July
3, 2016 Community Christian Church
of Springfield, MO
Roger
Ray, pastor “A Nation Under God?”
“When fascism comes to America, it will
come wrapped in the flag and waving a cross,” possibly attributed to Sinclair Lewis or Huey Long though
there is no record of either men having made this statement.
Other
than news programs, I rarely watch TV, especially since Jon Stewart gave up
hosting the Daily Show and Stephen Colbert sold out to network TV censors who
virtually never allow him to say anything that matters. I could count on the
fingers of one hand the televised sporting events I have seen, and, much to the
disappointment and horror of many of you, I have never watched an episode of
The Game of Thrones. I find that there are enough real dragons in this year’s
presidential campaign so I have no need for the imaginary sort.
But I
have binge watched a few series that hooked me in a way that I could not resist
but none so powerfully as Andrew Ross Sorokin’s regrettably brief series, The
Newsroom. I was hooked from the opening sequence when Jeff Daniel’s character,
a TV news host, in the midst of a nervous breakdown, suddenly unloaded on a
college sophomore who had asked him why the United States was the greatest
nation in the world. His four-minute rant about why America is not the greatest
nation in the world stands unrivaled, in my opinion, as the best 4 minutes ever
on TV.
Dismissing
all filters, including any sense of courtesy or civility, he fires off a litany
of American weaknesses and bemoans the loss of the greatness we were once proud
of…the time when we built great big remarkable things, declared war on poverty
rather than war on the poor. We produced the best artists, scientists, and
technological advances, we cherished our great thinkers rather than despising
them.
I watched
that segment and for the first time since I was a kid sitting on the floor of
the Ben Franklin store in Glasgow, KY reading comic books, I saw a character
that I thought: I want to be him. Will McAvoy is not a real person but I wanted
to be that person in reality.
I don’t
know if it shows, but I try to stand up here every week and tell the
unvarnished truth, whether it is the truth about religion, the institutional
church, American politics, poverty, the prison system, economic exploitation,
or international warfare. But the truth can be an elusive thing.
When
Independence Day falls so close to a Sunday that there is no way to avoid
talking about it, I always think of two 4th of July speeches. One
was delivered by the liberated slave, Frederick Douglass, just a few years
before the Civil War broke out, and the other was possibly delivered by Mark
Twain in London in 1899. I say “possibly delivered” because Twain later wrote
that though he had written the short speech and it was in his pocket, that a
minister had spoken at the 4th of July dinner for so long that he
was not allowed to get up and deliver his four minute speech.
Having
been to very many dinners where a minister spoke, I believe that it may have
happened in just that way.
But the
speech of Frederick Douglass was delivered and that he survived its delivery to
a 4th of July celebration is a bit of a surprise. He asked and then
answered this question:
|
What, to the American
slave, is your Fourth of July?
There
is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of
practices
more
shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very
hour.
|
We have the benefit of the perspective of
history. We know what followed. The sentiments expressed by Douglass and
countless others finally led to war. Other nations managed to end slavery
through peaceful means but the slave holding states of the south had rejected
Lincoln’s offers of compensation and the most lethal war in American history
brought slavery to an end and plunged much of this nation into poverty from
which they have never fully recovered.
But the sins and hypocrisy cited by Douglass did
not end when the war ended. The talk of freedom and a doctrine of separate but
equal only masked the divide in our nation. Nearly a century passed before the
Civil Rights movement gained the strength to begin to address this national
disgrace.
The thwarted dreams of blacks in the United
States found a voice in many black churches but at the same time there was an
evangelical revival among white churches that sadly tried to shout down the
calls for freedom and civil rights.
The phrase “one nation under God” was added to
the pledge of allegiance to the flag in 1954 when there was a revival of
religious fervor in America. Eisenhower’s pastor advocated adding it in a sermon
when Eisenhower was in church and he finally went along with the idea.
While the Jim Crowe laws of the south were being
dismantled and the “whites only” and “coloreds only” signs were removed, what
Michelle Alexander has called “The New Jim Crowe” was being assembled.
Though crime rates have been going down in the
United States, incarceration rates have gone up by more than 400% since the
Civil Rights movement began. We now have more black men in prison than we ever
had black slaves in 19th century America.
Jim Crowe laws stripped blacks of equal standing
in America. They prevented them from voting, from employment, education, and
even from owning homes. What was once accomplished through slavery, what was
effectively done through discriminatory laws, we now do by arresting the poor
and minorities and saddling them with a criminal record that keeps them, in
most states, from voting, from finding employment, from education, and very
effectively, from either buying a house or having access to public housing.
White privilege is seen no where so plainly as
in our judicial system where a black man or woman is seven times more likely to
go to jail for a non-violent drug crime than even a poor white man or woman. In
many ways, black women fair worse than black men, having racial discrimination
compounded by gender discrimination along with sexual abuse and physical
violence.
Indians and Mexicans were driven from their land
and slaughtered. Blacks have been enslaved and relegated to a second class role
in society in this land of the free in which the political phrases of “taking
back our country” and “making America great again” are loosely bandied about.
And now Muslims are being identified as the new dark skinned people we are
encouraged to blame for our national woes and are make the targets of
legitimate, if not baptized, racial hatred.
One nation… under God… not yet. Not that I, for
one, long for that particular moniker to be made into any kind of legal
reality.
We are not certain who actually penned the final
draft of the treaty with Tripoli that was adopted just six years after the Bill
of Rights was written… it may have been George Washington himself or some other
of our famous founding fathers but it was ratified and in 1797 it said:
As the Government of the United States is not,
in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no
character of enmity against the law, religion or tranquility of Musselmen; and
as the states never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any
Mohometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from
religious opinion shall ever produce an interruption of harmony existing
between the two countries.
Try getting language of that sort through this
congress, 220 years later! The greatness
of America lies in the ideals to which we strive, not in our realized history
of discrimination and conflict.
I began today by referencing two historical
speeches and one imaginary one. The speeches of Frederick Douglass and our TV
hero, Will McAlvoy, tell the shameful truth.
They expose hypocrisy and call us to come to
terms with our lies and national myths. But the other speech I mentioned was
delivered by a humorist who was also something of a social prophet. Mark Twain
spoke, or was supposed to speak, in England, the country we went to war with in
order to gain our freedom.
He was speaking a century after that war and in
that speech he made fun of both American politics and British imperial
arrogance but over it all he applauded the fact that even though it had taken
most of a century to do it, that the one time enemies had become friends,
allies, and that the bloody contempt we once had for one another was over.
It can happen faster now. The horror of WWII
fairly quickly evolved into real partnership between Japan and the United
States. The Germans whom we both feared and hated have become important allies
and, in many ways, technological and democratic teachers. In Germany a politician can go to prison for
lying during an election campaign… an idea whose time has come!
I have personally walked through the streets of
Masaya, Nicaragua where the bullet pock marks are still visible from the wars
we waged against the poor of that neighboring nation just a generation ago and
I have been greeted in friendship and sincere affection.
I think that Mark Twain was onto something we
need to remember.
We will not end racism, we will not resolve
classism, we will not win the war on terror, through incarceration, invasion,
bombing, or by building a wall and we certainly won’t make progress just by
naming our faults and falling into cynical anger. This war will be won through
humor, friendship, forgiveness, through fair trade, mutual respect, and, dare I
say it, sincere faith.
President Obama will leave office in a few
months with a long track record of historic and remarkable successes. He helped
this nation to avoid a seemingly inevitable second great depression. He brought
our official discrimination against our gay brothers and sisters to an end, and
he has given us a first family that we can be proud of and that we will be sure
to miss in the years ahead.
But he failed in one of his primary objectives
and that was to reunite this nation, to bring the left and the right together
with mutual goals and in mutual respect. We are less “one nation” now than we
have been since the end of the Civil War. That unity that still eludes us is
the common goal to which, I sincerely pray, we will strive to realize in the
years ahead.
We will not surrender to injustice, but we
cannot hate those who resist progress. We cannot bomb enough Muslims to make
them like us better. We cannot imprison enough blacks to end racism. We cannot
build a wall high enough to make Latinos stay and pick our vegetables and fruit
for slave wages.
Only love, good humor, a willingness to be self
critical, and a sincere desire to turn our enemies into friends can do that.
