Chanting "love wins" and singing hymns and songs, the vigil attendees in Charlottesville held small candles in a striking visual rebuke to the torches that swept through just days earlier.
“As a leader in my religious community, I am strongly opposed to any effort to repeal or weaken current law that protects houses of worship from becoming centers of partisan politics,” reads the letter faith leaders who support church-state separation delivered to Congress on Wednesday.
How would you describe Clinton’s faith? What are your impressions of her religious and spiritual life?
She’s a very deeply committed Christian. I know many people are critical of that and don’t believe it, but in my heart of hearts, from the conversations that we have had and from the good that she does, she’s a deeply committed disciple of Christ. And she’s a good Methodist. Methodists don’t talk about their faith very much. She doesn’t wear her religion on her sleeve, but I know that she practices it and she has spiritual disciplines, including reading the Scriptures every day and praying every day. People aren’t going to want to believe that, but it is true.
With tears and defiant tributes, hundreds of purple-clad people packed an historic Charlottesville theater to remember the 32-year-old woman killed when a suspected white nationalist crashed his car into anti-racist demonstrators.
"They tried to kill my child to shut her up. Well guess what? You just magnified her," Heyer's mother Susan Bro said to long and loud applause from those gathered at the city's 1930s-era Paramount Theater.
Of the many shocking images from Charlottesville, one continues to haunt me. White men, mostly younger, are marching and carrying torches in the night with faces full of grim hate and determined anger. It was malevolently reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan’s torch-lit night rallies, with cross burnings and the evil actions and killings that often followed. Even more, it brought memories of the Nazis marching with their torches, slogans, and violence in the 1930s. The neo-Nazis in Charlottesville chanted some of those same slogans.
Somewhere completely outside of all of this,
you are ushering in a kingdom not of this world,
one that rights all wrongs and rules in love.
But for now, here we are.
"White supremacy and racism deny the dignity of each human being revealed through the Incarnation. The evil of white supremacy and racism must be brought face-to-face before the figure of Jesus Christ, who cannot be confined to any one culture or nationality. Through faith we proclaim that God the Creator is the origin of all human persons. In the words of Frederick Douglass, “Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference."
I have been asked by two dear friends, “how can I be a stronger ally?” Being the slow emotional processor that I am, I wanted to spend some time with this before I answered them. I surely appreciate and love these two individuals, and I appreciate their vulnerability in asking me this question. I am not going to do much coddling here; I don’t know that I believe that love requires coddling. Here are six things you can do to be stronger allies.
This lack of enthusiasm stands in sharp contrast to earlier generations.
This morning's statue removals follow a weekend of violence in Charlottesville, Va., centered on the planned removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. On Monday, the Baltimore city council voted to remove and destroy the statues. That process took nearly immediate effect, in the middle of the night Tuesday and early Wednesday.