Dwight A. Moody
“Hitching the evangelical wagon to Donald Trump has meant unhitching it from the life and teachings of Jesus.” So wrote Peter Wehner in The Atlantic this week. What he is recognizing and describing now began many years ago when, instead of repenting of our sins, we found new and ugly ways to embrace white supremacy, denigrate people of color, and forestall the revival our country sorely needs.
We should have learned our lesson during the Civil War.
We lost that war, meaning we white Christians in the South, stretching from Virginia to Texas. For 250 years we had justified the purchase, transport, and enslavement of people from Africa, frequently quoting the Bible.
Which created this scene time and time again: white masters whipping their chained slaves down dusty roads from the tobacco farms of Virginia to the emerging cotton plantations of Mississippi. They are called coffles, as described in the opening paragraphs of Edward E. Baptist’s 2014 book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Along the way, they must have walked past many a white church, gathered on Sunday, and singing “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.”
Instead of repenting, and confessing our sins, changing our ways, and trusting God to “hear from heaven and forgive our sins and heal our land” (according to the oft-quoted promise of 2 Chronicles 7:14), we begrudgingly accepted a truncated citizenship for slaves but surrounded it with a thousand roadblocks to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This was segregation, and these were the Jim Crow laws, and that was the doctrine of separate but equal.
Seven decades later, we had another opportunity to repent, confess, and change. Baptist preacher of the South Martin Luther King, Jr. gave voice to the great need of the day, when he quoted Amos the prophet: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” What he wanted was the right to vote, and work, and live like all of us white folk, and drink from the same fountain and play on the same team and work in the same office.
But, again, we refused to change our ways.
We kept talking about repentance, especially in camp meetings and weekend retreats and late summer revivals. Preachers walked the aisles and pleaded with us white people to turn from alcohol and cursing and such, thinking the surrender of these things constituted the transformation the world needed, all the while ignoring our black neighbors and denying them a place around the table of the Lord.
Instead of welcoming our brothers and sisters into our classrooms and neighborhoods and congregations, we founded new schools, segregation academies they were called. Thus began the private school movement that, to this day, increasingly drains money and energy from the public schools. We call them charter schools, parochial schools, and private schools and extoll them as the answer to “failing” public schools.
Meanwhile, all across the country (especially the South), states living in this unrepentant condition have maintained their position at the bottom of every sort of index of human flourishing: mortality, poverty, divorce, crime, illiteracy, disease, and life expectancy. Our white leaders, obstructed by the vision and vocabulary of white supremacy, were blind to the connection between true repentance and human flourishing. What was clear to everybody else was obscured to us.
A third time God sent the opportunity to repent. “Today, if you hear his voice,” the psalmist writes in the vocabulary of God, “harden not your hearts.” Which is followed by a divine promise borne out by the realities all around us: “They will never enter my place of rest” (Psalm 95:27, 11).
George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis by a squad of police, and just a few miles from my home, Ahmaud Arbery was cornered by three men and shot to death, on a Sunday afternoon on a quiet suburban street. What erupted was a powerful movement called Black Lives Matter. It was a just cause calling for a righteous response. We needed to see, and understand, and repent, and walk together in brotherly love.
But we did not.
What began as campaigns to recognize the value of diversity, equity, and inclusion in our economic and political systems was overwhelmed by yet another wave of unrepentant citizens, this time bolstered by a Supreme Court that suddenly discovered the value of color-blindness. After 400 years of placing the color line (to use the provocative phrase popularized by W. E. B. Debois) at the center of all (segregated) human community, the “Christian” men on the Court reversed course and declared that noticing color or race or nationality to establish justice and distribute freedom was illegal. In this way, they gave free rein to the current campaign to blow up all DEI initiatives regardless of how effective they have been in helping people pursue life, liberty, and happiness. Once again, sputtering efforts toward repentance and healing have been doused by the familiar splatter of self interest and social hierarchy.
What this triple repudiation of true repentance has brought is a country divided, led by wealthy white men whose sole ambition is money and power, whose first five days in office have brought wave after way of disruption and confusion, and whose leader responded with defiant rage to the simple, gospel admonition to show mercy to the least among us.
How is it that millions of us, white Christians especially in the South, could listen to the words and wisdom of Jesus being quoted by a 65-year-old woman as a guide to the newly installed President, and then join the crude chorus calling for her removal? Did not Jesus himself say, in the first paragraph of the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the merciful for they will be shown mercy.” How is it that we (the President and his people) did not recognize the voice of Jesus and the call of God in this simple appeal?
Perhaps because he knew and we know that it entails repentance, that it means changing course and doing something different, that it calls us to humble ourselves and pray and seek the face of God and turn from our wicked ways; and we already know we have not the desire for such a religion.
In that five-minute call to the altar of God, we revealed yet again who we are, what we are unwilling to do, and what our future holds.
Merciful and mighty God, be merciful to us, sinners one and all.
Subscribe to Dr. Moody’s weekly newsletter on religion and American life. See elsewhere on this website for the subscription link.
Dwight A. Moody
“Hitching the evangelical wagon to Donald Trump has meant unhitching it from the life and teachings of Jesus.” So wrote Peter Wehner in The Atlantic this week. What he is recognizing and describing now began many years ago when, instead of repenting of our sins, we found new and ugly ways to embrace white supremacy, denigrate people of color, and forestall the revival our country sorely needs.
We should have learned our lesson during the Civil War.
We lost that war, meaning we white Christians in the South, stretching from Virginia to Texas. For 250 years we had justified the purchase, transport, and enslavement of people from Africa, frequently quoting the Bible.
Which created this scene time and time again: white masters whipping their chained slaves down dusty roads from the tobacco farms of Virginia to the emerging cotton plantations of Mississippi. They are called coffles, as described in the opening paragraphs of Edward E. Baptist’s 2014 book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Along the way, they must have walked past many a white church, gathered on Sunday, and singing “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.”
Instead of repenting, and confessing our sins, changing our ways, and trusting God to “hear from heaven and forgive our sins and heal our land” (according to the oft-quoted promise of 2 Chronicles 7:14), we begrudgingly accepted a truncated citizenship for slaves but surrounded it with a thousand roadblocks to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This was segregation, and these were the Jim Crow laws, and that was the doctrine of separate but equal.
Seven decades later, we had another opportunity to repent, confess, and change. Baptist preacher of the South Martin Luther King, Jr. gave voice to the great need of the day, when he quoted Amos the prophet: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” What he wanted was the right to vote, and work, and live like all of us white folk, and drink from the same fountain and play on the same team and work in the same office.
But, again, we refused to change our ways.
We kept talking about repentance, especially in camp meetings and weekend retreats and late summer revivals. Preachers walked the aisles and pleaded with us white people to turn from alcohol and cursing and such, thinking the surrender of these things constituted the transformation the world needed, all the while ignoring our black neighbors and denying them a place around the table of the Lord.
Instead of welcoming our brothers and sisters into our classrooms and neighborhoods and congregations, we founded new schools, segregation academies they were called. Thus began the private school movement that, to this day, increasingly drains money and energy from the public schools. We call them charter schools, parochial schools, and private schools and extoll them as the answer to “failing” public schools.
Meanwhile, all across the country (especially the South), states living in this unrepentant condition have maintained their position at the bottom of every sort of index of human flourishing: mortality, poverty, divorce, crime, illiteracy, disease, and life expectancy. Our white leaders, obstructed by the vision and vocabulary of white supremacy, were blind to the connection between true repentance and human flourishing. What was clear to everybody else was obscured to us.
A third time God sent the opportunity to repent. “Today, if you hear his voice,” the psalmist writes in the vocabulary of God, “harden not your hearts.” Which is followed by a divine promise borne out by the realities all around us: “They will never enter my place of rest” (Psalm 95:27, 11).
George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis by a squad of police, and just a few miles from my home, Ahmaud Arbery was cornered by three men and shot to death, on a Sunday afternoon on a quiet suburban street. What erupted was a powerful movement called Black Lives Matter. It was a just cause calling for a righteous response. We needed to see, and understand, and repent, and walk together in brotherly love.
But we did not.
What began as campaigns to recognize the value of diversity, equity, and inclusion in our economic and political systems was overwhelmed by yet another wave of unrepentant citizens, this time bolstered by a Supreme Court that suddenly discovered the value of color-blindness. After 400 years of placing the color line (to use the provocative phrase popularized by W. E. B. Debois) at the center of all (segregated) human community, the “Christian” men on the Court reversed course and declared that noticing color or race or nationality to establish justice and distribute freedom was illegal. In this way, they gave free rein to the current campaign to blow up all DEI initiatives regardless of how effective they have been in helping people pursue life, liberty, and happiness. Once again, sputtering efforts toward repentance and healing have been doused by the familiar splatter of self interest and social hierarchy.
What this triple repudiation of true repentance has brought is a country divided, led by wealthy white men whose sole ambition is money and power, whose first five days in office have brought wave after way of disruption and confusion, and whose leader responded with defiant rage to the simple, gospel admonition to show mercy to the least among us.
How is it that millions of us, white Christians especially in the South, could listen to the words and wisdom of Jesus being quoted by a 65-year-old woman as a guide to the newly installed President, and then join the crude chorus calling for her removal? Did not Jesus himself say, in the first paragraph of the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the merciful for they will be shown mercy.” How is it that we (the President and his people) did not recognize the voice of Jesus and the call of God in this simple appeal?
Perhaps because he knew and we know that it entails repentance, that it means changing course and doing something different, that it calls us to humble ourselves and pray and seek the face of God and turn from our wicked ways; and we already know we have not the desire for such a religion.
In that five-minute call to the altar of God, we revealed yet again who we are, what we are unwilling to do, and what our future holds.
Merciful and mighty God, be merciful to us, sinners one and all.
Subscribe to Dr. Moody’s weekly newsletter on religion and American life. See elsewhere on this website for the subscription link.
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