Last week I made the claim that knowing our religious family history is important, because it helps us understand where we’ve come from. It also engenders some humility to realize, ohhh man, probably not every universal, timeless truth was contained in the faith and practice of people who dedicated every Friday night to watching Full House.

Now I want to make a logical extension.

Hypothesis #3: I need to seek out the leadership and teaching of historically marginalized people & communities, who understand a lot that I don’t.

Something in me shrinks from the baldness of this declaration; it feels somehow indelicate. But I think obfuscation—making things unnecessarily complicated—is one mind-habit that keeps us stuck. So: simplicity and practicality!

Reason #1: It’s a numbers game. A homogeneous spiritual/intellectual diet does not reflect—or prepare me to sit at—The Global Table.

When I picture the people responsible for the substance of my early religious and ethical education, they’re almost exclusively white men: pastors, authors, theologians, professors. Of course, I had amazing and indelible women mentors. But they were learning from the same standard sources I was: we were never more than two degrees of separation from the white men who manufactured our ideas. Even now, the vast majority of the Works Cited in my mental landscape are the thinking of European or American white men with big formal educations.

In the year of our Lord 2023, we can list many reasons for this, and most come down to who gets access and who is believed.

But I want to live at that Big Crowded Global Community Table. I want to learn new ways of being, new routines, that make me an active table member. How can learn everything I need to know about the table from a handful of people clustered at one corner?!

Somehow, the American (and specifically the American evangelical) ideas industry had me convinced that people like John Piper are orthodox, standard, descended from Jesus himself; and that people like, say, Dr. Martin Luther King are just inspirational figureheads, sideshows driven by radical and tangential agendas. Not legitimate spiritual teachers under whose teaching we should humbly sit.

But people who’ve historically been pushed to the margins are not a sideshow. They comprise the majority of the freaking world, and they understand an enormous amount about the world that I simply do not. Theologian James Cone calls out American Christian thinkers, the kind who shaped my entire ethic, and warns that without learning deeply and humbly from the experience of people unlike us, we are stuck: “Theologians from the Western theological tradition often regard their theology as universal, something that everyone must study. But no theology is universal… We are all particular human beings, finite creatures, and we create our understanding of God out of our experience. Hopefully, our own experience points to the universal, but it is never identical with it.”

Just proportionally, if I want to understand the whole world, I need the teaching of non-white, non-male, non-het people. This isn’t about hating white men or anything so silly—but it is, in its crudest sense, a numbers game.

Reason #2: People closer to the margins understand things about the world and God that I simply cannot. And communities who’ve organized against their own oppression are the experts on justice work.

It’s not simply proportionality. It’s not simply “listen to people who are different from you.”

This is our first, very brief, introduction to standpoint theory and liberation theology, two disciplines that explicitly consider ways that people and communities who’ve traditionally been marginalized, who are far from centers of power, have critical knowledge about the world that are just not directly accessible to people closer to centers of power. If, as the saying goes, you’re “born on third base,” there’s…just a lot you don’t understand about the field or the game. It’s not because we’re bad! It’s because we’re limited. If we want to expand our understanding, be ready for the Big Table, we’ve got to seek out those with the wisdom.

Many spiritual leaders have observed that oft-excluded people are best suited to lead the rest of us into table living. Homeboy Industries founder Fr. Gregory Boyle says, “because those on the margins have been cut off, have been hurt, have been lonely, God views them as trustworthy guides into the kinship God desires. So we go to the margins because there we will find the people who can lead us into our own salvation.” (source p106)

I love the old story about Mister Rogers visiting a young fan with cerebral palsy, and asking for the fan’s prayers. The journalist shadowing Mister Rogers complimented him on his shrewd wisdom, noting that he had boosted the boy’s self-esteem by asking for his help. Mister Rogers’ response is instructive:

Mister Rogers responded by looking at me at first with puzzlement and then with surprise. "Oh, heavens no, Tom! I didn't ask him for his prayers for him; I asked for me. I asked him because I think that anyone who has gone through challenges like that must be very close to God. I asked him because I wanted his intercession."

When I read all of this, I realize: if I’m getting most of my teaching about what’s Good from people like me near centers of power…I’m still at the kids’ table, eating dino nuggets and fries, an all-tan diet. I’ve got some catching up to do.

We can do this work in a way that’s cringey and posturing—finding a new writer to quote at dinner parties or on Instagram, following a couple of people here and there. Dabbling; tourism.

Or we can do it for real, deeply reading and listening to and trusting and learning from and internalizing and putting into practice the ideas—theological, ethical, practical—of people who live at the margins of societal power.

We have to work a little to find these leaders, because—for all of the reasons we already know—our culture doesn’t hand us their wisdom on a platter, or prioritize it in all of our algorithms. But hey, we can help each other!

Who are your favorite teachers/leaders from beyond the white Euro-American scene? Why? What specific works of theirs have you learned most from? Let’s combine resources!

And, I’m interested to know: do you immediately buy Reason #2, or is it a tough sell for you, and why?