Advent and 'Allegiance' Spark Hope for Moral Revival

The season of Advent has long been something of a time travel trip for me. This year, my sense of “coming unstuck in time,” as protagonist Billy Pilgrim says in Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece science fiction novel “Slaughterhouse Five,” has broken open my battered, frozen heart. This year, my sojourns into the past have produced visions of a dark future.

A moment of profound enlightenment came this week when my husband and I attended a special screening of the Broadway musical “Allegiance.” I confess personal pride in “Allegiance.” I was among dozens of people who crowdfunded the original stage production of the musical, based in part on the life experiences of “Star Trek” actor George Takei. Mr. Takei was just 5 years old when he and his family were rounded up with some 120,000 other Japanese-Americans and interned in camps after Japanese military forces bombed Pearl Harbor. They were forced out of their homes and businesses, stripped of their personal possessions and their dignity, solely because they resembled America’s enemies. “Allegiance” tells how their experience of being imprisoned in inhumane conditions inflicted personal trauma and split up families over how to respond to the injustice of their imprisonment.

For decades, Mr. Takei and others sought to tell the story of Japanese internment. The terrible chapter of official racism was finally confronted in 1988, when President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, formally apologizing on behalf of the United States for the internment, and granting some 100,000 survivors of the camps reparations of $20,000 each. The Civil Liberties Act and Executive Order 9066 to “relocate” Japanese are now displayed side by side at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

“Allegiance” tells this story in a powerfully dramatic way. Its songs aren’t the kind of catchy tunes that might get stuck in the mind, like some from another historically based musical play, “Hamilton.” Nonetheless, “Allegiance” brings a priceless, if painful, gift; it exposes a wound of American racism that had been buried so long that the story was almost lost. “Allegiance” helps us realize that legalistic documents have direct impact on people, and that just because something may be “legal” doesn’t mean that it’s morally right.

The question of what’s morally right will haunt us over the next four years, because the American people have voted into office an administration that has demonstrated its allegiance to a worldview of bigotry, violence, lying and greed. In the words of commentator Neal Gabler, “There is no kindness in them.”

Their impact on American society bodes to be staggering. Also this week, religion professor Donald E. Miller of the University of Southern California wrote for the OnFaith website:  “In this new era, people of various colors and faith traditions will need to meet to confront the challenges of families without health care, children left behind because their parents were deported, and inflammatory and incendiary acts of violence against non-white and non-Christian peoples.”

Even so, glimmers of hope – lights in the darkness – are springing up this Advent.

On the national level, on Dec. 14 an interfaith group of clergy and concerned families called on Congress to reject the Cabinet nominees of president-elect Donald Trump. The Rev. Dr. William Barber, architect of North Carolina’s “Moral Mondays” demonstrations, put it bluntly: “We have to have a moral revival in this country, and a revolution of moral values.”

On a local level, United Methodists in the Desert Southwest Annual Conference (Arizona and part of southern Nevada) have responded to a request from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to shelter immigrant families in transition to more permanent placements. Two congregations – First United Methodist Church Tucson and Christ Church United Methodist – have agreed to host them. They’re calling the project “The Inn” – as in "room at the inn" – in honor of Advent.

More opportunities such as these will continue to appear, and we must be alert to them. Once again, Neal Gabler says it best:

“But even if values differ, all values are not created equal. Some are better than others. Most of us do know what is right. Most of us do know that we have moral obligations to others. Most of us understand kindness. It is just that we have been encouraged to forget it. … those of us who believe in traditional morality must mount what I would call a ‘kindness offensive.’ We must redouble our kindness in our daily lives, fight for it, promote it and eventually build a political movement around it.”

As its contribution to a kindness movement, United Methodist Insight will expand its original mission statement to include two new goals:

Advent and “Allegiance” show us courage and hope in the face of cruelty and injustice. It’s time to take their lessons with us into the future.

A veteran religion journalist and certified spiritual director, Cynthia B. Astle serves as Editor & Founder of United Methodist Insight.