Now What Theology?
Melissa Stewart and the Application of Process Theology
to Contemporary American Life
While our choices are constrained by the past and by constructs and norms that restrict free movement, we need not see them as intractable. We can ask, “Now what?” What is the best course of action in this situation? Where is the divine prompting leading us? What new doors of possibility does this next good step open, and what additional possibilities for future flourishing does it yield?
We can begin the work in our personal lives, where we have direct access to examine our actions, confront our internalized narratives of harmful ideology, and move toward repentance and reconciliation. We can expand by building local communities of trust,
- Melissa Owens Stewart, Now What Theology
Rev. Dr. Melissa Owens Stewart is a process theologian who explores public policy issues and reconstructs harmful theological frameworks. After a career supporting the U.S. Intelligence and Defense communities, she returned to her first love, theology. She earned her Doctor of Theology and Ministry (DThM) from Northwind Theological Seminary and an MSc in Philosophy, Science, and Religion from the University of Edinburgh.
What follows is a personal introduction from Dr. Stewart, followed by the fifth chapter of her dissertation, Y’all Means All: An Open and Relational Response to the Crisis of Privilege, submitted to Northwind Theological Seminary in June 2026 under the advisorship of Thomas J. Oord.
The chapter is titled “Now What Theology,” In the previous four chapters of her dissertation, she has been analyzing the current situation in American life - its Trump years - and introducing process theology. Her "now what theology”draws on broad ideals such as love, justice, peace, and God, but she does not rest with those ideals in the abstract. Her aim is not to speak for all time but rather to speak to her time, to this time. She directs her attention to what is happening politically, socially, and personally in America and asks how we might respond creatively and lovingly.
The “we” whom she addresses is fellow Christians. Stewart is a pastor, concerned with how Christians might live out their faith amid the crises she describes. More specifically she speaks to fellow Christians who are white,middle class, and privileged. I count myself among them. If we want to walk with Jesus, as she does, the gospel calls us to be honest about that privilege, to relinquish it, and to help build communities of love and justice, with no one left behind. And to do so now.
I think of her fifth chapter as an example of applied process political theology. Other examples might lean further left, right, or toward the center; there is in fact variety among process theologians. But the heart of all process theology is a conviction that the mystery at the heart of the universe, a Spirit of love revealed uniquely but not exclusively in a young carpenter from Nazareth, calls us to live in solidarity with others. Not to foist our peace upon them, but to live in peace with them, as part of a single family, such that 'they' are not really 'them,' but rather 'us.' Stewart invites us to recognize our privilege, let it go, and live into a widened sense of who 'we' are.
- Jay McDaniel
A Note from Melissa Owens Stewart
Growing up in a Christian family with an early love for the way of Jesus, I’ve grown aggrieved by the glorification of authoritarianism in both theological and political spaces, as it affirms control over cooperation and engenders conflict instead of peace. My dissertation critiques the practice of seeking power for one’s own advantage, as authoritarians do, and seeks to persuade those with an ear to hear that thoroughgoing flourishing is the attainable will of God. To do so, I explore two societal models. The first is history’s all-too-common practice of seeking “peace from” our enemies. In stark contrast is the model exemplified by Jesus, in which we pursue “peace with” one another. The peace-from model necessitates a division between “us” and “them,” consolidating its power to construct and preserve privileges for the chosen few. Peace-with embraces the love-based neighbor vision of the gospels, in which the inherent dignity of all is revered and their well-being pursued.
The vast inequality in economic and civil liberties we witness today, growing exponentially, testifies to peace-from’s stronghold. Those with the most privilege are extracting enormous wealth, evading accountability, and devastating people and the environment in their wake. We are in a crisis of privilege. While the world has long leaned into an ideology that tips the scales in favor of those in power, can embracing and living the peace-with vision change this course? I believe process theology offers an insightful framework for understanding the dynamics at play in these models. So informed, we can better answer the question that process theology begs: “Now what?”
Now What Theology
The histories explored in chapters 2 and 3, and the current state of affairs described in chapter 1, give us insight into the extent to which we have fulfilled the peace-from or peace-with visions. It seems clear that peace-from ideologies and practices recur with such frequency and ferocity as to appear innate. Their grip on political, civic, and religious thought, both throughout history and today, can reinforce unconscious acquiescence to their seeming veracity and permanence. Peace-with aspirations are then perceived as necessarily ephemeral, confined to fleeting, localized times and places. As such, we may find ourselves surrendering to these currents as the natural course of events, even providentially so in the minds of peace-from theologians. Lulled to sleep by the myth of permanence, we deaden our senses, undermine the power of critical analysis, and dampen our capacity to conceive of and execute novel possibilities. We may then have little imagination or aspiration to create more than pockets of peace. Yet, open and relational theology calls us to awaken our imaginations to the infinite possibilities before us—possibilities for progress. As the ever-adventurous Whitehead appealed to us,
Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude, we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of human life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude. I wish I could convey this sense I have of the infinity of possibilities that confront humanity—the limitless variations of choice, the possibility of novel and untried combinations, the happy turns of experiment, the endless horizons of opening out. As long as we experiment, as long as we keep this possibility of progressiveness, we and our societies are alive; when we lose them, both we and our societies are dead, no matter how externally active we and they may be, no matter how materially prosperous they and we may appear. And nothing is easier to lose than this element of novelty. It is the living principle in thought, which keeps us alive.1
Open and relational theology stirs our consciousness, fostering awareness that delegitimizes peace-from’s claim to permanence and awakens our imagination to the possibilities attainable if we earnestly pursue the peace-with Galilean vision.
The Promises and Prophecies of False Messiahs
From an open and relational perspective, our history and present circumstances call for critique and accountability. This requires an honest assessment of where we are and how we got here, which makes the histories explored thus far and the analysis of present-day anti-democratic provocateurs particularly important. As the weight of history seems to lie in the peace-from camp, we need to reflect on what this has yielded for us. The peace-from provocateurs discussed in chapter 1 promised salvation, and we need to ask what the hands of these saviors have wrought. How have their promises and prophecies unfolded?
They have rightly understood the pain points that make us susceptible to the kinds of salvation they promise. We are lonely. We do feel vulnerable. We have little faith in our neighbors and even less in our institutions. Most of us feel crushed by the wheel of unrestrained capitalism. But the exploitative salvific narrative offered by peace-from provocateurs to gain our trust in this milieu is the one it has always offered—one of division and othering. Be warned. The salvation they seek is always segregated, both in audience and in scope. It seeks to save a particular set from a specific threat. It aims to fortify power and privilege in the hands of some while limiting the power and privilege of all others. Where is their promised salvation? Who is being saved and from what?
Certainly, salvation has not been found in the democracy- and society-destabilizing maneuvers of DC powerbrokers who are intent on turning our institutions and intellectual capital into irreparable rubble as they attempt to reconstruct the U.S. in their own authoritarian image.2,3 It has not materialized in the attack on civil liberties, the disregard for national and international law, the shattering of global trust, or in illegal “war-is-hell” preemptive attacks.4,5 Nor is salvation found in public displays of scripture reading or in trite, weaponized sermonettes from the Department of War, nor in Christian Nationalists' parades of idolatrous tropes and the magic Christian fairy dust they sprinkle on themselves to misappropriate the divine in order to preserve their power and privilege.6,7 It cannot be found in the greed-driven vanity of Dark Enlightenment techno-oligarchs, divorced from any morality aligned with liberal democratic principles or ecological preservation, who are literally intent on maximizing their profits while curating a future only they can enjoy.8 Salvation is certainly not found in the disembodied spaces of social media and online communities, where more harm than good occurs because our minds are treated as disposable commodities—colonized, exploited, and excavated for profit.9
Their promises of “no new wars” and increased affordability tickled our weary ears but were readily discarded, replaced by religiously and financially motivated wars and the incessant drive for profiteering so sacred to the ruling elite.10 Just how are these peace-from saviors doing, we ask? It is more of the same. Yet this instantiation is a technology-enabled, capital-flush, frenetic, and adrenaline-fueled race to exponentially expand and preserve the privilege of some while clamping down on everyone else's privilege.
Instead of broad-based flourishing, we witness the deepening of the chasm between the privileged and the marginalized. We witness the further breakdown of public trust and the international, rules-based order. The intersectionally privileged have been revealed as the “Epstein class,”—those who control the levers of global economic extraction operate with impunity and are shielded from consequences by the sheer force of their concentrated power. Their campaign contributions and access to the perks of their powerful network make elected officials mere pawns in their game. When elected leaders themselves come from and operate within this circle of intersectional privilege, there are even fewer restraints on their self-aggrandizement and on their ability to exercise their will through domination rather than through the channels of normal governance maintained by checks and balances. The long-term investments, strategic plans, and dedicated efforts of political and economic organizations devoted to peace-from authoritarian forms of government are rapidly attacking the principles of liberal democracy in a dizzying, coordinated assault, and they are reaping what they have sown.
No data is as revelatory as economic data in capturing the frenetic pace and the concentration of advantage among the intersectionally privileged under the second Trump administration. In the past year alone, Donald Trump’s personal wealth grew by an additional $1.4 billion, with large portions of that wealth coming from the family’s opaque cryptocurrency investments.11 These gains are not the automatic fruits of laissez-faire business dealings or of a portfolio managed in a blind trust, as is traditional for a President, but rather reflect the deliberate and persistent pursuit of advantage by the occupant of the Oval Office, in continued conflict with the Emoluments Clause. Likewise, America’s ten richest billionaires grew $698 billion richer in 2025—ten people, one year.12 Their gains alone are 833,631% more than the typical American household earns per year. Meanwhile, they would have everyone else at each other’s throats, fighting over resources as if redistributing the 2.5% of wealth owned by the bottom 50% would solve all our ills.13 With hollow promises of salvation that evaporate as soon as they part their lips, we watch as the promised “golden age” of America turns into the “golden age” of the intersectionally privileged—criminal, unaccountable, and self-aggrandizing.
And what fruit has been born by the sectors of the church aligned with the Administration? By offering Trump the cheap of a simple prayer and constant sanction for his every policy decision or statement, those like Franklin Graham have emboldened an already egotistical man to wield power without regard for consequences and to make an utter mockery of the claim to Christianity.14 It is a present-day reminder of the solemn wisdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”15 As the moneychangers defiled the temple by turning it into a den of thieves and a spectacle of profiteering, so the Christians who angle for access and power devalue and soil the sacred. Cheap grace is the sanctioning lifeblood of privilege—whether afforded by the judiciary or the church. It enables the continued abuse and neglect of the marginalized and leaves those in power clinging to a false sense of decency that does much harm to their souls. In an effort to preserve their salvation through means other than surrender to divine aims, they also deprive themselves of their true calling to align with the restorative goodness of God. As Howard Thurman noted, “For the privileged and underprivileged alike, if the individual puts at the disposal of the Spirit the needful dedication and discipline, he can live effectively in the chaos of the present, the high destiny of a son of God.”16 Would that those who identify as ministers—who operate within the circles of intersectional privilege--heed Thurman’s appeal to dispose themselves to the Spirit and reject the false promises and prophecies of these false saviors.
It Does Not Have to Be This Way
We often read statistics on the widening wealth gap, disparate incarceration rates, and disparities in health and educational outcomes uncritically or unimaginatively, as if they were driven by natural forces beyond constructive assessment. We may assume that disparities reflect the will of God or are the natural outcome of any individual's “good” or “bad” choices, or of exceptional or limited capabilities. We may take for granted that we are in the best system. Yet open and relational theology offers us a way to critique these assumptions anew. We no longer need to accept any harm to anyone as the will of God. We no longer need to accept inequality as the fruit of an individual’s just rewards. We can recognize injustice as the damnable, alterable force that it is. These are constructs of our history, enabled by our ongoing acquiescence to their claims. But they are not innate. They need not be permanent. Open and relational theology allows us to reexamine these assumptions. In the spirit of Whitehead, we can cast off the stagnation of the status quo, which leads to death, and recapture a zeal for imaginative exploration of possibility that leads to renewal.
It is paramount that we break the hold of stifled thinking that yields peace-from’s logic and aborts appeals to flourishing before they can take root. We can make little progress if we are captive to notions of intractability and ignorant of the forces that shape the prevalence of injustice. We must be convinced that it does not have to be this way. In her book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, Heather McGhee uses her economic expertise to accomplish both of these tasks with respect to economic injustice. Her work offers a model for understanding the forces that enable inequality and reveals them as amendable.
McGhee set out to understand why the economy of the richest country in the world still fails so many. She refers to our current economy as the “Inequality Era,” pointing to statistics that reflect vast income inequality and stark disparities in education, healthcare, and criminal justice outcomes.17 The facts are alarming, as revealed in the following excerpt from Oxfam’s 2025 “Unequal” report,
Such extreme inequality manifests in lavish lifestyles for a small fraction of people, but widespread struggle for too many—and in needless instability, hunger, homelessness, poverty, and even death. The U.S. is home to more billionaires than any country, but tens of millions of people face significant economic hardship and financial distress. Homelessness is at a record high, and there’s not a single state, city, or county where a full-time worker making the minimum wage can afford a modest two-bedroom rental. Food insecurity is the highest it’s been since 2014. The Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival considers poverty the fourth leading cause of death in the US, based on research finding that long-term poverty is associated with the death of over 295,000 people a year—or over 800 a day.18
Her research makes it clear that this unimaginable and excruciating extent of inequality is neither requisite nor intractable, and that “nothing about our situation is inevitable or immutable, but you can’t solve a problem with the consciousness that created it.”19 As powerful as the economic policies that shape our society are, the myths and prejudices of our consciousness that enable them are equally powerful—some so powerful that even those who suffer under their yoke will support them in the voting booth.20
McGhee found a familiar answer when she asked, “Why was there a constituency at all for policies that would make it harder for more people to have a decent life?”21 She did not find new persuasive tools at work, but rather those reminiscent of the peace-from strategies of the powerful discussed thus far. She argues that the zero-sum game rationale was present from the womb in the United States’ development. This rationale manifested into manufactured racial competition and the othering that continues to animate our consciousness.
…from the United States’ colonial beginnings, progress for those considered white did come directly at the expense of people considered non-white. The U.S. economy depended on systems of exploitation… This made it easy for the powerful to sell the idea that the inverse was also true: that liberation or justice for people of color would necessarily require taking something away from white people. European invaders of the New World believed that war was the sure way to separate Indigenous people from the lands they coveted. Their version of settler colonialism set up a zero-sum competition for land that would shape the American economy to the present day, at an unforgiveable cost.
At the heart of the incongruence that allows those who support economic policies to their own detriment often lies the all-too-familiar racial motivation. McGhee notes that, “The narrative that white people should see the well-being of people of color as a threat to their own is one of the most powerful subterranean stories in America.”22
During the Wilmington Coup, poor Southern whites were rallied by this same appeal to zero-sum competition. Even though they had suffered economically and spiritually from the slave industry, they took pride in being “white,” which they believed was somehow superior. When the emancipated Black community began to excel, the poor whites needed a way to satisfy their itch for distinction and privilege, and they aligned with their own exploiters. Hinton Rowan Helper saw the impact on poor whites and wrote that the “oligarchs of the lash” were making Southern whites poorer because they had no need to invest in local education, trades, or infrastructure.23 Nonetheless, they took solidarity in their whiteness rather than in community flourishing.
McGhee asked a deeply insightful and revealing question that uncovers yet another familiar layer to the problem of inequality. She asked, “…why did so many people seem to blame the last folks in line for the American Dream—the Black and Brown people and new immigrants who had just started to glimpse it when it became harder to reach—for economic decisions they have no power to influence?”24 Niebuhr understood how those in power use the blame game to their advantage. He observed it with the same kind of quizzical awe that McGhee expresses, saying,
“An irrational society accepts injustice because it does not analyse the pretensions made by the powerful and privileged groups of society. Even that portion of society which suffers most from injustice may hold the power, responsible for it, in reverence…. [now quoting Robert Briffault], No resistance to power is possible while the sanctioning lies, which justify that power, are accepted as valid…. Before any injustice, any abuse or oppression can be resisted, the lie upon which it is founded must be unmasked, must be clearly recognized for what it is.”25
The sanctioning lies provide cover for the transgressions of the powerful by giving victims of injustice a reason to admire the transgressors and to perceive their interests as aligned with their own, rather than uniting with those who are similarly marginalized. McGhee’s work shows how effective this time-honored method of blame is when abusers wield it to shape a defining narrative, as Reagan did in his war on “the undeserving poor.”26 Those constructing peace-from fortresses of privilege not only present themselves as saviors but also divide potential allies into false competitors. Manipulating these dynamics allows those who actually have the power to improve inequality to deflect attention from their culpability and to recruit from among those they disadvantage and disrespect to carry water for their own neglect.
Tragedy lies in the fact that among those suffering from economic disparity are those who continue to believe that their interests are being served by their exploiters. They continue to place their trust in politicians who offer false promises of allyship and protection from “the other.” One need only look at the statistical outcomes in the poorest states to see how surrendering to sanctioning lies harms the economic, educational, healthcare, and civil liberties of those living in places trapped in those lies. Although deep-red states have long supported the party of trickle-down economics, nine of them are consistently ranked among the nation’s ten poorest states, bearing all of the commiserate consequences.27 As the current administration enacts a dizzying array of policies that seek to further advantage the ultra-wealthy while destabilizing the economy with their frantic and senseless measures, the impoverished slide further down the economic ladder.
If we find ourselves captive to the sanctioning lies of zero-sum game theory and white supremacy, we would be wise to heed the insights of Grace Ji-Sun Kim, who reminds us that “White supremacy dismembers, separates, and eliminates the memory and history of peoples of European descent, allowing them to forget who they really are and their own histories of oppression and degradation in Europe, ignoring why and how they came to the land.”28 When we choose to align ourselves with those who continue to practice persecution and inflict harm, often when our ancestors escaped the same, we must ask whether we are comfortable with their sanctioning lies because they allow us to preserve pride-of-place in the shelter of whiteness. White supremacy is a constructed,manipulative tool that causes us to lose solidarity with the marginalized, and we all suffer materially and, most importantly, spiritually from its effects. The sanctioning lies of the powerful enable the false constructs built by peace-from powers throughout history. They should be disavowed and abandoned. It does not have to be this way.
False Constructs from False Saviors
From an open and relational perspective, we see that constructs and norms are merely repeated, often institutionalized, patterns of inherited history that present themselves as stubborn facts to be addressed in our current environment. The intersectionally privileged are well aware of their ability to shape opportunities for themselves and to limit opportunities for those they see as other or as valueless. As Reinhold Niebuhr observed, “Privilege withholds the means of gaining capacity and then uses the lack of capacity to withhold privilege.”29 In a world where peace-from ideology and injustice have had too much say, the powerful and privileged have too often constructed a reality in which they have better options at their disposal than those available to those they disenfranchise. The following are samples of their peace-from constructed handiwork:
- Discrimination is the willful withholding of good options from those deemed “other.”
- Institutional racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, and other patterns of marginalization are the systematic and bureaucratic codification of discrimination that both withhold opportunities from ‘the other” while strengthening opportunities for the privileged.
- Persecution and false incarceration are the violent removal of good options from the oppressed.
- Control, as exercised in abusive relationships or by dictatorial leaders, limits the available options.
Recall that Howard Thurman said, “Segregation… means that limitations are arbitrarily set up, which, in the course of time, tend to become fixed and to seem normal in governing the etiquette between the two groups.”30 Recognizing these norms as arbitrary, Thurman understood that they were the handiwork of the privileged. Having constructed the world this way, the privileged forget the many benefits the system confers on them. Niebuhr found this obtuseness ignoble, saying, “the most common form of hypocrisy among the privileged classes is to assume that their privileges are the just payments with which society rewards specially useful or meritorious functions.”31 How often do we see the economic spoils of exploitation accruing to the privileged, who then boast of their genius and sound business practices? How often are the spoils of white privilege amassed with little regard for how they were acquired?
When we consider false incarceration as an example of these institutional constructs, we see how the small-minded justice of peace-from ideology serves to protect only a few and to criminalize the “other.” Howard Thurman exposed the punitive and lopsided nature of justice when he spoke of a world in which law enforcement could not be trusted to protect all citizens.32 It is a scenario we see all too vividly today, as police body cameras show the abuse, violation, and even murder of those in the Black community. “Don’t Call the Police” is a public service advisory for communities that have too often seen the unwarranted escalation of mental health crises or petty crimes into incarceration or physical and mental harm. The “Don’t Call the Police” website offers community-based resources to help avoid these encounters.33 We know that Black male incarceration far exceeds that of other races. When sentencing is compared, we see that white males are far less likely than Black males to face imprisonment for the same crimes.34 Deprived of family, current and future income, and often the right to vote, these Black males and their families pay a steep and ongoing price, while white males go on their merry way.
Project 2025 is a classic example of institutionalizing privilege and discrimination through bureaucratic means. More than half of its recommendations, which focus extensively on white Christian Nationalist priorities expressed in fundamentalist ideology, have been implemented as of this writing.35 The Federalist Society effectively grooms and places conservative judges at every level of the judicial system to steer laws toward its preferred interpretation.36 Organizations like the Heritage Foundation work tirelessly at both the strategic and “mundane” bureaucratic levels to see their preferred ideology enforced from the ground up.37 These are examples of coordinated, funded, committed, and strategic efforts to codify arbitrarily constructed preferences and privileges. Whether it is the pieces of paper you need to vote, school funding based on property values and residential taxes, redlining for home loans, or closing local voting locations, these are all examples of bureaucracy used to close and open doors of opportunity.
For those whose lived experience involves multiple “othering” distinctions—whether from their sexuality, gender, prescribed race, religion, geography, poverty, health, or any other category the zealots chose to attack them for—destructive constructs abound. They are the intersectionally marginalized who bear the brunt of this system of arbitrary norms and codified discrimination. While intersectional thinking does not intend to provide a mathematical quantification of the injustices one suffers to be stacked and weighed against the challenges of others who also face injustice, it does reveal the inevitable mounting weight one faces when multiple aspects of identity lead to unjust treatment. While it does not ask us to neglect the suffering of some in exchange for that of others, it calls us to attend to the discrete and nuanced injustices that affect one who encounters the compounding effects of marginalization. For each attribute targeted for discrimination, they must walk a different, more difficult path than the paved roads more conducive to progress afforded to the privileged. In the peace-from milieu, they are treated as the least of these.
Who benefits most from this same system of constructed norms? The intersectionally privileged, because the converse framing holds as well. Mounting privileges afford them the opportunity to secure consequential benefits for themselves. We need only think of the technocratic, white, male billionaires in chapter 1, with their access to power, their escape from accountability, and their Dark Enlightenment preferences, to see the disproportionate influence they wield and the literal physical protections they enjoy against the world's harms. The intersectionally privileged distract us from their corruption and extravagance by making us fear the intersectionally marginalized.
But the advantages the privileged seek are not those of a thriving soul seeking the flourishing of all creation. The people they abuse, the wealth they hoard, and the planet they exploit may seem like expendable commodities, yet open and relational theology points us to the inherent worth of all creation. Theologian Adam Clark analogizes Whitehead’s arguments against matter as merely vacuous to the oppressors’ treatment of the marginalized.38 Slave owners, seeing their victims as mere property, dehumanized other humans to exploit their bodies, minds, and spirits. Grace Ji-Sun Kim states, “As colonists arrived in the land that would become the United States, the territory was considered empty because indigenous people were not Christians and therefore not human and non-existent.”39 The human capacity for harm, enabled by privilege, apathy, and greed, is responsible for the egregious exploitation of God’s good creation.
Using Marjorie Suchocki’s definition of sin (“participation through intent or act in unnecessary violence that contributes to the ill-being of any aspect of earth or its inhabitants”), we see that these peace-from constructs are entrenched forms of ill-being. She cautions that “Insofar as a society perpetuates itself by depending upon the ill-being of any, whether within or without its own boundaries, it is to that degree demonic.”40 Open and relational theology should take seriously the stifling power of bureaucracy and the limits it can impose on justice and flourishing. Bureaucracy can be a concrete home for the death-dealing ways of institutional injustice and privilege. Abused bureaucratic power is only one factor that contributes to the proliferation of peace-from norms, but with concentrated effort, open and relational theology can expose and rectify its misuse wherever it is found.
That They Might Have Life and Have it to the Fullest
The call of open and relational theology is to encounter the peace of the Spirit of Jesus and engage in his eucontaminating work, facing our individual and collective wounds and pursuing reconciliation. It should not honor the constructs of the privileged, assume they are God's will, ignore their destructiveness, or submit to their apparent intractability. As discussed in chapter 3, Jesus offered an alternative to the dissolution those intent on destruction offered, offering life to the fullest in its place (Luke 10:10). John Cobb inspires us for the work ahead when he said,
There are obviously many processes at work that are destructive…. What is perplexing is that there is any good at all. But there is, and this fact is awe-inspiring. Because there are so many destructive processes it becomes all the more important that we attend to that one process which is constructive, and that we relate ourselves to it in any way that will strengthen its working. This orientation will not eliminate suffering and injustice, but it can extend the limited sphere in which elements of joy and justice are to be found.41
Whitehead, Hartshorne, and open and relational theists share this worldview. It gives us a keen awareness of injustice—the outcome of our collective failures. It calls us forward toward restoration—made possible by God's presence and appeal.
Recall that an apt definition of love in open and relational theology is, “to act intentionally, in relational response to God and others, to promote overall well-being…. And because love is inherently uncontrolling, neither divine nor creaturely love controls.”42 The loving God of open and relational theology urges us to set aside behaviors that devalue creation and leave destruction in their wake. “God's love is a justice that is measured not by the well-being of an elite, nor even by the well-being of the many, but by the well-being of the least valued in society. Justice is an ordering of social relationships so that none is without help; it is therefore measured precisely by the condition of those without protection.”43 Until the constructs that cause harm to the “least of these” are dismantled and their well-being is restored, there is work to do. To combat injustice effectively, we cannot ignore the myriad ways it manifests and must judge them all as aberrations of God’s love.
In her call for Christianity to return to the witness of Jesus and his message, Grace Ji-Sun Kim argues, “Christianity through the lens of the powerful, the might of the colonist cannot be the real Christianity of love, liberation, and hope that Jesus shared as he walked the earth.”44 Jesus’ vision that we should care for the least of these, and his every action that embodied this value, was not some idealistic platitude meant to inspire our occasional charity and benevolence. It was the articulation of heavenly values and a standard for our adoption. It is not the projection of pity, in which the privileged merely share an occasional portion of their advantage, but a societal reset in which the conditions that leave us with the least of these are continually challenged and addressed. As Suchocki shares, “Jesus asks us to work until there is no least of these.”45
Open and relational theology affirms that this task will require us to tear down harmful constructs and build life-affirming ones in their place. For example, Monica Coleman implores us that, “Justice for the African American community will necessitate an eradication of the existing structures that oppress people on the basis of racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, and ecological injustice.”46 Where the constructs of peace-from seek to limit good options, the amipotent appeal of open and relational theology seeks to maximize well-being. To move further toward peace-with’s vision requires:
- Centering and platforming the leadership, expertise, wisdom, and experience of marginalized communities in identifying issues and crafting responses.
- Committing institutions to recognizing discriminatory barriers, mitigating their harm, and replacing them with corrective measures to ensure the institution’s ongoing faithfulness to equality.
- Practicing unified engagement that includes strategic and tactical investments of time, money, and talent to rigorously confront illiberal laws and practices, replacing them with those of justice.
- Providing resources like charitable giving, advocacy, allyship, mentorship, shelter, discerning bystander intervention, volunteering, and voting in support of marginalized communities while working alongside them to help eliminate the threats they face.
There are many ways we can work, both individually and collectively, to dismantle harmful constructs and replace them with healing alternatives. But the work and commitment must be equal to the task, one that must match the relentless devotion of the peace-from provocateurs. The fruits of their concerted efforts warrant a concerted response.
New Orleans’ success in removing its Confederate iconography offers one example of the yeoman’s effort required to succeed in this work. Landrieu engaged Winton Marsalis, Walter Isaacson, Ken Burns, the Tricentennial’s executive committee, New Orleans natives, gentry, and churches in countless discussions and forums to garner support for removing the monuments.47 It required extensive research into who managed the land where the monuments stood, and which ordinances and laws could support the project or would need to be changed to see it through.48 Funding was secured from donors and later lost as donors came under scrutiny. Protests, harassment, legislative pushback and stalling, social shunning, and death threats were persistent. Contractors were targeted and dissuaded from participating.49 In a city filled with contractors, only one company was willing to use its crane to move the statues. That company recanted after the owner’s car was firebombed, and the city eventually paid six times the amount to have an outside contractor do the work.50 The bureaucratic maneuvering took years of concerted effort. The emotional investment required years of faithful commitment in spite of setback after setback. The statues came down in May of 2017, in time for the city to celebrate its Tricentennial without the specter of the icons. As difficult as this one challenge to peace-from constructs was, it is much harder to change the sentiments that placed them there in the first place.
If we are to devote ourselves to this work, we must ask ourselves what our vision of justice is and how much we will invest to see it through. Can this peace-with inspired justice be more than the punitive hand of legality, especially one bent toward defending a few? Can it include fair and effective law enforcement in the inner city? Can it provide healthcare and safe working conditions in rural areas? Will it extend quality education across school districts? Will wild and domestic animals merit protection? Will land, water, and air garner preservation? How thoroughgoing will we be? For the peace-from provocateurs, it has the narrowest of visions. It has cordoned off the narrowest sense of justice and reduced it to its meanest form. It condemns broader visions as "woke" or "socialist". Suchocki encourages us to embrace a big vision of justice, noting that,
…we are always in danger of drawing our line of caring more narrowly than necessary, and more solidly than the spiraling circle of actual interdependence supports…. To hold to a criterion of universal well-being, despite its problems, is always to hold before us a question concerning the limits that we otherwise so comfortably draw…. To hold to a criterion of universal well-being challenges every border we close, and ever raises before us the reality that in fact our interdependence is far wider than we can consciously know. Therefore, in spite of all the qualifications and difficulties, the impossible ideal of universal well-being is the most effective.51
It cannot be that personal and systemic violence, and the intentional deprivation of life-affirming opportunities, reflect God’s good aims, regardless of what the current administration and its apologists tell us. We are instead to unify in creative advance.
Repentance, Reparations, and Restoration
Return to the story of the lamb lying down with the wolf and the questions we asked about this extraordinary depiction of peace-with reconciliation. From an open and relational perspective, we cannot read this scene as an assured future in which the divine picks a predetermined point in time to magically change and resolve all our peace-from tendencies, especially if that means sending some to eternal torment. And as tempting as it may be to take comfort in peace-ahead promises, relying on them only deters us from the work of the here and now to build the kingdom of God in our midst. We must recall that the wolf has work to do if we are ever to realize peace-with praxis. While the work is ongoing, we cannot forget the danger to those still suffering under the real threat of peace-from’s proclivity to control and violence. We must do more than feel guilt, apologize, and move on. In I Bring the Voices of My People, Chaneqa Walker-Barnes offers this challenge,
Reconciliation that does not liberate and heal the oppressed from the consequences of oppression is not reconciliation at all. At best it is cheap grace, an easy balm that offers forgiveness for the sin of White supremacy without seeking to correct the harm that it has inflicted. At worst, it is an affirmation of White supremacy in that it prioritizes the needs of White people to feel better about their relationships with people of color over the needs of people to recover from the psychological and material impact of oppression.52
We all know the painful scars left by attempts at reconciliation that rely on cheap grace. We have each faced lingering harm at the hands of someone who caused us pain and either never took steps to mend the wound or took only those that relieved them of guilt without making meaningful amends. And we have all operated from cheap grace when we have not taken account of the harm we have done and made things right. When this occurs at the institutional level and the harm is generational, there is much to account for and to remediate.
Journalist Stacey Patton cautions against the cheap grace and performative apologies for racial injustice, which she says have become all too common since the 1990s. She reminds us of their limitations, saying, “But don’t get it twisted – these expressions of profound sorrow do not complete the work of reparatory justice. They won’t inaugurate a new era of race relations. And they do nothing to transform white America from a nation of criminals into rehabilitated members of a human community.”53 While acknowledgment and repentance are a necessary first step, peace-with requires more.
Howard Thurman offers us a way to proceed past mere apology: “The first step toward love is a common sharing of a sense of mutual worth and value. This cannot be discovered in a vacuum or in a series of artificial or hypothetical relationships. It has to be in a real situation, natural, free.”54 By rejecting peace-from visions of God, with their accompanying othering, and moving toward the amipotent Spirit that enables peace-with flourishing, we can move away from the vacuum of segregation and initiate new relational connections grounded in mutual worth and esteem. No one needs to take shelter in myths that preserve their worth at others' expense. No one needs to buy into zero-sum mentalities that turn everything into a competitive commodity. Instead, we can build community together for the benefit of all.
In her research, Heather McGhee untangles the myth of a zero-sum game and demonstrates the value of solidarity. Whether through union organizing, expanding public spaces and services, or more inclusive democratic representation, working toward common well-being loosens the stifling, hoarding grip of the privileged and generates well-being across the broader community. She notes,
To this day, the wealthy and the powerful are still selling the zero-sum story for their own profit, hoping to keep people with much in common from making common cause with one another. But not everyone is buying it. Everywhere I went, I found that the people who had replaced the zero sum with a new formula of cross-racial solidarity had found the key to unlocking what I began to call a “Solidarity Dividend,” from higher wages to cleaner air, made possible through collective action.55
The zero-sum game myth is a narrative designed to perpetuate unnecessary violence and ill-being for some. It harms everyone exploited by the needless division it creates, the fear and animosity it feeds, and the real economic inequality it generates for everyone not in on the take. It is to death-dealing as solidarity is to life-giving. If we are to start with love, we must first renew our minds, searching them for the narratives we accepted that need not be there—those that denigrate humanity, including our own—and that would have us cling desperately to false saviors rather than embrace the life-giving reorientation expressed in the Galilean vision. As John Cobb reminds us,
“We are responsible for what we do. We are under bondage to many things, but finally this is a bondage we have brought upon ourselves, a bondage from which Christ sets us free.”56
Salvation has so often been portrayed as merely individual that we have neglected its reach as communal. It is a far richer inheritance, one that rejects the transactional nature of cheap grace in pursuit of peace-with shalom. Tripp Fuller offers,
What the Galilean vision actually looks like in practice appears with stunning clarity in Luke 4, at the opening of Jesus’s public ministry. He stands in the synagogue at Nazareth, unrolls Isaiah, and reads the announcement: good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom for the oppressed, the year of the Lord’s favor. Then he sits down and says,“Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” What he does not read is the line immediately following in Isaiah — “the day of vengeance of our God.” He inherits the tradition, cuts the violence, and doubles the blessing. And then, when the crowd is still nodding in approval, he extends the horizon: this anointing, this favor, is for the Gentile widow in Sidon, the Syrian leper Naaman. For the outsider. For the one his audience had good theological reasons to exclude. And then they try to run him off a cliff.57
Here we see the end of peace-from logic. It should have no hold on anyone who seeks to follow Christ. There is good news, and it is available to all. The example is one of community-building, wall-destroying, life-giving love. When Jesus showed up in the places our peace-from tendencies tell us were contaminated—the places we want to be saved from—the eucontaminating power of love overcame. As the Hoards’ state, “In bringing the divine into contact with the sinful, it is not God who is at risk, but the sin.”58 We must dismantle divisions rooted in perceptions of evil or the other. Christian Nationalists need not protect God. God needs no protection.
The path to restoration requires deep self-reflection that asks us to explore our fears and motivations, identify the idols we have built into systems of salvation, and move from a place of love outward to seek the flourishing of all. It moves us away from peace-from practices such as discrimination and toward peace-with practices such as empathy, allyship, and community. It divests from “free, white, and 21” exclusion and toward “y’all means all” inclusion. It shows up when Confederate monuments are taken down and when voting rights are protected.
But it cannot wrap itself in the white-savior garb of the messiah complex that clothed Manifest Destiny, colonization, and “benevolent slavery.”59 D. T. Bryant speaks to an all-too-common church practice today when he asks, “What might God say to our ‘Always Forward’ tendency to learn something and assume we should file papers on a 501(C) (3) to spread our new insights—often held by those we’ve been warning people to avoid most of their lives—as if we were the first to ever think about them?... Stop. Repent. Listen.”60 For Bryant’s part, he and his congregation, St. Mary of Bethany Parish, began community reparations work. They repent through action by responding to their community’s needs and supporting its healers. Through the Equitable Healing Reparations Initiative (EHRI), they help repay the student-loan debt of Black mental health counselors. The church acknowledged its complicity and addressed the systemic disparities in mental healthcare faced by its Black neighbors. Here we see the church’s high calling, “Bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ.” (Galatians 6:2)
Reconciliation practices bring shalom into our midst. By loving one another, we show that we are born of God, as 1 John 4 describes. Walter Bruggemann gives us this vision of shalom, saying, “Shalom is the end of coercion. Shalom is the end of fragmentation. Shalom is freedom to rejoice. Shalom is the courage to live an integrated life in a community of coherence.”61 From coherence rather than coercion, we seek to rectify and overcome any harm that afflicts our community.
We can begin the work in our personal lives, where we have direct access to examine our actions, confront our internalized narratives of harmful ideology, and move toward repentance and reconciliation. We can expand by building local communities of trust, such as the Edenton Reconciliation Group, which is working to establish new norms that prioritize the well-being of the whole community. We can unify and work collectively to support the strategic and multi-generational work of organizations like The King Center, the ACLU, and the SLPC, required to take on the deep pockets, ensconced bureaucracy, and entrenched sanctioning lies of peace-from provocateurs.
Our churches can reimagine their purpose, both individually and collectively, and provide much-needed space to address the loneliness and economic crisis of our time—the impoverished body and spirit—while better understanding the real needs of their communities. They need not amalgamate into a single body of worshippers to come together as a community. For instance, why expect Black congregations, rich as they are in spiritual, cultural, and historic treasure, to merge with white churches in a way that would only sanitize the depth of their experience? We can find ways to work together and form a community without dissolving the beauty of our distinctions or mandating that it happen in a certain way.
As a nation, we must return to the challenge presented by Daniel Dombrowski, “In the future, we will either continue to advance the political liberal process of inclusion and toleration of reasonable differences or we will perish.”62 We can rightly critique and seek to overcome the failings of democracy, such as Citizens United and the drawbacks of Voting Rights Act protections—the likes of which give democracy its reputation as four wolves and one lamb voting on what to have for lunch. At this impasse, at this point in history, its provisions and aspirations provide a meaningful basis for us to take up the political liberal process and continue to mature the democratic experiment. As universal human rights champion Maritain urged, these rights will be achieved only through the diligent work of “prophetic” activists who fight for truly representative forms of government, against totalitarian regimes.63 We will perish together under the weight of condemNation's toxicity and divisiveness, or we can work to live together in another way.
An Eschatology of Hope
The possibilities before us are immense, for as Whitehead observed, “We are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of human life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude...the endless horizons of opening out.”64 The future is not predetermined. Destructive and restorative courses of action lie ahead. While our choices are constrained by the past and by constructs and norms that restrict free movement, we need not see them as intractable. We can ask, “Now what?” What is the best course of action in this situation? Where is the divine prompting leading us? What new doors of possibility does this next good step open, and what additional possibilities for future flourishing does it yield? We are reminded by Griffin that, “There is an order among possibilities. We cannot run before we can walk, we cannot write poetry before we know the language.”65 So where we can walk, let us walk and learn to run. Where we are ignorant of our neighbor, let us learn and begin to build trust and friendship. Let us build momentum toward healing and flourishing. Let us be ever mindful of those still in danger as we pursue this unfolding path. As unimaginable as the companionship of the wolf and the lamb seems, let us pursue the brief Galilean vision it embodies.
In a state of disillusionment, Reinhold Niebuhr was deeply exasperated by liberal thought's failure to make much difference in society and its continued grasping for meaningful change. He grew weary of those who assumed, “that with a little more time, and little more adequate moral and social pedagogy and a generally higher development of human intelligence, our social problems will approach solution.”66 He was convinced that society as a whole could only go so far, given the “brutal character of the behavior of all human collectives, and the power of self-interest and collective egoism in all intergroup relations.”67 Yet we must ask, where would society be without efforts to educate, inspire, and elevate discourse? Where would we be without the faithful efforts to bring about the Galilean vision? Each moment of enlightened movement toward civil peace and accord not only brings us closer to our aspirations for flourishing but also wards off further descent into discord. Each act is meaningful, bringing us closer to or further from peace-with’s fulfillment. While we have witnessed the pervasiveness of peace-from in history, which caused Niebuhr to despair, open and relational theology gives us real reason to hope for peace-with’s flourishing as Suchocki states,
“But perhaps the power of hope against despair is not paradoxical at all. Perhaps it rests with the nature of God as the power for justice. God is the source of the vision and of the reality; there is a locus for justice in the nature of God. The effect of God upon us is the transmission of vision, along with the conviction of its worth and attainability. God is the source of hope. This is the significance of the doctrine of divine power for us.68
We see a faithful witness to the hope of peace-with-consciousness today, with bright glimmers of the Galilean vision in our midst. We see it in the Minnesota communities that are providing food, shelter, and literal physical protection for those targeted for deportation. Are they not acting as the body of Christ in the early church we see in Acts? We see it in Bishop Rob Hirschfeld, the New Hampshire Episcopal bishop, who called on fellow clergy to ensure their affairs are in order because, in light of ICE violence, they may be called to place their bodies on the line to protect the innocent.69 We see it in the tireless devotion of Heather Cox Richardson, who holds a light up to the current administration nearly every day to ensure the truth is documented. We see it in the consequential work of the ACLU, the King Center, the SPLC, the Center for American Progress, Common Cause, Everytown for Gun Safety, No Kings, and many others. There are those, as always, responding to the quickening, amipotent Spirit of God. It resides in all of us, ever-present to our needs and ever pointing us toward peace-with flourishing. As John Cobb reminds us, “We can be inspired to committed effort by the conviction that a situation much better than the present one is realistically obtainable.”70
Like Whitehead, we are to take Jesus as our standard. Per Whitehead,
“This standard [the Galilean ethic of Jesus] is a gauge by which to test the defects of human society. So long as the Galilean images are but the dreams of an unrealized world, so long they must spread the infection of an uneasy spirit.”71
This peace-with world is unrealized, yet we are ever closer to dislodging the sanctioning lies of othering and zero-sum game theory. It is unrealized, but we are keenly aware of the tactics used by the privileged to construct self-serving norms and bureaucracies. It is still evolving, yet we see through the false promises and prophecies of those who exploit our fears and present themselves as saviors. It is on the horizon, yet we believe in the possibility of personal and communal wholeness and are informed about the challenges ahead. We acknowledge our inherently relational nature and our responsibility to shape our open future. Whitehead leaves us with only one response when we measure our present state against the Galilean vision. There is much work to be done. God does not give up. Christ did not give up. Love does not give up. We must not give up.
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