Question f - Follow, Love, and Work

The confessions are not simply historical documents. While they arose from specific circumstances, we as a community believe they continue to contribute in a meaningful and ongoing basis to the life of the church, and, indeed, the world. Nor are the truths of the confessions confined to our Sunday morning lives. We who are Presbyterians, particularly as those who have taken ordination vows, believe they shape the entirety of our lives.

Reconciliation has the potential to become a watered-down nice term for getting along. It might mean a white congregation and a black congregation swap preachers once a year. It might mean two people in a broken relationship struggle to come back together.

When my brother and I fought as children, our mother insisted we talk through the conflict. She mentioned to me recently that it was painful for her to make us do that because we had hurt each other, and “talking it out” required we verbalize how we had been hurt and how we had inflicted that hurt. As the eldest and more verbal child, I tended to say things that hurt. My brother quickly grew to be physically stronger than I was and inflicted hurt in other ways. But regardless of how difficult it was, our mother kept it up because she believed that it was better to say the wrongs out loud than allow them to simmer, at least in the long run as we developed into adults and as two humans in a lifelong relationship.

My brother and I did not have structural advantages and disadvantages. The kind of reconciliation called for in the confessions is much more serious than two little ones working through a conflict. This is because the confessions speak to times and places where the conflicts are happening in the midst of structural oppression, resulting in some groups having legal, cultural, theological, and economic advantages, and others navigating society with the inverse disadvantages.

It is too easy for us to look at the contexts of the Confessions of Belhar and 1967 and believe we live in such different times that the confessions are unnecessary, hold no sway over our lives, or just do not apply. But consider these facts in just three of the modern-day issues of God’s people:

Incarceration

The causes of incarceration are not about inherent levels of criminality. Black Americans are more likely to be incarcerated in part because black neighborhoods are more heavily policed than white neighborhoods, due to segregation and persistent beliefs resulting in biased policies and procedures. Black people are also more likely than white people to be stopped by police. In fact, black drivers are three times more likely than white drivers to be stopped, even though white drivers are more likely to be carrying something illegal.^[5]

Creating Illegality

When my white Jewish great-grandparents arrived in the U.S. from eastern Europe, and my Japanese great-great-grandparents arrived in the U.S., they came before “illegal” was a term used to describe the processes of migration.

My great-grandmother Kimiko was born in the U.S. and was therefore a citizen. When she married my great-grandfather Shuichi, who was not a citizen (because it was illegal at the time for Asians to become naturalized citizens), she was subject to a law that stripped citizen women of their citizenship when they married men ineligible for citizenship. She lost her citizenship rights, effectively becoming stateless from the time of their marriage in 1924 until 1952, when the McCarren-Walter Act changed how the U.S. treated migrants from Asia, and my great-grandfather was allowed to become a citizen. At the time, a set of laws known as the Alien Land Laws prevented Asian immigrants ineligible for citizenship from owning property. Additionally, they lost whatever they and their children had during World War II, when they were interned in a concentration camp in Arizona.

Contrast these accounts with some of my white friends’ stories. Their ancestors passed through Ellis Island, and were given the opportunity to go west and claim land from which Native Americans had been removed. They could become citizens, own property, vote, and begin accumulating wealth without the government removing their entire ethnic group and causing massive loss as a community.

Today, the immigration system has set up concepts for “legal” and “illegal” immigration. While legislation no longer expressly prohibits migration from China, or prohibits noncitizens from ever becoming citizens, immigration policies and processes have created virtually untenable situations for people seeking documentation for migration, and criminalizes people who, just a few decades before, could have crossed freely between countries.

Sexism and Gender Discrimination

Now that we see more women in positions of leadership, it is possible for us to be unaware of the ongoing gender inequalities in the church and in society. In 2016, the PC(USA) released a study showing stark differences between how women and men in the church experience discrimination.^[6] Eighty-four percent of women teaching elders report experiencing gender-based harassment or discrimination, whereas only 32 percent of men teaching elders report experiencing gender-based harassment.

Society continues to face ongoing inequality between men and women, reflected in pay gaps, wildly unequal representation among elected officials and top corporate leadership. Additionally, women continue to bear the brunt of unpaid labor in the form of elder and childcare, as well as household responsibilities.^[7]