Soulforce

Sabotage Christian Supremacy

Blog Post

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Orlando, FL, February 27, 2017 – Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI) direct action group Soulforce is heading to the host hotel of a major conservative Christian communications conference, the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) Proclaim 2017, and neither the hotel nor the event organizers happy about it.

The NRB is a global leader in conservative Christian broadcasting with 1100+ members and an international audience of millions around the world.

“The NRB presents itself as the infallible arbiter of all things Christianity in its statement of faith, which focuses primarily on sex,” said Yaz Mendez Nuñez, Soulforce Programs Director.  “The Proclaim conference is where they gather each year to drive the message home that Islam, feminism, and the LGBTQI community are dangerous to their God. As a person of faith, I refuse to believe that.”

Soulforce and its local partners and activist members are setting up a “Living Altar of Resistance” inside the hotel tonight, an altar made up of over 400 doves decorated by supporters around the world. They intend to hold round-the-clock vigil for the duration of the conference.

“I am passionate about this because hate has already come into our city and shot down 49 people, while injuring 52 others.  Hate tried on June 12, 2016 and now hate is returning to our city.  Love wins, however.  Love always wins,” says local Rev. Terry Steed Pierce of Joy Metropolitan Community Church.

Date: February 27 to March 2, 1027

Time: Email for this sensitive information.

Location: Marriott World Center Hotel located 8701 World Center Dr, Orlando, FL 32821

The activists are committed to continued vigil after the launch until forcibly removed, and the host hotel has promised to remove them. It is yet uncertain whether those steps will include arrest.

“The NRB has blood on its hands. They create the conditions that make our community a target of violence,” stated Rev. Alba Onofrio, the group’s spiritual strategist. “In Orlando, where the LGBTQI community is still reeling from the violence done at the site of the Pulse Massacre, it is an affront to our human dignity to have such a hate-based conference here.”

The doves have shipped in from LGBTQI and allies people across the country in solidarity with the Orlando community and in remembrance of the 49 Latinx people lost at the Pulse Massacre.

This is not the first interaction between the activist group and the NRB. The NRB and host hotel had the activists removed after they interrupted the keynote address from Rick Warren at Proclaim 2016. The NRB updated their policies in response to include explicit rejection of transgender and gender non-conforming people the day after.

Community members are invited to join the protest, as the group intends to be present all week inside the hotel, though Soulforce has formally been told they are not welcome to conduct their protest activities. The security has assured the activists they will be removed from the premises.

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“Frankly, DeVos is an alum of my college, Calvin College, and I’m very disappointed with her appointment.”

It has been days since Betsy DeVos has been confirmed to the position of Secretary of Education in Trump’s cabinet, and our people refuse to comply.

Alongside tens of thousands of calls from around the U.S. to convince senators not to instate DeVos, protestors continue to push at every turn — for example, refusing to allow DeVos to enter the building of a D.C. school after her confirmation.

DeVos is a billionaire and graduate of Calvin College in West Michigan. Her family outspends the Koch brothers on Right Wing political causes every year – particularly focusing on Religious Right infrastructure for Christian colleges. 

Students at Christian colleges in West Michigan, the homebase of the DeVos family, are similarly refusing to comply with the ideals, theologies, and structures that bolster DeVos’s wealth and power.

A letter circulating in West Michigan has collected over 700 signatures from students and alumni of Calvin College opposing DeVos’s confirmation in the past month.

Today we lift up some of the voices of LGBTQI students from West Michigan on DeVos’s appointment.

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From a senior student at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI:

“As someone who has been spiritually violated by my college, purposefully and without purpose, Devos represents everything wrong with my college education. 

“Her mother, the matriarch of the Prince Family, is one of the leading donators to anti-LGBTQIA+ orgs. Her brother is a war monger.

“To think that Calvin will put her higher on the wall of distinguished Alumni…

“I don’t know what I am going to do this year, as a student again, to take care of myself at a place that has “borne a degree” for this woman. 

“The only political org that Calvin has, besides Student Senate, is the Calvin Republicans who invite the likes of white supremacists on campus, under the guise of learning constitutional freedoms! 

“Must I go back to school to organize and then let my education go by the wayside again?”

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From a junior student at Hope College in Holland, MI:

“Betsy Devos represents the interests of the billionaire class at the expense of low income families.  

“Her confirmation is one step towards consolidating an oligarchy of elites with personal ties to Trump, which poses a dangerous threat to the American public.  

“Her history of activism against public schooling serves to advance the agenda of the Religious Right, and her complete ineptitude on issues of national education is cause for grave concern. 

“When thousands at your alma mater, and hundreds of students at the school your children attend, join together in protest against your position, maybe it is time to reevaluate your life’s direction.”

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Youth in West Michigan understand the link between the DeVos family and their schools’ complicity in violence against LGBTQI students, shrinking social services, and gentrification in their communities. 

Together, students in West Michigan have developed relationships and ideas that build the backbone for national campus organizing strategies at large.

Through tactics like the Kudzu newsletter, a student-led GiveBackIX campaign, and the Southern-regional Beyond Equality Ride in 2016, we work Youth-to-Youth to provide students with the critical resources, tools, strategies, and back-up they need to make bold stances. 

To learn more on resistance against the ways that Christian colleges consolidate Right-Wing power, visit our website and support Youth organizing on our campuses.

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In this moment, when so many of us are fighting death, running in fear, and quickly becoming exhausted and numb, it is essential to our survival that we name what we know. 

We are at war. 

So many of us who are not straight, white, rich, male and/or Christian find ourselves on an unanticipated battlefield in our own home; the ammunition is live and the consequences deadly. 

Our bodies are engaged in mortal combat…. and so are our souls.

We are so inundated with news of the latest decrees and targets of this neo-fascist regime that we do not fully attend to the rapid fire assaults on our spirits. Beyond the endless noise of political warfare, there is a deeper crisis going unaddressed.

What is at stake is far more important than national unity, even more important than justice… for it is only in defeating the spirit of a people, that tyranny and death can ever truly reign.

What is happening now is nothing short of spiritual terrorism. And if we lose ourselves in this struggle, if we let those messages of dehumanization, coercive violence, and all-consuming power eat away at our souls, then our bodies will have little left to fight for.

This is spiritual warfare, and we must resist the death that seems to be coming at us from all sides. We must do the profound internal work of keeping our spirits alive alongside the critical communal work of saving our peoples from violence.

Spiritual violence is physical violence. It propels, reinforces, and antagonizes physical violence that leads to our death. The mosque burning in Victoria, Texas just hours after the signing of the executive order for the Muslim ban is a relevant example.

A distorted and corrupt version of Christianity moralizes these attacks and reinforces the systems of domination that say it is justified and acceptable for us to be murdered in the streets, attacked in our homes, and slaughtered en masse in our spirits.

One fundamental problem is the nature of power itself. Because of Christian Supremacy, we have come to equate power with control and domination, both of which are fear driven. “God-fearing” has long been a way to describe Christians, but it is a very specific version of God, i.e. Father-God-Patriarch-Judge-King, that uses divine power to intimidate and coerce submission. This is toxic theology.

This particular political moment is not one to get lost in our hurt feelings about losing the election or the exposed reality of the depth of racism, greed, sexism and xenophobia that is present in the hearts of our countrymen. We need to understand this is war, and a struggle between death and life, not just at a legal or cultural level. 

What is at stake is far more lasting than a political regime. It is the future fate of our eternal souls. Will we die on this capitalist altar of greed? Or will we save our souls and live? 

There is a legacy of evil that has come to reign. It is oriented towards death and despair, and it could lead to destruction for many of us. How we fortify ourselves and our peoples to actually engage in spiritual warfare is essential. 

We must train ourselves spiritually to be ready and prepared to combat these forces of evil that are encroaching on our people’s ability to live. We must resist these deaths not only in a physical way, but also in our spirits. Because these forces lead to our harm and annihilation by our own hands, as well as by the State and its allies.

So at this particular moment, it is not about combatting that power of brutality with another more brutalizing power. The nature of power as we understand it must change.

Claiming our own agency, cherishing our own power and nourishing it in our own bodies and souls is a commitment all of our freedom fighters must make.

Power over others that requires their subjugation leads straight to death for the oppressor and the oppressed. If we have learned anything from our history, I hope it is that lesson. We must now reorient ourselves to understand true power as the antithesis of fear-based domination. 

May we come to know and love and grow in ourselves the omnipotent power that comes through Creator to Creation, through the earth, through our bodies, through our bloodlines and our breath, through our histories and our ancestors that leads us all toward life abundant.

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Rev. Alba Onofrio
November 23, 2016

Listen for a second. Can you feel it? That pulsating….

When I stop thinking so hard. When I stop trying to comprehend how this political moment happened. When I stop trying to strategize the next moment, and take a pause from chasing after my people to make sure they’re still alive…

After the tears and before the hope, it comes to me.

And it sounds like Truth to my Spirit… like a call to my aching heart.

When I am still, when I get out of my own head, out of my own way, I can feel it come into me. That pulsating thing, under my feet.

Flowing from the depths of the earth, through the black fertile soil under my feet—

The seeds breaking through the hard clumpy dirt to reach the sun…

[Image – Painting of seeds, Rise Up]

Can you feel it? Listen. There it is again…

Rise.    Rise.    Rise.

It is as if all of Creation is pulling for us. In all its many forms telling us not to let this be our dying day:

Rise.    Rise.    Rise.

The ocean tides rhythmically against the sand:

Rise.    Rise.    Rise.

The super moon flooding us with light, creating shadows in her wake, just over the horizon:

Rise.    Rise.    Rise.

The wind sweeping us off our feet, strong and cold, keeping the calling birds aloft in flight:

Rise.    Rise.    Rise.

The doe gently nudging her fawn after birth:

Rise.    Rise.    Rise.

The thunder storming down upon our ears: Don’t let this be your deathbed! Don’t let this be your end!

Rise.    Rise.    Rise.

The sun, burning off the chill of apathy with hot stinging fingers, calling our souls like the vapor:

Rise.    Rise.    Rise. 

This is still more death to come; we can smell the decay. It scares us, and we grieve the truth that has been revealed in us and dread the helplessness of what comes next.

But we are a people who Rise and Rise and Rise.

Time and time again, we have faced impossible odds. We have felt the looming fear of uncertainty and heard the sharpening of the executioners’ blade in our ears. Death is a familiar stench. We know it too well; the taste of iron still fresh in the blood that fills our mouths.

Mouthfuls of hate rather than the bounty of earth that we each and every one deserve. This moment is a victory for fear and hate. It threatens our very lives.

But let us Rise Up and remember that we are an Easter People.

We may not all be Christians, but we all attest to power of the resurrection: of souls renewed and bodies healed and minds opened and movements changed.

May the death that comes be that of the systems that kill us, rather than the bloodshed of the ones we love. May a theology of Life shine through the thick fog and the Truth of Abundance be made clear to show us the way. It is time for a moral awakening in this land. It is time for a reckoning. It is time for repentance and renewal. It is time for the Easter People to Rise Up and set the souls of the peoples aflame with the good news of great joy which has always been, and must always be, for all of the people.

Amen.