South Africa's apartheid regime championed "Christian Nationalism", like today's US right. But a Christian liberation theology helped bring down apartheid. Could it help democratize America, too?
Tony, this is great. My first thought was that everyone who is not a person of faith should read your post, descent from their bubble, and recognize the role it has played in almost every liberation movement (purely Marxist ones excepted). People are going to he faithful whether you tell them to or tell them not to. This who want to lead should really learn that language.
... and its local variants. A book I've been reading illustrates how the Boer brand of nationalist faith came very much out of a particular strain of Calvinism-- Dutch, Scottish and Huguenot-- where the Psalms (my special interest) in Calvinist vernacular translation became so intertwined with the national cause that they were frequently used not just as battle cries, but identifiers and even secret code. Think the Marsellaise scene in Casablanca, multiplied by about ten (they didn't use all the Psalms this way).
Obviously this can be read positively or negatively retrospectively, depending on how you feel about nationalism or the particular nations in question. Thus the Dutch-born father of a friend of mine used to belt out Psalm 68 in the milking room of their Washigton State farm (which my friend took to calling "the bovine cathedral") in fond memory of it use as a signal and an active or resistance under the Nazis, who had no idea: "The heathen has invaded your land,...God shall arise and by his might/put all his enemies to flight/With shame and consternation" [but in Dutch].
And I have a 1903 book that quotes Paul Kruger quoting Psalm 83 in much the same way re: the brits. The book was written by an Englishman, who had these wise words about Kruger: "“Treachery, guile, cruelty, even if such faults could fairly be laid to his charge, are not inconsistent with with religious and religious sincerity, when minds of a particular type and training are imbued with the spirit of the Old Testament or convinced that they are fighting the Lord's battles against His enemies."
Yet here is someone else imbued with the spirit of the Old Testament. About a century after Kruger, Howard Thurman, one of MLK's great influences, would tell this story: As a boy, he had a job raking the leaves of the (white) owner of a local hardware store. The man’s young daughter loved scattering the leaf-piles, and when Thurman said he would tell her father, unsheathed a straight pin from her pinafore and jabbed him with it. When he asked why she had done it, she replied, shocked, “Oh Howard, that didn’t hurt you! You can’t feel!” Thurman ran home and fell sobbing on his bed. “There was a Bible in the room,” he wrote. “I opened it on Psalm 139 and read ‘Oh God, You have examined me and known me… you knit me together in my mother’s womb.’” He repeated it to himself until he had recovered from the everyday act of annihilation and reestablished his self-image a precious in God’s sight. Interviewed decades later, after he had been named by Life Magazine as one of the nations 12 most influential preachers and recognized as one of the spiritual fathers of the civil rights movement, he would say that when he felt particularly cast down, the recitation of the Psalm “gave me a sense of myself and the presence of God.”
All my best. I've signed up for your sub stack. As they used to say in the Crusades, "Deus vult!" (Oy gevalt.)
Thanks David -- I miss our leisurely conversations on these matters back in the day! And yes, agree re faith and religion in revolutionary movements, even in the "purely Marxist ones" -- I've just been reading Robin D.G. Kelley's The Hammer and the Hoe, a fascinating history of the Alabama Communist Party in the 1930s, waging a fierce battle against the Klan and lynch-mobs who were also the local constabulary, and sure enough, the militant Leninist sharecropper and union leaders were also in Church every Sunday...
Tony, this is great. My first thought was that everyone who is not a person of faith should read your post, descent from their bubble, and recognize the role it has played in almost every liberation movement (purely Marxist ones excepted). People are going to he faithful whether you tell them to or tell them not to. This who want to lead should really learn that language.
... and its local variants. A book I've been reading illustrates how the Boer brand of nationalist faith came very much out of a particular strain of Calvinism-- Dutch, Scottish and Huguenot-- where the Psalms (my special interest) in Calvinist vernacular translation became so intertwined with the national cause that they were frequently used not just as battle cries, but identifiers and even secret code. Think the Marsellaise scene in Casablanca, multiplied by about ten (they didn't use all the Psalms this way).
Obviously this can be read positively or negatively retrospectively, depending on how you feel about nationalism or the particular nations in question. Thus the Dutch-born father of a friend of mine used to belt out Psalm 68 in the milking room of their Washigton State farm (which my friend took to calling "the bovine cathedral") in fond memory of it use as a signal and an active or resistance under the Nazis, who had no idea: "The heathen has invaded your land,...God shall arise and by his might/put all his enemies to flight/With shame and consternation" [but in Dutch].
And I have a 1903 book that quotes Paul Kruger quoting Psalm 83 in much the same way re: the brits. The book was written by an Englishman, who had these wise words about Kruger: "“Treachery, guile, cruelty, even if such faults could fairly be laid to his charge, are not inconsistent with with religious and religious sincerity, when minds of a particular type and training are imbued with the spirit of the Old Testament or convinced that they are fighting the Lord's battles against His enemies."
Yet here is someone else imbued with the spirit of the Old Testament. About a century after Kruger, Howard Thurman, one of MLK's great influences, would tell this story: As a boy, he had a job raking the leaves of the (white) owner of a local hardware store. The man’s young daughter loved scattering the leaf-piles, and when Thurman said he would tell her father, unsheathed a straight pin from her pinafore and jabbed him with it. When he asked why she had done it, she replied, shocked, “Oh Howard, that didn’t hurt you! You can’t feel!” Thurman ran home and fell sobbing on his bed. “There was a Bible in the room,” he wrote. “I opened it on Psalm 139 and read ‘Oh God, You have examined me and known me… you knit me together in my mother’s womb.’” He repeated it to himself until he had recovered from the everyday act of annihilation and reestablished his self-image a precious in God’s sight. Interviewed decades later, after he had been named by Life Magazine as one of the nations 12 most influential preachers and recognized as one of the spiritual fathers of the civil rights movement, he would say that when he felt particularly cast down, the recitation of the Psalm “gave me a sense of myself and the presence of God.”
All my best. I've signed up for your sub stack. As they used to say in the Crusades, "Deus vult!" (Oy gevalt.)
Thanks David -- I miss our leisurely conversations on these matters back in the day! And yes, agree re faith and religion in revolutionary movements, even in the "purely Marxist ones" -- I've just been reading Robin D.G. Kelley's The Hammer and the Hoe, a fascinating history of the Alabama Communist Party in the 1930s, waging a fierce battle against the Klan and lynch-mobs who were also the local constabulary, and sure enough, the militant Leninist sharecropper and union leaders were also in Church every Sunday...
This is BRILLIANT. Sharing.
Very incisive. Spot on.