Pastor now wears Pride flag pin instead of cross

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This article was published 13/04/2024 (907 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For the longest time, Jamie Arpin-Ricci, a Mennonite pastor who helps lead Little Flowers Community here in Winnipeg, wore a cross around his neck as a symbol of his faith.

“For years, I did not miss a single day,” he said. But then one morning last year he put it in a bedside drawer and decided never to wear it again.

What caused him to stop wearing his cross? Little Flowers is a mostly LGBTTQ+ congregation, and Arpin-Ricci — who is married with two children — is bi-sexual.

“As a queer activist, I was also increasingly aware of how triggering Christian symbology and language could be to people traumatized by the church for their sexual orientation and/or gender identity,” he wrote.

But it wasn’t only his concern for queer people that caused him to remove it. Arpin-Ricci also thought about Indigenous people, many of whom suffered as children in church-run residential schools where crosses would often be found on the walls or worn around the necks of abusers.

Today, instead of wearing a cross, Arpin-Ricci now wears a Pride flag pin. “Now my daily ritual includes putting the pin onto my shirt or jacket with the same care and intentionality that I once reserved for the cross,” he said. “It was an important decision for me, one that I feel absolutely no regret over.”

Reflecting on his decision, Arpin-Ricci noted that the cross — a way for Romans to punish and kill people in the most humiliating and painful way — was turned against that empire by the earliest Christians who saw it as a subversive symbol of love, peace and reconciliation. But over the centuries it became the opposite.

It was co-opted by “colonialist, empire-building forces,” Arpin-Ricci said, becoming a symbol of conquest, domination and subjugation, especially against the original peoples of North America, Africa, Central and South America and Asia.

Arpin-Ricci is under no illusion that the Pride flag pin is a perfect replacement. It, too, is complicated by politics and ideology. But for him it conveys some of the original subversive meaning and also the risk that came from wearing a cross — especially in some Christian contexts where “I was once unquestioningly welcomed” but which now are “marked by thinly veiled disdain and even open hostility.”

He doesn’t condemn Christians who still choose to wear a cross. It’s just that for him wearing a Pride pin is a better way to show “faithfulness to the spirit of the life and teachings of Jesus,” as he put it, along with being a “visible symbol of my commitment to fight for the equality and flourishing of every person, especially those on the margins of power.”

By wearing the Pride flag pin, Arpin-Ricci said he isn’t departing from his Christian faith. Instead, he is returning “to the heart of Jesus’s call and example of radical love in the face of injustice.”

For him, the pin “is a vow to confront and disrupt systems that are built of exclusion, supremacy, and ignorance. It’s a vow to love and support others in the very ways I, too, would want to be loved,” he said.

Arpin-Ricci’s decision reminded me of others who have been troubled by what the cross represents in our current context.

For Wynema Morris, a member of the Omaha Nation in the U.S. and a lecturer at Nebraska Indian Community College, the cross represents the “brutality, savagery, and complete lack of humanity” displayed by those who sought to assimilate her ancestors.

Writing in the Humboldt Forum Magazine in 2020, she acknowledged not all Native Americans see it the cross that way. But for others it symbolizes the “brutality of the ‘civilizing’ process” and the negation of traditional Indigenous beliefs of culture.

In Montreal in 2022, a group of Indigenous women called the Mohawk Mothers called for the removal of the 30-metre-high century-old cross at the top of Mount-Royal, calling it a “symbol of oppression” and a glaring reminder of the harm done by the Catholic Church to Indigenous people.

Closer to home, last year Rossbrook House, which was founded by Sister Geraldine MacNamara to serve inner-city youth in Winnipeg, removed the cross that had been affixed to the building for 47 years.

“We recognize the trauma and pain the cross symbolizes for some Indigenous people, especially residential school survivors,” said executive director Patty Mainville in an interview in this newspaper.

At the same time, she wants non-Christian youth and families to see Rossbrook House as a welcoming place. “We want to be sensitive in a multi-faith society,” she noted.

Also in Winnipeg, some members of a suburban church built in the mid-1960s are talking about removing the cross from the steeple beside their building as a way to promote reconciliation, seeing that as a way to reduce harm it might cause others.

In this case, they don’t want to destroy the cross, but rather move it closer to ground level on the side of the building — more of a symbol of the church being among its neighbours, not lording it over them.

As for Arpin-Ricci, the response to his decision has been mostly positive, he said. While some have reacted negatively to his wearing of a Pride flag pin, he has also seen the eyes of some “light up” as “we see each other in a new way. Those are the moments I live for.”

Read Arpin-Ricci’s full essay here.

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