All of us belong to a "tribe" or "tribes," groups that help us feel that we belong. These tribes help make up our identity. What is your identity? I'll bet it is at least partially wrapped up in your family, the color of your skin, your ethnic or cultural background, your social class, the kind of work you do and your co-workers, your neighborhood, or your church. All these aspects of our lives give us a sense of who we are, an identity, a security.
Yet, our deepest, realest identity comes from belonging to God. From the beginning of the Bible, God tells us that we belong first to God. Our deepest identity and security is that we are sons and daughters of God. Even more than that, all of us, regardless of our religion, our skin color, our status as slaves or free, our nationalities, or our sex, or sexual orientation, are all one - united - in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28.) All of us were created by the Father THROUGH Christ and FOR Christ. (Colossians 1:16.) Every one of us has been created by the Father through the Son as a GIFT FOR the Son.
If God sees all of us as one, united people, then we are all equal in God's eyes! No skin color, culture, or sex is superior to the other. No group which happens to be dominant should ever lord it over others. IF OUR SPIRITUAL IDENTITY IS IN GOD, there is, then, no reason to ever feel threatened by, or fearful of, others simply because their skin color, language, or culture is different, or because they, in essence, belong to a different "tribe." Yet, this is what has happened, and continues to happen, throughout all of history: people lose sight of their common spiritual heritage and identity, and regress back into being fearful, warring tribes. Anyone different automatically becomes the Enemy, the Invader, when the spiritual reality is that this Other, made also in God's Image, is another Gift who can mirror the Face of God to us.
Thousands of years ago, according to the book of Exodus in the Old Testament, the Jews were slaves in Egypt. The Israelites had been in Egypt for generations, but now that they had become so numerous, the Pharaoh feared their presence. He feared that one day the Israelites would turn against the Egyptians. Gradually and stealthily, he forced them to become his slaves.
He made the slaves build grand 'treasure cities;' barefoot slaves built the walls while the overseer kept watch on top of a tower, while the slaves made bricks from clay and straw.
But Pharaoh was still worried that his Israelite slaves would rise up against him. So he ordered a terrible punishment - all the first-born male babies of the Israelites were to be killed. Pharaoh gave orders to the midwives that 'Every son that is born, you shall cast into the river'. It's a miracle of courage that Moses' mother hid him in a basket floating on the river until the Pharaoh's daughter found him and raised him as her own.
And so, even thousands of years ago, a dominant people, (the Egyptians), no longer having as many children as the minorities in their midst, fears the minority people because they are rapidly multiplying, fears that they will become the majority and overthrow them. So, dreading this "replacement," the dominant people resort to violence.
Today, the "Egyptian replacement theory" has morphed into the equally destructive "white replacement theory." Rosa Schwartzburg, writer and editor for "The Guardian," writes on Monday, August 5, 2019:
“'This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.' Those were the words that appeared in a manifesto published shortly before the deadly shooting in El Paso... More than half of so-called 'alt-right killers' are motivated by the 'white replacement' theory,' which refers to the belief that white people will be systematically replaced by black and brown migrants. The killer in El Paso, who law enforcement believes authored the memo, is apparently no exception.
"The white replacement theory is actually made up of two sub-conspiracies: 'the great replacement' theory, which originated in France, and 'the white genocide theory,' which comes from the US. Together, the theories are among the most widespread ideologies in far-right spaces, and the primary catalysts of far-right mass violence....The great replacement can generally be understood as two core beliefs. The first is that 'western' identity is under siege by massive waves of immigration from non-European/non-white countries, resulting in a replacement of white European individuals via demographics. The second is that replacement has been orchestrated by a shadowy group as part of their grand plan to rule the world – which they will do by creating a completely racially homogenous society. This group is often overtly identified as being Jews, but sometimes the antisemitism is more implicit.
"These beliefs have proliferated in mass killer texts for the past eight years. They are generally understood as having begun with Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass shooter whose 1,500-page manifesto expressed a fear of white ethnic replacement by migrants from the Middle East and North Africa. This same fear cropped up in the manifestos of several more mass killers in Europe, before making its way to the rambling screed published by the Christchurch shooter, which was titled The Great Replacement. The Christchurch manifesto begins with: 'It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates. It’s the birthrates.' It was directly inspired by Breivik – and he, in turn, inspired the El Paso shooter....
"One of the reasons that the great replacement theory was able to take hold so firmly in the US was because of the history of white replacement conspiracies here. The US has its own theory, called the 'white genocide' conspiracy, which came about in the Reconstruction-era after the abolition of slavery and constitutes a belief that the US is on the brink of a 'race war', in which freed slaves would rise up and kill their former masters. This belief has cropped up again and again throughout the 20th century (perhaps you will remember it from the Manson family murders), and most recently has been expressed in the manifestos of white supremacist killers like Dylan Roof and Frazier Glenn Miller.
"The gap between the two theories, however, is closing. As white replacement theory propagates online (galvanized by anti-immigrant rhetoric from far-right populists the world over, from Trump to Hungary’s Viktor Orban), so does the belief in an all-encompassing 'white, European identity' in need of saving. This is not a purely US-based conspiracy, but rather a call to arms to protect what is seen as the white race on a transnational level."
What is the end result - the final evil - of white supremacy? Unparalleled cruelty. Adam Sewar writes for the Oct. 3, 2018 edition of "The Atlantic":
"The Museum of African-American History and Culture is in part a catalog of cruelty. Amid all the stories of perseverance, tragedy, and unlikely triumph are the artifacts of inhumanity and barbarism: the child-size slave shackles, the bright red robes of the wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, the recordings of civil-rights protesters being brutalized by police.
"The artifacts that persist in my memory, the way a bright flash does when you close your eyes, are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. There’s the undated photo from Duluth, Minnesota, in which grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street—one of the white men is straining to get into the picture, his smile cutting from ear to ear. There’s the photo of a crowd of white men huddled behind the smoldering corpse of a man burned to death; one of them is wearing a smart suit, a fedora hat, and a bright smile."
We are living in a world of illusion if we think white supremacy is dead in this country. Those who believe whites are superior want white culture to dominate. Sandy Ovalle writes of her current fears after the mass murders at El Paso for "Sojourners." Listen carefully to her story.
"My body ached as I flew back from El Salvador this week knowing that I would land in a country where people like me had just been killed. And my fears were not unfounded. When I landed in the U.S., a Customs and Border Patrol Officer screened my Mexican passport chanting, 'Trump, Trump, Trump is the best president we’ve ever had.' Standing in front of him in my brown body, I was afraid. In the midst of the violence our community has experienced, this chant was a form of intimidation.
"Some Latinx people have known — and others have suspected — this land is not safe for us, but the extent to which that suspicion has been confirmed in El Paso is terrifying. The perpetrator in this massacre was deliberate in his plan to counter the 'Hispanic invasion.' It’s tempting to believe all this has been incited by the current president’s violent rhetoric. But while that rhetoric has added much fuel to the fire, the fire has been burning for a long time.
"In 1848 when the U.S. took over Indigenous and Mexican lands in the Southwest, Mexican people living in those areas were given a choice to become U.S. citizens or leave. The requirement to become a U.S. citizen in order to remain in the land was a call to assimilation. To legally change one’s allegiance to a new country is one thing, but the greatest demand of becoming a citizen was — and is — to become white, to perceive the greatness of this country lies in its white homogeneity. This ideology ensures that certain groups will always be permanent outsiders and, therefore, threats. The fire has been burning for a long time."
Let's leave white European identity behind for a moment, and return to our spiritual identity. God considers that we are all His, and therefore all one another's as well. Why do we consider others our Enemy then, groups out to invade us? Whites are supposed to have to protect "white, European identity" from WHAT, exactly? From becoming intermingled with other skin colors? From the mixing of other languages and cultures? If we are all one in Christ to begin with, why does this matter in the long run? Who has decided that this is a Bad thing? I've watched interracial couples walking together, with their child walking between them, holding their hands. Frankly, I've found it a beautiful, edifying sight, a sign of unity, of love that can cross all borders and boundaries. A profoundly holy and Biblical sight.
Biblical hope teaches us that when two people or two cultures meet, God, Who is Love, Who makes the two of us one, infinitely desires that we choose to blend and strengthen, rather than attempt to obliterate each other with one coming out "on top." And God gives us the grace to do so!
I can say all of this unequivocally, operating out of my fairly secure sense of my own identity, but then it becomes so easy to develop a sense of superiority, a rush to judgement, when someone is mouthing white supremacist or "invasion" rhetoric. What happens when someone doesn't have a strong, secure, sense of identity, and is searching for one, and for a life's purpose? What happens if someone is among the Walking Wounded? It makes him or her easy prey for white supremacist rhetoric. Christian Picciolini is a former violent extremist. Thirty years ago, he was a Neo-Nazi. Today, he runs a global network, The Free Radicals Project, through which he and other ex-white nationalists counsel others to free themselves from the grip of white nationalism. Listen carefully - Here, he tells his story:
"I was recruited when I was 14 years old, in 1987. My parents are Italian immigrants, and when they came over they struggled, had to work constantly, so I didn’t see them very much. But I grew up in a loving family. Still, I went searching for a sense of identity and community and purpose. I was standing in an alley, and a man came and recruited me. I spent eight years as part of America’s first neo-Nazi skinhead group. I didn’t have a foundation for racism; everything I wore as a suit of armor, I ended up believing, and certainly promoting and acting on. But the foundation of racism was never there for me. When I started to meet people that challenged what I believed about them, people that were black, brown, gay—they showed me compassion at a time in my life when I least deserved it. I’d kind of sealed myself off from the real world for eight years, and when I finally started to get peeks at what these people were really like, things changed.
"I got out in 1996, and spent three years trying to self-reflect after disengaging, and trying to understand how and why I got there—really struggling with that, until around 2000, when I started … unofficially doing the work that I was doing....
"I don’t necessarily look for people. They find me. I do interviews, I have a TV show, I’ve published a memoir. Anytime people see an interview or a TED Talk, they reach out to me. Because there really is nobody else to turn to. If you have a heroin addiction, there are groups for that. If you’re being abused, there are groups to turn to for that. But unfortunately, if you’re struggling with these ideas of hate, there really is nobody else."
Piccolini explains how he helps people to leave white supremacism behind:
"It’s a whole lot of listening. I listen for what I call potholes: things that happen to us in our journey of life that detour us, things like trauma, abuse, mental illness, poverty, joblessness. Even privilege can be a pothole that detours us. As I listen to those—rather than debate or confront them about their ideology, but creating a rapport with them—I start to fill in those potholes. I will find resources in their community to help them deal with the trauma, with whatever it is that was the motivation for them to go in that direction. Nobody’s born racist; we all found it. Then I leverage the community around them to try to engage them and support them, and try to find ways for them to crawl out of that hole. Typically what I found is, people hate other people because they hate something very specifically about themselves, or are very angry about a situation within their own environment, and that is then projected onto other people. So I’m really trying to build resilience with people." (from "A Reformed White Nationalist Says The Worst Is Yet To Come," by Yara Bayoumy and Kathy Gilsinan, in "The Atlantic," August 6, 2019.)
Chris Picciolini's life began to change when he started to meet people - black, brown, and gay - who, through their words and actions, challenged the stereotypes that he'd believed about them. They were honest about who they were. They showed him compassion when he needed it. As the Gospels remind us, Jesus interacted with people one on one, in loving, personal relationships, and that was the how and why of people's conversion experiences. Nothing more or less can work in our own lives, or our nation's life, whether it is our meeting one on one with those who desire to change, or our meeting one on one with people who can change us.
Simply calling oneself a "Christian," identifying with the tribe, knowing the rules, doesn't teach us our deepest identity - that of being brother and sister to every human being because we all belong to God. Only prayer, only a one to one encounter and relationship with the healing, revivifying, resurrected Jesus the Christ, can remove the last, sinful vestiges of racism, sexism and xenophobia from our hearts and souls - and lead to our resurrection from the death of sinful divisiveness. Change can never happen in people's souls if their fragile or iron-walled identity that they have personally constructed without God's input places them in a superior position to everyone else. Howard Thurman, great teacher, philosopher, theologian, and mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr., recounts this story. Listen carefully:
"In the fall of 1935 I was serving as chairman of a delegation sent on a pilgrimage of friendship from the students of America to the students of India, Burma, and Ceylon. [On this trip Thurman also met and visited with Gandhi.] It was at a meeting in Ceylon that the whole crucial issue was pointed up to me in a way that I can never forget. . . . I was invited by the principal to have coffee. . . .
He said to me, 'What are you doing over here? I know what the newspapers say . . . but that is not my question. What are you doing over here? This is what I mean.
“'More than three hundred years ago your forefathers were taken from the western coast of Africa as slaves. The people who dealt in the slave traffic were Christians. One of your famous Christian hymn writers, Sir John Newton, made his money from the sale of slaves to the New World. He is the man who wrote ‘How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds’ and ‘Amazing Grace’—there may be others, but these are the only ones I know. The name of one of the famous British slave vessels was ‘Jesus.’
“'The men who bought the slaves were Christians. Christian ministers, quoting the Christian apostle Paul, gave the sanction of religion to the system of slavery. Some seventy years or more ago you were freed by a man [Abraham Lincoln] who was not a professing Christian, but was rather the spearhead of certain political, social, and economic forces, the significance of which he himself did not understand. During all the period since then you have lived in a Christian nation in which you are segregated, lynched, and burned. Even in the church, I understand, there is segregation. One of my students who went to your country sent me a clipping telling about a Christian church in which the regular Sunday worship was interrupted so that many could join a mob against one of your fellows. When he had been caught and done to death, they came back to resume their worship of their Christian God.
“I am a Hindu. I do not understand. Here you are in my country, staying deep within the Christian faith and tradition. I do not wish to seem rude to you. But, sir, I think you are a traitor to all the darker peoples of the earth. I am wondering what you, an intelligent man, can say in defense of your position?'”
(from Thurman's classic, "Jesus and the Disinherited.")
Thurman prayed over this astute Hindu's challenging comments, and finally understood that Jesus, persecuted and executed as a criminal, has come to spiritually and physically free all oppressed peoples:
"The basic fact is that Christianity as it was born in the mind of this Jewish teacher and thinker appears as a technique of survival for the oppressed. That it became, through the intervening years, a religion of the powerful and the dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing that it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus. 'In him was life; and the life was the light of men.' Wherever his spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for he announced the good news that fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, the three hounds of hell that track the trail of the disinherited, need have no dominion over them.” (from "Jesus and the Disinherited.")
If we are white, perhaps we think we've never known what it is to be oppressed, or to endure discrimination, or to fear being genuinely ourselves in front of others. Yet, this is not completely true. Enslaved to unhealthy habits or addictions or sins, we all know what it is to be unfree. Enslaved to holding or voicing the opinions of others in order to be accepted, we know what it is to be unfree. Enslaved to cultural rules about what it means to be masculine or feminine, beautiful or handsome, we know what it means to be unfree. Enslaved to familial or cultural prejudices, we know what it means to be unfree. Once we can dig deep into our psyches and discover the ways we are unfree and the ways we keep others from being free or from feeling they belong, we can begin to face any latent racism or xenophobia in ourselves. We can come in prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner." We can accept Christ's Amazing Grace. We can be secure in our identity and help others to be secure in theirs. Because giving people a true sense of identity, of secure belonging in Christ, is giving them the freedom to be themselves.
When we know our true identity in Christ, when we realize and accept that we are equal to others, we can finally really listen to those who are different without feeling threatened by their differences or threatening them. We can finally hear their stories, and also tell our stories. The genuine identity in us rises up to meet the genuine identity in them. We are both truly free because we give each other the right to belong. Thurman puts it this way:
"There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have. And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls."
Biblical hope teaches us that God, Who is Love, desires that when two people or two cultures meet, they choose to "marry," become one, yet remain themselves, blend and strengthen, rather than sinfully attempt to overcome or obliterate each other. Our one on one encounters with Christ and in Christ can help us as individuals and as a nation to overcome white supremacy.
When, one on one, we meet and greet others of different races or cultures or sexual orientations, we can do the following: 1) meet in genuine caring and solicitude in our mutual spiritual identity as sons and daughters of God, 2) meet in humble encounter with each other's stories, 3) give each other a secure sense of freedom and belonging. We can prayerfully remember that St. Paul tells us the following: It is He, Christ, Who is our Peace, Who made the two of us one, breaking down the barriers that kept us apart....We are made one in the Blood of Christ.