As I have watched the implosion of the Christian Reformed Church, I have been particularly struck by the insistence that the “debate”[1] about human sexuality is nothing like other debates the denomination has had, particularly debates about racism or women in office. The party line is the CRC may have gotten it wrong on race once upon a time and may have been able to agree to disagree on women in office, but it is getting it right on LGBTQ+ people, and there is no room to agree to disagree.
As Andy Sytsma, writing for the Abide Project, said, to imagine that we can agree to disagree on LGBTQ+ issues “wrongly equates the matter of SSM (same sex marriage) with women in office, but they are two different kinds of controversies.” In the same post, he argues that white affirming Christians are “tone-deaf to the majority of the Global Church and most of our non-Anglo pastors.” They are not the ones being racist here.
This flat rejection of any argument by analogy is necessary to maintain the tidy fiction that the exclusion of Queer people is not simply part and parcel of the larger, idolatrous, project of “white Western male supremacy.”
Before I go any further, I should clarify that I’m not channeling Critical Race Theory or parroting something I picked up in a DEI training. The phrase “white Western male supremacy,” is a direct quote from a 1985 January Series talk by Hendrik (Henk) Hart.
Henk was born in the Netherlands and educated at Calvin College and the Free University of Amsterdam. He was deeply committed to the transformational, “always reforming,” part of being Reformed, and shaped generations of leaders as one of the founders of the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto. (The Institute for Christian Studies recently cut its historical ties with the Christian Reformed Church.)
Henk had been invited to talk at Calvin about “A Calvinist idea of public justice as an antidote to racism.” I had gone looking for this lecture,[2] originally delivered when I was about to turn three years old, because I spent a lot of my time at Calvin reading and advocating for the From Every Nation (FEN) document, the University’s commitment to anti-racism, multiculturalism, and reconciliation. FEN opens with some historical context about Calvin’s first plan related to diversity,[3] which after some digging, I learned traced back to Henk’s lecture. A document written after a lecture felt very culturally Calvin, very academic, and I hadn’t expected to find much exciting. I was wrong.
What I found was that here, at the very beginnings of Calvin’s commitments to anti-racism, there was no distinction between discrimination based on race, sex, or sexuality. In Henk’s mind, all were seen as dimensions of the same problem: “White Western male supremacy.”
This sort of intersectional analysis was all the more surprising given the context— which was Apartheid.[4]
Henk Hart was at Calvin in the immediate aftermath of a debate within the global Reformed community about how to respond to our theological (and for many, ethnic) brothers and sisters who were committed to defending Apartheid. The World Alliance of Reformed Churches had condemned Apartheid as a sin in 1982. The anti-Apartheid Dutch Reformed Mission Church wrote the Belhar Confession the same year. In the CRC, Synod 1984 had finally declared Apartheid a heresy.[5]
Given this context, both the FEN document that eventually emerged out of his talk and the rancorous Apartheid debate that preceded it, one might have expected Henk to limit his discussion to racism.
But about 26 minutes in, he outlines what he thinks is really going on here:
“In discrimination, I fear myself in others. I, a white male, may fear being Black. I might fear being gay. I might fear being female. But as God’s image bearers, such people too, are like me. In discriminating against them, I discriminate against myself. I end up fearing myself in them.”
This is the sort of insight that comes out of the Reformed tradition at its best: the ability to say this isn’t just about politics, or social problems, or differences of opinion, but about fundamentally different worldviews, different understandings of humanity and sin. About ten minutes later, Hart says:
“Racism is religious rebellion at its core, it is a sin not just against any commandment, but against the first and the second commandment, that is, against the heart of the whole law. A racist doesn’t only, merely, not fully love his neighbor of a different race, he commits the more grievous sin of not recognizing his neighbor as a self.”
I was a bit disappointed here, thinking perhaps his earlier intersectional analysis had been a one-off. But as he draws to a close, he returned to it even more forcefully, his Dutch brogue rising from a series of questions into a crescendo of emphatic statements:
“Insofar as the cause of liberation in our times must confront the religious force of oppressive ideologies, it is instructive to ask what three popular liberation movements have in common? Namely the liberation of non-white peoples, women’s liberation, and gay liberation. They all have in common a threat to white male superiority. In white racism, we meet the pride and arrogance, I believe, of the exclusivity of the image of God in the white male… White Western male supremacy is threatened by a Black who is not white, a woman who is not male, a gay whose orientation is not machismo. These three classes of people are not oppressed for what they made of their lives, or for what became of them, they are oppressed for what they are constitutionally, for how they are born.”
In Nicholas Wolterstorff’s writing, he often highlights the “quartet of the vulnerable” in the Hebrew prophets: the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, and the poor. Here, I believe, Hart is highlighting something similar, a trio of the vulnerable, who find themselves oppressed having done nothing, not even having experienced anything, but simply for existing.
It turns out, then, that the Abide Project is right to reject arguments from analogy. The debate over human sexuality is not like debates about racism, or debates about women in office, it is, actually, the same debate. The questions cannot be neatly separated. This is something I have always believed, and certainly something reinforced by the personal testimonies of the Queer and trans Black students I had at Calvin, but it was notable to hear Henk say it 40 years ago, from a stage at the Calvin Fine Arts Center.
Hendrik Hart died in 2021. In the year before his death, he returned again to themes he had laid out four decades earlier at Calvin. It was September, 2020, and the world was reckoning with the murder of George Floyd. Henk wrote:
“Now that we are seriously beginning to face up to racism, is it helpful to realize that what we see in racism is a broader phenomenon than discrimination focused on someone’s race? Are trans people less vulnerable to painful discrimination because the police cannot spot them? Is it easier to be a lesbian than being black? Is racism not a specific manifestation of a deeper problem with a greater scope, namely discrimination focused on a dimension of who a person unavoidably is beyond that person’s ability to change? Is the average white male God’s norm for being human?
“I believe these issues are more important than we customarily think.”
Even as he wrote this, Henk knew he was dying. In that same post he noted that, “I do not foresee my continuing participation in this blog. I deeply regret this. Doing so would add to the meaning of the last months of my life.” His final post found this glimmer of hope, that in our “electronic world,” his story and his work might inspire others: “In that way my world of dying could be life giving to others. That gives me joy.”
I never knew Henk Hart personally, but he has always inspired me as an academic and, to use his term, a Reformationalist. My sense is that if there is new life to be found in the death of the CRC, it will be in finally seeing that all of this is connected. It will be in perfect love driving out fear of the other. It will be in active pursuit of public justice. It will be in Reformed Christians rejecting white Western male supremacy.
[1] Quotes here because intellectually debating the humanity of other people, as if they were theological riddles to solve, is revolting.
[2] I am deeply indebted to Will Katerberg at the Heritage Hall archives for helping me find it.
[3] The Comprehensive Plan for Integrating North American Ethnic Minority Persons and Their Interests into Every Facet of Calvin’s Institutional Life (1985).
[4] Apartheid has of course been in the news again lately as the world’s richest man guts the U.S. government. Elon’s Apartheid-loving maternal grandfather moved from Canada to South Africa just to be a part of it. President Trump, after dismantling our refugee resettlement programs, signed an executive order specifically for the “resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination.” The past refuses to remain the past.
[5] It’s worth noting that Calvin religion professor Henry Vander Goot was still writing in 1986 that “On the basis of history and Scripture, I believe that separate development is a fundamentally Christian idea,” and that the “spiritual unity of the body of Christ” does not require “an integrated society.”
One Response
Excellent. Thanks.
One complication: actually, I think that it’s often possible to “spot” Trans people (though hardly always) especially as they work the challenging landscape of transitioning, and if you live out of a defensive and fearful Christian posture, or Nationalist perspective, I can imagine hatred and even rage at the presumed disloyalty to customary norms of appearance and bodily expression. Thus the particular scapegoating of Trans people by MAGA and the Christian Right. For me, at least, affirming Trans people means newly realizing the wonder of the love of God and the future of the Reign of God.