Peace? Now? Really?

Peace? Now? Really?

June 1, 2020

I participate in a weekly clergy lectionary study group that functions more like a clergy support group. We’ve been meeting by Zoom since the coronavirus lock down. At the end of each meeting we pray. Yes, clergy people actually pray. Today of course we talked a lot about the civil rights protests, the looting, and the sometimes violent police response that’s been going on across our country over the past week since the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Today as we prayed one of our number prayed for peace. Now, I’m generally very much in favor of peace. I’ve written about my commitment to peace on this blog more than once before. Normally I consider peace to be one of humanity’s greatest blessings. Jesus said “my peace I give to you.” In Jesus Christ our souls do indeed find peace. Thanks be to God!

Yet today when my colleague prayed for peace I had an unusual reaction, unusual for me anyway. I thought: Is peace what we need right now? No, I thought. At the very least we need to be peaceably agitated today. We need to be nonviolently assertive, aggressive even, in the cause of racial justice. After my colleague prayed for peace I prayed that we not miss the challenge and the opportunity of this moment actually to do something right. Is peace what we need today? Yes and no. Let me explain.

The culture of my country, the United States of America, is rotten to its core with racism. Our country was born in racism. European settlers began importing, buying, and selling African and African-descendant human beings virtually as soon as they got here. The Constitution of the United States said that any person who was not free was three-fifths of a person, and that meant almost exclusively Black slaves. Several of our states fought a brutal civil war in an attempt to preserve race-based slavery, and the states that stayed in the union were nearly as racist as the ones that pulled out. After the Civil War the Republican Party, the Party of Lincoln, did some good racial justice work in the south, but then it cynically sold southern Blacks out to racist Democrats for short-term political gain. There followed a century of legal apartheid in the south and de facto apartheid in the north. White Americans across the country considered Black human beings to be less than human. A century after the Civil War our national government passed significant civil and voting rights legislation, but making racial discrimination and voter suppression illegal hardly put an end to individual and systemic racism in this country. Not even having a Black president from 2009 to 2017 did that. Our country remains nearly as racist as it has always been.

That’s why all hell has broken out all across the country these days. A white cop pressed his knee onto the neck of an unarmed Black man named George Floyd until Mr. Floyd died. Mr. Floyd was under arrest and in handcuffs as a cop named Chauvin snuffed out his life. Righteous protests against police brutality started all over the country, for Mr. Floyd was hardly the only defenseless Black person white police had killed. Looting and property destruction broke out too, some of it by people who had been legitimate protesters and some of it by white supremacists intent on making the legitimate protesters look bad. The lawlessness of some detracts from the righteousness of the protesters’ cause and gives right-wing forces like Donald Trump and his minions an excuse to try to stop the legitimate demonstrations.

Do we need peace today? It depends on what you mean by peace. If peace means that the demonstrations die down, legitimate protesters go home, the status quo ante reasserts itself, and nothing changes then no. If that’s what peace means it is the last thing we need today. We certainly don’t need violence. I will never advocate for violence. But we need to be angry. We need to be angry about American racism. We need to angry about both personal and institutional racism. We need to be angry about police brutality against Black Americans. We need to be angry about a president who calls white supremacists fine people and sounds racist dog whistles to his bigoted followers. We need to be agitated. We need to be stirred to action. We need to demand reform and demand that it be done now. The peace of Jesus Christ in hearts to sustain us and give us courage yes. Inaction, complacency, and acceptance of the way things have always been in this country not just no but hell no!