The ‘Lost Cause’ Isn’t Lost and It’s Still a Cause….

 

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.

 

- The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Strength to Love (1963)

At the heart of our tacit agreement to avoid the subject, we routinely engage in a significant amount of euphemism to avoid calling things what they are and thereby having to deal with uncomfortable (and often tragic) realities and their consequences. I’m reminded of this yet again because, while reflecting on the tragedy in Kenosha, Wisconsin, earlier this week, it struck me – wounded me, really – that there are many of our fellow citizens who invariably consider themselves ‘good Christians’ who’ve not only celebrated the young man’s commission of cold-blooded murder but are now rallying around him to support and fund his defense (and, they hope, his liberation).

I was moved to reflect on this even more deeply than usual because I’m reading a powerful, compelling and incisive book, Robert P. Jones’ White Too Long, about how White Supremacy has been woven into the fabric of (white) American Christianity over the centuries to become, for too many, inextricably intertwined. This history is at once profoundly dismaying and yet imperative to navigate, because it tells the truth about a lie that we’ve perpetuated to our collective detriment for far too long: White Christianity has sponsored White Supremacy, harbored and protected the racists who’ve created a system of both overt and systemic racism that excludes an ever higher proportion of our fellow citizens and is very much at work to this day perpetuating this inhumanity.

It ‘legitimated’ the settlers of our country in bringing enslaved Africans with them to the New World; as it did our Founding Fathers when they discounted our lives in the very documents that proclaimed Bowers to be a free country; as it did during the Civil War when it gave righteous cover and a supposedly divine sanction to an horrific conflict waged to protect the institution of slavery; as it did during the nearly nine-decade period of legal apartheid that was Jim Crow; as it did to the Christian Right that became so influential in our politics and policies after the Civil Rights Movement (especially within the Republican Party); and as it does now to lunatic fringe elements on the Alt-Right that seek, among other supposedly sanctified actions, a race war to result in the establishment of a new whites-only nation.

Which brings me back to the alleged murderer in Kenosha who, under the guise of joining a group of vigilantes in a self-appointed defense of (other people’s) property against peaceful protesters advocating for a just response to yet another unnecessary shooting of an innocent Black man by the local police, armed himself illegally with an automatic weapon, joked amicably with members of that very same police force who offered him refreshment, went out into the crowd and shot three people and then walked back by those very same officers who allowed him to escape and return to his home where he got a good night’s rest after his craven carnage. Apparently, some of you white folks like your property– or, actually, other people’s property – so much that you’re willing to kill innocents who pose it no threat.

And then it hit me: Just like the millions of southern white men a century and a half ago, this teenage killer had chosen to value other people’s property that was in no meaningful danger more than human life and to risk his own life in ‘defending’ it. What is he, really, but a 21st century version of a Confederate? Just like they sacrificed themselves to protect a system in which other whites could enslave Africans in ways that actually depressed the economic well-being of these misguided volunteers, members of today’s Alt Right are claiming commitment to protecting others’ property rights so that African-Americans remain disenfranchised, if now only meaningfully but not totally.

The ‘Lost Cause’ isn’t lost and it’s still very much a cause.…

No, it’s not news to anyone that racism is alive and well – thriving, actually – in our country today. We need only to look at our president to see that such inhumanity has its most proactive sponsor in the modern era in the Oval Office at present. Not surprisingly, then, we’ve seen a proliferation of racist incidents and unprecedented growth among hate groups intent upon bringing their darkness into our light.

But it is still shocking that such darkness can overtake someone so young, that a police chief under siege could make multiple statements that, in effect, blame the murdered and wounded victims for their fate and that it can all be caught on videotape as if it’s just another nightmare in our continuing national repose of unrest.

Seriously, America, who are we and what have we become?

As far as I can tell, for too many of our fellow citizens, the American Dream that they seek would still presume to dispossess others meaningfully or fully. Their vision of our collective future is one that doesn’t include me or you if you’re not a “White Christian,” a designation that I feel compelled to put in quotes because it appears, definitionally, to be the complete and utter antithesis of the example of its claimed Patron.

And yet I want to be hopeful: after all, if you look back a half-century, it was perfectly acceptable to be a racist in many white circles, which is far less true today (at least overtly so). Organized hate groups are far more on the fringe of white society today than they were then. But, ominously, still they thrive, enabled by technology to connect, coordinate and multiply mostly out of sight of the mainstream of our country (though they have been brought back closer to it thanks to the president and his minions who not only don’t repudiate but actually help spread this movement’s bigotry and hate).

That there are now self-proclaimed White Christian groups that have raised more than $100,000 for the Kenosha murderer’s defense is another indication of the twin realities of the perversity of White Christian Supremacist doctrine and how modern technology can enable its propagation in ways that both legitimate it and give it far greater reach than was possible in the past. It may be fringe still, but it’s getting awfully close to the mainstream.

Which means that it verges on becoming a modern version of the post-Civil War travesty that’s known in apologist circles as “The Redemption”: while the reality is that in the Compromise of 1877 the US Government turned its back on the newly formed and integrated state and local governments within the former Confederacy, which then allowed the resurgence of White Supremacy via a widespread and extended campaign of violence and terror, Lost Cause enthusiasts consider this a development worthy of great celebration because it represents a return to the proper order of things (i.e., Black subjugation).

Relating this to the present incident, as Andy Richter asked poignantly via tweet:

What stake does a white 17 year old from Illinois have in “protecting the streets of Kenosha,” other than the opportunity to fulfill the gun culture fantasy of hunting Black people? Law and order? The protection of property? Bullshit.

That any self-professed people of faith could see this cravenly but casually executed murderous rampage as a righteous cause is an indication of just how divorced from reality – and inextricably tied to White Supremacy – so/too many of our fellow citizens have become … which means that it’s incumbent upon us to address this head-on and draw this supposedly religious inhumanity out into the light and expose it for what it is.

Though this will be painful, we have to contest this ideology directly and listen carefully so that we can discern its root causes and then work to eradicate them … because if we choose to ignore this, not only won’t it go away but, thanks to the Internet, it’ll continue to grow like a cancer within our body politic.

Our choice is clear: either we must do the hard work of seeking to understand and then endeavoring to ameliorate this scourge of White Christian Supremacy, or the Lost Cause will continue to grow in ways that threaten the very communal life of our nation that we all treasure.

(W)hite Christian theology has evolved to play this role powerfully: to render black claims to justice invisible while protecting white economic and social interests, all the while assuring them of their own moral purity. …

This double standard exists despite evidence that white supremacists account for far greater numbers of domestic terrorism than any group and a growing proportion of extremist violence worldwide. 

- Robert P Jones, White Too Long (2020)