Becoming Children of Light: Falling in Love with Truth During Dark Times
Friends, I write as the thin veneer masking white racism is being torn off, as our cities burn with the rage and grief of justice endlessly denied. I do not know who will read this essay, but I am directing it to fellow white people who abhor racism even as we are caught up in it. Soon enough other news stories, other crises, will dominate headlines. But we will remain enmeshed in pervasive racist institutions that will demand our attention for a long time. Many progressive churches have denounced racism. But the work of surfacing preconscious images and assumptions will be on-going.
Our unwilling complicity invites reflection on how racism embeds itself in our minds and our social structures. A crucial part of this picture is the ability of racist logic to mask itself. The philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that dark times are made possible in part by assaults on truth that render public atrocity morally invisible. Herself a refugee from Nazi terror, she writes:
All this was real enough, as it took place in public. There was nothing secret or mysterious about it. And still, it was by no means visible to all, nor was it at all easy to perceive it; for until the very moment when catastrophe overtook everything and everybody, it was covered up not by realties but by the highly efficient talk and double-talk of nearly all official leaders … When we think of dark times … we have to take this camouflage … also into account.
Even as racism is displayed with enormous clarity every day, mass deception has been horrifyingly successful in concealing from public discourse the persistence, scope, and barbarism of the American color code.
African Americans are beaten and killed, arrested and imprisoned at a much higher rate than any other demographic in this country. Their health outcomes, including infant and maternal mortality, are worse, regardless of their profession or income. Their schools are inferior and underfunded. Their pre-school children are more likely to be disciplined. College students weighed down by negative stereotypes find it difficult to perform at their intellectual level. These facts are easily available. A ten-second Google search produces pertinent articles and books from the CDC, National Institutes of Health, and innumerable scholarly sources. As we confront this information we might sympathize with Rachel Carson’s awakening to massive ecological degradation: “Some of the thoughts that came were so unattractive to me that I rejected them completely, for the old ideas die hard, especially when they are emotionally as well as intellectually dear to one.” Like Carson, we must locate “an island of difficult, lifesaving truth amid the ocean of civilizational delusion.”
Why is it so easy to believe lies? To acquiesce to systems that destroy countless lives? The demonic is an old symbol for the structural delusions that infect society. Satan is a murderer and liar but also the ruler of the world (e.g., Jn 8:44, 12:3, 2 Cor. 4:4). This ancient mythology is potent because it gives shape to the obfuscating mystery of how easily we—as individuals, people of faith, citizens who want to be good—are seduced by it. The demonic symbolizes the power of patriotic ideals and the supposed nobility of Christian mission to conceal the atrocities built into our nation’s history and the conduct of our churches. Once we normalize evil with plausible-sounding rationalizations, we dissociate it from our ethical categories. We are horrified, for instance, to hear of a teenager being stalked and murdered as he walked along talking to his girlfriend on the phone. But racist assumptions are built into our thinking. In the case of Trayvon Martin’s murder, we reconstruct the narrative. He was likely a criminal. Black teenagers can be frightening. Even a slight teenager facing an armed adult is threatening. Self-defense is a natural response. The plain atrocity of gunning down a high school student armed only with a packet of Skittles becomes invisible, masked behind racially biased newspaper accounts, justice systems, and a thousand media images of dangerous and criminal black people.
This is how the demonic works. It does not scare us with hideous face and horns. It slides into the seemingly natural, pre-conscious assumptions we make. It turns our automatic trust of whiteness and anxiety about blackness into unreflective willingness to accept as sensible an array of laws, anecdotes, and explanations which, upon careful reflection, are obviously racist. It is uncomfortable and personally demanding to see the way racism has infected our minds. So, we accept prefabricated deceptions that translate moral outrage into further evidence of black criminality. Unconscious but potent consent to this lie fuels a quick descent into a twisted acceptance of violence: if by virtue of being Black someone is a criminal, however trivial the crime, it is natural to stop them, however egregious the force. Events that would be inconceivable if the victim were white become commonplace when the victim is Black.
Racism infects religion, as it does the rest of society. During the recent protests against racism, Donald Trump called on the military to clear a path through peaceful protestors with rubber bullets and tear gas so he could process across a street for a photo-op holding aloft a Bible in front of St. John’s Church. It was an almost perfect ritualizing of the demonic. Trump’s symbolic gesture reaffirmed America’s long-held allegiance to the sacred worth of domination. Church and scripture perfume authoritarian violence. The bishop of Washington D.C. condemned this act, and for many it was deeply disturbing. But many white evangelicals applauded it, celebrating Trump as “wearing the armor of God.” Their praise ratifies the demonic appropriation of religion, mirroring the way religion and racist violence have been braided together in an unholy love knot for centuries.
As noted womanist theologian Karen Baker Fletcher observes, “In the presence of extreme violence, faith is sorely tested. When faith survives and thrives to the point of being a source of healing for others, it manifests as a form of courage … But how does one attain this courage in a world of violated relationships? If the courage to confront the complexities of existence in its beauty and its ugliness is found in the dance, pulse, touch, heart, and breath of God, then who is God?” The demonic entices us into thinking God lives in white churches, far from the tangle of injustice, poverty, and “the new Jim Crow.” But the gospel calls us to adore the God who created the world, who is present in its beauty and tragedy, and who cherishes everyone in it. “Metanoia!” Christ calls out to us: wake up, open your eyes—the Kingdom of God is already among you (Matt. 4:17, Mk 1:14). The gospel invites us to renounce demonic lies and to experience reality in a completely different way. This is not forgiveness or remorse but becoming aware that heaven is already present whenever we perceive Christ dwelling in one another (Matt. 25). If the demonic pushes our Black siblings out of the circle of this command, the gospel demands that we awaken to the sacred worth of those whose humanity and suffering we have been blind to. The joy of the gospel will be born in us when we pierce the veil of consoling fictions and recognize the beauty of those who stand before us, even when these black and brown faces are “despised and rejected by men … full of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isa. 53:3).
We are vulnerable to the demonic when emotionally satisfying lies ingratiate themselves into our sacred precincts. But as Christians we have resources for resisting white supremacist “powers and principalities.” When we renounce our delusions, we rejoin our Beloved in the long work of unsentimental, urgently concrete love. We seek mercy not only at the end of times but commit ourselves to lives of radical compassion—for all beings and for the earth itself—in the midst of time. Maya Angelou wrote of the caged bird who sang for a freedom it had never seen and yet longed for. She is speaking of Black America’s unfathomable courage to envision freedom in the midst of spiritual and literal incarceration. But cannot those of us who are imprisoned by self-deception and mutilated by the distortions of privilege also long for freedom? Freedom to join the lament for the relentless assaults on black bodies—and trans bodies, female bodies, immigrant bodies, poor bodies? Freedom to discover the innumerable contributions to science, medicine, art, literature, education, religion, and political reform that we benefit from? Freedom to re-evaluate the past and join the labor for a different future?
The world is structured by the demonic: by deception and lies, domination and violence. As Christians, we must remain alert for the ways in which the demonic infiltrates our churches and our faith. I long for racial reconciliation and have experienced communities where this seems possible. But it is early to demand reconciliation: “They have treated the wound of my people carelessly saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace” (Jer. 6:14). Rather, we can allow ourselves to be taught, not only by a history we have denied and repressed, but by the spiritual wisdom that our Black siblings have gained through their intimate walk with Jesus during their long crucifixion. Let us listen to Black leaders. Let us learn from the rage of protesters. Let us apprentice ourselves to great civil rights mothers such as Rosemarie Freeney Harding who invokes her maternal ancestors to, “Teach about how to be family. How to live like family. How to live with some strength and care in your hands. How to live with some joy in your mouth. How to put your hands gentle on where the wound is and draw out the grief. How to urge some kind of mercy into the shock-stained earth so that good will grow.”
I pray that we are at a turning point. But it will be so only if we outwit the demonic in our churches, politics, newspapers, schools, minds, and hearts. Let us be children of light—not because we walk in the light—but because we desire the light of truth and justice and are willing to dedicate ourselves to this desire.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crowe: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York, NY: New Press, 2010.
Arendt, Hannah. Men in Dark Times. New York: A Harvest Book, 1968.
Baker-Fletcher, Karen. Dancing with God: The Trinity from a Womanist Perspective. Nashville, TN: Chalice Press, 2006.
Brown Douglas, Cheryl. Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1915.
Harding, Rosemarie Freeney and Rachel Harding. Remnants: A Memoir of Spirit, Activism, and Mothering. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.
Fletcher Hill, Jeannine. The Sin of White Supremacy: Christianity, Race, and Religious Diversity in America. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 2017.
Jennings, Willie James. Christian Imagination and the Origins of Race. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.
McClintock-Fulkerson, Mary and Marcia W. Mount Shoop, A Body Broken, a Body Betrayed: Race, Memory, and Eucharist in White Dominant Churches. Eugene, OR: Cascade Press, 2015.
Popova, Maria. Figurings. New York: Vintage Press, 2020.
Steele, Claude M. Whistling Vivaldi. New York: Norton Press, 2010.
Teague, Matthew. “He Wears the Armor of God: Evangelicals hail Trump’s photo op,” The Guardian June 3, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/03/donald-trump-church-photo-op-evangelicals
This article was originally published in the Fall 2020 edition of Insights: The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary