Category: Justice

Martin Luther King On Spiritual Blindness

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

These words of Rev. King are from a sermon entitled, “Love In Action,” in his book, Strength To Love. This sermon has for its text the words of Jesus from the cross: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” The quote above comes from King’s reflection on the last part of Jesus’ words: “They know not what they do.”

For King the reality of these words—“they know not what they do”—runs through all of human history. Wars, slavery, and Jim Crow were “perpetuated by sincere though spiritually ignorant persons.” Therefore, “sincerity and conscientiousness in themselves are not enough.” We can be sincere and conscientious about all the wrong things. King lifts up the Apostle Paul’s words concerning those who “have a zeal for God, but it is not enlightened.” So, it has been with a White nationalist Christianity.

King is pointing to the problem of spiritual blindness. He speaks of “head and heart—intelligence and goodness.” King calls us to an intelligence that is spiritual in nature. (I think of Jesus calling upon his followers to “be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”) King makes clear that what he means by intelligence does not come merely by formal education:

I know many people of limited formal training who have amazing intelligence and foresight. The call for intelligence is a call for openmindedness, sound judgment, and love for truth. It is a call for [people] to rise above the stagnation of closedmindedness and the paralysis of gullibility. One does not need to be a profound scholar to be openminded, nor a keen academician to engage in an assiduous pursuit for truth.

King reminds us of words from the Gospel of John:

“This is the condemnation,” says John, “that light is come into the world, and [people] loved darkness rather than light.”

The point is this: The “sincere” embrace of what amounts to false values, ideologies, and commitments keeps us from the truth and in the darkness. If we refuse to acknowledge the false thinking that we have used in order to secure us from addressing our fears and insecurities, and to secure us in our prejudices, we will remain closed. We must relinquish our false ways and false thinking—false to our true humanity, false to love toward others. We must let go of what we are guarding in order to be open to the truth. We must be committed to the truth no matter how uncomfortable it makes us. We must stay committed until the truth sets us free. We must let the truth break the bondage of our fabrications about ourselves, our nation, and its history.

This is a word for our time. King speaks of “gullibility.” We have massive gullibility. When politicians and corporations so easily hook into our passions, prejudices, fears, insecurities, and self-absorption, we end up directed away from our true needs and the needs of our life together as a nation. We devolve into ever deepening divisions. The way out is for individuals to become aware of why they make the decisions they make and contrive the rationalizations they give for their decisions. We must each turn from what is false and take actions directed to what is real. As we read in the Gospel of John, “Those who do what is true come to the light.”

Filed under: Justice, Spirituality, Truth

Learning War No More

Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. (Isaiah 2:4)

The United States brought its 20-year war in Afghanistan to a close and proved again the futility of war for nation-building and constructive outcomes. After trillions of dollars were spent and thousands of civilians and soldiers maimed or killed, the United States left Afghanistan to the Taliban it had pushed out 20 years earlier. The speed at which the Taliban took over the nation revealed how little impact the United States had on governance in Afghanistan. More to the point, it demonstrated the futility of war for positive outcomes. (When we assume positive outcomes, it is only because we have no experience with the alternative: God’s governance.)

Nevertheless, nations will lift up swords against nations and the United States will continue its warring ways. We spend massive amounts of money on learning war—on building sophisticated weaponry and training warriors. And we have shown our propensity to use what we have learned.

What if we stopped studying war and started studying peacemaking? What if we spent the money we now spend for war preparation on humanitarian aid, building up communities, and on the ways that make for peace? What if, instead of making our security the paramount issue, we made doing justice our focus?

Of course, the radical nature of these thoughts means they are immediately dismissed by any in positions of government leadership. What is painful, is that many Christians are dismissive of such thinking. That has not always been true. In the first centuries of the church, Christian leaders spoke with one voice against war. It was assumed that followers of Jesus could not take up arms. They could not be soldiers. Former soldiers were to learn war no more: “The Lord in disarming Peter henceforth disarms every soldier.” (Tertullian, 155 AD – c. 220 AD)

Despite the state of Christianity today, there remain Christians who continue the tradition of the first centuries of the church. They take up the work of peacemaking and therefore do justice. They stand against war as a means of securing our lives and the life of our nation.

In witnessing for peace and against war, I have no illusions that any nation will give up warring. Capitalism and greed do not give up war as a means of securing possessions and gaining power. Enmity and fighting remain as ways of this world. Nevertheless, the followers of Jesus are to witness to God’s governance and God’s ways. They are to demonstrate, by their lives, a radically different way of living and of doing relationships. Love must abound among us. How else can others hear us, when we proclaim the good news Jesus proclaimed, “Turn to God, for the governance of God is near.”

We must keep before ourselves and others the radical message of Jesus:

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for justice’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Filed under: Discipleship, Justice, PeaceTagged with: , ,

Gracious God, You Know Daunte Wright

Gracious God, have mercy on us. Help us. You know Daunte Wright—another Black young man killed by a White police officer. He had been stopped for an expired registration tag. You know the pain of his family, today, and are with them in their grief. They join so many other families who have had a loved one snatched from them by the actions of those called to “serve and protect.”

Gracious God, you see how we treat one another, how we hurt, maim, and kill one another. You see our addiction to guns and our powerlessness over our addiction. We call our guns our “protection,” when you alone are our Protector. We put these guns in the hands of those we have called to “protect” us, without truly acknowledging the attitudes of White supremacy and bullying that are present. We refuse to see the racism that drives so many of our actions, lethal actions, police actions.

Gracious God, you see the racism embedded in our system of policing; you see the disregard for human life, for Black life. You see our blindness to this racism that is endemic to our society and its institutions. Help us, gracious God. Enlighten the eyes of our hearts, so that we get a glimpse of what you see of our sin, our brokenness, and our dehumanizing ways, and so that we might also come to know the lavishness of your grace that liberates and transforms us.

Help us, gracious God. Give us eyes to see and, then, free us from our bondage and inaction. Help us to turn from our idolatry of race to embrace each other as sisters and brothers of one human race. Break down the hardness of our hearts toward each other and toward you who are merciful and compassionate. Help us, gracious God, to surrender our lives to you who are Love, that we might love one another as you love us.

Free us and help us, gracious God, to work for change. Help us to dismantle what is destroying us and to build what brings life. In Christ, many of us have discovered the power of dying and rising (not only rising but also dying). Help us to die in order that we might live. Help us to let go of policing as we know it. Help us to envision a life-giving way to serve and protect. Help us to be willing to do what you called the prophet, Jeremiah, to do: “to pluck up and to pull down…, to build and to plant.” Guide us by your Spirit, the spirit of love, to make right what is wrong. Amen.

Filed under: Grief, Justice, Racism, SocietyTagged with: , ,

What White Grievance Looks Like

Something is being snatched from them and it’s not just money or jobs or security or even the White House. The common refrain is a fear of an America where white privilege is challenged and whiteness as the gold standard of beauty or power or value or provenance is no longer the automatic default.

Michele L. Norris, Washngton Post

The rioting in the Capitol building was not a surprise, though the lack of security was. The mob that breached security, trashed the halls of Congress, and brought death was not a surprise given the virulent White supremacy that has supported Donald Trump and has been incited by him. That there was a noticeable “Jesus Saves” sign among protesters was not a surprise either, given the blending of White nationalist values and culture with Christian rhetoric. If we let go of our rhetoric and actually follow Jesus, we may recognize our nation’s similarities to the Roman empire that crucified Jesus. As with the Roman empire of Jesus’ time, America’s empire-building tentacles reach out globally. America’s way of doing peace (maintaining order in the empire) is not so different from the “Pax Romana.” The followers of Jesus are called to proclaim God’s reign over against the empires of this world.

Much has been made of White grievance in the news, often without unpacking the nature of the grievance. Are we surprised by the ferocity of it? Are we blind to White supremacy, not merely as an ideology, but as an attitude, expectation, and aspect of White culture? As our nation becomes more diverse on its way to becoming a nation of minorities, are we surprised by the increasing backlash, given our racist ways?

White Americans do not have to claim White supremacy or understand themselves in those terms to be supremacist. All we have to do is to think that our view of ourselves, our nation, its history, and its values are who we are as a nation. When we are able to think of this nation as our nation without really thinking about anybody else but ourselves, we are White supremacists and are likely to think of ourselves as the real Americans. Then the history of this nation that we tell is the history of our ancestors—a White history of a White nation. The history that Native Americans and African Americans tell is quite different from the history of those of us who are of European descent, and yet it is real American history. And it fills in what a White-centered history leaves out. I grew up learning from history books that were grossly incomplete and slanted. Only in receiving the history of others have I found a corrective. We must provide our children with a true and diverse history of our nation, not downplaying its sin and brutality, while, at the same time, lifting up the powerful movements for justice that largely have come from those who have been oppressed.

I remind those who call themselves Christians and who are caught up in a White nationalism: Jesus came from a subjugated and minority people in the Roman empire, and he sided with outcasts. He did not attempt to be seen as one of the “winners.” He did not side with the elite, whether their elite status was in wealth or position or in an ethnic group (being Roman). He calls all to come down from whatever perch we have put ourselves on. He tells us to lose our lives, to let go, and to follow him as he leads us out of our false allegiances to live under God’s reign and be light in the world and to love others (even our enemies) with the love of God.

Those who stormed the Capitol had no real mission or purpose. They did not come with a vision for a “more perfect union.” They came to take back America for themselves. You could hear it in their words, “This is our house.” Never mind that representatives of a great diversity of United States citizens were gathered in that place.

St. Paul wrote of grief that is godly. Some grief or grievance is ungodly. Grief that is godly, is grief that brings repentance and change. It turns away from what demeans and destroys others and works for loving transformation. It does justice, loves mercy, and walks humbly with God.

Filed under: Grief, Justice, Racism

The Year That Exposed Our Ignorance
And Gave Us Work For The New Year

The disparities have always been there: the inequities in health care, education, housing, city services, job opportunities, and the injustices of the criminal justice system. In the year 2020, many Whites were awakened to these realities by the reporting of disparities in infections and deaths from COVID-19 among communities of color, and by the video of the death of George Floyd at the hands of a White police officer. But the disparities and injustices have always been there. Ignorance has been there as well.

At this end of 2020 and as we make plans for 2021, let us make the commitment to address the disparities and injustices. This will mean that we acknowledge our ignorance of what others suffer and are open to change.

Scripture is revealing in the way it treats ignorance. Ignorance is an aspect of a broken humanity and society in which we all share (Ezekiel 45:20). It is an expression of our alienation from God and is coupled with hardness of heart (Ephesians 4:18). Ignorance is not only a lack of knowledge but an act of ignoring what we ought to pay attention to. It comes from the breakdown in our relationship with God. We ignore God and God’s will. We are distant from what is on the heart of God for humanity. We are self-absorbed and do not see what God sees.

God said to Moses, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians.” Then God engaged Moses in God’s work of deliverance. As with Moses, God continues to call us to turn from our self-centered ways and observe what God observes, and then to let God engage us in God’s work of liberation and justice.

This means that we repent from ignoring the experience of others (the others who are not kin or friend or “like us”). It means that we get to know how others are affected by our attitudes, decisions, priorities, and the kind of policies and legislation we vote for and work to get implemented. How do our actions affect the lives of others, especially those who have been marginalized by racism, poverty, or incarceration? With the help of God, we can repent and turn to what we have ignored and become intent on getting to know the lives of those who have been largely out of sight and out of mind because of our ignorance. Because we have ignored them.

As we enter 2021, let us do so in prayer, turning our hearts to God to see the way God sees, with the love of God poured into our hearts by the Spirit. And let us hear again God’s call to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly. Let us surrender our lives to God and to the leading of the Spirit for the concrete actions that God calls us to take, each of us with our individual abilities and ways of serving. Let us turn from ignorance to understanding and action, so that in the freedom of God’s love we work to make right what is wrong.

Filed under: Justice, Racism, Spirituality

Trump, White America, and Our Humanity

After all that Donald Trump has done, all the misery he has caused, all the racism he has aroused, all the immigrant families he has destroyed, all the people who have left this life because of his mismanagement of a pandemic, still roughly half of the country voted to extend this horror show.

White people—both men and women—were the only group in which a majority voted for Trump. (Charles M. Blow)

I have thought of Donald Trump as a mirror by which we could see ourselves as a nation. After all, we had managed to put him into the office of the presidency. My hope was that, after four years of looking in the mirror, we would not like what we saw. I had not expected Trump to grow his base by several million voters. Apparently, many looked in the mirror, saw themselves, and liked what they saw.

Many, who have been the opposition to Trump, have been alarmed by the breaking of democratic and institutional norms, practices, and mores; the narcissistic, demeaning, dishonest, and immoral behavior; the utter lack of leadership and care for the real issues of our time. We have an incredibly self-absorbed human being heading our government. He is a mirror of self-absorption. In fact, Trump has mirrored our ability, as a people, to be absorbed with our most narrow interests, to see not far beyond our personal issues and those of people like us. When Trump has expressed grievances, prejudices, and fear of others different from us, we may have seen ourselves in the mirror. When Trump has demeaned those viewed as the opposition or “not us,” we may have seen ourselves, having craved their demeaning. If we have been a part of the opposition to Trump, we may have seen ourselves in the mirror of those who have demeaned Trump and his supporters.

It is apparent that we can look into a mirror that represents something of ourselves and be blind to the defacement that is present. We need a different mirror. We need the mirror of Christ, the mirror of our true humanity, a humanity turned outward to others, not merely looking out for its own interests. In Christ, we see compassion that recognizes the needs of others and reaches out with healing and liberation. We see mercy that enters into the lives of the “least” of the human family, those marginalized by our inhumanity towards others. In Christ, we see justice that works to make right what is wrong. In Christ, we see one who loses his life for the sake of the world. We need to look into the mirror of the humanity we see in Christ. This humanity—which is compassionate and merciful—is near, as near as God is to us, the God who is in all things. But we must turn from our false humanity to our true selves made in the image of God.

If we look into the mirror of Christ, the mirror of compassionate humanity, we will begin to see truthfully. We will see the disfigurement of our humanity by sin, the spiritual roots of our blindness. We will also see that neither Trump nor support for Trump is an aberration. As Jamille Bouie expresses it, “The line to Trump runs through the whole of American history.” Trump mirrors our history. Whatever our democratic ideals, ours is a history of the degradation and subjugation of people, of native Americans and people of African descent and others. Ours has been a history of White supremacy—what many have called our nation’s original sin. The majority of Whites voted for Trump. He represented them more than the alternative that at least expressed the desire to address racial disparities and injustices and to stop the mistreatment of children and families at our border. When we look into the mirror that is Trump, we see White supremacy. And White supremacy has supported him.

White evangelicals, who saw in Trump a protector of “Christian values” or, at the least, “religious freedom,” need to turn to Christ, who said that if we seek to secure our lives, we will lose them, but if we lose our lives for Christ’s sake, we will gain them. Only when we relinquish our lives to God will we be witnesses to Christ, rather than witnesses to our fears and self-absorption and White nationalist values that exist under a guise of “Christian values.”

Dear reader, if you are finding your true self in Christ, you know that you are called to be a witness to what is on the heart of God whose image you are. We are to be witnesses in a world plagued by inhumanity. We are to be witnesses before a false Christianity. We join with others who are discovering their true humanity. They may not call it Christ, but they are increasingly living from that humanity, and we recognize them by their compassion and share with them a common labor to do justice, love mercy, and live faithfully.

Filed under: Humanity, Justice, Racism, Society, WitnessTagged with: , ,

We Choose Our Bubble

Much has been made of the influence of Fox News and social media for the continued support of Donald Trump by 42% of the electorate. There is little question that if you got someone off a diet of Fox News, it would likely affect their views. But there is a reason why people are drawn to Fox News. And there is a reason why Facebook gives its users the kind of news they seek. People choose the bubble they live in.

A White woman, in an overwhelmingly White suburb of Milwaukee, described herself as a Democrat concerned about climate change and health care who was voting for Biden, until the police killing of George Floyd and the massive protests around the country. Now she is going to vote for Trump and law and order and safety. She has depicted the Black Lives Matter movement as a guise for looting and burning. What is particularly revealing to me is that she started listening to Black conservatives and managed to find a Black commentator who portrays White privilege as a myth. We choose our bubble.

Getting out of our bubble begins when we choose to leave it. That is why Jesus says, “Repent for the Reign of God is near.” We do not have to remain in any bubble. We can enter the freedom of God’s reign. Under God’s rule of love, we begin to be liberated from our racism, xenophobia, and nationalism. We are being delivered from the ways we make an idol of our “blood and kindred,” our security, comfort, pleasure, power, money, etc. We are empowered to turn from these idols to serve the living and true God and to become a people for others.

Conversion from lives centered in ourselves to lives increasingly centered in God is the basis for deep, foundational change. Our fundamental bubble is the self-centered bubble. Spiritual conversion (which is an ongoing experience) is the way out. We come to this experience by grace. It is a gift of God who is our Liberator. Without spiritual conversion, we remain stuck, merely working around the edges of our bubbles or exchanging our bubbles for others, perhaps bigger bubbles, but which have us equally trapped.

In the Spirit, we become open to our true selves and to others. In the Spirit, there is an infinite openness that enables us to see our bubbles for what they are, one bubble among many others—bubbles of our making. In the Spirit, we are brought into the broad expanse of God’s reign of love and mercy. In that openness, we are made able to see others and to listen and receive from them. We experience the call outward and the desire to move out from our inturned selves into the lives of others. This becomes the basis for our seeking to understand and to know more of what others, different from ourselves, experience and contend with. It also allows us to examine our own hearts and our decisions and actions and their effects on the lives of others. For those of us who are White, this openness will have us stop defending ourselves with “I am not a racist” to become antiracists working to change laws and policies and the way our society has been structured by White law-making, practices, and institutions—in other words, by White supremacy.

I pray for a spiritual awakening in our nation—for the foundations upon which we have built our lives to be shaken and that we reach out for our true selves and for true community in the One in whom “we live and move and have our being.” It is in this way that we can begin to truly come out of our bubbles and meet each other and build a life together.

Filed under: Justice, Racism, SpiritualityTagged with: , , ,

Donald Trump and White Nationalist Christianity

At Dordt University, a Christian college in Sioux Center, Iowa, in January 2016, Donald Trump said to a group of Christians, “Christianity will have power. If I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power, you don’t need anybody else. You’re going to have somebody representing you very, very well. Remember that.” (New York Times)

Eighty percent of self-identified White evangelical Christians remembered and voted for Donald Trump. He was the one that White nationalist Christianity chose for its president. Donald Trump, however, is not a Christian president nor a president for Christians, but a president that appeals to a White nationalism that has the veneer of Christianity and uses Christian language and a theology that shelters White supremacy. A Christianity that finds in Trump a protector and provider is far removed from the life and teaching of Jesus and our participation in his death and resurrection (dying to the old life and rising to the new).

What kind of Christianity looks to Trump to give it power? An idolatrous Christianity. The roots of its idolatry go deep, to the beginnings of a nation established as a White nation for Whites built on the free labor of enslaved Africans and the genocide of Native Peoples of the land. A theology was developed (some of it ready-made for the task) that justified, supported, and reinforced White nationalist values and commitments. This theology has remained, in one form or another, through Jim Crow and the new Jim Crow. While no longer providing a rationale for slavery, it remains White supremacist. Rather than being a blatant, ideologically framed White supremacy, much of it operates hidden (especially to participants) and persistent. As Ibram X. Kendi has so clearly pointed out, the opposite of racist is not “not racist” but antiracist.

A Christianity that follows Jesus is active in doing justice. It works to make right what is wrong. It seeks to dismantle in order to build a just society. We have a mission like that which was given to the prophet Jeremiah “to pull down” in order “to build and to plant.” In its most subtle forms, White nationalist Christianity simply overlooks or diminishes the racism, disparities, and injustices experienced by people of color and seeks to maintain a White supremacist status quo. It will not acknowledge this, but its denial is seen for what it is when it supports voter suppression (while calling it something else) and dismantling affirmative action (as if it were no longer needed), opposes true reform of the criminal justice system, and works against initiatives to address disparities in health, education, and housing.

I share with other Christians the concern for the life of the unborn, but I also believe that being pro-life means care for the life of the born and therefore health care for all. I oppose the taking of any life and therefore, as with the early church, oppose capital punishment and cooperation with war. I believe that following Jesus includes doing what he told Peter to do and that was to put down his sword. It is hard to follow Jesus in loving and praying for our enemies while killing them. Jesus calls us to be witnesses to God’s reign, not to the nations of the world and their security solutions.

Now, I do believe there are evangelicals (and other Christians) who voted for Trump that know and love God and have experienced God’s grace. There are all kinds of reasons people get caught up in various belief systems and do not recognize the inconsistencies with their new life in Christ. And, of course, God comes to us where we are and has us on a journey. We begin a journey that brings us out of many false, hurtful beliefs. For Christians, this happens by following Jesus daily. We expect transformation and growth. Increasingly, we become responsible for exercising discernment, with the help of the Spirit—discernment regarding leaders and teachers in our lives. The greatest responsibility, however, goes to leaders. James says that not many should be teachers for they will be judged more harshly. The greater the responsibility, the more required. And Jesus says, “Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to the one by whom the stumbling block comes!” (Matthew 18:7)

What, at times, happens is that a person “accepts Christ” in a genuine desire for a life change, perhaps from a drug addiction which is the immediate idolatry or obsession that they are aware of, from which they need deliverance. God is gracious and they experience healing from their addiction as well as help with other personal struggles. At this point, in their spiritual journey, theirs is a malleable Christ. (If only we would be malleable to Christ.) The guidance they receive is critical. What they may receive from an available pastor is a theology shaped by nationalist values and ideologies or that does not question these (which is fine with the person who holds them). The only way out of this false religious bubble is to actually follow the Jesus of the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount, and the New Testament. Let Jesus’ teaching challenge, disrupt, and “take every thought captive to obey Christ.” (2 Corinthians 10:5) Above all, this means that we do what Jesus tells us to do: Count the cost of following. It goes beyond initial acceptance. Jesus says, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves [including their present commitments and ways of thinking] and take up their cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 9:23)

Filed under: Discipleship, Justice, Leadership, RacismTagged with: , ,

Gifts In A Time of Pandemics: Anger

Anger follows hurt. We experience pain, then anger. We expect fairness. We expect welcome rather than rejection. We expect to be seen, to be acknowledged, and our basic needs recognized and affirmed. We expect our lives to be valued. Our humanity expects these things. At the heart of all these expectations, we expect love—to be loved and to love. From love flows mercy, justice, and faithfulness. Our humanity is trampled upon when these are not present. And we respond with anger and a desire and a need for what is wrong to be made right, that “justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” We cannot go on under conditions devoid of justice without taking action.

When Jesus came into the temple, he saw the injustice. He saw that what was meant to be a house of prayer had become a “den of robbers.” In anger, he made a “whip of cords” (John 2:15) and “drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves.” (Matthew 21:12-13) In the streets of our cities, police cars have been overturned.

We learn what replaced the selling and the buying and the money changers, in the next verse (Matthew 21:14): “The blind and the lame came to Jesus in the temple, and he cured them.” Envision for our present moment: Police violence against black and brown bodies replaced by acts of healing.

Anger, of course, can simply lash out and accomplish little more than additional pain. And those on the outside of the pain can simply judge its futility. But if the pain underneath the anger is received with compassion (rather than with judgment and self-righteousness) healing is available. I think of the judgment that gets directed at looters and those who damage property when openness to the pain would provide another view. (Take a step toward being open and the help for being open will be there because the Spirit of God is about opening our hearts and giving us eyes to see.) Rather than simply seeing the destructive behavior of individuals, we will see a society that has been crafted and structured by white supremacy and racism, from slavery to Jim Crow to the present “new Jim Crow.” We, who are white, will see our racism rather than be fixated on broken store windows. We will see the racism and greed and indifference that have historically robbed people of ownership within our society, disenfranchised them, cut off opportunity, brought death, and provided a framework within which destructive action makes sense. I saw a video clip of a couple of protesters, seeing a man with a bat in front of a store window, go over to the man and gently lead him away from the action he was contemplating, and then put their arms around him in an act of understanding and solidarity. Compassion has an altogether different mode of operation from that of self-righteous judgment.

When compassion responds to and takes up misdirected anger and redirects it, healing and liberation happen. A little compassion, like a little faith that can move mountains, is powerful. God is in it.

Love can use anger in powerful and purposeful ways. It can help focus on and target what needs to be addressed. Anger is a strong and urgent emotion carrying within it the pain from which it arises, and harnessed by compassion zeros in on the present moment with imperativeness. It takes what love clarifies and gives it emotional urgency. Love—caring enough to attend to the depth of the problem and to gain knowledge—gives rise to solutions. Anger presses us with “why we cannot wait” for the solutions. Change must come now! Jesus saw the temple turned into a den of robbers and immediately acted.

A police force (along with carefully manufactured laws) that historically has been used to “dominate” (using our president’s term) black lives, must be dismantled. It needs to be replaced with that which can truly serve. I am grateful for those who have been rethinking what makes for public safety, who are “dreaming dreams and seeing visions” for something radically different from what we have now. “Defund the police” puts before us, with urgency, the kind of change that must happen: Defund the present police organizations with their militarization and their “us against them” mentality and their opposition to reform. Funds freed up by decreasing police functions become funds for social services, mental health care and housing for the homeless (rather than have police break up their encampments), treatment (rather than criminalization) for those with addictions, and health care, education, job training, community organizations, and community mediation. My local grocery store was one of the few grocery stores on the southeast side of Chicago that was not looted. It was not the police that stopped the looting, but neighborhood residents who essentially talked potential looters out of looting. And this was going on with other stores, as well. They were saved from being looted by the mediation efforts of the community. Contrast this with what we have come to expect from police in such situations, with their oppositional relationship to the community. It is time to defund the present “public safety” institutions and build and fund something more holistic and compassionate and embedded in the community.

For those who would immediately dismiss “defunding” as an impossibility, a sign of hope came from the Minneapolis city council when they voted to dismantle the police force. They decided that the “current policing system could not be reformed.” They pledged “to begin the process of taking apart the Police Department as it now exists.” (New York Times)

The pandemics of the coronavirus and racism have both brought forth anger, in different ways. In either case, we are helped by becoming aware of the pain underneath the anger, acknowledging it, and recognizing where that pain is actually coming from, so that we do not misdirect our anger. Love of ourselves and others helps us with that. The freedom of love gives a healing, liberating direction to our anger as we address the causes of the pain.

Filed under: Grace, Justice, Love, RacismTagged with: , ,

“I Can’t Breathe”

“The opposite of ‘racist’ isn’t ‘not racist.’ It is ‘antiracist.’

Ibram X. Kendi, How To Be An Antiracist

George Floyd, a black man, his arms handcuffed behind him, cries out for help with the words, “I can’t breathe,” as a white police officer presses a knee down upon his neck. There are three other officers at the scene. They all hear the cry for help. Bystanders hear and call out for the police officers to help: The man is down and handcuffed; how much more brutality is necessary to demonstrate your power? All of the officers, who are called to “serve and protect,” ignore the pleas. George Floyd dies.

There are many steps before murder: many attitudes, fears, prejudices, demeaning actions, and unjust behaviors. Some talk about a white supremacist police culture, but this kind of police culture flows out of a wider American white supremacist culture.

Often, in the media, white supremacists are depicted as an ideological minority. But white supremacy is an inherent ingredient in the narrative of this nation. The history of the United States is a history of white supremacy in the form of white law-making and actions that created and maintained the institution of slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, the present mass incarceration of people of color, voter suppression, and continued support for inequities in education, health care, jobs, wealth, and power—if not supported actively, certainly by white apathy toward these injustices.

White supremacy must not be seen merely as the ideology of a few. Those of us who are white do not need to have a developed supremacist philosophy to have attitudes, tendencies, and views that keep us from truly understanding and addressing the injustices in our society. White sense of entitlement, along with denial of our racism, allows us to ignore the voices and experiences of people of color.

White supremacy involves us in viewing white ways and culture as the norm and standard by which we judge others. This all happens, of course, implicitly and in an unacknowledged manner. But it allows us to form views without listening as if all we need are the “answers” that our biases and fears provide. We simply draw from what we already think. Where and how our thoughts are formed goes unexamined.

Every aspect of racism, whether blatant or subtle, minimizes the humanity of another human being. There is a link between the apathy that ignores injustices and police officers who act with brazen disregard for the life of a fellow human being. The distance between the two is not so very great.

When we realize this, we are approaching the first step of the Twelve Step Program for Addicts (racism being very similar to an addiction). Step one requires us to come out of denial: We admit our racism and powerlessness and that this way of living has become unmanageable. The acknowledgment of unmanageability means we are recognizing the massive scale of the problem: the deep entrenchment of racism. We feel our inadequacy and realize we need power to change. We need spiritual liberation. We need step three: “We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand God.” We need to be raised up into a higher reality—into the One in whom “we live and move and have our being.” We need to be freed into our true selves that have their source in God.

With the confession of our brokenness and a spiritual turning (repentance) and the grace that brings liberation (steps 1-3), we are released into action. In this spiritual journey, there are further steps that involve a “moral inventory” of our lives. We become involved in inner work, the Spirit helping us to acknowledge the intentions, motivations, and attitudes of our hearts, and the actions that flow from them. We are helped by words of truth that come to us from others and from their experiences. We listen to others, and the Spirit of truth helps us to receive truth.

There are also steps for “making amends,” that is, making right what is wrong. These steps have us moving outward. We become intentional about addressing racism not only in our own lives but in the institutions, laws, and structures of our society. We work for radical change and reform—the reformation of the criminal justice system, the removal of voter suppression laws, and the dismantling of discrimination and inequities of all kinds. We are becoming antiracist. The defensive “I am not a racist” does not work for us anymore. Our focus is outward on understanding the nature and extent of this social disease and equipping ourselves to fight against it.

Formerly, we were not seeking to understand and gain knowledge and wisdom for action—not about racism and white supremacy. But now that we are on a journey of openness and action, we are seeking—and finding. In our seeking, we reach out to others who have a history of being antiracist. We are being liberated into community antiracist action. Together we become agents of change. Or, as Jesus puts it, “salt and light.”

Are you on the journey? If not, this blog post is an invitation.

Filed under: Justice, Racism, Spirituality, WitnessTagged with: ,