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I came home to a different city this week.
Before I left on Sunday, I talked to friends in Charlotte, North Carolina about ICE raids that had begun on Saturday - assaults on work sites and grocery store parking lots that sounded like what we’ve seen in Chicago and Los Angeles and everywhere else Greg Bovino has been this year. By the time I got home on Wednesday, masked Customs and Border Patrol officers had been seen at a few locations across Durham. Rapid response networks showed up to nonviolently challenge their presence, record interactions, and inform the community about what was happening.
This morning, as I was dropping kids off in the carpool lane, volunteers were outside my son’s school (as they were at all Durham Public Schools) with a simple message.
Their signs said, “We Are Family.”
For more than four decades, religious nationalists have tried to steer people who care about “family values” toward the Republican Party. Anxious and afraid that their way of life was somehow passing away as the world became more diverse in the swift transition to postmodern thought, post-industrial society and a global economy, many white Christians believed this story.
James Davison Hunter, a sociologist attuned to the ways elites and institutions were shaping public conversations in the late 20th century, named the phenomenon in his 1994 book, Culture Wars. “America is in the midst of a culture war that has had and will continue to have reverberations not only within public life but within the lives of ordinary Americans everywhere.”
Describing the institutions that had lined up across from one another on the battlefield of public life, Hunter noted that historic divisions in America had shifted. No longer were religious people divided along the denominational lines that had shaped public engagement for most of American history. Increasingly, Hunter observed, Americans saw themselves on one side or the other of a war between traditional morality and progressive values. This wasn’t just about left versus right in politics, though the culture wars inevitably shaped where people stood on political issues. The divide between orthodoxy and progressivism was more fundamental, Hunter observed. People on each side increasingly understood their way of seeing the world as fundamentally incompatible with the enemy across the battle line.
In the realignment that Hunter described, people who affirmed “family values” were lined up against progressives and policy proposals that sought to expand rights and alleviate poverty. In the name of defending traditional morality and a “biblical worldview,” religious conservatives were asked to fight against marginalized and vulnerable people who were crying out for justice in public life.
On the frontlines of this culture war, some of us who committed to follow Jesus as Lord realized we had been deployed to fight against the people through whom Jesus promised to be present in Matthew 25. I know this because I was trained as a foot soldier in the culture wars. Growing up in the Southern Baptist Church and an evangelical college in the 1980s and 90s, I experienced the vilification of liberals, environmentalists, civil and women’s rights advocates not as a strategy to gain political power but as God’s truth. However sincere the agenda of social justice warriors might seem, I was told that their true aim was a squishy tolerance that, in the end, could stand anything but a true Christian.
My memory verses in Sunday School taught me to love my enemies, but the culture war taught me to be on guard. Love someone too much, and it might cost you your moral grounding.
I went AWOL from this cultural identity when I learned that Jesus was present to me in the people I had been taught to fear. Poor and marginalized people taught me to read the Bible anew, not only as a vision for God’s justice in the world but also as a story about how God’s justice comes to us through people who’ve been rejected. I learned new and better family values.
I’ve spent much of my adult life working as a pastor and teacher with people who’ve come to realize that they were lied to about the things that matter most to them. A political movement used their faith to try to get their vote. It doesn’t feel good to be used. Turning on the identity politics of the culture wars is difficult and painful work.
But I know enough stories to know that the change happens when people see how the lies hurt the people they share life with, know, and love. People change when the lies touch their family.
In the fog of war, people often become confused about where battle lines lie and who the enemy is. Those who’ve known war are honest about this. Clarity is hard to come by in the heat of battle. But at the Last Judgment, Jesus says, nations will be measured by how we treat the least among us. Such an apocalypse isn’t meant to inspire fear so much as to offer clarity about which side to take in confusing times. When we stand with people who are hungry and thirsty, naked and far from home, sick and incarcerated, we stand with Jesus.
My neighbors standing outside of Durham’s schools this morning understand this. We are family.
No lie can live forever, but this particular lie has brought us, four centuries after the first enslaved Africans were brought to this land, to a moral crisis unlike anything America has experienced since its families, churches and government were rent by civil war. Now, as then, it is uncertain whether a democratic political arrangement can endure without addressing the fundamental division in our common life—not an irreconcilable difference of worldviews, but a growing breach between the extremes of inequality. If a multi-ethnic democracy is possible in 21st century America, it will depend on a moral movement that resists the false gods of Christian nationalism and rediscovers a biblical vision for justice and mercy in our common life.
If we are to become the America we’ve never yet been, it will require what Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. called a “revolution of values.”
That revolution begins, I think, when we recognize that we are family - that real family values are not found in culture wars that divide, but in coming together to defend all of our families from an authoritarianism that threatens us all.
I look forward to joining the King Center and two of my PRRI Senior Democracy Fellows, Kristin Du Mez and Jemar Tisby, PhD , for a conversation about Dr. King and the revolution of values we need this evening. You can watch live at 7pm ET.
PS - Bishop Barber is giving a talk this evening at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA on the moral obligation to tell the truth when lies are being used to justify policy violence. We’ll share a recording of his message with Our Moral Moment subscribers as soon as we have the recording.
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