The Haunting of American Memory
A Raging Election, The Moral Power of Memory, and the church in America
This is an edited and condensed excerpt from a longer piece published this week on Seen and Unseen, an online magazine of the Centre for Cultural Witness and the Church of England.
Foreboding. That’s how my friend recently described the time between now, the election, and the aftermath.
It’s everywhere, and nowhere. A creeping, unanswered question. It’s felt, it’s lived, it’s immediate. And it’s true: there is little reason to carry ourselves as though this election will be anything other than consequential.
We would do well to pay attention to this. And for me, I plan on casting my vote against Trump and for what I wager to be a better path towards provisional freedom.
I’m thinking alot of the words of Lebanese theologian, Nabil Habiby:
“Let us be wary of dressing our political decisions with biblical certainties. Let us take care that our political philosophies—whether leading us towards direct engagement or conscious disengagement—be biased towards the marginalized and against the interests of power, money, and accumulation of privilege.”
But weighing our responsibility and coming to understand—really and truly—the crucible of this American election, means descending to the depths of American memory, into its distortions and attempted preservations.
And here you find a stark truth that rages beneath the surface of our politics and our society and the church in America: “We The People” have never resolved the American Civil War. And not just the Civil War itself, but its ongoing aftermath, from a period called Reconstruction to the century later Civil Rights struggle, and on to today.
Recently I heard historian
share an anecdote of something uttered by a Gettysburg battlefield tour guide, “The north won the war,” he said, “but the south won the memory.”History appears to moderns as “objective,” as a set of facts. It’s something we assume, bone deep, the air we breathe. And this concept obscures how our own memory of history can be distorted and warped. How calls to “move on” from things in the past are often effective strategies to extend willed ignorance, to deny the truths that lead to reconciliation.
Memory can be distorted, warped, and pressed into service of propaganda.
Consider this past month that former US President Jimmy Carter turned 100 while in hospice care. His birthday made mainstream news. An impressive lifespan to go with an incredible legacy as a husband, father, and public servant. But the American memory is strange. Strange because Carter, the oldest living US President, is still with us. Making it all the more startling to remember that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was born 5 years after President Carter. That, if not for an assassin's bullet at a Memphis hotel balcony in 1968, Dr. King could have been celebrating his 96th birthday this coming January.
This distortion of memory persists within a white church in America which has made itself fit for service as a chaplain of empire. Willingly producing, baptizing, or consuming memories which obscure the truth that brings about reconciliation. In so many words, we have in America today a more reactionary and partisan element of the church. One that cannot take the moral responsibility of memory seriously because it finds itself too invested in its role of reifying and deifying America. And whenever the church settles to serve as a chaplain of empire, it soon confuses the privilege and luxury it secures with its own freedom. Because many white churches confuse this power with freedom, the memory of America is captive to its own ends. It is not free. It does not know the freedom which liberates the church to the moral task of memory.
I think here of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s claim that the church can never take immediate or “direct” political action as church because, as the community of God’s people it “does not know the necessary course of history.” The church does not possess special access to the ideas of the future, nor does it consign the world to fate. What the church is, it is as witness. It testifies in the bread, the wine, the water of the liberating presence of God. But when the church acts apart from this vocation it risks becoming what Ernst Kasemann called the “anti-church” which replaces the cross with power.
I find this a broadly accurate depiction of what the white American church presently offers to the American public. It is not the beloved community and conscience of the nation to which Martin Luther King Jr. spoke, rather it is a chaplain of empire. And in this role, the church finds itself both a producer and consumer of a distorted memory, filled with a mixture of sentiment, propaganda, and raw fact. A story of America in service of a particular vision of America which never existed.
Is this not too political for the church? Mustn’t we keep religion and politics separate? All theology is political. That is, all human talk about God involves consequences—for good or ill—concerning fellow human beings. James Cone puts it more directly: “Any talk about God that fails to make God's liberation of the oppressed its starting point is not Christian.” The difference then is not whether the church is political, but rather whether its talk about God is indeed talk which remembers in a living way the God of Jesus Christ, and whether or not it opens itself up to the critical examination of its own god talk. And this is where we find a good deal of the white American church today.
Even the mention of the “white church” in America should stir up the paradoxes and contradictions which persist in the field of American memory. But perhaps we too easily confuse “history” with “memory.” Memory is living, fluid, and potent. I like how Robert Jenson puts it, “so long as a people is alive, there will be an exchange between how it remembers its history at any given time and its needs, concerns, and goings-on in the present. There is thus usually a difference between a people’s own living memory…and the accounts constructed by historians…” Jenson was talking about the Old Testament. Here, we reflect a bit on the American experiment.
I remember in 2020, as a pastor, I sat in a prayer night at the church where I served on staff. But there was not much praying. Instead, we were shown a video selected by our senior pastor. The video was a tour of Washington D.C. highlighting all the Christian imagery and inscriptions scattered across the American capital. I’ll never forget the words that came from my pastor: “The next time,” he said, “anyone tells you America isn’t a Christian nation, you tell them about what you learned here tonight.” And that was it. The video never mentioned many of the buildings were built by the hands of people enslaved in an institution justified by a most bankrupt faith.
I’ve come to understand that every church in America, even with the Christian story on its lips, tells a story about America, too. And the memory of that story carries with it theological consequences. There can be no more direct way to discredit human words about the God of Jesus Christ than to attach those words to a false memory of America masquerading as dogma.
This distorted memory, and its myths, are part of the raging fury of this election, too. And responsible Christian action must reckon with the theological reality contained in this willed ignorance and silence.