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Liberated By Grace

Liberated By Grace

WASHINGTON — For those who see religion as primarily an opiate, African-American Christianity offers a riposte. For those who see Christianity itself as a faith that encourages quiescence and conservatism, the tradition of the black church is a sign of contradiction.

Over the last few weeks, white Americans who never paid much attention to the religious convictions of their brothers and sisters of color have received an education. As has happened before in our history, much of this learning is prompted by tragedy, beginning with the murder of nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston and also a series of church burnings, not all of which have been explained.

The African-American Christian tradition has been vital in our history for reasons of the spirit but also as a political seedbed of freedom and a reminder that the Bible is a subversive book. In the days of slavery, masters emphasized the parts of Scripture that called for obedience to legitimate authority. But the slaves took another lesson: that the authority they were under was not legitimate, that the Old Testament prophets and Exodus preached liberation from bondage, and that Jesus himself took up the cry to “set the oppressed free” with passion and conviction unto death.

The church was also a free space for African-Americans, not unlike the Catholic Church in Poland under communism, which provided dissidents with room to maneuver. Even when segregationist Jim Crow laws were at their most oppressive, their churches provided places where African-Americans could pray and ponder, organize and debate, free of the restrictions imposed outside their doors by the white power structure, to borrow a phrase first widely heard in the 1960s.

It was thus no accident that the black church was at the center of the civil rights movement. And it’s precisely their role as an oasis from repression that the churches became the object of burnings and bombings. The freedom enabled by sacred and inviolable space has always been dangerous to white supremacy.

But the church is about more than politics, and a liberating Gospel is also a Gospel of love. The family members of those slain at Emanuel AME astonished so many Americans by offering forgiveness to the racist shooter, Dylann Roof.

There was nothing passive about this act of graciousness, for forgiveness is also subversive. By offering pardon to Roof, said the Rev. Cheryl Sanders, professor of Christian Ethics at Howard University’s Divinity School, the families of the victims demonstrated that there was “something radically different” about their worldview. The act itself “was a radical refusal to conform to what’s expected of you. It’s a way to avoid hating back.” They were, she said, following Jesus, who declared on the cross: “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

President Obama created an iconic moment when he sang “Amazing Grace” at the funeral of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney. Few hymns have greater reach, not only across denominational lines, but also to nonbelievers who can identify with its celebration of personal conversion and transformation — of being lost and then found.

But Sanders, who is also pastor of the Third Street Church of God in Washington, D.C., points out that the hymn has particular meaning to African-Americans. John Newton, who wrote it in the 1770s, was a slave-ship captain who converted to Christianity, turned his back on his past (“saved a wretch like me”) and became a pastor. Newton eventually joined William Wilberforce’s Christian-inspired movement to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire.

The African-American church tradition teaches that Christianity’s message resonates far beyond the boundaries of any racial or ethnic community, yet also shows that particular groups of Christians give it their own meaning. The idea that all are divinely endowed with equal dignity is a near-universal concept among Christians. But as Sanders says, an insistence on “the dignity and humanity of people in the sight of God” has exceptional power to those who have suffered under slavery and segregation.

“The whole story to them is ‘I can be free,'” she says. “If I am poor, poverty doesn’t invalidate my humanity. If I am humbled, I can be lifted up by God.”

And the scholar Jonathan Rieder noted in his book about Martin Luther King Jr.’s ministry, “The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me,” that the Resurrection and the Exodus stories were rich sources of hope, especially in the movement’s darkest moments. “God will make a way out of no way” was King’s answer to those whose spirits were flagging.

No shootings, no bombings, no fires can destroy this faith.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne. (

Photo: Allen Forrest via Flickr

Why The Fourth Of July Feels (Refreshingly) Different This Year

Why The Fourth Of July Feels (Refreshingly) Different This Year

For every American who venerates the ideals set down by this country’s founders in the Declaration of Independence, July 4 is a day of reflection as well as celebration. For me, this holiday has also become an occasion to point out that liberals and progressives cherish those principles, along with the symbols that represent them, just as fervently as our conservative compatriots.

So over the past several years, I’ve written an annual Independence Day column examining the politics of patriotism – and exploding the myths behind the right-wing monopoly on patriotic expression like so many festive firecrackers.

Looking back over American history, it isn’t difficult to argue that the Sons (and daughters!) of Liberty were the progressives of their era, fighting to end monarchy and aristocracy, in bitter conflict with Tory conservatism. Nor is it hard to show that the abolitionists whose movement sparked the Civil War were the progressives of their time, battling the revanchist conservatism of the Confederacy. Or that the liberals of the New Deal era, struggling to save the world from fascism, confronted entrenched resistance from prominent rightist and corporate leaders — sometimes in league with the nation’s foreign enemies — whose heirs later founded the modern conservative movement.

In all those historic turning points is embedded a fundamental truth, that the right’s claim to patriotic exclusivity is and always was ludicrous. Repeating that  every year is a necessary corrective as the wingnuts wrap themselves in Old Glory, pretending once more to be its sole owners.

But July 4, 2015 is a little different.

Following the massacre of nine innocent citizens by a thug named Dylann Roof at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC, the national discourse has turned toward an important issue raised annually in those July 4 columns. At long last, the Confederate battle flag, a banner of racism, segregation, secession, and yes, treason, may be removed from public display in state Capitols across the South – because Roof waved that flag while stomping and burning ours in the pictures posted on his website. A long overdue movement toward that flag’s interment in museums, where it belongs with all the other regalia of the old slave regime, has won support from the same kind of politicians who once enabled its disgraceful flaunting.

In South Carolina, Republican governor Nikki Haley, recognizing the imperative of this moment, stood with Democrats and African-American leaders as she called for the removal of the Confederate flag from the state Capitol grounds. According to the Associated Press, she can expect enough legislators in her party to vote for that change. In Mississippi, Republican legislative leaders are calling for the Confederate symbol to be struck from their state flag. Jeb Bush, who removed the Confederate flag from public display when he was governor of Florida, finally spoke up in support of Haley’s initiative. So did Mitt Romney. Walmart, a company based in Arkansas, has announced that it will no longer market items bearing that emblem.

And those Republicans have spoken up despite polls showing that most members of their party, especially in the GOP’s Southern heartland, still condone the display of Confederate symbols. Southern chapters of the Tea Party cling to the Stars and Bars, while ventilating the usual swill about “states’ rights” and the Constitution. They have closed ranks with the fascist right, including the usual suspects in neo-Nazi cells, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Council of Conservative Citizens, whose racist propaganda inspired Dylann Roof.

Obviously the Tea Party’s self-proclaimed super-patriots lack enough wit to notice the embarrassing irony of their position. It is not possible – indeed, it was never possible, as Robert E. Lee and other honorable Confederate veterans swiftly acknowledged – for anyone loyal to this country to salute that standard or any of its variations. And it is troubling that most of the Republican Party’s presidential candidates cannot yet find the courage and decency – the patriotic morale – to stop pretending otherwise.

On this day, however, in Lincoln’s own spirit of charity toward all and malice toward none, we ought to embrace those Republicans who have reaffirmed their loyalty to the flag that represents all of us. Today we should stand together — as President Obama suggested in his remarkable eulogy of Rev. Clementa Pinckney at Mother Emanuel — to honor the flag that flies over the “United States of America.”

President Obama Delivers A Speech For History

President Obama Delivers A Speech For History

“This whole week,” said President Obama, “I’ve been reflecting on this idea of grace.”

That was the turning point of Friday’s eulogy for Clementa Pinckney, the Charleston, South Carolina minister who was, with eight of his congregants, murdered by a racist terrorist two weeks ago. It was the moment a memorable speech became a speech for history.

“According to the Christian tradition,” the president-turned-preacher explained, “grace is not earned, grace is not merited, it’s not something we deserve. Rather, grace is the free and benevolent favor of God.” Grace, in other words, is that which bridges the gap between creation and Creator, the staircase connecting the soil to the celestial.

And it is amazing. So the heart leapt when, moved by some ephemeral thing cameras could not see, Obama launched into a soulful, heartfelt and, yes, off-key rendition of one of the foundational hymns of the church. “Amazing grace,” he sang, 6,000 voices rising to meet him, “how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see.”

“As a nation, out of this terrible tragedy,” the president said, “God has visited grace upon us, for He has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind. He’s given us the chance, where we’ve been lost, to find our best selves.”

The president named a few of the things to which we’ve been blind, the issues upon which we have been lost. He spoke of gun violence, the hunger of children, the brazen hatred that inspired the alleged shooter, the soft bigotry that gets “Johnny” called back for an interview but leaves “Jamal” job hunting.

Though he didn’t mention it, it seemed not inconsequential that he said these things on the same day the Supreme Court affirmed the right of same-sex couples to marry. It seemed fitting that he returned that night to a White House bathed in colors of the rainbow. One could almost see history making a great, wide turn toward freedom.

And, too, one heard predictable howls of outrage. Sen. Ted Cruz called it one of the darkest days in American history, Rush Limbaugh predicted polygamy, some Southern states, as they did during the civil rights years, declined to be guided by the court’s ruling. But, it all carried a tinny, faraway sound, like a radio station from some distant town, drowned out by the thunder of rejoicing.

This is not to say those doorkeepers of yesterday are without power to interdict change. They are nothing if not stubborn and resilient. It is, however, to say that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. And, moreover, that the genius of the nation founded 239 years ago Saturday by a group of men we would now call sexist, racist and homophobic, was not its perfection as originally conceived, but the fact that it was built for change, built to become better, and continually expands itself to accommodate that long arc.

Are we not tasked with forming “a more perfect union”? It’s the ongoing work of America, work no one speech or court ruling can finish, but which we are all charged with pushing forward. Until one bright day, you look up and are surprised how far you’ve come.

That’s what happened Friday. And it might be the story of John Newton’s life. Newton, who wrote the hymn in which President Obama found solace, was a slave trader who changed by increments over the years until, by the end of his life, he was issuing grief-stricken apologies for his part in that evil business. If the first verse of his hymn is a paean to the redemptive power of grace, its third is a reminder that grace obligates us to push forward toward bright days not yet glimpsed:

“Through many dangers, toils and snares,” he wrote, “I have already come / Tis’ grace has brought me safe thus far / And grace will lead me home.”

—

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL, 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.) 

The Acceleration Of History

The Acceleration Of History

WASHINGTON — Sometimes history speeds up. Rarely in our nation’s 239 years of life has a single week brought such a surge of social change and such a sweeping set of challenges to past assumptions.

The move against the Confederate battle flag in South Carolina quickly cascaded into a national effort to cast aside commemorations of secession, slavery, and white supremacy. This was more than symbolism. It represented something bigger — the nation’s turn toward “thoughtful introspection and self-examination,” as President Obama said in his powerful eulogy for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney on Friday.

For years, the fact that slavery was the central cause of the Civil War was swept under a rug woven of heritage and battlefield glory. Confederate emblems that came into wide public use in the 1950s and 1960s in large part to protest racial equality and civil rights were treated as if they had always been there, representing a “tradition” kept vague enough to hide away slave labor, disenfranchisement and murderous night riders.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court decided, 6-to-3, to keep the Affordable Care Act whole. To go the other way, as Chief Justice John Roberts argued, would have violated any plausible understanding of what Congress had intended. Roberts’ reasoning was rooted, ironically, in the principles of interpretation put forward by Justice Antonin Scalia. This did not stop Scalia from offering a scalding dissent that gave the nation a vocabulary lesson when he condemned “interpretive jiggery-pokery.”

Yet if the King v. Burwell case was about a textual dispute, its implications were much broader. In principle, there are no irreversible changes in a democratic republic because everything is always subject to popular review. In practice, some reforms do become irreversible as they are accepted by overwhelming majorities as necessary and normal. Obamacare has not quite reached this point, but it is now on the road to joining Medicare and Social Security as fixtures of social policy.

And the next day the Court made same-sex marriage the law of the land. Few legal cases have more dramatically demonstrated the complicated interaction of personal decisions, social movements, political struggles, and judicial judgments than Obergefell v. Hodges. And on few issues has the American public so rapidly changed its collective mind. In Brown v. Board of Education, the Court led public opinion. In Obergefell, the Court followed it.

It’s plain how this happened: As individual gays and lesbians came out, more and more Americans realized that someone they cared about belonged to a group that had long been oppressed and stigmatized. Supporters of gay marriage mobilized these new allies, gradually winning victories in legislatures and referendums. These campaigns further turned opinion to the point where Justice Anthony Kennedy could discern a 14th Amendment right to equal protection that did not seem to apply just a few years ago.

“The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times,” Kennedy wrote for the majority. “When new insight reveals discord between the Constitution’s central protections and a received legal stricture, a claim to liberty must be addressed.”

Most Americans will agree with this. Despite my own qualms about judicial activism, I found myself cheering his logic and the result. A fair share of conservatives I know are privately happy that the Court has begun to take the issue out of politics.

This does not make concerns about judicial activism disappear, and liberals should be candid: They cheered Roberts’ judicial modesty in the Obamacare case (“we must respect the role of the legislature, and take care not to undo what it has done”) and then criticized him for upholding a related principle in Obergefell (the majority, Roberts charged, “seizes for itself a question the Constitution leaves to the people”). Liberals — myself among them — have also taken Roberts to task on his own brand of judicial activism in tearing apart laws on campaign finance and voting rights.

Yet these inconsistencies also illustrate something conservatives need to recognize: that social movements, public opinion, the courts, and the elected branches are not hermetically sealed off from each other.

And the core liberal conviction about the Supreme Court, developed during and after the New Deal years, still rings true: that the Court plays its most constructive role in our national life when it uses its power to vindicate the rights of beleaguered minorities. This week will be remembered as a stunning moment when our institutions converged to accelerate our long, steady movement toward an ever more inclusive equality.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne. 

Photo: Photo Phiend via Flickr