Introducing the All Lives Matter™ Bible

Christians believe that God loves everyone. And we believe that in some mysterious way we all bear his image, giving each human being an irreducible dignity and worth. We believe human beings have a basic unity in that we are all loved by God, and all in need of him. These beliefs describe only the starting point for Christian social ethics, not their application. Indeed, precisely because we believe human beings are undifferentiated in dignity and worth, we take special offense and are moved to action when we see that worth trampled on in specific times and places. Our general concern for all is the basic context in which our special concern for oppressed groups is expressed.

Ordinary Bible translations are full of examples of God's particular concern for groups that are oppressed, marginalized, and lacking in social power. God loves us all, but his calling card is his work on behalf of the most vulnerable. As a result, the Bible often makes distinctions between groups of people occupying different social positions, with God casting himself as the defender of those with less power. Here in the United States, some Christians are uncomfortable with these passages and are reluctant to apply them to our social context.

So I'm thinking, what would the Bible look like without its consistent message of God's special concern for the oppressed and judgment for oppressors? What would the scriptures look like if we read them in the same way many Christians are "reading" their own society?

Let the satire begin.

I'm proud to introduce an all-new Bible translation that will assure modern American readers that God loves everyone and never takes sides. It's called, The All Lives Matter™ Bible. In its pages, old scriptures will burst forth with new life to comfort a new generation of privileged Christians.

A Satisfied Reader of the All Lives Matter™ Bible

Hear the words of the Apostle James as he asks us, "Has not God chosen [some random people] to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him? Later on, James appears to warn the reader about something, but the All Lives Matter™ text resolves the passage with pleasing ambiguity: "Now listen, [everyone], weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you." 

Be inspired by the words of the Apostle Paul as he set out on his missionary journey: "All they asked was that we should continue to remember [everyone equally], the very thing I had been eager to do all along." Paul's perspective on the Christian life comes through clearer than ever as we read about how he had no social privilege to give up and so described following Christ as ["a piece of cake."]

Of course, among the highlights of any Bible are the profound parables of Jesus. And here the All Lives Matter™ Bible does not disappoint. Be encouraged as you read the Parable of the Good [Man of No Particular Ethnicity]. And be shocked all over again as you read about Jesus's subversive behavior, as when he talked to the [Genderless Person of No Particular Ethnicity] at the well.

And who can forget Jesus's challenging words when he declared, "[I'm sure there are some people out there, from no group in particular, who are] hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean."

In this Bible you will read about how Jesus offered table fellowship to everyone equally, and no one in particular was scandalized by it. What the translation lacks in theological specificity it more than makes up for in comforting spiritual bromides. Anyone tempted to apply their faith to specific social problems will be reassured that vague expressions of goodwill are enough.

The All Lives Matter™ Bible also offers readers strikingly original translations of beloved Old Testament passages.

Timeless Hebrew proverbs come alive for the modern American reader, vaguely reminding us to be nice to each other: "Whoever oppresses [anyone] shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to [anyone] honors God." And the Psalms of David give privileged readers the affirmation they need that God is on their team no matter what! "A father to [everyone], a defender of [everyone], is God in his holy dwelling."

Even the Torah appears here as you've never seen it before. Feel the grandeur of God's commands to the people of Israel: "Do not oppress [anybody]; you yourselves know how it feels to be [nobody in particular], because you were [something or other] in Egypt."

Because the Hebrew prophetic tradition is considered especially offensive to many American Christians, the translators have made the difficult choice to excise a few chapters, such as Isaiah 10 and Isaiah 58. 

In the 2,000 year history of the Christian Church, we've never had a Bible like this before. But with so many American Christians feeling uncomfortable, and with so much loose talk that could encourage introspection and social engagement, it's time Christians had a place to turn where they can be assured, All Lives Matter. 

Revisiting the Gospel and White Evangelicalism

I'd like to revisit my last post. In particular, I received some helpful pushback from a current professor at Moody Bible Institute for what he saw as my unfairness toward Dwight L. Moody. He had some good points to make. And, it must be said, he knows much more about Moody than I do. He noted that Moody associated himself with a variety of progressive causes, founded an integrated school in Massachusetts, privately expressed displeasure with segregation, and was supported by some Black southerners. Including all of this in my last post, I think, would have strengthened the argument I was trying to make.

If people read what I wrote about Moody and Edwards and Whitefield and concluded, "Wow, I didn't realize these guys were so monstrous; let's disown them," my post had the opposite of its intended effect. Rather, for White evangelical readers in particular, there is an urgent need to embrace the totality of our history and inheritance. The point is not that Moody was horrible. The takeaway ought to be that I have little reason to assume I'm any less blind than he was. It's probably just blindness about different things.

When we pay attention to what Black Christians were saying in Moody's time and others, we can begin to see that our inheritance is a distinct brand of White Christianity, with its own foibles, idioms, and blind spots. This is less a shocking indictment than an obvious reality of any human community of faith. We are culturally located. We are not the normative group by which other Christians can be measured. There is no fault in having never heard the sordid details I shared in my last post. But we can know the outlines of our own tradition. We can become students of our own community, knowing some of its errors and biases, including, especially, its idolization of Whiteness and American nationalism.

Some Christians seem to be concerned that we might focus on the negative side of past heroes to the exclusion of the good they did. I understand this concern. But the much greater danger is that in ignoring their sins, we will repeat them. When we build up people of the past to mythical status, we encourage a culture of arrogance and unwarranted self-satisfaction. Scripture doesn't do this. The so-called heroes of the faith in the biblical narrative are usually presented as scoundrels and cowards, the better to emphasize the grace of God.

Ida B. Wells, 1862-1931

Let's return to Moody. How are we to interpret his disapproval of segregation? Does that make his segregated meetings better? Or, indeed, does it make them worse? That Moody did what he did in service of the Gospel, as he understood it, is precisely the point. His belief that individual conversion would ultimately undermine segregation was not just naive; it was a view his privileged position made easy, and a luxury that many Black Christians facing questions of life and death felt they couldn't afford. Moody's understanding of the gospel was narrow, culturally specific, and White. In refusing to speak and act publicly against the anti-Christian society of the American South and the greatest social evil of his time, Moody compromised the Gospel.

Consider the contrasting fortunes of Moody and Ida B. Wells. Moody toured the South to widespread acclaim, preaching to many thousands of White southerners. Just a few years later, Wells had to flee the South for her life because she had spoken out against lynching. Moody's public silence won him praise, but what did it cost him? What was the cost to the integrity of the Gospel and the church? What are we to make of a message that was more readily accepted by the oppressors than by the oppressed? How can such a message be anything other than a perversion of the teachings of Christ?

While Moody's Gospel allowed White southerners to believe they could love Christ while remaining indifferent to their brother, Wells did the much harder work of clinging to faith while grappling with the world as it actually was. "The heart almost loses faith in Christianity," she wrote, "when one thinks of...the countless massacres of defenseless Negroes...O God, when will these massacres stop?"

Was this a cry of despair? Perhaps, yes. It was also a cry of faith in which the key word was "almost." We would do well to come closer to Ida B. Wells, to meditate on evil committed in the name of Christ, to question and struggle to the point of "almost." If this means lost certainty and self-assurance, it may also lead to unexpected compensations. Not least, the discovery that "God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble."

Recovering the Gospel from White Evangelicalism

I received my undergraduate degree from Moody Bible Institute. A small evangelical college in Chicago, MBI was founded by the evangelist Dwight L. Moody in the late nineteenth century and became a major player in the fundamentalist movement of the early twentieth century. Though the college no longer enjoys the outsize influence of its earlier years, it remains a well-regarded institution in evangelical Christian circles.

As a kid, I learned about the career of the great Dwight L. Moody, perhaps the most famous evangelist of the late nineteenth century. I suppose any self-respecting evangelical has at least heard of Moody. While at MBI, I learned more about the school's founder. He traveled around the country and across the Atlantic preaching to huge crowds. His commitment to the Gospel and passion for sharing his faith were legendary.

Dwight L. Moody, 1837-1899

But what I didn't learn about Moody is crucial to understanding White evangelicalism in our own time. I didn't learn that as Moody preached across the South in the 1880s there were Black churches boycotting his crusades. Moody held segregated meetings, emphasized reconciliation among Whites after the civil war, and told folksy stories associating African Americans with dirt and poverty to illustrate his sermons. He emphasized his respect for White southern ideals and did not discuss Black aspirations for freedom.

Black clergy protest segregated revival, Galveston, 1886.

One member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church wrote of Moody, "His conduct toward the Negroes during his southern tour has been shameless, and I would not have him preach in a bathroom, let alone a church." As southern Whites lynched African Americans and kept their body parts as souvenirs, Moody ventured South preaching that they could have their Christ and White supremacy too. The  anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells said Moody had "encouraged the drawing of the color line in the churches," the very last place it ought to exist. Frederick Douglass agreed. "Of all the forms of negro hate in this world," he declared in disgust, "save me from that one which clothes itself with the name of loving Jesus."

Moody prioritized national unity and racial hierarchy over Christian doctrine, perverting the good news he claimed to preach. Moody could not have been unaware of basic Christian teaching found in the Bible he loved. Christ had declared in no uncertain terms that he would enact eternal judgment on the basis of how his followers treated the most vulnerable and despised people in their society (Matthew 25). And his disciple John had bluntly warned that people who claimed to love God while hating human beings were liars (1 John 4). But Moody refused to apply the Gospel to his own country.

At the very end of his life, after his influence had waned, Moody finally stopped holding segregated revival meetings. But by then the damage had been done. And Moody had been overtaken in popularity by other preachers who were more overt in their commitment to White supremacy.[1]

We can trace a similar theme both forward and backward in time from Moody's position in the late nineteenth century. White evangelicals revere the profound theological reflections of the eighteenth-century minister and theologian Jonathan Edwards. We know much less about the people he enslaved.[2] White evangelicals have drawn inspiration from the astonishing zeal and oratory of the eighteenth-century evangelist George Whitefield. We know little about his lobbying efforts to institute slavery in the colony of Georgia.[3]

Moving forward in time, White evangelicals laud the most famous evangelist of the twentieth century, Billy Graham. If we know anything about his stance on racism, it is likely a triumphant narrative about how he desegregated his crusades (leaving aside the question of why they were segregated to begin with). Despite desegregating his crusades, Graham did not aid the civil rights movement. Worried that the movement threatened national unity and provided an opening for communism, Graham called for a more moderate course. When Martin Luther King wrote to Graham seeking his help in the battle against Jim Crow, Graham did not even respond. The task of brushing King's plea aside was left to one of Graham's lieutenants.[4]

White evangelicals do not generally know these stories. In this forgetting there is more than institutional protection and group bias at work. In the dominant White evangelical imagination, all these stories, if they are recalled at all, do not touch upon the essence of these men or their ministries. As long as these giants of the faith preached repentance and salvation through Christ alone, they can be heroes. This unchristian narrowing of theological vision allows the bonds of Whiteness and nationalism to go unexamined in many evangelical circles.

While White evangelicals venerate Moody and Whitefield and others, they erase from the story Christians who clung more faithfully to the Gospel. During these men's lifetimes fellow Christians were rebuking them for perverting the good news! These Christians believed, alike with Moody, that human beings are sinners in need of God's grace through Jesus Christ. But they also insisted on applying scripture to American society. We don't know the stories of those Christians or respect their theological insights because they were Black.

During my years at Moody, I'm not aware of having been assigned to read any theologian of color. Though my theological training was distinctly White in its cultural orientation and value system, and the campus culture strongly nationalistic, I was taught that what I was learning was simply biblical Christianity. This is perhaps the central conceit of my evangelical heritage: that a faith so bound up in modern categories of race and nationalism is somehow an unmediated expression of "true" Christianity rooted in the early church of 2,000 years ago.

This is the context in which we ought to read polls showing strong White evangelical support for Donald Trump. A new CBS poll has Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump 43% to 37% among all registered voters, while Trump leads among White evangelicals 62% to 17%.

Trump is running the most aggressively anti-Christian campaign of our lifetimes, with execrable displays of racism, contempt for women, and disregard for refugees. He shows no concern for the poor. He directs his venom against the very groups God, according to the Christian scriptures, chooses to identify with. And when it comes to protecting the lives of unborn children, Trump seems even less sincere than the usual degree of insincerity from GOP politicians.

Many White evangelicals are prepared to vote for Trump because they're heirs to a cultural and theological tradition that binds race and nation to faith. Trump may not offer a clean-cut portrait of Christian character, but he is surprisingly forthright in his White nationalism. It is a mistake to assume that Trump's irreligious persona doesn't carry a religious message. To make America great again, to restore America's racial hierarchy--these are religious goals of an idolatrous people.

Many White evangelicals are still under the impression that America is a new chosen nation, like the Israelites of old. They still don't know that the biblical narrative of the Exodus offers America a closer parallel: the blasphemous enslavers, the Egyptians. Many White evangelicals still haven't discovered that scripture is filled with God's constant claims that he identifies with those society despises. They still haven't realized that God's compassion for the oppressed and wrath for the oppressor is not a message of comfort to White, Christian America, but of judgment.

I know many White evangelicals who are too busy experiencing the grace of God in their daily lives to be enthralled by White nationalism. They are building health clinics, adopting children, running summer camps for poor children, raising scholarship funds to send students of color to college, working against gun violence, and living in poor communities as neighbors rather than gentrifiers. I know well all the good evangelicalism can do.

But we've seen, as well, the evil it can do when fused with political power and drained of the good news Jesus declared. In this extraordinary political season, I feel it is important to lay down a marker. The political "Christian right" is likely to follow Trump into the abyss. But many millions of Christians refuse to go there, and we insist that this so-called Christian political mobilization does not speak for us.

We claim that White nationalist Christianity is a perversion of the Gospel, and we invite everyone to receive the message of our savior, who came preaching liberation rather than hatred:

 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
    and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
    to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

_____________________
[1] My account of Moody relies on Edward J. Blum's excellent book, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press). See especially chapter 4. 

[2] See for example Richard A. Bailey, Race and Redemption in Puritan New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

[3] Jessica M. Parr, Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015). 

[4] Curtis J. Evans, "White Evangelical Responses to the Civil Rights Movement," The Harvard Theological Review 102 (2009): 245-273.

Can Americans Dare to be Honest about Trump?

In the spring of 1900, the populist demagogue Ben Tillman of South Carolina took to the floor of the United States Senate to glory in his state's recent violent return to White supremacist rule. Along the way, he prodded his northern colleagues for their hypocrisy. He claimed that they, alike with White southerners, would do whatever was necessary to maintain White supremacy:

We took the government away. We stuffed the ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it. The Senator from Wisconsin would have done the same thing. I see it in his eye right now. He would have done it...The brotherhood of man exists no longer, because you shoot negroes [sic] in Illinois, when they come in competition with your labor, as we shoot them in South Carolina when they come in competition with us in the matter of elections. You do not love them any better than we do."

As the United States rang in the twentieth century waging a brutal war of conquest against Filipino freedom fighters, a sitting U.S. senator could stand in the center of national power and boast of the murders that secured his political power.

Nearly half a century later, much had changed. It was 1947, and the Senate was refusing to seat one of its recently reelected members. Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, a racist populist beloved by many Whites in his home state, was accused of obliquely urging his supporters to employ violence to ensure Blacks did not vote in the election. While the Senate dithered, Bilbo went home to Mississippi to die of cancer later that year.

The racist violence that Tillman could boast of with impunity in the halls of national power at the beginning of the century had become, by mid-century, grounds to refuse a Senator his seat. Bilbo was disciplined for whispering in Mississippi what Tillman had shouted in Washington. In the aftermath of World War Two and the Holocaust, explicit racism was fast going out of style.

George Wallace: The face of the so-called "white backlash"

By the height of the civil rights movement, southern senators were much more likely to resist civil rights legislation with defenses of a colorblind constitution than with claims of Black inferiority. They hastened to say that they desired opportunity for all, deplored violence, and merely wanted to uphold the American tradition of limited government. Even George Wallace, the man who is remembered as the embodiment of "white backlash" in the mid-to-late 1960s, often used rhetoric that was more temperate than we might assume. When he ventured north in 1964 and shocked the political establishment with his appeal to Democratic primary voters, he did so with tried and true conservative rhetoric. He warned, for example, of the "unnatural and unhealthy accumulation of power in the hands of an all-powerful central bureaucracy." Wallace certainly appealed to White racism, but he did so in terms that are familiar to us today.

Why does all this matter now?

There was a dramatic amount of racial change during the twentieth century, as the shifting rhetoric from Tillman to Bilbo to Wallace indicates. Much of this change was for the good, and the fortunes of people of color in the United States today are vastly different than a century ago.

The problem is that a certain narrative about that change has become foundational to the story we tell ourselves about the nation. To mess with that narrative is to pick a fight with American exceptionalism. The narrative, in brief, is this: a church-based civil rights movement awakened America's moral conscience and the nation rose to fulfill its highest ideals. Racism as a potent political force was defeated, and Martin Luther King's dream is in reach if we focus on our common identity as Americans rather than emphasizing color. We now live in a society of broadly shared opportunity and racism is repudiated by the vast majority of Americans.

What would happen if some sort of new political development occurred to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that this narrative is fundamentally flawed? What if something happened to demonstrate that racism still has enormous popular appeal? What if new developments strongly suggested that racism is politically potent? Would Americans reexamine the exculpatory story we've been telling ourselves for decades? Or would we choose the path of self-imposed confusion and denial? For many years I've guessed the latter path would be more likely. Now I know.

With the emergence of Donald Trump as a political figure far more powerful than George Wallace ever was, we are witnessing a degree of explicit racism at the very center of national power that we have not seen in many decades. Trump's racist attacks this week against the judge in the Trump University case are just the latest in his long line of racist activity stretching back to the 1970s. To find an adequate precedent for Trump's racist appeals, we arguably need to go back prior to the civil rights era.

What's remarkable about this is that whole swaths of the nation's institutions cannot even describe it. They are compelled to resort to euphemism and obfuscation. Politicians and pundits avoid using hard-edged words like racism not because they are inadequate descriptors of the matter at hand, but because, a priori, one simply doesn't describe contemporary America in this vein. To admit that Trump is running a racist campaign is to admit that America is not what we thought it was. It is to admit that progress has not been as easy, facile, or comprehensive as our national myths tell us.

The reaction of America's media and political institutions to Trump shows just how powerful are narratives of racial progress. We've come to believe that a vast gulf separates contemporary White politics from the segregationist politics of the 1960s. Never-mind that the rhetoric and policy goals of these two movements separated by half a century are often almost indistinguishable. We simply declare this separation to be so rather than enacting it through the hard work of moral reflection and policy change. To engage in serious thought about the meaning of Trump's rise to power would call into question not only these cherished racial progress narratives but the very meaning of the nation, because that progress has been so woven into our sense of what America means in the twenty-first century.

Can Americans bring ourselves to be honest about Donald Trump? Can we recognize in his emergence another chapter in a long tradition of diseased White politics? This is the America we're living in. Trump is a disgrace, but he's our disgrace.

What Trump's Rise Means for the Future of the Country

Several months ago, there was a lot of discussion about whether Trump's campaign was edging toward fascism. Trump's incitement of the crowd to violence at some of his rallies and his ethnocentric nationalism contributed to the sense that he represented something new and dangerous in American politics.

But is it really fascism?

Throwing the word around so easily is a reflection of how unfamiliar we are with the horror of organized political violence and ethnic nationalism. Read a book about Europe between the world wars. Or better, reflect on our own history.

The practice of defining Americanness as Whiteness runs deep in American law and culture. And Whites often resorted to political violence to sustain this arrangement. During the Reconstruction era, whole states succumbed to paramilitary forces seeking the restoration of White rule. Call this fascism or something else; it was not a free country as you and I would ordinarily define it. During World War Two, African Americans launched a "Double V Campaign," seeking victory over what they saw as fascism at home and abroad. The civil rights movement achieved remarkable success in discrediting political violence and opening the way to multi-racial democracy. Unfortunately, there's now very little national memory of how White terrorism functioned politically in American history. So our unfamiliarity with fascist-like political movements is an indication both of how much has changed and of how much we have forgotten.

The NAACP compared the Jim Crow South to America's fascist enemies during World War Two

Remembering our history compels us to move from the theoretical, "It could happen here," to the quite concrete, "It has happened here and could happen again."

To be clear, Trump is not, at this stage, leading a fascist movement. Nor, in my judgment, is he ever likely to. But what is genuinely terrifying about Trump's emergence is that it shows the safeguards we thought our political system had built up are not there at all. Trump is so far beyond the pale, so manifestly unfit to exercise power, that the level of support he garners can be used to measure the health of our political system. The patient is more sick than we realized.

It's not that Trump is a fascist; it's that if people can support Trump they can support anybody. We must bear in mind that all this is happening at a moment of relative peace and prosperity. The economy is growing, unemployment is low, and Americans benefit from governance that is more efficient, responsive, and effective than in most of the world. Yet we're seeing the rise of a dangerous nihilism, a pervasive sense that we need an "outsider" to come in to Washington to blow things up. If Trump is empowered now, how much worse will it be in a moment of genuine economic crisis?

Perhaps the key question is whether Trump will act as a vaccine for our political system, inoculating it against future demagogues, or as an accelerant, paving the way for a strongman ten or twenty years down the road to seize power. Much depends on whether or not Trump wins the election. The Republican Party's cowardly falling in line has made a close election likely, and a Trump win a possibility.

My guess is that Trump will lose and that the worst possibilities inherent in his rise to power will be avoided. But the damage is nonetheless likely to be extensive and long-lasting. Trump will be both symptom and cause of a long-term degradation of our political institutions and civic fabric. In November, tens of millions of people will vote for him, a man who makes whole groups of Americans fear for their physical safety. In November, tens of millions of people will say to their fellow Americans, "we don't want you here."

Americans are not natural lovers of liberty in a way that other people aren't. We don't magically correct our course toward our constitutional foundations. We simply have a set of institutions that have worked well and have proven remarkably durable. Donald Trump is an obvious threat to those institutions. And millions of people don't seem to care, because at least he'll "shake up the system."

This is a dangerous state of mind. We must discard the assumption--at once complacent and utopian--that radical change will necessarily be for the better. Steering a course between the horrors of fascism and communism is not an inevitable condition of American life but a hard-won achievement that must be constantly maintained. Trump threatens that achievement. In staking out this ground, I find myself a truer conservative than many of the self-styled "conservatives" of the Republican Party.

Polling shows that White Americans have become deeply pessimistic about the future of the country. Whiteness does not deliver the wages it used to. The opening up of more opportunity for all is perceived by many Whites as an unfair reduction of their own position. Their resulting pessimism threatens to harden into an extremism that could power a figure worse than Trump to the presidency in the future. We must not accept the lazy belief that White pessimism is merely a function of economic hardship. Wage stagnation is real enough, but the most oppressed and economically desperate Americans have rejected Trump decisively. Most of them aren't feeling the Bern either. Instead, they're voting for the ultimate conventional politician: Hillary Clinton.

They're not doing so because they're naive. They know better than many of us how oppressive the United States can be. But they also have cultural and institutional memory of how much worse it was, and how hard-fought and precarious are their gains. In this dangerous moment, preservation is as important as transformation.

In this year when so many Americans seem to want radical change and a shattering of the "establishment," we would do well to remember that if we get our wish, picking up the pieces may not be as easy as we think. Conventional politics, with its moral compromises and frustrating incrementalism, can be infuriating. But it might be just what we need right now.