The week’s reflection is by The Rev. Steve Reedy who serves on the Cornelius Corps Board of Directors. He draws on our nation’s racial history to challenge us to take the opportunity to both call out white Christian nationalism and offer an alternative by practicing the Way of Jesus in our struggle for racial justice today. Following Steve’s insightful reflection are two short videos featuring quotes about contrasting forms of Christianity from the first autobiography of Frederick Douglass to which Steve refers.
Steep Challenge, Greater Opportunity!
The backlash to the legal, social and economic progress of African Americans was severe. New federal policies had rolled back and even reversed the recent gains in voting rights and economic opportunities.
Justice was being inverted across a broad array of categories. A creeping authoritarianism was upon the nation; democratic in form, but autocratic in practice, and power the only principle.
A large section of the American church was monolithic in support of the new policies. An individualistic theology regarding salvation prevailed. A natural and indisputable racial hierarchy was the collective ideal.
Federal apparatuses commissioned to instill racial justice were disbanded. Members of violent White Supremacist groups were deputized to round up people of color and to suppress dissent. Racial demagogues were given gavels. Previously installed Federal officials committed to expanding racial justice were fired illegally and without cause. Most symbolic of the inversion of justice were the blanket pardons given the mass of insurrectionists. The White Nationalist revolutionaries who had raised their hand in violence were now given a variety of compensations.
The year was 1865. All of the above occurred following the elevation of Andrew Johnson as President after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. And all of the above is happening now. Today’s backlash is in near lockstep with the reactive movements that followed the racial progress of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the post-World War II modern Civil Rights movement.
Today’s backlash is driven by a White Christian nationalism, a repeating historical pattern. The current (White) Christian Nationalist movement has boldly used a distorted understanding of the scriptures to support the imposition of authoritarianism and racial and gender hierarchies.
Paradoxically, the rise of White Nationalism as a political movement rationalized in Christian terms has created a great opportunity for Christians committed to justice. The opportunity is this: To declare more boldly the connection between our work for equality and justice with our Christian faith. To declare more boldly that Jesus calls all people to the work of justice for the marginalized. To show boldly by our actions that injustice is overcome through the ways of Jesus: peaceful, sacrificial non-violent resistance through declaration of truth and works of redemption and restoration.
In the dark times of 1845, White Supremacy reigned supreme, with nearly three million African Americans locked into enslavement and free Blacks into oppression. And many church traditions and congregations of the nation were aligned with the mass injustice.
And yet, the small but growing Abolition movement was rising to meet the moment. One of the movement’s superstars was the great Frederick Douglass, who self-liberated from enslavement. Douglass had aggressively called out the churches that were passive or complicit with slave interests and opposed Abolition. For this, Douglass’s Christianity was challenged.
In response to his critics, Douglass wrote this: “…between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference–so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”[1]
[1] Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. (1845 edition).