One Book One Diocese Lenten Study

The Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis is reading the same book together for Lent. Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God by Kelly Brown Douglas. We’re gathering in local communities to discuss the book or reading independently.

As part of my own discipline of reading the book and preparing for discussion, I’m summarizing each chapter in fewer than 300 words.

6. Prophetic Testimony: The Time of God

We carry our history with us. But the true difference is how we see the future.

To talk about the time of God, Douglas uses Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech as demonstrating what this means.

King deftly combines the two visions of faith in the stand-your-ground-culture war:

1) America’s faith in itself
2) Black faith in the freedom of God.

These two visions are “warring souls” as the former represents a vision of a justified self-defense. It is the very preservation of privilege and cherished whiteness. And the other is the simple idea that God calls for the oppressed to be free.

King uses the inherited narrative of American exceptionalism as mandating equality.

The idea that a lack of knowledge dooms us to repeat our history is born out, both in the repeated rise of stand-your-ground cultural backlash, but also in the protests from the prophetic black tradition to be included in the American myth. “To be sure, as we have seen, the idea of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” was never meant to extend to white bodies.” (220-1)

King draws us to our moral foundations, to regard our moral memory, moral identity, moral participation, and moral imagination to bring forth the central argument of God’s conviction.

That we know our history, let go of the signifiers of superiority, and participate in God’s work of transforming the world. Perhaps most importantly, we’re called into a moral imagination, which doesn’t get stuck in the unrealized past, but participate in the hope for a yet-to-be-realized future.

The time of God, therefore isn’t a protected present of a justified past, but a hopeful future manifest in our present work.

Reflection

Michael Brown’s body

There is a way that cherished whiteness can’t help itself. Something about it compels it to jump-the-shark of acceptability and justifiable reasonability. It just can’t help it. It has to signal its oppression.

Like “spectacle lynchings,” the need to communicate the protection of whiteness as a mechanism of enforcement reveals the argument is groundless.

The leaving of Michael Brown’s body in the street for hours and the lazy pace of police movement to deal with the crime scene was beyond a caricature. But it is also revealing of the hope Douglas raises throughout the book, and especially in chapter 5: that we confront a culture of death with God’s tools of life.

We preserve the humanity of the victim and call to account those actions with deprive his dignity. And, as I said at the time, we focus on the body.

The Value of Knowing

Several years ago, I was struck by the experience of reading Diana Butler Bass’ A People’s History of Christianity. Over and over again, she would tell the story of people of faith who were killed for what they believed. Each case was a person simply ahead of their time. All throughout history, victims suffering for belief, only to see their faith normalized within the next century.

This sense of tragedy, has not led to mass revelation, however. But it would seem, continued support for the status quo. A misremembered history constantly repeated, not only by the powerful, but the fearfully disempowered. This is both tragic and completely unacceptable.

But accept it, many of us do.

Douglas offers two different streams of thought. These are not streams which run against each other. They aren’t parallel or perpendicular. They are streams which can run together and can run away from each other.

These streams are not enemies, nor are they balanced. They aren’t in and yang or providentially maintained. They are two different streams: one filled with those who impose oppression and the other filled with those longing for equality.

Most important though, is that only one stream pretends to run in isolation. Only one stream acts like it is superior to the other. It is the older brother stream (of the Parable of the Lost Sons) and the stream which sows division by its nature.

Knowing this history and what the powerful do to that history is freeing. It is knowing the very freedom of God. And it is the kind of compelling freedom we’re eager to share.