Magazine

ON TUESDAY, NOV. 8, control of federal spending and legislation will be at stake with every seat in the House of Representatives up for election along with a third of the U.S. Senate, not to mention countless offices at the state and local level. Many of these races are critical for determining what the next few years will look like in the United States and beyond.

Christians should resist single-issue voting and instead apply our faith across a broad range of issues that impact human dignity and human flourishing. Our faith should inform and shape how we evaluate candidates and cast our ballots. While many important issues will be on the ballot this midterm—from inflation and the state of our economy to reproductive health, climate justice, our continued response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and a range of racial justice issues, to name just a few—increasingly the fate of democracy itself will be on the ballot. The challenge is that democracy is not often treated as a top-tier issue and can be easily taken for granted. As the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection has illuminated with sobering and chilling clarity, our democracy is not a given. A criminal conspiracy by former President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election and the ongoing efforts to erect new barriers to the right to vote have damaged and continue to imperil our democracy. In the face of these threats, it is important that the midterm election becomes a referendum on whether candidates are committed to protecting and strengthening a more inclusive and just multiracial democracy.

Many state legislatures have recently passed laws making it easier to interfere with and subvert election results, which alongside voter suppression directly threatens the health of U.S. democracy.

DURING THE “KLITSCHKO ERA,” the first decade and a half of this century, Vitali Klitschko and his brother, Wladimir, reigned over the world of heavyweight boxing—The Ring magazine listed both of them on its list of the greatest heavyweights of all time. Today, the brothers are engaged in a battle with much higher stakes than anything they faced in the ring. Vitali is now mayor of Kyiv, Ukraine. Soon after Vladimir Putin’s forces stormed into Ukraine, the brothers issued a call on social media for religious leaders and others to visit their embattled country as a sign of solidarity and support.

YOU, FAITHFUL CHURCH workers, have survived the demands of Lent, Holy Week, Easter, and Pentecost, and I’m willing to wager you are tired. By this time in the liturgical cycle, I’m usually exhausted and my spiritual (and sometimes physical) walk includes a pronounced limp. Vocational and social demands have taken their toll, not to mention the profound collective trauma we have all been through. Two years ago this summer, the waves of direct action in response to the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd left many of us particularly drained. And the shootings have not stopped. We have all done and been through so much.

Throughout the New Testament, the text refers to faith using the Greek word pistis. That word can also translate as faithfulness, a dogged determination that refuses to acquiesce or let anyone stifle it. It’s the same faith exercised by the woman with the flow of blood and shown in the litany of ancestors in Hebrews 11. It is more than sentimental, and sometimes is best exercised by simply being still and remembering who God is.

Our scriptures this month encourage us to exercise and examine our faith so that we keep going forward, even if we must stop and reset ourselves. Whether our posture is active or passive, our faith is still called into action because the world needs our witness.

IN A FORMER job, I traveled to farms scattered around the world searching for coffee beans to make espresso drinks for Western consumption. I became intimately aware of the complex origins of something as seemingly simple as a cup of coffee and witnessed firsthand the currents of a worldwide distribution system that transfers surplus value from the Global South to the Global North.

In Reconsidering Reparations, Olúfémi Táíwò, an assistant professor of philosophy at Georgetown University, describes the history of this system and how it contextualizes discussion of reparations. Colonialism and trans-Atlantic slavery, what he terms the “global racial empire,” created the world and the complex web of social and economic relations we inhabit today. This system has resulted in an accumulation of safety, education, food, health care, and opportunity in Western countries and insecurity and precarity in the Global South. Táíwò argues this history is “not simply a point of comparison to the present. It is a way to map the currents that engulf us in the present.”

Unsurprisingly, these currents extend to the vulnerabilities occasioned by climate change. The metrics most equated with human flourishing—life expectancy, maternal mortality rates, dietary adequacy, literacy rates, sanitation accessibility, and “government effectiveness” (civil liberties, political rights, and governing accountability)—are significantly worsened by a country’s history of colonization and intensified by climate change. Climate justice and racial justice turn out to be the same project, in response to the same political history of global racial empire.

NUMBNESS IS GOOD for dental work and as a temporary coping skill in surviving direct traumas. But most of us are not survivors of tornados or wildfires, haven’t lost our loved one to a young man with an assault rifle, nor worked triple ICU shifts at the peak of the pandemic. Yet many of us, myself included, hunker down deeper into whatever task is at hand when another breaking news bulletin about a mass shooting pops up on our phone. We barely glance at the latest tally of U.S. COVID-19 deaths or reports on war and natural disaster.

A few things recently have cracked open my numbness and made me wonder if we owe it to the dead and the grieving to let our hearts break.

I first saw the photo of a child-sized casket decorated with princess pink and a TikTok logo in a story shared on Instagram. Trey Ganem, a man who has a business creating custom caskets, had donated his work to the grieving families in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two teachers were killed in their school by an 18-year-old with an assault rifle. Ganem sat with parents and asked about their children. Then he and his team made designs reflecting the delights and obsessions of typical childhoods: TikTok. Spider-Man. Softball. Whales for the girl who dreamed of becoming a marine biologist. The colors were bright and glossy; the caskets’ handles and trims were lovingly painted to match.

In the past I might have pondered the prevalence of commercialism in both American childhood and the funeral industry, or the cultural history of how we grieve. But this was only days after the Uvalde shooting, and the juxtaposition of cheerful designs on obscenely small caskets brought a rush of feeling: I wept at a stranger’s heartfelt attempt to bring solace to the inconsolable. I was deeply agitated that we are a country where slaughtered kids are sent to their graves in candy-colored caskets while politicians and weapons manufacturers rake in power and profit.

WHEN REVIEWING FILMS, especially from a faith-based angle, it’s natural to look for concrete messages. Most mainstream films tell three-act stories, and those typically include a tidy resolution that presents a perspective or moral. But film is also an art form, and great art is more interested in creating atmosphere and asking questions than providing answers—not unlike faith, which teaches us to pose unanswerable questions and to sit with uncertainty.

For those who like tidy narratives, filmmaker Alex Garland’s work can be frustrating. Garland’s films are concerned with big concepts, many related to the characters’ desire for control at the expense of their humanity and others’ lives. However, his films rarely answer the questions they pose, leaving room for viewer interpretation. For audiences willing to engage with art that lives in an in-between place, this can be a thrilling, sometimes visceral, experience.

Garland’s latest film, Men, is his most tonally upsetting and his most abstruse. In it, Harper (Jessie Buckley) rents a country manor as a space to emotionally recover from the violent death—a possible suicide—of her husband, James (Paapa Essiedu). Her idyllic solitude is disrupted by a series of men (all played by Rory Kinnear) who threaten her emotionally, psychologically, and physically. The men appear in various forms, including a patronizing older man, a vulgar child, a manipulative vicar, a macho policeman, and a naked, silent stalker.

The concept itself is clear; Men is about the act of male intrusion on the lives of women. But it’s the way the movie communicates the theme that creates questions Garland would rather ask than answer.

IN APRIL, Pope Francis made a long-awaited apology to a Canadian delegation of Inuit, First Nations, and Métis leaders at the Vatican for the “deplorable” violations children suffered at Catholic-run Indian Residential Schools for more than a century. The pope committed to come to Canada in late July to make his confession personally to residential school survivors and their descendants for “the abuse and disrespect for your identity, your culture, and even your spiritual values.”

In this historic apology, Pope Francis stated, “Clearly, the content of the faith cannot be transmitted in a way contrary to the faith itself.”

This watershed moment comes 25 years after Harry Lafond—a Catholic and then-chief of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation in Saskatchewan—raised issues of Indigenous faith and culture in a historic audience with Pope John Paul II during the Vatican’s 1997 Synod of the Americas. An educator and Catholic deacon, Lafond and his ancestors have a long history of building bridges between settler and Indigenous communities. J.B. Lafond, Harry’s great grandfather, was a spokesperson for Chief Keetoowayhow at the sixth of the 11 numbered treaties signed by First Nations with the Canadian Crown between 1871 and 1877. At the Treaty 6 table in 1876, J.B. Lafond negotiated with a British colonial government for relief from the flood of encroaching European settlers on the prairies. The parties were trying to avoid the violence waged against the Lakota, Dakota, and Cheyenne to their south. Though traditional Muskeg Lake Cree territory covered hundreds of square miles, Treaty 6 allotted a reserve of only 42 square miles.

Harry Lafond’s family has lived on the Treaty 6 reserve since then. He and eight of his 11 siblings attended nearby St. Michael’s (Duck Lake) Indian Residential School, run by the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1975, after marrying Germaine Laplante, a former Catholic sister of Métis (mixed European and Indigenous) heritage, Lafond worked as an educator and then served for a decade as chief at Muskeg Lake. Later, he directed the Office of the Treaty Commissioner of Saskatchewan, formed to bring Indigenous views of treaty covenants to the wider settler community. His tenure coincided with the years of Canada’s groundbreaking Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

In 2015, after six years of gathering testimony from across Canada, the TRC issued 94 calls to action to repair past and continuing damages wrought by the residential school system as an instrument of colonization. These included 10 calls directed toward churches, one of which demanded an apology from the pope on Canadian soil for abuses—which is being realized this summer, thanks to seeds planted by leaders such as Harry Lafond.

Today, Lafond continues to foster dialogue about what it means to be both Cree and Catholic. He works to renew Cree language and traditions among his people, while accompanying settlers interested in restorative solidarity. In May, the first federal study of Native American boarding schools in the U.S. identified more than 400 Indian Residential Schools and more than 50 associated burial sites. We interviewed Lafond in March and May 2022 by Zoom and email about his journey toward restorative justice and how the church might be replanted in Cree culture and land.—Elaine Enns and Ched Myers

Elaine Enns and Ched Myers: How did you feel when you heard Pope Francis’ apology in April to the First Nations delegation?

Harry Lafond: Pope Francis is an exceptional man with a very strong instinct to find the right path to the hearts of his visitors. I felt great hope and comfort that together we will find our way to wahkohtowin, Cree law for making relatives. And I recognize that it is an event that should have taken place 500 years ago.

IN THE OPENING scene of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 silent film The King of Kings, a scantily clad but opulently accessorized Mary Magdalene reclines on a lush chaise lounge, caressing a cheetah. She’s an upper-class prostitute, and she learns that Judas, one of her clients, has left her to follow a carpenter. Furious, Mary demands, “Harness my zebras—gift of the Nubian King! This Carpenter shall learn that he cannot hold a man from Mary Magdalene!”

Before she mounts her chariot, someone wagers a purse of gold that she won’t be able to take Judas back from Jesus, because Jesus has magical power to heal the blind. Mary scoffs in reply, “I take thy wager—I have blinded more men than He hath ever healed!”

An angry, haughty Mary finds Jesus, but when he looks at her, she is shaken and steps back. Jesus begins to heal her of seven demons, which emerge one by one from her body like ghosts. After the demons have departed, Mary looks down at her partially naked body, picks up her cloak to cover her skin and hair, then kneels at Jesus’ feet. He pats her head, as if patting a child, and looks away, speaking not to her, but to a man beside him.

I had enjoyed Mary Magdalene’s exotic transportation via zebras, her fury at being scorned, her verbal sparring with the men who doubt her ability to win Judas back. But as I watched the “demons” drain out of her, I felt her life draining too. Now docile and meek, she responds to healing by clothing herself more modestly. The viewer, I take it, is supposed to feel amazed at her transformation. Instead, I felt horror, like I was watching Christianity’s centuries-long suppression of women captured in a 20-second clip, with Mary Magdalene standing in for all of us. The film was silent, but I could hear it speaking to women loud and clear: “Cover up. Lower your eyes. Kneel. Repent. Leave your body and your sexuality behind. Submit. That’s a good girl. You are allowed to belong now.”

Centuries of obsession

WHILE CHEETAHS AND zebras and Judas as Mary’s patron were new adornments to the Mary Magdalene story, the rest of the film’s portrayal was consistent with how Mary has been painted in popular culture for the last 1,500 years: Mary, the prostitute and sinner, turned repentant.

In the earliest accounts, Mary Magdalene is never called a prostitute. Luke 8 says she was healed of demons, but nothing is mentioned about her line of work. It is not until 591 C.E. that Pope Gregory I preaches a sermon calling Mary Magdalene a prostitute, and the misidentification has stuck.

WE OFTEN UTTER the phrase “Christ bore our sins” in a metaphysical sense, assuming sins occupy a place in our hearts, consciences, or spirits. Jesus died, we think, because of our spiritual transgressions. But I’m starting to see that sin isn’t just spiritual (as if anything could be just spiritual in our very physical world). Sin is also environmental. It impacts our air, water, and soil. It alters our ecosystems.

Sin might be defined as stepping out of right relationship with Creator and the rest of creation. The standard American lifestyle, which would require five Earths to sustain if everyone lived this way, puts the U.S. in a state of dire transgression. Pursuing a bloated illusion of progress, so many businesspeople, decision-makers, and culture-shapers have ignored the cost.

The wages of sin is death, says the apostle Paul (Romans 6:23). Today we are witnessing mass extinctions of species, destruction of homes and habitats by climate chaos, and premature deaths in communities closest to pollution sources. I live in one of these communities, though I didn’t know it when we moved here. My town is home to four Superfund sites, legacy pollution from a gaslight mantle factory that later produced thorium for the country’s atomic bombs in World War II. Though the sites have been remediated, residual contamination will pervade the land for millennia to come. Researching this history, I notice who moved away—white folks with resources—and who stayed—brown and white working-class folks who had no choice. Who would choose contamination?