Dear Christians,
I lined the streets for my fourth protest of the year, myself, Will, and our four-year-old daughter, who loves the protests so much she confuses them with a parade. That should tell you something about how peaceful and joyful the protests are: people in costumes, upbeat music, balloons, and a whole bunch of smiling and sweet elderly people. The protests here in my town are full of silver-haired seniors; they account for at least half of the whole. Elderly people show up even with their walkers and canes, and always smile at my four-year-old daughter. One man turned to me and pointed to my daughter and said, “We gotta do this for her.” Maybe at my first protest I would have been inclined to give him a high five and say, “That’s right!” but as soon as the words left his mouth, tears started welling behind my sunglasses. Grief was overwhelming. Somehow, between this 84-year-old man’s life and my four-year-old daughter’s, the fight for equality, justice, and basic human kindness has just spun in circles. I can feel the defeat in just my lifetime. After joining the Black Lives Matter protests, I took time to educate myself further on the Black American experience; I read one of MLK’s books, and page after page I was aghast at how we are still fighting so much of the same fight they were fighting back then.
Beyond my grade school education that taught me that we had slavery, then segregation, and then equality and everything is all good now, I had no true understanding of what systemic racism was. I had no idea the ways we legally and intentionally incarcerated Black people, broke up their families, stopped them from buying homes, and even filled their communities with addictive drugs. I gained an understanding of the bottled-up rage in Black homes, unable to be anything but calm and stoic so as to spare their lives while being grossly disrespected by law enforcement and white agitators. I learned of the killing of Black children by white neighborhood watch groups and police officers who got away with murder in the name of self-defense. Self-defense from an unarmed child whose only threat to society was walking through a neighborhood with Black skin—and the courts agreed his death was justified. Freedom for the murderers, death for the innocent Black boy. I learned of the outrage and protests that took place after that young boy, Trayvon Martin, was killed. I was 19 when this happened, but young and living in my white community, I didn’t remember this story when it happened—only when it happened again, and I joined the protest and educated myself, did I start to understand the depths of racism in our country.
I screamed the words “Black Lives Matter” over and over in the streets of our white community, marching with a few hundred other protestors. I felt broken to my core that this is something we even have to scream, Black lives matter. Why isn’t that just assumed? Why do we treat our fellow human beings so badly?
It was through that experience that I became glaringly aware of the church’s silence. Their silence led to a further understanding of the church’s support of slavery and all the ways it has been on the wrong side of history as far back as its formation. I had been on my way out of the church for a few years at this point, but this is where my anger toward Christians and religion started to fester.
As I had been raised to do, I continued my fight for social justice and equality once I had left the church, but disturbingly found that not only do Christians not help in the fight for equality, they are usually the creators of the roadblocks and hurdles that we have to get through. For example, countering the Black Lives Matter movement with “All Lives Matter,” taking away the much-needed focus that our Black brothers and sisters needed, watering it down, and bringing it back to their go-to scapegoat cause: abortion.
As I was standing at this protest, fighting tears and observing my daughter playing with the old ladies, I again was faced with my rage toward Christians. I live in a town with a megachurch; it’s so mega that the leaders of the church have been to the Oval Office to pray over Trump. They wrote books and gave prophecies to help get him elected. As I’m holding my sign, feeling utterly beaten down, devastated, and helpless, I begin thinking about how much more could be done if this megachurch in my town was out here protesting with us. How much more could be done if even half the churches across America would actually speak up against the brutality of immigrants and our Black and brown neighbors. If the church would speak up on livable wages and corporate greed. But rather, we have a collective church that is responsible for the unwavering support of the most corrupt, racist, and predatory president we have ever seen. Like every protest before, the Christians are the ones I make my signs for; the Christians are the ones whose hearts need to be turned back toward empathy. It was the religious leaders themselves who crucified Jesus, who called him evil and drove nails through his hands and watched him suffer to death on the cross. The religious leaders couldn’t see the son of God as he stood right in front of them. That is where the church is today—lost.
