If the presidential debate left you feeling soiled, as it did me, I would highly recommend getting hold of the new biography of John Lewis by Historian Jon Meachem: His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis And The Power Of Hope.
I had my dose of the worst of America Monday night, and reading about the best is cleansing and nourishing.
Lewis’s remarkable life restores not only my faith in the ability of people to do good, but it reminds me that Christianity, in particular, has been and can still be a powerful force for good in our public life.
For many Americans, including myself and other non-Christians, the thought that Christian morality can play a powerful role in our civic is dubious at the moment.
This is mostly because so many white evangelicals from 2016 to now have decided to make a philandering, corrupt, lying, cruel, boastful bully their messenger from God.
They seek great power in our political structure.
Martin Luther King and his protege John Lewis stuck closer to the actual teachings of Christ. They were genuinely humble and truly Christian.
George Washington and Billy Graham both warned against religious leaders involving themselves and their followers in politics.
Graham said he wished he had spent more time at home with his family.
“I also would have steered clear of politics,” he said. “I’m grateful for the opportunities God gave me to minister to people in high places; people in power have spiritual and personal needs like everyone else, and often they have no one to talk to. But looking back, I know I sometimes crossed the line, and I wouldn’t do that now.”
George Washington said, “I am persuaded, you will permit me to observe, that the path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction.” Gently put. He was more direct when he warned about the need for “effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution.”
Spiritual tyranny is a good term for what many scholars and judges believe is what the modern Christian Evangelical movement has been doing, as they fund and supported Super Pac’s and the most ambitious effort ever for a single faith to take over our judicial system and force their tyranny and values on everyone else.
Instead of embracing Billy Graham’s open-arms approach to everything and everyone, the modern evangelical movement has almost become a nationalist movement of its own, a strike force and devoted ally of the Republican Party, and it’s a nakedly non-religious best new friend with his orange hair.
I wonder if the evangelists and their many young students have any idea of the stain they are leaving on Christ’s once rich moral history.
I am very sad to hear young friends jeer at the mention of Christianity, and I’m not even a Christian.
John Lewis’s life is inspiring; it reminds me of the moral power of Jesus Christian and the true Christian Church and the power and support that power gave to the civil rights movement.
In December of 1975, in a story headline SAINTS AMONG US, Time Magazine listed Lewis, along with Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day, and others as “Messengers of Love and Hope: Living Saints.”
To many people, the term “saint” is a medieval word having little to do with modern times. To others, the term is shorthand for describing someone who willingly suffers something that seems beyond the call of duty, or a person of heroic virtue – Gandhi, Mother Teresa.
Or a John Lewis. “A saint has to be a misfit,” religious historian Martin Marty told Time. “A person who embodies what his culture considers typical or moral cannot be exemplary.”
Lewis was exemplary and a misfit.
His friend Diane Nash, who loved him, said she didn’t think of him in saintly terms.” He was human,” she remembered. “He was my friend, my brother.”
But saints, say, religious scholars, are human. That’s what makes them saints rather than saviors.
“Next to Holy Scripture there certainly is no more useful book for Christians than that of the lives of the saints, especially when unadulterated and authentic,” wrote Martin Luther. For those stories, he added, “one is greatly pleased to find how they sincerely believed in God’s word, confessed it with their lips, praised it by their living and honored and confirmed it by their suffering and dying.”
There was a lot of Lewis’s life to suggest he might very well have been a saint.
He was always in front of the lines, beaten, kicked, struck on the head, jailed.
John Lewis said he made Christ’s teaching the centerpiece of his life. From the time he met Martin Luther King, he followed Jesus and his preaching about nonviolence to let the “Kingdom” about which Jesus prayed when he said “Thy Kingdom Come” – a kingdom governed by the Sermon on the Mount, begin in every person.”
In the nonviolent civil rights movement that he and Dr. King helped to found and shape – and which he followed in different forms through all the years of his life – Lewis always lived that faith in his personal life writes Meachem. “I would say that without reservation or hesitation, ” said Lewis.
In that way, he made these much evoked but rarely followed Christian ideas very real and very political. And very effective.
At times in its history, Christianity has been an instrument of repression. In many of us’ living memory, it has also been used as a means of liberation, progress, and care for the needy and vulnerable.
The secular have often tried to ban religious from the civic square, but it always seems to come back, sometimes in noble forms, at others in greedier and more selfish, even murderous ways.
“In ages of faith, the final aim of life is placed beyond life,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his Democracy of America in the time of Andrew Jackson. “The men of these ages, therefore..learn by insensible degrees to repress a multitude of petty, passing desires. This was the vision, says Meacham, a religious vision that elevated America in the mid-1960s.
The protest movements in America today are mostly non-violent, but non-violence is not universally embraced. In many ways, the civil rights movement was a struggle between nonviolence and violence, between a demand for “Freedom Now” and the cry for “Black Power,” between he visions of Martin Luther King and the vision of Malcolm X, who argued that Black Americans had a moral obligation to use any means necessary to achieve what the Founders thought of as citizens’ rights.
The path that ultimately prevailed was the non-violent way of Lewis, which was also the way of Jesus. The movement Lewis and King spawned turned the South upside down and began the still-raging battle for equality and equal justice.
“We say we are a believing nation,” said Lewis, “yet when we are wronged, the people demand revenge. “If we truly believe, then what is the role of forgiveness, mercy and compassion in public life.”
I feel the loss of this vision acutely in our angry, judgmental, and selfish ways. Dr. King, Lewis, Gandhi, and Mandela all demonstrated the power of moral authority and faith as preached by the true Christ, but not by the Christians lobbying for political power for its own sake, not for the good of others.
There is nothing humble in that. And it is wrenching to see that white overseers are still trying to take their voting rights away.
Lewis and King never gave up on what Lewis thought of as the “Beloved Community,” which was different from the American Founders’ perfect union.
The Beloved Community was something wholly perfect. Lewis said it was “nothing less than the Christian concept of the Kingdom of God on earth. According to this concept, all human existence throughout history, from ancient Eastern and Western societies up through the present day, has strived towards the community, toward coming together. That movement is as inexorable, as irresistible, as the flow of a river towards the sea.”
The evangelical movement has distracted us from what John Lewis did, and his Beloved Community did. Our public square is filled with poison, threat, and hatred.
I am not a Christian, but I fantasize that a human Messiah will rise among us and bring it back one day. Why not?