In what remains of the summer, which for me is that space of time between the ending of spring semester and the beginning of fall, I’m going to try and blog more often. Maybe come up with some regular types of posts–a version of throw-back Thursday or a Mondays with Merton or some such ideas as these.
I read a lot, so I think I might try to come up with some posts focused on that reading. This is the first of those posts, not all of which will be as long as what follows.
My friend Vallory recently shared an article about Christian mission trips that included these words:
Why do we want to go on mission trips to Honduras or El Salvador and help those poor children but we don’t want to let those same children fleeing for their lives come into our country?
Why So Many Christians Want to Go On Mission Trips to Help Kids But Don’t Want Them Here
Here’s my answer: letting them come in, live near us, become citizens, and share in our resources requires more than a narrow, circumscribed version of acting good. We feel great about ourselves when we send out Samaritan’s Purse boxes. We helped feed hungry kids! But what happens when the hungry kids come to us? What happens when they have no way to support themselves but their parents have chosen to flee here so that they don’t starve or get murdered? A box isn’t going to do it.
We should, indeed, “feel great about ourselves when we send out Samaritan’s Purse boxes” (apart from the fact that the organization is connected to Franklin Graham, in whom his fathers — earthly and heavenly — would, in my opinion, would be sorely disappointed). But it can’t stop there. Jesus didn’t say, “Hey, John, give this box of healing to that woman over there, who can take it to that other guy around the corner, who might not mind getting it to the leper colony.” Jesus went to the lepers himself. And, perhaps, more importantly, he welcomed the lepers to come to him.
Vallory also shared a post from John Pavlovitz and his blog, Stuff That Needs to Be Said. Here’s my favorite excerpt:
No, Donald Trump wasn’t anointed by God.
He isn’t an instrument of Divine will.
He isn’t Biblically hastening Armageddon or Jesus’ return.
He’s just a hateful, indecent, predatory fraud who is destroying the environment, stripping people of their human rights, and making America a global laughing-stock.
His ascension is not prophetic but pathetic, the result of:
Russian interference,
fake news,
gerrymandering,
voter suppression,
Hillary hatred,
Obama resentment,
Fox News brainwashing,
Democratic stumbles,
the votes of bigoted Evangelicals, whites terrified of losing market share, and third-party voters—and the inaction of 100 million Americans who couldn’t be bothered to participate in one of the greatest responsibilities of living here.
That’s it.
No Providence.
No Divine messages.
No Biblical prophecies.
No spiritual movements.Pavlovitz, John, “God Has Nothing to Do with Trump Being President,” John Pavlovitz: Stuff That Needs to Be Said. Accessed 13 June 2019.
Just ordinary human beings who chose really, really poorly when they should have known better.
One thing that has become continually clearer to me over my years of reading and teaching American literature from early indigenous materials to Columbus, from John Winthrop to Emily Dickinson, is that “America” is in a perpetual state of decay. (I’ll write more on this later, as it’s something I’ve been tracking through the literature.) And the struggles the USA faces today are in one sense or another the same struggles the country has faced since its inception.
I’ll provide a handful of quotations below from thinkers and writers whose work sees behind the curtain of American mythology. First, Trappist monk Thomas Merton gives his take on what lies beneath the nation’s pimpled skin:
. . . I have undergone my dose of exposure to American society in the ’60s. . . . I love the people I run into, but I pity them for having to live as they do, and I think the world of U.S.A. in 1967 is a world of crass, blind, overstimulated, phony, lying stupidity. . . . The temper of the country is one of blindness, fat, self-satisfied, ruthless, mindless corruption. A lot of people are uneasy about it but helpless to do anything against it. The rest are perfectly content with the rat race as it is, and with its competitive, acquisitive, hurtling, souped-up drive into nowhere. A massively aimless, baseless, shrewd cockiness that simply exalts itself without purpose. The mindless orgasm, in which there is no satisfaction, only spasm.
Merton, Thomas, “May 28: On America in the Sixties,” A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals. (Merton wrote this on 27 May 1967.)
So writes Merton in 1967, but this shade of the American character is, in part, the reeking residue of the rotten practice of slavery. Here’s Frederick Douglass, a self-freed man, speaking on 5 July 1852 to a mixed-race group continuing their Independence Day celebration in Rochester, New York. The feelings of whites hearing this can easily be imagined, but I wonder about the freed or self-freed or free-born blacks, particularly those who were — perhaps mindlessly — caught up in the celebration. Douglass’s final paragraph should knock all of us to our knees and bears quoting in its entirety:
What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless: your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgiving, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy–a thin veil to cover up crimes that would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States at this very hour.
Douglass, Frederick, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”
“But slavery is over,” we might argue, and we would be technically correct. The racism, prejudice, and greed that supported the institution, however, remain with us. I know a white Christian woman who recently pointed to a magazine focused on a black audience and asked, “Why do they have to have their own magazine?” “Why not?” I’m sorry to admit I was unable to ask. How long has the black community in the USA had a public voice in comparison to the white community?
Similarly, John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, recently said this on The World and Everything in It:
If there’s a group right now whose expansion of rights—even beyond rights into privileges—is most evident, it’s the LGBT community. There’s not a systemic set of persecutions or dehumanizations against this group of people. It’s remarkable, in fact, whatever essentially it seems they want to claim, they can have.
“Culture Friday: Unalienable Rights and Stranger Things,” The World and Everything in It, 12 July 2019.
Likewise, how long has this group had any access to rights and privileges? If LGBTQ folks are excited and emboldened by the recent level acceptance in the public sphere, then where’s the blame? I’m sure Protestants did the same in the wake of the Reformation. I’m sure white American males did the same in the wake of the Revolution. The mistake — if I may be so bold as to describe it thus — this Christian woman and man make in their comments regarding race and gender is to be blinded by labels to the humanity behind the labels. To paraphrase Thoreau from “Resistance to Civil Government,” we should be humans first, and only afterward, if absolutely necessary, citizens of this country or that / adherents of this religion or that or none / members of this political party or that or none / persons of one race or ethnicity or age or gender or sexual preference or economic bracket, etc.
Our endless pitting of “us” against “them” — however “us” and “them” are defined — demands labels to identify the sides. But identity labels limit and undermine humanity; that is, labels are dehumanizing. Again, however, our politics and economics and religion work only in the context of labeling, which, I believe, works only in the context of dehumanization.
I’ll end this rant with a couple of quotations from Margaret Fuller’s 1845 essay, “Fourth of July”:
Much has been achieved since the first Declaration of Independence. America is rich and strong; she has shown great talent and energy; vast prospects of aggrandizement open before her. But the noble sentiment which she expressed in her early youth is tarnished; she has shown that righteousness is not her chief desire, and her name is no longer a watch-word for the highest hopes to the rest of the world. She knows this, but takes it very easily; she feels she is growing richer and more powerful, and that seems to suffice her.
Near the close of her essay, Fuller tries to imagine the individual — in the gendered language of her time — who would serve as a savior from all of this lecherous seeking and grabbing and hoarding that is such a big part of American life these days:
We know not where to look for an example of all or many of the virtues we would seek from the man who is to begin the new dynasty that is needed of Fathers of the Country. The Country needs to be born again; she is polluted with the lust of power, the lust of gain. She needs Fathers good enough to be God-fathers–men who will stand sponsors at the baptism with all they possess, with all the goodness they can cherish, and all the wisdom they can win, to lead this child the way she should go, and never one step in another.