I write today from Washington DC, where I attended my first board meeting for the Public Religion Research Institute. I love this community of colleagues who are using their big brains and brave hearts, who are holding up a mirror for the American public of what we think, what we feel, and what we are saying about faith, politics, and democracy. They do this by sharing data—all of its stories—that help inform the future story. For me, it’s as though they are saying, “This is who we are, and this is who we might become if we reach for the stars…or maybe for the stardust inside of each of us.”
We were plotting a revolution here, is what I am saying. Kelly Brown Douglas, Gene Robinson, Obery Hendricks, Jemar Tisby, Robert P. Jones, and so many other brilliant minds. These are just the ones I know best. Nate Walker is the chair of the board and he opened our time with the reflection below, as we turn our faces toward Juneteenth, toward July 4th, toward a future in which freedom and democracy are on the line. I hope you enjoy his tender and fierce words, like I did.
We, too, are plotting a revolution, family. We’re going to have an off-the-chain worship this Sunday with music and words that are tender and fierce. We have three ways to celebrate Juneteenth on Wednesday. You can go to hear Ivan sing in the evening, celebrate Juneteenth at Carnegie Hall, or enjoy the sounds of Freedom Songs at Lincoln Center. On June 23, we’ll ring that freedom bell again, and right after worship, we’ll do an action in the park about a statue that mocks the freedoms for which we yearn. On June 30, we’ll worship early—9:30a—so we can take it to the streets in the Queer Liberation March.
We know we need to make freedom a way of life, not an empty sentiment. We’ve been doing this work together for 20 years, family. If you are in New York, come celebrate 20 years of our Fierce Freedom work, at Joe’s Pub on June 15, at noon. Get a ticket here.
Love you, all the way to freedom.
Jacqui
Freedom: A Way of Life
June 13, 2024 | Nathan C. Walker
For centuries, insiders sought to transformation from within.
Incremental moments of institutional reform soon became calcified embalmment’s of the past.
Pushing forward, regressing back,
liberation has always been a struggle for and against power.
From out of ancient times into the twilight of now, reformers made a sacred vow: never mischaracterize freedom as a zero-sum game.
Freedom does not become what it sets out against.
People do. The power we seek becomes our reign. Freedom knows not a selfish thought, knows not how to diminish your worth.
To know freedom is to know that your win is my glory your suffering is bound to my own.
For, the sum of all that is holy shines far beyond failed promises of democracy–– from party jingles to picket signs.
The sum of all that is holy is found in our collective desire to know freedom not as a political slogan, but as a way of life.
What always need to be made widely public are such instances of immense mass inhumanity.
In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, the narrator notes that, like the South, the Civil War era northern states also hated Black people but happened to hate slavery more.
[Of course, this succinct summation of the ugliness of the politics of difference and scale is applicable elsewhere: e.g. they hate libertarians but hate liberals even more; they loath Semites but despise the Palestinians far more, or hate Hispanics but abhor the Chinese more so, etcetera, etcetera.]
Black people have been brutalized for centuries, and in the U.S. told they were not welcome — even though they, as a people, had been violently forced to the U.S. from their African home as slaves. And, as a people, there has been little or no reparations or real refuge for them here, since. ...
Sadly and atrociously, human lives on this planet are consciously or subconsciously perceived as not being of equal value or worth, when morally they all definitely should be.
They can then be treated as though they are disposable and, by extension, their suffering and death are somehow less worthy of external concern, sometimes even by otherwise democratic and relatively civilized nations.
A somewhat similar inhumane devaluation is observable in external attitudes, albeit perhaps on a subconscious level, toward the daily civilian lives lost in protractedly devastating war zones and famine-stricken nations.
In other words, the worth of such life will be measured by its overabundance and/or the protracted conditions under which it suffers and/or perishes; and those people can eventually receive meagre column inches on the back page of the First World’s daily news.
It is like an immoral consideration of 'quality of life'.