the goblin: Racism

As promised, an excerpt from Wendell Berry's "The Hidden Wound." In the opening paragraph, Berry gives his motivation for writing the book and explains the title.

It occurs to me that, for a man whose life from the beginning has been conditioned by the lives of black people, I have had surprisingly little to say about them in my other writings. Perhaps this is justifiable - there is certainly no requirement that a writer deal with any particular subject - and yet is has been an avoidance. When I have written about them before I have felt that I was doing little more than putting down a mark, leaving an opening, that I would later have to go back to and fill. For whatever reasons, good or bad, I have been unwilling until now to open in myself what I have known all along to be a wound - a historical wound, prepared centuries ago to come alive in me at my birth like a hereditary disease, and to be augmented and deepened by my life. If I had thought it was only the black people who have suffered from the years of slavery and racism, then I could have dealt fully with the matter long ago; I could have filled myself with pity for them, and would no doubt have enjoyed it a great deal and thought highly of myself. But I am sure it is not simple as that. If white people have suffered less obviously from racism than black people, they have nevertheless suffered greatly; the cost has been greater perhaps than we can yet know. If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself. As the master, or as a member of the dominant race, he has felt little compulsion to acknowledge it or speak of it; the more painful it has grown the more deeply he has hidden it within himself. But the wound is there, and it is a profound disorder, as great a damage to his mind as it is in his society.

In those precious few minutes a day when I'm not working or playing with my five month-old daughter, I have been scribbling down thoughts and notes and quotes for an essay I'm writing for an upcoming issue of the Writers Collective.

A couple years ago, I had this idea that American followers of Jesus should establish Good Friday as a National Day of Reconciliation, with each year focusing on a different alienated group. For example, the first year might focus on racial reconciliation. Subsequent years would address anti-Semitism, sexism, the genocide of the Native Americans, and so on.

My thoughts on reconciliation have changed somewhat since I first wrote (and seven people read) my manifesto for a National Day of Reconciliation. While I still believe that reconciliation is the primary "mission" of the Church, I got too far ahead of myself. I was too quick to call for a national movement when I wasn't practicing reconciliation in my own local community. I was naive to think that one million people observing a single day of reconciliation was somehow more powerful than six people committed to meeting regularly and over time to wrestle with these difficult issues together. And so I've exchanged my fifty-state strategy for a humbler and probably more effective strategy I've taken to calling "living room reconciliation" - the topic of my essay-in-progress.

Writing this essay has carried with it the great benefit of spending time with the words of Desmond Tutu, John W. De Gruchy, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Miroslav Volf. I've also been reading "The Hidden Wound," Wendell Berry's highly personal account of the legacy of slavery in our language, our families, our land, and even in our churches. Early in the book, Berry writes:

From other stories that have been handed down to me I know that my people, like many others in the slave states, went to church with their slaves, were baptized with them, and presumably expected to associate with them in heaven. Again, I have been years realizing what this means, and what it has cost.

Berry goes on: "[Consider] the moral predicament of the master who sat in church with his slaves, thus attesting his belief in the immortality of the souls of people whose bodies he owned and used." To keep himself from asking the troubling questions like "How can I presume to own the body of a man whose soul is as worthy of salvation of my own?", the master had to "perfect an empty space in his mind, a silence, between heavenly concerns and earthly concerns, between body and spirit."

The preachers at these churches were put in a similarly troubling position.

If a man wanted to remain a preacher he would have to honor that division in the minds of the congregation between earth and heaven, body and soul. His concern obviously had to be with things heavenly; unless he was a saint or a fool he would leave earthly things to the care of those who stood to benefit from them.

Thus the moral obligation was cleanly excerpted from the religion. The question of how best to live on the earth, among one's fellow creatures, was permitted to atrophy, and the churches devoted themselves exclusively and obsessively with the question of salvation.

How do you get to heaven? Well, I have quoted some passages, and there are many others, that say you get there by obeying the moral imperatives of the Scripture, by loving one another "in deed and in truth." But the churches, with their strong ties to the pocketbooks of racists, felt obliged to see it another way: the way to heaven was faith; one got there by believing. And to this day that continues to be the emphasis of such denominations as the Southern Baptist: to be saved, believe!

These are devastating passages, and they knocked me flat. Having grown up in a church that is Southern Baptist not in name but in character, I have seen how the emphasis on belief can overshadow the "moral aspects" of Christianity. That this "false mysticism," as Berry puts it, might have its roots in slavery is news to me - though it doesn't exactly come as a surprise. How could we use religion to justify the enslavement of tens of millions of human beings and expect it to not obscure the gospel?

...Detached from real issues and real evils, the language of religion became abstract, intensely (desperately?) pious, rhetorical, inflated with phony mysticism and joyless passion. The religious institutions became comfort stations for scribes and publicans and pharisees. Far from curing the wound of racism, the white man's Christianity has been its soothing bandage - a bandage masquerading as Sunday clothes, for the wearing of which one expects a certain moral credit.

There is probably someone reading this post - someone with a much better understanding of American church history than I - who disagrees with Berry's thesis and/or my summary of it. No doubt there are many others who take profound issue with the notion that fundamentalist theology is indivisible from the legacy of slavery. I hope you're out there. We should talk. This is one part of a much larger conversation we need to have as believers and as a country - a conversation I think will be the disturbing but important result of a sustained commitment to the long process of reconciliation.

Update: I am completely engrossed in "The Hidden Wound." Each page is more beautiful and challenging than the one before. I've decided to post short excerpts from now through Easter Sunday.