After Ferguson: America Must Abandon “Sick Christianity”

Our present moment is not about the occasional killing of black men, or about poor training of police officers, or even about better relationships between law enforcement and black and Hispanic communities. It is about violence. We have been bathed in it, and nurtured in it. It flows through our veins and covers our skin like a thick layer of sweat. From our seduction by guns to our formation as a people within gun cultures, Americans have made weapons part of our national confession, “….the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” We Christians have rarely resisted that seduction or that formation. In fact we helped create it on both the frontier and the plantation, and bound to this seduction and formation has been our blind commitment to abstract ideas of law and order.

Law and order have always been hallowed words on the American landscape filled with two abiding realities: our racial animus and our obsession with property. We repeat the mistake continuously in this country of trying to address our racial animus as though it is a virus that occasionally attacks our social body, rather than seeing that racial animus isa constituting reality of our social body. The ideas of law and order have always encoded the work of white bodies controlling dark bodies for the sake of controlling the land, organizing spaces of commerce, and monitoring the movements of racial others. We live always in the midst of geographic struggles with deep racial underpinnings, where policing presence tasked with controlling space moves unremittingly toward confrontation with black bodies, whether in malls, parks, neighborhoods, or stores.

We live also in the midst of a horrible calculus, the weighing of human life against private property and commerce. Only in a distorted world turned completely into commodity, could a life be weighed against private property. Yet we hear constantly the comparison between loss of life and the destruction of property as though these things are on the same plane of moral existence. Black life has always lost out in that calculus, because the ideas of law and order have overwhelmingly been orientated toward the protection of property and not black bodies. Christianity in America has much too often served as the high priest of this sick reality of law and order, too quickly aligning our biblical visions of sin and punishment to ideas of crime and punishment, and lending our support to forms of policing that are betrothed to the control of space and married to violence.

Violence has won in America, and we live always in the break, in the silence, like that of a musical break between movements where violence is being prepared to answer back to violence, and where someone is about to be seduced into believing that peace and stability will be established through violence. Black life is always in the break, and we have heard the before and after for so long that we have grown accustomed to it, like white noise. Black Death in America has reached a sanctioned ubiquity rooted in the normalization of fear.

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