[Dialogue] 11/25/2021, Progressing Spirit, Rev Irene Monroe: Celebrating Thanksgiving’s 400th anniversary of revisionist history; Spong revisited

[Ellie Stock]

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Celebrating Thanksgiving’s 400th anniversary of revisionist history
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|  Essay by Rev. Irene Monroe
November 25, 2021
 
“We forget everything. What we remember is not what actually happened, not history, but merely that hackneyed dotted line they have chosen to drive into our memories by incessant hammering.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

“Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another.”  Ephesians 4:25, ESV 

Before this year’s national celebration of Thanksgiving, the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts, just 43 miles southwest from Cambridge, where I reside, celebrated its 400th Thanksgiving anniversary. The nationally televised extravaganza venerated the arrival of European Pilgrims to America in 1620. Packaged in the promotion was the story of these early Pilgrims’ heroic voyage on the Mayflower,  and the beginning of American democracy that Quincy native President John Quincy Adams depicted as “the earliest example of civil government established by the act of the people to be governed.” Also, the event promoted the one-year celebration after they arrived in 1621, symbolized as a Thanksgiving depicting a cooperative and cordial relationship between the Pilgrims and  Native Americans.

This Thanksgiving’s 400th anniversary arrives amid a continued COVID pandemic that has ravaged marginalized communities of color as the county reckons with its past by re-examining its roots of persistent inequities. For example,  this year, Massachusetts celebrated Indigenous Peoples Day in lieu of Columbus Day. In 2020, the NFL team formerly called the “Washington Redskins” is now the Washington Football Team. And in this supposedly more “woke” moment, television images of whites doing “war whoops” and “tomahawk chops” coming across our screen are now frowned upon.

That said, what would celebrating Thanksgiving’s 400th anniversary with the town of Plymouth be a reckoning?

Historically, for  Native Americans, Thanksgiving is not a cause of celebration but rather a National Day of Mourning. Why would Native Americans  celebrate the people who tried to destroy us?”

Since 1970, Native Americans have gathered at noon on Coles Hill in Plymouth to commemorate a National Day of Mourning on this revered U.S. holiday. And for the Wampanoag nation of New England, whose name means “people of the dawn,” this national holiday is a reminder of the real significance of the first Thanksgiving in 1621 as a symbol of persecution of Native Americans and their long history of bloodshed with European settlers. 

Oddly, the first group of settlers was refugees, a group America closes her doors to now.  The Pilgrims were seeking a better life.  However, the Pilgrims, who sought refuge here in America from religious persecution in their homeland, were correct in their dogged pursuit of religious liberty. Regrettably, the Pilgrims’ fervor for religious freedom was devoid of an ethic of accountability, and their actions did not set up the conditions requisite for moral liability and legal justice. Instead, the actions of the Pilgrims brought about the genocide of a people, a historical amnesia of the event, and an annual national celebration of Thanksgiving of their arrival. In other words,  their actual practice of religious liberty came at the expense of the humanity and the civil rights of Native Americans.

In 1990, President George H.W. Bush designated November as “National American Indian Heritage Month” to celebrate the history, art, and traditions of Native American people. However, in this nation’s reckoning moment, celebrating the arrival of the Pilgrims hints at its continued revisionist history. And it must cease!

As we get into the holiday spirit, let us remember the whole story of the arrival of the Pilgrims.

“It is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection as well as a protest of the racism and oppression which Native Americans continue to experience,” reads the text of the plaque on Coles Hill that overlooks Plymouth Rock, the mythic symbol of where the Pilgrims first landed.

The United American Indians of New England (UAINE), a Native-led organization of Native people, supports Indigenous struggles in New England and throughout the Americas. Also, UAE supports the struggles of communities of color, LGBTQ+ communities, and, yes, all refugees because it understands the interconnections of struggles.

“Most pilgrims would have died during the harsh winter had it not been for the open arms of the Native Americans,” Taylor Bell wrote in “The Hypocrisy Of Refusing Refugees at Thanksgiving.”

The misrepresentations about what was served at the first Thanksgiving in Plymouth in 1621 needs to be corrected, too. For example, there is no evidence that turkey was offered, and pie could not have been served because there was no flour or butter available for the crust in those days. Also, the Mayflower arrived in Plymouth Harbor in 1620, after first stopping in Provincetown, now known as an LGBTQ+ vacation hot spot.

As we get into the holiday spirit, let us remember the whole story of the arrival of the Pilgrims and other European settlers to the New World. When Malcolm X said, “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock. The rock was landed on us,” in March 1964 in a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in NYC, he identifies Plymouth Rock, not as the stepping stone of America’s preordained manifest destiny. Instead,  the symbolism of the rock is a direct consequence of the continued struggle Native Americans confront today, as well as black, brown, and other oppressed people in this country. 

Memory is a form of resistance. It’s transgressive against glorified lies, like the prevailing narrative of Lost Clause Myth, revering  Confederate soldiers as America’s true patriots in the Civil War. Also, memory is subversive in its enduring power to disrupt historical amnesia and a canonical past unwillingness to confront itself, like January 6th depicted, by some, as American patriots defending freedom instead of an insurrection. 

On a trip home to New York City in May 2004, I went to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to view the UNESCO Slave Route Project, “Lest We Forget: The Triumph Over Slavery. ” The exhibit  marked the United Nations General Assembly’s resolution proclaiming 2004 “The International Year to Commemorate the Struggle Against Slavery and Its Abolition.”

In highlighting that African Americans should not be shamed by slavery, but instead defiantly proud of our collective memory of it, I read the opening billboard to the exhibit that stated the following: 

“By institutionalizing memory, resisting the onset of oblivion, recalling the memory of tragedy that for long years remained hidden or unrecognized, and by assigning it its proper place in the human conscience, we respond to our duty to remember.”

In the spirit of our connected struggles for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, this Thanksgiving,  we should not solely focus on the story of Plymouth Rock. Instead, as Americans, we should focus on creating this nation as a solid rock that rests on a multicultural and democratic foundation. 

And in so doing, it helps us remember and respect the struggles that not only this nation’s Pilgrim foremothers and forefathers endured, it also enables us to recognize and respect the present-day struggle refugees and other marginalized groups face, especially our Native American brothers' and sisters' ongoing struggle every day, particularly on Thanksgiving Day.

~ Rev. Irene Monroe


Read online here

About the Author
The Reverend Monroe does a weekly Monday segment, “All Revved Up!” on NPR's WGBH (89.7 FM). She is a weekly Friday commentator on New England Channel NEWS. Monroe is the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail, Guided Walking Tour of Beacon Hill: Boston’s Black Women Abolitionists. A Huffington Post blogger and a syndicated religion columnist; her columns appear the Boston LGBTQ newspaper Baywindows, Cambridge Chronicle, and the Boston Globe.
Monroe states that her “columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African American, queer and religious studies. As a religion columnist I try to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people.” Her papers are at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College’s research library on the history of women in America. Click here to visit her website.
 
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Question & Answer

 

Q: By Russ

What do we mean by the word “faith?”  People, who would dismiss us as anti-intellectual, ridicule faith with the presumption that it means believing in things that are hard to believe in or believing in things that are contrary to known facts.  I know this is not what we Christians mean by that word (outside the evangelical fringe), but I don’t have good words to explain it. Can you help?


A: By Bishop John Shelby Spong
 
Dear Russ,

I can try. Faith in its original biblical meaning had more to do with trust than it does with believing.  This trust was not in the conviction that all would be well, but that whatever tomorrow brings, God would be present in it.  That is why the author of the epistle to the Hebrews could write that it was “by faith that Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees” to form a new nation in a new place.  It was “by faith” that Moses left the known of Egypt for the unknown of the wilderness.

Later in Christian history “faith” was connected with believing certain propositional statements.  That was when the creeds began to be called expressions of “the Faith.”  Actually, this was little more that idolatry.  Creeds represent the human and ecclesiastical assertion that the mystery and wonder of God can actually be captured in something that human beings have created.  That is in creeds, doctrines or dogmas.  This practice is also the source of the development of religious imperialism, which ultimately gave birth to the Inquisition, to religious persecution, to religious wars and many other evils.

Creeds are at best pointers to the mystery of God.  They are not and should never have been allowed to become strait jackets that we were required to put on in order to pretend that we have captured the truth of God.

The first creed of the church was only three words.  It was an affirmation that “Jesus is Messiah” rather than a set of beliefs.  To call Jesus “messiah” was to claim that in the life of Jesus the transcendent power of the divine has been met and engaged.  I think this is still the best creed the church has ever formulated.

In a word (or two), I define faith as “having the courage to be.” 

~ Bishop John Shelby Spong
   (December 8, 2011)

Read and share online here
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited


The Lecture Tour of Germany 
Part II: Gottingen

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
August 4, 2011
My lecture tour of Germany was joined from the very beginning by a unique Frenchman named Raymond Rakower, who accepted Gerhard Klein’s invitation to come to Germany and to accompany us.  Gerhard Klein has been the translator into German for four of my books.  Ray Rakower was his French counterpart, who has translated two of my books into French.  Both were remarkable men and able scholars.  Since I introduced Gerhard last week, let me now briefly introduce Ray this week.  Ray, fluent in German, French and English, came out of a Jewish family.  His grandfather had been the Chief Rabbi at the synagogue in Krakow, Poland.  Both his father and his brother were killed in a Nazi death camp, while Ray and his mother managed to escape into Switzerland.  In his adult life he had a very successful career in the oil and gas business that took him all over the world.  He added a unique dimension to our German experience, especially when we went to places where anti-Semitism had victimized millions.

Three venues hosted my visit.  I described Grebenstein last week.   Because it was Gerhard’s home it was the fitting place to start.  He is a highly-respected citizen of that community and his friends came from all walks of German life.  The other two venues were university towns, Gottingen and Marburg, both of which have theological schools and theological faculties on their campuses.  This week I will focus on the Gottingen visit for it had many rich and provocative moments.  Next week, I will examine Marburg.

One of the things that made the visit to Gottingen University so unique was that on its theological faculty was a man named Gerd Ludemann, a brilliant New Testament scholar.  Gerd is described far and wide as a biblical and theological radical, and today no longer identifies himself as living inside the Christian tradition.  I have known and liked Gerd for several years as we have spent time together as members of the Jesus Seminar.  In that fraternity of scripture scholars, Gerd found support for his insights, his findings and his journey, but what he enjoyed there was certainly not what he experienced from the hierarchy of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Germany, who saw in him a destroyer of what they held sacred.  These hierarchical figures regarded him first as a “disturber of Israel,” a bit later as an unacceptable provocateur and finally, as one whom they judged to be no longer worthy or qualified to teach students preparing for ordination in their Lutheran tradition.  In time the conflict between Gerd and the leaders of the German Lutheran Church reached a crescendo and the Lutheran Church in Germany cancelled its recognition of Gerd as an acceptable Lutheran teacher and withdrew his “certification.”  They ordered that his university title be changed to indicate that he was no longer recognized by the Lutheran Church.  Those preparing for ordination from this time on were to be given no credit for taking his courses.  His students immediately dried up, but the university’s commitment to academic freedom meant that he maintained his tenured position on the faculty.  It was a strange compromise.  He became a professor with no students.  What Gerd had done to bring about this judgment was to suggest in his writing that the vast majority of the words attributed to Jesus in the New Testament were not spoken by him at all, a conclusion that is commonplace in the Jesus Seminar. Gerd, however, had gone further to assert that since these words, attributed to Jesus, were not in fact spoken by him, then the superstructure of ecclesiastical creeds, doctrines and dogmas based on these unauthentic words could not be said to present a defensible body of data originating with Jesus.  While many in the church recognize this problem, there are few who, like Gerd, draw the conclusions that are apparent and appropriate.  If his challenge to ecclesiastical authority had come in the 14th century, Gerd Ludemann would very probably have been burned at the stake.  In the 21st century, he was simply marginalized and dispossessed.  So Gerd dedicated the remaining years of his Gottingen career to study, to public lectures and to writing.  He was, however, the one who was eager to have me invited to this university.

When we arrived, Professor Ludemann was waiting outside the university building to greet our party, which he did warmly and generously.   We talked as we renewed our friendship.  His time at Gottingen was coming to an end as he was preparing to retire at the end of June. In his office, his books had already been removed and packed.  He had recently signed a three-year contract to teach at the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.  There he would join Professor Amy-Jill Levine to form an unusually competent duo of biblical scholars.  Vanderbilt must not think that controversy in biblical studies is a liability.

The format for the Gottingen visit was that I was introduced to deliver the lecture of the day,  Gerhard Klein served as the translator, and afterward Gerd Ludemann and I were to engage in a dialogue/debate over the content of my presentation, moderated by a third person.  When that was complete, a general question period was entered in which the audience would have an opportunity to ask either of us a question.  My topic was the relationship of the thinking of Charles Darwin to the traditional way Christians have told the Christ story.  The contrast was striking.  Darwin had rooted human life in the struggle for survival, which is a mark of all living things.  Christians have, however, interpreted this survival drive and its inevitable manifestation of self-centeredness as the mark of our “sinfulness.”  They understood this mythologically as “The Fall” and this, they have asserted, left human lives victimized by “original sin.”  On the basis of this analysis of the source of human evil, traditional Christianity has postulated Jesus as the divine rescue operation mounted by the external deity.  Against this backdrop Christians have traditionally told the story of the Cross as the place where the price of the fall was paid and where the power of original sin was broken.  This has resulted, I believe, in a theology rooted in victimization with Jesus being seen as the first victim.  Catholic Christians refer to their liturgy as the “sacrifice of the mass” and suggest that the mass serves liturgically to make the death of Jesus ever available to overcome the “sin” that is present in us all.  Protestant Christians, working in this same theology of victimization, have developed the mantra “Jesus died for our sins” that permeates our prayers, our hymns and our scriptures and which is primarily a guilt message of blame.  It is this understanding of human evil that is rendered absurd if Darwin is correct.  Since Darwin asserts that there was no original perfection, there could have been no “original sin.”  If there was no “fall” then to speak of Jesus as the one who rescued us from that fall becomes nonsensical, as does salvation being understood as a restoration to a status we have never possessed.  So in conclusion, I recast the Jesus story as empowering us to become fully human.  “Atonement” theology has been, I believe, the prime distorter of the Jesus story.

When the lecture was completed, Gerd challenged me from the perspective of his belief that the Jesus story is not history at all, but a later mythological development.  I defended the position that the Jesus story in fact is rooted in the history of a particular life in which people believed they had encountered what they understood God to be and that it is not that life, but the way life itself has been interpreted that is the problem.  It is quite obvious to me that much mythology has been wrapped around the memory of Jesus, but the substance and outline of this historical life can still be identified.  That life was seen by his followers as a doorway into God.

The issues between us were clear and the questions from the audience were lively.  It was a good and exciting afternoon.  When it was over, Gerd bade us farewell and both of us looked forward to continuing the dialogue when he will be in the United States over the next three years.

I can respect Gerd Ludemann and be challenged by him without agreeing with him. It would never occur to me to try to silence him, but only to engage him, to listen to him and to learn from him.   If his insights force me to change the way I look at Jesus then so be it.  My interest is not in the way either I or the Christian Church has traditionally understood the Christ experience, my interest is in what the reality of that experience is.  Of course, the mythology of the ages has been wrapped around Jesus, but the question I seek to answer is not whether this mythology is true, but what was there about the life of Jesus that caused people to think it was appropriate to wrap mythological patterns around him.  Of course, the virgin birth, the bodily resuscitation and the cosmic ascension are ancient myths, but I want to know what the experience was that elicited those myths and caused them to be attached to Jesus? Can we, apart from that mythological content, retell the Christ story in the accents of our day?  The basic issue that divides me from Gerd Ludemann is that I believe we can and therefore that story still has integrity for me. Gerd believes that this is no longer possible and that one should not even try.

I too am convinced that the structures of traditional Christianity are dying.  I do not want to rescue dying structures.  I do believe, however, that Christianity is bigger than the structures in which it has been carried for 2000 years and that we still have the ability to sing the Lord’s song in the real world of the 21st century, if we can but separate the Christ experience from the explanations of the past.  I am no more interested than Gerd in trying to defend the concept of God from the erosion of modern thinking, nor am I interested in protecting traditional creeds.  My interest is in discovering the authenticity of the Christ experience and then being able to enter it as a citizen of the 21st century.  I am interested in learning how to relate that experience to out increasingly non-religious world.  That is what my lecture at the university in Gottingen was all about and I believe that goal justified the approach I took.

We drove back to Grebenstein that night weary, but happy.  The next day we were headed to Marburg and another adventure.

~  John Shelby Spong
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