Slavery, Racism, and the letter of a freedman to his former master

Posted on February 3, 2012 by djgrieser

You probably saw this letter making the rounds this week. It’s a remarkable thing, from a former slave in response to the request of his former master that he come back to work for him. Among the choicest bits:

Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living.

…

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

When the letter was posted to yahoo, the comments thread focused on the impossibility of it being authentic. I won’t link to that, but it’s what the “racism” in my post title refers to.

Others have dug more deeply into the letter’s provenance. It was dictated by Anderson, and published in The Freedmen’s Book. Others have discovered that Anderson was living in Ohio as late as the 1900 census, and they have also discovered much of his family tree. Fascinating stuff.

Segregation past and present, racism past and present

Posted on January 31, 2012 by djgrieser

Walter Russell Mead points to a WSJ article describing a study that concludes:

Fifty years ago, nearly half the black population lived in a ghetto, the study said, while today that proportion has shrunk to 20%. All-white neighborhoods in U.S. cities are effectively extinct, according to the report.

I read this after a conversation with a parishioner that began by him asking me about the South Carolina primary and continued with his first encounter with segregation and Jim Crow while being based near Ft. Worth, TX during WWII.

It’s wonderful that American metropolitan areas are less segregated today than fifty years ago, but the WSJ article goes on to point out that there remain glaring differences in racial inequality: “Minorities at every income level tend to reside in poorer neighborhoods than whites with comparable incomes.”

Part of the reason for this enormous change is the migration of African Americans back into the “sunbelt.” Both retirees and younger people have moved in search of jobs and better quality of life. Immigration has also played a role.

The Vast Christian Right Conspiracy to brainwash your kids

Posted on January 28, 2012 by djgrieser

Otherwise known as “See You at the Pole.” There’s another in the long line of liberal media-bashing of American Evangelicalism in the Daily Beast. Katherine Stewart writes about the program that has kids gather at flagpoles in schoolyards to pray regularly. While including lurid details about rallies leading up to such events, Stewart wants us to focus on the constitutionality of the practice:

At Starbucks I meet up with students who participated in the SYAP prayers at Bradley High School, another public school in Cleveland. “Everybody basically bumps into us on their way into the school building,” says a boy with a wide, freckled smile, “so almost every kid in the school joined in.”

I ask a curly-haired girl, a participant over the past several years, how she heard about the event. “Sometimes they make an announcement during lunch,” she says. “Sometimes your teachers tell you about it.”

I’m shocked! Peer pressure? I read this as I read another in long line of articles from evangelical (and progressive) Christians about the radical decline in religious involvement among young adults. These liberal conspiracy theorists assume teens have no power to resist the attractions of evangelical Christianity, that such acts turn people into unthinking, conservative Christian robots.

It didn’t happen to me. When I was in high school, we were granted permission to leave study hall to attend movies shown in the cafeteria by a local church. They were cheesy attempts to convert us, silly, really, because we were all already saturated with Christianity.

The reality is more complex than Stewart would have us believe. Yes, evangelicalism is a powerful force in American culture, especially in the South and in the heartland. But there are other powerful forces in our culture. Hollywood and consumerism are powerful as well, and have probably claimed the allegiance of all of those kids already, whether they realize it or not.

Downton Abbey: Where’s the Church?

Posted on January 16, 2012 by djgrieser

I fell in love with Downton Abbey in its first season, largely because of the lines Maggie Smith was given: “What’s a week-end?” for example. And I was delighted to see how many of my facebook friends were equally enthralled. The first episode of the second season seems to have been as popular among Episcopalians as the Presiding Bishop’s latest fashion statement.

That being said, I realized half-way through last season that there was no evidence of religious practice in the show. Neither the upstairs nor downstairs contingent were shown attending services or practicing private devotions.

Trailers for the new season featured prayer prominently, perhaps because of the outset of war.

In spite of the absence of any Anglican presence in the series so far, it hasn’t stopped commentators for speculating on the spiritual lessons we might learn from watching it. Here’s the take from Spirituality and Practice.

Perhaps now that Tim Tebow and the Broncos were soundly defeated and we won’t have to speculate on the religious meaning of football until next July, the commentariate will find new topics to analyze, such as the religious significance of Downton Abbey. I wait with bated breath.

In the meantime, there is no dearth of political and cultural commentary on the popularity of DA on both sides of the pond. From Salon: Why liberals love Downton Abbey. From Slate: The very serious looks of Downton Abbey. Simon Schama writes in Newsweek about its cultural necrophilia. And Kathryn Hughes explores its popularity in America from a London perspective.

But still, the only praying we’ve seen so far (correct me if I’m wrong) comes from Lady Mary, whose pure motives are hardly to be trusted. My knowledge of the Church of England in the 19th and early 20th centuries extends no further than Chadwick’s 2 volumed The Victorian Church, so I’ve got little to go on, but I should think that the country aristocracy would have made a regular show of attending services. Perhaps its a sign of the decline in Christianity’s importance in 21st century England that the show’s writers didn’t feel a need to make even a nod in that direction.

But why are progressive Episcopalians as enamored of the show as everyone else?

Loving Jesus, hating religion

Posted on January 15, 2012 by djgrieser

There’s a video making the rounds in which someone I’ve never heard of recites poetry about the contrast between (true) Jesus and (false) religion. It’s received publicity from Sojourners, among others.

Nadia Bolz-Weber’s response is here.

So…I believe in Religion AND Jesus. I believe in the Gospel. I believe in the transformative, knock you on your ass truth of what God has done in Christ. I believe that I can only know what this following Jesus thing is about when I learn it from people I would never choose out of a catalog when we all gather together as the broken and blessed Body of Christ around the Eucharistic meal. I believe that I am the problem at least as often as I am the solution. I believe in participating in sacred traditions that have a whole lot more integrity than anything I could come up with myself. I believe I need someone else to proclaim the forgiveness of sins to me because I cannot create that for myself. I believe that Jesus is truly present in the breaking of the bread and that where 2 or more are gathered he is there. That’s religion AND Jesus. May God make us worthy of it all.

Jonathan D. Fitzgerald is scathing in his response:

See the problem is, Bethke doesn’t mean religion either, but he’s rehearsing a popular evangelical trope, that the freedom that Christians find through Jesus is freedom from structure, organization, and authority. Of course, Bethke, like all Christians, is a member of a religion, he holds “a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs,” as Dictionary.com defines it. What Bethke is actually railing against is people whose expression of religion doesn’t look like he believes it should. Thus, rather than discounting religion, he is just discounting other religions, or even just other manifestations of his own religion.

Read it all: “Lame Poetry, False Dichotomies, Bad Theology.

My question, as someone with an academic background in theology–Haven’t we heard all this before? Remember Karl Barth? Of course, Barth’s critique of religion focused on its human origins, to which he contrasted the divine origin of the Word of God. On a lighter note, as Fitzgerald points out, this critique of religion is something of a trope in Evangelicalism. I would only add that the rise of nondenominational churches is in itself a product of the Evangelical critique of religion.

Theology and the NFL

Posted on January 13, 2012 by djgrieser

Of course, there have been countless articles written about Tim Tebow and Christianity. But only one includes the following:

(Since theology plays such a large role in these playoffs, Foster is worth a brief digression. He was not, unfortunately, named after Arius, founder of Arianism, the most important Christian heresy: If he had been, he and Tebow would have been on opposite sides of the Christological questions debated at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. But their trademark poses do constitute a theological throw-down. Tebow’s famous “Thinker” pose is a prayerful Christian attitude. By contrast, the little bow that Foster takes after scoring is derived from eastern religions. “It’s a Hindu greeting that means ‘I see the God in you,’” Foster said. “It’s a Namaste. It means respect. It’s me paying my respect to the game of football.” Unfortunately, since their teams are both in the AFC, the world will not be able to witness the clash of religious gestures that would take place if Tebow and Foster scored in the same game.)

Read it all here.

For the perspective of a scholar of religion on the Tebow phenomenon, including mentions of Mircea Eliade (the Religious Studies equivalent of Vince Lombardi or George Halas), read this.

Football and Religion: Or, the Religion of Football

Posted on January 9, 2012 by djgrieser

I grew up in small town Ohio. Football in the seventies was not an industry. Basketball was still more important. I played in the marching band, cheered on my high school team, though it wasn’t particularly successful. Basketball mattered more, so much in fact, that the traditional rivalry with the closest town had to be suspended in 1968 because passions ran so high. We didn’t pray before games; I don’t think anyone believed that God cared whether Archbold or Pettisville won the game, no matter how much it mattered to us.

I’ve probably posted about this before, because over the years I have become less and less interested in sports contests. Yes, in part it was because I found myself teaching at colleges that had athletic programs. And at those institutions, the values always seemed skewed. For example, one year, members of the volleyball team couldn’t make it to the first class of the term because of an away game (I’ve actually been surprised by my wife’s experience teaching at UW Madison with starting players from the football team in her class).

But the whole Tebow thing takes it to another level. No, God does not care who wins a football game. As the prophet Amos makes clear:

I hate, I despise your festivals,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt-offerings and grain-offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Let’s face it. An NFL game, or a college bowl game, is as close to a festival as we get in the USA.

It’s pathetic that identification as a Christian seems now to be connected with a mediocre quarterback who makes ostentatious display of his piety:

‘And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

Rearranging (redesigning) the church furniture

Posted on January 6, 2012 by djgrieser

I love the creative incongruity of the internet, which often is reflected either in my Google Reader or facebook feeds. To wit: Today two facebook friends linked to things they had written about seating in churches. Nadia Bolz-Weber has a post on Patheos about the restrictions placed on worship and community by traditional church pews. Scott Gunn highlights news that the Church of England is seeking new designs for church chairs. Gunn is having some fun at the CoE’s expense, but Bolz-Weber is completely serious as she points out the clear message sent to contemporary culture by traditional interior church architecture and design:

There is a critical “why” to the reason we do things this way that extends far beyond taste. It’s missional. In a postmodern context people are increasingly leery of organized religion and it’s attendant obsession with hierarchy. We have peeked behind the curtain and seen only scared little men. So a shared, communitarian experience of liturgy in which we live as the Priesthood of all Believers is inviting in a way that the formality of the traditional church is not. (To be clear, this is not the same as saying that we no longer need clergy – I still hold the office of Word and Sacrament but I hold it on behalf of the whole community and with their permission). This population of urban, postmodern young-ish people have a deep critique of consumer culture and as such are far more interested in being producers than consumers. This goes for church as well. And being able to worship in the round creates an accountability of presence to each other and a shared experience which allows for the community to create the thing they are experiencing rather than consuming what others have produced for them.

It’s an interesting perspective on the debate that’s going on over at the Cafe about “what’s up for grabs.”

There’s more to say about the historical development of the pew. Bolz-Weber aligns it to the Protestant Reformation and the importance of preaching. In fact, preaching was important before the rise of Protestants–the Dominicans, for example, are officially known as the Order of Preachers. Medieval preachers, and many Catholics and Protestants in the 16th century complained, often in their sermons, about the lack of attention paid to their words by the assembled congregation. Pews were in part an attempt not to make the sermon more central but to force disciplined behavior on churchgoers and to establish a clear hierarchical relationship between clergy and people, which undergirds Bolz-Weber’s larger point.

On the other hand, one of the odder moments in the debate between radical reformer Conrad Grebel and Huldreich Zwingli had to to with Grebel’s insistence that communion should be received while seated, just as the disciples were seated at the Last Supper.