Priests, prophets and the 4th of July

Swiped from Agence France Presse via washingtonpost.com

I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.

Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon.

Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps.

But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

--AMOS 5:21-24

We will be having one of the biggest gatherings in the history of Washington, D.C., on July 4th. Major fireworks display, entertainment and an address by your favorite President, me!

--DONALD TRUMP

Independence Day is Thursday, marking the 243rd anniversary of American independence from Great Britain, and our country's annual mid-summer holiday. I'm afraid I'm not feeling it this year. I'm often not feeling it on the Fourth of July, being ambivalent about crowds, loud sharp noises, and (often) excessive heat. This year, though, I'm really not feeling it.

America has a lot to celebrate, of course: our heritage of individual freedom, all the natural beauty preserved in our national parks and wilderness areas, all the people from the military to first responders to teachers to social activists to planners to writers and artists who have dedicated their lives to their communities and country. At our best we have been an example and inspiration to the rest of the world, the "city on a hill" to which the early settler John Winthrop aspired--and probably a better version than Winthrop and his Puritans might have produced on their own. The Founders of our country were flawed individuals--by our standards they were racist, sexist and elitist--but they created a framework that could be expanded and adapted. 

The prophet Amos (Wikimedia commons)

The Fourth of July is a holiday tailored to "priestly" celebration of America. I use the term "priestly" in the sense Martin E. Marty did when he visited Coe College nearly 30 years ago and did an impromptu lecture on civil religion in my class. Marty had just published Religion & Republic: The American Circumstance (Beacon, 1987) which included a chapter reflecting on "two kinds of two kinds" of American civil religion. The priestly-prophetic dimension particularly made an impression on me. Here's his explanation:

The priestly will normally be celebrative, affirmative, culture-building. The prophetic will tend... toward the judgmental. The two are translations of Joseph Pulitzer's definition of the compleat journalist or, in my application, of the fulfilled religionist: one comforts the afflicted, the other afflicts the comfortable. Needless to say, no adherent need always express only one side or kind... Thus a priest may judge and a prophet may and often does integrate people into a system of meaning and belonging. But the priest is always alert to the occasions when such integration can occur and the prophet is always sensitive to the fact that he may have to be critical of existing modes of such integration. (pp. 82-83, emphases mine)

For a priestly example, think of almost any American president, but maybe Ronald Reagan more than most, with his celebration of the mythos of small-town America. Or George W. Bush at a naturalization ceremony in 2008: Throughout our history, the words of the declaration have inspired immigrants from around the world to sail to our shores. These immigrants have helped transform 13 small colonies into a great and glowing nation (Tumulty 2019). For a prophetic example, think of Martin Luther King's speech to the March on Washington in 1963, noting despite the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence... America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

Americans should take pride in our heritage and what we have today. And yet the danger of being too self-congratulatory, too self-satisfied looms especially large this year. We need to set aside the self-praise of our priestly class for a spell, and give the fireworks a rest, and think about what we're doing.

Pictures of crowded detention camps from the Inspector General's report in the New York Times

The situation at the U.S.-Mexico is so awful it defies description. Moreover, it's evil--evil because a problem we didn't ask for has been inflated many times by prejudice and fear. I've criticized the toxic politics of President Donald Trump, and as President he bears a lot of responsibility for these atrocities. But he can't make things happen on his own; there's been way too much cooperation, and way too little outrage, for anyone to claim that what's going on at the border is not itself a manifestation of America. Faced with an influx of refugees, the United States has responded by ignoring their claims, imprisoning them, threatening Mexico, and unbelievably, kidnapping their children, drugging them, and farming them out to commercial operators who are neglecting and abusing them. The New York Times reports:

A chaotic scene of sickness and filth is unfolding in an overcrowded border station in Clint, Tex., where hundreds of young people who have recently crossed the border are being held, according to lawyers who visited the facility this week. Some of the children have been there for nearly a month.

Children as young as 7 and 8, many of them wearing clothes caked with snot and tears, are caring for infants they’ve just met, the lawyers said. Toddlers without diapers are relieving themselves in their pants. Teenage mothers are wearing clothes stained with breast milk.

Most of the young detainees have not been able to shower or wash their clothes since they arrived at the facility, those who visited said. They have no access to toothbrushes, toothpaste or soap.... The border station in Clint is only one of those with problems. (Dickerson 2019)

If anyone doubts that these abuses are serious, the Brookings Institution offers a summary of research on the long-term impacts of bad hygiene, sleep patterns disturbed by lights on all night, minimal food and no exercise. Small children, forcibly separated from their parents for long periods of time, have in some cases been lost by either government or private operators. The Brookings writers wonder:

How can government lawyers argue that no soap, lights on all night, and minimal food are safe and sanitary conditions for children? Who have we become as a nation? (Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, and Rauh 2019)

The situation has been worsening for at least a year ("Zero Tolerance" 2018, Miller 2018, Dickerson 2018, Chen and Ramirez 2018), and has been documented as well as the chaos and governmental evasions and cover-ups will allow. It has gotten renewed attention after the release of a report by the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General, after several members of Congress visited facilities in Clint and El Paso, Texas this week (Mettler, De Bonis and Thebault 2019), after investigative reporting by Pro Publica, the Associated Press, and several legal aid groups. President Trump and Vice President Pence leapt into action when the conditions came to light, only to blame the mess on congressional Democrats for not appropriating money. "We're doing a fantastic job under the circumstances," said Trump. What about leadership? "The President and I are going to stand strong, call on Congress to do their job," said Pence (Flynn 2019). The administration is all about ginning up fake crises, but when it comes to actual ones, they're helpless?

The mess at the border would be extremely difficult even if the administration hadn't inflamed the situation while evading their own responsibility. The proper solution is easier said than done: for the immediate term, treat the influx of refugees as the humanitarian crisis it is, as though it were a hurricane or a flood--get whatever resources are necessary to the scene, and treat people with compassion instead of contempt. For the long run, the U.S. needs to address situations in the countries of origin, particularly El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras (see Medicins Sans Frontieres 2017, Kristof 2019). It does no good to be offended at the refugees, and apparently little good even flagrantly to mistreat them, if the situations they're fleeing are worse. Help them improve.

Sherman Tank (Wikimedia commons)

Not included in our military parade because they're no longer made

Instead, we get rationalization and evasion of responsibility, while the priestly side of Independence Day is carried to a ridiculous extreme by a military pageant in Washington, D.C., complete with tanks and fighting vehicles. What would Amos, or Jeremiah, or Martin Luther King, say about that? Or about the Border Patrol Facebook site where they joke about migrant deaths and post obscene depictions of Latina lawmakers? Or people who are totally fine with all this, and contributed a record $105 million in the last three months to Trump's reelection effort?

The most destructive American public policy in my lifetime was the Vietnam War. Second, arguably, was the second Iraq war. The refugee mess on the Mexican border doesn't compare with those for magnitude. But those wars, however they're viewed in hindsight, at least had some plausible justification. The utter gratuitousness at the border, and the malice that informs it, make it more purely evil.

On this Fourth of July, America needs a prophetic call back to itself. And priestly celebration of its accomplishments. But mostly prophecy.

SEE ALSO:
Eugene Kiely, Robert Farley, and Lori Robertson, "Confusion at the Border," Factcheck.org, 3 July 2019
Jeremy Raff, "What a Pediatrician Saw Inside a Border Patrol Warehouse," Atlantic, 3 July 2019
"Eventually, We're Going to Have to Figure Out Immigration," 10 January 2019
"Fourth of July in Cedar Rapids," 5 July 2013 [I was in a more priestly mood that year]


There are a number of organizations actively mitigating the situation at the border. I have been contributing to RAICES, which has a 30-plus-year presence in the region providing legal services to immigrants.