A Church is Burning

Tomorrow, millions of Americans will cast votes that will determine if we are to carry on living in our poverty of true and decent leadership. They will join millions of their fellow citizens who have already done so in defiance of plague and often of their own government, deciding if we are to live in a world where military strength is matched by moral restraint, wealth with wisdom, power with purpose.

I have invoked President Kennedy’s ideas of moral restraint, wisdom, and purpose before. At the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in June I wrote that we must choose hope from despair, intellectual fervor from backwardness, a compassionate and fruitful future from the sameness of the sedentary. This era—I wrote—was the spoilt fruit of generations’ failure to have created something better. This era must end.

I wrote then that “America burns as the world weeps”. It is that burning which has most preoccupied my thoughts in recent weeks otherwise marred by an obsession with polling, early vote totals, rising COVID case counts, and all manner of other data as if in the coldly mathematical reality of data we might find some sort of answer to our sorrow, or some sort of hope for our future.

I am reminded of a song by Paul Simon, who in 1965 wrote of white violence against black Americans (Apple Music | Spotify):

A church is burning
The flames rise higher
Like hands that are praying, aglow in the sky
Like hands that are praying, the fire is saying,
“You can burn down my churches but I shall be free.”

Three hooded men through the back roads did creep
Torches in their hands while the village lies asleep
Down to the church where just hours before
Voices were singing and hands were beating
And saying, “I won't be a slave any more.”

This moment is so wrenchingly painful because in the United States (and elsewhere) the civic religion upon which Americans and the world once relied has been burned to the ground. It is painful because it is a visceral loss. A loss of something in which so many deeply believed, the loss of an ideal that called many to vocations of public service and many more around the globe to futures free from the tyranny of their past. A loss of—as New York Times writers so poignantly described last week—innocence, imagination, faith, generosity, pride, and friends. The Pax Americana. But also a loss of the illusions and naïveté that once made us complacent, of our apathy, making way for an opportunity for reckoning.

This is the idea that I have woven through blog posts this year and in my book, Field Blends. This idea that we are a world in pain, that…

…mostly I was sad. Sad like I imagined the children of the Lost Generation might have felt when the promise of the War to End All Wars came crashing down around them. I was sad that the idyllic experience of being an end-of-history kid had slipped through our fingers. We’d never find the same bits of sand again. They had mingled into the sea of time.

- Field Blends, Chapter Twenty-Three

Yet that…

There was something reassuring to me about the idea that so many people my age—younger, even— should be so committed. The only sense of peace I had with the whole ghastly affair those last couple of years was the sense that great swaths of society were building a world in which they’d actually want to live...

- Field Blends, Chapter Twenty

And it’s an idea that to me found new words when in that song from 1965 that I re-discovered just last week:

Three hooded men, their hands lit the spark
Then they faded in the night and they vanished in the dark
And in the cold light of morning there's nothing that remains
But the ashes of a bible and can of kerosene.

That there are too many among us who will burn down the religion—civic or otherwise—they claim to cherish. That there is wrenching pain in the cold light of morning. And, yes, there may be a cold light of morning. But that the minds of those weak men are as short sighted as their motives are dark, because we the people know that…

A church is more than just timber and stone
And freedom is a dark road when you're walking it alone
But the future is now, and it's time to take a stand
So the lost bells of freedom can ring out in my land.

May your vote be an act of shedding the illusions and naïveté that once held us back. Of reclaiming the innocence, imagination, faith, generosity, pride, and friends we have lost. The future is now, and it’s time to take a stand so that the lost bells of freedom can ring out in our land.

You can burn down my churches, but I shall be free.