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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.
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
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.
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