[Dialogue] The Charleston Murders: The Final Battle in the Civil War?

[Jeanette Stanfield via Dialogue]

Dear Ellie,
Thank you for sharing this talk of Spong.  I was in the USA during the
Charleston time and experienced grace happening.  It felt like a pivotal
moment.  I hope Spong is right.

Peace,
Jeanette

On Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 10:05 AM, Ellie Stock via Dialogue <
dialogue at lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:

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>          The Charleston Murders: The Final Battle in the Civil War?
> It was a brutal murder of nine people in an AME Church in Charleston,
> South Carolina. The victims, including their pastor, who was also a member
> of the South Carolina State Senate, were gunned down by a racist killer who
> wrapped himself in the symbols and rhetoric of the Confederacy. This was
> not America’s first gun-related mass-murder, but this one turned out to be
> dramatically different in one significant detail. On the next day, the
> heart-broken African-American mourners confronted the murderer of their
> loved ones. Their words to him were not of anger, blame or even revenge,
> but only of forgiveness. That act, so beyond expectations, opened the
> reservoirs of racial emotions, held for so long just beneath the surface of
> this nation’s political life. As a result racism visibly began to die.
> Within days politicians across the South moved to take down the Confederate
> flags. The call to take this step in South Carolina was led by two unlikely
> Republican legislators. One was State Senator Paul Thurmond, the son of
> Senator Strom Thurmond, arguably America’s most noted voice of our racist
> past; the other was Republican State Representative Jenny Horne, a direct
> descendant of Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy. The vote
> in both Houses of the South Carolina Legislature was overwhelming,
> suggesting that racism, implanted so deeply and for so long in the American
> character, was at last dying. People have always had a hard time accepting
> the fact that racism was motivating them. This sickness seems best dealt
> with by denial or by perfuming it with pious words. Let me take a moment to
> identify its continuing presence in our national life.
> Race was the elephant in the room when Black People were counted, without
> embarrassment or shame, as “3/5 of a human being” in our Constitution. Race
> dominated the admission of new states into the Union in the 19th century,
> so that the balance of power would never tilt against slavery. The
> Emancipation Proclamation issued in the midst of the Civil War, served to
> harden the lines of resistance. When the Confederate forces were finally
> defeated in 1865, Southern resistance did not end, it just went
> underground. Hooded Ku Klux Klansmen became the successors to the Army of
> Northern Virginia. Lynching, economic oppression and political
> powerlessness became racism’s tools, and black subjugation became racism’s
> goal.
> In 1876 the electoral votes from three Southern States were in dispute in
> the presidential contest. New York’s Democratic Governor Samuel Tilden,
> held a 300,000 popular vote lead over Ohio’s Republican Governor Rutherford
> Hayes, but he was one vote shy of victory in the Electoral College. The
> white South saw its chance to act and the latent racism in the rest of the
> nation created the willingness to co-operate. The South proposed to deliver
> all of its disputed electoral votes to Hayes and thus the presidency. In
> return the Republican nominee agreed to remove the occupying Union Forces
> and to look the other way while segregation was installed in the South as
> “the law of the land.” The deal was done. Segregation was then enforced in
> the South by the aggressive use of intimidation for which the Confederate
> flag was the symbol. An overwhelmingly white voting constituency would then
> send white supremacists to the Congress and Senate of the United States.
> There, through the use of seniority and the filibuster, they would dominate
> American politics and protect the “Southern way of life.” The South then
> gave its electoral votes to the Democratic national ticket to keep the
> party of Lincoln at bay. It was a cozy relationship. The Democratic Party
> was made up of four divergent blocks: the white South, the big city bosses,
> the labor unions and the internationalists. The Republican Party tended to
> be made up of the leaders of business, the rural and conservative heartland
> of America and the isolationists. The tension between these two parties
> dominated every national election. The Democratic Party achieved power in
> the election of 1912, because a Third Party movement headed by the previous
> Republican president Theodore Roosevelt split their party. The winning
> Democrat was an academic, the Governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson, but
> he was also a native of Virginia, an internationalist, and one who was
> comfortable with “racial” politics. When the Senate refused to enter the
> League of Nations after World War I, he was defeated. Isolationism,
> business-oriented politics and keeping racial oppression in place then
> elected Republicans Harding, Coolidge and Hoover to the White House in the
> 1920’s.
> The worldwide economic depression put an end to that string of victories
> and placed New York’s Democratic Governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, into the
> White House in the election of 1932. He followed the pattern of the past by
> naming a Southerner, John Nance Garner from Texas, as his vice president.
> He was to win four terms. In 1940 the clouds of war overcame the
> traditional pattern and liberal Henry Wallace became the new vice
> president. In 1944, however, the war was not sufficient to suppress the
> angry Southern Democrats, who managed to force Wallace off the ticket,
> replacing him with a “border state” senator, Missouri’s Harry Truman.
> That war also destabilized the racial patterns of the past. Black veterans
> returned from combat no longer content to accept powerlessness and
> oppression. Before and after that war Southern farms began to be
> mechanized. Black tenant farmers became redundant. A massive migration of
> these black, disenfranchised farm workers moved into America’s great cities
> in search of jobs. The core of America’s cities became black, but here
> these black citizens began to exercise their political power and to put
> pressure on the entire political system.
> At the Democratic Nominating Convention of 1948 the young mayor of
> Minneapolis, Hubert Humphrey, responding to these urban voters, mounted a
> campaign to place a civil rights plank into the Democratic Party’s
> platform. He succeeded. Southern Democrats, led by Governor Strom Thurmond
> of South Carolina, walked out, formed a new party known as “the
> Dixiecrats,” which then nominated Strom Thurmond and Fielding L. Wright of
> Mississippi for President and Vice President. They would carry the
> electoral votes of four southern states. The alliance of convenience
> between the white South and the rest of the Democratic Party began to
> shatter. President Truman also lost the left wing of his party that year as
> former vice president Henry Wallace was nominated as the candidate of the
> newly formed Progressive Party. With no further need to “court” the
> southern vote, President Truman, by executive order, desegregated the Armed
> Forces. He then went on to win re-election in a stunning victory.
> In 1952 the Republicans recaptured the White House with General Dwight
> Eisenhower of World War II fame at the head of their ticket. In his first
> term the Supreme Court ordered the end of segregation in schools by a 9-0
> majority. The quest for racial equality had begun. In 1960 Senator Jack
> Kennedy of Massachusetts revived momentarily the old Democratic coalition
> by placing Southern Senator Lynden Johnson of Texas on his ticket as Vice
> President. The assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas in 1963 then
> thrust this Southerner into the White House. So it was at the hand of a
> Southern Senator, a traditional segregationist known as LBJ, that the Civil
> Rights bill of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were passed into law.
> The white South felt beleaguered and betrayed. Fear of black political
> power was rampant so various laws designed to discourage black voting were
> passed. Legislative redistricting lines were wildly gerrymandered to create
> black districts. Give the blacks a few individual congressmen, but keep
> solid white majorities in all the other districts was the plan. Appealing
> to disaffected white voters, the Republican Party turned the South into a
> solidly Republican block, by running the “southern strategy.” Goldwater
> tried it in 1964, but lost. Richard Nixon, however, ran it brilliantly to
> victory in 1968 and 1972. It looked as if the nation was headed for a long
> and continuous Republican majority based on racial politics. Code language
> was developed. “States’ Rights” meant the Federal Government must not tell
> the people how to treat black people. “Strict constructionist judges” meant
> judges who would look the other way and not force the nation to deal with
> its racial prejudices.
> In 2008, helped by an economic recession that brought the ghost of the
> 1930’s depression back into our minds, this nation elected its first
> African-American President. His vice president was a committed liberal from
> Delaware. The white majority was stunned and racial politics became “hard
> ball” as it faced its own demise. President Obama was not legitimate,
> voices proclaimed. He was born in Kenya. He is a Muslim. He is not “one of
> us.” We will keep him from accomplishing anything. We will wipe his
> presence from our history by not allowing him to create a legacy. That was
> the stated agenda of many. Racial profiling became obvious. “Stand your
> ground” gun laws were passed. The murder of black males by white police
> officers or white vigilantes became a regular feature of our national life.
> No one was indicted. Riots, demonstrations and marches inevitably followed.
> It looked as if a race war might break out. The political charges became
> more and more shrill. Then the murders of nine people in a church in
> Charleston occurred. The perpetrator had a racist agenda. The nation braced
> itself for one more racial confrontation. It did not happen, but grace did.
> These black Christians through their tears extended their forgiveness to
> the killer of their family members. Our African-American President spoke at
> the funeral and led in the congregation in singing “Amazing Grace.” They
> were not just words. This nation had seen “Grace” operating. It was as if
> the boil of racism had finally been lanced and its poison flowed out of
> perpetrator and victim alike. The battle flags of the Confederacy began to
> come down across the South. Perhaps at last, some one hundred and fifty
> years after Lee’s surrender to Grant on the fields of Appomattox, the final
> shot of the Civil War had been fired. We pray that it is so. Now our task
> is to live our dream to be “one nation under God, with liberty and justice
> for all.”
> ~John Shelby Spong
> Read the essay online here
> <http://johnshelbyspong.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb232418480&id=af1e61dd09&e=db34daa597>
> .
>      Question & Answer
> Michael Read from Hawthorne, Victoria, Australia, writes:
> Question:
> I have followed with great interest your series of articles on the Gospel
> according to Matthew, in which you set out your understanding and
> interpretation of the metaphors and biblical references within this gospel.
> I find your arguments entirely convincing.
>  As I understand what you are saying, your understanding is that this
> story was originally written to be read by people who were familiar with
> the Jewish Bible, and who could as a consequence understand Matthew’s
> references and his symbols. Our later “traditional” and “literalized”
> interpretations of the gospels have, in contrast, provided us with a very
> simple, story, but one that is no longer literally believable. Matthew’s
> narrative, however, sets out a clear objective within a simple story line.
> It was therefore, easy to respond to a non-believer’s question with a clear
> answer in a few brief sentences.
>  In contrast, the new way of reading the gospels appears to demand that
> the reader bring much thoughtfulness and insight to the task. There does
> not seem any longer to be an explanation which can be summed up with any
> brevity or which lends itself to such powerful images as the traditional
> story.
>  My question then is this: Is it still possible to tell this new story
> with the simplicity and boldness of the traditional gospel reading or
> should we approach this task differently and, if so, how might this be? Or
> am I missing some point?
> Answer:
> Dear Michael,
>  You are not missing any point. You have stated the problem facing 21st
> century Christians very clearly. What we must do today, however, cannot be
> done by a simple re-telling of the “old, old story.” Let me state it
> specifically.
>  We Christians are facing the world of the 21st century armed with a
> Bible written between 1000 BCE and 140 CE, with creeds fashioned in the
> dualistic, Greek-thinking world of the 4th century CE and with worship
> forms constructed primarily in the 13th century.
>  The Bible makes assumptions that we cannot make. Among these assumptions
> are:
>  1) God is a supernatural being, dwelling above the sky and invading the
> world from time to time to accomplish the divine will or to answer our
> prayers.
>  2) Whatever we do not understand must be attributed to miraculous divine
> intervention.
>  3) Human life was created perfect only to fall into original sin from
> which we must be rescued.
>  4) Sickness and natural disasters are sent as a divine punishment for
> our misdeeds.
>  5) Mental sickness and epilepsy must be understood as demon possession.
> The 4th century creeds assume that there is a gap between the human and
> the divine and that the human cannot go to the divine, but the divine can
> come to the human. Salvation depends on the divine doing exactly that.
> Jesus thus becomes a “person from outer space.”
>  Our 13th century worship forms portray God as either a punishing parent
> or a hanging judge who confronts us with our sinfulness, making it
> inescapable. This all-seeing God keeps a record of every misdeed, every
> evil thought and every carnal desire. It suggests that we are to relate to
> this God as a slave relates to a master, as a beggar relates to the source
> of his or her next meal or as a serf relates to the Lord of the Manor. We
> are to be on our knees and constantly in the mode of confessing, of facing
> our own shortcomings and therefore of begging for mercy.
>  Unless we break out of these patterns of the past, I am convinced that
> there will be no Christian future. The church does not have the answers
> that it once professed to have. The certainties of yesterday are not viable
> today. Christianity is a journey into the future, the unknown, a journey
> beyond our familiar security patterns. So we relativize yesterday’s truth
> and walk into tomorrow’s world. We cannot read the Bible the way we once
> did, we cannot say the creeds the way we once did and we cannot worship the
> way we once did.
>  We have to move and when we move, we will inevitably break open the
> ecclesiastical forms of yesterday, but we still seek the truth to which
> those forms once pointed so inadequately. There is after all only one
> truth, but none of us possesses it.
>  Any church that does not confront the reality of this new world is not a
> church that will survive. To pretend that nothing has changed is a stance
> of disaster, but that is the stance in which most church life is lived
> today. It is not easy to be a Christian in the 21st century. It demands
> hard work, difficult thinking, the embracing of radical insecurity and the
> possession of a faith deep enough to know that God is real and to journey
> into the unknown in search of that reality.
>  Our task is to develop these things. It is a task only for the brave of
> heart and for the heroes of faith. When I look at the church today, I no
> longer see primarily a community willing to take up this challenge, what I
> see is an entrenched attempt to preserve the past and to return to the good
> old days of yesteryear when faith was simple and when answers were easy. I
> do see increasingly in many churches, however, a small cell or core made up
> of people, hopefully including the priest, pastor or congregational leader,
> who recognize the problem. These people are then willing to engage it
> despite the risk of failing and of being misunderstood by “the faithful.”
> It will be from that within these “cells,” I now believe, that the future
> of Christianity will be secured.
>  Thanks for your letter.
>  John Shelby Spong
>      Announcements
> Shedding Light on the Gospels Study Guide
> Based on Bishop Spong’s “Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism”
>
> By David Ridge
>
>
> <http://johnshelbyspong.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb232418480&id=603bde0e9c&e=db34daa597>The
> four gospels – Mark, Matthew, Luke and John – provide the most reliable
> synopsis of the teachings of Jesus, as imperfect as that summary may be.
> But the gospels do not stand by themselves, either in content, in purpose
> or in style, but are a continuation of the Hebrew literature that has come
> to be called “scripture”. Our purpose in this discussion group will be to
> identify and dissolve the obstacles to your broader understanding of the
> truth contained in the Bible. Our guiding assumption is the “Truth” of the
> Bible will be a personal revelation to be applied only to one’s own life.
>
> *MORE INFO HERE*
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