Easter is usually a cheerful occasion. This is in no doubt due partly to the eggs, bunnies, and Hallmark cards, but for Christians the true cause for celebration is Jesus' resurrection, coming after the terrifying darkness of Good Friday. On Easter, God conquers the greatest evil: the death of God's beloved child at the hands of imperial authority.
But we live in a moment of great darkness. In a world awash with social and political violence, Jesus is being crucified all around us. And for American Christians, the tables are turned; the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" is still our own government, just as Martin Luther King publicly acknowledged almost forty years ago.
That our aspiring Caesar calls himself a born-again Christian is an offense, quite literally, against all that is holy. That the overwhelming majority of those who worship weekly voted to re-elect him is a sign of a cancer upon what scripture teaches is to be the living body of Christ: the church.
But today, five months after that re-election and three years after the invasion of Iraq, with few signs of hope on the horizon, we are jarred by an unlikely reality: Christ is risen!
That reality has sustained generations of Christians through times of great torment and trial -- most far worse than our own -- and led many to bravely follow the gospel, even at the cost of their own lives. Among these was King, who was fond of saying that "the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice." But today, my mind turns to another -- Archbishop Óscar Romero, and the words he preached the day before he died:
Easter is itself now the cry of victory. No one can quench the life that Christ has resurrected. Neither death nor all the banners of death and hatred raised against him and against his church can prevail. He is the victorious one! Just as he will thrive in an unending Easter, so we must accompany him in a Lent and a Holy Week of cross, sacrifice, and martyrdom. As he said, blessed are they who are not scandalized by his cross. Lent, thus, is a call to celebrate our redemption in that difficult combination of cross and victory. Our people are well prepared to do so these days: all that surrounds us proclaims the cross. But those who have Christian faith and hope know that behind this Calvary of El Salvador lies our Easter, our resurrection. That is the Christian people's hope.
Amen.
Wise words on how to build a powerful religious left:
Religious progressives must now learn the lesson evangelicals learned long ago: the key to organizing people of faith is not through celebrity clergy but through congregations. Congregations are where the rubber hits the road. This is where the faithful meet, greet, eat and mobilize. E-mail lists are great and an important tool, but congregations are the long established historical and spiritual bases of operation. Congregations are the very definition of grassroots. The right knows this and the left does not. ...
One problem for religious progressives today is a lack of trained organizers in their midst. The religious right has been training organizers for years. Religious progressives, with some heroic exceptions, have not. Progressives need to enlist the help of professional organizers from the likes of the labor movement and community organizations to fill in the gaps and train a new generation of activists. Otherwise there will be lots of message, lots of talk, lots of spin, but it will not filter down to the congregations with sufficient force to mobilize significant numbers.
I would add that mainline Protestants are too often conflict-averse, fearful of losing members to political controversy or otherwise upsetting the apple cart. While evangelicals are busy making sure everyone has a Christian Coalition voter guide, the rest of us are forming task forces to gather input on whether at some point we might issue a vague statement about faith and politics. In addition to being politically useless and reflective of organizational ostrich-headedness, that's also bad theology: "Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers" (Matthew 21:12).
As I've written previously, I think there's really no good empirical basis (as opposed to a poorly-worded question in an inaccurate exit poll) for the notion that this election turned on "moral values" more than any other (especially 2000). Nevertheless, the buzz on that front hasn't subsided much since election night. And while my initial inclination has been to chalk it up to lazy journalists and the right-wing noise machine, it's been picked up on to a far greater degree by a far wider audience for that to be an adequate explanation. From the blogosphere to the editorial pages, everyone and his brother is offering some variation on "the left needs to (re-)claim the language of religion and morality."
What if this meme is sticking in part because it speaks to something deeper than exit polls and message strategy? There's an obvious kernel of truth in the religious right's diagnosis -- that our nation really is on the wrong moral path, suffering from a degraded culture and an eroded value system, particularly in the way we treat the most vulnerable members of society.
I'd like to humbly suggest that some of what's going on here is a case of projection. Perhaps it's not just that lefties know the religious right is hurting our side on Election Day (hell, they've been doing that for a quarter-century), but that we sense that America really does need an authentic, radical religious renewal and the hope and prophecy that comes with it. That we need to reach to something beyond ourselves to fully articulate a political vision that will not only lead us to victory, but speak to the times in which we live.
I went to the march this weekend, and while I should've been writing papers instead, it was pretty incredible. While I'm not quite buying the largest-march-in-American-history line, it was truly massive, and should give pause to anyone writing obituaries for the feminist movement.
And while I'm perfectly willing to march for legal access to abortion (and even more willing to march for a broader agenda of access to reproductive choice and health care), I continue to be deeply morally conflicted about abortion, as many of you know. And the dynamics with the counter-protesters really made me squeamish. Sure, there were the crazy contigent, preaching into megaphones and brandishing side-by-side photos of aborted fetuses and Holocaust victims. The usual shouting matches ensued.
But there was also a large contigent of (mostly) young women, silently holding simple signs reading "Women Deserve Better Than Abortion", "I Regret My Abortion," and so forth. What's the right answer to these folks? Do we really want to glorify abortion? Ignore the obvious reality that women frequently are forced into having abortions they don't really want, whether because of poverty, family pressure, or other factors?
I heard a lot of snickering as we marched by, but not a lot of answers. One particularly opportunistic pro-choicer found a man a few blocks down, holding the same sign, and set up shop next to him with her own reading "77% of anti-abortion leaders are men" -- talk about an unfair cheap shot.
Searching through Sojourners archives (try running a search for "abortion" -- there's some interesting stuff), I found something with Naomi Wolf referencing an article she wrote for The New Republic in 1995. I looked it up, and found it to be about the most challenging and moving thing I've ever read on the issue:
It was when I was four months pregnant, sick as a dog, and in the middle of an argument, that I realized I could no longer tolerate the fetus-is-nothing paradigm of the pro-choice movement. I was being interrogated by a conservative, and the subject of abortion rights came up. "You're four months pregnant," he said. "Are you going to tell me that's not a baby you're carrying?"The accepted pro-choice response at such a moment in the conversation is to evade: to move as swiftly as possible to a discussion of "privacy" and "difficult personal decisions" and "choice." Had I not been so nauseated and so cranky and so weighed down with the physical gravity of what was going on inside me, I might not have told what is the truth for me. "Of course it's a baby," I snapped. And went rashly on: "And if I found myself in circumstances in which I had to make the terrible decision to end this life, then that would be between myself and God."
Startlingly to me, two things happened: the conservative was quiet; I had said something that actually made sense to him. And I felt the great relief that is the grace of long-delayed honesty.
Worth considering.