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In a movement based upon moral dissent, defeat does not cause us to doubt our purpose or question the ends toward which we strive. We do not belong to those who shrink back, for we know the tragic truth of history. When oppressed people shrink back, they will always be forgotten and destroyed. Faith-rooted moral dissent requires that we always look forward toward the vision of what we know we were made to be. But defeat can and must invite us to question our means. While realism cannot determine the goals of our faith, it must shape our strategy in movements of moral dissent.
The moment when misery abounds necessitates messages that can move the masses to engage in deeply moral actions that question mean and hurtful public policies.
Not only must we know the arguments on all sides of any debate, we must also seriously consider the questions that are not being asked and their implications for everyone involved.
Nothing is worse than being loud and wrong.
The Southern Strategy introduced cultural memes every bit as powerful as the Confederate flag or a lynch mob’s noose. Only now, their buzzwords were “entitlements,” “big government,” and “the undeserving poor.
We can never know the ecstasy of true hope without attending to the tragic realities of the poor and forgotten.
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Not long ago I was a guest on Real Time with Bill Maher, with one of America’s most prominent atheists. Wearing my clerical collar, I realized that I stood out among his guests. So I decided to announce to Bill that I, too, am an atheist. He seemed taken aback, so I explained that if we were talking about the God who hates poor people, immigrants, and gay folks, I don’t believe in that God either. Sometimes it helps to clarify our language.
All of our faiths made clear that the codification of hate is never righteous. Legalized discrimination is never just.
From Moses to Jesus, the Bible tells us that those who fought for justice—those who spoke truth to power, those who refused to accept that injustice and inequality had to exist and that there was no better way—always found themselves hated, hounded, and heaped upon with false accusations simply because they believed in the necessity of speaking and working for the cause of righteousness and building a more just community. This lack of majority support is why the just must live by faith and must know exactly who we are.
Though slavery officially ended after the Civil War, the Christianity that blessed white supremacy did not go away. It doubled down on the Lost Cause, endorsed racial terrorism during the Redemption era, blessed the leaders of Jim Crow, and continues to endorse racist policies as traditional values under the guise of a "religious right." As a Christian minister myself, I understand why, for my entire ministry, the number of people who choose not to affiliate with any religious tradition has doubled each decade. An increasingly diverse America is tired of the old slaveholder religion.
But this is why the freedom church that David George joined in the late 1760s is so important. We who speak out in public life to insist that God cares about love, justice, and mercy and to call people of faith to stand with the poor, the uninsured, the undocumented, and the incarcerated are often accused of preaching something new. But those who claim "traditional values" to defend unjust policies do not represent the tradition of David George, George Liele, and Brother Palmer. They do not represent the Black, white, and Tuscaroran people of Free Union, North Carolina, who taught my people for generations that there is no way to worship Jesus without being concerned about justice in the world.
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We stand against systems and policies rooted in systemic classism and racism.
The battle, while deeply political, wasn’t fundamentally about campaigns and elections. Long before people went to the polls, our struggle was to reshape the stories that tell us who we are.
Though North Carolina’s constitution guaranteed free elections, folks struggling to make ends meet on hourly pay simply could not afford to miss a day—or even an hour—and risk losing their fragile employment. They certainly didn’t have time to travel to their county board of elections months prior to November, make sure their paperwork was in order, and then get off work again on a weekday to vote at their local precinct. Due to the highly mobile nature of low-wage work, many working poor people told us that they were often hours away from their precinct on Election Day, building someone else’s home or cleaning a school miles away from their own children.
When we pay attention to this history, a pattern emerges: first, the Redeemers attacked voting rights. Then they attacked public education, labor, fair tax policies, and progressive leaders. Then they took over the state and federal courts, so they could be used to render rulings that would undermine the hope of a new America. This effort culminated in the landmark case Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, which upheld the constitutionality of state laws requiring segregation of public facilities under the doctrine "separate but equal." And then they made sure that certain elements had guns so that they could return the South back to the status quo ante, according to their deconstructive immoral philosophy.
Dr. King was called a troublemaker and even a race-baiter 45 years ago as he led the call for a civil rights and economic justice Movement. He called for a Poor People’s Movement to address the glaring realities of poverty even as he loved America enough to say: Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds.
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What
transcends our labels, our political alliances, and our situational
ethics? What is greater than the political majority at any given moment?
It’s not enough to conquer the opposition. In a nonviolent struggle, we are committed to fight on until we win our adversaries as friends.
Do justice. Love mercy. Walk humbly before your God.
In a fusion coalition, our most directly affected members would always speak to the issue closest to their own hearts. But they would never speak alone. When workers spoke up for the right to organize and engage in collective bargaining, the civil rights community would be there with them. And when civil rights leaders petitioned for the expansion of voting rights for people of color, white workers would stand with them.
When the forces of extremism become so overwhelming that they depress the hope of the people, the prophetic voice and mission is to connect words and actions in ways that build restorative hope, so a Movement for restorative justice can arise.
We were black, white and brown, women and men, rich and poor, gay and straight, documented and undocumented, employed and unemployed, doctors and patients, people of faith and people who struggle with faith.
Only a fusion coalition representing all the people in any place could push a moral agenda over and against the interests of the powerful. But such coalitions are never possible without radical patience and stubborn persistence. I was about to learn both in a struggle I would never have chosen.
We need a Moral Movement across the nation. An indigenously homegrown, state-based, state government-focused, deeply moral, deeply constitutional, anti-racist, anti-poverty, pro-justice, pro-labor, transformative, Fusion Movement. A Movement that is about the moral fabric of our society guided by a deeply moral and constitutional vision of what is possible.
In American's long story, we have a lot of stones that have been rejected. Policy violence and rejection have too often been our legacy. And often, in spite of the calling of the Spirit and instruction of the Scripture, that legacy has been endorsed by the church. Think, if you will, of the Trail of Tears, the rejection of American's Native indigenous people and the genocide of those folk. In American's story, they have been rejected stones. Think of the rejection of Black people's humanity – not just slavery, but chattel slavery, reducing human beings to nothing more than mere property and animals. Think how even in the original writing of the Constitution, women were rejected and poor white men who didn't have land were also rejected. We must be honest about these foundations and not think that there is some great day behind us when all was well.
We must be honest about the foundations of the political and economic systems we call America. I love America because of her potential. But I know that America will never complete the work of reconstruction – will never even get close to being a more perfect union – until we are honest about her past and the politics of rejections. And as a preacher, Lord help me, I must tell the truth about how the Christian faith has been used to whitewash the rejection that stains our nation's soul.
― Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II
https://www.breachrepairers.org/williambarber
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