, Pink Menno named intersecting oppressions, refused stranger identity, and, in a subtle way, called out the imperialistic overtones of “kingdom.” Their theological metaphor of choice was “kin-dom,” a concept honed in the mujerista/womanist theology of Ada Maria Isasi-Díaz, the Cuban-American Catholic theologian who spent her life challenging imperialism and patriarchy in institutional Catholicism.185
Immediately after the delegate session, Pink Mennos met back at their Hospitality Room in the Renaissance hotel a block from the convention center. Ostensibly, they were there for a scheduled seminar led by inclusive pastors, entitled, “Where Do We Go From Here?” The action that had just taken place, however, added urgency and palpable excitement to the intergenerational meeting of fifty or sixty people. The conversation was wide-ranging, covering the role of ambiguous denominational language; the continuity of Pink Menno’s protest with older Mennonite protests, such as those of women who refused to wear head coverings; what the role of straight, inclusive pastors should be moving forward; the pros and cons of working at a congregational level versus a denominational one; the massive generational change in perceptions of LGBTQ people that signaled, as one teenager put it, “the light at the end of the tunnel.”
As positive as the mood in the room was, one pastor offered a sobering caution at the very end of the meeting. Sheri Hostetler, the pastor of First Mennonite Church of San Francisco, shared an area conference with a group of immigrant pastors from Africa and Southeast Asia, mostly in the Los Angeles area, that four years earlier had appealed to the
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185 Paul Vitello, “Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Dissident Catholic Theologian, Dies at 69,” The New York Times, June 5, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/nyregion/ada-maria- isasi-diaz-dissident-catholic-theologian-dies-at-69.html.
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Executive Board of MCUSA with a request for a conservative, denomination-wide sexual ethic and disciplinary measures to enforce it. As the pastor of a church that had been openly LGBTQ-inclusive since the 1980s, Hostetler had run up against sexually conservative immigrant leaders many times, and to some degree, had forged positive connections with them. Hostetler began by noting that, particularly after the morning’s delegate session, pro-LGBTQ inclusion Mennonites had momentum on their side. “Our momentum is threatening to a lot of people,” she said. She referred to her relationships with immigrant pastors: “Pink Menno isn’t aligned with colonialism and Western imperialism, but a lot of people still make that connection,” she continued. “How do we approach people who are threatened by us with the spirit of Christ?” “How,” she added, “can we show people the difference between feeling threatened and being threatened?”
Fighting for chairs
Those marginal group members who are close to the edges of dominant power, where access and involvement in decision making actually seem possible, confront incentives to promote and prioritize those issues and members thought to 'enhance' the public image of the group, while controlling and making invisible those issues and members perceived to threaten the status of the community.186
—Cathy Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics
When MCUSA was incorporated, its bylaws indicated that three seats on the new denomination’s Executive Board would be guaranteed to members of the recognized constituent groups representing people of color in the denomination: the African American Mennonite Association (AAMA), Iglesia Menonita Hispana (IMH), and Native
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186 Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century (Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis Books, 1996).
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Mennonite Ministries (NMM).187 Each of these organizations is in charge of selecting their Executive Board representative. When, in a candid moment, I asked one white board member why white leaders seemed to pick and choose which people of color they would acknowledge based on the conservatism of their sexual politics, he mentioned this structure as integral to the problem. Later, he sent me a clarifying email:
I think it is healthy for the MCUSA board to have formal representatives from its largest constituency groups because it avoids the danger of the dominant culture handpicking non-representative leaders of color. However, both IMH and AAMA have their roots in conservative evangelism efforts by Virginia and Lancaster conferences,188 and have always been a more comfortable home for congregations and people of color who are more theologically conservative, and its representatives generally reflect this leaning.189
Iglesia Menonita Hispana leadership, particular its current moderator Samuel López, has been particularly adamant in their protests of LGBTQ activism. In a letter to Stutzman and the current MCUSA moderator Elisabeth Soto Albrecht in September 2014, López wrote the following:
At our IMH Biennial Assembly on August 8 and 9, 2014, the Hispanic pastors and delegates expressed their deep concern about the issue of homosexuality and how the Conferences and congregations are dealing with it.
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187 “Bylaws for Mennonite Church USA” (Mennonite Church USA, July 2013), http://www.mennoniteusa.org/wp- content/uploads/2014/07/MCUSABylaws_APPROVED_2013_July.pdf. Beginning in the summer of 2015, the Asian Mennonite Ministries constituent group will also have a guaranteed seat.
188 Within MCUSA, the Lancaster and Virginia area conferences are generally recognized as the most socially and theologically conservative. 189 Email to author, November 19, 2014, used with permission.
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On the one hand we see the affirmation of our historical position on sexuality and Confession of Faith, but on the other hand we see a different practice. Therefore, confusion and doubts are raising and we pray to God that He will give wisdom to our Mennonite Church leadership on how to handle this issue.
It was not surprising to the IMH Board to hear the Hispanic pastors and delegates calling the MC USA to keep the teaching position of the church and enforce it in all the Conferences and ministers. Also, the pastors and delegates expressed the painful sentiment that most, if not all, of the Hispanic Mennonite Churches will withdraw from MC USA if the present teaching of sexuality and Confession of Faith is changed.190 A month after this letter hit the church press, I met with Mennonite historian Felipe Hinojosa, author of Latino Mennonites, at a meeting of the American Studies Association in Los Angeles. Hinojosa, who teaches at Texas A&M University, had been part of the campaign to keep MCUSA out of Phoenix. Thus his cynicism at the intractable whiteness of Mennonite power structures was particularly well informed. Over coffee and a long conversation about Mennonite church politics, he explained his frustration at López’s claim—not only with its heterosexism, but with the way it presumed to speak for Latinos as though they were theologically and ideologically homogeneous. To understand Hinojosa’s argument, it helps to know one of the core arguments of his book: Mennonite congregational polity has consistently stymied Latinos
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190 Quoted in full in John M. Troyer, “Mennonite Church USA: Monochromatic or Various Shades of Brown?,” Evana Network, accessed March 8, 2015, http://www.evana.net/blog--news-updates/mennonite-church-usa-monochromatic-or- various-shades-of-brown.
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in the creation of a national Latino Mennonite movement.191 Like the board member I quoted above, Hinojosa saw IMH not as a representative body for Latino Mennonites as a whole but rather as an arm of the entrenched social conservatism of the Lancaster conference (where Lopez serves on the all-male bishop board). Later, Hinojosa fleshed it out to me in an email:
Here's why I believe Iglesia Menonita Hispana is bluffing when they threaten to leave the denomination. First, IMH does not have the national reach that Latina/o Mennonites had in the 1960s and 1970s. Regionalization and conference structures essentially diminished any Latina/o national movement. This means that Latino churches are tied to conferences (Lancaster, South Central, Western District)--and have been since at least the 1970s--and are more likely to follow conference leads, not the denomination as a whole. Second, IMH is most strongly tied to Lancaster conference (Sam Lopez) and so the "threat" to leave will not create a mass exodus. It only means that Hispanic churches in the northeast will do whatever Lancaster wants them to do. For me, it's more important to follow what happens at the conference level. 192
When I took Hinojosa’s advice and started following Latino Mennonite politics at the regional level instead, the first thing I noticed was an article in The Mennonite referencing Gilberto Flores, the associate conference minister of Western District Conference (WDC, an area conference of mainly Kansas congregations).
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191 Felipe Hinojosa, Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith, and Evangelical Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). 192 Felipe Hinojosa, email to author, March 9, 2015, used with permission.
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These leaders, Flores said, don’t want to talk about the issue of same-sex relationships anymore. They will not try to change churches who want to be more welcoming, and they don’t want to be judged by others. If WDC organizes its assemblies around issues of disagreement, they said, they don’t want to participate. They want to focus on the things we agree on, Flores said.193
Flores’s statement isn’t exactly welcoming to LGBTQ members, but the larger point is that it contains no threat of departure should the denomination become more LGBTQ- inclusive. His statement was congruent with what Joanna Harader, a WDC pastor whose credentials were reviewed after she officiated a same-sex wedding, told me in an interview. Latino Mennonite churches in the WDC don’t have time to issue ultimatums to the denomination and fight other churches over same-sex marriage, she said. They’re too busy dealing with poverty, racism, and the consequences of xenophobic anti-immigration laws.194
To Hinojosa, the selective political use that white denominational leaders made of IMH statements was further evidence that they had little interest in doing anti-racism work that went beyond surface-level image management. “I find it outrageous that the denomination picks and chooses when it will listen to Latinos,” he wrote. “On immigration, they essentially ignored us, but on becoming a welcoming and inclusive church for LGBTQ people they all of a sudden are concerned about losing us and about being an anti-racist church.” Isaac Villegas, pastor of the Chapel Hill Mennonite Church
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193 Gordon Houser, “Western District Talks Congregational Authority,” The Mennonite, November 16, 2014, https://themennonite.org/daily-news/western-district-talks- congregational-authority/. 194 Joanna Harader, interview with author, October 1, 2013.
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and an MCUSA Executive Board member (unaffiliated with IMH), expressed a similar sentiment in his review of Hinojosa’s book:
Hinojosa states that more than half of Latinos support same-sex marriage. Such diversity doesn’t fit within the Latino/Latina Mennonite identity that has been constructed and that is assumed to be against LGBT inclusion. But, in reality, we — speaking as a Hispanic Mennonite — are on both sides. I know, because of my own family and my conversations with Hispanic Mennonites. Hinojosa notes his surprise that white Mennonites support this opposition to LGBT inclusion under the guise of being an antiracist church. A truly antiracist church would honor the diversity among every racial group and not use one part of us against the other.195
“Natural allies”
Hinojosa was particularly frustrated by the layers of historical ignorance that white leaders’ statements about Latino Mennonites revealed. His book, a painstakingly researched account of Latino leaders’ largely frustrated attempts to create an emancipatory Latino social movement within the Mennonite church, has the potential to disrupt a far more common narrative among white Mennonites: that Black and Latino leaders were naturally drawn to the Mennonite church because of its transformative peace theology, and that white Mennonites were more racially enlightened throughout the fifties and sixties than their other white Christian peers. Hinojosa, in contrast, writes, “Placing Mennonite responses to racism in their historical context reveals that they were not any
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195 Isaac Villegas, “Despite Missteps, Latinos Joined Mennonites,” Mennonite World Review, December 4, 2014, http://mennoworld.org/2014/12/04/columns/despite-missteps- latinos-joined-mennonites/.
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more progressive about race than other evangelical groups in the 1950s.”196 His account of the 1960s details a long, hard, and ultimately thwarted struggle by Latino Mennonites to convince white Mennonite leaders to prioritize the civil rights struggle of Latino farm workers over the demands of wealthy, union-busting Mennonite farmers in California.197
On the other hand, readers who didn’t want to absorb the details of Hinojosa’s narrative could reinvent it to suit their own fantasies. In a November 2014 review of Hinojosa’s book in The Mennonite, Mennonite historian John Roth—well-known for his social conservatism—began with a laudatory account of Hinojosa’s book, emphasizing how white Mennonites grew closer to evangelicalism due to their encounters with Latinos. He moved on, then, to a description of the IMH statements about homosexuality, quoting Samuel López’s prediction that Hispanic churches would leave MCUSA en masse if stricter discipline was not enacted against LGBTQ-inclusive churches and conferences. Roth then offered this analysis:
Among the many painful realities of our current ecclesial tensions is the fact that racial-ethnic minority churches who once regarded Mennonite progressives as natural allies in the struggle for racial and economic justice now find themselves increasingly alienated from those leaders.198
I wasn’t entirely sure, reading this, that Roth and I had read the same book. The Latino and African-American leaders that Hinojosa describes did not find “natural allies” with white progressive Mennonites; in fact, a large number of them left the Mennonite church entirely before homosexuality ever became a public topic of discussion in Mennonite
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196 Hinojosa, Latino Mennonites. 197 Ibid, 122-145. 198 John Roth, “‘Meno-Latino’ Identity,” The Mennonite, November 2014, 9.
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congregations. By this point, straight white men making concerned pronouncements about LGBTQ activism on the supposed behalf of people of color was turning into something approaching a genre in Mennonite forums.
I asked Hinojosa what he thought of Roth’s review: “My impression was that your book was a pretty hefty intervention into the idea that Latino Mennonite leaders found ‘natural allies’ in progressive white Mennonites,” I wrote. Hinojosa responded,
Your assessment of Roth's comments is right on. My book never assumes that these were "natural allies," but instead contested and complex relationships. To assume that "natural alliances" have today been disrupted only serves to romanticize the struggles that Latina/o Mennonites and other people of color have had in the Mennonite Church, especially with white progressives.199
The kingdom’s airport security
In California, where I live, many people have moved from other parts of the world to work here, but they keep their citizenship with their home country. They are required to carry a visitor registration card (called a “green card”), which allows them to work here even though they aren’t citizens. Christians should carry spiritual green cards to remind us that our citizenship is in heaven....
Your identity is in eternity, and your homeland is heaven. When you grasp this truth, you will stop worrying about ‘having it all’ on earth. God is very blunt about the danger of living for the here and now and adopting the values priorities, and lifestyles of the world.
—Rick Warren, The Purpose-Driven Life200
To proceed as if the categories do not matter because they should not matter would be to fail to show how the categories continue to ground social existence.
—Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life201
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199 Hinojosa, email to author, March 9, 2015, used with permission. 200 Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For?, Special Anniversary edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2012). Rick Warren has claimed affinity with Anabaptism, and Stutzman’s preaching style, use of symbols, and circular theology seem to reflect Warren’s influence.
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On July 4, 2013, Ervin Stutzman, took the stage at the Phoenix Convention Center and began his sermon by raising his hands in greeting: “Shalom.” Speaking without a podium from a wraparound mic, he opened with an observation, that Mennonite Church USA conventions are always held over the fourth of July. “You’ve probably wondered, why do we do that?” Stutzman said. “The answer is, it’s cheaper that week.” This was played for laughs, but Stutzman continued by linking the MCUSA’s bargain-price conventions with a practice of the Apostle Paul. During Paul’s time in Ephesus, Stutzman explained, the teacher Tyrannus allowed Paul to use his lecture hall in the afternoon, as Tyrannus gave his lectures in the cool of the morning. Paul trained many followers in this hot lecture hall, followers who were then sent into Asia to spread the word of God. Stutzman explained that we know this because of the apostle Luke, the author of the book of Acts. At this point he cocked his head slightly to the side, raising a finger to indicate an idea. “Let’s hear it from Luke himself,” Stutzman said, “what he might say about what Paul was speaking in the kingdom of God.”202
Stutzman then walked to a side table on the stage, where he picked up a long, dark, front-fastening robe with a tassel draped loosely about the neckline, snapping it on over his button-down shirt. He then reached for an embroidered kufi skullcap, which he placed on his head. These accessories were clearly meant to signal that Stutzman was assuming the persona of Luke. He preached for the next ten minutes in this costume, telling stories about the ministry of Paul, ending his “Luke segment” with a story in
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201 Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 182. 202 Mennonite Church USA, Ervin’s Sermon: Phoenix 2013, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I00UNxST1e0.
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which Paul and his fellow disciple Silas are freed from unfair imprisonment by a timely earthquake. But they choose to stay in the prison, where Paul converts his jailer. The next morning the civil authorities who threw him in jail ask him to leave quietly. Paul holds them to account, crying, “I’m a Roman citizen! You beat us without a trial. You come here and escort us out of town.” (The story to which Stutzman refers here is in Acts 16:17-39.) Stutzman continued, “I learned a lesson from Paul. One can be a citizen of the Roman empire, and a citizen of the kingdom of God. But there’s never, ever a question as to which kingdom, which empire, holds our ultimate loyalty. That’s when I learned to say ‘Jesus is Lord,’ not ‘Cesar is Lord.’”203
For a convention in which the concept of citizenship was both deliberately and unintentionally central, it was a strange moment. Stutzman’s use of Luke’s voice allows him to frame the story of Paul’s imprisonment and resistance as an occasion for downplaying the importance of worldly forms of citizenship. But while Paul ignores his initial chance at freedom in order to minister to his jailer, he also demands accountability for his treatment from the civil authorities through the invocation of his Roman citizenship. And while Stutzman didn’t mention the end of the story, Paul’s Roman citizenship, not his citizenship in the kingdom of God, is what forces the authorities to humble themselves in apology (Acts 16:39). The dignity with which Paul and Silas depart from this situation is due to their entitlement to due process as Roman citizens.
If what Stutzman was attempting was a liberatory message, he might have done better to mention the Paul and Silas story’s role in the lyrics of the African-American civil rights song, “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.” But the emphasis in that song is on the
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203 Ibid.
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falling walls of the jail. Stutzman, on the other hand, seemed to want to do something with the idea of citizenship, though it is not clear exactly what. His costume change gestured towards a desire to portray his undeniably white body as racially fluid, yet his inattention to the racialized history of the Bible story he tells suggests an unwillingness to engage with imprisonment and jails as literal experiences in the literal world.
He then tried another metaphor:
Coming to the kingdom of God is like entering airport security. Anybody done that lately? Like coming to border security. You know the routine, right? What do they tell you? 'Everybody empty your pockets.' So that's what we do...empty your pockets and put them on the belt. Take off anything metal. [removes his watch], like watches, or cell phones [he sets his cell phone next to his watch], empty your pockets of any keys or anything else. Put all those things there. And then they come up with the more disgusting part; 'Please, take off your shoes.' [begins to take off his shoes] Some of us think we're getting ready to go to bed or something. Put your shoes on the belt. But here's the kicker. For a lot of places, you come in and they say something like, 'put your hands above your head, and stand here like this. It's almost like coming to Jesus and raising your hands. Because when Jesus said you come into the kingdom, he said, you give up everything you've got. So when you get into the kingdom it's like walking here, and you say, 'Where's my stuff'? And Jesus says, 'Well, you gave it to me. You gave your self to me.' 'But how am I going to get to convention without my wallet?'
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And I think the conversation may go like this. Where Jesus says, 'You're going to need your wallet to get along in life, some of this plastic and cash you've got. So I'm going to loan it back to you for now. and any time that anybody needs something that you've got, I'm going to send them to you. Who owns the wallet?' 'Yes, Jesus, I got the point.' 'Those keys that you gave me--that's a lot. Who owns the house?' 'Yes, God, you own the house.' 'That's true. And there's a lot of people, homeless people who need a place to stay. So I'm going to be calling on you to let them into my house. That car key you've got there [holds up keys], that's a powerful thing, to be able to drive around a neighborhood, all around this country. There's lots of people who need transportation to get to the place my spirit is calling them to be. So when somebody needs a ride, I'll be calling on you to let them ride in my car.' 'I got it. I got it, Lord.'...
...So that's how we walk in the kingdom of God. Everything we've got belongs to God. It's like when we step into the kingdom of God, God says to us [throwing up hands], 'Join in the riches of the kingdom of God. Everything I have is yours to share...204
In the dozen or so times that I have watched the video recording of this sermon, I have fought hard against the temptation to write it off as bad preaching and ignore it. On almost every level it fails: charisma, coherence, and narrative flow are all absent. Its usage of jails, citizenship, and airport security as universal symbols, drained of their historically specific and racialized meanings, assumes a listening audience full of people whose bodies, identities, and papers allow them to move as easily through the world’s
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204 Ibid.
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racialized, gendered sites of surveillance as Stutzman does himself. His easy conflation of “airport security” and “border security,” as if these phrases did not each indicate their own specific dangers and specific threats would be troubling enough anywhere—but this was Phoenix. Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s prisons were mere miles away, full of liminal bodies, aliens, strangers. People who were tortured, sexually humiliated, and stripped of hope, people for whom citizenship could never be only a metaphor. Those prisons were part of why Latino Mennonites stayed away from the Phoenix convention.
From the perspective of an institution that embraces anti-racism as a core principle, the bare minimal answer to the problems of this sermon might be a long course in cultural competency. Whiteness is everywhere in this sermon, and yet nowhere is it named as such. Stutzman’s performance evokes nothing so much as the abstract citizen of classical liberalism, with all the inherent flaws of that construct. The abstract citizen allows for the fiction that we all have equal access to the privileges of citizenship, and thus, that disregarding earthly citizenship could possibly mean the same thing to all of us. The abstract citizen, of course, assumes a white, male, cisgender body with papers is stepping through that TSA scanner, perhaps facing a patdown from the TSA’s hands.
From this perspective, Stutzman’s symbology begins to look depressingly coherent. Once again, the white male benefactor speaks on behalf of the community, speaking his institution into being. He admonishes people to share their wallets and cars, admonishing citizens to welcome strangers, beckoning, enticing, always with the distant promise of an empty chair.
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