Perspectives lead to accusations of the absurd
I learned a long time ago that my opinions generally amount to little more than, well, opinions. There is a glut in the market, and the worth of most of them is way, way down. Yet we are raised in a culture that has always suggested to us that our voice matters, our opinion counts, and our first amendment provides us an opportunity to state our opinions without regard to the nature or veracity of our statements. The more and more opinions that we can access, and in our internet age, we can access nearly unlimited numbers of statements of varying degrees of fact, the more and more are arguments become less about persuasion and more about self-justification.
I’m not about to argue that one’s voice does not matter, nor should we ever stop telling the truth with authority. Yet truth, as well as historical records, perceptions of reality, and interpretations of events and written or spoken words, is always a matter of perspective. The truth of a matter is entirely a matter of how one experiences it in a context of race, class, gender, and faith. In Flint, in the state of Michigan, and across the United States, our political, religious, and social views are all a product of our life experiences. This is especially true of our opinions, which tend to be statements made out to be facts when they are indeed nothing much more than initial observations of raw data presented to others as “facts” with the specific intention of supporting our primary set of beliefs.
I had important conversations yesterday with my host family that help me put the above statements into perspective for me. Now I must make sense of how to talk to others about Flint, and what the Gospel says about being a servant to others, in the context of how I make sense of raw data through the lenses of my faith, class, education, and personal experiences.
Driving into the church yesterday morning, I had shared that the chief of Flint’s police force was fired because he was using door-to-door water delivery as a means of arresting folks who had warrants. I don’t remember where I read this, but it was a part of a news story in an information source that I trust, and I repeated the information as an indicator of how bad the injustice in Flint had become, and, as an example of why some people will never trust authority. It turns out that the Flint police department never arrested anyone in this manner, that it is against policy, and that the mayor never believed that his rumor was true. The rumor was sourced to a Genesee County Jail inmate by an “alternative” media post by a radical political group. I do not have any disregard for inmates or radical political groups – but the source I gathered the information from was not one of these sources.
I immediately believed the story about the Chief of Police because in my experience, and from the perspective of my social class, it was not only not surprising that police would do this, but in the climate of chaos in Flint it made the statement all the more believable. In light of this false information, I formed a number of opinions about the ability of government to respond to crisis, and the legitimacy of local leadership that had been in place for the past few years. But let me say this – anytime I stated that the Flint police force was arresting people while distributing water, I was not stating an opinion – I was restating a lie or a misinterpreted event which was narrated by someone with a perspective that was radically different from reality. Data like this, true or not, are informants of opinions. When I was trying to inform someone else’s opinion of Flint, of the establishment’s response or culpability to the water crisis, or when I was simply trying to make sense of everything, I did so by forming opinions built upon the various information that I gathered. Opinions can be flawed, and not only that, the more our opinions are challenged when someone points out false assumptions that buoy the rest of our beliefs.
Once we respond to events based on perceptions reinforced by selective use of information that fits nicely with our personal beliefs or desired outcomes, we tend not only to skew the response toward emerging from relationships as a winner, we skew our ability to empathize with both victims and victimizers. We engage in a battle over what truth emerges from the ongoing narrative of Flint instead of engaging in loving responses to the most important fact – that Flint needs assistance in emerging from this crisis and being whole again.
This is the nature of gospel ethics. Christian and biblical ethics should always be sourced from a perspective of servanthood and voluntary sacrifice as a reflection of how God responded to the astounding reality of evil and violence. Faith is not a matter of opinion, and it should, when the rubber meets Corunna Rd, not be a matter of belief. Faith is an affirmation of God’s faithfulness – we respond to crisis and injustice by sacrificing our own agendas on behalf of those who do not have the means to meet their own needs. Once my Christian ethics become clouded with political, economic, or uninformed opinions, I am no longer positively serving a God who makes the rain fall upon both the just and unjust. I am more invested, at that point, in controlling outcomes, the behaviors and beliefs of others, and the potential that I might be able to force positive change upon people who do not see the world in the same way that I do. Often, the Good News is not so good if it cannot be voluntarily received as such.
The manner in which politicians, citizens, businesses, and the federal government are held accountable for what happens in Flint, as the truth of how and why it happened, will be the focus of a number of people for a number of years. There is no quick fix. But the Christian response should be clear – sin is responsible for all brokenness, and we should never be surprised that sin sometimes has catastrophic results. The church is responsible for exposing the weakness of sin and embodying the power that comes only from voluntary yet bold sacrifice that redeems all involved regardless of their culpability. The church treats the symptoms of sin, and exposes sin as a disease, then offers an alternative to sin that recognizes confession and forgiveness make a toxic state of living manageable, and then, overwhelms it with positive, relational action.
My education, social class, and experience with law enforcement made it easy for me to believe an untruth, and then apply that misinformation to my persuasive arguments. But persuasive arguments are intended to change political or social outcomes, but not in the manner of the Gospel ethics of servanthood. Certainly, the apostles argued from Scripture that Jesus was the Messiah, but it is their actions and ministries that made the claim credible, not debates at the Temple or in Athens. The authorities tried to shut down the gospel wherever it was preached, and even when apostles were incarcerated, they preached Jesus. But they never preached the Gospel from the perspective of punishment for the sins of the jailers. They preached that the gospel was so liberating that even prisoners could be justified for their suffering while the church has historically tried to redeem broken systems such as mass incarceration and prison conditions, all the while working to change the perspective of the jailers themselves.
My opinions are worth a “dime a dozen.” The Gospel tells me to spend those dimes in the service of others, not on political outcomes that rely on combativeness and argumentation.
