Charlottesville and the local public square

Sometimes it takes a few days to absorb the impact of a cultural disaster such as what took place in Charlottesville last Saturday. I feel I’ve become so numb to these types of tragedies that I was not all that surprised that it happened, even as I watched the horrifying events unfold before our eyes, or went back to see the footage of clashes that culminated in actual death.

Numb. Frozen. Muted. Discouraged. Depressed. Hopeless.

Those are the feelings that had me withdraw from my personal Twitter account earlier this year, quit writing my regular blog last year, and the same a couple years ago when I scrapped Facebook, because in each case there were social or cultural events going on, and it just didn’t seem to matter any longer. There was no longer a way to dialog, to communicate, or to have productive critique, and not just from others, but even from myself. I just could not look at, or participate in, the hatred and condemnation that was being hurled about any more; I needed a break.

There is not a pause button for life, however, and the events that trigger defensiveness continue.

I speak (or I did speak before, and am attempting to once again) from the perspective of a white middle-aged Christian man who is dumbfounded that the faith I was brought up in, evangelical Christianity, has been so contorted to support political figures and political power that it has lost all effectiveness. There is no more salt. There is no more light. We literally have nothing to offer “the world” when everyone wonders aloud at how something like Charlottesville could happen.

I will try to describe this situation we find ourselves in without spewing any hate or intolerance of my own toward all those in my own demographic, but no doubt these words will be hard for some to read.

As a little boy growing up in the midwest in the 70’s I was the son of a preacher. We were conservative, disciplined, and held education in high regard. Most of my family (on both maternal and paternal sides) were from the south, and more specifically from Alabama. When you’re 8 years old in the late 70’s, and start learning some basic elements of American history (not to mention one’s own family history), the public facing side of education taught us that racism was “evil” and that our country had “emerged” from its racist past. Not yet having any real life context, I assumed these things that I was taught were all true, and that the ugliness of segregation, Jim Crow, and the institution of slavery, were all in our rearview mirror.

This is exactly how white privilege manifested itself in many other white kids that are near my age. We all assumed the things we heard in school, and what we heard in church, were true. We assumed that there was a hard stop for all of the oppression that had occurred before we were born. We had no control of what happened during desegregation, nor any memory, so it was very easy to just go forward with these assumptions.

Then my (white) generation got a little older. As we aged, the sentiments of our parents’ generation were still there, but we were so desensitized to (and unaffected by) any real oppression ourselves, and we completely lacked the social awareness to see the oppression that was still all around us, that we were simply ignorant to the problem of systemic racism still rampant in our country.

It’s quite surprising when I look back because, and many of my (white) generation know this is as true as the sun lights the day, we walked through life hearing that “racism” was a thing of the past, while at the same time hearing verbal affirmations that the plight of black Americans was of their own doing. We were in the living rooms with our parents when other white parents or family members were around, and they would talk about things going on (such as in an election season because this was the only real time we were “concerned” about these types of things while living in our white bubbles), and the prevailing thought was that African Americans just couldn’t get it done for themselves (you know, the “welfare moms” discussions, or the “lock your doors” in some parts of town warnings, the drug epidemic being an “inner city” problem, and all other sorts of victim blame).

After high school I went to college in Nashville, and have been in the south ever since. And even though there was a good portion of this white-Christian-double-standard-on-race thinking still going on, I tried to separate myself from some of this “thinking” from our parents’ generation. I determined I was going to be more socially aware and not merely “pretend” I wasn’t racist in public, like many of our previous generation of adults had done, while they, in private, would minimize the cries of the oppressed as just being “lazy” when they talked amongst themselves. Interesting side note, and not coincidentally, this is all happening during the rise of the so-called “Religious Right”.

So what does any of this have to do with Charlottesville? More than any of us would care to admit, so let me lay it out a bit more.

Fast forward… My wife and I found “our own” church once we got established and started having kids, and we were just ecstatic with the “community” we found ourselves in. It “seemed” to us to be a bit more “diverse” than other churches we had grown up in, so we were feeling pretty good about ourselves when it came to social and cultural views. By “a bit more” diverse, I mean it was probably only 90% white rather than the 99.9% white churches we had grown up in. Even still, not all of our friends were white, so we felt quite “cosmopolitan” in our middle TN community. Everything seemed so loving, so open, and then something happened that started to pull it all apart.

Barack Obama was elected as our first African American president.

This was a huge pivot point for white evangelicals, especially those in the south, who not only had given themselves over to the Republican party, but had also not really come to grips with the latent, under the radar, racism that so easily has gotten handed down from one generation to another like a family heirloom. Sure, it’s usually pretty well locked up and hidden away, but it was still there, and those sentiments would often get pulled out and shown off when a group of white people find themselves sitting around talking about the “liberal black” president.

It didn’t matter that President Obama was a self-professed Christian because, as I was often reminded by people in my predominately white male Christian circle, he was a Democrat, so he must be lying about everything, including his “faith”, right? Everybody knew he was a Muslim anyway, right? I mean, he wasn’t even born in this country, was he?

Let’s just say, at least for areas around where we live in Murfreesboro, things started to unravel in 2008, and for our community, 2010 came around and the battle lines started to become visible. Our Muslim neighbors sought to build a mosque on some property they bought, and then the gloves came off. From then until now, the virtual battle lines have been drawn and white evangelicals have been enlisting people into the “Lord’s army” ever since. All hell broke loose in Murfreesboro and we have not yet recovered from the hatred that spurred ugly protests and conflicts.

These days the importance of political party affiliation for “real” Christians has become as important as whether or not someone actually professes to be a Christian. Any of us who have a compassion for our Muslim neighbors are viewed as “deceived”, or any of us who understand the importance and need of a movement like Black Lives Matter are viewed as socialist liberal progressives, and therefore are not to be trusted. Politics is now the litmus test for whether or not people can be “real” Christians or whether or not they belong to the “true” Church or the “false” Church. The lines are clearly drawn and, every now and then, people line up on their sides and face off, and sometimes quite literally.

So we have religion and politics in an illicit relationship, and we have a generation (mine, Generation X) tucked awkwardly and (sometimes, but not always) uncomfortably between white baby boomers (who are still sentimental and nostalgic toward the “good ole days” when segregation was the defacto standard), and we have a younger generation that is ready willing and able to call “Bullshit!” when they see us Christians try to quote the words of Jesus, while at the same time looking to ban anyone who doesn’t look like us, “worship” like us, or just plain “accept” the southern status quo like us.

So if I look at my own life experience, or my own southern community, as a backdrop for what happened in Charlottesville, it’s not all that surprising that things are materializing the way they are. Aside from white evangelical congregations seeking repentance for trying to maintain their “dominance” and top social spot in these communities, nothing will change.

“What do we need to repent for?” some of my white peers might ask (those of us who are still living under the illusion that we live in a post-racial society might ask that anyway). To put it bluntly, we have to repent for standing on the very same platform that the white nationalists stand on. We are effectively trying to guard the same fort.

Let me explain.

What was the reason the white nationalists and neo-Nazis went to Charlottesville to protest in the first place? It was the Robert E Lee monument coming down. Why is this important to note? Because most of the white evangelical Christians in my community are just as pissed as the neo-Nazis are about this kind of thing happening around the country. The white Christians in my community may not actually hit people, shoot people, pepper spray people, or run over people to show their ire, but make no mistake… many white Christians are standing on the exact same platform that white nationalists are standing, and they see no conflict of interest in doing so.

Therein lies the rub.

Can white Christians in the south really condemn the alt-right white nationalists when they share the same core sentiments? Can white Christians, who are agitated that their “heritage” is called into question by glorifying an oppressive regime such as the Confederacy (with monuments and Confederate flag enshrouded shrines) really understand that their call to “maintain their rights” is nothing more than a continuous systemic attempt to marginalize people groups who have been “under the boot” of our “privilege” since before this country officially came into being?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it?

Well, it should be, but unfortunately this week the POTUS decided to further align with a revisionist history that was rooted in, what the TN state historian calls, “state-sponsored domestic terrorism”. Even our southern historians know this is false, and the notions of “heritage” are at odds with the fact that after Reconstruction is when most of these Confederate monuments were put on the public squares of our communities (many between 1900 and 1920). This was a time when the KKK flourished, and Jim Crow was in full force, and lynchings were more common than county fairs. When our African American brothers and sisters see these monuments that glorify a regime that sought to keep them enslaved, there is no way in hell they can look at that and think, “oh, ok… that’s just them paying respect to their granddaddies”. These “symbols” can only be attributed to oppression, and that if “the South” had it their way, slavery and the social system of pre-Civil War America would have still been in tact when they were erected (again, decades after the Civil War had concluded).

When people say “we can’t change history” they are correct, but when people try to make the argument that removing offensive symbols to a huge subset of our population is changing said history, they are flat wrong. Would it be appropriate to reminisce about some other imperial power that sought to enslave, torture, and kill those of a different race or culture among them? I mean, for real, this is the stuff that ISIS seeks to do, and yet too many of us are unaffected by the terror, so we remain indifferent, and this indifference is as much a part of the problem as racists marching down our streets and spewing hatred and violence.

So here is the question of the day; why do white Christians, especially in the south, agree on so many “principles” with white nationalists? There are many reasons:

We want to keep our monuments.

We want to get rid of any form of welfare or public assistance.

We are angry over government funded healthcare.

We are pissed when a person of color gets into a university before a white person.

In our “offended” state we scream “white lives matter” as a response to a people group who have physical evidence, in the form of scars and graves, of knowing that their lives have amounted to very little over the course of the history of this country.

These are the very same things that the KKK and neo-Nazis are pissed about, and we rarely (if ever) question ourselves within predominately white churches why that is. We come to “the Lord’s Table”, some of us every single week, and the only things we self reflect on in repentance is whether or not we looked at porn, had lustful thoughts, or fudged a bit on our taxes? How can we drink our “little wine” and have our “little cracker” without any meaningful self reflection? If ever there were a definition of white privilege in the church, it would be that the only thing we hold ourselves to in terms of repentance is whether or not we’ve made a personal moral mistake, yet completely ignore any evils of the social constructs we might find ourselves a part of. We vote (with full-throated instruction from many white pulpits) along party lines, in lockstep, and yet we are not concerned with the effects of group think?

Apparently 81% of white evangelicals are not concerned… at least not last November. As a demographic, we made a choice to ignore the concerns, and the outright warnings, of our Christian brothers and sisters of color. Not simply because a certain “man” was elected, because even if he didn’t “win” the tragedy of that vote would still have had ramifications. 81% of us, across the country, turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to millions upon millions of voices who have been crying out for years (decades, centuries) that to choose someone that represents an ideal of supremacy was more important to us than choosing the alternative.

That alternative is to put ourselves second.

“I am second.” How many white Christians have been wearing those wristbands over the last several years? Hundreds? Thousands? More like millions upon millions of us. But we don’t really mean it. We never did. It just felt good to say it and it looked cool when we went to youth rallies, ball games, and Christian “men’s events”. The very last thing we want is to not be in first place, you know, because “we’re not winning” enough anymore.

It’s all such a surreal tragedy. We go to church on the weekends, and we raise our hands to the ceilings as we sway to the current “moving” praise and worship song with tears in our eyes and a sense that “God’s Spirit” is all around us, and then we walk out of the auditoriums, login to Facebook, and let the world know that there is no way in hell we are going to be “second” any longer. We somehow sincerely believe that it is all just a liberal agenda trying to “take Jesus out of the public square” even though we have the opportunity to walk anywhere in our towns without fear of being arrested for wearing a Jesus t-shirt.

So we casually go about defending positions that are very literally oppressive to people of color, or of other orientations, or of other religions, and feel completely justified in doing so. We are so casual about it that when people get targeted and killed in the name of white supremacy that we try and justify it in the same way the current president did this week, by laying blame on others, yet not looking at our own hearts to see where we propagate white supremacy.

Because we all do it, whether we want to admit it or not, even the tiny percentages of us who did not vote with the 81% in the election. Some of us want to elevate ourselves to public position or public office because we think we have “the answers” to this failed society. Some of us look the other way when we see bigotry in action because we don’t want to “cause a scene”. Some of us sit around the dinner tables with our families as hate and prejudice rolls out of our relatives’ mouths but we don’t say anything to the contrary or try and share a different point of view. More often than not, those of us that pride ourselves being in the white Christian “minority” concede to the “majority” and remain silent, myself included.

And all of this, mixed together with the violent, aggressive, and provoking behavior of white nationalists, continues to press against people who have endured a lifetime of prejudice and disadvantage. We are so hell bent on maintaining the status quo that we have no idea what that means to people around us, nor do we care, so we defend our politicians and “Christian leaders” even when we know they are dead wrong because we’ve taken it as our own identity. A threat to them is a threat to us, we think, so we must plug our ears (or block people on Twitter) so that we don’t have to listen to anyone who might have a different perspective. We gripe and moan and label those “others” as the “false church” because, God knows we are the “true church” and must not be questioned. We’ve become completely self-justified in our hearts, even if we say “we need Jesus” with our mouths.

We don’t even want Jesus. Jesus says hard things. The sacrificial way of Jesus will make you carry a cross. Getting anywhere near Jesus, even for the most morally upright person in the world, will cause us to hit our knees at our lack of worthiness, so we just invoke his name all the time to give others the impression we actually give a shit about what he said, but we don’t give a shit about what he said, because if we did it there would be a visible change in the way we treat people, and especially those who look, talk, or act differently than we do. There’s way too much to lose if we applied what he said to do, and white Christians in America have accumulated quite the collection of “stuff” that we clearly aren’t willing to let go of.

It’s time to take down the statues.

It’s time to take down the monuments.

It’s time to take down the idols.

They are not what we have been telling ourselves that they are. We do not live in a post-racial society. These things we have been reluctant to give up are abhorrent and haunting to a great many of our brothers, sisters, and neighbors. It’s also time to start having tough conversations. If we find ourselves in circles where everyone agrees on everything, we are in a very small circle, and within that circle there is little room for a spirit of Truth to work.

The other night we had a vigil on the Murfreesboro town square for the victims and the situation that happened in Charlottesville. There were probably about 250 to 300 people in attendance (a sad crowd considering we are a community of well over 100,000 largely white evangelical Christians). Many of the speakers were Christian clergy, and they denounced the racism that rocked the country on the basis of their faith in the man Jesus. One of the ladies who spoke also said something along the lines of “if you go to a church here, and your pastor made no mention this morning of the horrors of racism, or the tragedy of Charlottesville, then you need to think twice about whether you should stay in that church”.

Seems to me that there is still plenty of opportunity to profess the words of Jesus in the public square… it’s too bad so few white Christians and clergy who complain about the “war on Christianity” won’t join our brothers and sisters of color in that public square after unspeakable tragedy.