Tikkun Magazine, March/April 2008

RETHINKING RELIGION

Theology for Healing the Nation 

by Glen Stassen

A STRANGE THING HAPPENED to me when, on the first evening of the New Baptist Covenant meeting in Atlanta (see box), The Greater Travelers Rest Baptist Church choir sang. I buried my head in my hands, and sat there weeping.

Why? That choir had transported me back into Canaan Baptist Church of Christ on 116th Street in Harlem. My family and I joined Canaan the year I was on sabbatical leave at Union Theological Seminary. Something deep happened to me at Canaan, and I am still trying to understand it.

Canaan was celebrating the thirty-fifth year of the ministry of its very thoughtful pastor, Wyatt Tee Walker. The church's three choirs were fantastic, They connected us with something very deep. We were the only white family among 2,000 members. When Pastor Walker welcomed our new-members' class into church membership one Sunday morning, he pointed to my family, and said: "The Stassens may look like some folks who have not treated you right. But they may be a little different from those folks. And in any case, the Stassens are now our members. You treat them like our members!" And the members of Canaan did. Their warm welcome each Sunday was a far deeper experience than these words can say. Some kind of healing happened for me that I am still trying to understand.

It's not like I was some kind of segregationist finally getting reconciled with black brothers and sisters. I was deeply engaged in the civil rights movement, and antiracist teaching since. My father, sister, and I were part of the March on Washington where we witnessed Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech; I was not raised in a racist family. Maybe you would not think I needed such healing from a black church family. But something deep happened. Why?

It wasn't only about race. When the Canaan choir sang, they made contact with suffering, and also with rejoicing. They reached some kinds of suffering that are buried deep in me, and they brought me to reconciliation and then to rejoicing. On Easter Sunday the choir was absolutely phenomenal; it was the best Easter worship I have ever experienced. My soul was touched, it was deeply moved, and it was resurrected, rejoicing. I know why that woman at the New Baptist Covenant meeting was crying out, "Hallelujah" when the choir sang. I was too, silently. There are depths of unreconciled disconnection in many of us that are not all about race—most of us have our own inner wounds, shames, or alienations; to experience hospitality, welcome, acceptance, and embrace that touch an ethnic divide in us can also bring an experience of healing for other unreconciled disconnections.

I believe many white Americans, consciously or unconsciously, feel a sense of shame when we think of ourselves as part of a nation that has a history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination. Many of us aren't aware of it, but for too many, this shame partly blocks us from making the kind of open connections with other people that we need. I believe that much of the religious right consists of people who have some hidden shame that they displace by insisting on an authoritarian righteousness. Once it was not smoking, not drinking, and not doing wrong sex. Now it is condemning abortion and homosexual sex. The leaders of the religious right opposed the Civil Rights movement, and many opposed a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday due to the self-righteous authoritarianism that has displaced their hidden shame.

This nation has deeply needed a leader who would reach out and say: "The struggle for civil rights was hard for many. It brought forth resistance, anger, shame, and resentment in some whites, and experience of pain and hope, mixed with disappointment for some blacks. But now we realize that our nation would be in much greater trouble if we had not had the nonviolent accomplishments of that movement. Let us reach out to one another and give each other many warm welcomes, as we join together as a new, more reconciled family."

John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. could have led us in that healing, but they were all assassinated. Lyndon Johnson was disempowered by the Vietnam War. Tragically, we have been deprived of the redemptive leader we have needed. Canaan Baptist Church of Christ, its pastor and choirs, its members who regularly saved a seat for us, and their warm welcome, brought about that healing for me. Maybe I am only projecting my own needs on others, but I think our nation deeply needs healing from our past shame and our present polarization.

In Atlanta, I shared some of these thoughts with the Theological Education Steering Committee of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), and it immediately caught resonance. We decided that our next AAR annual meeting of 10,000 academics will have a session on "A Theology for Healing a Polarized Nation." We will invite Cornel West, Michael Lerner, among others, to lead us in thinking deeply about the kind of public rhetoric we need to bring healing to this nation.

Glen Harold Stassen is the Lewis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics and Fuller Theological Seminary. He has published a number of books, including Just Peacemaking: Ten Practices for Abolishing War, Living the Sermon on the Mount, and Kingdom Ethics, which won the Christianity Today award for best book of 2004 in theology.

RELATED ARTICLE: The National Baptist Convention

Fifteen thousand Anglo, African-American, Asian-American, and Hispanic Baptists gathered in Atlanta on Jan. 30th this year. They began to fulfill the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr. that "One day, on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners would be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood."

Jesus' call, based on Isaiah 61, inspired The New Baptist Covenant: "to promote peace with justice, to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, care for the sick and marginalized, welcome the strangers among us, and promote religious liberty and respect for religious diversity."

William Shaw, president of the National Baptist Convention, USA, proclaimed that Jesus "concretized" his mission by seeking to reverse the injustice of structures that caused oppression. Marian Wright Edelman called for Baptists to unify around protecting children. She cited a litany of statistics that reveal the depth of poverty, neglect and risk that describe the United States's 13 million children in poverty—a national catastrophe. Former vice president and Nobel laureate Al Gore called for Baptists to make creation care one of their major initiatives. "The scientists are screaming from the rooftops. The ice is melting. The land is parched. The seas are rising. The storms are getting stronger."

Convener Jimmy Carter said that in March, the leaders will plan follow-up actions.

Stassen, Glen. 2008. Theology for healing the nation. Tikkun 23(2):44-45.