A Third Reconstruction: Who Can Participate?
Not all social issues are created equal, nor do some deserve to exist alongside others. But in the political landscape of America, diseased by an impulse to administer litmus tests and draw lines, the real principles that should set some issues apart are hard to differentiate. Even the most well-meaning efforts seem to go awry.
I know first hand there are untold numbers of center-right / center-left (real) evangelicals who are willing to get behind progressive social policies that advance and ensure equality, overthrow unjust power structures, dignify the poor, welcome the refugee and contend for fair wages. This describes the vast majority of the people I presently pastor. There is a strong fire burning in our hearts to see change and to expose the barren political soil for what it is. It’s why most of us couldn’t vote for Donald Trump.
But we can’t pass the narrow, liberal litmus tests, either.
Last evening, I went to a coalition-building event at Furman that proposed to unite people of all backgrounds behind compassionate, Biblical social policies in pursuit of racial and economic equality — a third political way, even. I am always moved by the radical call to tangibly love the poor and the marginalized because I see their struggles so vividly in my own predominantly poor, black neighborhood. I agreed wholeheartedly with the speaker, the Rev. William Barber II, when he suggested America has been locked in a pattern of “call and respond” whereby white constituencies have responded to progress for people of color (the call) with power-grabbing policies that continue to marginalize, subjugate and oppress. So I agreed when he said, “Without Obama, there’s no Trump.” Obama was the call. Trump was the response.
I agreed that we need wholesale repentance in the form of progressive, economic policy-making. Specifically, we need health care for all that is federally well-funded by Medicaid and we still need the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to ensure the black community has equal access to polls. I agreed that white people who see the light of truth cannot remain passive. For the sake of our black and brown human family, we cannot be silent while voter suppression, callous immigration laws and inherently racist policies perpetuate suffering and widen the divide between rich and poor.
I clapped a lot. I was in tears a few times.
But despite the eloquent challenge to reject the language of Left and Right, Liberal and Conservative, even Democrat and Republican, the evening devolved as the call for justice began harmonizing with the full social agenda of the Democratic Party. The unfortunate litmus tests came out, flattening all social issues as essentially equal and part of one morally superior agenda. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. But I’m determined to fend off my cynicism, remain hopeful and be engaged.
“A woman’s right to choose” was mentioned a few times among a long list of policies to defend, though it never became a strong thrust. Rev. Barber also suggested that Biblical, neighbor-loving people are those who, in effect, embrace a decades-old ideology that arguably contradicts the millennia-old Christian teaching on identity and sexuality, a coherent metanarrative. As a Christian pastor, Rev. Barber rightly invoked the authority of both the Old and New Testaments on behalf of the ethical pursuit of economic justice. He did not, however, apply the same standard in the pursuit of Biblical anthropology and sexual ethics, which are not as unclear as he made them sound.
These are, in effect, litmus tests. Artifacts of an in-crowd. One issue gets functionally conflated with another, but they should not be considered equal. In settings like last night, it feels as though the political litmus test trumps all nuance and diversity on controvertible matters. Apparently, we simply could not talk about deeply troubling economic and racial matters on which so many Christians can and should agree without at least a tip of the hat to stratifying social agendas. Can I not merely accept the fairness of civil unions and antidiscrimination laws for LGBTQ people without needing a Biblical case to justify their lifestyles and language? If I believe that an unborn child is not part of a woman’s body that can or should be discarded, should I be filtered out of these other serious conversations that could result in a broader movement for the good?
“Filtering out” is what happens in these settings and it immediately walls off the very people who are ready to address the plight of the poor and people of color in America, which may remain the most serious social and political issue of our time. Christians who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton or against Tim Scott are villainized, and the coalition to end systemic inequality never reaches critical mass because it settles for the same old homogenous, thoroughly liberal crowd, all of whom can pass their own litmus tests but can’t tolerate (or work alongside) those they deem intolerant. And the truly sad reality is that, unlike the first and second reconstructions that were so powerful precisely because they didn’t try to do everything, this third reconstruction is just a shill for the party politics of the DNC.
I sat among many black brothers and sisters knowing that the majority in their community are actually morally opposed to abortion and probably wouldn’t comfort many gay or transgender people as to their personal views on identity or their religious views on sexuality. But the overwhelming majority of black people vote as Democrats. And I understand why. There has historically been only one party for the last half century or more who have fought for (or at least seemed to care about) racial equality with an eyes-wide-open approach to systemic poverty and its relationship to America’s slaveholding, segregationist and racist history.
But in the end, the Democratic party still serves the interests of white elites who have gotten enormous leverage from the black vote despite despicable policies that led to mass incarceration of black men and redlining, among other things (Read Michelle Alexander or Ta-Nehisi Coates). Like the Republicans who have hijacked the pro-life vote for their own ends, the Democrats have hijacked the black vote. And both are primarily interested in suppressing democratizing forces to keep power concentrated among so-called elites. Rev. Barber suggested that poor whites vote for people and policies that are against their own interests. I agree (though its not because they are all racists. For some, their faith informs the belief that abortion is a bigger issue than their income. This includes Catholic Latinos, too). And when Hillary Clinton gets the poor black vote over a candidate like Bernie Sanders, are they not essentially making the same mistake?
We all need a new party.
The night began with a clarion call to reject two-party politics and unite at the “moral center.” But as the night wore on, the contours of this moral center were drawn with the Freudian ink that weakens the argument it is attempting to write on behalf of racial and economic justice. Above all, this keeps me mourning for the margins, especially for my black neighbors. So long as their political plight is bound up with competing immoral policies and perspectives, the moral center will remain a myth and significant inertia will plague white Christian voters who long to align behind a true “Third Reconstruction” that neither requires we discard the unborn nor seeks to shame and silence Biblical orthodoxy when it doesn’t align with expressive individualism.
Maybe there’s no hope for a “Third Reconstruction” because there’s no hope for a coalition that is courageous enough to actually be the third way. Political litmus tests are the default tool of insiders who have a personal stake and who act like outsiders with a new vision. Until they can no longer wall us off from each other and from a fusion toward the issues that actually matter to a “Third Reconstruction,” we’ll continue to have one social issue parading as equal and belonging to another, pushing the moral center back into the morass of American politics as we know it.
