“At Canaan’s Edge”
by The Rt. Rev. Bishop Dr. Raymond H. Rufen-Blanchette
A homiletic essay in theological exposition in consideration of the excellent book in
three part series by Taylor Branch, ‘At Canaan’s Edge’
three part series by Taylor Branch, ‘At Canaan’s Edge’
Let ‘US’ come to the unambiguous mutual understanding that the social and political condition of the nonviolent civil society that is our United States of America is predicated in one dynamic and fundamental societal proposition, the premise rooted in our republican democratic right to vote. One man, one woman, without respect to race, religion, creed or cultural identity, reaching the age of majority in the bond of citizenship, one vote in the election of representative democracy. In the right to exercise the American franchise, in sincerest hope of righteous unbiased representation, rooted in the guarantee of our societal compact to all of America’s citizens in her founding Constitution, a notion of liberty espoused in our Declaration of Independence in the principle that as created human beings “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”. The entire degree in architecture of the American franchise of republican representative democracy springs from the handiwork of non-violence rooted in the right of every citizen to vote.
To our enemies; those that oppose our righteous work and movement to confront and slay the three-headed dragon of inequity, inequality, and the injustices that perpetuate disenfranchisement and the ravages of poverty sewn into the very fabric of American civil-society denigrating our collective humanity, the vote itself and the right of the disenfranchised poor and minority peoples to exercise it, in every ballot that is cast, is regarded paradoxically as violence and violent insurrection against the principalities and powers that rule this deeply flawed America. Populist Nationalism, Conservatism and authoritarian segregation in America are kissing cousins rooted in the false ideal that a populace needs the discipline of a superior people, force and authority in order to achieve and maintain prosperity. Whether it be national superiority subversively interwoven into the ‘Doctrine of American Exceptionalism’; or the bankrupt concept and ideal of racial and religious superiority covertly interwoven into the political ideology of Republican Conservatism; or in the veiled authoritarianism in America that has led to the over-policing of the poor and black and brown communities, the increased militarization of local police departments particularly in urban centers throughout the United States, and the institutional injustice and immoral inequity of the criminal justice system employing the prison industrial complex to once again enslave the bodies of black and brown men and boys, in circumvention and usurpation of the 13th Amendment of the Constitution, robbing us of hope and our future; America institutionally is engaged in covert national violence against black and brown peoples and the poor, because our efforts to exercise our franchise is regarded and experienced as violence by those who will not share power, or the true fruits of American democracy.
The Rt. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. attempted to balance and temper the imperative for voting rights and equality for negroes, now African-Americans, in the United States with the foundational prophetic vision and theology of the equality of all souls before God. It was his profound objective to use the Civil Rights Movement as a spiritual mirror, that American’s might as one people look through a glass darkly and recognize our common humanity and spiritual heritage, embracing our oneness and brotherhood, assuaging violence, versus embracing the abyss of cold bigotry and the immoral counterspirtual national cruelties of racism, racial separation and socioeconomic segregation and depravity.
In the Book of Exodus we find a man anointed and appointed named Moses, lifted and empowered by the hand of Eternal God to lead the peoples of Israel out of the house of bondage and slavery in Egypt toward the promised land of Canaan, where Jehovah ELOHIM Himself would give them possession of a land set apart for them ‘flowing with milk and honey.’ (Exodus 3v.7-8; Deuteronomy 34v.1-4) The Book of Joshua following the Exodus narrative, tells of the campaigns of the Israelite General Joshua in the land of Canaan subduing the populace with the hand of God and by His command overcoming among others the City of Jericho. It is of both parabolic and paradoxical value that we recognize that it took the ‘Children of Israel’, Jacob’s seed, forty years to consummate a pilgrimage that even in the worst of conditions took only three weeks journey to complete. With all of the vile and powerful enemies that they faced, it was their own sin that proved to be their ultimate nemesis and impediment. It is of further note for our understanding, that Moses, the Deliverer himself was not permitted to enter into the ‘Land of Canaan’. The Book of Joshua begins, “Now after the death of Moses the servant of the LORD it came to pass that the LORD spake unto Joshua the son of Nun, Moses minister, saying, Moses my servant is dead; now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, thou, and all this people, unto the land which I do give to them, even the children of Israel.” (Joshua 1v.1-2) The Law, of which Moses was the corporate representative, could never provide a sin embattled people with the victory that they needed to overcome their shortcomings and finally achieve prosperity entering into Canaan, the Land of Promise. The Deliverer could not deliver the people from the shortcomings that impeded them. Moses could not pass over. The Children of Israel would have to rely upon God’s divine power provisioned through His Grace to get them over the River Jordan into Canaan, and Joshua was the chosen agent of that Grace through whom Jehovah ELOHIM would exercise that divine power to bring them in.
Throughout the years of struggle in the Civil Rights Movement Dr. King used biblical metaphor and imperative in a principled and righteous campaign to sway hearts and minds, that abolishing ‘Jim Crow’ (State laws and local ordinances in the Southern former Confederate States of America codifying the legal segregation of black and white people’s, sustained through repression by state authority, acts of extreme violence and the murder of people of color, voting fraud by whites and suppression of the black vote) and the fight for civil and voting rights for blacks in America was a moral and spiritual imperative and just cause. It was a dynamic objective of the movement to lay bare the humanity of black America and by doing so exposing both the ardent American hypocrisy and abject murderous immorality of ‘Jim Crow’. Biblical metaphor typifying black American’s as the modern day ‘Children of Israel’ was used judiciously by Dr. King, and on the night preceding the day of his assassination, at Mason Temple Church of God in Christ, in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 3, 1968, Martin delivered what has come to be known as ‘The Mountaintop Sermon’. He evoked in himself the typology of Moses, from Mount Nebo looking over into the ‘Promise Land of Canaan’, and in his own declaration of righteous defiance in ebullient exhortation declares to sanitation workers preparing to strike for fair and just wages, and black America in the aggregate, “WE, as a people, will get to the ‘Promise Land’”. On the doorstep of a prolific poor people’s campaign which sought to expand the scope and reach of the Civil Rights Movement, it was a sermon steeped in biblical symbolism used against the contextual backdrop of American institutional power as the engine of social injustice.
But there was a fundamental problem with Dr. King’s biblical metaphor, a problem that he was unable to ameliorate throughout the years of the movement and he had run out of time to find remedy, for he would be assassinated the following day. White America had their theologians, as well. The question had to be asked, if black Americans were in spiritual typology the ‘Children of Israel’, who were white Americans? If America was in spiritual type the ‘Land of Canaan’ there could be no other conclusion in the examination of Dr. King’s radical Civil Rights theological metaphor that blacks in America were the Israelites, and by logical extension whites were the Canaanites, and black Americans in the context of the movement to obtain Civil Rights in America were coming to dispossess the residents of the land. It was a conflict in spiritual juxtaposition, and a pretty disturbing dissertation if you’re a white American. Most educated and progressive minded whites in America understood Martin’s thesis as metaphor, however, in the mind of segregationist Southern whites, justice for the black man no matter the moral justification conflicted with the survival and existence of the white man. The juxtaposition between the militant ‘by any means necessary’ of Malcolm, and the ebullient discourse of nonviolent protest movement and peaceful direct activism by Martin was inconsequential, because whether achieved through the force of armed confrontation and conflagration, or through the ballot box, dispossession was in fact dispossession, and dispossession was violence.
Southern white evangelicals and mainstream white Anglo-Saxon protestants representing America’s socioeconomic and political power establishment in the 50’s and 60’s had their own clear and unambiguous understanding of Dr. King’s metaphorical dissertation in the context of the Civil Rights movement. They received and experienced King’s message in their own racially framed political and economic tableau, and they understood the ramifications of egalitarianism in America through the lens of their own socioeconomic and sociopolitical displacement. In short, to the vast majority of blacks in America the Civil Rights Movement was about obliterating societal inequities and attaining socio-economic equality; Southern whites saw it in terms of power, and them losing it, and in that context race ‘trumped’ both religion and social justice. This is the fundamental reason why black churches became prime targets during the Civil Rights era, and why the vast majority of Southern white evangelicals stood quiescent in the presence of the most egregious violence and murders against men, women and children of color, choosing to take their stand based on racial identity versus what was morally right and Gospel imperative. Southern white evangelicals were morally, theologically and spiritually bankrupt in their perspective and stand during the Civil Rights Movement. They would allow coloreds to be destroyed and confess their sins in private to a forgiving Jesus later. This was the zenith of Southern cultural and religious hypocrisy. The fact could not be escaped then and cannot be escaped in the American now, despite our Constitutional architecture guaranteeing the voting franchise for every American as the root premise of a nonviolent civil society, in America voting was and still is institutional violence. The root and foundation of ‘Jim Crow’ law was the violent denial and murderous suppression of the black vote. There can be no other surmising.
Voting is violence in America, and from that perspective you can come to the revelational understanding that except for the bullets and the bayonets, the Civil War has yet to conclude in American civil and political society. You need look no further than the white political domination of Southern state legislature’s, and the controversy over ‘Alt-right’ white nationalist social discourse entering into the mainstream of American political dialogue. You need look no further than the battle for voting rights in North Carolina, and the failure of the United States House of Representatives through the tenure of one President Barack Hussein Obama to re-establish an effective preclearance coverage formula under Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act, struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in Shelby v. Holder; according to the U.S. Department of Justice, considered to be the most effective piece of civil rights legislation protecting the rights of blacks to vote ever enacted in the United States. You need look no further than the 2016 Presidential Election and the perplexing, bigoted, xenophobic political ascendancy and white neo-fascist nationalism of one President-elect Donald J. Trump, and the racist passions that his candidacy and election has laid bare, galvanizing working class whites throughout the Country. Economic boycotts and social protest are both effective and necessary instruments for social change in America, as was the bus boycott in 1955 Montgomery, Alabama; the Sanitation worker strike in 1968 Memphis, Tennessee; and the present day ‘Fast Food Forward’ low wage worker movement, the ‘Fight for 15’ living wage worker campaign, and the moral social protest movement ‘Black Lives Matter’. But let us be clear, even Dr. King understood the nuance of direct action campaigns and the revelation that economic boycott and social protest will never be anywhere near as powerful and efficacious as the right to vote and the voter exercising that franchise, because its foci is on the roots of American socioeconomic and sociopolitical power. This is why Dr. King’s activism on March 25, 1965 leading a five day, fifty four mile nonviolent march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, seeking voting rights for black citizens of the state was so powerful.
In American civil society, the real tough guy is the guy that votes and who works to control and/or manipulate the outcomes of elections, at all levels of American government, because therein reside both the root and levers of American social and economic power. It is long past time that black America embrace and engage this sociopolitical reality. The Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence and the violent take it by force. White America is willing to fight electorally using the vote, access to it, and tactics of voter suppression, to retain and maintain their agenda. Look no further than the solid political South and the proliferation of ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws. Let there be no mistake, to oppose that power in America is an act of violence. The vote controls civil services. The vote controls local, state and the national budgets and their priorities. The vote controls both police and the policed and dictates policing policy. The vote controls economic direction and who benefits from economic policy, stimulus and incentives. The vote controls our system of criminal justice and our institutional Courts, to include the highest court in the land, whose rulings and interpretation of law affects every aspect of our common civil society and the disposition of Civil Rights. To be disenfranchised by an unjust political system is one thing, but to fail to exercise one’s franchise right to vote, as a matter of personal indifference, is an act of profound ignorant self subjugation, socio-economic disempowerment, and relegates entire communities and peoples to the draconian violence of that three headed dragon of poverty, inequity and inequality. Beyond this, an overwhelming aspect of our sin as a people is in our failure to exercise the right and gift that God has given to us in America, and that so many having shed their own precious blood and died that we should have it that we might possess the land. That is in our failure to exercise our American franchise and vote. And because of this sin, in many ways, we have brought violence and wrath down upon ourselves and have failed to come into both our sociopolitical and socioeconomic inheritance.
If Black people do not vote, then black lives do not matter in America. How many ways would you like me to say it to you? If black people do not vote in America, black protest activism is not movement, it’s begging. If black people in America do not vote, they are not woke, they are dead tired and politically blind. And it is not simply that people of color vote in America, it is how they vote that determines entry into the American ‘Promise Land’. You vote for those that espouse and demonstrate your values, culturally, politically, economically and spiritually. Which means that you have to know and understand your values on these levels, and further care sufficiently enough to engage with candidates and elected public officials that represent those values and interest, and promise to reference those values as the foundation of political policy engagement. You must as well, be sufficiently committed to hold those individuals serving as your representative in government accountable for every decision that they make in that elective office, not simply every two or four years when it’s time to vote, but every day through efficacious, robust relationship so that they know that you are serious about who stands for you in republican democratic government. If you do not care enough to engage American civil society at the sociopolitical and socioeconomic roots of civil society then you don’t care enough. If you do not vote, then in America, you are being socially, politically and economically short changed.
Consider. Since the Supreme Court of the United State’s 5-4 decision in ‘Shelby County V. Holder’, decided June 25th of 2013, finding Sec. 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 designating particular American states with a legally documented notorious history of suppressing the access of people of color to vote in certain jurisdictions and subjecting those jurisdictions to preclearance from the U.S. Justice Department before making changes to laws and regulations affecting the ability of its lawful citizens to vote, to be unconstitutional, conservative State governments throughout the South and elsewhere have moved at breakneck speed to introduce new restrictions on the voting franchise affecting the most vulnerable of its citizens, with the full knowledge that Republican obstructionist walking the halls of our nation’s House of Representatives would bar the door to effective legislation that would cure the Voting Rights Act preserving the right to vote for every American citizen. The most egregious of these attacks on the right to vote is the comprehensive voter restriction law passed by a majority Republican legislature in the State of North Carolina. The law modifies the accommodation of early voting, places restrictions on private groups organizing and conducting voter registration drives, election day voter registration is eliminated, and without equivocation imposes the most draconian voter identification regulations in America. Conservative legislatures throughout the country have moved to emulate North Carolina in both legal word and deed. Make no mistake, this is postmodern ‘Jim Crow’ in all but name.
Neither ‘Jim Crow’ nor the end of post Civil War Reconstruction were accidents of American History. Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 declared all slaves within the Confederacy (The Confederate States of America) to be free, but was inadequate in that it did not end slavery as an institution in the United States of America, as a matter of law. This milestone in American Constitutional history could only be achieved if and when the Union won the Civil War in 1865, and subsequently ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution (The 13th abolitioning slavery Constitutionally; the 14th granting full citizenship to former slaves; the 15th giving full voting rights to all adult males among the free people of the United States) to become known as the Civil Rights Amendments to the Constitution, or the Reconstruction Amendments. The period of Reconstruction was an attempt by the federal government of the United States, after the conclusion of the Civil War in Confederate surrender, to establish new state governments throughout the former Confederacy and to bring free black men, known as ‘Freedmen’ into civil society as full voting citizens. This was accomplished by the federal government sending U.S. troops into the former Confederacy to enforce ‘the Civil Rights Amendments’ to the Constitution. Federal troops occupied the South, for cause. This is one primary reason why culturally and politically most Southerners do not trust the federal government today.
The vast majority of Southern whites would have no part of living on equal intellectual, societal and political footing with former slaves, particularly after so many immoral years of slave history and so much blood and treasure had been lost on Southern soil by Confederate troops during the Civil War conflict. As a consequence, former Confederate soldiers traded their Confederate uniforms for white hoods and waged a campaign of violent mayhem and murders throughout the South resulting in the federal government employing those same occupying federal troops throughout the former Confederate States to force compliance with Constitutional law and to prevent violent ‘whitelash’ against the freedmen in an attempt to compel political, moral and social change. This failed experiment in American societal reconstruction lasted less than twelve years. The United States of America learned then that you cannot legislate the hearts of men, the hearts of unrepentant corrupt men in particular. Modest gains were made by blacks during Reconstruction, with former slaves learning to read, becoming entrepreneurs and starting businesses establishing middle class communities in states like North Carolina, and holding elective office in state legislatures and in Congress as Republicans. These modest gains, however, drove racist whites and former slave owners crazy both socially and politically, and Southern whites did everything in their human powers to undermine this black progression.
The U.S. presidential election of 1876, among the most notorious, contentious and disputed elections in American history, gave racist Southern whites their opportunity to escape the forced legal and political mandates of Reconstruction. New York Democrat Samuel J. Tilden outpaced Ohio Republican Rutherford B. Hayes by over 250,000 popular votes garnering 184 electoral college votes to 165 electoral college votes for Hayes, with 20 electoral college votes unallocated and disputed in three Southern states (Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina). Both candidates claimed victory in those states leading to a bitterly contested legal and political battle. In the most consequential and morally bankrupt political compromise in American political history, former Union General and Republican President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, entered into an immoral oral compact with the Democrat controlled House of Representatives flipping the electoral college and the election to the Republican nominee for president Rutherford B. Hayes, in exchange for removing United States troops from the Southern states, effectively and formally ending the era of Reconstruction in the South after the Civil War and hanging Southern black ‘freedmen’ dependent on that protection out to dry. The political failure of Reconstruction cleared the path for the uncontested re-emergence of Southern white domination, the erasure of Southern black socioeconomic and sociopolitical gains, and the imposition of state law in state after Southern state legalizing segregation and discrimination based upon race (‘Jim Crow’) ushering in a period of societal violence, social injustice and sociopolitical terror that lasted nearly one hundred years. Between 1890 and 1910, ten of the eleven former Confederate States passed constitutions, or amendments to state constitutions, effectively disenfranchising most blacks and thousands of poor whites through a combination of poll taxes and bogus literacy tests, with other subversive tactics in voter suppression that worked to keep whites in power and blacks and poor whites subsisting on the margins of Southern civil society. Within a decade of disenfranchisement the legislative program of legalized white supremacy (‘Jim Crow’) had erased all semblance of the Reconstruction black middle class from the minds of white North Carolinian's, and throughout the South. We falsely believe that racist rhetoric in the United States of America is just rhetoric ... It is not.
Consider further, the rhetoric and the fight to obstruct comprehensive immigration reform in America. From ‘The Dream Act’ to the path to citizenship for millions of hardworking undocumented persons living for more than a generation in deprivation and desperation in cities and towns throughout the country, forcing immigrant families to live the existence of the lumpenproletariat, without a country, without help and without hope. A permanent underclass of sub-citizenry living on the margins of civil society without the possibility of reaping the benefits of their significant human contribution to our civil society. This is tantamount to a socially immoral push to delegitimize human beings, creating nationalist limits on who can become a citizen in America. We have come to the understanding that those who work to obstruct comprehensive immigration reform, in Congress and politically throughout the Country, have the express objective to limit the number of black and brown citizens entering the electorate, as it is their calculus that peoples of color will vote their interest, interests that the Conservative movement in America does not share.
Institutional disenfranchisement is sui generis to the black experience in America. African-Americans came in on that boat. But to enter into the ‘Promise Land’, we have to redefine what America is, and that definition must be relevant for all Americans. America can only be her people. All of her people. The body is nothing without her soul and spirit but ashes and dust. America is not her land, but it is most certainly her people that occupy that land. In the same manner that Moses was not the Messiah, but could only lead the people of the Nation of Israel to the ‘Promise Land’, Martin was not the Messiah. Martin could lead the movement of black peoples and the disenfranchised poor to the top of Pisgah, allowing us with him to look over the River Jordan to see the ‘Promise Land’ that is America. But it was not for his sins and shortcomings that Martin was not allowed to pass over. It was for ours. Martin was not the Messiah, but he was the American Moses. It is for our collective sin, as a Nation, in not realizing who we really are before a just and Holy God, and our presence before all humanity as a whole that has barred the door. We are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a beautiful, diverse peculiar people before the Almighty God; that we should shew forth the praises of Him who hath called us out of darkness into His marvelous light. We must come to a righteous agreement, as one civil society that is America, about the beloved community that we all say that we desire to live in, and with all deliberate speed engage a battle plan of how we ‘together’ are going to get there, with the ultimate revelatory understanding that this world is not our final home. The true River Jordan is our spiritual crossing.
In the American now, the vast majority of Americans are enveloped in a cavernous righteous anger burning throughout their conscience, as they believe that in Donald J. Trump America has given white nationalism the authority of the State. However, we fail to see that we are so much more than the ignorance and bigotry of any presidency. The Presidency is what it is because the American people are who we are. We can and shall overcome this Presidency. America is in spiritual Moab, black and white, all of America, and we cannot cross over and enter into the ‘Promise Land’ unless we all enter in together. The sin that has ultimately kept all Americans out of the ‘Promise Land’ is the sin of hate, bigotry and our failure to reconcile our repugnant history and be reconciled to one another as one people. The particular sin of the black community is in our apathy for the American process rooted in black disaffection, and the failure to engage dynamic coalitions at the grassroots in American life to force African-American sociopolitical and socioeconomic values and the black agenda for societal equity and social justice rooted in the right to vote and our unified exercise of that franchise. We have settled for the baubles and trinkets of American Capitalism and we have sold our children’s future up the river toward a bankrupt wasteland of materialism. Black America must repent, as well, and we must fight. America’s failure to repent and the white penchant to marginalize those that have suffered the most on this American journey must be seriously addressed and reconciled, and there can be no reconciliation without justice. We are all at the gate, we are all at Canaan’s edge, seeking to come into our inheritance, but what we have failed to embrace in America is that the inheritance is shared. It cannot be one people versus another people. As cliche as it may sound it is our truth, we cannot be white versus black, or black versus white, we must be one people embracing our rich and dynamic American mosaic of cultural and racial diversity, and the profound spiritual revelation and political reality is that we shall not enter unless we enter together.
Like Moses, with the Children of Israel in the wilderness of Moab wandering for forty years, it has taken America a journey of more than 200 years wandering in the wilderness of sophomoric bigotry and deleterious hate, because anger resteth in the bosom of fools, and the hatreds that are so endemic to the American cultural fabric have blinded us to the door. American’s claim, in deep cultural and spiritual hypocrisy that America is a Christian nation, but you cannot be angry and worship. God cannot and will not receive it. He will not let you in. The community of ‘Faith in Justice’ has the righteous obligation to minister to and educate the American populace through grassroots engagement about our pernicious spiritual condition as a nation, providing spiritual leadership and direction, both for the diverse progressive movements with the potential to drive change in America and the American conscience as the fountain of societal progress rooted in reconciliation and social justice.
For almost fifty years the progressive movement has been in mourning, looking for the next Martin King to lead black and brown peoples and a poor people’s movement fighting inequity, inequality and social injustice into the American ‘Promise Land’, with various leaders vying to take up the mantle. I declare today that we do not need another Moses, we have no need for another agent of the Law, we have been to the top of Nebo and we have seen the ‘Promise Land’. What America needs today is to engage national repentance and true societal reconciliation, embracing GOD’s efficacious and abundant GRACE as the foundation of liberty and justice for all Americans. The grace that binds and heals every wound, and that binds the broken heart and sets those that are held captive by the shackles of American hate and bigotry free. The grace that allows us to see every human being as human beings and our neighbor that we love as ourselves, and the GRACE that will finally allow America to live out the true meaning and foundations of her creed. And the movement community of ‘Faith in Justice’ can lead us there, through His Grace, we can get there together. To a nonviolent civil society rooted in Constitutional law predicated on the right of each and every American citizen to vote in a robust and dynamic republican democracy bound in one core American value, that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”.
America is at Canaan’s edge.
