Worst Things
I think of when I was enamored of Stanley Hauerwas, the Methodist theologian who had a bout of celebrity back in the early 2000’s. He was an extraordinary voice, and I learned a great deal from him. But he also had the kind of academic demeanor that meant you were either with him, or you weren’t. And I eventually realized I weren’t, or at least weren’t all the way that he was. But I took with him a concern for peaceability as a center of Christian life and the sense that such a concern meant having a very distant relationship to the institutions of power in our society.
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Bryan Stevenson’s work, by exceptional contrast, has become a touchstone of my more recent years and it has confirmed a long-held sense that mercy and peace and meekness and all those other Beatitudinal virtues should be at the center of our social awareness. He gets to narrative, like Hauerwas does, but only after intimate proximity with those whose story is being told. He is hands on and convictions first. He lands at story and learning and reflection only AFTER first working to un-do the work of injustice. America, then, is not a thing that is at odds with a Christian politics — it is a venue with a specific history and a concrete context for that politics to be enacted. Stevenson’s project works on the world that is with a faith that grace is sufficient to navigate even the mundane politics of the 21st century.
Especially because I learned so much from Hauerwas, it was hard not to see patriotism as an evil. And so it is, much of the time. And I certainly haven’t changed my feelings about the role that nations should play in churches. But since we’ve become so involved in this difficult work of confronting our history, I have wondered about national myths and how, in America, if we don’t have a thread that we are involved in a project and that that project is pointed toward progress, we are all lost. To be clear, we absolutely should tear Jackson’s mug right off of the $20 bill and put Harriet Tubman there instead. But do we not have to come up with some kind of account in which America––even one conceived of in a vastly different way––is still a project worth continuing?
That’s why Stevenson’s account of America in the work that he has done has struck me so deeply. It shouldn’t surprise me that a merciful and forgiving look comes from someone who has spent his time humanizing those of death row, but it did. And yet, there is Stevenson, on Krista Tippet’s podcast, reaffirming the role that mercy must play in our world. It comes straight from his work with courtrooms, where has learned that despite our intentions, crimes do not get sentenced. And it is people who get labeled and yoked with the worst thing they’ve ever done. Perhaps that goes for nations too? Perhaps America has a past that needs to be reckoned with, but that doesn’t mean that America is the worst things it has ever done. Perhaps there is room for mercy, even when it comes to nations.
