Larycia Hawkins' Righteous Witness

One of the greatest honors of my life is being able to refer to Dr. Larycia Hawkins as my friend. I first heard tell of her when she decided to publicly undertake a gesture of Embodied Solidarity (her phrase) by donning a hijab when Jerry Falwell Jr. publicly joked about killing Muslims. When Wheaton College fired her, I remember thinking that, by doing so, it had failed the Bonhoeffer test. What I mean by that is that Wheaton, the institution, refused to follow—or even countenance—the moral lead of one of its own. Embodied Solidarity is, as I understand it, the human future that was and is and will be. Wheaton fronted in its presence. My prayer for that learning community is that it will one day have leadership that will publicly repent for having compelled the institution to disgrace itself in this way.

Dr. Hawkins and I first met on video in 2017 when my brother, Jon Foreman, moved by the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, decided to facilitate a public convo. Our mutual friend and mentor, Charles Marsh, put us in touch with her. I’m a little ashamed to say that this was probably the first time it occurred to me to say publicly that white nationalism is antichrist. I hesitate to mention this lest it draw attention away from Dr. Hawkins’ witness, but that video marked the beginning, for me, of being the target of people hiding within anonymous social media accounts.

From there, I invited her to speak at Belmont, and she honored our community profoundly by accepting. In public and casual conversations with our students, she demonstrated a lively intellectual hospitality, an unending wit, and a constant determination to hold the door open for avid inquirers that I’ve tried to model ever since. For Dr. Hawkins, the work of prophetic imagination is an open table to which everyone is invited. I don’t have audio or video of her presentation, but she was kind enough to speak to the Nashville Scene in advance of her time with us. Her conversation with Amanda Haggard is here.

BUT I say all this to note that the best thing I’ve read about Dr. Hawkins has only recently appeared among us. It was penned by Linda Midgett, the director of the film—yes, there’s a film, Same God—that chronicles her experience. In addition to framing Dr. Hawkins’ prophetic action from five years ago, this essay recalls and grieves all the missed opportunities of the last four. It is good to highlight and commend all the moments of candor we’ve seen from folks who are beginning to see the terror they’ve normalized and thereby abided over what we might like to call an era of “Trumpism,” but it’s also right to ask where they’ve been and what they’ve been imagining for themselves long before the broken man took command of the Republican party. Dr. Hawkins tried to show us something. Most of us refused to listen. Are we listening now?

Let me implicate myself a little by sharing a conversation I had with Linda Midgett just before the election. It was a joy, and I offered what wisdom I believed I had. But Dr. Hawkins appears at the end, and, while she’s exceedingly gracious to me, careful viewers will also notice that I’m getting meaningfully schooled. I am made to see that I didn’t know the half of what I was talking about, BUT…when one feels respected, as I did, by the person telling you what’s what, it isn’t at all a shame spiral. It can be a relief. Claudia Rankine says we can’t have a realization and feel shut down simultaneously. This is true. And there, at the end of the video, you can see me realizing things that, up until then, I wasn’t letting myself see. That’s an apocalypse which is also good news which is, of course, gospel. I thank God (and Dr. Hawkins and Linda Midgett) for it.

Do you know someone who hasn’t followed Dr. Hawkins’ witness? If you do, I’d like to urge you to share Linda Midgett’s essay with them. Or maybe watch the film and discuss it with others over the holidaze. What could be more worthwhile or wide-ranging or relevant to where we are? Are you worried about upsetting someone with good news? I’d like to gingerly assert it might be time to go for it. If not now, when?