A GOD BEYOND THE BINARY
Frustration washed over me as I collected my things and carried them out of the parish hall and into the side chapel. I was sitting in church on a Monday night this spring while waiting for my kid’s choir practice to end, overwhelmed with dizziness and nausea in the aftermath of one of the worst migraines I’d had in years. And as much as I’ve worked on, touted, and written about body positivity, I couldn’t help but feel irritated at my body.
I believe the migraine was precipitated because I had been pushing through an asthma flareup, determined not to miss things, or have to cancel plans like I have had to do for so many years in the past. And I know the drive to do all the things also comes from the fear that something else will go wrong, or it’ll all get out of balance and everything I love to do will stop again. Also, I don’t want to let people down. I don’t want to say no and tell people why I can’t because I’m all too familiar with the supremacy of ableism that would seek to sideline me even as someone who only sometimes needs accommodations and not someone that is full-time disabled. You see, if certain people get the idea that I’m disabled–even part time–I will become “less than” forever. This status means an accumulation of missed opportunities and side-lining both intentional and otherwise. So my default has been to hide whatever is going on and push through, trying to “pass” as an able-bodied person.
It took me years to realize my chronic health conditions are a dynamic disability and years more to openly talk about them. Who wants to hire someone who can only work sometimes? And then there’s the constant fear that people will think I’m faking. After all, I post hiking pictures all the time, surely I’m “healthy.” The idea that I can be athletic and disabled, but without a visible disability, is something I still struggle to be upfront with because it defies the default and false binaries that society seeks to mold people into.
My symptoms were better that Monday so I drove my youngest to his choir practice and sought refuge in the chapel to get away from the conversations of the other parents. Even with my loop earplugs in, I couldn’t bear the background noise.
The fading evening light filtering through the windows wasn’t bright enough to read my book, so I stared up at the stained glass window. I’d seen it before, and I’ve never liked this window, but that day, I found it extremely unsettling. I’d been listening to the Freedom Road Podcast episode with Dr. Grace Ji-Sun Kim about her most recent book, When God Became White, and the themes from the episode were still playing in my head as I sat there, bathed in the multi-colored light streaming into the chapel. Dr. Kim talks about God becoming “white gendered,” an intentional collision of ideas that highlights how making God into a certain image to benefit certain people leads to a creation of theological underpinnings and rationale for supremacy. And in reality, the ultimate supremacy is narrower than that: white, male, cisgendered, straight, able bodied, and wealthy. Not only does this enforce the false binaries of society, it creates value for one set of them over the other. This ideology of supremacy would have you believe it’s better to be male than female, and those are the only two options. It would have you believe it’s better to be straight than gay, to be white than any other of the options in the global majority, and on it goes.
Almost all of the stained glass windows in the church date to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and were given in memory of many white enslavers from the mid nineteenth century by their children. It’s one thing to translate Jesus into your culture and depict him looking like you. It’s quite another when that is done by one group of people who also have claimed their group is supreme. Then Jesus goes from being a point of identification to a weapon.
The real Jesus–a brown Jesus, a Palestinian Jewish Jesus–threatens the ideology of supremacy. Therefore, he must be killed again by white Jesus. Jesus was a member of an indigenous, oppressed group under foreign rule, and as such is a natural point of identification for oppressed people. The Bible is so full of arcs of justice and liberation for all that white enslavers literally cut it up before allowing the Africans they enslaved to read it, and it was still powerful enough for those enslaved to identify with, and practice their own faith apart from supremacist culture in hush harbors.
I was also sitting with an NCIS episode from season one that I’d watched over lunch that day. It was the final straw for me realizing I can’t watch this show. Beyond that fact that all murder mysteries featuring law enforcement as the protagonists are apologetics for law enforcement (that’s another essay all together), the original NCIS is sexist, homophobic, and transphobic. I’d given it a try because I’d enjoyed NCIS Hawaii and Sydney, characterized by a diverse cast, strong female leads, and some LGBTQIA+ characters.
The original show begins with all white leads, and the first queer person to show up in the story is a trans woman who turns out to be the fugitive they’re searching for. As soon as they realize this is the same person, the entire cast immediately starts to misgender her, deadname her, and the agent who’d been on a date with her as part of the surveillance (I know), is immediately disgusted that this woman is trans, and he’d been making out with her. And then as she tries to escape, the lead agent–a cis white man–shoots her in the face in front of a bar full of people in a particularly egregious shooting even by the standards of the show. It was a directing decision that seemed to exist only to make a statement.
Trans women are victims of violence at a much higher rate than other LGBTQIA+ folks, even more so if they are black or brown. Trans women represent a particular threat to male supremacy and therefore must be killed. Brown Jesus represents a threat to white supremacy and therefore must be killed by being replaced with white Jesus.
So there I was, taking refuge in the chapel and the only light is coming through this large stained glass window in which super blond, aryan Jesus is surrounded by rainbow colored clouds with his hands in the air looking like he’s rolling his eyes with what I can only imagine is relief to be done with all the stupid little people on earth as he ascends back into heaven.
That’s not Jesus, I thought to myself, and yet if you were uninitiated in anything related to Jesus—or even if you were—if you walk into my church, white Jesus is all there is to see. And white Jesus doesn’t give a crap about ableism, transphobic television shows or genocides of brown people, he’s too busy rolling his eyes at everything down here.
I walked around the nave looking at the rest of the windows in the church, all figures depicted as white, all figures depicted as thin. All figures are conventionally attractive. Almost all are standing, most of them are male. No hint of disability, or variety, clearly according to the windows in my church, only a certain type of people are really “chosen.” Never mind Pentecost and Ethiopian eunuchs and Hagar naming God. Never mind the woman at the well, or Mary Magdalene appointed as the first apostle. Never mind the audacity of the woman who touched the hem of his garment, or the woman who won an honor contest with Jesus in public. Never mind. The windows are clear about who the kingdom of God belongs to.
Except. Except the actual characters in the Bible are diverse, are indigenous, are male and female and sexual minorities. Are sick and healthy and blessed regardless. Are almost exclusively non-white and yet are the main characters in the story. Are poor, working class, indigenous people working off the land as fisherman and farmers, carpenters and even reformed tax collectors who would have likely been hated by their own people for colluding with the invading empire. Jesus goes out of his way to include those excluded and there is nothing more antithetical to the gospel than any form of supremacy.
Scripture shows us a God who reveals themself in male and female terms, giving us a God beyond the binary, a God who transcends gender and therefore embodies any gender, a God who was crucified and permanently bears the marks of that in God’s body. A God whose perfection is in perfect love and not any one racial or gender identity or physical ability or status. A God who reaches into the sidelines and makes people that society has discounted and discarded the main characters in the story.
