Sojo: Closure

Betsy [Shirley], Adam [Taylor], Matt [Murphy], Josiah [Daniels], and Rose [Berger]; 

I've sat with your silence for long enough and I want to close this with open honesty rather than the moral vacuum left in the wake of your self-forsaken "mission."

Nearly two decades. More than three dozen pieces. I came to Sojourners trying to make sense of what I'd done and what had been done to me, and this platform offered me language and a community when I needed them. I am genuinely grateful for that. I want to say so plainly before I say what comes next.

What comes next is this: I submitted a piece that would have given voice to a marginalized community your publication claims as its mission. You declined it without editorial rationale. I asked, directly and on the record, whether there was a reason consistent with your stated commitments. Your silence spoke for you. I am treating that response as the answer it is, an answer dripping with moral cowardice. 

I am not angry, that ship has passed. All I have left is sadness. 

The communities I serve — military families, veterans of color, people bearing moral injury from wars prosecuted in their name — have, for two decades, been taking their own lives at rates that should make every progressive Christian institution stop and ask hard questions about who they are actually serving and how. You had the opportunity to stop, to learn from your faults, but you chose political tribalism over moral integrity. That says all anyone needs to know about your institution. 

I have spent twenty years trying to get lifesaving questions into rooms like yours. What I have learned is that most rooms are more interested in the click-bait those questions might generate than in the human beings those questions bear in heart and mind. 

I will be adding your silence to the transparent account of this unfortunate story your behavior discloses. Not as a grievance—grief is lost on hard hearts—but as a record. Because the people I serve deserve to know what "progressive" "Christian" institutions claim and what those institutions do (and refuse to do) when standing costs something. 

This is not the end of my work, it might just be the beginning. Whether this is the end of this particular relationship is (as always) up to you. I wish you'd use your power wisely, but now I know better than to expect you to. 

- brother Logan