FPE: We sometimes think that if you get your theological commitments right, your moral commitments will follow. But I gather that hasn’t been your experience? How did you first get interested in Christian ethics?
Sara: Not at all – quite the opposite actually! I was raised in what I call a “Catholic-gelical” household. My mother is a devout Catholic, and my father has always followed her lead. When I was coming of age in the mid-to-late 90s, thanks to the Moral Majority my mom found herself in that Venn diagram between conservative evangelicals and conservative Catholics, in regard to abortion certainly, but this bled into other ethical and theological spaces for her. She dabbled with the Catholic charismatic movement and was a regular viewer and donor to Pat Robertson’s 700 Club. We went to a Billy Graham Crusade and went forward together for the altar call. She bought me a copy of The Teen Bible, that paint splashed-covered copy of the Christian scriptures that many elder millennials in the evangelical orbit remember from their youth.
All that to say, it was not a major leap from Catholicism to evangelicalism for me. I attended an evangelical youth group in high school, which eventually led me to attend college at Moody Bible Institute. And while there are many, many serious problems with Moody’s theology and ethical practices (see for example this Mother Jones expose on Moody’s cover-ups and victim shaming of sexual abuse), one thing I can honestly say is that Moody, despite itself, is where I was first conscientized to social justice. I have a friend from Moody who went on to Wheaton for her masters, and liked to say, “At Wheaton everyone talks about social justice but nobody practices it. At Moody, people practice it but don’t talk about it.” I think this was largely right. Not to say that Moody was some bastion of social justice work, but that because of its location in the early 2000s when I was there, engaging in “missions and evangelism” conscientized many people. We lived a few blocks to the east of Cabrini Green, the infamous housing project that has since been dismantled but at the time was very much alive, and a few blocks to the west of Chicago’s Gold Coast, the pinnacle of opulent luxury. The extreme racial and economic disparities were difficult to miss, and many of us developed a social concern for which we did not have theological (or political) language.
After Moody I became a social worker in Chicago’s immigrant-rich northside Rogers Park neighborhood and its historical Black southside West Englewood neighborhood. This further conscientized me to structural inequality, and I found myself searching for literature that could help me make sense of it. Unfortunately, the first thing I stumbled upon was Ruby Payne’s Framework for Understanding Poverty which makes a highly problematic (and racist) “culture of poverty” argument. But fortunately, I was disabused of this the next year when I started my MSW at the University of Georgia and learned for the first time to think in terms of structural social analysis.
It is in this program that my politics began to shift, and I came to a kind of crisis of faith. Still in the world of conservative evangelicalism, I had no theological language for where my heart, my experience, and my studies had taken me. I began to wonder if Christianity was compatible with compassion for the marginalized (every liberation theologian everywhere lets out a collective scream!). It is at this point that someone handed me Tony Campolo’s Letters to a Young Evangelical, the first theological articulation of social justice I had every read. I devoured the book in an afternoon and sent him an email telling him how much the book meant to me (he sent me a very nice reply). This opened up a world of progressive evangelicalism to me. I soon found myself solidly in the Sojourners orbit, reading as much Jim Wallis, Ron Sider, and Brian McLaren as I could get my hands on. Eventually, this led me to divinity school and then on to a PhD in Christian Ethics. At divinity school, I left my evangelicalism behind for the Episcopal church, which I saw as more theologically aligned with my values.
So, to loop back to the original question, it was really my moral commitments – born from conscientizing experiences – that proceeded my theological commitments. And this makes sense to me. Maybe it’s why I’m an ethnographer! I think praxis is formative in a way intellectual beliefs can never be. This is an important corrective, I think, to our Protestant heritages.
FPE: You have a dispensationalist past and while theologically that’s not where you’re at right now, how does that inform your current interests and book project?
Sara: My book project, “Journeys to the Margins: American Christians in the Palestinian Holy Land,” examines an increasingly popular form of travel among progressive American Catholics, mainline Protestants, and evangelicals I call “journeys to the margins:” short-term packaged trips that promise participants moral and spiritual transformation through encounters with marginalized persons. The primary questions the book explores is, what are the ethical stakes of journeys to the margins, given their potential to instrumentalize and essentialize marginalized persons? And, does the potential to essentialize and instrumentalize inhibit possibilities for solidarity? I explore these questions via an ethnographic case study: hybrid Holy Land pilgrimage/political solidarity tours co-organized by American and Palestinian Christian clergy and lay activists.
As an undergraduate at Moody Bible Institute, I was immersed in dispensationalist theology and its elevation of Israel as central to its end times schema. During my senior year I participated in a Moody-sponsored packaged Holy Land tour grounded in appeals to expand Israel’s territory as evidence of Christ’s nearing return. This tour also framed Palestinians as prophesied persecutors of God’s chosen people. After Moody I became a social worker, through which I was conscientized to structural injustice. I began reading Naim Ateek’s Palestinian liberation theology and immediately connected with his critique of dispensationalism’s role in American Christian complicity in Palestinian oppression. As a Yale Divinity School student, I spent a summer in Palestine and Israel, where I participated in programs for North American tour groups sponsored by Ateek’s organization, the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center. Sabeel’s “witness visits,” as well as similar trips offered by Palestinian Lutheran theologian Mitri Raheb’s Diyar Consortium, former Melkite archbishop Elias Chacour’s Pilgrims of Ibillin, and others struck me as a vital form of counter-placemaking for American visitors, a material extension of Palestinian liberation theologies.
I was so compelled that I centered my dissertation research on Come and See Tours to Palestine and Israel that invite American Christian travelers to come and see the “truth of [Palestinian Christians’] reality” (Kairos Palestine Document) and return to tell of it at home. I eventually came to understand this “come and see, go and tell” structure as a travel genre that extends beyond Palestine and Israel to multiple locales globally. Examples abound, from trips to witness the experiences of migrants in the U.S./Mexico borderlands, political atrocity survivors in South Africa and Rwanda, and civil rights activists in the American South. Such journeys to the margins are supported by calls from influential denominational and ecumenical bodies such as the World Council of Churches’ invitation to “pilgrimages of justice and peace,” the Episcopal Church’s naming of “racial justice and reconciliation pilgrimages” as a formation strategy under its guiding rubric of Becoming Beloved Community, and Pope Francis’ repeated calls for a “culture of encounter,” which animates immersion trips hosted by myriad Catholic campus ministries and progressive Catholic parachurch organizations such as the Ignatian Solidarity Network.
Those of us in the theological academy are among the primary audience for this form of travel. Many of us are progressive Christians and find not only scholarly but also spiritual and moral resonance with journeys to the margins’ epistemological privileging of “the crucified people” (Ellacuría). Our enchantment with journeys to the margins may obscure, however, how quickly epistemological privilege can blur into romanticization. At a moment in which journeys to the margins are burgeoning in progressive American churches, my book contends that their critical examination is of paramount importance to align our ideals with our practices.
FPE: You’ve written about moral commodification. What does this mean, and why should ethicists be thinking about it?
Sara: I came to the term “moral commodities” through the work of sociologist Arlie Hochschild. Hochschild wrote a book called The Outsourced Self in which she analyzes the uptick in payment for services that once belonged solely to the personal and familial spheres. It dawned on me that among her examples of renting a friend, hiring a life coach, and paying someone to curate your child’s birthday party might as well be “purchasing a moral experience.” After all, that is essentially what we do when we fork over money to denominationally-affiliated travel agencies and Christian nonprofits that promise us a transformative experience at our southern border, or at American Civil Rights sites, or in the West Bank. Though promotional materials obscure the economic transaction we are making – they tend to opt for language and images that evoke religious and moral sentiments – we are, by paying for the experience, hiring someone else to curate an itinerary that directs meaning in certain ways toward a desired moral end, typically some kind of ethical formation. Journeys to the margins are therefore, among other things, commodities. They point to a commodification of the moral life, at least to some extent.
As with Hochschild, I do not say all this simply to pronounce judgement upon this as morally wrong or bad. It is impossible to escape commodification in our late capitalist era. Whether we like it or not, almost every nook and cranny of our lives is being commodified. Just think of the last time you like, merely mentioned you might want to go on a trip, or eat a type of food, or do anything at all, and suddenly that thing is advertised to you everywhere as a commodity for sale. The interesting (and possible) question is not how to escape moral commodities; it’s how we navigate their tensions and traps. In the case of journeys to the margins, I suggest (drawing quite a bit on the work of anthropologist of ethics James Laidlaw) that to be free to make myself as an ethical subject, we have to navigate this kind of travel in a reflexive mode. Meaning that even tours that seem to be critiquing and championing all the “right things” ought to be structurally scrutinized, because it is impossible for a commodity not to package, simplify, romanticize, and objectify. So if we engage in journeys to the margins, we must always be searching for where we are complicit in constructing “I-it” relationships (to draw on Martin Buber) and to allow this recognition to be the truly ethically formative event that clarifies our moral relationships.
I analyze moral commodities in the form of journeys to the margins in particular, but I think the idea of moral commodities can be extended beyond religious travel. What other commodities do we purchase in service to the moral life? Could paid spiritual direction, for example, be subject to similar tensions and traps? How about tokens of our moral commitments such as pride flags or Black Lives Matter signs? Do their temptations toward virtue signaling act in service of packaging persons and communities as moral products? These are the kinds of questions the lens of “moral commodities” beckons me and, I hope, us, to ask.