Maybe let’s not remain in community with those who do harm
One of the most harmful oft’ repeated sentiments in Christian culture is the belief that it is required of us to be in community with those with whom we disagree. On the surface, this is a reasonable statement. After all, our lives are made richer when we can sit, listen, and learn from those who are different from us. When we restrict our communities to those who look, think, and live in the same ways we do, we miss out on the richness of God’s creation, living in echo chambers that only reinforce our prejudices and narrow set of beliefs.
The problem comes in when the call to live in community with those who disagree with us is, in actuality, a call to live in community with people who have done us harm, or a call to have no boundaries around our own lives to protect our safety and sanity.
Of course we can, and should, live in community with people who have different theology around communion or the atonement. When we engage in conversation around these defining theological issues, we can be opened up to new ways of thinking or further deepen and define our own beliefs. When I, a radical leftist, sit in community with capitalists or people who believe in the power of our representative democracy as it currently stands, I learn better how to talk to people who believe deeply in the power of the invisible hand of the market, and maybe they will learn that leftists aren’t what the news has told them.
These conversations have little material bearing on my life as I live it today. While they may be heated, they are actually pretty low stakes conversations. No matter how much I wish it would be so, we probably aren’t going to change our current economic system anytime soon, and what someone else believes about the nature of God’s presence in bread and wine affects neither my belief nor my salvation.
Being in community with people with whom we disagree on Eucharistic theology is radically different than remaining in community with people who have done harm. When people in the church get all “come together now” about matters of white-supremacy, anti-LGBTQIA+ theology, or abuse without any sort of atonement, we are doing real harm in this life, in this moment, to those harmed by racism, queer-phobia, ableism, and abuse. Allowing an individual, particularly a leader, to remain in a community in which they have committed acts of racism to continue to live their lives inside of that community does real, continual harm to every PGM (person of the global majority) in that community. A person who does harm is not a safe person for the people who experienced the harm, those who come from the same community as those harmed, or for people who have experienced similar harm in the past. A community that allows that person to remain, without repentance and atonement, is not a safe community for those harmed.
In addition, the people who stay in relationship with people who have committed harm are, by extension, not safe people — unless they have been explicitly asked to stay in relationship with the person who committed harm by the person or community harmed, likely as a part of a transformative justice model of working with harm in communities. When people decide they are going to stay in relationship with a person who has done harm who shows no sign of desire for repentance or atonement, those people are announcing that they are on the side of the person who does harm and are probably not safe.
Should a person in Christian community who has done harm be shunned?
Have they repented? If they haven’t, the answer is yes.
Have they begun the work of atonement? If they haven’t, the answer is yes.
Does the person or community harmed feel comfortable having the person who committed harm in the community? If not, the answer is yes.
“But what about healing for the person who committed the harm? Where are they to go? What are they to do with their gifts?”
To those questions I ask what about the people who were harmed? Where are they to go? What are they to do with their gifts? Why are we always placing the rights of those who have done harm to heal over the rights of the people who have been harmed?
“What about grace?”
Why are we so much more invested in extending grace to those who have done harm than to those who have been harmed?
“What about forgiveness?”
Jesus lived, learned, and taught within a culture with a strong understanding of atonement as a part of a forgiveness process. Matthew 18 tells us that people who won’t listen when told they have done harm should be treated like, “a pagan or a tax collector.” Shortly thereafter in the parable of the unforgiving servant, the servant promised restitution before their debts were forgiven.
Everybody is talking about trauma-informed church right now. If we want to have trauma-informed churches, the first thing they need to be is as safe as possible. The second thing they need to be is transparent. So long as we allow people who commit harm to remain in our communities, we cannot be places where people can have anything resembling safety. So long as our rules for discipline are unclear and authority is used in ways that look random, there is no transparency. What we need are clear boundaries about what is and is not okay and clear processes for what happens when someone commits harm.
Were Christian communities and institutions to have a solid understanding and practice of transformative justice, we could have communities in which those who commit harm and those harmed enter into a process to figure out how the person who committed harm can re-enter community. Were we to untie ourselves from our punitive notions of justice that pervade our consciousness, those who commit harm might be more likely to confess and repent because they would know they would be facing a process that would allow them to atone. We should look to building these systems as we look to build new ways of being in community together. We might even hire people to help us in the situations we are in now, given all parties are willing.
What we should not be doing, at least not without the direction of those most harmed, is engaging in hand wringing about how we might keep those who have harmed others in our community. Let’s save our energy for analyzing the systems that got us here and working to create new ways of being so white supremacy, anti-LGBTQIA+ harm, ableism, sexism, and abuse are no longer a part of church.
