Abstract
While postmodernists have claimed that the failure of the Enlightenment was a failure of philosophical courage, this plenary address explores how its greatest shortcoming actually was its hubris. Paying attention to how Western scholars have centered pride in their elitist purview was their ultimate worldview, this article examines ‘pride’ as the doctrinal dimension of the good life in contemporary Western society and culture. Furthermore, it implores postmodern Christian social ethicists to reform their stewardship to the telos of the field's highest ideals and role, in order to confront the shortcomings of the Enlightenment and help realize its greater capacity for social transformation. Borrowing the Gandhian critique of ‘knowledge without character’, the author surveys how the existential crisis of higher education, the political manipulation of journalism, and the policy practices of politicians, public intellectuals, and pundits operate in addressing post-imperial/postmodern legacies have legitimated implicit biases and dehumanizing projects that pass off stereotypes as scholarship and hate as hermeneutics.
In the first year of my graduate studies in the early 1990s, I recall that several of my white, supposedly liberal, professors—some historians, ethicists, and theologians but all white males—had David Irving's War Path, Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, and Hernstein and Murray's Bell Curve on their office bookshelves. This bibliographic trend was as much a common feature of my professors’ office furnishings as was a leather satchel bag and a bottle of vodka (so the trace was undetectable) in their desk drawers. I often wondered, ‘Why does Professor X not only own some of the most heinous forms of human horror turned scholarly conspiracy theory, but also has them literally shelved and showcased as displayed knowledge?’ One day, I got up the nerve to ask the question of one whom I assumed to be a moral exemplar among our faculty, to which he claimed, ‘Having an open mind means that we contend and consume ideas that are not our own, even when we stand in opposition to them’. I responded, ‘That's what I thought at first. But where are books such as Cornel West's Race Matters, George Fredrickson's Black Liberation or bell hooks’ Black Looks, works that offer the truth about America—the truth about which Irving, Bloom, Hernstein and Murray are not only lying, but also trying to deny and revise historically?’ His response: ‘What are lies to some are merely opinions to others. Our job is to attend to both’.
The infamous Lipstadt-Irving Holocaust denial battle is just one prime example of this matter of venue shopping from the point of privilege, power, and perspective. In 1993, American historian and Holocaust expert, Deborah Lipstadt wrote and published Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory with the Penguin Press. 1 Like many Jewish Studies and Holocaust scholars before her, Lipstadt had a firm policy of not debating the historicity or reality of the Holocaust, in the same way that legitimate historians will refrain from engaging whether the Transatlantic Slave Trade, World War I, World War II or the Vietnam War were actual events in United States or world history. This scholarly resolve is well founded—if you debate the obvious, instead of engaging legitimate new insights, you give authority to the unfounded, credibility to the crude, and lose intellectual footing, the very essence of our moral ground.
In the book, Lipstadt devoted a few hundred words discrediting David Irving, one of the world's most notorious Holocaust deniers. A British born public speaker, author, and pseudo-historian who lacks a university degree (least of all an advanced degree in history) Irving had built an international reputation and lucrative career by repudiating in both writing and speech the veracity of the Holocaust and attempting to uplift the notoriety of Adolph Hitler. Irving gained prominence and gravitas as early as the 1970s in certain mainstream enclaves when he maintained that the Holocaust was a fallacy because Hitler never ordered the extermination of the Jews. Like many US Civil War sympathizers, Irving took the position to promote a favorable, sympathetic narrative of Nazis by championing the lost cause of erasing from both German and European history the systematic genocide and deliberate extermination of Jews. As but one example, Irving once claimed that ‘I don’t see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz. It's baloney. It's a legend … in fact … more women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber at Auschwitz’. 2
The hyperbolic and histrionic nature of such remarks are only outweighed by the sheer horror of their intended implications. It is inconceivable that such observations could be made by any learned person or college graduate who has passed a World History course from any accredited university. But it is almost unfathomable that this would be considered the claims of any legitimate scholar. To have any fulsome, scholarly engagement of this assessment would be a sham, a shame, and ultimately a fool's errand. Nonetheless, the ranting rags of his research have afforded him sufficient significance to be touted as a historian of scholarly repute who holds prominence as an arbiter of ‘effective … historical scholarship’ and whose publications take up residence on scholarly shelves. 3 None of this is founded upon his training or credentials as a scholar—which he clearly lacks—but rather upon his appeal to the receptive masses.
Although such pseudo-scholarship was nothing new within the public sphere, the extent to which educated elites were willing to indulge such counterfactual, contrarian and corrosive views within the marketplace of ideas was a looming threat in the age of mass media. The rouse of Irving's publications aims to resurrect the exoneration of Hitler's evil ploy in the Final Solution. Ultimately, Irving's provocations resulted in London's high courts’ finding that his work was ‘for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence’.
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Nevertheless, his rants have held sway in the scholarly mix, despite the fact that his ‘maverick’ appeal proved he was neither a part of the historical profession nor held any degree in higher education.
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Not only have his publications been bestowed with a degree of scholarly significance, but they have afforded him the social power to charge a real scholar such as Lipstadt for libel as she fulfilled her professional duty to bear witness to the historical truth. As Lipstadt stated, It may seem an absurd semantic dispute to deny the appellation of ‘historian’ to someone who has written two dozen books or more about historical subjects. But if we mean by historian someone who is concerned to discover the truth about the past, and to give as accurate a representation of it as possible, then Irving is not a historian. Those in the know, indeed, are accustomed to avoid the term altogether when referring to him and use some circumlocution such as ‘historical writer’ instead. Irving is essentially an ideologue who uses history for his own political purposes; he is not primarily concerned with discovering and interpreting what happened in the past, he is concerned merely to give a selective and tendentious account of it to further his own ideological ends in the present. The true historian's primary concern, however, is with the past. That is why, in the end, Irving is not a historian.
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Ultimately, Lipstadt was determined not to be guilty of libel and that ‘the allegations that Irving is a racist is also established’. In his ruling, the Honorable Mr. Justice Gray stated that Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that for the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews; that he is an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist, and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism…
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Yet, this was not merely a scholarly skirmish about Holocaust scholarship; it was an outright fight about the Holocaust itself. Lipstadt, like so many other scholars whose content of their scholarship is inextricably linked to the content of their character, found herself out of her realm and up against the ropes, confronting not only a revisionist and denier, but a powerful legacy of indefatigable endeavors that sought to distort history by placing the burden of proof on the victim whose experience and expertise are considered little less than libelous statements. 12 In the final analysis, Lipstadt's scholarship reigned supreme, but not without the support of a high-ticket legal team, costly experts, and the backing of Penguin publishing house. An entire arsenal was necessary to ward off the attacks of an arrogant and self-aggrandizing anti-Semitic Nazi apologist charlatan who was given social power to claim scholarly status.
Although an international encounter, the Lipstadt-Irving scandal provides critical insight into the American crisis of knowledge production lacking moral clarity and integral character. The arduous work of those scholars who do not embody the personas of dead white men is that they are compelled to ‘undertake praxis that liberates theory from its captivity to the intellectual frames and cultural values of those which cause and perpetuate the marginalization of [others]’. 13 Both obvious truths and objectified scholars are continuously placed on trial, burdening women and racial-ethnic minoritized scholars with the imperative not only to know their field, but also to defend and arm themselves from the predictable and unavoidable reality of hate masquerading as history and terror projected onto theory. In so doing, Katie Cannon claims that knowledge is legitimized only when vetted by and interpreted in light of ‘the gaze of misogynistic subjectivities that masquerade as human normativity’. 14 When underrepresented scholars and perspectives do not pay homage or deference to these theories of terror, they are compelled not only to be doubly-informed scholarly experts, but also to be veritable, fully armed revolutionaries, in that the truth will not always win out. Even though the notion of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ in American jurisprudence countermands Great Britain's ‘guilty until proven innocent’, the Eurocentric, anglophilic aspirations of American education have nevertheless adopted and extended the ‘home court advantage’ of power, pedigree, prestige and privilege that allows for white, male, heteronormative perspectives to put other truths on trial, regardless of what the record or recollection shows.
I can attest that the minds of many Americans, for instance, have been indoctrinated by the guardians of the status quo at the gates of education and learning. As legends become truths, they preserve the way things are and put into place systems of knowledge-persuasion that preserve status for some and bar entry for others. In terms of its religious utility, when it is in service to our reality, 15 ‘myth’ is not regarded as ‘lie’, but rather as revered narrative and perspective reflective of what many people whole-heartedly believe. The enduring power of myths and their accompanying symbols is predicated upon discerning the fine line between belief and truth. When myths are taught, which is to say undergirded by academic, scholarly, and intellectual power, they not only are given permanence but also become validly esteemed as objective truth. The doctrinal dimension of the good life, as an example, is essential for distinguishing and differentiating the projections and shadows that myths cast. The US discipline of education and schooling produces knowledge that shapes American lives as to what is good. Which is to say, education creates a learning machine that indoctrinates Americans to accept social and cultural norms, assumptions, and lies about themselves and others as fact and unchallenged belief. And Americans are merely the bitter fruit of the poisonous tree that finds its roots unfettered in the ideological and theological soil and soul of Europe—where whiteness united conquers all others.
This is pride, namely, the arrogance of ignorance. Pride is falsehood asserted and assumed as certainty. In Christocentric terms, it is the pinnacle of human hubris to focus on our own ability that is too often rooted in allusions of our own grandiosity. Rather than how Hebrews 11:1 articulates our faith in the Divine, when we substitute that emphasis with our own self-aggrandizing feats and self-serving facts, these also stand as the ‘assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen’. 16 To wit, one could argue that the confession of our faith is little different from the projection of our lies if either of these is only rooted in what is comfortable or convenient to our sense of self instead of a search for truth. Philosopher David Hume assesses ‘pride as a pleasant sensation, and humility a painful one’. 17 Pride is deemed by many as the greatest of sins. American pride emanates from the substance of American patriotism and the magnanimity of the United States as a first world power. The United States is regarded by many in the world as unparalleled in the plenitude of its pride as well as the paucity of its national self-awareness. An internationally perceived feature of the United States is its reluctance or inability to learn moral lessons from past great empires and to gauge its historical significance relative to them. Pride, in this respect, has been founded upon Gandhi's blunder of ‘knowledge without character’, in that we have been indoctrinated to believe that self-knowledge is more about trusting feelings about ourselves, as opposed to gaining an enlightened, factually-informed, historical self-understanding so as to build and advance common ideals, such as fellowship, freedom, and flourishing. That is to say, the system of knowledge production privileges the national functionality of its citizens to the detriment of their national character and moral formation. The rising intolerance for critical reflection and analysis has coddled the American mind and compromised its character and ability to search for wisdom and critically question untruths.
Nevertheless, a cottage industry of white male scholars has emerged who make their bread and butter condemning historical revisionism while simultaneously endorsing ethnocentric narratives. Likewise, there are many people who have profited from the ‘lost cause’ of counterfactual research as a scholarly pursuit that promotes fiction as fact, while rarely suffering professional or personal consequences. They are the harbingers of history who aim to preserve the aforementioned lies that have become legend and birthright to legacies. They give gravitas to the myths that have menacingly mocked not only the horrors of the past but also have stagnated scholarship and accelerated the decline of the pursuit of truth and greater knowledge. The underrepresented scholar often finds herself under the gun and compelled to actively respond to and disprove controversial counterclaims recognized as worthy of scholarly attention. However, at the same time, she lacks the agency to do so, in that misinformation is used to indoctrinate and inform social power, in the place of scholarly prowess and expertise.
While postmodernists have claimed that the failure of the Enlightenment was a matter of falling short of philosophical courage, we must explore how its greatest shortcoming was its hubris. Paying attention to how Western scholars have centered pride in their view of the world as their ultimate worldview, this article examines ‘pride’ as the doctrinal dimension of the good life in contemporary Western society and culture. It implores us as postmodern Christian social ethicists to reform our stewardship to the telos of the field's highest ideals and role, responsibilities and rights in order to confront the shortcomings of the Enlightenment and help realize its ultimate capacity. The Gandhian critique of ‘knowledge without character’ is an accurate description and moral indictment of how the existential crisis of higher education, the political manipulation of journalism, and the policy practices of politicians, public intellectuals, and pundits in addressing post-imperial/postmodern legacies have legitimated implicit biases and dehumanizing projects that pass off stigmas as scholarship and hate as hermeneutic. And it is not only our right but the responsibility and mandate of our religion, as feminist liberationist Bev Harrison once said, to ‘undo what history has done’, that is, to correct the wrongs and not merely chronicle history's wrongdoings.
In an effort to be foils, and not fooled, our work as Christian social ethicists who shape the moral consciousness of our institutions (church, state and academy) must attend to the insistent practice and insurgent pedagogy of understanding moral agency and responsibility as a force to be used for good as its ultimate end. To take up the crux of our scholarly telos is to engage in a metaethical project not simply for the failed project of the Enlightenment but also for the undermining of Christian ethical socialism. Towards this end, we must introduce a metaethical framework for answering theo-ethical questions with logic and epistemological insight with regard to what is fitting or good for society as well as what is freedom or responsibility for moral leadership within the collegium, church, and society.
Evident within the mandate of the social gospel is the democratic principle of paideia as implied in Micah 6:8/Luke 4:18. My good colleague and brilliant ethicist Gary Dorrien extends the claims of this form of critical pedagogy by maintaining that education is never a neutral process but rather, it either indoctrinates us into the unjust system of domination or it liberates us as learners who transform the system for the cause of justice. 18 By privileging the critique of oppression, forgoing the serenity of the status quo, and linking divine justice to social justice, we must outline an insurgent pedagogy as that which forms moral theologians to interrogate the intersections of race, gender, class, embodiment and sexuality informed by our life-work and call to educate and inform lives well lived. Thereby, to disavow ties to the ‘lost causes’ of Empire and take up instead the struggle for success of not only the Social Gospel and but also the very soul of democracy itself.
First, the critical role of Christian social ethicists must be to debunk the current crisis of hubris, especially within the white Christian imagination. Central to this task is the decolonizing of Christian ethics. We must confess and that everything we know and understand in light of ‘liberalism in the modern western world’ whether it is ‘constitutional democracy’, or our structure of late-stage capitalism—which is actually rebranded or refashioned into ‘neo-liberal political economy’—quite literally is compromised by this notion of pridefulness. And that pridefulness is our fragility and, in many cases, the failure of democratic practices and institutions that cause the rise of the MAGA movement in the US but also the Brexit movement in the UK. This is in addition to the rise of far right movements and even governments being installed in various European nations such as the rise of the far right in France, the establishment of the neo-fascist government in Italy, the almost successful takeover of the Spanish parliament that has also witnessed the rise of Recep Erdogan's control over Turkey, or the former Soviet satellite eastern European nations, such as Victor Orban's takeover of Hungary. There are various places in which we need not speculate or question Putin's attack on the Ukraine or what he is attempting to do there. So, while we are witnessing all of this, the question remains: Does Christian social ethics have an actual witness in terms of talking directly and forcefully to these issues, not only philosophically but publicly and politically as well?
To this end, we must attend to the essence of the telos of Enlightenment and the commitments of liberalism. Herein, we can look to Richard Rorty who in the 1990s wrote the text Achieving Our Country, 19 in which he was inspired by the writings and thoughts of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. 20 In trying to address in his stance as a philosopher, Rorty was trying to speak to what liberalism could and should do in the response to this rising tide. The tide was rising but had not yet risen to shore. Rorty was already speculating from a white, mainstream or traditionalist point of view. He was already questioning what could and should be done in terms of dealing with the multicultural, multiracial and multifaith societies in the future that was yet to be written. But many conventional people and guilds in the maelstrom and mainstream of philosophy, ethics, religion and politics and other related fields marveled at his intellectual acumen, and were okay in terms of his professional pedigree but kept his impact and prescription at arm's length in that they still did not take seriously the charges that he leveled against Western thought and what Western thought needed not simply to survive but to thrive into the twenty-first century by having the audacity to center justice and deconstruct white supremacy at its core. Rather, the reconstructing and decentering offered by the queer[y]ing of a Black gay erstwhile Christian voice like Baldwin’s posed too much dissonance and disdain. We don’t talk about that. We don’t teach that. We don’t preach that. And we definitely don’t take that to task or heart. But that is very much our case and task.
Consequently, we must note that our critical responsibility must be to decenter our localized delusions of comfort. If COVID-19 taught us anything as scholars and students of postmodernism, it is that disease and peril, like power and delusion, have no boundaries or borders that humans can control and keep under strict watch. Viruses have their own intelligence and are not ignorant of their will to survive, the context in which they can thrive, the host in which they must reside, and the means by which they must evolve to be kept alive. This is not merely the coronavirus but the virus of racial violence and cultural intolerance as well. Here we are in this moment now, on the other side of the century, some two and a half decades after Rorty penned his tome and while recently observing the 60th anniversary of the likes of King's March on Washington and the sentimentality of the Beloved Community, World House, and our own global summer of racial reckoning. This recognizes a corrective and condemnation of the world that the Enlightenment has made because there is still a comfort, convenience and complicity—all baked and steeped in white ethnocentric and nationalist pride—that will not allow for this kind of rapprochement to occur. This would mean that EU and US far-right politicians emphasizing the imagined threat posed by black and brown refugee and immigrant populations reflects not a flaw but actually a feature of Western democracy. Likewise, many churches and church leaders cannot dare to reimagine the community and kin-dom of God because they still want kingdoms to be manifest in the world. They still want a hierarchical and hegemonic power structure embedded in pridefulness rather than saying that a new paradigm and paragons need to be established. This is pride in its power that will be the death of us. It makes of us cruel gods dependent on cheap grace. Grounding and basing civitas in a discourse and discipline invested and more prevalent in European circles and consciousness whether it is Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic or Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, the fluidity and flux of nationhood and nation-states has been largely the history of modernity of the last five centuries. But, only within the twentieth century do we witness the rise of genocides in various parts of the globe, including the fringes of Europe and its eastern European nations like the Bosnian war, but also the rise of Rwandan genocide and the tail end of the Troubles in Ireland and the present regionalized crises and unrest around the globe such as Palestine and Israel, Russia and Ukraine, China and Taiwan, and India and Pakistan. Much like the writer Francis Fukuyama’s proclamation that the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s signaling ‘The End of History’, we are witnessing many places in the modern world where everything allegedly was going to be fine and dandy with the global expansion and onward march of Western liberal democracy and the dominance of free market capitalism and yet now appear to be falling apart in spectacular fashion. What we thought was the collapse of the Soviet Union would correlatively signal the dawn of a glorious golden age for everyone. Beholden and indebted to the thoughts of Kant and thoughts of other grand political philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, and Rosseau among others, we had reached the telos of human civilization and yet with all of those grand imaginations and machinations, folks failed to see the rise of Putin. Folks failed to imagine that there could be a COVID-19 pandemic. Folks failed to recognize the notion of a Donald Trump and the world being morally and socially indicted because such a gross lack of awareness of the grotesque in our midst.
Last but not least, we must realize our critical role as Christian social ethicists is that we do not have the right to remain silent on such matters by tucking ourselves and our consciousness away in lofty idealism and solipsism of ivory towers. Neither can we remain blinded by the personal piety of stained-glass ceilings. If we abnegate our duty to teach, preach, and produce knowledge that not only builds a good society but is accountable to our reality and accessible to the majority, there are other forms of knowledge that will take our place. It will not be the charlatan stances of a David Irving, but a rival so omnipresent and ubiquitous that we will not be able to reign in its power. Such is the case with Artificial Intelligence. With all these great imaginings that the emergence of constitutional democracies, the expansion of free market capitalism, and the rise of civil society in the cyber age via the internet along with everything that was promised by a democracy indebted and informed by social media, we thought that the great awakening of human consciousness was at its heightened state only to find that we are deathly afraid of Artificial Intelligence and its algorithms that we have paid to direct, and perhaps, even dupe us. Because from the Enlightenment to where we are now, consciousness as we see in the US due to our conservative pundits and politicians telling us to be woke (aka consciousness) is a problem in that they would rather that we in the world be ‘unwoke’ and ‘unconscious’. Let that sit with you for a moment as you think. If the height of human civilization—the pinnacle and apex of what we have accomplished—is to bring some form of sentience of our own or organic humanly curated and created form of consciousness, if this is the end all and be all of our essence and we have a viable and vocal contingent of the world's polity saying that is not what they want—they don’t want thinking or thought to be part of the bargain, what then do we do with that!? When folks are antagonized by the emergence of liberation theologies and threatened by the advancement of feminist, womanist, queer and other standpoint theologies, they feel betrayed or besieged by the articulation that the subaltern, oppressed and marginalized of every walk of life and of every nation are now the villains rather than the victims of modernity. That is, people, alive and in living color at the intersections and underside of the social ills of racism, sexism, classism and heterosexism are less valued than the tomes and tombs of dead white men. These dead white men, whose treaties in their highest idealized states are also bastardized if we claim that no constitution can be a living organic or expanding document. If they didn’t mean what they said, even if there is hypocrisy in their brand of democracy; if their very words claimed that humans are citizens and citizens are human yet we extend partial humanity to some citizens and partial citizenship to some humans, making those who are not white men property, problems or parasites, that abrogates and violates the terms and conditions of our existence.
White supremacy masquerading as pride that propels oppression rooted in unrealistic, irrational fear of the Other will be the death of us all if left unchecked. In light of how we define and debate about Christian ethics, it is incumbent on us as both a field and a guild to make our best efforts to not perpetuate the making of future racists, neo-fascists, and white supremacists. However, in our contemporary culture, ethics still has a foothold in the determination of moral authority especially in helping us discern what denialism and similar modes of dehumanization truly mean to humanity as a whole. This is significant because we have a duty to recognize and ultimately reckon with that hatred that has undergirded most of the West's encounter with human difference. In A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,
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human rights expert and former diplomat Samantha Power observed how the US was consistently hesitant to declare, much less condemn, genocides and other mass atrocities—citing the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and ‘ethnic cleansing’ in eastern Europe as key examples—while denouncing the American military and foreign policy apparatus for its half-hearted justifications for apathy in the face of such horrors. We need to head such warnings and mind our own time in relation to the rising tide of white supremacy and neo-fascism. In his study of race and identity in Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon states: At first thought it may seem strange that the anti-Semite's outlook should be related to that of the Negrophobe. It was my philosophy professor, a native of the Antilles, who recalled the fact to me one day: ‘Whenever you hear anyone abuse the Jews, pay attention, because he is talking about you’. And I found that he was universally right—by which I meant that I was answerable in my body and in my heart for what was done to my brother. Later I realized that he meant, quite simply, an anti-Semite is inevitably anti-Negro.
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For the purposes of my remarks in this moment in time, the great concern here is, despite the distinction in their respective clout and social status, it is clear that the posh Irving did with books what the pauper Copeland did with bombs, namely attacking those human beings who were wrongly discarded and disrespected by the incestuous twin enterprises of the Enlightenment and Eurocentric Empire. If anyone needs any further reminder of how insidious and dangerous such thinking can be, recall the recent comments by the European Union's foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, when he stated ‘Europe is a garden’ and ‘the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden’. When considering Borrell's controversial remarks delivered live before an audience last week at the European Diplomatic Academy in Bruges, Belgium, he said what he said with gross disregard for modern Europe's grotesqueries—namely, its history of warfare, colonial conquest, economic exploitation, and political crises over the past 500 years especially in its lopsided relations to the darker nations of the world.
When we have to develop hashtag activist campaigns and social justice movements out of whole cloth or galvanizing individual as well as institutional resources to combat anti-Black racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia as anti-systemic grassroots initiatives, it is with the fulsome recognition that the status quo does not always automatically make space for those of us who look, live, and love differently than the presumed sociocultural norm. Nevertheless, human difference must no longer be viewed as deficiency, nor toleration be considered the optimal stage of cultural relations. Persistence of such thinking, being, and doing is not merely a failure of either the individual or the identified populations. Instead, this is a failure of our profession and our polis—our philosophies, public practices, and politics. However, moving forward in good faith of a shared future as part of a global civil society not only entails but demands the steadfast belief that each and every one of us has the civil and human right to be free. Lofty as this claim might seem, it will only be accomplished when all of these efforts to transform ecumenical congregations and faith communities proclaiming ‘openness’ ostensibly free ourselves of our hubris. In moving towards esteeming and empowering of human difference as the best goal of our collective endeavor, this will be accomplished by never forgetting our history, including the good and bad faith that originally formed it. That being the case, it leaves one to ask the questions: What do we have to be so proud of in light of all this tragedy, travesty, and our trespasses? And ultimately, if we are not ready, willing, and able to confront these truths, ‘
