Milwaukee Church Protests Racism Through Religion

“You’re not a church, you’re a cult.”

“Jesus did not teach of resistance.”

“You’re supplying food and supplies to Satan’s army.”

“Satan’s army?!” 

Worship Pastor Cameron Overton recalls the incredulous reaction he had when reading the flood of hate comments in his church’s inbox. 

“Good Lord!”

The pastors of Zao MKE Church believe this animosity is a reaction to their Christian community, which explicitly affirms LGBTQIA people and the Movement for Black Lives. 

Zao experienced an influx of hate mail after its Black Lives Matter action group sent a U-Haul of supplies to protestors during the Kenosha unrest in August. Kenosha Police confiscated the truck’s contents, opening a door for “trolls” to engage in hateful commentary across the church’s social media.

Despite backlash, Zao’s pastors say their values of social justice and tolerance are fundamental to the stories and teachings of the Bible. The church’s core expressions of “Jesus Rooted, Justice Centered and Radically Inclusive” are the theological backbone upon which Zao addresses current fights for racial equality.

Jesus Rooted, Justice Centered, Radically Inclusive

Born into religion as the child of a justice-centered Evangelical Lutheran pastor, Lead Pastor Jonah Overton looked to theologians and sociologists as a young adult to understand systemic injustice in the Christian faith. 

“I was told in some evangelical spaces that issues like racism were personal problems that would just fade away if you loved Jesus enough,” said Jonah. “I couldn’t ignore the gaping holes in the justice parts of the theology.”

Partners Jonah and Cameron adhere to the depiction of Jesus they believe best represents his role in Biblical context: a “radical, brown-skinned, Palestinian Jewish organizer.” The church’s three key features are centered around a moral responsibility to justice that Jonah says is directly intertwined with Jesus’s actions against structural oppression.

“The point of justice work is so that we can have a world where all people are actually connected to one another, healed and no longer being harmed, but being brought into the fullness of life,” said Jonah. 

After navigating through worship communities to find a home, social worker Cameron remembers encountering “Justice Jesus” for the first time.

“When I met radical Jesus, the one who came to me and lived in this world in a way I want to live, I saw the Bible so differently,” said Cameron. “That it was this big huge love letter to me.”

For Cameron, justice-oriented faith is about forging the most direct path from vulnerable communities to Jesus.

“When we’re trying to make decisions about anything, we go back to the Gospel,” said Cameron, pointing to the banner on the church’s wall. “How do we make sure everything we’re doing, standing up for politically, anything we’re saying, has the most marginalized person in mind?”

Church member and Milwaukee resident Taylor Katz was drawn to Zao’s call for radical inclusion, after having felt dissatisfied with some facets of organized religion. She describes what Zao has taught her as “new perspectives on old teachings.”

“The theme of 2020 in the protest circles is ‘no justice, no peace,’” said Katz. “I learned what that means and looks like in Jesus’s teachings in ways I didn’t know existed.”

Jonah and Cameron believe the reason not all Christians adhere to Zao’s image of a radical Jesus is because they have reimagined him as a tool of a status-quo American Christian culture and have co-opted his message to better represent a white majority.

“We’ve stripped Jesus of all of the political, which is to say the power analysis, of his theology, including facing down an empire with oppressive law enforcement,” said Jonah, “and we have hyper-spiritualized it and taken the literal meaning out of it.”

The interconnectedness of the Christian faith and politics is described by Jonah as an irrefutable condition of Biblical times, where they say the same structures were in place for both institutions.

“Many people who identify as Christian will say, ‘keep your politics out of my religion,’ but that’s impossible,” said Jonah. “That wouldn’t have made sense to anyone in Jesus’s time and it’s weird that it makes sense to us.”

I think there’s a little bit of a rhetorical question unspoken at the end of it, like ‘Black Lives Matter to God, why don’t they matter to you?’

Jonah Overton

Cameron’s identity as a Black man points him toward the footsteps of past freedom fighters like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X who shook down oppressive systems by direct provocation. In his eyes, faith compelled them to push back against harmful powers. 

“Yelling black lives matter is an agitation of a system that is oppressing people, and that’s exactly what Jesus would have done,” said Cameron.

In a sermon, Jonah compared the de-radicalization of Jesus to that of Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, all of whom they say were rewritten as sanitized versions to fit a retroactive narrative of false peace. To Jonah, the misrepresentation of civil rights heroes serves a culture that would have chided their actions in the moment.

“These wild, prophetic beings were unlikeable, uncontrollable, in conflict with the government and with anybody with privilege,” said Jonah. “Prophets are never validated by the institutions and structures they are called to break down.”

Katz, who teaches a worship group each week, defines Black Lives Matter as an integral aspect of Jesus’s devotion to uplifting society’s downtrodden. She believes many have lost sight of the connection between equality, justice and faith.

“The Black Lives Matter movement is directly connected with what the root of Christianity or any faith should be,” said Katz. “It’s focusing on who needs to be uplifted, and bringing everyone to the same level.”

In addition to providing aid to protestors in Kenosha, Zao’s Black Lives Matter Action project has transformed unused worship spaces in their building into a medical aid station and a supply depot, where tables are stocked with PPE, non-perishable food and First Aid kits. 

After seeing the need for such provisions in the community during protests following George Floyd’s killing, Jonah and Cameron immediately jumped on the opportunity to make use of their then-empty space. Now, the depot serves as a home base for multiple religious and non-religious organizations in Milwaukee to pool resources.

Jonah believes that without offering material, spiritual and relational support in movements of justice, their devotion to Jesus’s ethic of love isn’t truly materializing. Whether it’s joining protestors to march in the streets or coordinating online, Jonah says helping in any capacity is crucial to building a radically inclusive world.

“There are regular people on the streets right now who are speaking a prophetic word of divine truth every day,” said Jonah, “and it is our call of people of faith to hear that as a call to action.”

Volunteers like Katz keep inventory for the depot, connect with community organizers and create action plans for critical situations in protests. She says she was always interested in making a difference for social justice causes, but didn’t have a place to figure out exactly what that looked like until she came to Zao.

“The liberation in the Bible is so actively relevant and it honestly always has been,” said Katz. “When these cries for justice started ringing through the air again, it was something that Zao had prepared me for.”

---

A survey from the Public Religion Research Institute found that 71% of white evangelicals considered police officer killings of Black men to be isolated and not connected to a larger pattern.

According to a poll by Pew Research forum, 42% of white Americans believe “political topics like immigration and race relations” should be left out of sermons, while 62% of Black Americans said it is important for houses of worship to address them.

UWM History and Religious Studies professor Christopher Cantwell describes resistance from conservative Christians to activities they deemed as political, dating back to the Antebellum era and abolition.

“There’s a doctrine that more conservative Christians will cite that says the church has an inherently spiritual mission, and anything that interferes with that should be scrupulously avoided,” said Cantwell. 

In today’s context, Cantwell sees this doctrine emerge in conservative Christian communities that disavow the BLM organization for being against the word of God, or who send Zao hate mail saying their work is contrary to the tenets of Christianity.

“There is a kind of implicit whiteness to American Christianity, where any kind of maintenance of the status quo is a maintenance of white privilege,” said Cantwell, “so to say that anybody who would challenge that is not a true Christian is to suggest that Christianity serves to bolster white privilege in that way.”

Hatred and False Unity

The Overtons and Katz refer to one of Jesus’s parables, the story of a shepherd who leaves 99 of his sheep behind to follow one in peril, to contextualize contemporary arguments for people who feel attached to the claim that “all lives matter.”

“Jesus told this story to say you actually can’t just go along as normal, privileging and preferencing the majority or the people who are okay,” said Jonah. “We can’t say that everything’s fine when even one person is suffering.”

False unity, Jonah says, is common in moderate or liberal Christian circles that advocate for an end to difficult conversations on race based on articulations that all of God’s children are united in faith. Jonah says it is unloving for churches to ignore historical pain and trauma from racism and start anew, or as Katz puts it, “say a quick prayer and move on.”

While working as an inner-city missionary, Cameron became familiar with racial reconciliation, a movement popularized in the 90s among evangelical Christians that acknowledged a history of racism, but not necessarily its structural or systemic causes. Cameron and Cantwell both criticize racial reconciliation for pandering toward white saviorism and the problematic notion of racial colorblindness.

“If we are really wanting to be together, liberation is for the white and Black folk,” said Cameron. “Saying ‘we’re all the same’ is fundamentally different than ‘I see you, and what God made in you is beautiful.’”

The transition from racial reconciliation to a racial justice movement with terms set by Black activists rather than white Christians is what Cantwell believes is reigniting the right conversation about racism and religion. He describes Zao as a modern embodiment of the Social Gospel movement of the late 19th century.

“The presumption of the Social Gospel is that to focus only on an individual personal salvation is an incomplete understanding of the Christian message,” said Cantwell. “Part of what it argued is that sin can be so personal as well as structural; there can be sin in society as much as there is sin in the individual heart.”

Jonah interprets God’s love as prioritizing “unity in difference,” where the goal is for all of His children to make up one body, not to become the same part.

“Until we learn to honor how we were all created differently and celebrate that and advocate for one another and fight for one another, we’re totally missing the point about what it means to be the body of Christ,” they said.

To Jonah, the hate mail Zao receives is a condition of toxic assumptions about Jesus and theology that have permeated through modern day Christianity, including a sense of fearful urgency toward any possibility of going to Hell. 

“People want to instill that fear in us so that they can prove that they tried,” said Jonah. “It’s really awful to think about the relationship many folks have to a God they’re so afraid of.”

Zao’s pastors have tried to converse with the senders of hate messages, but are usually unsuccessful in learning the deeper motivations behind their outward expressions of vitriol. 

“Jesus preached the gospel to those folks who were not ready to hear it,” said Jonah. “There’s a real mix of offering a kind and open invitation to anybody who wants to be on this journey with us, and also not stepping off of the path to argue with them on the side of the road in a way that stops us from continuing along.”

Katz believes that discomfort is the primary emotion behind the defensiveness of commenters, who she says are finally being confronted with the possibility that what they have practiced might need to be reimagined.

“It’s easier to be mad than to completely change your framework of how you see the world, especially when the world up till this point has been made easier for you because of what’s been put into place,” said Katz. 

As what they say is a crucial extension to their support of Black Lives Matter, Zao has publicly called for the abolition of I.C.E. and for the defunding of the police.

“The structures of evil and racism are structured into our lives and into our culture,” said Jonah, “and the only way to dismantle it necessarily includes dismantling those structures and institutions.”

The first step in attempting to rectify years of racial injustice, according to Cameron, is to be truly honest about its continued existence.

“The country was built on land that was stolen on the backs of slaves,” said Cameron, “so how can we actually have a system that is helpful for every single person when that’s how it started?”

For both pastors, the church has been instrumental in providing a space for necessary conversations to take place.

“The way Jesus taught was all very public,” said Jonah. “Part of what we do is bring into public discourse what it actually means to be loving, what it means to follow Jesus and how those things call us into radical action rather than away from it.”

As for Katz, she hopes the church’s justice work will produce tangible results and reform.

“My consistent prayer is that everything that has been happening this year and everything that has happened to this point will lead towards something better and genuine, lasting change,” said Katz.