My night has opened up, so I figured I would write about something that stays on my mind.
And that is our loyalty to that which doesn’t work.
Tradition is perhaps one of the most contentious parts of the human experience. It’s often the core disagreement of the conservative and liberal arguments. It’s not just interpretation, translation or implementation, but whether or not one should maintain any adherence at all.
It comes up in society, in families, at universities, and in religion. In nearly every aspect of life we measure our need for reverence to tradition and our belief that loyalty to it has somehow shaped the best of the lived experience.
I’ve historically not cared as much for tradition. I’m not against it exactly, but I do not believe it immortal. I love learning about it and studying how it shapes us. However, I’ve long found myself favoring my assumption of the “better thing.” I think I come by this more easily than most by willing to let go of a flawed loyalty. Again, this is sometimes rooted in my own subjective view.
And therein, I recognize the faults of that ease. My preference I know doesn’t come as easily by the masses. And that’s in large the benefit of a conservative perspective flaunting tradition, it keeps us from running too wild with every new idea or thing. It forces us to pause and consider what has come before. But dammit, can it keep us from moving forward.
Tradition is too often the bigger god. The idol in the way of love and expansion. The idol in the way of a beloved community. The barrier to including the excluded.
I often think tradition’s hold on progress has spilt so much blood and caused so much grief.
I grew up adhering to the politically conservative and religiously evangelical line of thinking. I held this tradition trusting well into college, and was in communities that maintained that leaning until as recently as 2016. Tradition was great at teaching me wisdom, at handing me values, at fostering my love of country, at heightening my social belonging, at cheering on football games, at helping me set aside myself for the greater community. Tradition has a valuable service.
I cared about the greater community, I tried to put that before myself. In doing so, I learned new stories. And in that process I began to find things that unravelled my beliefs on my held traditions. I met people in my community who were disrespected by my traditions. Who were hurt by my traditions. Who were not cared for or considered because of my traditions. Simply put a lot of my tradition never had room for some people to begin with.
An easy example: I grew up in Tallahassee, FL. I thought the traditions of Florida State University were the best in all of college football. We were passionate fans. I went to Florida State and cheered on the Seminoles with significant pride and joy. But then I started meeting Indigenous People who were disgusted by our “tomahawk chop”, a history with “Sammy the Savage” and our shouts to “Scalp ‘em!” While it’s true we had permissions from a small tribe in Florida, I started learning that the largest faction of the Seminole tribe today actually has a stance against using Indigenous people and icons as mascots. It was a really difficult thing for me to learn as I spent so much of my life loving these traditions. Sure, I could go on loving them and burry what I had learned, or I could adopt something new because of what I had learned. I could change and leave something (that no longer worked) behind.
As a young Christian I grew up centering the Bible as an inerrant and infallible book. It’s what my churches taught me, I believed it fiercely, and thought to let go of this tradition and belief was to basically curse Jesus and renounce the faith. And then my university professors showed me all kinds of contradictions and changes and humanity in the Bible. And with seeing that humanity I also figured there’s a lot we’ve learned in the last 2,000 years these authors never even knew about. The way I used and believed in the Scriptures evolved with this.
Now I could have ignored what I was learning and remained loyal to a doctrine that no longer served me honestly. I could’ve put loyalty to my communities tradition over what had been made plain to me, but that would eat at me for the rest of my life and have unending consequence to my soul. So I did the honest thing for my heart, my mind, and my faith and moved on from the tradition of inerrancy and ancient ideas of gender roles and sexuality. There was a real social cost to me doing that, but it also led to the social gains and alignment I’ve lived with the last seven years here in Austin.
We are allowed to move beyond and reevaluate.
Tradition is not God. God is constantly calling us forward, God is already ahead of us, inviting us into something deeper than we’ve ever imagined. I do my best to lean into that, through prayer, through community, through tradition, through scripture, through science, through reason, through ALL the tools God has given me. If there are new tools to be discovered, well I’ll include them too!
Which brings me here:
We are at a devastatingly overdue impasse with our constitution and the tradition of thought regarding the second amendment and we all know it. For starts, what we think we know about the second amendment is far from what our founders ever intended. The guns we hold are far from what our founders ever imagined. And quite frankly our founders are not us. Just like those biblical authors, there is a great deal we have learned and observed, and practiced, and discovered in the many years since our amendments. We know things they didn’t. We have observed things they hadn’t. We have created things unrealized in their time.
I have never felt that the slippery slope of what might happen is a justification for maintaining something that is neither true nor healthy. For example, I was long long told that to leave the doctrine of inerrancy was to basically say that you could believe whatever you wanted with no Godly authority ruling your beliefs. But that potential risk never solved that inerrancy was wrong. It never addressed the issues at hand. It just named a fear meant to keep an adherence to a broken way of upholding a tradition that did not serve what was now known.
I got to a place to where I felt comfortable saying of the Bible “I feel no need to agree with Paul.” His patriarchal worldview needn’t be mine. He was also using the tools at hand figuring it out in his time and place. Hell, you can read him doing just that.
I am more than comfortable saying I feel no need to agree with our founders. These people owned people. They circled around their own ideas often. They’re brilliance of shaping what has been, doesn’t mean they had the best beliefs about a semiautomatic rifle putting holes in our children at school. It is not necessary or sensible to assume they had a better idea for this than we do. It is absurdity to put such a tradition over what has been plain to us for nearly three decades.
I want this idolatry to cease. I’m tired of sacrificing our children, our peace, our future to the god of guns. And I don’t give a damn if Thomas Jefferson would disagree. This is absurdity to the highest level, to say we can’t do a new thing because of what we once may have believed a very long time ago before our reality and these specific issues existed. We live now. We live here. We have insights they did not. We have brilliant tools at hand to create common sense policies and we can debate that all together without bowing down to those who are no longer with us.
Maybe the tradition is the process of using the process just like they did; to create a way forward.
Maybe the tradition is going to God like the authors of scripture did, to find the path forward.
It is not necessary for us to remain slaves to ancient slaveholders.
We take forward what is good, and leave behind what is harmful.
May we leave behind the false gods. May we always form the better way and do that messy work together. May we not install our own Pharaohs when freedom is available to us.
Let us go!!!!
DevonBailey.com 