Lately I've thought a lot about how very little the Episcopal Church (TEC) has to offer families like mine. Promiscuity and adultery among us straight people have destroyed many hopes and dreams in my family, but the Episcopal Church's focus when it comes to sexual morality is homosexuals and their rights 100 percent of the time.
The destruction of the working class economy also doesn't much register with TEC. This morning I spent an hour or so trying to imagine any Episcopal priest I've known since I left Atlanta actually preaching a sermon about, say, how a Christian should cope with the kinds of situations working class white people might encounter with their bosses, how St. Paul's advice to the Christian slaves of the Roman Empire might could be applied to the wage slaves of the American empire, how the words of the Gospel of Jesus might be prayed over by we of the wage class.
And I could not do it. I simply could not imagine any of these priests managing it. I could imagine two Episcopal priests who served on the Southside of Atlanta when I lived there preaching such sermons because I'd actually heard them do it. One of them was very "conservative," and the other very "liberal," but both of them loved Jesus and it showed, AND they actually preached about the situations we of the wage class find ourselves in (although they also preached against the sins of the middle and upper classes and THAT, friends, is what caused them to be ejected from the Atlanta metropolitan area of TEC).
Part of what's frustrating about the catchphrase "Stuff White People Like" or SWPL is that the white working class doesn't much like that stuff either. Or maybe we like that kind of stuff, but we can't afford it quite like other white people can. We are the white people who, in addition to having to suffer all the crap the boss class throws our way, have to also endure being lumped in with the boss class by the all social justice warriors who shriek about how horrible we are for being, well, white. Well, yeah, we're white, ain't going to change even if the day ever comes when we all enjoy "transracialism." ;)
But today, the spiritual, cultural, and economic needs of people like me, my parents, my siblings, my stepchildren ... we don't quite register with the local parishes of TEC. Trouble is, I'm only picking on TEC because they're what I know best, but it's not that any denomination really seems any better. My favorite perhaps is the Orthodox Church as described by Fa. Stephen Freeman at Glory to God for All Things , but wise and dear as I find Fa. Stephen, I don't see him preaching these sermons either. As for the more "conservative" churches, some of them will say they are a working class church. But among them I have always noted all kinds of typically conservative problems, such as their uncritical support for the lies that led to the Iraq War and their continued failure to repent of that support. Although the suffering the Iraqis suffered from that war was horrific and continues to this day, the suffering the American working class has suffered from the war deaths and disabilities of our veteran children is considerable. And no one in power in any of the churches seems very concerned about any of it.
Not the wars. Not the economy. Not the environment. Not the destruction of the family. None of the churches see the world through the lens working class white people do.
This morning it occurred to me that what I was missing was a church that thought more along the lines of my old Yarnell Perkins Helpful Household Hints column in the Hellbender Press. The Hellbender has been out of business for years now. Rikki Hall died two years ago this spring. I don't know where any of the other editors and writers are. Frankly, we were never that close. I turned in my column and that was kind of the extent of our socializing. That is, it was all online. I got the impression it would've helped my writing career if I were just willing to go out drinking more, but there again ... I am a married woman and I'm old. I'm devoted to my husband. Even if I were young, running around drinking in order to argue politics with the editors is not the kind of prudent behavior I want to model or encourage for working class white people.
And that's a feminist issue, or it would be if the interests of the white working class mattered to feminists. There's a name for the gulf between the interests of conventional feminism and those of women of color, "womanism," invented by women of color to take into account the differences between the interests of upper and middle class white feminists and those of women of color. If anyone has invented a name for an effort to address the gulf between the interests of white feminists bosses and the white working class women they oppress, please clue me in.
Anyway, the editors did not like the full and deliciously wordy name I originally planned for my Hellbender column, which was Yarnell Perkins Helpful Household Hints and Guide to Nonviolent Class Warfare. It occurred to me this morning that I might not be able to establish a congregation, or be ordained a deacon, or found a newspaper, or form a revolutionary party, but I can start a blog. And in that blog I can talk about these issues from my viewpoint as an aging white woman dangling precariously between the middle and working classes as she loves a great many working class people she happens to be kin to. And in that blog I can be as Christian and as churchy as I want, to a degree that wouldn't have been appropriate in a secular journal like the Hellbender Press.
So this is my Hellbender column resurrected and christened with the name it always ought to have had anyway. I hope to post at least once a week. If anyone actually reads this, thanks and God bless.
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