Opinion

Walking into Iglesia La Gloria de Dios Internacional, a Latino Pentecostal church in the heart of Hialeah, Fla., I felt nervous to be on church grounds. I’m Mexican American, but I don’t speak Spanish; I’m an autistic person who really doesn’t like new situations. And even though it’s now been a year since I moved back home to Miami from Minnesota, I am still a bit self-conscious of my Midwestern accent. But most importantly, I am an atheist and an openly queer and trans person living in Florida.

Commitment to democratic norms is not a matter of political partisanship. The vast majority of Americans believe in, practice, and defend democracy — but there are partisan elites with powerful antidemocratic impulses gaining a foothold. People of faith have values rooted deeper than any political ideology and have led powerful pro-democracy movements around the world. In Hope and History, Vincent G. Harding reminds us that history, like our democracy, is not a spectacle but a task; it’s “a destiny that is still ours to create.”

I won’t impose my 21st-century language or conceptions on this person, and say that he was trans, non-binary, gender non-conforming, or queer, but it’s clear that he did not conform to the social understanding of gender binaries or sex in the ancient Greco-Roman or Jewish world. There’s no getting around that. He was also from one of the farthest-off places early Christian disciples had heard of. The Ethiopian in this text is likely not from the Ethiopia that we know today, and instead is likely from a place called Kush that today is now part of South Sudan.

I felt a sense of somber relief when I learned former President Donald J. Trump had been found guilty of 34 felony charges. Somber: It’s a sad moment when a former president is convicted of falsifying business records to cover up an alleged sexual encounter that could have hurt his presidential campaign in 2016 — a verdict that will inflame the deep divisions in our nation. Relief: This is a victory for the United States’ constitutional commitment that no one, not even a former president, is above the law.

Fury Road drew on Exodus imagery in Furiosa’s flight from the Citadel, leading her people to a promised land. No surprise, then, that the earlier beats of Moses’ story have striking parallels to Furiosa’s backstory.

After the South Carolina Gamecocks women’s basketball team won the NCAAW championship on April 7, 2024, the team’s deeply emotional head coach Dawn Staley attributed the historic win to God: “We serve an unbelievable God — we serve an unbelievable God.” Staley continued, “Uncommon favor, unbelievable.”

What does “uncommon favor” mean exactly? Typically, that phrase has been used in church spaces to denote an unexpected blessing. In Staley’s case, we find her crediting God for blessing her and the Gamecocks with a national championship.

Is this uncommon favor?

The “how” of politics — engaging in ways that uplift civility, truthfulness, empathy, and integrity — still matters, particularly in a time in which our democratic norms and systems are being challenged. From a Christian standpoint, how we engage in politics should be rooted in the fruit of spirit, which in his letter to the Galatian church, the Apostle Paul describes as “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23). Obviously, these virtues are not the norm in our body politic. And while it’s easy to blame politicians, we must first remove the speck from our own eyes. 

Like any Black man, I’ve had no choice but to learn how to navigate racism. But as a man, I’ve had to intentionally educate myself and correct my own sexist behavior.

Men often fear critiques of patriarchy, but I want to keep learning about feminism, which I understand to be the fight for women’s right to self-determination. I was taught to believe that a woman’s central purpose is to serve men’s needs — a message that came from both religious and secular sources. But I am learning that I can challenge that message.

With a feminist framework, I can see that my socialization into gender roles started early. My parents, mass media, the education system, and the church were all part of training me — sometimes overtly and sometime subtly — to believe that because I was male, I was superior to women.

“The Lord is my shepherd: I shall not want.”

Over the phone, Ran Limbu quotes the words of Psalm 23. He is the pastor of Christ Believer Nepali Church, a Bhutanese refugee church on the west side of Madison, Wis. This passage has come alive for him over the past decade while living in the United States of America. This verse has encouraged him to trust that God is his home even in his displacement.