America
Just who are you
Where is your heart
What do you do
Are you culture wars
And the war on woke
Unjust, unequal
And morally broke
Are you homophobic
Are you racist slurs
Discriminatory
With your conscience blurred
Do you censor truth
And bias history
Do you ban all books
That make you think and see
Do you lie to yourself
Continually
Suppress other voices
And those who speak
From other perspectives
Alternatively
Is yours the only
Speech that’s free
Oppressing others
With your liberty
Blind to the plight
You refuse to see
Not of Christ
Nor Christianity
America
Just who will you be
If you cease to hear
And you cease to see
If you choose to act
Only selfishly
Consumed by pride
And vanity
Selling your soul
And your sanity
Wayward, lost
And self-deceived
Unmoored from what
You once believed
The abyss
Your Manifest Destiny
Your fate no more
A mystery
All for preferential
Liberty
You trample love
Beneath your feet
Not of Christ
Nor Christianity
America
Do you want to be great
Then abandon oppression
Turn from your hate
Open your arms
And open your gates
Care for the sojourner
And advocate
For equality, justice
Before it’s too late
Look down no longer
From your privileged place
Dismantle all barriers
Divisions by race
Voter suppression
A moral disgrace
No more redlining
Consider your fate
If Christ should return
Whom you claim to await
To find you’ve abandoned
The truth of your faith
And turned to idols
You should never conflate
Selfishness, pride
Power and greed
Nationalism
And patriot creed
Not of Christ
Nor Christianity
America
You’ve never been
All you purport to be
Melting pot
Community
Land of opportunity
Where all is fair
And all are free
Where everyone experiences
True equality
And all find in your bosom
A place of liberty
The founders walked a crooked line
Of flawed morality
Speaking noble notions
While practicing slavery
And Western European style
Colonial supremacy
Double minded men they were
Holding forth so morally
Yet sinning also openly
So utterly hypocritically
Serving selfish purposes
So duplicitously
Yet held up in our day and age
In our mythology
As men of faultless principles
And unquestioned integrity
Yet truly they were complicated
Creatures as are we
We do them no great service
By our whitewashed history
Such is not of truth
Nor is it honesty
Truly not of Christ
Nor of Christianity
America
I want to believe
That you can overcome
The lies that still deceive
The injustice you have done
To turn from your oppression
The thing that you’ve become
To seek again the promises
Of liberty and freedom
For everyone and all
To stand again upon
What you’d once begun
In fits and starts and failures
Better some than none
Return to the resolutions
To make right the wrongs
Put your hand to the plow
And finally have done
With your racist ploys
Whose time has surely come
And your sexist ways
That should have been long gone
So you might now become
What your stated aspirations
Claim that you should be
A land of true equality
Liberty and prosperity
With every person free
To be who they can be
Let there be reality
To the blessed community
Closer then to Christ
And Christianity
D. Gee, 2023
Thus says the Lord: “Do justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the resident alien, the fatherless, and the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place.” — Jeremiah 22:3
“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in,I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’” — Matthew 25:31–40
“When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them in slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education, and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no. Not God bless America! God damn America! That’s in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating her citizens as less than human. God damn America as long as she keeps trying to act like she is God and she is supreme.” — Rev. Jeremiah Wright
“America, nobody can serve God and the military. You can’t serve God and money. You cannot serve God and mammon at the same time. America, choose ye this day who you will serve.” — Rev. Raphael Warnock
It was obvious to everyone concerned that white people frequently became enraged when their status or power was threatened, and that they were willing to maintain the racial order through violence — including burning buildings, looting homes, and attacking or lynching Black people. But when Black rebellions swept our nation, they were cast as deviant, criminal, and irrational.
[…]
Rather than focus on “root causes” of crime and violence, and the systems and structures that create and maintain inequality, politicians across the political spectrum capitulated to a narrative that segregationists had been selling decades earlier — and that enslavers had embraced before them: namely that Black people were lazy, had to be forced to work, were inherently criminal, and thus must be subject to perpetual control.
[…]
The impulse to resist efforts by Black people to gain freedom and equality and to respond with punishment or violence, no matter whether demands are made through peaceful protest, lobbying, or outright rebellion, has been the defining feature of Black-white relations since the first slave ships arrived on American shores. This habitual impulse has been driven by chronic fear not just of Black people — because similar responses can be found in post-colonial dealings with other racial groups and Indigenous communities — but, more deeply, of what true justice might require. — Leslie Alexander and Michelle Alexander, in Fear, Chapter 4 of The 1619 Project
What white Americans never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget — is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it. — Excerpt from the 1968 report of the Kerner Commission created by President Lyndon Johnson
In the history of our nation, many people groups have experienced heavy persecution and oppression for at least a period of time (Italian, Irish, Chinese, and Latin American immigrants, e.g.), but none have been treated as badly on a consistent basis as the Indigenous or Black populations with the treatment of Blacks representing perhaps the most extremely and continuously egregious of the bunch. If you don’t believe these things have been true and remain true of the lived experiences of Black people in America right up to the present day, you are likely as ignorant as I was when I began my journey in these areas in the wake of the George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery killings. I needed to fill in some major educational gaps, which is something I continue working to do. There are many good places to start and no better time than now. I’d perhaps recommend checking out The 1619 Project from your local library, which explores the Black experience in American history and even touches at points on the Native American experience as well (it is extensively footnoted for cross-checking and cross-referencing). That book is a real eye-opener for folks raised and educated as I was with a whole raft of myths and partial truths about the history of this nation — history we must take the time to understand more completely, reassess, and engage if ever we hope to rise above so much that holds us back and holds us down as a collective people — particularly our friends and neighbors of color (black, brown, red, and rainbow). White Christian Nationalism is a pox upon our country. The Culture Wars are among its primary weapons and tactics. Both are based on false history, false premises, and false beliefs. And in this guise, we are seeing deeply immoral historical themes repeat themselves in our day and on our watch.