Terror, Trauma, and Better Questions
Last week Ed Stetzer, director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, was interviewed by NPR about the white evangelical presence at the U.S. Capitol insurrection. It's obvious that, for Stetzer, this is a catastrophic moment which requires serious reflection and blunt questions. He asks, "How did we get here? How were we so easily fooled by conspiracy theories?" Later in the interview he wonders, "What happened? Why were so many people drawn to somebody who was obviously so not connected to what evangelicals believe by his life or his practices or more."
It's right that white Christians would ask questions about ourselves after seeing so many of us represented amidst symbols of violence, conspiracy, and racial supremacy. I wonder, though about the timing and direction of our reflection.
In early 2017 the Council of Bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church wrote an open letter warning of the un-Christian and destructive aims of the Trump administration. Here are the first two sentences. Note the explicit call to action.
The Council of Bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church had hoped that the Trump Administration would alter the views and policies espoused during the presidential campaign, but is disappointed and troubled by the decisions and actions taken during the early days of this administration, and vow to do all that we can to see that these decisions and actions do not last. We ask that every member of this denomination, and people who are committed to justice and righteousness, equality and truth, will join with us to thwart what are clearly demonic acts.
It took far less than a deadly insurrection to compel the bishops of the AME church to warn of the coming danger. It's probably inevitable and necessary that white Christians are asking the sorts of questions suggested by Stetzer right now. But shouldn't we have been doing this a long time ago?
Was an attack on our nation's symbols of power and democracy really necessary to force this introspection? Why was the attack on the Central Park Exonerated not enough? The slander of immigrants from Mexico and Central America? Separating children from their parents?
The collective disinterest in these previous dehumanizing offenses hints at my other question about this reckoning. For many of the white Christians who were appalled by the scenes from Washington D.C. last week, the foremost question seems to be, How? How did we get here? This is the framing question for Kristin Kobes Du Mez's excellent new book, Jesus and John Wayne. Not surprisingly, the book begins and ends with our outgoing president and the rest is a compelling answer to that How? question.
But why is this the first question? Let's review again that ugly scene last week. Whatever their specific aims, the mob successfully broadcast their racial/religious messages and symbols of supremacy. There's nothing new about this. Listen to what James Cone writes in The Cross and the Lynching Tree. "The claim that whites had the right to control the black population through lynching and other extralegal forms of mob violence was grounded in the religious belief that America was a white nation called by God to bear witness to the superiority of 'white over black.'"
The white supremacist insurrectionists should be prosecuted. But any eventual convictions will do little to blunt the terror that was already brazenly unleashed. Every attempt to downplay the terror - as many Republican representatives have done - only exacerbates it.
Terror aims beyond its specific victims. It is the members of the community represented by the victims who are the real targets. Cone writes, "Whites often lynched blacks simply to remind the black community of their powerlessness." Terror is meant to traumatize communities.
I hear a lot of non-Black people who are outraged at the desecration visited upon the country by that white mob. Our sense of dignity or respect or civility or patriotism or justice or whatever has been offended. This is when we start asking our preferred question, How?
But many of us don't see the terror and the trauma. Why not? Cone writes, "Whites acted in a superior manner for so long that it was difficult for them to even recognize their cultural and spiritual arrogance, blatant as it was to African Americans." Supremacy inoculates us against the truest experience of the insurrection. We see but don't rightly interpret what has been wrought. We don't feel the shattering impact on flesh and blood. And so, rather than beginning with the intended trauma of that terrorizing mob, we make ourselves the focus. Again. Rather than opening ourselves vulnerably to the experience of suffering, we retreat to our analyzing and theorizing. Again.
How did we get here? We have to ask this question. But when we make this our first question - and often our only question - we are revealing just how incapable we are of answering it truthfully.
(Photo: Brett Davis on flickr.)
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