[Oe List ...] 9/17/20, Progressing Spirit: Rev. Dr. John Dorhauer: A White Man Makes the Case for Reparations, Part 2; Spong revisited

Thu Sep 17 02:10:54 PDT 2020

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A White Man Makes the Case for Reparations, Part 2
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|  Essay by Rev. Dr. John Dorhauer
September 17, 2020“Wherefore, as best we can, we ask and require you that you consider what we have said to you, and that you take the time that shall be necessary to understand and deliberate upon it, and that you acknowledge the Church as the Ruler and Superior of the whole world, and the high priest called Pope, and in his name the King and Queen Doña Juana our lords, in his place, as superiors and lords and kings of these islands and this Tierra-firme.

If you do not do this, and maliciously make delay in it, I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country, and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of their Highnesses; we shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as their Highnesses may command.”

These words, written by both the Pontiff in Rome and the King of Spain and enforceable by their conquering armies, would be among the very first words spoken by European settlers to indigenous peoples in the New World.

They come from an official document that would have been carried by a conquering explorer to the Americas. The document was entitled The Requerimiento. It was an amalgamation of both religious and royal power that argued that from the time of Peter, God intended for the Church and its titular head, namely the Pope, to rule over the Earth, all lands and all peoples.

The document begins by stating that the Pope owns the land upon which the document is now being read. It tells of other lands newly conquered, and within them the conversion of inhabitants who were proselytized by Roman priests and who converted to Christianity. It says they willingly ceded control of those lands to the Pope and his designees, the King and Queen of Spain.

Having shared news of other lands and inhabitants acquiescing with immediacy, it demands that the peoples of this new land do the same. The words I quoted above come at the end of this document.

Imagine if you will a native people, having spent millennia in that place without encounters of any kind from European conquerors, one day seeing this new tribe. The complexion is odd. The language unrecognizable. And yet, in a language that sounded like gibberish, they would be told to convert “with immediacy”, cede ownership and control of the land to the rightful owner the Pope, or prepare to be at war with the church. This war would end up with the justifiable enslavement of all – including wives and children.

THAT is how white Europeans entered these shores.

When I write as a white man about calling for reparations, this is the source and origin of the damages for  which we bear responsibility and for which we seek repair. The question I want to ask in this essay is this: how far removed from that source are we. Is it a distant relic of the past from which we are now utterly disconnected? Or is there a lingering thread through time that ties us intimately not only to its worldview but to the hubris and arrogance necessary to believe it is justifiable?

There has never been a time after we whites occupied these shores when both white religious authority and white political power failed to conspire to instantiate white power, white privilege, and white supremacy. Yes, there would be voices of resistance (even white ones) to this ideology from the start – but they would never be sufficient to slow its progress, much less end its power.

This second essay will use but a very few (of countless thousands) examples of how that ideology persists and evolves, taking ever new forms; how that ideology created not merely racism but systemic racism that eventually even white people lost the ability (and desire) to see or mitigate; and how those conditions undermine the argument that whites today do not benefit from nor are they responsible for the sins of the past.

This is a mere sampling of the moral and legal claims made by whites that began with first contact and continue to this day. Damage has been done. We whites today are both responsible for and beneficiaries of that damage; and the act of repairing that damage – of making reparations – falls to us. Why us? Because none before us has taken up the responsibility of repairing the damage. That repair is crucial to the emergence of equity, restoration, and reconciliation.

I can’t provide deep context for the documents or public statements I reference in this short essay. I will simply record them as given with minimal commentary and let them speak for themselves.

As you read this, ask yourself at what point in our history was fair distribution of wealth and power between the races actuated?

We have already seen the language of the Requerimiento – a legal and theological document that gave whites sole right to possess land and enslave anyone refusing to worship Jesus.

Let us move forward now through our history.

Louisiana revised their slave codes in 1852, and the new code included these provisions: “no slave can possess anything in his own right, or dispose in any way of the produce of his industry, without the consent of his master;” “slaves shall always be reputed and considered real estate;” “no slave shall be permitted to buy, sell, negotiate, trade or exchange any kind of goods or effects…under penalty of forfeiting the whole;” “all persons who shall teach, or permit or cause to be taught, any slave in this State to read or write, shall, on conviction,…be imprisoned.”

In 1705 Virginia passed a slave code establishing that any runaway slave could be dismembered.

>From the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court:
“In the opinion of the court, the legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence, show that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants (italics added for emphasis), …were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument.” A little further on: “The legislation of the different colonies furnishes positive and indisputable proof of this fact. It would be tedious, in this opinion, to enumerate the various laws they passed on this subject.”

I only cited two examples of such laws. Judge Taney wrote in his opinion to the court in this landmark case that they were too numerous to cite. Every one of those laws written by then two centuries before and since were sufficient to perpetuate white skin privilege by law and be upheld by the highest court in the land.

>From the Requerimiento to the colonies to the state constitutions to the Supreme Court, now over three hundred years of legal precedence conspired to deprive blacks of voting rights, property ownership, commerce, and education.

We continue with post-civil war rhetoric and legislation. Here we simply need to demonstrate that the Emancipation Proclamation did not change the economic outlook even if some of the laws were rewritten.

In 1901, political leaders from Alabama gathered for a Constitutional Convention of the State of Alabama. The Journal that recorded the proceedings notes the following argument put forth: “…there is no higher duty resting upon us…than that which requires us to embody in the fundamental law  such provisions as will enable us to protect  the sanctity of the ballot in every portion of the state.”

A voting rights act in 1965 attempted to end what had become rampant, overt  and legal disenfranchisement of  black voters.  But since 1965 legal means like gerrymandering, closing polls or having fewer voting booths in heavily  black districts, along with  mass incarceration have rendered that bill  useless.

And then there is this: “They want three and a half billion dollars, for the Post Office. Now they need that money to make the Post Office work so it can take all of these million and millions of ballots. But if they don’t get those two items that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.” This was spoken just days ago by the President of our country – an admission that he will choke the Postal Services of money needed to count and collect ballots cast during a global pandemic.

The continual and methodical subjugation of the black vote is a primary care and concern for white men in power. Black voters scare the hell out of white men in power.  What Donald Trump said in his press conference about dismantling the Post Office is eerily reminiscent of the white Alabama politician saying “…there is  no higher duty…. than to protect  the  sanctity  of  the ballot.” 

Mr. Trump is only doing what white men have conspired to do for and with one another from the founding of this country.

Until 1968, white resistance to black empowerment included creating housing regulations that forbade or prohibited the sale of property to black families. The first known such covenant was written in Minneapolis  in 1910 and read this way: “…the premises shall not at any time be conveyed, mortgaged or leased to any person or persons of Chinese, Japanese, Moorish, Turkish, Negro, Mongolian, of African blood or descent.” From there, one Henry Scott would become the president of the Seven Oaks Corp. in Minneapolis  and would put that same language into thousands of deeds across the city.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 was an attempt to stop this discrimination. Housing discrimination was a means of prohibiting black laborers from accruing wealth over a lifetime commensurate with their sweat, talent, and abilities. It was legally enforced discrimination that had a profound effect on how wealth could be accrued and transferred to future generations.

After the act passed, it was proven to have very little effect. Very few violations were ever investigated and even fewer were prosecuted. In order to get enough votes to pass, the Dirksen amendment was written into the bill that greatly weakened the enforcement power of the federal government. Former HUD Secretary Patricia Harris once said of the Act that HUD was reduced to “asking the discovered lawbreaker  whether he wants to discuss the matter.”  (US Congress, 1978). Those who would successfully prove and prosecute wrongdoing could only  be awarded $1,000 recompense for damages. By 1980, only five plaintiffs received awards  in excess of $3,500.

There is a footnote to this. In July of 2012 the Federal Government reached settlement with Wells Fargo bank, forcing them to pay a penalty of $184.3 million in relief to homeowners  to resolve fair lending claims. It was discovered that from 2004-2009 they practiced wholesale discrimination in lending practices involving black and Hispanic borrowers. Having been denied prime lending rates ONLY BECAUSE OF THEIR RACE (it was proven), when the market collapsed their homes were foreclosed on at rates much higher than their white counterparts. This was not the slave era, dear reader. This was ten years ago.

This has been anything but comprehensive. It is a mere tip of the iceberg in terms of legally defended and morally repulsive tactics used from the founding of this country to the present day to compromise the voting power and earning potential of black Americans by whites in power,  who used that legally enforced discrimination to maintain control over wealth and its distribution.

The damage we are seeking to repair when we talk about white power, white privilege, and white supremacy isn’t just about slavery. Yes, slavery is a part of the legacy of forced disenfranchisement  and legalized wealth disempowerment. But it didn’t begin with slavery and it didn’t end there. America has always let whites be educated differently, given whites unfair access to property, favored white voters, paid whites different salaries, while denying people of color access to education, depriving them of the right to vote, and writing laws that prevented them from their full earning potential and property ownership.

There is not a time in America when the actions of whites in power failed to compromise the earning power and potential of the black race.

Reparations are owed. Damage has been done and repairs need to be made.

If you are white in America today – you owe reparations. You have benefited from the system whether you actively constructed the system or not. In every election cycle, we whites have held fairly or unfairly a majority and ensured that the leaders we elect and the laws they write will fail to level the playing field. That is not an accident.

Reparations is not  a question of if, but of how and when.

That is what I will talk about in my third installment of this series.~ Rev. Dr. John Dorhauer
Read online here

About the Author

Rev. Dr. John C. Dorhauer was granted a Doctoral Degree in White Privilege Studies in 2007 from United Theological Seminary in Dayton, OH. He also has degrees in Theology and Philosophy. He is the author of two published books, Beyond Resistance: the Institutional Church Meets the Postmodern World and Steeplejacking: How the Christian Right Hijacked Mainstream Religion. He is a recipient of Eden Seminary's "Shalom  Award," given by  the student body for a lifetime of committed work for peace and justice. John was ordained as a Christian minister in 1988. He currently  serves as the 9th General Minister  of the United Church of Christ, one of the USA's most progressive faiths, whose vision is "A Just World for All." He is a frequent speaker on  the subject of white privilege, and is especially committed to engaging white audiences to come to deeper understandings of the privilege. He is  particularly interested  in how whites manifest privilege every day and how it impacts people of color, two things whites remain largely either ignorant of or in denial about. He has been devoted to his bride Mimi  for over 36 years, and they have parented three children - a composer/musician, an author/painter, and a poet.  John and Mimi have two grandchildren they dote on constantly.   |

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Question & Answer

Q: By David

Does God have to heal all the people who ask me to pray for them?

A: By Rev. Lauren Van Ham
 Dear David,If God were like us, with an ego, I would say, “God doesn’t have to do anything,” but this has not been my experience of God.  In the world around me, I see God in the Life that is happening in you and in me, and in every living thing.  Our creation is God, generating life and learning and possibility every single moment.  Along the way, we get hurt, mistakes happen, events take place in ways we don’t like.

Prayers for healing are some of the best prayers we can pray.  It is never wrong to pray for a miracle or for a cure, but prayers for healing create space for outcomes we might not be able to see initially.  Healing is a space where any number of things may happen, and all of them are movements toward wholeness.  I pray for the health and wholeness of all beings each time I remember to -- and especially when I am struggling with the enormity of injustice or heart-break or another hardship that feels so, so wrong.

When we pray for the healing of others (and for ourselves), we are asking for God – the source of unfathomable Love – to bring us into wholeness with that love.  I don’t believe these prayers are ever “wasted,” because each one reminds us of our own intention to strive toward this sense of love and wholeness in our own life, and in our walk with others.  I hope you will keep praying healing prayers, when you’re requested to do so.  Life and Love are ancient and wise.  In ways we understand, and in ways we do not, they are always conspiring to bring us into divine wholeness.~ Rev. Lauren Van Ham

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About the Author
Rev. Lauren Van Ham, MA was born and raised beneath the big sky of the Midwest, Lauren holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, Naropa University and The Chaplaincy Institute. Following her ordination in 1999, Lauren served as an interfaith chaplain in both healthcare (adolescent psychiatry and palliative care), and corporate settings (organizational development and employee wellness). Lauren’s passion for spirituality, art and Earth's teachings have supported her specialization in eco-ministry, grief & loss, and sacred activism.  Her essay, "Way of the Eco-Chaplain," appears in the collection, Ways of the Spirit: Voices of Women; and her work with Green Sangha is featured in Renewal, a documentary celebrating the efforts of religious environmental activists from diverse faith traditions across America. Her ideas can be heard on Vennly, an app that shares perspectives from spiritual and community leaders across different backgrounds and traditions. Currently, Lauren tends her private spiritual direction and eco-chaplaincy consulting practice; and serves as Climate Action Coordinator for the United Religions Initiative (URI), and as guest faculty for several schools in the San Francisco Bay Area.  |

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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

The Origins of the New Testament, Part VIII:
The Corinthian Letters

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
December 10, 2009
 Paul was a complicated mixture of many things. He was a missionary who traveled hundreds of miles by foot and by boat to tell his story. He was, as we noted last week when examining the letter to the Galatians, an intense zealot who would fight vigorously to defend his understanding of the gospel. He was a theologian who sought to put his experience of God into rational thought forms so that they could be passed on. Perhaps above all things, however, Paul was a pastor who sought to smooth out disputes, confront evil and ease hurt feelings in the congregations that he founded and served. When we examine his correspondence with the church in Corinth, it is this pastoral side that dominates. Even when he discusses issues like the resurrection, his discussion is pastorally oriented as he seeks to ease in the people of the Corinthian church their anxiety connected with mortality.

The first thing to note about the two Corinthian letters is that they appear to be composites of a more extensive correspondence that perhaps reached a total of four or even five Pauline letters. By a careful analysis of our two remaining epistles to the Corinthians, scholars have come to the conclusion that these “lost letters,” to which Paul actually refers in the epistles that we do have, have been included, at least in part, in what we call II Corinthians. These scholars point to such passages as II Cor.6:1-7:1, II Cor.10-13 and even in the extraneous verses in Cor.11:32-33 that appear to be inserts into the texts that actually break the flow of Paul’s argument. Despite this strange construction, however, scholars find no evidence to suggest that all of II Corinthians is the authentic work of Paul.

We need to remember that preserving letters in the first century was an inexact and costly procedure of hand copying, and that no one had yet assigned the status of “Holy Scripture” to the writings of Paul. Maybe that is why they preserved only what they believed was most important.

When we turn to the content of these two Corinthian epistles themselves, we find Paul, the pastor, dealing with human beings who are acting like human beings. Paul knows what every pastor knows, namely, that congregations are not made up of angels. At the same time congregations learn very quickly that ordination does not bestow perfection on their ordained leader. Pastoral care is the sensitive attempt to bring wholeness out of an exchange between human passion and human insecurity. It is a delicately nuanced balancing act, the job of which is to enhance the humanity of all who are involved. If we need a text to describe the goal of all pastoral activity, it would be the Fourth Gospel’s definition of Jesus’ purpose: “I have come,” John’s Jesus says, “that they might have life and have it abundantly.” That is finally both the mission of the Christian Church and the hoped-for outcome in every pastoral situation. Abundant life, please note, does not always mean happiness or even the easing of pain. Many people seek wholeness in quite destructive ways, with addiction to drugs, alcohol, sex and even success being just a few of them. Sometimes abundant life becomes possible only in confrontation and brokenness. Real pastoral care is not about making it feel good; it is about helping wholeness to be created. Paul understood that and every pastor must learn it sooner or later. Wholeness is seen in the freedom to be, in the ability to escape the survival mentality that inevitably locks us into self-centeredness. Wholeness is found in the maturity of being able to live for another by giving our love away. It will be through the lens of that understanding of pastoral care that I will seek to explore the issues found in the epistles to the Corinthians.

The Corinthian congregation appears to have had more than its share of pastoral needs and even to have exasperated Paul on more than one occasion. Some of the issues to which he refers are party lines and divisions among the people. Some claimed loyalty to Paul, some to Apollos and still others to Peter. Beyond that their rowdy behavior had begun to distort the worship of the people. In that early part of Christian history the Eucharist was begun with a community meal called “The Agape Feast.” The Corinthians, however, had turned this common meal into a gluttonous orgy that left some of the poor hungry. Then they had turned the Eucharistic wine into an occasion of public drunkenness. Paul obviously needed to speak to this behavior.

There was also a dispute in the congregation about the meat served at this “Agape Feast.” It had been bought at a local butcher shop where, in this pagan society, it had been slaughtered in ceremonial offerings to the idols of the people. Could Christians eat meat that had been offered to idols? Some Corinthian followers of Jesus were offended by this idea. Still others had become enamored with Paul’s message of salvation as the ultimate expression of God’s grace and the conviction that this grace, so abundantly and freely given, was not dependent on their personal behavior. This meant that they had now become what the church came to call “anti-nomianism,” that is, some were suggesting that the more they sinned, the more God’s grace abounded. This stance appeared to render any sense of personal ethical responsibility completely meaningless. Still others seemed to have a hierarchy of value associated with certain activities of the synagogue. Prophets who shared their prophetic words with the congregation were deemed to be of less value than those who claimed the gift of “glossolalia” or “speaking in tongues,” that is, the ability to utter words that only God could understand. This was, they seemed to think, the highest gift of all and thus the most to be honored.

If this were not enough for one pastor to deal with, there was also a gender dispute going on. Some Corinthian women seemed to take seriously Paul’s words, in his earlier letter to the Galatians, that “in Christ there is neither male nor female, but all are one.” This new freedom and equality for women obviously challenged the patriarchal value system of that ancient world. Some women, quite clearly, pushed these boundaries well beyond even Paul’s comfort level. No one, not even Paul, escapes his or her cultural prejudices completely. The extent of this boundary pushing becomes obvious when Paul asserts his threatened male authority by saying, “I forbid a woman to have authority over a man!” Since no one forbids what has never happened, these women were overtly claiming authority over men in the life of the church.

While Paul’s prejudiced humanity is in full display in this last conflict, on most of the others he rises to the pastoral challenge. Paul begins by telling them that Christ alone is their foundation and that any division of loyalties among the followers of various leaders was based on the inability to understand that these leaders were simply “servants through which you believed — I planted, Apollos watered, but only God gave the increase.” In regard to the Eucharist, Paul upbraids the members of this congregation for eating and drinking in such a way that some are hungry and some are drunk. He urges them to eat and drink in their own homes and to recognize that the act of breaking bread and drinking wine in the Eucharistic feast is “a participation in the body of Christ” and what his life of love and sacrifice was all about. The Eucharist, he proclaims, is a liturgical way in which they participate in Christ’s wholeness.

Paul takes anti-nomianism on directly, reminding them of their mutual responsibility to one another. He suggests that immorality, at its heart, was to treat another human being as a thing to be used rather than as a person to be loved. He defuses the debate about meat offered to idols by saying that since idols are nothing, meat offered to idols is meat offered to nothing, so there is no prohibition as to its use. He continues, however, by stating that this stance misses the point of this dispute. “All things are lawful, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful but not all things build up.” It was a subtle, but powerful, distinction. The evil in this debate, he continues, is the lack of sensitivity on the part of some to the feelings of others. Candy is not evil, but to offer candy to one battling with obesity is not loving. It does not build up the person or fulfill the goal of Christ.

Finally, Paul gets to the debate on spiritual gifts. There is no hierarchy of gifts, he argues, for all gifts are in the service of the same spirit and are expressions of the same God who inspires us all. The gifts of the people offered in worship are necessary to the building up of all, he suggests. Every gift is for the benefit of the whole community that he calls the body of Christ. Following that analogy of the body, he moves on to suggest that their bickering as to whose gift is the most important makes as much sense as a debate between the eye, the ear, the hand and the foot as to which part of the body has the higher value.

This sets the stage for Paul’s writing of what is surely the most beautiful, the most memorable and the most quoted passage in the entire Pauline corpus. After describing the body in which the various organ and parts work together for the good of the whole, Paul says, “I will show you a more excellent way.” Then he begins his famous ode to love.
“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” He continues by defining love as patient, kind, not boastful or jealous and never ending. He recognized that all human knowledge is partial. No one sees God face to face. We all see “through a glass darkly.” He urges the Corinthians to put away childish things and to grow up. Finally, he concludes “that faith, hope and love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love.” It is Paul at his insightful best.~  John Shelby Spong  |

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