The opening lines are close to giddy. This example appeared on the NBC news website.
... If there was any lingering doubt, last week made it clear: The religious left is not a curious outlier in American politics. The religious references during President Joe Biden’s inauguration, the inaugural prayer service held Thursday morning with a powerful lineup of religious leaders and the swearing in of the Rev. Raphael Warnock as a newly minted senator are proof that progressive people of faith are a powerful force in American politics.These writers, who work at faith subdivisions of the Center for American Progress, go on to remind us that progressive religion has been one of the underpinnings of every justice struggle in U.S. history from the abolition of slavery, though overthrowing Jim Crow, to opposing the empire's forever wars, and even to recognizing the full humanity of LGBT people.
Peace- and justice-seeking religiosity may have been eclipsed by Trump's coterie of evangelical courtiers, but it never went away. Given a chance by the Biden election, this sort of faith advocacy is back and determined to push the new administration in its direction.
Four years ago, many Episcopalians, myself included, were aghast that the National Cathedral in Washington had extended its accustomed welcome to the new president for an interfaith service to be held the day after the inauguration. On that occasion, church leaders finessed the contradictions in giving house room to Donald Trump by omitting any sermon. What could anyone say? This year, the interfaith service was on online, and the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II spoke the homily.
We must address the five interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation/denial of healthcare, the war economy, and the false moral narrative of religious nationalism. These are breaches that must be addressed, and according to the text, repairing the breaches will bring revival…
Please God, grant us wisdom, grant us courage, until the poor are lifted, the sick are healed, children are protected, and civil rights and human rights never neglected. Grant us wisdom for the facing of this hour until love and justice are never rejected.
Grant us wisdom and courage for the facing of this hour until, together, we make sure there is racial justice and economic justice and living wage justice and health care justice and ecological justice and disability justice and justice for homeless and justice for the poor and low-wealth and working poor and immigrant justice—until we study war no more and peace and justice are the way we live.
This is the only path to domestic tranquility and healing.Elizabeth Dias reported an interview with Rev. Barber which catches emotions and hopes in progressive religious circles occasioned by the change in administrations:
Jesus taught that a nation is judged by how it treats the least of these, the poor, the hungry, the sick, the immigrant, he explained.
“Birth pangs require one thing: pushing,” he said. “That is what the movement has to do.”
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While surfing about collecting material for this series of posts, I stumbled upon some provoking reflections from Tony Karon, a South African-born journalist and former anti-Apartheid activist who writes Rootless Cosmopolitan. A self-described "nice Jewish boy" and not any kind of believer, he thinks the South African experience of defeating apartheid may have something to teach about the role of religion in a struggle against Christian nationalism.
... In apartheid South Africa, Christian discourse also provided an off-ramp for some of the regime’s supporters to stand down, to accept the sinfulness of their system, reconcile themselves with equality and ask forgiveness — in the common discourse they shared with the moral underwriters of the liberation project: Such epiphanies were common among individual high profile white Christian figures before the end of apartheid, and the narrative of Truth and Reconciliation Commission headed by Bishop Tutu — for all its limitations and faults — exemplified this idea and possibility, that Christianity creates a pathway for weakening, disabling and dismantling white nationalism.
Not by itself, of course, not absent intense social-justice struggles on other fronts. But Christian witness against apartheid played a role in unraveling the ideological conviction that sustained the system’s enforcers in South Africa. And I have a feeling that the social-justice project in America may need to create pathways, also, for at least some of the adherents of “Christian Nationalism” to find their way back to a Christianity based on justice and equality....
I'm unsure about that -- but I am open to living and learning. The whole of Karon's post is broadening.
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U.S. religious landscape 2021:
Evangelical Christians: but how can they?
White Christian insurrectionists and fellow travelers
A coming out for liberal religion
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