“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost but now I’m found, was blind but now I see.”
We are all wretched. And by grace in many forms, saved. John Newton knew this when he wrote the well-known Christian hymn “Amazing Grace” in 1772. He’d been a slave trader capturing natives from West Africa to be sold to markets around the world. But during a fierce storm he feared would cause a shipwreck, he experienced a conversion which would lead him to become an avid abolitionist and later an ordained minister of the Anglican church.
Sadly, much in our history did not follow such an example of humility born of grace. And today, if we are going to confront and solve our systemic problems together as Americans and preserve our democratic republic, we too must first “see” when and where we’ve been “lost” before we can get “found.”
For starters, we must acknowledge that Christopher Columbus did not discover America as many of us were taught. This nation was stolen from Native Americans who called it home for thousands of years. In our country’s early formation, much of our wealth was built on the backs and brawn of slaves deemed to be three-fifths human, as was stated in our U.S. Constitution, for the purposes of determining congressional representation. Women had to take to the streets with a decades-long struggle to demand the right to vote. Still, it would be another 45 years, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights movement, before African Americans could begin their quest for full citizenship.
In our more recent history, it’s immigrants — often escaping life-threatening conditions at home — coming here glad to work menial labor jobs, who are now in danger of being labeled criminals and rounded up off our streets and deported without any due process.
President Trump, surrounded by Christian evangelical ministers, tells us we can make America great again. Again? As it was when? Oh yes, before DEI policies. A time when largely only white males were valued and those of other ethnicities, as well as women, knew their God given place. Before the social movements of the 1960s began unraveling the former idyllic Mayberry American society. Before exposing the barely half-truth of the “All men are created equal” proclamation in our Declaration of Independence. Modern blasphemy!
A particularly egregious expression of being “blind” is seeing female legislators proudly displaying crosses around their necks while taunting the value of rounding up thousands of the so-called “worst-of-the-worst,” terrorizing communities and separating families, many of whom just happen to be people of color.
And they eagerly join their male counterparts in slashing SNAP benefits to the most vulnerable, cutting money to Medicare and Medicaid, reducing access to doctors and threatening the closure of hospitals and nursing homes putting millions of Americans at risk. Such actions I would call no less than the weaponization of Christianity.
What might they “see” if touched by just a hint of amazing grace? They might see the immigrant they’re rounding up as not so different from people in their own family, just several generations back, who came to this county in search of a new life. They might see the face of their own son or daughter when they indiscriminately round up a mom or dad leaving children behind. They might see the struggling single mom going to the food pantry for the first time because her benefits were unexpectedly cut. Perhaps they might even feel the desperation of the young man, recently laid off, who knows he must swallow his pride and rely on church and strangers to be Santa so his kids can still believe on Christmas morning. They might see the elderly woman who lives alone who must choose between food and heat. They may even see the crowds in our emergency rooms growing daily because so many can no longer afford medical insurance.
Imagine in moments of grace, such professed Christians might ask themselves, “What would Christ do now?”
If our history has taught us anything, it’s that our great American spirit is too grand to allow itself to be silenced, nullified or codified into any ideology that erases diversity, ignores equality and resists inclusion. Perhaps this is why Chicago priest, Rev. Pfleger, said, “I believe it’s time for the churches to lead the revolution, a spiritual revolution to stand up to this fascism, or the streets are going to do a revolution and it’s going to be bloody and ugly.”
I pray for a spiritual revolution. Yet, who will emerge victorious? The slave trader deciding who is worthy and who is not, or those touched by grace ready to reignite the torch of our Lady, the beacon of light for the world?
Rev. Dr. Stephanie Rutt is founding minister of the Tree of Life Interfaith Temple in Amherst. She lives in Nashua.
