Here's my favorite Bible passage: Matthew 25:40 And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’
as always, david freench takes a reflective, honest look at his faith and the social issues regarding the politics that surround it.he concludes that there ought to be some introspection of self. the first link is the piece he sites as providing the quotes and the second data from the surveys to support his own conclusions. money quote: No, I’m not talking primarily about Donald Trump. Support for the president is a symptom, not the disease. Instead, I’m talking about race, immigration, history, and the vast and growing gulf between white Evangelicals and the rest of the United States on issues that dominate so many American hearts. https://religionunplugged.com/news/2020/12/15/the-growing-divide-within-american-evangelicalism https://s3.amazonaws.com/iasc-prod/uploads/pdf/sapch.pdf https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com...0.v-a4N56Rh5_ZdygxqGOVavj1bPpn40pYRQVC5stOjn4 If there is any good to come from last weekend’s Christian-nationalist “Jericho March,” and other bizarre, angry, and sometimes-violent right-wing attacks on the 2020 presidential election, it’s that the scales may start to fall from the eyes of thoughtful American Evangelicals. We will see the truth, and we’ll learn that the story we tell ourselves about our own alienation from American culture is fundamentally wrong in many material respects. In short, contrary to popular conservative Christian belief, Evangelicals are not just facing resistance for their righteousness: They are also reaping what they’ve sown with their own commitment to partisan politics and to sometimes unjust and even malicious policies that have no grounding in biblical ethics. There is no question that many millions of theologically conservative Christians feel like they’re increasingly under cultural siege, loathed and despised by the broader secular culture. The anger raises a critical question: Why? Here’s the common Christian answer, the one that’s conventional wisdom in most conservative churches: “Just as Jesus and the apostles promised, the world hates us because of our faith. We reject the world’s libertine sexual ethics and commitment to abortion, and thus the world rejects us.” There is truth in this statement. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, time and again. During a two-decade litigation career, I represented Christian groups tossed off campuses for their defense of traditional biblical sexual ethics. I represented Christian students and groups at schools from coast to coast who faced censorship for advancing pro-life views. I advised Christian institutions who faced threats to their existence and independence for requiring that employees and/or students believe and uphold orthodox statements of faith. I can tell story after story of astonishing intolerance and even outright hatred displayed against good and faithful men and women who merely sought the right to speak, the right to meet, to sing, and to pray. Elements of the illiberal left have been and still are threatening and cruel to even the best Christian folks. No amount of winsomeness or kindness or civility could save those Christians from relentless attacks. These cases were both alarming and comforting for conservative Christians. They were alarming for obvious reasons. No one wants to face threats to their liberty and livelihoods because of the free exercise of their faith. Yet the attacks were comforting because these are exactly the kinds of secular attacks Christians are taught to expect. After all, in John 15, Jesus told his disciples: “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.” But there’s also a less comforting—and also quite true—answer to the question, “Why do they hate us?” There is a growing cultural divide between white Evangelical America and much of the rest of the nation that has nothing to do with Christian faithfulness. No, I’m not talking primarily about Donald Trump. Support for the president is a symptom, not the disease. Instead, I’m talking about race, immigration, history, and the vast and growing gulf between white Evangelicals and the rest of the United States on issues that dominate so many American hearts. Last month, the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture published a report called Democracy in Dark Times that was designed to take a deeper look at the different beliefs and motivations of red and blue America. Its findings regarding white Evangelicals were startling. Evangelicals, it said, were emerging as the “cultural other”: The cultural other is an individual or, more than likely, an entire group, whose beliefs and practices place them outside of “normal” or “acceptable” society. Their way of thinking and of life offends the sensibilities and ideals of the dominant group, and in this sense, they are stigmatized in the extreme. As such, the cultural other is regarded as not just outside of the in-group, but so far outside that their very presence represents a profound ethical violation that might even be experienced as repugnant to those who are not part of it. This would now seem to be how many people outside of Evangelicalism have come to think about the modern-day Evangelical movement and those who comprise it. The authors—James Davison Hunter, Carl Desportes Bowman, and Kyle Puetz—recognize that theological and philosophical differences explain part of the divide, but so does politics: On theological and philosophical grounds alone, Evangelicalism today finds itself outside of the mainstream of the contemporary world. But the more political power the Evangelical movement has sought to wield, and the more the Evangelical movement has aligned itself with the politics and practices of the political Right, the more its reputation has been diminished. So far, many conservative Evangelicals would nod along. “Tell us something we don’t know,” they’d say. “We’re remaining biblically faithful in an increasingly unfaithful world. Of course secular America won’t like us.” But wait. What does the data say regarding America’s widest gaps? Where is the gap between white Evangelicals and the rest of America particularly acute? On matters of race: The widest divisions in America are, in fact, between White Evangelicals and the African American community as a whole. It is a racial chasm, to be sure, but one intensified and deepened by the particular character of conservative White Evangelicalism—a chasm not mirrored between Black Evangelicals and non-Evangelicals. This division is seen most sharply on those issues that specifically bear on African Americans and Hispanics as well. The numbers are just immense. Moreover, concerns about racism are no mere side issue, in the survey, they represented the top political concern of progressive partisans. When you drill down into the numbers, the gaps can sometimes be astonishing. For example: Here’s another example: Almost universally, Blacks (91%) believe that “the police and law enforcement unfairly target racial and ethnic minorities.” (This figure is up from 83 percent in 2016.) The majority of Hispanics (60%) and White non-Evangelicals (57%) today share this opinion. By contrast, the percentage of Blacks who hold this view is more than five times the percentage of White Evangelicals (17%); 83 percent of the latter disagree, with 41 percent disagreeing strongly. When you drill down into the numbers, the gaps can sometimes be astonishing. For example: And another: There is the question of what to do about the legacy of slavery and of racism in America. One proposal that has been debated for a number of years is the idea of reparations—some kind of “financial compensation to African Americans for their historic mistreatment by White Americans.” The racial divide over this issue is staggering. Nearly eight of 10 African Americans (78%) are in favor of reparations, compared to 41 percent of all Hispanics and 34 percent of all non-Evangelical Whites. White Evangelicals as a group, however, stand far outside of this consensus, with only 7 percent in favor of this idea. And another: But wait. You might object that it’s unfair to compare White Evangelicals with populations of people who don’t share their theological beliefs. After all, if theology is relevant to policy, then perhaps we should compare groups who share the same theology but not the same race—white Evangelicals and non-white Evangelicals. Do white and non-white Evangelicals see the world the same way? Here’s what the study concluded: A community of religiously committed Evangelicals holds a common faith that operates at the center of their lives and, as such, it provides a common culture that they share—one that, in principle, transcends politics, economics, and other matters of this world. Does this actually hold true? Not remotely. It turns out that non-white Evangelicals are much closer to their more secular fellow citizens in their perceptions of race problems in the United States. Non-white Evangelicals are also “twice as likely as White Evangelicals to say that inequality and poverty are a very or extremely serious threat to the country.” Earlier this month Ryan Burge published an important piece noting the large gap between “Evangelical elites” and the “the millions of white evangelicals who occupy pews on a typical Sunday morning all over the United States.” Burge writes: Just over the weekend, popular Bible teacher Beth Moore tweeted, “I have never seen anything in these United States of America I found more astonishingly seductive & dangerous to the saints of God than Trumpism”. And it’s likely to have no impact on the political behavior of white evangelicals. The same people who will buy tens of thousands of copies of Beth Moore’s new Bible study and will pack arenas to the rafters to hear her teach about the Scriptures are ignoring her admonitions and moving further and further to the right every day, in outright defiance of the invocations of those that they say they follow. But Beth Moore is just the most recent in a long line of evangelical leaders trying to right the ship. He walks through multiple examples. Even though multiple conservative Christian leaders condemned family separation, the policy was more popular with white Evangelicals than with any other American religious group. While powerful Christian organizations like World Vision condemn the Trump administration’s dramatic reductions in refugee caps, white Evangelicals were most likely to support reducing even legal immigration by 50 percent: And if you think these attitudes are merely ancillary to American Evangelicals—side issues that shouldn’t distract from the main issue, abortion—then think again. In an August post, Burge found that “white evangelical Republican support for Donald Trump is based more on immigration policy than his view of abortion.” Both abortion and immigration mattered to Evangelicals. Immigration mattered more. What is going on? Yes, there is some outright racism in the church. But we’re also seeing evidence of the Christian nationalism that has emerged more explicitly in the age of Trump, and Christian nationalism—because it is rooted so deeply in reverence for a particular version of the American story—will always minimize America’s historic sins and the present legacy (and reality) of American racism. Christian nationalism will also always be alert to cultural change of all kinds (not just the sexual revolution), in part because “American culture” and “Christian culture” are experienced by all too many white Protestants as inseparable. You see signs of this in the conservative branding many of the more-religious sectors of American society (especially the rural and exurban centers of Republican power) as “real America” while huge swaths of American society, from its urban centers to its universities to many of its most successful corporations, are branded as less than fully authentic. Moreover, in attitudes about the American founding, the American police, and the American military, you can see a defense of this nation and (some) of its institutions that runs deeper than in other American communities. Again, it’s worth emphasizing that many white Evangelical political positions—on matters of immense importance to many millions of Americans—do not flow naturally from Evangelical biblical orthodoxy. There isn’t a straight line from scripture to severe immigration restrictions, for example, or from scripture to confidence in American police. Instead the political gaps between white Evangelicals and the rest of America flow from a series of historical, cultural, and ideological commitments that are contestable at best and unjust at worst.Christians should defend religious liberty. They should defend life. But they should not even begin to presume that their ongoing “othering” in American society is a product of their virtue. Sometimes the world rejects Christians because it rejects Christ. Sometimes, however, the world rejects Christians because Christians are cruel. In that case, alienation isn’t persecution. It represents righteous judgment for our own political sin.
Being a real Christian is a good and beautiful thing. These days there are many people who pass themselves off as Christians who do not lead Christian lives nor do they espouse Christian beliefs. My favorite example of a true Christian is the Pope while Jimmy Carter also comes to mind.
Which reminds me...... The definition of an agnostic, dyslexic insomniac is..... Someone who lays awake at night....wondering if there really is a dog.
Or, I don't know, it could be that I skimmed through the thread because I thought it was new, and noticed you made the joke. chuckled, and moved on. Then saw that you made the same joke and thought "wtf? I just read that" and scrolled up again and saw that you had repeated a joke. It's one thing to repeat someone elses joke, but to repeat your own joke? That takes talent.
I listen to Michael Brown quite a bit. He has some interesting takes, as well... https://www.lightsource.com/ministr...e-danger-of-christian-nationalism-859667.html
Great point. I had forgotten I had made the same joke in this thread 3 months ago. My, how time flies.
Well, 3 months in 2020 is about 15 years in regular years, so I think it's well within the bounds of acceptable repeated joke telling limits.
https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com...Q.ADVpIsWGTkRjrI9VoBd4PRetYPYHnpoAouzYzXuymsc Why the Atlanta Massacre Triggered a Conversation About Purity Culture The problem with purity culture is not Christianity. The problem is that its extremes are not Christian at all. David French Mar 21 It always happens. Every time there is a mass shooting—often before we even know the number and identity of victims—there’s a desperate and immediate quest to know who was the shooter and what were his motives. Part of this is understandable, human, and necessary. When innocent women and men are gunned down in cold blood something in our spirits cries out, “Why?” But another part of this quest for an immediate explanation is toxic and destructive. Every single mass shooter (and, sadly, there are many of them) becomes an immediate weapon in the culture war. Did the shooter wear the red jersey or the blue jersey? Does he fit or defy an existing narrative? Soon enough, the partisan argument drowns out the answer to the necessary question. We still need to know the reasons each shooter kills—no matter whose partisan or religious ox is gored. And that brings me to the Atlanta shooter (I will not use his name). Last week a young man walked into three metro Atlanta massage parlors and killed eight people, including six Asian women. Why did he do it? According to police, the shooter said he suffered from “sex addiction” and shot the women because “they were a temptation for him he wanted to eliminate.” Does that mean there was no racial component to the killing? Well, no. For one thing, we don’t automatically take a killer’s word as the final explanation for his motives. For another thing, his actions provide their own testimony. The identity of his victims is plain to see. Moreover, there are disturbing cultural patterns that sexualize and exploit Asian women. There is much we still don’t know. At the very least we can and should mourn with our Asian American brothers and sisters and understand (and share!) their heightened concerns. In the days following the shooting, however, the evidence of the shooter’s sexual confusion and dysfunction continued to mount. And so it’s important to focus on what we do know, on where the evidence is leading us now. The shooter is a Christian young man, baptized in a local Baptist church. He struggled so deeply with sexual sin that he was a patient at a local Evangelical treatment facility, called HopeQuest. He reportedly told a former roommate at a different recovery center that his “very salvation was at stake” if he couldn’t overcome his sexual sin. And with these revelations, suddenly the Christian part of the internet broke out into a debate about Evangelical purity culture. The shooter’s stated beliefs and deadly actions represented a hyper-violent and extreme manifestation of a toxic theology that long corrupted a slice of Evangelical Christianity. Those same beliefs and actions brought an immense amount of pain bubbling to the surface of the Christian conversation. Soon enough the conversation burst into mainstream media and splashed across the virtual pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. But first, let’s define our terms. “Purity culture” is not a synonym for traditional Christian teachings about sexual morality—specifically the belief that sex is reserved for a marriage between a man and a woman. No, “purity culture” refers to the elaborate set of extra-biblical rituals and teachings that became popular in the 1990s and were designed to build safeguards and “strongholds” of sexual purity in Christian communities. The Gospel Coalition’s Joe Carter has written an excellent FAQ about purity culture, and he identifies a number of common characteristics, including specific “purity pledges” that young men and women would take, father-daughter “purity balls” where dads would often given their daughters “purity rings” to symbolize their commitment to chastity, and strict “courtship” relationships that would often feature parent-supervised meetings in lieu of dates and written “purity contracts” prohibiting physical contact. All of this was distinctly different from what one might call normal or conventional Christian sexual teaching. I’ll give you some examples, from my own Evangelical upbringing. As many readers know, I grew up in the Church of Christ, and while my church was more fundamentalist than most, our teaching about sex was mainstream. It represented down-the-line Christian orthodoxy, but it was stripped of the bells and whistles of the purity movement. Our youth group talked about sex a lot (we were teenagers, after all), but there were no rituals. There were no rings. We’d never heard of “courtship.” We weren’t perfect, but we tried to do the right thing. Fast-forward four years. My college girlfriend was devoted to purity culture, and when she tried to bring me into the fold, I felt like I’d entered a parallel Christian dimension. We both agreed on the top-line moral questions, but she believed so much more. We didn’t date. We “courted.” And one condition of the courtship was that I attend a week’s worth of “seminars” held by Bill Gothard, then the head of the Institute in Basic Life Principles. At the time Gothard was a powerful Christian celebrity. His seminars could pack arenas, and hundreds of thousands of Christian families hung on his every word. His words, however, appalled me. Premarital sexual sin was viewed as defining, status-changing rebellion. You could be forgiven, but if you were no longer a virgin, your life, your wedding, and your marriage would be diminished as a result. You would walk down the aisle fundamentally tarnished, having lost something you could never get back. Purity was such a special virtue that God would reward purity with increased beauty, creating a “Godly countenance.” But that beauty must be concealed. Women bore a particular burden to protect “visual” men from temptation. Thus, modesty rules were strict. For example Gothard materials condemned even remarkably modest clothing if it contained what he called an “eye trap.” Here’s an example, posted by a former Gothard student: (Gothard was later forced out of his ministry after facing dozens of allegations of sexual misconduct.) By the late 1990s, the purity movement was spreading like wildfire. Josh Harris’s book I Kissed Dating Goodbye sold more than a million copies, and it urged Christian young people to abandon dating entirely. Movements or ministries like “True Love Waits” or the “Silver Ring Thing” elevated purity pledges and placed great emphasis on teenage purity. (Harris wrote his book when he was only 21. He has since repudiated the book, separated from his wife, and renounced his Christian faith.) While some purity teaching was both orthodox and beneficial, other teaching kept lurching towards the same extremes. Time and again purity acolytes repeated the same themes. Sexual sin is a defining sin. Women bore a special burden to protect young men from lust and (later) satisfy their husband’s desires. In one particularly pernicious ritual, youth pastors and summer camps would show Christian teenagers two pennies (or other coins), one brand new and others that had been in circulation. The brand new penny was “pure.” The dirty pennies were “handled,” and the more they were “handled,” the dirtier they became. At the same time, some purity acolytes taught what the writer Katelyn Beaty has critiqued as a form of “sexual prosperity gospel.” Purity now would mean great sex later. It was God’s reward for your youthful obedience. Chastity was the pathway to sexual satisfaction. It’s important to emphasize how much the extreme teachings were contrary to the Gospel. And by “contrary to the Gospel” I don’t mean that the orthodox sexual ethic is contrary to God’s plan or that sexual sin can’t be very serious indeed. Instead, I’m referring to the perverted theology of the abusive purity movement. Are Christians defined forever by their sin? No. They are not “dirty.” They are white as snow: Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool. Do women pollute men’s hearts with their beauty? Is the sight of women the source of male sin? No. Evil comes from within: For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person. Denying these eternal truths did and does tremendous damage to young hearts and minds. Singling out sexual sin as particularly pernicious and life-defining leads to fear and panic when people do stumble and fall. Perversely enough, it can even enable sinful conduct by leading people to feel hopeless when or if they do fail. “I’m ruined anyway. What’s the point of further restraint?” Placing responsibility for male purity on women harms women. It creates an impossible burden. You cannot oppress women enough to protect men from themselves. You can ban porn, ban explicit TV and movies of all types, put women in long dresses, prohibit makeup, and require courtship contracts, and you still will not solve the problem of sin. In fact, placing such burdens on women does not make the church more Christian. It instead connects the church to millennia of oppressive practices across the world and across faiths that have put women in a position of covered bondage all for the sake of avoiding the lustful male gaze. I saw the costs of an abusive purity culture with my own eyes. During the late 1990s, my wife and I served as volunteer youth directors in our church youth group. The youth pastor had just become a purity acolyte. Over our objection he prohibited dating. He condemned most forms of physical contact before marriage. Soon enough, I found myself consoling 17 year-olds who believed they’d already harmed their future marriage merely because they kissed their prom date. (Shortly after he initiated the dating ban, the youth pastor resigned after being caught engaging in inappropriate sexual activity online.) When the youth pastor left in scandal, I became interim youth pastor, and we reversed course. We held to Christian orthodoxy but we rejected the idolization of purity. Sin does not define the Christian. Christ does. And this brings us back to Atlanta. When many Christian women (and women who’d left the church) heard the killer’s motive, they thought, “That’s an extreme version of an idea that I was taught for years—that men need to protect themselves from women, that they need to protect themselves from me.” At its most benign, purity culture put unnecessary burdens on young men and (especially) young women. In its more harmful manifestations, however, it has enabled abuse, and at the extreme edge the male demand that women save them from their own sin can lead to murderous rage. As this conversation unfolds, it’s important to keep two things in mind. First, the purity culture I’m describing never fully captured the church. Millions of people have thankfully lived their entire Christian lives free from the extremes I’ve described above. Second, however, it’s absolutely vital that Christians do not leave the task of confronting extremes to a secular world and media that is often hostile to (or doesn’t understand) Christian orthodoxy itself. The secular critique is typically all confrontation, no redemption. The Christian response, however, requires both confrontation and redemption. It recognizes that Christ holds the answer when the church fails. As I’ve written before when addressing the failures and faults of the purity movement, through Christ even stories of past pain and suffering can be redeemed and transformed into instruments of grace and mercy. Shortly after we received the first reports about the Atlanta killer’s motives, my friend and Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Karen Swallow Prior tweeted two insightful words, “Culture cultivates.” A culture that defines a person by their sexual sin cultivates misery. When it places women in a position of guarding a man’s heart, it cultivates abuse. And sometimes, when a man’s heart is particularly dark, it can even cultivate murder. The problem with purity culture is not Christianity. The problem with purity culture is that its extremes are not Christian at all.
That's the most they could say on the subject without providing the impetus for the Southern Colonies to bolt from the new governments opposition to the tyrannical rule of the British.
Joe Biden can "flip flop" but Trump could not accept the onus of Presidential Responsibility for the people. Basically, he was a first class self absorbed bullshit artist disguised as an American President.
David French May 30 How old were you the first time you heard about the Tulsa Race Massacre? I’m ashamed to say that I was in my forties. Some of my readers might be today years old when they learn of one of the most horrific and brutal events in American history. And it didn’t occur in the early days of the republic. It didn’t occur in the midst of the American Indian wars. It happened 100 years ago this weekend. On May 31, 1921, a 19-year-old black man named Dick Rowland was arrested after an encounter in an elevator with a 17-year-old white elevator operator named Sarah Page. We don’t know definitively what happened in that elevator, but Page apparently screamed, Rowland ran, and word soon spread across town that a black man had been arrested for sexually assaulting a white woman. As an angry white lynch mob numbering in the hundreds gathered, a small band of 25 armed black men arrived to try to protect Rowland’s life. At the sight of armed black men, a number of white men left to gather their guns, and the white crowd continued to grow. Approximately 75 more black men arrived to help protect Rowland. At around 10:00 p.m., one of the white men demanded that a black World War I veteran surrender his sidearm. He refused, a shot was fired, and immediately a gun battle broke out in the streets--killing people of both races. As the outnumbered black men retreated, the white mob surged forward into Tulsa’s prosperous Greenwood District, home of Black Wall Street, a thriving neighborhood of black-owned businesses. What happened next is beyond horrifying. The district was set ablaze. In spite of valiant attempts at self-defense, black Americans were shot dead by the dozens (unofficial accounts put the number as high as 300), and there were reports white attackers dropped incendiary devices on the neighborhood from the air. By the end of the massacre an entire neighborhood lay in ruins, black men and women were herded into internment centers, and the dead were buried in mass graves. This was Greenwood ablaze: This was Greenwood after the riot: I would urge you to read the entire report of the 2001 Oklahoma Commission to Study the Race Riot. It contains an hour-by-hour chronology of an urban massacre, and it includes these infuriating words: “Not one of these criminal acts was then or ever has been prosecuted or punished by government at any level, municipal, county, state, or federal.” In my entire adult life, I don’t think America’s dialogue about race has been as toxic as it is today. Extremists dominate, pushing us into ever-more-polarized ideological corners. If you live in right-wing spaces and spend time talking about contemporary racism or the ongoing, persistent consequences of centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, and segregation, extremists will quickly label you “woke.” And no one should listen to anyone woke. If you live in left-wing spaces and you push back against emerging “anti-racist” ideologies that sometimes declare the nation foundationally evil, engage in their own forms of gross racial stereotyping (including unremitting hatred for “whiteness”), and seek to defund and discredit policing itself, extremists will quickly label you “racist.” And no one should listen to anyone racist. At the center of the conversation is a battle about the past, and it’s not just a battle over what we should remember, but how we should remember it. What is it that defines us as a nation? There are some events that we can’t seem to remember enough—when was the last time you heard anyone say that we pay too much attention to June 6, 1944 and the veterans of Omaha Beach? Indeed, one of the best things our nation does is remember and honor the men who fought, bled, and died to preserve American liberty. That’s the purpose of this very weekend. The memorials to their sacrifice deservedly and rightfully cover this country. When we look at their courage and valor—and repeat those stories to our children and grandchildren—we aren’t just remembering the past, we’re defining the present. We’re saying this is who we are. Indeed, we often even derive a sense of unearned pride and self-worth from the sacrifices of our ancestors. We delight in telling about the great-grandfather at Iwo Jima or the great uncle at Midway. My own family’s legacy of service begins in the bitter cold of Valley Forge. It’s that deep emotional tie to the present that renders battles over our past so bitter and brutal. We’re more than willing to feel pride over the virtues of our ancestors. But when the past is grim, we separate ourselves. We forget. We grow defiant. “How dare you,” we say, “impose any responsibility or accountability on me for something I did not do.” But how should the people of God view the past? Should we be so defensive? The book of 2 Kings, Chapter 22 gives us part of the answer. If you grew up in church, you’ve likely heard this story. In the 18th year of the reign of Josiah, king of Judah, the king ordered the Temple repaired. During the repairs, the high priest found the Book of the Law. The king’s secretary then read the book to the king. Josiah’s response is profound. “Go, inquire of the Lord for me,” he says, “and for the people, and for all Judah, concerning the words of this book that has been found. For great is the wrath of the Lord that is kindled against us, because our fathers have not obeyed the words of this book, to do according to all that is written concerning us.” (Emphasis added.) Josiah perceived God’s present wrath for the kingdom’s past sin—past sin that had a present consequence. There was no sense of defiance. There was no deflection of blame. Instead, as the chapter later describes, he “tore his clothes” and “wept” before God. But he did more than weep. He changed. The king “made a covenant before the Lord, to walk after the Lord and to keep his commandments and his testimonies and his statutes with all his heart and all his soul, to perform the words of this covenant that were written in this book. And all the people joined in the covenant.” Josiah is not alone. Daniel confessed the sins of Israel’s fathers. In the book of Nehemiah, the Israelites confessed the “sins and iniquities” of their fathers. In the book of Leviticus, God commands the Israelites to “confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their fathers.” In short, we cannot and must not ignore our ancestors’ sins. American believers should remember and lament the terrible violence of May 31, 1921. We should remember and change. And one thing we should remember is the profound sin of the church. One church that remembers and laments is First Baptist Tulsa, a congregation located just a few blocks from the Greenwood District. It has a prayer room dedicated to remembering the massacre, and its purpose is to “provide a place for our church and our community to explore the history of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and to prayerfully oppose the sin of racism in our world, in our churches and in our heart.” It does not flinch from facing Christian complicity. A friend sent me pictures from the walls, pictures of quotes by Christian ministers in the immediate aftermath of the massacre. They’re so grotesquely racist that I hesitate to share any of their words, but these, from the Rev. Harold Cooke, of Centenary Methodist Church, come from a heart of darkness: There has been a great deal of loose-mouthed and loose-minded talk about the white people of Tulsa being equally to blame with the blacks. This is not true. Any person that makes this assertion makes an assertion that is false to the core. It should be a lesson learned, once and for all that the colored man is a colored man and a white man is a white man, and there can never be anything like social equality between the races. Many negroes realize this and are the better element of the colored race. And what of First Baptist Church? What did its leaders say? The prayer room contains a placard that humbly and simply says this: No record exists of what was publicly said by Dr. William O. Anderson, the pastor of First Baptist Tulsa. The church archives are mysteriously silent. However, we have little reason to hope that his statements departed from that of the other pastors that history happened to record. Thank God that we do not live in the America of 1921. Thank God that we do not have the church of 1921. But we do live in an America that was shaped by 1921. We live with the legacy of 1921. And the posture of the present American church should not be some version of “how dare you try to make me feel bad for crimes I did not commit.” While the violence in Tulsa was stunning, American history is littered with examples of street battles, racist uprisings, and mass killings. The history of the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, massacre and coup, in which a racist mob overthrew the city government, is its own category of chilling. So is the Rosewood Massacre. The list goes on. It is not “hating America” to acknowledge this is part of our story. It is not unpatriotic to understand that much of our present reality exists because the legacy of past atrocities does not fade as quickly as their memory. So, what do we do? Perhaps we can take a cue from the way in which we honor the glories of the past, but with a very different emphasis. When it comes to our great moments, we remember them, we celebrate them, and we teach our children to emulate the courage and virtue of our heroes. We cover the countryside with tributes. If it is right to celebrate, it is also right to mourn. When it comes to our darkest moments, we should remember them, we should lament them, and we should take a page from Josiah and seek reform to ameliorate their effects. Unless we remember our worst moments, we simply can’t truly understand our own nation, nor can we relate to all its people. Humanity has not transformed its fundamental nature in the last 100 years. A nation full of people no better than us can do great good. A nation full of people no worse than us can commit great evil. Remembering our nation’s virtues helps give us hope. Remembering our sin gives us humility. Remembering both gives us the motivation and the inspiration necessary to repair our land.
