Thanks to a kindness art campaign going on at our local elementary school this month, I have received multiple notes from my youngest child with a rainbow drawing and one simple command: “BE KIND NOW!!”
Nex Benedict
These BE KIND notes came to mind when I heard of the recent death of a trans 10th grader from Oklahoma, Nex Benedict, who collapsed at home the day after they and another trans student were bullied and beaten up by other students in a high school bathroom. Benedict sustained severe head injuries from the beating, but the school did not call an ambulance and gave Benedict a two-week suspension for fighting.
While the cause of death has not yet been made public, do not ignore the traumatization from having one’s face beaten black and blue in a bathroom. To be treated afterward as an offender instead of being treated with medical care by the adults in charge is yet another ordeal of distress and pain.
How people acted toward Nex Benedict was the opposite of kind. This was the dehumanization and humiliation of a minor due to their nonbinary identity.
How Oklahoma state policies, structures and recent law have fostered the dynamics that contribute to bullying is also the opposite of kind. An event like this usually grows from precedent and conditions that foster hostility toward vulnerable populations.
“Since the election of Kevin Stitt as governor in 2019, Oklahoma has been a hotbed of political and cultural conflict over trans rights.”
Since the election of Kevin Stitt as governor in 2019, Oklahoma has been a hotbed of political and cultural conflict over trans rights. In 2021, Stitt issued an executive order blocking any change of birth certificates to counteract a court decision allowing a third option of “nonbinary” on birth certificates. In 2022, Stitt signed three anti-trans bills, including a bill banning all public-school students from using any restroom other than the sex listed on their birth certificates.
This bill and other measures have contributed to increasing marginalization and hostile conditions for trans and other queer minors. Like bacteria in a petri dish, dehumanization and bullying proliferate in organizations and structures where people do little to guard against them or actively seek to create standards that punish nonconformity with the norm.
Lest we misdiagnose Oklahoma as the fault of one political party or leader, it is important to admit that social systems and structures in the church, politics and American culture have been toxic and unjust toward the queer community for a very long time. Discriminatory language and actions from the past continue to affect our present, and old habits don’t go away automatically.
Many current active campaigns to disparage and legislate the queer community are reusing old strategies to create a humiliating and toxic environment for LGBTQ people in the United States. These campaigns are happening at all levels of government and in several denominational organizations. There are many people working for positive change, but there are also efforts, like the recent split of the United Methodist Church over LGBTQ inclusion, to disrupt organizational change and push in the opposite direction.
How does one give a political system or a church denomination a rainbow drawing and persuade it to BE KIND NOW toward the queer community? How does one call out social and political injustices and advocate for transformation of the church and society toward the reign of God? Can any social organization ever be wholly kind, just and loving at all? These were the great questions of the Social Gospel, Civil Rights and social justice movements of the past century.
These movements sought to bring justice, reform culture and repair harm in the personal, the social and the political arenas of life. Noticing the unjust actions of humans and society at large, Christian advocates for social change challenged Christians to take the social as seriously as the soul in their theology and practice. Their questions are worth pondering and practicing for our current moment.
Some of the best teaching on justice, reform and repair already have come from and will continue to come from the LGBTQ community. I learned this lesson firsthand as a café barista in the mid-2000s. This was in the era before the repeal of “don’t ask don’t tell” military policy and before the Supreme Court upheld the 14th Amendment for the right to same-sex marriage. When another worker found out I was straight and studying to be a minister in seminary, he immediately nicknamed me “church girl.” It was not a term of endearment. “Church girl” was a caution sticker because the church was not safe to the majority LGBTQ workforce of baristas and bakers. The café was their safe place from dehumanization, and several coworkers directly stated that they would not tolerate any harm toward themselves or anyone else.
I did not understand at first, but then I learned. I learned their personal histories and the greater history of LGBTQ discrimination and the push for civil rights. I learned how powerful they felt in places where they were the center of cultural power because it happened so rarely at school and in other jobs. To repel humiliation, they collectively guarded against hate and shared an interest in one another’s lives.
This is the collective action needed to counter bullying and dehumanizing social structures and policies in the American politics, church and wider culture.
“I also learned I was culpable, no matter how nice I was.”
I also learned I was culpable, no matter how nice I was. Even though I have fought my share of battles for women’s ordination, other facets of normative church culture worked for me. Because of the benefits, I had willingly overlooked how others were demeaned. I learned how churches, denominations and Christian culture had humiliated my coworkers and my fellow seminary students in so many ways. I would not learn that some of my school friends were closeted until years after we graduated because their church would reject their call.
Both the closet and the rejection when they did emerge still breaks my heart. The church needs to do more than include. It needs to reform the hostile and dehumanizing systems inside our denominational infrastructures and challenge American society to do the same. We need to not tolerate harm anymore.
Walter Rauschenbusch once called the kingdom of God “the realm of love” and “the commonwealth of labor.” We often connect the reign of God to the church, but my years at the café taught me a lot about the realm of love and the commonwealth of labor.
After some years of paying attention as the “church girl,” I learned the realm of love can’t be a realm that unconditionally loves straight white people but has a lot of conditions and lower-class status for others. For people who are normative like me, working for the transformation of social groups means actively working to dismantle the structures in our organizations that routinely reinforce our authority at the top. We have to serve by building platforms for queer leadership and restructuring the system so we don’t backslide into older habits that push everything backward. We have to cede control of the center and build the commonwealth.
Humiliation and dehumanization, the opposite of kindness, still happen every day for LGBTQ people. It happened to Nex Benedict in the school system due to the hostile policies of the state, and it contributed to their death at 16.
Jesus Christ, the ruler of the realm of love, is calling for the transformation of church and society toward the reign of God. How long will it take for the church to BE KIND?
Laura Levens
Laura Levens serves as assistant professor of Christian mission at Baptist Seminary of Kentucky. She is a graduate of Baylor University and earned a doctor of theology degree from Duke University Divinity School. She is ordained within the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and lives in Lexington, Ky., with her husband and two children.
Related articles:
On Nex Benedict, invisible students, Easter Sunday and Trans Day of Visibility | Opinion by Patrick Wilson
Oklahoma senator says of LGBTQ kids, ‘We don’t want that filth in our state’
Conservatives’ agenda for America is starting to read like my Bob Jones University student handbook | Opinion by Rick Pidcock