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#Post#: 15346--------------------------------------------------
Re: GEORGE FLOYD - Riots Go Nationwide
By: patrick jane Date: July 17, 2020, 9:46 am
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[img]
HTML https://www-images.christianitytoday.com/images/118416.jpg?w=940[/img]
HTML https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2020/july-web-only/perils-of-white-american-folk-religion.html
The Perils of White American Folk Religion
Many Christians unwittingly practice a counter-faith that
doesn't know how to deal with racism.
In June, 2020, Dan Cathy, the CEO of Chick-fil-A; Louie Giglio,
pastor of Passion City Church; and Lecrae, a platinum-selling
recording artist, gathered to discuss the tortuous death of
George Floyd, choked by officer Derek Chauvin, who put his knee
on the unarmed man’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. They
gathered to talk about Ahmaud Arbery, who was chased down by
armed residents, surrounded, and shot to death in Glynn County,
Georgia, on February 23. A potential cover-up protected the
murderers.
After Rayshard Brooks was killed by police in the drive-thru of
an Atlanta Wendy’s, Cathy, Giglio, and Lecrae sat together to
talk about racism and the church’s role. Over 60 percent of
white Christians think pastors should not talk about race. Forty
percent believe race and immigration should never even be a
topic in church. Meanwhile, an equal number of black folks say
that pastors and churches should. This shows that racial
reconciliation conferences do not work. Before reconciliation
can be introduced, we have to embrace the truth.
In the aftermath of terrible state violence in other countries,
truth and reconciliation commissions convened to bring
reparative, restorative, or punitive justice. This happened in
Rwanda after the 1994 genocide, in South Africa after the fall
of apartheid, and after what is termed the “Dirty War” in
Argentina. This has never happened in the United States.
These secular governments understand a fundamental reality that
should be familiar to followers of Jesus: We confess and God
forgives. Truth and acknowledgement come before reconciliation.
Christians of every color should have a firm, biblical grasp of
the necessity for individual and collective confession and
repentance before forgiveness and reconciliation can occur.
When we trespass, we must wrestle with the gravity of personal
and corporate sins—including sinful actions we were not even
aware of, injustices we benefit from, and results that we did
not intend. We must lament, confess, and repent (Acts 2:38;
3:19). Only then are we truly reconciled to God through Christ
Jesus and sent, equipped, to be ministers of reconciliation to
others (2 Cor. 5:18).
In well-resourced, often white evangelical churches, entire
ministries and parachurch organizations disciple people out of
patterns of sin, struggles with alcoholism, and drug addiction.
Ministries serve those in need while reinforcing their personal
dignity and value. But such compassion toward sinners and the
needy gets lost once the topic turns to white supremacy.
White Christians and those pursuing whiteness often become
defensive and angry when asked what Jesus would say about the
race-, class-, gender- and ideologically based hierarchy evident
in our world. The inability and unwillingness to acknowledge and
confess what exists and repent creates conditions for violence
and oppression against people of color. Our country and its
churches are socialized to not critique white supremacy.
The church has been instrumental in the creation, defense, and
propagation of the myth of whiteness under the reign of White
Jesus. Jemar Tisby, author of the best-selling The Color of
Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in
Racism, lays out clear and searing connections between the
enslavement of Africans and leaders of white congregations.
“Many of the men who conducted night rides” that terrorized
black communities with burned crosses and lynchings were the
very same men who “ascended to pulpits to preach on Sunday.”
Go back further, detailing how 15th-century church edicts
exalted those with lighter skin and rejected the personhood of
those with darker skin. A series of Roman Catholic decrees (the
Doctrine of Discovery, 1493) codified white supremacy and
sanctioned genocide, rape and abuse against African and Native
peoples. Theologian Willie Jennings asserted the purpose was to
bring people and the planet to “maturity.”
Colonialism created a counter-faith I call White American Folk
Religion (WAFR). It’s a set of beliefs and practices grounded in
a race, class, gender, and ideological hierarchy that segregates
and ranks all people under a light-skinned, thin-lipped,
blond-haired Christ. Americans of every color and racial
assignment must reckon with the current and historic reality of
a country and its churches rooted in White American Folk
Religion. WAFR fuels ignorance, complicity, and willing
participation in the patterns of injustice that perpetuate the
death and degradation of brown, black, and indigenous women and
men. Yet, in this moment of racial turmoil, those entangled in
WAFR believe it is their right and responsibility to speak,
teach, and lead.
In our post-colonial world, and especially in the United States,
Western seminaries and theology prioritize whiteness and defer
to white men like Giglio and Cathy—evangelical, older, white,
wealthy, well-known, well-educated, well-connected, able-bodied,
and gainfully employed—and regard them as credible and
trustworthy, though neither Giglio nor Cathy is an expert on
American policing or the history of a racism that promotes mass
incarceration and instinctively perceives black bodies as
criminal in every community. Neither of them has done the inner
work to decolonize and disempower their frames of WAFR
reference. They were not chosen to lead this dialogue in front
of cameras and congregants in a crisis because of their
experience or expertise but because they fit the description of
authority.
There are many leaders who could have led this dialogue with
clarity, conviction, and compassion and who are already leading
Christ-centered, Holy Spirit–filled movements. They were passed
over in favor of these, like too many in the white church and of
the world, who speak lies from the pit of hell about how slavery
is a “white blessing” from their Christ in their stained glass
windows.
Colonialism succeeded. Racism is pervasive—so much so that we
are often unaware of the depths of our socialized sin and
individual participation. Giglio apologized on Instagram and
asked for prayer. What he did not do was confess how his
seminary training and discipleship did not prepare him to lead
in this moment; that he is stepping down and stepping back to
make space for the women and men of color to lead this
conversation; and that he will take their direction. Often,
white Christians are not willing to believe, let alone follow,
people of color or rigorously engage in the process of
detangling the Jesus of scripture from WAFR. This is what the
work of decolonization looks like.
Pastors of every color in Giglio’s position must acknowledge
that western theology and praxis are intertwined with WAFR and
confess where they lack the personal and institutional wisdom to
comprehensively resist white supremacy. Church leaders that are
ill-equipped to lead and teach on issues of ethnic justice and
reconciliation should confess their limitations and empower
leaders of color to shepherd them and their congregants towards
the Acts 2 community of true fellowship and wonder and unity and
prayer (Acts 2:42–44). In the face of certain backlash, pastors
must do more than denounce racism. Christians need to be
discipled out of prejudice, bias, and WAFR. This begins with
white pastors confessing complicity in racist systems and
testifying to God’s grace and forgiveness in their own lives;
then they can lead others to do the same.
How amazing it would be if pastors and leaders who benefit from
the racism in their families and institutions repented for not
resisting racist actions, ideology, and theology? What if
pastors repented publicly for not rejecting the curse of Ham,
not standing up for the Japanese during internment, or
participating in white flight because people of color moved into
“their” neighborhoods? What if parents asked for forgiveness
from God and their children for saying, “You can marry anyone
but one of them”? What if Christian families and institutions
quantified their benefits from slavery and genocide of native
peoples and allocated money toward financial reparation? This
would be profound, powerful, and beyond significant for people
of color. White people too would be liberated from the false
burden of superiority, the lie of white supremacy, and enter
into the desegregated, reconciled family of God. No more
statements, panel discussions, conferences, or book clubs; what
we need is lament, confession, repentance, and a refusal to
conform to the world’s racist patterns. Jesus prayed in John 17
that we might all be one and preview the coming “great multitude
that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and
language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb” (Rev.
7:9–17). We can experience a slice of this future on this side
of heaven if, as the body of Christ, we embrace truth and
reconciliation in the United States.
Jonathan Walton is the author of Twelve Lies That Hold America
Captive: And the Truth That Sets Us Free. He is also an area
director for InterVarsity NY/NJ focusing on spiritual formation
and experiential discipleship. He is from Southern Virginia and
lives in New York City.
#Post#: 15380--------------------------------------------------
Re: GEORGE FLOYD - Riots Go Nationwide
By: guest17 Date: July 18, 2020, 8:13 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
Car delivers baseball bats in front of City Hall for "peaceful
protesters" on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Jul 16, 2020
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlNi4tsGUj4
#Post#: 15382--------------------------------------------------
Re: GEORGE FLOYD - Riots Go Nationwide
By: guest8 Date: July 18, 2020, 8:31 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
[quote author=truthjourney link=topic=948.msg15380#msg15380
date=1595121204]
Car delivers baseball bats in front of City Hall for "peaceful
protesters" on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Jul 16, 2020
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlNi4tsGUj4
[/quote]
Everything is only going to get worse until after the election.
Blade
#Post#: 15383--------------------------------------------------
Re: GEORGE FLOYD - Riots Go Nationwide
By: guest8 Date: July 18, 2020, 8:37 pm
---------------------------------------------------------
[quote author=truthjourney link=topic=948.msg15380#msg15380
date=1595121204]
Car delivers baseball bats in front of City Hall for "peaceful
protesters" on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Jul 16, 2020
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlNi4tsGUj4
[/quote]
this is not going to stop until the election.
Blade
#Post#: 15999--------------------------------------------------
Re: GEORGE FLOYD - Riots Go Nationwide
By: guest17 Date: August 9, 2020, 12:40 pm
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Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of BLM, said, "Well, I’m a trained
organizer. And so, I think sometimes people think that because
Black Lives Matter is the biggest thing, that that’s the first
thing I ever did. And it’s not. I was trained knocking on doors,
you know, getting on buses and passing out flyers and getting
people to join organizations. The Labor Community Strategy
Center is my first political home. .."
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Started by an old friend of mine, Eric Mann.
PATRISSE KHAN-CULLORS: Yes, Eric Mann. That’s my mentor.
HTML https://www.democracynow.org/2018/1/16/when_they_call_you_a_terrorist
Radical Roots
Labor/Community Strategy Center is an urban experiment to root
grassroots organizing focusing in Black and Latino communities
with deep historical ties to the long history of anti-colonial
anti-imperialist pro-communist resistance to the U.S. empire. We
teach and study history of the Indigenous rebellions against the
initial European genocidal invasions, the Great Slave Haitian
Revolution of the 1790s, the Great Slave Rebellions that won the
U.S. civil war for the racist north as explained in W.E.B.
DuBois’ Black Reconstruction in America. We appreciate the work
of the U.S. Communist Party especially Black communists Harry
Haywood, the African Blood Brotherhood and Cyril Briggs, Paul
Robeson, Claudia Jones, Du Bois, Benjamin Davis, William L.
Patterson, and Lorraine Hansberry.
We applaud the great work of the Black Panther Party, the
American Indian Movement, Young Lords, Brown Berets, and the
great revolutionary rainbow experiments of the 1970s. We also
have roots in the new communist movement of the 1970s and 1980s
especially the August 29th Movement, I Wor Kuen, Congress of
African People/Revolutionary Communist League (and Amiri Baraka)
and their merger into the League of Revolutionary Struggle.
HTML https://www.keywiki.org/Labor/Community_Strategy_Center
Eric Mann
....in 1969, Mann, then a leader in the SDS faction, the
Weathermen (Weather Underground), adopted the Revolutionary
Youth Movement’s belief that violent "direct action," a
euphemism for terrorism, should be used as a tactic to dismantle
the group's perceived power centers of “US imperialism”.[20]
Mann and 20 others were arrested in September 1969 for
participation in a direct action against the Harvard Center for
International Affairs, which the Revolutionary Youth Movement
saw as a university-sponsored institution for
counter-insurgency.[14] [21] Mann and 24 other Weathermen were
charged with conspiracy to commit murder after two bullets were
fired through a window of the police headquarters on November 8,
1969. Mann surrendered to the police on four counts stemming
from the November 8 incident: conspiracy to commit murder,
assault with intent to commit murder, promotion of anarchy, and
threatening.[22] Mann was sentenced to two years in prison of
which he spent 18 months in Billerica, Deer Island, and Concord
State Prison (with 40 days in solitary confinement).[20] He was
released in July 1971.
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Mann
Patrisse Cullors developed an interest in the Nigerian religious
tradition of Ifá, incorporating its rituals into political
protest events.
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrisse_Cullors
Ifá is a Yoruba religion and system of divination.
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If%C3%A1
Divination
the practice of seeking knowledge of the future or the unknown
by supernatural means.
synonyms:
fortune telling · divining · foretelling the future ·
forecasting the future · prophecy · prediction · soothsaying ·
augury · clairvoyance · second sight · magic · sorcery ·
witchcraft · spellworking · vaticination · sortilege ·
auspication · witchery
Susan Rosenberg
As of 2020, Rosenberg serves as Vice Chair of the Board of
Directors of Thousand Currents, a non-profit foundation that
sponsors the fundraising and does administrative work for the
Black Lives Matter Global Network, among other clients.[24]
From the late 1970s into the mid-1980s, Rosenberg was active in
the far-left revolutionary terrorist May 19th Communist
Organization ("M19CO"), which according to a contemporaneous FBI
report "openly advocate[d] the overthrow of the U.S. Government
through armed struggle and the use of violence".[2] M19CO
provided support to an offshoot of the Black Liberation Army,
including in armored truck robberies, and later engaged in
bombings of government buildings.[3]
After living as a fugitive for two years, Rosenberg was arrested
in 1984 while in possession of a large cache of explosives and
firearms. She had also been sought as an accomplice in the 1979
prison escape of Assata Shakur and in the 1981 Brink's robbery
that resulted in the deaths of two police and a guard[4],
although she was never charged in either case.
She also joined the May 19th Communist Organization, which
worked in support of the Black Liberation Army and its offshoots
(including assistance in armored truck robberies), the Weather
Underground and other revolutionary organizations.[11]....The
Weather Underground Organization (WUO), commonly known as the
Weather Underground, was a radical left militant organization
active in the late 1960s and 1970s, founded on the Ann Arbor
campus of the University of Michigan. It was originally called
the Weathermen....The FBI classified the WUO as a domestic
terrorist group...
Rosenberg was sentenced to 58 years' imprisonment on the weapons
and explosives charges. She spent 16 years in prison, ...
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Rosenberg
HTML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground
#Post#: 16057--------------------------------------------------
Re: GEORGE FLOYD - Riots Go Nationwide
By: patrick jane Date: August 11, 2020, 11:29 am
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Black Lives Matter is a Domestic Terrorist Organization | Change
My Mind
Steven Crowder takes to the streets of Austin to have real
conversations with real people. In this installment, Steven
posits that Black Lives Matter is a domestic terrorist
organization.
1 hour 7 minutes
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yITK_Bm78mI
#Post#: 17057--------------------------------------------------
Re: GEORGE FLOYD - Riots Go Nationwide
By: guest17 Date: September 4, 2020, 9:50 am
---------------------------------------------------------
The BLM Connection to Witchcraft
HTML https://youtu.be/xGJSEoirF90
[b]BLM leaders practice 'witchcraft' and summon dead spirits,
black activist claims
A black conservative Christian podcast host has claimed that the
Black Lives Matter movement engages in “witchcraft” and called
on Christians who have allied themselves with the organization
to rethink their decision.
Abraham Hamilton III, who hosts “The Hamilton Corner” on the
socially conservative American Family Radio, devoted the Aug. 19
episode of his program to highlighting “The BLM Connection to
Witchcraft.”
Throughout the podcast, Hamilton argued that Black Lives Matter
was not merely another social justice advocacy organization.
Instead, he argues that it is a religious movement.
Hamilton, who serves as the American Family Association’s public
policy analyst, began the podcast by criticizing the Black Lives
Matter movement as a “Marxist, anti-Christ, anti-family, [and]
anti-man organization.”
“What we are witnessing is a copy and paste of the Bolshevik
Revolution from Russia just applied into an American context,”
he contended.
After reminding his listeners that Patrisse Cullors, one of the
co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, described
herself as a “trained Marxist,” Hamilton read aloud a quote from
Cullors explaining her point of view on spirituality.
“I’m calling for spirituality to be deeply radical," Cullors
said. “We’re not just having a social justice movement, this is
a spiritual movement.”
Hamilton played audio from a “Zoom-type conversation” between
Cullors and Dr. Melina Abdullah, a professor of African studies
at California State University Los Angeles who founded the
group’s L.A. chapter.
“We’ve become very intimate with the spirits that we call on
regularly,” Abdullah said in the clip. “Each of them seems to
have a different presence and personality. You know, I laugh a
lot with Wakiesha … I didn’t meet her in her body, right? I met
her through this work.”
The “Wakiesha” mentioned by Abdullah refers to Wakiesha Wilson,
an African-American woman who was found dead in a Los Angeles
jail back in 2016.
Hamilton argues that the conversation proved that Black Lives
Matter leaders were “summoning the spirits of the dead [and]
using the power of the spirits of the dead in order to give them
the ability to do what they’re calling the so-called justice
work.”
Hamilton stated that those leaders seeking to summon the spirits
of the dead are adhering to “the Yoruba religion of Ifa.”
“They are summoning dead spirits,” he said. “One of the
touchstones of this religious practice is ancestral worship.
Guess what the Bible calls that folks? Witchcraft.”
“I started to feel personally connected and responsible and
accountable to them, both from a deeply political place but also
from a deeply spiritual place,” Cullors said. “In my tradition,
you offer things that your loved one who passed away would want,
whether it’s like honey or tobacco, things like that.”
“It’s so important, not just for us, to be in direct
relationship to our people who have passed, but also for them to
know we’ve remembered them,” she added. “I believe so many of
them work through us.”
Abdullah said that the first thing people do when they hear of
murder is “pray” and “pour libation we built with the community
where the person’s life was stolen.”
“And it took almost a year for me to realize that this movement
is much more than a racial and social justice movement,”
Abdullah said. “At its core, it’s a spiritual movement because
we’re literally standing on spilled blood.”
The women proceeded to discuss the meaning behind one of the
most common chants associated with the Black Lives Matter
movement: “Say her name.”
“When we say the names, right, so we speak their names, we say
her name, say their names, we do that all the time, that you
kind of invoke that spirit. And then those spirits actually
become present with you,” Abdullah added.
Hamilton contended that Abdullah and others “really believe that
the names of the folks that they are saying have become
ancestral gods.”
Cullors said that “spirituality is at the center of Black Lives
Matter.”
“I think that’s not just for us. I feel like so many leaders and
so many organizers are deeply engaged in … a pretty important
spiritual practice,” she said. “I don’t think … I could do this
work without that. I don’t think I could do it as long as I’ve
done it and as consistently. It feels like if I didn’t do that,
it would be antithetical to this work.”
Hamilton mentioned the chants as an example of “spiritual
wickedness” that the Apostle Paul warned about in Ephesians
6:12.
In condemning BLM’s spiritual practices, Hamilton cited
Deuteronomy 18. The Old Testament chapter describes those who
practice witchcraft or call upon the dead as “detestable to the
Lord.”
Before opening up the phone lines to his listeners, Hamilton
delivered a message to Christians and churches who have embraced
the Black Lives Matter movement.
“How can you reconcile that with what the word of God says?” he
asked. “We have got to evaluate everything through the word of
God.”
HTML https://www.christianpost.com/news/blm-leaders-practice-witchcraft-and-summon-dead-spirits-black-activist-warns.html
BLM leaders are being invited into school classrooms to teach
this to children.
#Post#: 17439--------------------------------------------------
Re: GEORGE FLOYD - Riots Go Nationwide
By: patrick jane Date: September 9, 2020, 9:26 pm
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[img]
HTML https://www-images.christianitytoday.com/images/119195.jpg?w=940[/img]
HTML https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2020/september-web-only/cut-stone-confederate-monuments-ryan-newson.html
Monuments Can Be Destroyed, but Not Forgotten
Our most controversial stone statues carry layers of communal
history that aren’t easily cast aside.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, stone monuments are earthen witnesses
to a sacred covenant. When Jacob contractually maneuvered
himself out from under his father-in-law Laban, he set up a
pillar in the highlands of Gilead. It was supposed to be a
reminder of a legal separation, but the fragility of the peace
was underscored by the dueling names given to the monument:
Jacob’s in the Hebrew tongue, Laban’s in Aramaic. The monument
was barely dedicated before it became an object of linguistic
civil war.
What’s old is new again. Disputes over historical markers and
their meanings are simply the continuance of culture war by
other means. Theologian Ryan Andrew Newson wrote his new book
Cut in Stone: Confederate Monuments and Theological Disruption
in the wake of the 2017 protests and counter-protests in
Charlottesville, Virginia. Thousands of organized white
nationalists infamously marched through the University of
Virginia campus chanting language—“White Lives Matter!” “Blood
and Soil!”—charged with centuries of racial supremacy. The
material cause for the march was the threatened removal of a
statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Erected in 1924,
the statue presented a genteel, handsome Lee—hat in hand,
martial but not militaristic. The stone general is resigned but
undefeated, like the Lost Cause he represents.
The statue lasted decades in the city center without scrutiny,
but in the 21st century, it struck some as strange to venerate
the leader of a rebellion devoted to the preservation of chattel
slavery. Newson’s book delves into the history of Confederate
monuments like this one, asking what sort of political
ideology—or theology—underwrites them. What did these
monuments—often constructed many decades after Lee resigned at
Appomattox—mean for the communities that created them? What gave
them their near-sacred value? And what is the appropriate
political and theological response to markers of a contested
American legacy? Can you—should you—erase a moral tragedy?
Remembering a Tragic History
When they were originally constructed, monuments to Confederate
leaders and soldiers were remarkably free of cultural guilt.
Hundreds of statues appeared in over 30 states in the aftermath
of Reconstruction, as the South began to rehabilitate its
image—and historical memory. As Newson points out in fascinating
detail, the Confederacy was re-memorialized decades after its
military defeat. Monument construction was most intense from
1890 to 1950, a span of time that unsurprisingly coincides with
Jim Crow.
Other defeated nations and causes have wrestled with how to
remember a tragic history. Germany after the Second World War
underwent a therapy of historical penance that continues even
today. The Confederacy, however, did not. Its monuments served a
“palliative” purpose, Newson argues, aiming to “alleviate
collective suffering without addressing the root cause of the
pain.” So the stone figures stood as reminders of the genteel
honor and heroic manhood of figures such as Lee, Stonewall
Jackson, and Jefferson Davis—eliding their militant defense of
chattel slavery. With these symbolic moves, the memory of
slavery was quickly shunted into the distant past, even as its
system of involuntary unpaid labor shifted from the plantation
to the chain gang in the late-19th century and the systemic
incarceration of African Americans in the 20th.
As a historical project, Cut in Stone focuses on the
Reconstruction-era South, but Newson’s theological analysis
touches more broadly on the nature of historical memory and the
moral obligations of a political community that is still haunted
by the sins of its fathers. Newson’s book was published in the
middle of the summer of 2020—a wry moment of providence if ever
there was one. While Charlottesville in 2017 provides the
backdrop to the book, more recent events have made its subject
matter even timelier.
I was invited to review Newson’s book the day that statues of
Christopher Columbus were removed from Grant Park and Arrigo
Park in my hometown of Chicago. A week prior, a confrontation
between protesters and police had centered on the statue in
Grant Park. As protestors attempted to topple Columbus by force,
multiple people on both sides of the conflict were injured.
In the early-20th century, the monuments had been commissioned
by Italian-American communities in Chicago to memorialize the
Genoese explorer, who at that time evoked a spirit of
exploration and American destiny. Forgotten for centuries was
Columbus’s brutal subjugation of indigenous peoples—not to
mention the mercenary motivations of his transatlantic voyages.
There’s a reason political communities—and movements—make myths
about themselves. And not all of them are formed in malice or
bad faith. We typically retell the story of the civil rights
movement in heightened rhetoric that foregrounds its best ideals
while leaving other details—including the moral peccadillos of
its leaders—in the shadows. Only recently have we begun to tell
the stories of grassroots figures like Ida B. Wells and Fannie
Lou Hamer in addition to chronicling the (sometimes problematic)
charismatic male leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. and
Malcolm X. When a narrative has been told for decades, or
centuries, it takes of lot of intention to reorder historical
memory.
In Charlottesville and Chicago, historical myths finally
cracked. The stone figures of Lee and Columbus, for different
reasons, were not mere historical memories, but witnesses to
some deeper sense of national or ethnic identity.
One of the blind spots of modern liberalism—the political
philosophy, not the ideology—is its studied obliviousness to the
sacral elements of social life and national identity. There’s a
reason that the debate over stone structures reaches the fevered
pitch that it does. You find out what a community reveres when
the removal of its earthen symbols triggers charges of
disrespect, violation, and even blasphemy. You find out what a
revolution really seeks when you notice what the iconoclasts
want to destroy.
Newson is appropriately circumspect when asking what the proper
social or theological response ought to be toward Confederate
monuments. There is no way to continue honoring the noblesse
oblige of figures like Lee and Jackson without resorting to a
moral naivete that is willfully ignorant of American history.
The instinct to topple national idols is understandable. But
does destruction lead to erasure? Is there a reason to remember
the tragedies of American history in a way that acknowledges the
complications of the past without giving honor where shame is
due?
Handle with Care
This is where the virtue of prudence comes in handy, as virtues
do. How do we distinguish among the different symbols—what they
portray and what they represent for a variety of communities? If
we decide collectively that honorific statues of Confederate
military leaders should be removed, or perhaps limited to museum
exhibits, should we do the same for Christopher Columbus, Thomas
Jefferson, George Washington, or even Abraham Lincoln? All of
these figures have come under scrutiny, often for good reasons.
On July 24th, the day Columbus came down in Chicago, one of the
protestors made the statement that the statue symbolized
negative values that the city needed to “acknowledge,” but also
“divorce ourselves from.” The monument, she said, had “nothing
to do with where Chicago is going and our future.” But that’s
the tricky, sometimes awful thing about sacred symbols: Even
though they are only made of stone, they carry layers of
communal history that aren’t easily cast aside. Is it important
to remember what Columbus represented to Italian-Americans at a
time when they were also the victims of white supremacy? How
does that piece of history need to be preserved once the idol
has been toppled?
Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot explained that the removal was “an
effort to protect public safety and to preserve a safe space for
an inclusive and democratic public dialogue about our city's
symbols.” Which seems quite responsible in such tenuous and
terrifying times. Putting a hold on things—providing space for
deliberative liberalism to do what it does best—seems prudent.
And yet few, on the left or the right, seemed disposed to mimic
the mayor’s temperament. Charges of lawlessness were thrown from
one side, and charges of brutality and moral complicity from the
other. Few seemed satisfied with the mayor’s actions—or if they
were, they were reluctant to say it publicly.
Newson’s historical and theological analysis reminds us that a
statue is rarely just a statue; stone pillars are usually
consecrated to a cause—for better or worse. And while the past
few summers of culture-warring haven’t come close to resolving
every question of whether our most controversial monuments
should stay up, come down, or go elsewhere, Cut in Stone
provides a helpful framework for understanding the political and
theological principles at stake.
Clearly, sacred objects ought to be handled carefully. And yet,
sometimes their destruction—as with golden calves or stone
tablets—is the more meaningful response. If Moses smashed stones
etched by the divine hand in response to national idolatry, then
what kind of iconoclasm calls to us today?
David Henreckson is the director of the Institute for Leadership
and Service at Valparaiso University. He is the author of The
Immortal Commonwealth: Covenant, Community, and Political
Resistance in Early Reformed Thought.
#Post#: 17446--------------------------------------------------
Re: GEORGE FLOYD - Riots Go Nationwide
By: guest8 Date: September 10, 2020, 9:09 am
---------------------------------------------------------
[quote author=patrick jane link=topic=948.msg17439#msg17439
date=1599704784]
[img]
HTML https://www-images.christianitytoday.com/images/119195.jpg?w=940[/img]
HTML https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2020/september-web-only/cut-stone-confederate-monuments-ryan-newson.html
Monuments Can Be Destroyed, but Not Forgotten
Our most controversial stone statues carry layers of communal
history that aren’t easily cast aside.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, stone monuments are earthen witnesses
to a sacred covenant. When Jacob contractually maneuvered
himself out from under his father-in-law Laban, he set up a
pillar in the highlands of Gilead. It was supposed to be a
reminder of a legal separation, but the fragility of the peace
was underscored by the dueling names given to the monument:
Jacob’s in the Hebrew tongue, Laban’s in Aramaic. The monument
was barely dedicated before it became an object of linguistic
civil war.
What’s old is new again. Disputes over historical markers and
their meanings are simply the continuance of culture war by
other means. Theologian Ryan Andrew Newson wrote his new book
Cut in Stone: Confederate Monuments and Theological Disruption
in the wake of the 2017 protests and counter-protests in
Charlottesville, Virginia. Thousands of organized white
nationalists infamously marched through the University of
Virginia campus chanting language—“White Lives Matter!” “Blood
and Soil!”—charged with centuries of racial supremacy. The
material cause for the march was the threatened removal of a
statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Erected in 1924,
the statue presented a genteel, handsome Lee—hat in hand,
martial but not militaristic. The stone general is resigned but
undefeated, like the Lost Cause he represents.
The statue lasted decades in the city center without scrutiny,
but in the 21st century, it struck some as strange to venerate
the leader of a rebellion devoted to the preservation of chattel
slavery. Newson’s book delves into the history of Confederate
monuments like this one, asking what sort of political
ideology—or theology—underwrites them. What did these
monuments—often constructed many decades after Lee resigned at
Appomattox—mean for the communities that created them? What gave
them their near-sacred value? And what is the appropriate
political and theological response to markers of a contested
American legacy? Can you—should you—erase a moral tragedy?
Remembering a Tragic History
When they were originally constructed, monuments to Confederate
leaders and soldiers were remarkably free of cultural guilt.
Hundreds of statues appeared in over 30 states in the aftermath
of Reconstruction, as the South began to rehabilitate its
image—and historical memory. As Newson points out in fascinating
detail, the Confederacy was re-memorialized decades after its
military defeat. Monument construction was most intense from
1890 to 1950, a span of time that unsurprisingly coincides with
Jim Crow.
Other defeated nations and causes have wrestled with how to
remember a tragic history. Germany after the Second World War
underwent a therapy of historical penance that continues even
today. The Confederacy, however, did not. Its monuments served a
“palliative” purpose, Newson argues, aiming to “alleviate
collective suffering without addressing the root cause of the
pain.” So the stone figures stood as reminders of the genteel
honor and heroic manhood of figures such as Lee, Stonewall
Jackson, and Jefferson Davis—eliding their militant defense of
chattel slavery. With these symbolic moves, the memory of
slavery was quickly shunted into the distant past, even as its
system of involuntary unpaid labor shifted from the plantation
to the chain gang in the late-19th century and the systemic
incarceration of African Americans in the 20th.
As a historical project, Cut in Stone focuses on the
Reconstruction-era South, but Newson’s theological analysis
touches more broadly on the nature of historical memory and the
moral obligations of a political community that is still haunted
by the sins of its fathers. Newson’s book was published in the
middle of the summer of 2020—a wry moment of providence if ever
there was one. While Charlottesville in 2017 provides the
backdrop to the book, more recent events have made its subject
matter even timelier.
I was invited to review Newson’s book the day that statues of
Christopher Columbus were removed from Grant Park and Arrigo
Park in my hometown of Chicago. A week prior, a confrontation
between protesters and police had centered on the statue in
Grant Park. As protestors attempted to topple Columbus by force,
multiple people on both sides of the conflict were injured.
In the early-20th century, the monuments had been commissioned
by Italian-American communities in Chicago to memorialize the
Genoese explorer, who at that time evoked a spirit of
exploration and American destiny. Forgotten for centuries was
Columbus’s brutal subjugation of indigenous peoples—not to
mention the mercenary motivations of his transatlantic voyages.
There’s a reason political communities—and movements—make myths
about themselves. And not all of them are formed in malice or
bad faith. We typically retell the story of the civil rights
movement in heightened rhetoric that foregrounds its best ideals
while leaving other details—including the moral peccadillos of
its leaders—in the shadows. Only recently have we begun to tell
the stories of grassroots figures like Ida B. Wells and Fannie
Lou Hamer in addition to chronicling the (sometimes problematic)
charismatic male leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. and
Malcolm X. When a narrative has been told for decades, or
centuries, it takes of lot of intention to reorder historical
memory.
In Charlottesville and Chicago, historical myths finally
cracked. The stone figures of Lee and Columbus, for different
reasons, were not mere historical memories, but witnesses to
some deeper sense of national or ethnic identity.
One of the blind spots of modern liberalism—the political
philosophy, not the ideology—is its studied obliviousness to the
sacral elements of social life and national identity. There’s a
reason that the debate over stone structures reaches the fevered
pitch that it does. You find out what a community reveres when
the removal of its earthen symbols triggers charges of
disrespect, violation, and even blasphemy. You find out what a
revolution really seeks when you notice what the iconoclasts
want to destroy.
Newson is appropriately circumspect when asking what the proper
social or theological response ought to be toward Confederate
monuments. There is no way to continue honoring the noblesse
oblige of figures like Lee and Jackson without resorting to a
moral naivete that is willfully ignorant of American history.
The instinct to topple national idols is understandable. But
does destruction lead to erasure? Is there a reason to remember
the tragedies of American history in a way that acknowledges the
complications of the past without giving honor where shame is
due?
Handle with Care
This is where the virtue of prudence comes in handy, as virtues
do. How do we distinguish among the different symbols—what they
portray and what they represent for a variety of communities? If
we decide collectively that honorific statues of Confederate
military leaders should be removed, or perhaps limited to museum
exhibits, should we do the same for Christopher Columbus, Thomas
Jefferson, George Washington, or even Abraham Lincoln? All of
these figures have come under scrutiny, often for good reasons.
On July 24th, the day Columbus came down in Chicago, one of the
protestors made the statement that the statue symbolized
negative values that the city needed to “acknowledge,” but also
“divorce ourselves from.” The monument, she said, had “nothing
to do with where Chicago is going and our future.” But that’s
the tricky, sometimes awful thing about sacred symbols: Even
though they are only made of stone, they carry layers of
communal history that aren’t easily cast aside. Is it important
to remember what Columbus represented to Italian-Americans at a
time when they were also the victims of white supremacy? How
does that piece of history need to be preserved once the idol
has been toppled?
Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot explained that the removal was “an
effort to protect public safety and to preserve a safe space for
an inclusive and democratic public dialogue about our city's
symbols.” Which seems quite responsible in such tenuous and
terrifying times. Putting a hold on things—providing space for
deliberative liberalism to do what it does best—seems prudent.
And yet few, on the left or the right, seemed disposed to mimic
the mayor’s temperament. Charges of lawlessness were thrown from
one side, and charges of brutality and moral complicity from the
other. Few seemed satisfied with the mayor’s actions—or if they
were, they were reluctant to say it publicly.
Newson’s historical and theological analysis reminds us that a
statue is rarely just a statue; stone pillars are usually
consecrated to a cause—for better or worse. And while the past
few summers of culture-warring haven’t come close to resolving
every question of whether our most controversial monuments
should stay up, come down, or go elsewhere, Cut in Stone
provides a helpful framework for understanding the political and
theological principles at stake.
Clearly, sacred objects ought to be handled carefully. And yet,
sometimes their destruction—as with golden calves or stone
tablets—is the more meaningful response. If Moses smashed stones
etched by the divine hand in response to national idolatry, then
what kind of iconoclasm calls to us today?
David Henreckson is the director of the Institute for Leadership
and Service at Valparaiso University. He is the author of The
Immortal Commonwealth: Covenant, Community, and Political
Resistance in Early Reformed Thought.
[/quote]
Only in Democratic controls cities.,...
Blade
#Post#: 17480--------------------------------------------------
Re: GEORGE FLOYD - Riots Go Nationwide
By: guest17 Date: September 12, 2020, 12:34 am
---------------------------------------------------------
Language warning
BLM "Protesters" Terrorize Restaurant Diners In Rochester New
York
HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-iCAgWvcYI
*****************************************************
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