U. Of Pennsylvania professor Anthea Butler has published a powerful piece at the Huffington Post that details how the separation of families at the border is not un-American at all but rather only the latest manifestation of a peculiar sect of Christianity that preaches, to its practitioners, power over the powerless in direct contradiction of the author of that faith.
“In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, published in 1845, Douglass named the true religion of America. America was not a Christian nation, he wrote, because it followed the gospel of “the slaveholding religion.” In describing “the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land,” he concluded that there was “no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.”
Whether or not President Donald Trump realizes it, Douglass is no longer with us. But the events of this week would not surprise the man who wrote that to call America a Christian nation was “the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.” This week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders cited the Bible to justify the unjustifiable: a Trump-approved immigration policy of ripping children from their parents. In fact, in doing so, Sessions invoked Romans 13, which is the exact same argument that slaveholders and sympathetic clerics used, in Douglass’ day, to justify slavery.
While there has been an outcry from many quarters, it is worth remembering that separating and destroying families is American history. White evangelicals supported slavery; Andrew Jackson, Trump’s hero, was responsible for the Trail of Tears and the forced march of the Cherokee; Japanese internment was used to indoctrinate prisoners into Christianity.
And now, separating and destroying families is our American present. This is America; this has always been America. This reprehensible moment in America is not an anomaly, but a continuation of the intertwining of race, nation and slaveholding Christianity. President Trump’s administration and his evangelical supporters insist that we adhere to their pernicious interpretations of scripture, as so many American theocrats have done before them.”
Normally I prefer to quote from the whole of an essay by presenting paragraphs from the beginning middle, and end, but Butler’s first four perfectly outline the predicament we, as liberals, face.
The “hypocritical Christianity” of this nation has taken control of every branch of government, and ridding ourselves of that control, and its unbelievable perversion of the teachings of Christ — backed by 300 years of American history -- will be a long and arduous process.
Please click over and read the rest of Butler’s essay.
She has much to say.