Liturgy 35.1: Liturgy as Protest and Resistance
This issue of Liturgy deals with “Liturgy as Protest and Resistance.” What follows is an excerpt from Guest Editor Andrew Wymer'’s “Introduction” to the issue. We hope this will help define the theme and encourage you to want to read the entire issue.
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As the board of The Liturgical Conference gathered together for our annual meeting in February 2017 soon after the inauguration of the president of the United States who campaigned on a provocative and divisive political agenda, we recognized the need for an upcoming issue of Liturgy to explore the interconnectedness of liturgy and politics. We hoped to bring together the voices of scholars and practitioners who could provide a timely, liturgical engagement with the powers that divide and demean. This issue means to show how communities of faith might liturgically engage matters of power during the 2020 election cycle in the U.S.
The following questions served as our conversational starting point: (1) What sacred texts, practices, gestures, symbols, and rituals, exist within liturgy for protesting domination? (2) What new perspectives and expressions are needed or are emerging in liturgy as it is situated in relationship to dominant social structures? (3) How might the needs of those neglected by society be brought to the assembly’s awareness through liturgy? (4) How can the sacred texts, practices, gestures, symbols, and rituals of liturgy be utilized to subvert, resist, or protest domination in multiple social locations? (5) What is inherent in a liturgy (e.g., sacred texts, practices, gestures, symbols and rituals) that might require protest of the liturgy itself? (6) How might protests be understood to constitute a “liturgy,” and how might that liturgy critique, inform, or provide alternatives to formally recognized liturgy? These questions positioned our entrance into the theme of liturgy as protest and resistance in light of the deep inequities that shape human experience in the church and our society.
This issue contains essays that are richly informed by these historical streams of liturgical protest and resistance, breaking new ground as they call us to embody faithful protest and resistance in our worship. In “Love Your Flesh: The Power and Protest of Embodied Worship,” Khalia Williams recounts her research with African American women who engaged in dance ministries in their local congregations. She argues that embodied liturgical participation by marginalized persons can fundamentally alter both the participants’ and the community’s perception of the intrinsic worth of socially marginalized bodies. Lorena Parrish argues in “Dismantling Domination Through Womanist Rituals of Resistance” that churches need to replace androcentric liturgies with liturgical expressions that invite black women to tell the truth about their human experience and to be fully included in congregational life and leadership. In “Pastoring (In the Face of) Resistance: A Tale of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Seattle,” Kristen Daley Mosier reflects on practices of worship that resist the dehumanization of homeless persons in an increasingly affluent and gentrified urban setting and the resistance these practices engender. Andrew Scales, Klaas Walhout, and Emily Wilkes recount in “‘Christ Is No Stranger Here’: Disrupting Advent with Central American Migrant Narratives” how they utilized the season of Advent to resist xenophobia and anti-immigrant violence in contemporary political discourse and federal policies, providing an example of how a liturgical season can be enlisted in resistance to domination. In “‘How can these things be?’: Zilpha Elaw’s Foolish Ministry,” Kate Hanch describes Elaw as an example of “foolish preaching” and calls Christian preachers today to likewise subvert and critique dominant social, economic, and political systems. Finally, Elyssa Salinas-Lazarski, addressing “Care at the Site of the Dead,” constructs a theology that resists the dehumanizing and brutal forces that strip human dignity from persons even after death.
I hope that this issue will stretch the liturgical imagination, re-center liturgical theology, and ground liturgical practice in faithful commitment to resisting the powers that do harm, particularly along lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality.