An excellent and necessary film

Films are judged by many measures. Three I often use are (1) a film’s excellence, which includes the various aspects of a film’s creation: its direction, writing, acting, cinematography; (2) its importance, which includes what it teaches about life and our world, new insights into humanity and challenges to us about how we respond to people; and (3) its emotional impact.

Many films fit one of these categories; only a few each year seem to fit all three. 12 Years a Slave is one of these rare films. It is outstanding in all aspects of its creation; it is an important, I venture to say necessary, film for people, especially Americans, to see; and it leaves viewers with strong feelings of sadness and anger.

Now let me offer a caveat to the second point. This is a difficult film to watch. The violence and dehumanization it depicts are horrendous. And the film’s director, Steve McQueen, doesn’t let us turn away quickly. The camera lingers on many scenes holding us there so that we cannot look away.

12 Years a Slave is adaptation of the 1853 autobiography Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northrup, a free black man who was kidnapped in Washington, D.C., in 1841 and sold into slavery. He worked on plantations in the state of Louisiana for 12 years before his release.

Writer John Ridley makes excellent use of detail throughout the film and creates a variety of characters so that neither slaves nor slaveholders are seen as a type but as individuals. Slaveholders vary, for example, from owner William Ford (played by Benedict Cumberbatch), who is relatively kind and saves Northrup’s life, to Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), an extremely racist and abusive planter who believes his right to abuse his slaves is enumerated in the Bible. The slaves as well have particular stories, from Eliza (Adepero Oduye), who weeps endlessly for her children, who were sold to a different owner, to Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), who picks the most cotton of any worker by a wide margin and is frequently raped by Epps, yet remains strong and resilient.

The performances in this film are consistently good, but several stand out. Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Solomon Northrup. He shows the shock of being treated as a slave when he is in reality a free man, and he portrays vividly the agony of his suffering at the hands of the slavemasters and overseers. His changing posture becomes part of his portrayal of the change slavery creates in a person. Fassbender and Nyong’o’s performances also stand out in their power to make us see them as real, complicated human beings.

McQueen, who is British, paces the film well and inserts occasional scenes from nature that juxtapose their beauty with the horror the slaves are enduring. And the music by Hans Zimmer is appropriately understated. Here, too, the juxtaposition between Northrup’s fiddle playing (he is a trained musician) and its setting in a plantation where he is a slave, adds to the emotional impact of the film. And when a group of slaves sing a spiritual at the funeral of an old slave, it is a powerful moment that speaks to the persistent faith and hope that helped them endure such injustice.

12 Years a Slave is both excellent and important. Though difficult to watch, it keeps before us the necessary truth that our country held people in legal servitude for many years, and that servitude represented a great evil. We dare not forget that.

This gets my vote, thus far, as the best film of 2013.

Churches adopt the 'binary of liberalism'

Church members often reflect the wider society in their conflicts and how they identify themselves. Joshua Brockway, a Church of the Brethren minister and a doctoral student who works on the staff of that denomination, writes about this phenomenon in his blog for Missio Alliance.

In “Scandal of the Brethren: Binary and Church,” he notes how churches often divide themselves into two camps: conservative and progressive. He calls this the “binary of liberalism,” which he says “has framed the way we imagine ourselves as disciples.”

We in Mennonite Church USA must recognize that this isn’t just true of the Church of the Brethen. It is also true of us—and many other churches.

Brockway writes about how this plays out: “We unintentionally (or intentionally, depending on who you talk to) label our congregations and our districts as progressive and conservative. There are even certain places that receive a wink and nod when they are mentioned because of the extent to which they reflect one or the other of the modern camps.”

He goes on to get more specific about how this tends to work by looking at the question of sexuality. He notes that in 2009, Church of the Brethren leaders initiated an extended process of local study and districtwide listening sessions in response to two different responses to the question of sexuality that were presented to the church for discussion at an annual meeting. In 2011, the final report was presented to the church, and a decision was made.

“The report was a case study in the conservative-progressive divide in the church,” he writes. Though not a statistical survey, the report showed that there were generally three camps that emerged from the local conversations.

First, the report said there are two camps at the far ends of the spectrum, one conservative and one progressive.

The surprise came when leaders realized that together “the two groups comprised one-third of the members of the denomination. That means that one-sixth of the denomination is decidedly progressive and another sixth is conservative.”

This means that two-thirds of the denomination are somewhere in the middle of the question about sexuality. “In terms of parliamentary procedure, the deciding majority is in the middle,” Brockway writes.

Further, this means that the two ends of the spectrum—the minority—are driving the conversation. Sound familiar?

This has serious consequences for the church. Brockway writes: “The ideologues on the ends—those most set in their perspective regardless of what is happening in their congregation and in their community—make no room for those in the middle to narrate their perspectives or experiences. The majority of the church is shut down by the constant debates and politics of one-third of the membership duking it out among themselves.”

Brockway says that in his experience, this same breakdown is true for other issues as well: war and peace, mission and evangelism, gender and leadership. This does not mean, however, that the middle is lukewarm.

Brockway warns against adopting a model of making decisions that teaches us “there can be only two options—winner and loser, with us or against us, yes or no.”

This model derives from modern liberalism, he writes, with its emphasis on efficiency and the binary of progressive and conservative, which forms us to expect only two answers.

By following this model, he concludes, “we have not only lost the memory of our past but we have lost the ability to envision the possibilities of faithfulness in our context.”