Tag Archives: republican primary

Featured, Listening

When Politics Trumped Faith

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As a child, I was taught that the most important characteristic about a political candidate was their faith: as a Christian nation, we needed Christian leaders, preferably born again and evangelical. Learning to swim in waters so thick with political convictions and action, it felt at times as though the world around me inhaled religion and exhaled politics, and somewhere inside us one became the other.

The political world changed over time, and so did my faith. Once I learned that I could fail and God would still love me, I started to understand grace and fell in love with being a part of the Methodist movement that places grace at the center. Once I released the list of “Don’ts” that I clung to as a life-preserver in a terrifying sea of sin, I found solid footing on all the “Do’s” of a loving God. I began to walk forward. I found passages in John and 1 Corinthians and Isaiah that became old companions on the journey; my oldest and my dearest friends, always faithful, always present.

The years passed and I journeyed far and wide seeking to be a good Methodist, to “Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can.”

I messed up plenty – as often as everyday and as recently as this morning – but I put my heart and soul into it. I tried so hard. Every day. I tried to live with faithful discipline, love with liberal generosity, and learn with determined optimism. With time, I learned that faith was not about what I did or did not do, it was about the fact that God loved me and that love required a response.

One of the biggest changes I had to make was the choice to accept my calling to preach after being raised in a church that taught that women were not to be clergy. I wrestled so hard with it; the struggle most intense between the age of 20 and 25, when one of my deepest points of identity fought for it’s very survival against the erroneous teachings of my youth that tried to tell my calling that it deserved to die; that it was heresy; that I was heretic.

My calling won, and I proceeded forward as United Methodist clergy, fully ordained, fully credentialed, fully amazed by what God had done with a little girl who had never imagined she’d live in a world that wanted to hear her voice.

As my faith grew, it brought me to acquire a set of my own deep convictions: some the same I had been raised with, some different, and some quite the opposite. I came to understand how Christianity had been co-opted and used to justify the expansion of Empire after Empire; how the same Empire that had issued Jesus’s death warrant, would be the first one to recognize the power of misusing his name.

I decided that my faith could inform my politics, but that for the sake of my faith, it was too dangerous to mix them together in the same bowl and end up losing track of which was which.

My faith changed, and so did the political world around me. When I crossed paths again with the Republican Party of my youth, I saw a stranger before me and I felt betrayed. I may not have found myself in sync with the Republican Party, but I expected that when we came across one another he would at least look familiar and we could be civil with one another. He had, after all, sat at my dinner table every evening growing up. I may have taken a different path in life, but I felt unreasonably aggravated that the old path did not feel familiar.

When I bumped into the Republican Party, he told me that Barack Obama, a member of the United Church of Christ, was a Muslim; and that Mitt Romney, a member of the Mormon religion, was closer to the evangelical Christian ideal. I was so confused; I felt like the whole world had been turned upside down. I had been okay with all the changes that had taken place within me, but I felt betrayed by the changes that had taken place within the world I left behind. I no longer recognized the Republican Party when he told me that Donald Trump was a Christian man; although there was a flicker of familiarity when he claimed that Hillary Clinton was not a Christian, that was an old song he had sung all throughout my youth.

Yet, when Hillary spoke, I could not deny I heard the echoes of her Methodist upbringing in her words; I heard that earnest determination, that Wesleyan intensity, that I shared with other Methodist women like Jarena Lee, Harper Lee, and Sandra Bland.

On Trump’s tongue, I heard poison. A poison that threatened to destroy everything I am and everything I love. Fear. Hate. Mockery. Sexism. Racism. Xenophobia. Power. Greed.

I wondered how could the political realm I had grown up in have changed so much? Then again, maybe it never changed; perhaps we are only just becoming aware of the repercussions. While we were inhaling religion and exhaling politics, did we never realize that the direction of the wind might change? Did we never realize that we might choke on our own exhaust?

Maybe it was politics that trumped faith all along. We just failed to see it clearly until now.

 

Featured, Justice

‘The Next Generation of Waller County’

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Tomorrow marks the first day of a new month, and it could be the first day of a new chapter in Waller County’s history. That will only come to pass, however, if the people of Waller County want it.

Primary elections for both the Democratic and Republican parties will be held on March 1st, and on the ticket for Sheriff, you will still find Sheriff R. Glenn Smith.

Yes, that Sheriff Smith.

What truly made me marvel was not that Sheriff Smith was still running even after a year full of highly public mishaps that embarrassed the County. Instead, it was the slogan that his supporters had chosen: “Keep R. Glenn Smith Sheriff – Sheriff for the Next Generation of Waller County.”

Driving past these signs on the backroads of Waller County, as I journeyed to help facilitate a leadership retreat for some of our nation’s most promising young minds, the irony of those words was not lost on me.

Sheriff for the Next Generation of Waller County.

I can and do understand how people have felt offended that rightful criticism of the Sheriff reflected on their County, and I do understand how that has made people defensive at times. It is one thing, however, to defend what you have; it is quite another thing to not want something better for your children. It is one thing to resist chaos by trying to protect the stability of your community from what you see as outside forces; it is another thing to reject change when it is handed to you and all you have to do is take it with your ballot.

You see that “Next Generation of Waller County” is my generation and my nieces’ generation. A generation is not bound by County lines, it is bound by common experience and common calling. It is bound by the fact that as time goes on, we will have to figure out together what to do with the messes and the blessings that others have left behind for us. Our responsibility to one another is not now, nor will it be in the future, limited by County, State or even National boundaries.

As Ephesians 4:4-6 says, “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.”

My responsibility to my generation lies in my concern not only for the magnificent Prairie View A&M students, but also for the young, local white man their age who came to the jail once and spent the day sitting with me just because he wanted to know for himself whether we were the monsters people said we were. We gave him water, and laughter, and friendship, and I respected his courage to sit out there with us, just to know for himself what was going on. I have a responsibility to the young, local white woman, whose pastor brought her to meet the “Wicked Witch of Waller” so that she could know for herself whether I was truly what people said I was. I have a responsibility to the young woman who came to the jail the day after Sheriff R. Glenn Smith threatened us and told me to go back to the Church of Satan; she came to me with tears in her eyes and begged me to be careful, telling me that I was in more danger than I thought. I have a responsibility to the young men and women who lived around the jail and truly loved me and truly were concerned whether I had enough water and food and strength.

Yet, perhaps even more than to them, I have a responsibility to the young woman who tried to lure me to a local restaurant for who knows what reason when folks were looking for me to “confront” me. And I have a responsibility to the young mothers, women in my generation, who sat at home and commented on posts about Sandra, or about those holding vigil, or reported when and where they had last seen my car, concerned that their way of life was being threatened by calls for justice. I was tired, but I could have done better by them. I could have tried harder to find a way to communicate to them that God’s justice is for their children as well and that we are all in this together.

As Ephesians 2:19 says, “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and are of God’s household…”

For them, for their children, I believe that God has something better in store for them than the kind of repetitive injustice, threats, and danger that many before them have already known. I believe that Justice for Sandra Bland, also means Justice for them and for their neighbors. I believe that we are all connected in a web of mutual responsibility.

God has something better for “The Next Generation of Waller County” than what has come before because we are called not to fear the future and protect the ways of the past, but to serve a God who promises to “make all things new.”

Even as voices continue to seek justice, transparency and answers, the people of Waller County have an opportunity themselves to quite easily, without investigation or legal case, offer accountability for the way they have been represented. Vote.

How they vote will show us whether R. Glenn Smith represents who they are and who they want to be, or whether he does not.

I pray that they will show us that they truly do want something better for “The Next Generation of Waller County.”