My wife Jeannie and I went to see the movie "Marshall" recently. A deeply moving experience. When I add it to the related multi-media journey (books, articles, movies) I have been on the past few years, I find myself realizing that I have lived most of my life in the atmosphere of sanitized and selective history.
Marshall Movie Poster
I see how that artificial narrative has created the means for this nation to largely ignore and/or pointedly deny our inhumanity and the innumerable acts of injustice which have woven their way through our common life, largely perpetrated through Aryan arrogance which manifests itself in a variety of ways by ideological ethno-centrism political partisanship, and religious fundamentalism.
I now see that one of the damnable lies we have been told and taught--and have allowed ourselves to naively believe (at least I did for a long time)--is that The United States is "a Christian nation." Notice the last three words are in quotes. Of course, we are a Christian nation if we measure it demographically and architecturally. We are a Christian nation if we mean that a lot of people genuinely follow Jesus and live lives of serious discipleship, doing huge amounts of good at home and abroad. All that is true.
But....to take all that and use it to allege we are a Christian NATION is blatently false and easy to disprove when the searchlight of history is shined upon us. Sadly, segments of the Christian Church have been a major contributor to the lie that prevents us from recognizing and confessing our shameful national underbelly. Some of the most bigoted and discriminatory people in our history have been "pillars in the church."
The fact is, from the moment the first ship scraped its bow onto an eastern shore, we were an exploratory and pilgrim people intent on extending Manifest Destiny and to do it within a new context of espoused "religious liberty" different from the colonizing nations from which we came. From the outset, our Aryan arrogance demeaned and damaged the humanity of Native Americans, and not long after, it went on to do the same to African-Americans. Both of these subjugations have wound their way into the present moment with innumerable illustrations.
Along the way we have built a literal and figurative "trail of tears" for other ethnic and religious groups to walk on into social and relational exile: the Irish, Italians, Japanese, Mexicans, Jews, Catholics, Muslims, women, and LGBTQ+ people--to name a few. Each of these groups, and more, have their histories which include narratives of deformative and destructive attitudes and actions perpetrated against them in overt and covert ways by Anglo-Americans (many of whom carried and continue to carry genetic percentages of the very groups they claim to hate) intent on protecting and preserving "The American Way" as defined largely by straight white-male privilege--even when it was predatory, adulterous, and abusive.
Nearly fifty years ago, some people found a way to assassinate the one who said, "I have a dream," and some today are working to deport the "dreamers"--both efforts (though separated by time) fueled by an evil illusion of American "greatness" and global superiority. Historic and contemporary efforts to mint a counterfeit coinage that equates patriotism with nativism comes straight from the pits of hell. The facts of our history witness against our fallacious allegations.
What emerges from even a cursory exploration of our national history (outside of the Jesus/Flag narrative) is a nation that was strategically at work from the outset to make "whiteness" normative, all the way down to such things as "Whites Only" water fountains. Ours is a history of systemic, sustained, and pervasive discrimination by those enthroned in and benefitting from white privilege--in both the society and church. And at the end of the day, I realize that includes me, through the ways I have naively accepted the spurious story. Even benign neglect is a form of harm. Mea culpa!
Today, we call this "white nationalism," but using extremist language is yet another way to perpetuate the problem by making it "appear" that only those who are on the margins and are aggressively hateful are problematic. To think this way only ignores the fact that Manifest Destiny (to use the classic term) is alive and well in The United States today, and "some of the nicest people you could ever know" are carriers of the Aryan-arrogance disease.
Walter Brueggemann is giving me a language to speak of this theologically ("empire") [1], and "Marshall" adds an audio-visual reminder of how damning and damaging our Aryan arrogance has been. Now, may God give us the vision and will to see that whenever we name a person or group as "the other," and then use words and actions to discriminate against them, we continue to perpetuate the damnable lie.
[1] I am writing a new series about this, "The Prophetic Task," on Oboedire.
The Rev. Dr. J. Steven Harper is a retired seminary professor, author and spiritual director. This post is republished with his permission from his Facebook page. He blogs at Oboedire.