It didn’t start well — this American nation conceived in America’s original sin of racial dehumanization of Indigenous land theft and the slavery of Africans. Yet, many of the ideals that the nation’s founders aspired to still hold the potential to build a future nation much better than the one we began with. And that has been the struggle ever since.
These retablos reflect on the faith that people had to begin the journey of migration, entering a foreign land. Often leaving family and home into the unknown, on a journey that is fraught with peril but also promise. Young fathers and mothers, children of families who will pray for them daily as they go. As the exhibit description mentioned, these retablos "depict a side of migration usually not told in statistical reports or even in detailed interviews of migrants."
As a student of the history of biblical interpretation, the rhetoric employed by Dobson and other evangelical leaders is frighteningly similar to that of German pastors and theologians in the Third Reich. It appears that Christians have either forgotten or are ignoring the dark history of Christianity’s marriage to partisan politics and nationalist agendas.
Advocacy groups MoveOn, United We Dream, the American Friends Service Committee, and Families Belong Together collectively hosted peaceful protest gatherings across the U.S. on July 2, calling on members of Congress to defund border detention centers immediately and #CloseTheCamps. The masses who protested outside the White House were not daunted when heavy rains greeted their chants.
In a stinging defeat for President Donald Trump, his administration ended its effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 U.S. census, saying that it will begin printing forms that do not include the contentious query. But, nevertheless, Trump later indicated he would still try to get the "most vital" question included on the questionnaire.
Because of this immense history, power, and influence despite generations of ill treatment and racism, black churches need to thrive, continuing to speak truth to power and serve black communities beyond the sanctuary.
“ICE is coming into our communities and tearing apart families and tearing apart our community on a regular basis, and they did so just again last week,” Sanctuary DMV organizer Ben Beachy said. “We need our D.C. elected officials to make D.C. a real sanctuary city, which means severing all ties with ICE.”
As a white, suburban evangelical in the early 2000s, I grew up going on short-term mission trips every summer and participating in charitable missions during the school year. When I think back on it, I now see that these trips and the kinds of charity they encouraged began to fall out of favor around the mid 2000s, around the time that the grants from Bush’s faith-based office would have kicked in. Books like When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert, and Toxic Charity and its follow-up Charity Detox by Robert Lupton, exemplify the way that Christians on both the right and left would come to absorb the ideological imperatives of welfare reform.
Christ, you taught us to give water
And to help the ones who thirst.
Yet in places near the border,
We confess we’ve done our worst.
Those who walk must now walk farther.
We have made their journey harder;
We dump water in the dirt.