What do you want for Christmas?
Paul Brandeis Raushenbush and Ian Bassin (R&B) publish this morning in The Bulwark a call for a new Great Awakening. Students of history know that there have been three recognized in colonial history and in the democratic republic that followed. Each grew “out of periods of moral dislocation” and a recognition that character is an essential element of a stable government.
Today we face a need for another, R&B declare. Our current crisis is not merely a political one but spiritual too. Nowhere, they write, “is this more painfully evident than in how our government treats immigrants in our name.”
I wrote yesterday about my Wednesday sign: REMEMBER DECENCY? | YEAH, ME TOO. On Thursday, that sign elicited a middle finger from one driver. On Tuesday, a woman passenger flipped me off for displaying another reading ETHNIC CLEANSING | IS ILLEGAL AND UNAMERICAN. I assume HOW WOULD JESUS | TREAT STRANGERS was too on the nose to elicit a “fuck you” from such people. But they represent the America that R&B believe needs an intervention.
Yes, the country has a duty to enforce its laws, R&B insist, but enforcing them with gleeful cruelty “deforms institutions and deadens consciences.” Moreover, it degrades the moral character of people who tolerate it and look away:
When we normalize the humiliation of the powerless, something in us breaks. When suffering becomes bureaucratic routine, our moral imagination shrinks. And when that happens, democracy itself is imperiled—because a society willing to deny the humanity of some will eventually rationalize denying the rights of many.
This is why if we are to survive this moment, let alone rise from it, we must do more than reform our politics, we must call forth a new Great Awakening.
Mutual regard matters. Decency matters. Sharing power with others with different views and backgrounds matters in a democratic republic. Freedom “untethered from responsibility corrodes the soul of a people.” Plainspokenness is one thing. “Telling it like it is” with intent to insult and wound in the name of freedom is another.
Organizations R&B lead have launched an ad campaign to promote rejection of our government’s cruel, terror-based approach to applying immigration law.
The pair conclude:
EVERY GREAT AWAKENING in American history arose not because conditions were ideal, but because they were intolerable. People sensed that the old ways were failing, and they dared to believe that renewal was possible.
They are not alone. You see it. We see it. Bishop William Barber has preached for years on the need for a Third Reconstruction, a moral movement of renewal dedicated to “overcoming the politics of division and fear” R&B decry today. In Barber’s book he shares this anecdote:
Not long ago I was a guest on Real Time with Bill Maher, with one of America’s most prominent atheists. Wearing my clerical collar, I realized that I stood out among his guests. So I decided to announce to Bill that I, too, am an atheist. He seemed taken aback, so I explained that if we were talking about the God who hates poor people, immigrants, and gay folks, I don’t believe in that God either. Sometimes it helps to clarify our language.
Sometimes it helps to stare at oneself in the mirror.
What a shame this isn’t a Sunday sermon.
Happy Hollandaise everyone!