Good preachers return

Sam Smith - Last evening, before my weekly gig on Mark Thompson's Sirius XM show, as I listened to Rev. William Barber, the North Carolina guy behind Moral Mondays, I was struck again by the fact that it's been about four decades since I felt such affinity with any public preachers.

I don't think this has been all my fault. As I noted last month, "I’m a Seventh Day Agnostic and, as such, I don’t give a shit about what you believe, only what you do about it":  

By the time the 1960s were over, I had worked with about a dozen preachers, some of whom would seem strikingly odd today. None of these ministers ever questioned my faith or lectured me on theirs. They ranged from the head of the Revolutionary Church of What’s Happening Now to Catholic priests... Meanwhile, in the larger capital, we had two Catholic priests in Congress, one as Assistant Secretary of Housing, and one elected to the DC school board.

Among the assets of some of these preachers were basement meeting rooms in their churches. During the scores of times I found myself in such rooms, we pressed anti-war protests, started the DC Statehood Party, began a bi-racial pre-school, and upped the ultimately successful battle against freeways in DC.  And no one made you recite a creed before the meetings began.

Now we've got not only Moral Mondays but a Pope like we haven't seen in decades. Sure he's got some work to do understanding gays and women, but he's moving in the right direction like only a tiny number of our secular leaders these days.

There are two things about Moral Mondays that even an agnostic can like:

• Religion is participating in, but not defining, the movement
• In an era of atomized activism, it is a movement of collective causes and collective interests. As Mother Jones put it: "To Barber, the movement's success is not tied to the ballot box. Rather, it's in moments like the cold Saturday morning in February when tens of thousands of people flooded the streets of the capital. Black, white, gay, and straight, they came from churches and synagogues wearing rainbow flags for marriage equality, pink caps for Planned Parenthood, and stickers reading "North Carolina: First in Teacher Flight." 

This year  is the 55th anniversary of another movement that started in North Carolina. In February 1960, four black college students had sat down at a white-only Woolworths lunch counter in Greensboro, NC. Within two weeks, there were sit-ins in fifteen cities in five southern states and within two months they had spread to fifty four cities in nine states. Nothing quite that good has happened to Moral Mondays but as recently as last week 28 clergy and other activists were arrested in Chicago during a Moral Mondays protest aimed at a billionaire and his private investment firm.

Part of the problem is that the media would much rather cover Rachel Dolezal's ethnicity or a Confederate flag in the wrong place than bigger things really happening now.

As Denise Oliver Velez put it in Daily Kos:

One of the most powerful voices in the nation, fighting to mobilize a broad-based coalition of social activists to fight voter suppression, is that of the Rev. Dr. William Barber II. What is disconcerting is that with only a few exceptions, the major traditional media have managed to ignore his voice and the Moral Mondays movement he is leading—from his home base of North Carolina, to as far north as Wisconsin.

How did much of the press manage to ignore 80,000 people who marched in Raleigh, North Carolina, back in February?

While the traditional media is willing to pay homage to Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks in memorials and tributes, journalists are far too willing to pretend that the civil rights movement was buried with Dr. King. Contrary to those who speak as if the movement ended in 1968, it is alive and growing. Blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, women and men—straight and LGBT, religious and non-religious, young and old—have come together in a breathtaking and extraordinary fusion movement...

"I am a Christian evangelical conservative" [Barber] said, "because I believe that actually many of those who claim to be conservative, are actually quite liberal." There was laughter from the audience. "Because while they talk religion, they liberally leave out any mention of the centerpiece at the heart of faith. I want to conserve what's at the center of faith...and at the heart of faith is love, and at the heart of faith is justice at the heart of faith is fairness.