Do spiritual motivations matter?

Thoughts on a justice-centered spirituality

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to me to be a person of integrity. I’ve also been questioning what it means to believe in a justice-centered spirituality. I can’t separate these two questions.

These questions are coming up for me right now for a couple of reasons.

The first is the situation in the Middle East. As a person who is maintaining a justice-centered brand, I feel compelled to speak out. But I have to question my motivations. Do I feel compelled to speak out because it’s the right thing to do or do I feel compelled to speak out because not to do so would hurt my brand? (I’ll come back to this.)

I’m also chewing over what it means to me to believe in a justice-centered spirituality because of my work on my memoir.

As I write about my twenties, a theme that keeps coming up is my search for theological justifications for things. A theological justification for being queer, being a sexual person, being an activist, etc.

For most of my life, I sought out God’s approval of everything. God’s approval of my life choices, my identity, my beliefs. And it was impossible to separate what I thought God approved of and what the church approved of.

In my mid-twenties, when I officially left evangelicalism and started to have a much broader idea of God, I still sought out God’s approval. This time through progressive theologians.

I read books by queer, feminist, and liberation theologians to justify what I believed to be true. That it was okay to be queer. That we should honor and respect other’s spiritual paths. That the most sacred thing we can do — the most “godly” — would be to reduce the suffering of others.

And when I began to grasp the reality of systemic oppression in my early thirties, I turned to theology to understand what to do about it. Specifically, I turned to James Cone, a black theologian who was instrumental in advancing black liberation theology.

Most influential to me was Cone’s denouncement of Reinhold Niebuhr, a social ethicist and theologian who spoke about the suffering of African Americans and yet failed to condemn the publicly approved lynchings that were happening at that time — the vilest threat against African Americans of his day.

In his book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Cone grounds his critique in theology:

The lynching tree—so strikingly similar to the cross on Golgotha—should have a prominent place in American images of Jesus’ death. But it does not. In fact, the lynching tree has no place in American theological reflections about Jesus’ cross or in the proclamation of Christian churches about his Passion. The conspicuous absence of the lynching tree in American theological discourse and preaching is profoundly revealing, especially since the crucifixion was clearly a first-century lynching. In the ‘lynching era,’ between 1880 to 1940, white Christians lynched nearly five thousand black men and women in a manner with obvious echoes of the Roman crucifixion of Jesus. Yet these ‘Christians’ did not see the irony or contradiction in their actions.

He goes on to say, “The crucifixion of Jesus by the Romans in Jerusalem and the lynching of blacks by whites in the United States are so amazingly similar that one wonders what blocks the American Christian imagination from seeing the connection.” (The emphasis is mine).

The “American Christian imagination” part really stuck with me because what is faith if not a divine use of imagination? We imagine the possibility of divine forces. We imagine prayers being received. We imagine a world beyond this one.

And so, if our imagination fails us, so does our faith. But we don’t just lose our faith, we lose our connection others, as well. We lose empathy.

Empathy requires imagination. Empathy is simply imagining what another person might be feeling based on their current circumstance. And empathy is a necessary component of justice.

Ever since I read this, my personal mantra has been to not be like Niebuhr. I have vowed to use my empathy to connect with others and then act on it. To strive to understand suffering using my imagination, and then speak out.

***

When I left the church completely, my desire to theologically justify my actions didn’t magically go away, but I gave up my allegiance to the tradition that I knew best — the one that I used for decades to understand what a spiritual sense of justice might be.

I no longer feel compelled to align my beliefs with that of the Christian God, but I still care what that more expansive universal presence that I call Spirit believes. I still care about being in alignment with a Universal sense of justice, even as I fail to grasp what it is.

But should I care?

Regarding the title of this post, do spiritual motivations matter, part of what I’m questioning is why I still care about a spiritual sense of justice.

If people are starving, being raped or murdered, and if the planet is dying because of our actions, why does a spiritual response matter?

Of course, a secular motivation to reduce suffering is enough in and of itself. But, for those of us who feel drawn to spiritual questions and practices, to not align our ethics and our spiritual identity just seems wrong to me.

Here’s all the answer I have at the moment, and it’s just an outline of a thought, really.

• For our spirituality to mean anything, it has to address the problem of suffering.

• Conversely, asking spiritual questions about suffering can give us a different perspective. Seeking spiritual guidance might allow us to see beyond our short-sightedness and our ego-based perspective to something greater.

• If we’re truly open to doubt, open to questioning, open to wisdom from beyond, we might be lucky enough to be humbled by the Universe.

I can’t write this and not acknowledge that the U.S. government’s response to the Hamas/Israel war has been deeply impacted by the country’s Christian influences. And yet, the government’s response seems deeply short-sighted and blind to the suffering of so many.

***

I stayed mostly silent after the actions of Hamas on October 7. I felt guilty about not speaking up, and yet I wasn’t sure what to say.

I didn’t know how to speak out against what was happening to the people in Gaza while also acknowledging the great loss that the Israeli people faced. What Hamas did was deplorable and so was Israel’s response.

There is so much I don’t understand about the long history of the contested land; the relationship between the Palestinian people and Hamas; and what a long-term solution could look like that’s fair for the Jewish and Arab people alike.

If I were to say I “stand with Palestine,” does that mean standing with Hamas? Does that mean standing against not only Israel’s military complex but also the Israeli people? Does that mean chalking up the 200+ hostages as casualties of war? Does that mean that Middle Eastern Jews don’t also deserve to be safe?

Today, I finally sent emails to my congressional representatives asking them to support a resolution calling for a ceasefire and humanitarian aid to Gaza. And I posted a link to a form that helps you send similar emails on Instagram. And I need to confess that I can’t separate out my desire to actually help the people in Gaza from my selfish desire to be someone who helps the people in Gaza and my equally selfish desire to maintain my brand.

The real question of integrity for me is what I’ll do a month from now when the hotbed of social media turns its gaze on a new issue.

How does one act with integrity — how does one choose what to focus on and speak up about — when war continues to wage in Ukraine and in the Middle East, while legislation impacting the safety of trans folks and abortion seekers continues to get passed, while Black folks continue to die at the hands of the police, while sex workers’ rights continue to be violated, while immigrants seeking asylum are refused at the border, and on and on and on?

I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

In May, I wrote a post called “What’s the point of a spiritual life?” And that question feels so crucially connected to the rest: What does my personal integrity look like? What does it mean to have a justice-centered spirituality?

As I write this, I have a profound sense of gratitude that I believe it’s possible to connect to my ancestors and spirit guides and Spirit to guide me as I ask these questions.

I know that sounds so weak as thousands of people around the world are dying. But I can only do my small part to help. And, thank Spirit, I don’t have to do it alone.

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P.S. Here are quotes on the importance of imagination from two recent posts:

From Charlie Claire Burgess:

I believe the world we know—the world ruled by white supremacist, colonialist, capitalist patriarchy—not only must fall but will fall. I believe that anything built upon the oppression and subjugation of other people or the extraction and abuse of the earth’s resources and its creatures is not sustainable and is ultimately doomed to fail. And I believe that the future must of necessity be queer, by which I mean radically divergent from what has become the norm, and trans, by which I mean radically transformed and transforming, if we humans are to have any hope of survival. (I want to credit Tyson Yunkaporta, Bayo Akomolafe, adrienne maree brown, José Esteban Muñoz, and Susan Stryker as being instrumental in my thinking here.) I know that seems bleak and scary, but if we can step beyond the terror of losing the known world, we can begin to imagine other ways of living on the planet and relating to one another that are sustainable, connected, equitable, and just. And how beautiful that world might be!  

From Kai Cheng Thom:

That attempt to hold space in one's heart for JK Rowling and trans women who have been murdered or fallen, and for sex workers and for shooters … that is a microcosm of the project that is living in the world, which is that we only have one and we have to share it, unfortunately. So yeah, it's painful. I think mostly it's painful because it feels like something we should be able to do, but then in practice we can't. And that's a paradox that I really struggle to resolve inside myself when one is a child and being taught things, or even watching the Disney movies or whatever, there is this idea about world peace and moving toward mutual understanding.

And of course, real life adult politics are much more complicated than that. But also there is still this part of me, maybe a very young part that's like, but why should it be more complicated than that? Really? Why do we have to dominate and murder people in order to maintain our capitalist lifestyles? And what if we did actually just stop? What are the billionaire class actually thinking, and why are they doing things the way they're doing? Is the military-industrial complex doing what it's doing? It's very complicated questions, but it feels like there should be simple answers. And I think that is the core of faith. Even though we can appreciate how complex things are, I think we have to remember that faith says, actually, another world is possible, otherwise we would not be imagining it.