All Idols are Slated for Destruction

All Idols are Slated for Destruction          Feb. 28, 2021    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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Before I start to go all “Old Testament” on the Republican party’s CPAC meeting where, this week, they actually erected a golden statue of Donald Trump, I literally want to take a quick dive into the Old Testament.

 

If I may take you back to your Sunday School lessons, to the book of Exodus, which heroically describes the escape of the Hebrews from bondage in Egypt and their 40 years of trial in the wilderness as they prepared to militarily invade and occupy Palestine, your Sunday School teacher may not have described it in quite that way but, look it up, that’s what Exodus says happened. The Biblical texts say that “God gave them” this land but the subtext of that is that they had to first kill all of the Canaanites and Philistines who were already living there. Which is why Abraham Lincoln famously described America as being a sort of new promised land when white Europeans escaped the economic slavery of Europe to come to these shores, taking the land by killing about 90 million of the people who had lived here for thousands of years. 

 

Historically speaking, people always try to baptize genocide by saying that it was, somehow, God’s idea. It never works on a small scale. If someone climbed over the wall of one of our gated communities and broke into one of our mansions and killed the inhabitants and announced to the world that God had given him the house and all three of the Mercedes in the garage, you are going to have a hard time selling that story.

 But note that the thousands of people who invaded our Capital building on January 6^th carried crosses and signs with the name of Jesus on them, along with the hangman’s noose and material for building a gallows on which to hang the former Vice President, along with the current Speaker of the house and a few other leading government officials. They are seen here, momentary pausing the ransacking of the Senate chambers to offer a prayer of Thanksgiving to God who had given them the Capitol building, after they had killed a few people to get there. 

 

So, the story in Exodus, is that during their long sojourn in the wilderness, Moses goes up onto a mountain for a pow-wow with Yahweh, and he is simply gone too long, weeks, even. So Moses’ little brother, Aaron, gathers up everyone’s gold jewelry and fashions a golden calf and they all begin to worship the calf until Moses suddenly shows up and breaks up the rage. 

 

Now, let me give you a bit of the back story:  All of these ancient Israelite narratives were first being put into written form while the Hebrews were enslaved in Babylon. The Exodus presents itself as an account of something that had happened 500 years earlier. We have no substantive reason to assume that any part of this is actually historical, right down to the existence of a liberating prophet named Moses. 

 

But it should not come as a surprise to any of us that the captured slaves would write stories about how God had led them out of slavery in a foreign land to reclaim their own homeland. 

With the least possible “in your face” affront to their Babylonian captors, the priests wrote about how God had delivered them from an entirely different captivity in an entirely different country. I don’t know if this really slipped past the Babylonians or not, but the book did, somehow, survive. 

 

So, the images in the book are a blend of things from their cultural memory. The Semitic religion that became Judaism didn’t start out as a monotheistic faith. The God of the Hebrews was considered to be a regional god, one god among many in the world. The Psalms even reflect a certain cynicism about whether Yahweh could hear their hymns and prayers in Babylon since Yahweh was imagined to be enthroned in the clouds above Jerusalem. 

 

So, there is a lot in the Old Testament about the people allowing their loyalties to wander a bit, sometimes paying homage to Yahweh and sometimes hedging their bets by dabbling in the religions of their neighbors. The golden calf of this narrative in Exodus chapter 32 is a blending of several influences. Before the Babylonian captivity, when the Jews had a northern kingdom and a southern kingdom, Israel and Judah, Yahweh was worshipped in the northern kingdom at an altar that had two golden calves. At the same time, the Phoenicians worshipped a fertility god, called Ba al, represented as a bull, as did the Egyptians and the Babylonians. A casual walk through the British Museum, would give you several ancient examples. 

 

What your Sunday School teacher may not have mentioned was that the veneration of a fertility god was a very sexy thing, usually involving both wine and orgies. 

So, you can imagine how Moses was not proud of his little brother’s religious infidelity. But the story embodies the ageless temptation away from a spiritual life that calls for compassion, sacrifice, character, and concern for others, when the alternative is a religion that encourages self-indulgence, greed, sexual license, and, quite literally, the glorification of power. 

 

The priests who wrote Exodus realized that the majority of Hebrew slaves had come to acquiesce to slavery, they were forgetting about ever returning to their homeland and to fidelity to a deity whom they had all but forgotten, and they were being seduced by the religion of Babylon, which represented power, wealth, sexuality, and conquest. Having said that, I suspect that most of you could finish this sermon for me.

 

On Thursday of this past week, I delivered a lecture to a group of progressive clergy and laity in England via Zoom. One of the incredulous questions I received from our friends across “the pond” was one we have been asking ourselves for years, “Why have Evangelical Christians remained so firmly in support of Donald Trump when he seems to contradict absolutely everything that they say that they believe in?”

 

And therein lies the rub, he contradicts everything they say that they believe in, like the sanctity of life, fidelity in marriage, honesty, a repudiation of greed, arrogance, crime, and violence. But that is just what they say that they believe in. Trump does stand for what they actually believe in:  military power, wealth and greed, white supremacy, American nationalism, and the oppression of women, blacks, immigrants, and brown people whether they are from Egypt or Mexico. 

 

Trump affirms what evangelicals really believe in and that is why they melted down their jewelry and erected a golden statue of Trump at their political rally to prepare for 2022 and 2024 elections. The only thing that surprises me is that they all have so totally forgotten their Sunday School lessons to the point that the comparisons between the golden calf in Exodus and the Golden idol of Trump at CPAC could not have been lower hanging fruit for their critics. 

 

Many of us have been nearly apoplectic about the unwavering support that Trump has received from right wing religion, to include many American Catholics, especially since they were all so outraged when Bill Clinton had a sexual dalliance with an aid. Their puritan values were on full display in the mid 90’s weren’t they? But really was never about sex or even perjury. It was about power. 

More than 20 years ago, conservative columnist and evangelical pastor, Cal Thomas and the late Ed Dobson, wrote this book, Blinded by Might, about how the Moral Majority had come into existence to elect Ronald Reagan to office but that what they got out of the deal was largely a lot of photo ops in the Oval Office. 20 years after the Reagan revolution, this pair acknowledged that their movement had been seduced by power. They said they wanted to claim America for Christ, but what they did was claim America for the Republican agenda of tax cuts for the wealthy, military dominance of the world, and the repression of if not the imprisoning of black and brown people. 

 

Evangelicals, when they helped to elect Trump, got some anti-abortion Supreme Court appointments but mostly what they got was the rhetoric of white supremacy, of racism, of misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia. They didn’t get a president who was sympathetic with the values of Christianity, they got a president who was supportive of what evangelicals really believe in: Power. Power and white privilege, and wealth hoarded by white men, and the economic enslavement of minorities and women in lower paying jobs and more menial labor. He even helped to build high the wall, not the wall between Mexico and the United States but the economic wall between the children of the poor and the colleges and universities that might have given them a way out of poverty. 

 

I am ready for the Trump era to be over. I’m ready to write sermons that never mention him again. I’m ready to move on to solve the problems that have plagued our nation from its inception. But nearly a half of our peers have made an idol out of Trump and the social id that he represents. That just can’t be allowed to cast a shadow over our nation.

 

I remember attending a lecture given by the famous psychiatrist and author, M. Scott Peck, about 35 years ago in Louisville, KY. One line from that lecture still echoes in my skull: “Anything that cannot be questioned is an idol and all idols are slated for destruction.”

 

Last month, Trump loyalists, at Trump’s beckoning, stormed the Capitol building to stop the constitutional validation of the November election which Trump lost by millions of votes. They killed people, the desecrated the sanctuary of democracy, and they believed that this violent victory would end in Trump sending in the National Guard to finish the job of toppling the government. 

And I don’t doubt that he really wanted to. Reports are that Trump was confused why his aides were not as jubilant about the riot in the Capitol as he was. He had actually convinced himself that he was about to be allowed to remain in office. Even now, his supporters will not give up on the white privilege he represents and they have ignorantly put up their golden calf and this weekend, they are engaging in their idolatrous worship of themselves. 

 

Folks, many of our peers, even members of our own family, have been seduced by a false idol but, as Scott Peck said, all idols are slated for destruction. 

I had hoped that they would figure it out on their own and that I could move on to speak only of the future, I still look forward to that. Realistically, however, we have yet to bury the idol of American racism, greed, oppression, and violence. 

 

About 20 years ago I was a part of a demonstration at our local state university, demanding that they change their employment policy to extend non-discrimination protection to their gay and lesbian faculty. The ardently Roman Catholic president of the university refused, and the university trustees felt compelled to back him in his decision to defend prejudice as university policy. In the closing moments of the meeting, I stood and told the president, “I know that you believe that you have won this issue, but the truth is that you have already lost. We are right and you are wrong and all that stands between the present moment and the civil rights of gay and lesbian faculty members is a little bit of time. Just a little more time now, and you will be gone and your memory will be an embarrassing reminder of prejudice.”

 

America is not yet the shining city on the hill our founders dreamed of but all that is left is a little more time. White supremacy will not last. Confederate monuments will continue to disappear. We will have a living wage and universal healthcare. We will have a compassionate immigration policy. In very truth, we have already won. We have not won because we are larger in numbers or because we have used violence or coercion. We have won because our cause is just and we are on the right side of history.

 

Rebuilding America (after Trump)

“Rebuilding America (after Trump)”   February 21, 2021   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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The first thing that all of us who live in a democracy must accept is that the messiah is not on the ballot.  The media, especially in America, covers our elections with increasing intensity for two years leading up to each presidential election as if that singular vote was going to change the fate of the world. And, in the case of November 2020, it was much more important than usual because, if a president could mess up everything from the environment to international relations to the management of a pandemic, no one could be more destructive than Donald Trump. Still, Joe Biden, while he is already a much better president that Trump, is no messiah. 

 

Like all of you, I am very relieved that Joe Biden has finally replaced Trump as America’s president but, without wanting to be too mean about this, our 77-year-old president attended one of the lower ranked law schools in America where he graduated near the bottom of the class. And, if he had attended one of the grad schools that I attended, he would have been kicked out in his first year when he was caught plagiarizing a paper, taking five full pages from a published law review and turning it in as his own work. How many of you would choose to have your heart surgery done by a physician who attended a low-ranking school and who barely graduated? I wouldn’t, you wouldn’t, and yet, the most powerful person in the world was chosen from among the bottom of the class. 

Our political system is not very good at giving us a choice between two highly qualified candidates. Your political campaigns in the UK are never more than a few weeks long, since the date of your elections are unknown until announced. But you also put in place legislation to limit the amount of money spent on a campaign 150 years ago, something we have yet to accomplish. 

 

Our candidates receive large donations from the very industries that the government is supposed to regulate. It would be like giving the monopoly of installing security systems to the mafia. The failure of American politics can be traced directly to political donations made by corporations and special interests and yet we have never mustered the political will to put a stop to this insane system. 

 

A person of real intellectual prowess does sometimes make it into elected office, Bill Clinton and Barak Obama come quickly to mind, but, folks, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, George W. Bush, and his father, George H. W. Bush, and Ronald Regan, could not have earned degrees from Ivy League schools without having been wealthy or influential. That is just a sad fact. More often than not, we elect presidents who would not be hired to manage a large retail store. Serious campaign finance reform would transform the quality of our candidates overnight, but you can imagine our industrial leaders prefer having mediocre minds in the seats of power because they are much more easily manipulated. 

We have a very sad alliance between the corporate powers who want to manipulate government and a huge portion of our electorate that prefers politicians who reflect their own prejudices and their gullibility in the presence of easily disproven conspiracy theories. Your own media has reported a great deal on the whole QAnon phenomena in America which, even after the failed insurgency on January 6^th, still claims about one-fourth of Republican voters and not a few among the voting public in the UK and Germany, largely inspired by resistance to pandemic quarantine measures. 

 

I realize that reuniting our great nations within our own populations and among the world’s democracies is a noble and necessary goal but, we have to admit, we have a larger portion of our populations who are gullible than we ever cared to admit.

In a recent NPR pole, American voters were asked the question, "Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth," 26 percent of those surveyed answered incorrectly. Though no one has tried to see if the fourth of Americans who don’t know that the earth revolves around the sun and the fourth that believe in QAnon conspiracy theories are the same 25% of our population but I am willing to put my next paycheck on there being more than 80% overlap in those two groups. 

 

Before you get too worried about American voters though, I should remind you that more than a third of the people in the UK believe that ghosts are real and even now, a few of you are likely saying to yourselves, “That American pastor was making a lot of sense until he said that.” But where we are more similar, about half of UK residents who voted for Brexit believe that your government is lying about how many immigrants are living in the UK and about half of Trump voters similarly believe that the US government is lying about the number of immigrants we have here. 

 

No matter what else they tell you, most of the people who voted for Brexit have an anti-immigrant prejudice and an entirely exaggerated view of how many of them there are, and at least half of Trump voters are absolutely xenophobic, insisting on building a wall along our border with Mexico when the majority of movement along our border is people in the USA going to Central America. Many of my own family members and “former” acquaintances who were Trump supporters would tell you that they didn’t especially care for Trump but they liked his policies, which is complete bologna. 

 

The Republican party in 2020 didn’t even come up with a platform! Trump had no policies, no core beliefs, no goals, and no ambition. People voted for him because they loved his slogans, his hatred of Democrats, blacks, gays, Mexicans, and people who read books. 

 

John Churcher posed the question to me for this lecture, “How does America rebuild after Trump?” I do believe that in his first month in office that Joe Biden has done a lot to restore international credibility and to reverse many of Trump’s worst, most prejudiced and destructive policies. But undoing Trump’s influence on America will require more than getting Trump out of office or even putting he and his henchmen on trial and giving them permanent homes in our Federal Prison System. It will require a change of heart among Americans. Trump was a disastrous president who had an inexplicably close relationship with Putin and other tyrants, and a profound dislike for the majority of Americans. But he also revealed something that doesn’t feel at all good for me to have to say, an awful lot of Americans are not good people. Many are not terribly bright and not very good at critical thinking, but even if you don’t understand planetary movement at a 3^rd grade level, not wanting sick people to receive health care, or opposing poor people receiving a living wage, that isn’t really about being smart or educated, is it? That’s about being a decent person. We have difficulty choosing to be decent people and that does not feel good to say.

 

 

40 years ago, when President Regan struck down the Federal Communications Commission’s Fairness Doctrine, there emerged an entire industry of radio talk shows and right-wing TV news services that turned hatred and prejudice into a form of entertainment. The late Rush Limbaugh, a product of the state where I live, was awarded the Medal of Freedom last year by Trump, shortly before he left office, literally giving one of America’s highest honors to a race-baiting, divisive, climate denying, college drop out. 

 

Confucius once said that “one does not plaster and dung wall.” But, for the past two generations in America, we have been trying to gold plate ignorance and prejudice and that will have to stop if we ever want to get back on track as one of the world’s great nations. But with Limbaugh’s recent passing, we see what I believe will be the real change agent among Republican voters. Death. Most younger Republicans do not share their elders’ prejudice against homosexuals, blacks, Latinx, and the transgender community. 

 

It seems grim to claim mortality as your reason for hope in the future, but the majority of the worst aspects of prejudice in America are found more often in the generation that is on its way to memorial gardens than is seen among younger conservatives. With every passing year for the past 25 years, Republican voters have been, on average, older, whiter, less education, and skewing more towards lower income families. 

 

 

Through Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and with no small amount of foreign interference, the Trump Republican party may see a few gains in the midterm elections, but on their current path, unless they dramatically change their message, their priorities, and their appeal to non-white voters, the Republican Party is headed for extinction. As a liberal, you may think that would be something that I would celebrate but honestly, it is not. We need at least two viable parties, I wish that we had four, but we need at least two, in which case, I don’t want the Republican Party to fade out of existence, I just want it to be a better party; a more honest, intelligent, and moral party. 

 

So let me try to sum up my best answer to John Churcher’s question: What does America need to do to rebuild after Trump?

 

Number one, as I have said, is going to be one of the hardest. That is sweeping campaign finance reform. Americans have to get corporations and special interests out of funding elections. We call them “campaign donations” but they are very obviously bribes, right? If McDonalds gives $10 million to health inspectors, you know what they are doing, right? It is no different when military manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and the banking industry raises billions of dollars for political candidates, they are bribing them, buying their support. And that must stop.

Secondly, we must restore the Fairness Doctrine that Ronald Reagan struck down 40 years ago. Americans love free speech but what Reagan did by striking down the requirement that news shows give a fair representation of both sides of an issue, allowed for public lying. It created an industry of hate speech, conspiracy theories, and tabloid journalism that has led to a grossly misinformed, deceived, and manipulated voting public. Germany saw what propaganda did to their nation in the 1940’s and passed laws to make sure that politicians would be punished for lying and their media had to strive for journalistic integrity. America must do the same. 

 

Thirdly, we must renew our commitment to public education, to include access to higher education. When we have honesty in journalism, we also need serious content in our schools. QAnon and other conspiracies do not appeal to people who are capable of doing critical thinking. These insane tales of cannibalistic pedophiles running the government and space aliens and lizard people composing our deep state, are fictions used to thrill the simple minded, not the basis for either voting or storming the Capitol Building to overthrow our government. 

It is easy to make light of uneducated people who fall for conspiracy theories, even though there are, at times, substantial danger represented by their delusional thinking. But even among some of our more educated professionals, misinformation, propaganda, conspiracy theories, and social media spread lies can have an effect. A half a million Americans have died from the coronavirus at this point and yet, here in Missouri, a half of our patient facing healthcare workers have refused to take the vaccines offered to them. Half! This is a mind-numbing level of scientific incompetence and vulnerability to the dumbest of internet rumors. 

 

My fourth point is that our nation must be reunited around important and achievable goals. It is not always a war that unites a country. In many ways, our drive to put an astronaut on the moon captured America’s imagination and respect for science and engineering. We have been killing our planet by burning fossil fuels as if we had another planet to move to once we had destroyed this one.

 

Just as we reached new levels of cooperation globally to develop vaccines in the face of Covid-19, our scientists and yours, as well as those on every continent, need to develop sustainable energy, non-polluting transportation, and efficient and effective delivery of health care. Ironically, we already know how to do most of these things and even while we have been distracted by childish political partisan fighting, major automobile manufacturers have turned from gas burning cars to electric cars. The technology of wind and solar power production is already more affordable than burning coal and gas. We can save the planet while we make human life more just, more fair, and, frankly, more enjoyable.  Why should the French get all of the paid vacations?

 

 

It would likely be kind of me to end right there but I don’t want to be Pollyannish about this. These four simple steps are not simple, they are massively difficult and maybe even impossible for us at this time. 

 

I am not universally a fan of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was theologically a bit too conservative for my tastes and yet there is no denying that he was both very brave and very smart. In one of his letters from prison, written as he awaited execution at the hands of the Nazis, Bonhoeffer spoke very frankly, as only a German can, about stupid people.

He wrote:  ‘Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings  at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed- in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.

 

 

It is difficult to just write off 20 or 30% of your own country as being so irredeemably ignorant that there is no building of a bridge towards reconciliation. Damn us if we don’t try, but we cannot risk our democracies on being successful in getting people who have repudiated science, history, and reason in favor of conspiracy theories and prejudices to suddenly come to their senses. My greatest fear for the Biden administration is his inherent desire to reunite the left and the right. 

 

Talk about being non-partisan always sounds right. Obama fell for it in 2008 and, like Charlie Brown, kept falling for it until Republicans regained a majority in the Senate and the Congress and nearly kept him from accomplishing anything.

 

My fear is that Biden wants harmony so much that he will fall for the same ploy that derailed the Obama administration. There are people who simply will not come to the table. That is true in your churches as you try to figure out how to adjust to be relevant in the 21^st Century, and it is true in your Parliament, and it is especially true in American government. 

 

 

Once a church member, a politician or an in-law has demonstrated that they are impervious to facts, it may be time to just move on towards accomplishing your goals rather than becoming paralyzed by sophistry. That is, of course, just my opinion. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Love in the Time of Pandemic

“Love in the Time of Pandemic”    Feb. 14, 2021   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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I am not sure when you would say that civilization began. Humans started to  plant crops about 12,000 years ago. Settled farms called for the development of walled cities about 10,000 years ago. We began to develop written language about 5,000 years ago. 

About 3000 years ago we emerged from the bronze age into what we call the iron age, but it wasn’t just the discovery of how to make iron, it was about that time that we learned how to weave cloth, and Greek philosophers, poets, and playwrights began to write works that we still read today. 

But then, since the insurrection on January 6^th, it has been difficult for me to have confidence that agriculture, walled cities, a written language and such things as iron, the wheel, electricity, computers, and spaceships all add up to civilization. Maybe we are not there yet. 

To understand our push towards civilization, we really have to look back a couple of million years to our evolutionary ancestors. As humans begin to evolve with larger brains, and therefore, much larger skulls, the females of our lineage had to evolve to give birth sooner and sooner in order to be able to pass these, not quite fully formed, beings through their cervix, and, by all reports, it is rather more painful for humans still than it is for other mammals. I’m going on hearsay here;

I got my kid at the Memphis International Airport and there was no screaming or pushing involved. I understand that it can be quite difficult. All I had to do was remember where I had parked the car. 

Newborns of other species, even animals as large as horses and elephants, can stand and walk the day that they are born. Not so for modern humans. Human babies have to be carefully protected, carried, fed, guarded and trained for years to survive. 

 

Every species evolved with a powerful instinct to reproduce. But simply mating would not perpetuate the human race. The anthropologist, Margaret Mead, has said that marriage was invented by females who needed the father of her children to stay and protect and provide for her and the infants while they were so vulnerable. That is not a very romantic thing to say on Valentine’s Day, but the family, marriage, the whole social structure of human civilization, begins at the point where babies have to be born long before they can even do the basics of survival on their own. 

 

Other mammals have gestation periods that can go for 15 or 16 months, or elephants, nearly 2 years. Sure, baby elephants, camels, and horses are born with mad skills but, they don’t have the brain capacity for written language, forging steel, or getting into political arguments on FaceBook. So, who’s civilized now?

It may be a bit clinical to talk about coupling as a matter of propagating the species and then having to hang around to gather nuts, berries, and firewood, but that is just where romance begins. There is function before there is poetry. 

For our ancient primate ancestors, it may have started out from the impulse to reproduce and the necessity of forming a family to raise young, but, as most of us know already, when the process of reproduction and child rearing is in the distant past, there remains both a capacity and a need for connection, love, romance.

 

In fact, possibly my favorite priest, rabbi, and minister joke goes like this:

Don’t stop me if you have heard this before: So, the priest and the minister are arguing about when life begins, with the priest insisting that life begins in the womb when the egg is fertilized. The minister is trying to argue that human life is not a zygote or a fetus but a baby that is viable outside the womb. The rabbi finally interrupts them and says, “You’re both wrong, life begins when the kids are out of college and the dog dies!”

 

There is obviously a vital element of lust at the beginning of any love relationship, and there is a tremendous amount of bonding in the shared experience of having and raising children. But, in the 21^st century especially, after the kids are out of college, and without casting aspersions on dogs, maybe I can say, in retirement, there is still a great deal of life left, and where there is life, there is the potential for true love. 

 

It has now been a year since the corona virus began to change history in the United States and all over the globe. When we were first called into a pre-emptive lock down to avoid the spread of the virus, David Ketchum and I believed that a lot of people would panic, suffer from depression, or turn to drugs or alcohol, or that there may be instances of domestic violence.

 

We did what good pastors do. We put together some reassuring meditation videos to encourage people to accept a brief interruption in life and to live with a new set of disciplines for a couple of months. Of course, it wasn’t a couple of months. It has been a year and the pandemic has steadily gotten worse with the numbers of deaths and new infections only now trending down, though, with a half a million deaths in the United States, we can hardly find much to celebrate. And though the current trend is promising, there are new strains of the virus that may yet plunge us into deeper and deeper health and economic crisis.

 

Though our meditation videos were almost entirely ignored, there has been a spike in drug and alcohol abuse. There has been a huge spike in suicides and gun related deaths. Still, it has been hard to tell exactly who has the hardest time enduring Covid-19. I have lived alone for more than a decade now, but I didn’t know what “alone” really meant until this past year. I have gone from “cabin fever” to full blown “house bound leprosy.” It has been crazy lonely, and it is not getting any better. But I have known that there is an entirely different set of challenges when you are not alone, especially if the kids are out of college and you aren’t going to the office anymore. 

Two people who love each other and have spent decades together are now spending decades together every week or two. I do get lonely in my homebound isolation, but I regularly talk with people who would love a little alone time.

 

Where life had been a pleasant blending of time together and time apart in separate volunteer activities and hobbies, now, there is mostly just a lot of time together. . . and that takes a whole different set of skills. And, frankly, every marriage will not survive the stress, depression, and challenges that have come from a year in quarantine. And some of the ones that are not making it are ones that I really wanted to see survive. I’ve done a lot of weddings over the past 42 years, but I have never gotten good at predicting who was going to stay together and who wasn’t. 

In marriage, as in evolution, it is important to realize that we have mischaracterized Darwin when we speak of evolution as a matter of the survival of the fittest. It is not the strongest or even the smartest of the species that survives to reproduce, it is the one that can best adapt to change. In any marriage that has lasted for 15, 20, or 25 years, anyone can tell you that it was not just one single marriage, but it was probably three or four, if not five or six. People don’t stay the same and sometimes two passionate lovers who were inseparable a decade ago, cannot stand each other now. People change, and they either change in complimentary ways or they arrange to give almost all of their life’s savings to a total stranger, commonly called a divorce lawyer. 

 

Libidinal appetite may play a huge role in why people are initially drawn to one another, but that is certainly not why they choose to stay together, 5, 10, or 50 years later. I could hope that no couple gives up on intimacy entirely but, statistically, I know that it happens. 

 

About 15 to 20% of couples live in sexless marriages and that includes about 10% who are under 40. This can happen for a lot of physiological reasons but mostly it is psychological. I will not say much more about this, but I will leave you with this one thought, researchers tell us that couples that are sexually intimate at least once a week, live much longer than those who do not. So, friends, take your vitamins. And that goes for gay couples as well. The stats on your sexual frequency are even more dismal than among heterosexual couples. All of which, can be complicated by the stress of the pandemic. 

 

As these months have drug on, I have noticed a distinct increase in people’s willingness to be rude or even cruel, in entirely unnecessary ways. I can only imagine what that must be like when you are around the same person 24/7. 

 

 

In the early days of the pandemic, I was in the habit of talking with a physician friend in New York nearly daily, as he was seeing many patients die and he was experiencing the growing stress on New York’s whole healthcare system. But we sometimes talked about family and it has always seemed to me that William and Cristina have the kind of marriage that everyone would love to have. At some point, I said to William, “It is a shame that Cristina doesn’t have a single sister.” To which he replied, “Oh, she does, but she is a professor in Brazil. She doesn’t speak English and I don’t think she likes men.” Well, he was half right. 

 In the early days of our internet courtship, I picked up this novel, thinking that it would offer some catharsis from the challenge of being in a budding romance facing the barriers of not only thousands of miles and complicated language issues, but also the extremity of a pandemic which has kept Brazilians from coming to the United States and has made going from here to there something akin to inventing agriculture, walled cities, written language, and iron. 

 

The novel was a bit disappointing in that cholera doesn’t figure into the plot nearly as much as the title would indicate. But it is about love, initially the love between Florentino and Fermina. As in so many Latin novels, their love was forbidden by Fermina’s family and in the end her father took her far away to end the relationship, but they secretly stayed in touch through the early 20^th century version of FaceBook messenger, the telegraph. 

 

When Fermina was old enough to leave her father and return to Florentino, she discovered that though they had imagined a great love affair, they were, in truth, total strangers. And so, she broke off their engagement and returned to her father’s home. There she was eventually courted by and married to a very beloved national hero, a physician, Dr. Urbino, whose passion, oddly enough, was the eradication of Cholera. How romantic!

 

He was, however, a sincerely good man, and he loved Fermina and was almost entirely loyal to her. Fermina forgot all about Florentino and was a devoted wife who, though not passionately in love, shared a noble and admirable life with her hard-working husband. 

The plot turns when they had grown old. Dr. Urbino was called out to examine the body of a close friend who had committed suicide at the age of 60, purely out of fear of growing old. When he returned home, he found that his pet parrot had escaped and was in a tree in the lawn. He climbed a ladder to retrieve the frightened bird but fell to his death. 

 

On the heels of Dr. Urbino’s death, Florentino shows up to proclaim his undying love for Fermina, swearing to her that he had been totally faithful to her through all of the decades when she was married. This was a lie on the scale of Donald Trump’s account of his landslide victory in the November election, but this is a novel about romance and so we will not get bogged down in the sordid details. Though she was but recently widowed, and Florentino’s advances were not entirely well regarded in the community, she gave him a second chance, and after five decades apart, they were at last given a life together. 

 

Love later in life may seem a bit like giving out free dancing shoes at the nursing home. It may be a generous gesture but what good can come of it? All I can say, is that you don’t know everything about dancing. I have never had a fair shot at a mutually meaningful relationship and the fact that Silvia did not show up in my life until I was in my 60’s has not made it less meaningful for me.

 

There are stereotypes for Latin families and Anglo-American families. I would say that my family and Silvia’s pretty well check all of the boxes on those stereotypes. 

I had two brothers and a sister and once we left home, we almost never saw one another short of absolute necessity. I have tried, for years, to get us to be closer and have failed at every turn. There is nothing to be mad about, there is just no desire to do any better. 

Silvia has a mother, two sisters and a brother, four nieces, and three in-laws. I have met them all. All educated, interesting, colorful people, and by “colorful” I mean that they have their own issues. As Silvia’s sister, Andrea, has assured me, “My psychiatrist tells me that all 6 of my personalities are doing just fine.” They all have their issues, but the number one issue is that they all love and support one another in ways that my family not only couldn’t imagine, but I dare say, that they would hate. My siblings always preferred competition to affection which is sad since I am the youngest, tallest, smartest, and best looking of the litter.

 

I spent two weeks with Silvia on Florianopolis last fall, and I knew before I went that she and her whole family meet online every Saturday and Sunday night for a loud and animated family meeting. What I did not know is that beyond those twice weekly transcontinental zoom meetings, they also all call and text one another, if I use the word “constantly,” you will think that I am exaggerating. I am telling you, it is a conversation that never ends. It is like a 3-ring circus, you find yourself thinking, this is just too much, and yet you are endlessly intrigued, and you cannot look away. As Andrea says, “Our family is all crazy, but no one ever wants to leave.”

 

Silvia and I have no plan and no idea for how we might combine our lives. We both have compelling reasons to be where we are and yet we both want to find a way to be together. I hope that we can make it work though I can tell you this, I am not afraid of growing old and I cannot even imagine doing it alone. 

 

When we first were introduced and she was showing me why William was certain that Silvia did not like men, and she especially did not like religion, philosophy, or even poetry, I shared with her a passage that has been broadly falsely attributed to Frieda Kahlo, that says:

“Te mereces un amante que te quiera despeinado, 

con todo y todos los motivos que te despiertan de prisa y los demonios que no te dejan dormir. 

Te mereces un amante que te quite las mentiras y te traiga esperanza, café y poesía ". 

 

“You deserve a lover who wants you disheveled, with everything and all the reasons that wake you up in a haste and the demons that won’t let you sleep.

 

You deserve a lover who takes away the lies and brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.”

 

Through the right poem, we discovered, that while Silvia does not care for lesser men, she is willing to make an exception for the right one. 

 

Folks, the world can beat you down. Your career, even a career like mine where it has been my honor to roll out of bed and to try to make the world a better place, to feed the hungry, build houses for the homeless, and bring comfort and moral challenge to a world beset with darkness . . . but even my wonderful, amazing, life in ministry has also been marked by irrational hatred, broken friendships, lies, and that most insidious dimension of ecclesial politics. 

 

Life can take a toll on a marriage, even the explicit joy of having and raising children together, that too can weigh you down, turning young lovers into strangers who share a bed. But it doesn’t have to be that way. It doesn’t have to stay that way.

 

The novel lets us peek in on Florentino through the years of his adult life, when, frankly, he had hundreds of affairs. But I like to think, even when he was being a scoundrel, that he was always wishing that it was the real thing, wishing that it was Fermina. . . until the day, when it was Fermina. 

 

I’ve been single for 25 years. I had resigned myself to the fact that I was one of that large percentage of people in our world who was destined to go it alone. But there has never been a day in these 25 years that I did not believe that I “deserved a lover who would take away the demons, and bring hope into my life, and coffee, and poetry.” 

 

Silvia and I do not know with any certainty what the future holds for the two of us, but what we do have is hope. I do not know where your life stands on this Valentine’s Day, this wretched greeting card holiday that has, for decades, just made me feel sad, . . . I don’t know where you are on this day, but I do know this, 

“You deserve a lover who wants you disheveled, with everything and all the reasons that wake you up in a haste and the demons that won’t let you sleep.

You deserve a lover who takes away the lies and brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.”

 

Whether it happens or not, you deserve it. And if you are in a marriage that has become a roommate relationship, let me tell you, that happens a lot, but you don’t have to leave it to find love again in a new person. Although you can’t change a stale relationship all at once, you can change it.

Sometimes change comes in the form of a gesture, bring her a cup of coffee in bed and start out this way, “I found this poem, . . . may I read it to you?” And if you were to do that every morning for a week or two, well, you can thank me later. 

 

 

 

Beyond Toxic Propaganda: Education, Memory, and a Better Future

Beyond Toxic Propaganda:  

Education, Memory, and a Better Future 

click here to see the video              “Katya” Ketchum 

February 7, 2021 

Fifteen More Minutes of Fame 

Springfield, Missouri made a brief appearance on Fox News Flash on January 21, with what I think was meant to be a shocking headline, but what should be common knowledge by now: “Missouri diversity session tells teachers ‘colorblindness,’ ‘all  

lives matter’ are forms of white supremacy.”  

(https://outline.com/8v4t8H ) The article describes activities  

and handouts from a local professional development session for middle school teachers that had been “leaked” to the Discovery Institute, an antievolution organization.   

In a testament to being uninformed, Fox News was outraged to uncover educational materials that have been openly discussed and distributed for years. The article claimed that “middle school teachers were pressured to endorse certain ideas about race,” but the examples given are not, or, at least, should not be controversial. For example, though the article acts surprised that the training session began with an acknowledgment that we live on land taken from Indigenous Peoples, it’s no secret that the land that now makes up the United States of America was taken from Indigenous Peoples, largely  

through violence and deceit (https://aeon.co/essays/how-were-1-5-billion-acres-of-land-so-rapidly-stolen ). It’s no secret that children of color are disproportionately treated as adults, unconsciously perpetuating racism and propping up racist systems and  

cultures (https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/substantial-racial-stereotyping-toward-young-children-ofcolor-found-among-white-adults-who-work-with-them/ ). It’s no secret that White people endanger the lives of Black people by using the flimsiest of excuses to call  

the police on them (https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1293&context=mjrl ). We  

have the hard data on all of this. And, after all these years, I can’t imagine a valid excuse for still not understanding how saying “All Lives Matter” distracts us from dealing with the ongoing, tragic, and cumulative impacts of  

White supremacy on our Black, Indigenous, and People of Color  

communities (https://www.oprah.com/inspiration/layla-f-saad-all-lives-matter-is-a-weapon-to-silence ). In all  

these cases, the article bristles at the idea that racist ideas and actions could somehow be connected to upholding racist systems and cultures. 

Again, none of this is new. One version of the handout I suspect Fox News was shocked to discover goes back at least 15 years! I did a simple image search using key words from the article (“overt covert white supremacy”) and found pages of results, many of them variations of a resource developed by the Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence  

back in 2005 and updated by Ellen Tuzzolo in 2016. (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php? fbid=10155008422952523&set=a.85127512522.81621.626002522&type=3&theater   ) In other words, Black,  

Indigenous, and People of Color have been more than patient with us White folks’ slowness to learn and change, and there is no excuse for our enduring and harmful ignorance. So, dear fellow White people: if any of the material that Fox News was complaining about is new to you, then you are most likely way behind on the learning and changing you need to do.  

And if you would like to take a simple step to support our local educators so that they can continue to receive the kind of training and resources that Fox News was so mistakenly terrified about, you can send a message of encouragement to the Springfield School Board. As you might expect, the board, and also and especially the faculty and staff, have been getting lots of pushback and hostility for promoting racial and social justice  

(https://www.facebook.com/BrettRhetoric/posts/10100435977750666 ). So let them know you are glad that Springfield schools are trying to get on the right side of history and on the right side of marginalized students and communities. Please contact:  

Springfield School Board secretary Kathy  

Looten,  

1359 E. St. Louis St. Springfield, MO, 65802 email: klooten@spsmail.org Ignorance, Lies, and Misinformation  

As important as all of this is, there is another aspect to this story that connects to larger conversations about how we remember the past, deal with the present, and create a better, more just, more compassionate, and more livable future. The Fox News article made two connections to this larger context that we need to make sure we notice. First, one of the participants in the professional development session asked, “Is the district saying that we should be Marxists?” Second, the article connected this training event to the Trump administration’s “executive order opposing critical race theory” and the announcement of a new “legal coalition with the aim of bringing a lawsuit before the Supreme Court.”  

The Marxist dog whistle (https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2003/cultural- 

marxism-catching ) is one of the more persistent ways that we see White people try to prop up the status quo while avoiding accountability for White supremacy. Please note that you do not have to have read or understood Marx or Marxism to invoke the reflexive disgust that has become associated with the name in the minds and hearts of many people. Interestingly, the person who blew this particular whistle received a fair bit of space in the Fox News article. And while we don’t know if this person was White or not, it’s difficult to avoid concluding that what he said benefits the racist status quo. At any rate, this person expressed three things: critical race theory is Marxist, and he does not like Marxism; critical race theory “pushes a narrative” and “silences anybody who has any kind of disagreement”; and he really likes Martin Luther King, Jr. He said:  

“Dr. King did not teach the kind of vitriol that we see out of Marxism. Marxism has a long replete history of countries being bigoted and prejudiced against others and then murdering millions as a result of it.” 

Claiming devotion to Dr. King while decrying Marxism is more than a little ironic, since Dr. King was also accused by the FBI of being “a ‘wholehearted’ communist who followed a ‘MarxistLeninist line.’” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/11/04/in-the-latest-jfk-files-the-fbis-ugly-analysis-on-martinluther-king-jr-filled-with-falsehoods/ ) But now that the establishment has had 50 years to forget about how radical Martin Luther King, Jr. really was, and 50 years to try to shape his popular image into a harmless icon of racial harmony, he can be invoked in a non-threatening way. Meanwhile, the new generation of folx insisting on and leading us toward racial justice are now accused of Marxism as a way to scare the general populace away from the hard, but liberating, work of dismantling White supremacy.  

Unfortunately, the Fox News hero is not unusual or even original. In the new legislative session, our neighbors to the south are one of the states now considering institutionalizing a rejection of critical race theory and, more broadly, an honest understanding of history. Arkansas Representative Mark Lowery has introduced House Bill 1218 in the hopes of prohibiting schools from any lesson, event, or activity that, to quote the bill, “promotes … social justice” on the basis of issues such as race, gender, and social class. It also prohibits any class, event, or activity that “Advocates the solidarity of … a group of students … based on …  (A) Ethnicity; (B) Race; (C) Religion; (D)  

Gender; and (E) Social class”. (https://www.arkleg.state.ar.us/Bills/FTPDocument?path=%2FBills %2F2021R%2FPublic%2FHB1218.pdf ) This bill is obviously atrocious and unlikely to  

pass, but just proposing it helps normalize what should be ridiculous ideas. As Ali Noland has pointed out: “This modern-day-book-burning law would cut funding for any public schools and universities that did their job of making students think about hard things.”  

(https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2021/02/01/arkansas-lawmaker-pushes-a-bill-sobad-it-should-be-banned ) 

However, House Bill 1218 was not enough for Representative Lowery, who has sponsored a second bill that shows yet another way to make sure students do not “think about hard things.” Arkansas House Bill 1231 is called “An Act Creating the Saving American History Act of 2021.” Its explicit goal is “to prohibit the use of public school funds to teach the 1619 Project Curriculum.” The bill describes “an activist movement” that aims: “to deny or obfuscate this history by claiming that the United States of America was not founded on the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, but rather on slavery and oppression.” The language in the bill goes out of its way to deny the fact that wealth and power in the USA did grow “out of slavery” and simply doesn’t understand that the founders and early citizens of the United States could both have lofty aspirations and ideals while also participating in oppression and injustice. Instead, the bill claims that - 

“The 1619 Project is a racially divisive and revisionist account of history that threatens the integrity of the Union by denying the true principles on which it was founded; and The State of Arkansas has a strong interest in promoting an accurate account of the history of the United States of America in public schools and forming young people into knowledgeable and patriotic citizens.”  

(https://www.arkleg.state.ar.us/Bills/FTPDocument?path=%2FBills%2F2021R%2FPublic%2FHB1231.pdf ) 

It probably goes without saying, but Representative Lowery and I have very different understandings of what constitutes “an accurate account of the history of the” USA and what it means to be “knowledgeable and patriotic citizens.”  

1619. and 1776 

Nevertheless, these ideas are becoming normalized, and similar bills are also being considered in Iowa and Mississippi (https://www.kcrg.com/2021/02/03/proposed- 

iowa-bill-would-reduce-funding-in-schools-if-the-1619-project-is-taught/ ). This is disappointing and  

dangerous, but not surprising, especially after the spectacle that Donald Trump made in the waning months of his administration.  

Last September, Trump issued an “Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping” that prohibited “federal employees, contractors, and grant recipients from discussing or considering concepts such as critical race theory and white privilege and discourag[ed] diversity education and training.” In a move you will recognize, Trump claimed that diversity training promotes “Marxist doctrine” and “is itself racist and sexist.” As malicious and misguided as the order was, it still had a ripple of impacts across the nation, as organizations, universities, and nonprofits had to weigh the decision to continue programming and multicultural celebrations with the  

risk of losing their funding. (http://www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2020/10/ala-statement-executive order-combating-race-and-sex-stereotyping ) 

Then, in December of 2020, Donald Trump took aim at The New York Times’ 1619 Project. What did it do to incur such wrath? In the Project’s own words:  

“The goal of The 1619 Project, … , is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year. Doing so requires us to place the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the  

story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.”  

More to the point, the Project asks: 

“What if, …  the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619? Though the exact date has been lost to history … , that was when a ship arrived at Point Comfort in the British colony of Virginia, bearing a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s very origin.”   

(https://pulitzercenter.org/sites/default/files/full_issue_of_the_1619_project.pdf ) 

However, Trump and his allies insisted that such truth-telling about US history was “toxic propaganda” and even went so far as to say that "left-wing rioting and mayhem [referring to movements such as Black Lives Matter] are the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools."  

(https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/535323-biden-rescinds-trumps-1776-commission-a-report )  

He insisted that:  

“Critical race theory, the 1619 project, and the crusade against  

American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison that if not  

removed will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together … . It will destroy our country. That is why I recently banned trainings in this prejudiced ideology from the federal government and banned it in the strongest manner possible. … The only path to national unity is through our shared identity as Americans, … That is why it is so urgent that we finally restore patriotic education to our schools.”  

(https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/17/devos-black-history-1776-unites-417186 ) 

And that goal, of restoring “patriotic education to our schools,” resulted in Trump’s establishment of the 1776 Commission last December. The commission then issued a report on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day this year that disrespected both the man and his memory. Like the unnamed man in our Fox News article, the commission sought to pay lip service to Dr. King while hollowing out his message, claiming that:  

“‘the Civil Rights Movement was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders,’ criticizing affirmative action policies and arguing that identity politics are ‘the opposite of King's hope that his children would “live in a nation where they will not be judged by the  

color of their skin but by the content of their character.”’”  

(https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/535323-biden-rescinds-trumps-1776-commission-areport ) 

This report, issued almost two weeks after the capitol riots, asserted: 

 “Today, … , Americans are deeply divided about the meaning of their country, its history, and how it should be governed. This division is severe enough to call to mind the disagreements between the colonists and King George, and those between the Confederate and Union forces in the Civil War. They amount to a dispute over not only the history of our country but also its present purpose and future direction.”  

(https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/18/trump-1776-commission-appointments-448229 ) 

If you hadn’t noticed before, please pay attention now. The 1776 Commission report was an official document, representing a now wellestablished conviction that movements for racial and social justice represent a threat to the United States, rather than an opportunity for healing and growth. And they are steadfast enough in these convictions that they published these words, comparing their enmity for American citizens who have been tirelessly working to bring about a more just, equal, and compassionate society for everyone, with the disagreements that led to the American Revolution and the American Civil War. And while Trump is no longer in the White House, and President Biden quickly rescinded the 1776 Commission, the influential people whose ideas brought the commission into being, and the people who were willing to storm the US capitol to uphold their distorted, whitewashed version of US history and identity, are still very much around. 

 These are natural consequences of us failing to take seriously, as a society, the ongoing work of understanding our history: the wonderful and the terrible; the oppression and the resistance; the proud moments and the disgraceful ones. As W.E.B. Du Bois taught us back in 1935:  

“We shall never have a science of history until we have in our colleges [people] who regard the truth as more important than the defense of the white race, and who will not deliberately encourage students to gather thesis material in order to support a prejudice or buttress a lie.”  

(https://activisthistory.com/2019/12/06/white-supremacy-in-the-academy-the-1913-meeting-of-the-americanhistorical-association/ ) 

And discerning what is true and what is prejudice is where our work still lies. 

The Bible Tells Me So  

So, on one side, represented by the 1619 Project, we have an insistence that, in order to properly heal from our historical and present-day wounds, we have to be honest about them, and even go out of our way to learn about them. On the other side, represented by the 1776 Commission, we have an insistence that, in order to be patriotic, we have to tell a version of our history that minimizes and even hides those wounds. And while I am not aware that any of the conservatives and conspiracy theorists in my social and familial circles stormed the Capitol, I am aware that many of them are sympathetic, if not supportive, of the 1776 Commission.  

Further, the people in my life that are – or have been – most insistent that remembering our mistakes is somehow undermining our ability to be a healthy society also happen to overwhelmingly subscribe to Judeo-Christian beliefs. And that just makes the whole thing stranger to me. After all, the Jewish and Christian scriptures are largely a record of people struggling, and often failing, to create a healthy society – and they wrote it all down so it could be remembered and they could do better! Psalm 106 is one such example of how this memory was included in the spiritual lives of these ancient communities.  

The Psalm praised God for steadfast love and blesses people “who observe justice,” and then recited a list of times when their nation had failed in doing “righteousness … . Both we and our ancestors have sinned,” the Psalmist declared: “Our ancestors … rebelled against the Most High at the Red Sea.” God rescued them, “But they soon forgot [God’s] works; … they had a wanton craving in the wilderness, and put God to the test in the desert”. The Psalmist then described them – their own ancestors - as jealous and wicked, going so far as to worship an idol. Yet even when Moses persuaded God “from destroying them,” they “grumbled in their tents.” Scattered for their arrogance, they still didn’t learn and “attached themselves to” another god, eventually going so far as to practice child sacrifice. Yet through all of this, through plague and exile, the Psalm ended as it began: steadfast love brought the people back together, with each other and with God: “For their sake [God] remembered [God’s] covenant, and showed compassion according to the abundance of [God’s] steadfast love.” (Psalm 106:45 NRSV) 

This is but one example of a biblical model of how to remember a difficult, painful history, and it is much more consistent with the 1619 Project than the 1776 Commission. However, we do have a biblical example of a ruling elite that refused to honestly acknowledge the painful history that preceded them. Unfortunately for lovers of the 1776 Commission, that approach lines up more closely with those on the receiving end of Jesus’ scathing denunciations in Matthew 23:  

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous, and you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ Thus you testify against yourselves that you are descendants of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your ancestors. You snakes, you brood of vipers! How can you escape being sentenced to hell?” (Matthew 23:29-33 NRSV) 

Resistance to truth-telling, such as the 1776 Commission and Arkansas House Bills 1218 and 1231, testify against themselves. They whitewash history and whitewash the present. They comfort themselves by saying, first, things were not so bad and, second, if they were that bad, we have progressed and outgrown those bad things, so there is no reason to bring them up again. And there are many people who quite blatantly say, “If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood” – of slaves, of immigrants, of Indigenous Peoples, and of all the marginalized communities that spoke up for justice and received violence and oppression in return.   

I’m sharing these examples because people who have been critical of attempts to honestly deal with the history of the United States have often claimed some special patriotic and religious virtue. If you’re going to make that claim, it won’t be through citing the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, because these records show us a people who didn’t shy away from naming and repenting of their mistakes and those of their ancestors. And we should not shy away from honestly dealing with US history, either.  

I do understand that many White people still feel bewildered by changes we have been asked to make, and that we are (thankfully) increasingly expected to have already made. And I understand that they are afraid that they will get called out for making mistakes. If this is you, I can empathize with your discomfort, but it cannot be offered as an excuse for inaction. Please let me challenge you to change your perspective. Rather than getting stuck in your fear, get busy doing the work. If you find yourself worried about making mistakes, view that as an invitation to learn and do better, so that you make fewer mistakes. If you worry that you are ignorant about the insights and demands that Black, Indigenous, and People of Color are making regarding racial justice, start paying attention to their voices and taking their words to heart. If you fear that you will somehow experience the pain of prejudice and discrimination, devote yourself to working with others to create community where everyone’s voice is heard and everyone’s needs are met. But, whatever we, and especially White people, do, we must stop letting our discomfort get in the way of action. We need to turn and honestly face the reality of 1619, so that we can better understand 2021. Because we must all take steps to do our part to dismantle White supremacy and heal the deep, terrible wounds that racism has left on our communities and our hearts.