I was settling into the pew with apprehension. The guest preacher for the day was someone who a few years back had indignantly critiqued an ecumenical service my colleagues and I had held after the shooting of five police officers in Dallas, a service intended to honor their sacrifice and mourn their tragic deaths.
The preacher and his wife, both vocal supporters of the civil rights movement, complained that the service failed to account for the problem blacks have with law enforcement. This was, be it noted, at the height of the Black Lives Matter controversy.
That this issue was unrelated to the purpose of the service was, apparently, beside the point.
In any event, the preacher got up and starting pronouncing judgment on the United States as bigoted and racist. He offered a broad survey of the civil rights movement beginning in the 50s and reaching its culmination with Martin Luther King, Jr.
He even went on to quote Black Panther Stokely Carmichael’s famous line, “Violence is as American as apple pie.” We were all duly chastened.
Afterwards, I told my wife, tongue-in-cheek, that the next time I preach I plan to confront the timely subject of whether the earth is round or flat. The idea, I explained, is to boldly reject flat earth-ism, to the likely acclaim of a suitably awestruck congregation!
Listening to the preacher, in other words, one would have thought we were living in segregated Mississippi in 1953 instead of Cape Cod in 2019. I can’t imagine a single member of that congregation holding such odious racist views.
I chalked it up to yet another pastor seeking affirmation for his perceived virtue as well as an example of how pastors “of a certain age” tend to focus on events from the past, from their glory days.
To be fair, the civil rights era was indeed a time when many church leaders clearly were on the “side of angels.” No question about it.
However, since then every social issue that comes down the pike is treated with the same moral equivalence, solemnity, and social import as the civil rights movement.
And each is cast as a choice between good and evil. It’s that cut-and-dried. Which only diminishes the singular importance of the civil rights movement.
Let me be clear. There’s no doubt where I’ve always stood on civil rights. I recall sitting in front of the TV as a kid watching with horror and disgust as dogs and fire hoses were turned on civil rights protesters. My entire family was incensed.
Not only was my immediate family staunchly in favor of equal rights, but my grandfather, as I’ve written, was the first pastor in New York City to eliminate paid pews at his church in Harlem. The purpose was to end segregation and discrimination.
For this and other reasons, more blacks attended my grandfather’s funeral than whites, a testament to his dedication to the cause of human dignity. My father couldn’t have been prouder of this fact.
Then there was my father’s practice of paying full tuition and board to black students at his alma mater, anonymously. The only reason I know about it is my mother told me. He never would.
My larger point, in any event, and the main purpose of this essay, is to suggest that the civil rights movement today is being misused in order to sanctify a larger social and political agenda.
Part of the problem is that mainline pastors want to be “relevant” and thus tend to promote the latest cause or “ism.” Regardless of the relative merits of each, these causes rarely find their origins in the gospel. They almost always come from secular sources and are intended for mostly secular purposes.
One of the problems I had with math (and there were many) was the teachers’ insistence that we “show our work.” It wasn’t enough to get the right answer, which was hard enough, but you had to show how you arrived at that answer.
Too often the church takes positions on social and political issues without explaining, or even understanding, how or why they make sense theologically.
Tony Robinson, UCC pastor, author, and consultant, tells the story of a former president of the UCC who’d been invited by the mayor of Chicago to publicly endorse a new social program he had instituted.
After the pastor’s presentation, the mayor politely confided that while he appreciated his support for the policy, he had hoped to hear how that policy fit into the church’s understanding of the gospel. Alas, the pastor hadn’t “shown his work.”
This gets to the root of the problem. We don’t show our work because we haven’t done our work. Theological justification for the church’s social or political positions is too often an afterthought. The impetus comes from elsewhere.
And that “elsewhere” is the new “clerisy,” whom German sociologist Max Weber called society’s “new legitimizers.” These are, as Joel Kotkin writes, “the ever-growing section of the workforce that works outside the market economy – teachers, consultants, lawyers, government workers, and medical professionals.”
It is this “educated, affluent class,” the “intelligentsia,” that sets the agenda. It’s also the group the clergy, wittingly or unwittingly, seek to emulate.
The ideas expressed by the clerisy, however, come mostly from academia, various think tanks and foundations, and the media, all of which promote secular progressive thought.
Historically, American society sought reform as the primary means of change. We in the UCC, in fact, come from the “reformed” tradition. The idea here is that tradition is honored. All change and growth emerge organically.
Implicit is the idea that certain things are inviolable and should be conserved, those values, norms, and institutions within society (including the church) that have proven over time to align with lived experience, and that reinforce the spiritual and moral origins of shared beliefs and foundational truths.
Change or growth occurs when new insights and new life-experiences demand modification of the status quo. Such incremental change seeks to maintain the efficacy of first principles as they confront and adapt to the inevitable changing circumstances through time.
Progressivism, on the other hand, is an ideology that views the status quo as outdated if not immoral, filled with systemic inequality, injustice, and other evils. It cannot be reformed. It must be replaced.
By what? By a wholly new set of values and ideas.
Rather than social ills being understood as human sin writ large, progressivism assumes human beings are innately sinless. Injustice, therefore, comes from the evils of the social structure. If a society is deemed less than perfect, it must be replaced by “root and branch,” to give way to a new and better world order.
Interestingly, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, progressivism openly opposed two institutions they viewed as the main obstacles toward establishing this new utopian society – the family and the church.
Both, it was believed, were inherently “conservative” and backward-looking. Unless these mainstays of traditional society were eliminated or radically altered, they would thwart any and all efforts to bring forth this new utopian vision.
Despite their efforts, up through the 50s and early 60s, mainstream America still believed the problems of society and nation could be improved by means of “the system.” In the mid-60s that changed.
Ever since, the idea is that we live in an innately unjust and hopelessly immoral society. Today’s “cancel” culture, for instance, aptly illustrates this misguided, juvenile attempt to tear down and replace.
As for the mainline church of today, I only wish it would approach social and political matters from a theological as well as a “reformed” perspective, seeking to cull what is best in our religious and cultural heritage while adopting necessary change from within that very same tradition.
Instead, the church seems to have embraced the secular progressive agenda, attacking tradition by means of the various “isms” that, at root, seek to fundamentally transform society, as well as religion itself! Behind these efforts is a larger agenda, one I doubt our spiritual ancestors would either recognize or approve.
One of the great ironies of the civil rights movement, despite contemporary efforts to rewrite history, is that its successes were largely effected in and through the very “system” modern progressives wish to tear down.
It was in the institutional church where civil rights leaders effectively appealed to Judeo-Christian ideas of equality and the dignity and worth of every single human being.
And the legal, institutional changes that ultimately occurred were legislated and enacted by a government that had no choice but to respond to the will of the people.
Sadly, or so it seems, the civil rights movement has been co-opted to stand for something alien to its original mission – that of ending discrimination and advancing the cause of equal rights.
It’s now being used as but one of any number of modern-day causes purposely aligned to delegitimize the very traditions and institutions that led to its success, not least the church.
One wonders how many pastors have any inkling of this.
Totally Brilliant ⭐️