The Importance of "And": The Forgotten Political Message of Christianity
Editor's note: Diana Butler Bass will be speaking at the Church Anew online conference, Being Church Today, on August 17, 2020 about leading from our deepest sense of identity. In her weekly newsletter, The Cottage, she explores Christianity's first creed and her hope for a different kind of Christian politics.
Religion News Service was quick to point out that Kamala Harris, the newly selected Democratic vice-presidential candidate, is both bi-racial and bi-religious:
Harris, who was born in Oakland, California, to a Jamaican immigrant father…and an Indian immigrant mother…is both Black and South Asian. She grew up in a home that accommodated both Christian and Hindu religious practices.
Black and Asian. Christian and Hindu.
Over the coming weeks, it is important to remember the “and” of Kamala Harris’ experience. That little word – and – is a conjunction which, as the dictionary puts it, connects things “that are to be taken jointly.”
We forget how important “and” is, this small, modest word.
In the case of Sen. Harris, the “and” acts as a bridge between identities that most people consider distinct. Race and ethnicity, faith and religion – these are humanity’s unbridgeable divides. When we imagine these things, we picture boundaries, borders, and walls. Not unity, not what we share.
There is a potent political message in her “and”: a candidate whose life embodies a bridge counterposed to a President who based his previous campaign on building a wall. This election is about choosing between bridges and walls. Do we want to span that which seems impossible to connect or strengthen the fortifications that separate?
Most people think Christianity is necessarily part of the wall-building enterprise.
Indeed, some call for a “Christian America,” a thinly veiled desire for a white, religiously unified state. Many believe that to be a Christian means to reject other religions – to follow a singular way with an exclusive savior. Church membership requires adherence to creeds and particular dogma that proclaim Christian superiority over and against other – and lesser – prophets and teachers. “Bridge” is not the infrastructure associated in popular culture with “Christian.” Wall, fortress, moat, yes. Bridge, not really.
This would have been a big surprise to the early Christians, those who took up the new faith in the years following Jesus’ death. They proclaimed a creed. But it wasn’t the familiar creed that most Christians know from church. The first creed was thus:
For you are all children of God in the Spirit.
There is no Jew or Greek;
There is no slave or free;
There is no male and female.
For you are all one in the Spirit.
