A More Perfect Union?

“…that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

These words came to mind yesterday as I read the news that the Supreme Court had finally finished off what remained of the Voting Rights Act.

The long 60-year battle to undo the Civil Rights movement, first led by the likes of Jerry Falwell and his far-right ilk, has found its completion in a Supreme Court divorced from sound constitutional and philosophical inquiry.

The hubristic legal filings against the Southern Poverty Law Center are the rotten fruit of a distorted “Christianity” that has aligned itself with the sins of nationalism, racism, and patriarchy.

White supremacy, our nation’s original sin, sits firmly ensconced in the halls of American power.

But this did not happen overnight.

In the mid 1960’s, when it became clear that our nation had reached a pivotal moment of racial reckoning, a path “tread through the blood of the slaughtered”, America’s white religious institutions organized, first under the banner of resisting desegregation, and when that failed, through the reorganization of the Republican party around the so-called racial grievances of “disaffected” white voters.

Scholars call this the “Southern strategy”, a political reshaping of the electoral map that combined the mythology of “states rights” with corporatist economic commitments that have, as an added bonus, fueled the immoral wealth inequities we live with today.

There was hardly any Christian resistance.

The truth tellers who preached prophetically against the insatiable greed of our materialistic age were dismissed – American society blissfully accepted the empty notion that we were a “post-racial” society.

There is a hard truth to be met when you reach the very bottom. When you must sit in sackcloth, where there is nothing else to do but weep.

But as people of faith, our hope does not rest in a Supreme Court, a congress, or an idolatrous executive. Fear has been overcome by grace, and the love of God that compels us forward lights the path ahead.

“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

The strength of our country has never been in the number of bombs we build, how much money we make, or the lip service we give to being a “Christian nation”.

It is in the care that we provide one another, in our setting aside of fear, in the embrace of difference, in the challenging and painful conversations we must have, and in the deep truth we must confront about who we actually are.

Democracy is hard. So too is Christian faith. Both demand our attention.

Friends, in faith we know that there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God, and that through God, all things are possible.

Let us begin to live as if we believe it.