“The Golden Rule 2020” is Dangerous and Misguided

I couldn’t figure it out at first y’all. I mean why was I so incredibly disturbed by this little piece of church news. If you are a progressive Christian (and apparently an Evangelical) you may have run across something called the “Golden Rule 2020” and may have even seen church leadership of your denomination either sign this agreement? Document? Guidance? Or even help shape it. That’s the case for me as clergy in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Our Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton helped shape this document and has whole heartily endorsed it.
And I get it. I get why this is an appealing and tantalizing cause to take up in a polarized and often dangerously toxic environment and political landscape. I’m just like you, wading through an endless stream of often partisan bickering and even more dangerous rhetoric. This is a call for “civility” and an attempt to elevate the conversation. Why doesn’t that sound good? What clergy could possibly be against a call to treat others how you want them to treat you?
Well for starters this one.
This is a dangerous and misguided attempt to reset the board and pretend 2016 didn’t happen and the last few years have been some fever dream of a white supremacist that somehow, we have all tuned into. It is what the Rev. Dr. King warned us against in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. The White moderate.
It is the white moderates attempt to fix something they desperately need to be set aright. That is quite simply the institutions of this country and the American Dream. They need the framers to be right so desperately that they are willing to sacrifice my personhood in attempt to prove the American experiment has legitimacy. They are wrong.
We cannot set the clock back to a little over three years ago and pretend that almost half of the US government didn’t support and defend a grossly overt rise of nationalism, white supremacy, nativism and did it without blinking.
We cannot pretend the checks and balances work, because if anything we have learned how wrong the framers were when they conceived of this union. They predicated the presidency on the rising of moral men. Moral landholding white men, but still. They believed that even if the person who rose to presidency was completely convinced they were right and everyone else was wrong, they would-for the sake of the nation-accept the checks by Congress and that Congress itself would put the nation first.
Now you can question the moral integrity of slaveholders. As a black man I know I do. But you cannot discount the framers almost childlike belief that an “amoral” person would never rise to the presidency or last very long in that position. That the nation and the legislative branch would rise up and not stand for it, or the executive branch would realize that they should step down. Resign. You see they thought either only the best of us would rise to this position or that at the very least they would be loyal to the systems of power that put them there in the first place. Surely, they wouldn’t want to shatter the republic and the means in which they rose to power?
Nixon was a monster and he still resigned.
This is why this a dangerous time. Why this is dangerous to call for civility in an uncivilized age. And this is why calls for civility are not the Gospel but are instead systems of oppression being trumped up (pun intended) as a Sunday sermon that can lead to the healing of weary and grieving nation. Look I write all of this as a queer black man who has never had full access to this republic, its promises, its levers of power, or its dream. It remains a dream deferred.
Team: I get it we just want it all to stop. Yes, we are allowed to have a difference of opinion and no you aren’t supposed to be treated as less than because of your opinion. Or your political party or lack thereof. But if your “opinion” is based in my oppression and erasure of my rights quite honestly you can shove your “opinion.”
And therein lies the problem with this “Golden Rule 2020.” It is not only signed by denominations that don’t recognize my or many of my friend’s ordination, but it would deny our personhood. Look this isn’t the progressive purity hour where nothing is good enough, but this document reads like you want me to hear out the case nationalism makes so you can pretend your country isn’t broken beyond repair- at best. At worst it is outright pandering to this administration’s supporters in your pews. To make them feel like they haven’t done anything morally wrong.
In many cases they have.
As a called and ordained minister in the church of Jesus Christ I can’t absolve them if there is no repentance. Followed by reparations. It would be theological malpractice and spiritual abuse to pretend there isn’t a moral position we are called to when an administration use child kidnapping as a deterrent to the sojourner. There are dozens and dozens of directives in scripture how we are supposed to treat the immigrant.
That’s just one example of the last 3+ years.
How am I supposed to preach good news to the oppressed and proclaim sight to the spiritually blind if you won’t let me in the name of civility. Nothing, I repeat nothing, has ever changed for black and brown peoples, woman, or queer folx in this country with civility. In fact, there isn’t even implied civility in the Gospel. There is a sense of urgency and deep offense taken by those in power to the words of Jesus.
We worship a man who was arrested for blasphemy and insurrection, publicly lynched by law enforcement after a sham trial, then hung from a tree. Who spent most of his time pissing off almost every authority and person in power he happened to come across. Who was so offensive to those around him his hometown tried to throw him off a cliff. That’s the guy who is the center of our movement and you want me to be civil. With literal Nazi ideals being proposed and social engineering reminiscent of some eugenics and phrenology nightmare and I am to, once again, as the oppressed play nice. Be polite. Keep my voice down. Bishop Eaton in RNS article said that this isn’t a call to not speak out against injustice, but it certainly isn’t going to help the causes of those on the margins.
This document holds up white privilege which is the playground of the moderate.
This Golden Rule 2020 also completely ignores the long history of the oppressed of trying to negotiate in good faith with many leaders like this one. He isn’t the first authoritarian bully black folks and brown folks have run up against in this country. He is hardly original. In fact, he is quite simply the first one you have noticed in the last 30–40 years. We have resisted them all and we have our own methods of waging love and peace on this world. That I think is the most heart-breaking thing about this call for civility. It is an attempt to find a middle path where there isn’t one. The stakes have become too high. Either we support the rise of nationalism that is happening the world over or we don’t.
Am I willing to have deep conversation with you? Yes. Do you have the right to start where you get to start? Yes. No one gets to steal your journey.
But what I take exception with is when you refuse to take that journey at all. When you deny the Imagio Dei in another child of God. When you engage in hate rally’s and call them political discourse. When you have treated reason and fact as if they are an add on to an opinion poll.
When you put the weight and responsibility back on oppressed people in these conversations to “act right.”
You don’t have to ask me to love the people, I already do. Or ask if I have people I love with diverse political opinions. I do.
But that’s not what you are asking for in this document. You are asking for the illusionary and often reimagined thing called “civility.”
Love is an expression of the infinite divine that can comfort us or afflict us. It can invite us into change or sometimes demand it. It is the unfolding of the will of God in an ever-widening circle of grace and mercy with a place at the table for all.
“Civility” is a product of white supremacy and heteronormativity and I refuse to play your damn games. Maybe it’s time for you to actually see the gross inequities in this country rather than smooth them over. Maybe it is a time of naming Evil for what it is. Maybe this is a battle for the soul of America that some of us have been engaged in since the day we were born into a country that did its best to destroy us.
Maybe just maybe you and all who signed are just plain wrong.
Rev. Lenny Duncan +
