A Welcomed New Holiday

Celebrating Juneteenth with my Fellow Americans

Why a new holiday? (I have seen it asked.) Why a new day of independence when July 4th ought to have been enough?

I want to let a better preacher than me speak. Wrote Fredrick Douglass about July 4th, 9 years before the Civil War:

I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. — The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.

The masterful piece — What to the Slave if the 4th of July? — is worth reading in its entirety every Juneteenth. It explains to white folk like me why July 4th is not the same for the descendants of slaves as it is to others. Jonah Goldberg, conservative columnist, wrote yesterday of the holiday.

America is different. Slavery in America was different because America is different.

America was founded on principles of universal human equality and dignity. China wasn’t. Germany wasn’t. No other country was…

There was nothing hypocritical about slavery in Asia, the Middle East, or Europe. To the extent those civilizations had charters, creeds, or some other form of fleshed-out ideals, slavery was consistent with them. In America, slavery was a grotesque hypocrisy whose horror was eclipsed only by the actual horror of the institution as practiced….

Acknowledging this hypocrisy is valuable and important because it illuminates the very ideals being violated. Without principles, you can’t be a hypocrite. You would have nothing to fall short of or betray…

Moreover, making Juneteenth an American holiday and not just a black holiday underscores that Americans — all Americans — are (or should be) rightly proud that we did away with an institution existentially at war with the best version of ourselves.

I celebrate today that America settled — at the cost of more than 600,000 lives — the question of the worth and value of black Americans. I celebrate that the ideals of the founding have been and continue to be refined and enacted. That our nation is better today than it was then, though the road ahead may seem impossibly long and arduous.

I celebrate the acknowledgement of the pain and anguish black Americans experienced even on July 4th. Listen to the preacher again. Douglass quotes here one of the most painful personal reflections in all of Scriptures, in the Psalms:

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”

Then he makes it personal:

Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them… I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery — the great sin and shame of America!

I celebrate that though we have many sins to combat, slavery is not one of them, for we settled that question with the blood of our ancestors.

Importantly, as a Christian, I celebrate that it was the word of God in the hands of men like Douglass which overwhelmed the abuse of the word of God in the hands of the the slaveholder. I celebrate that the slave Bible was not the last Bible black Americans got to read, and that the Exodus narrative which shaped and inspired their movements toward freedom could not be silenced no matter how hard slaveowners tried.

What do I do on Juneteenth?

First, I don’t try to run the show or tell folks how it ought / ought not be celebrated. I would not expect a Muslim to tell me, a Christian Pastor, how to celebrate Easter, or let a Canadian tell us Americans how to celebrate July. I instead celebrate with and for those black Americans who have today as their day. I learn from them what celebrating freedom means, for my forefathers were not slaves, I did not endure Jim Crow, and I never understood the hunt for freedom as they have. If I am invited to the barbeque, great! If not, great! Not everything is about me.

Second, I seek justice. This is a biblical command, you see, and God judges nations, even his favored nation, on the basis of how they treated the least among them. I seek out that which would necessitate another holiday like Juneteenth. I ask, “where do we still fail to live up to the ideals of our founders?” Where are we hypocrites, America? This is a good biblical question that cannot be dismissed with jargon-y claptrap like calling it sjw crt woke whatever. God is just, and seeking justice on earth is righteous.

Douglass links justice and worship:

A worship that can be conducted by persons who refuse to give shelter to the houseless, to give bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and who enjoin obedience to a law forbidding these acts of mercy, is a curse, not a blessing to mankind. The Bible addresses all such persons as “scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites, who pay tithe of mint, anise, and cumin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith.”

Third, I seek the purification of the church. Lest we think, oh church, that we have ‘made it,’ we must recall that the church in America made the tragic error of protecting slavery, even when godly men told them they were wrong:

But the church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. It has made itself the bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave-hunters. Many of its most eloquent Divines. who stand as the very lights of the church, have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system. They have taught that man may, properly, be a slave; that the relation of master and slave is ordained of God; that to send back an escaped bondman to his master is clearly the duty of all the followers of the Lord Jesus Christ; and this horrible blasphemy is palmed off upon the world for Christianity.

This sort of unrighteousness is worse than atheism. Preachers who use the bible in defense of wickedness are evil, pure evil.

These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having neither principles of right action, nor bowels of compassion. They strip the love of God of its beauty, and leave the throng of religion a huge, horrible, repulsive form. It is a religion for oppressors, tyrants, man-stealers, and thugs. It is not that “pure and undefiled religion” which is from above, and which is “first pure, then peaceable, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy.” But a religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, stay there; and to the oppressor, oppress on; it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind; it makes God a respecter of persons, denies his fatherhood of the race, and tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man. All this we affirm to be true of the popular church, and the popular worship of our land and nation — a religion, a church, and a worship which, on the authority of inspired wisdom, we pronounce to be an abomination in the sight of God. In the language of Isaiah, the American church might be well addressed, “Bring no more vain ablations; incense is an abomination unto me: the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth. They are a trouble to me; I am weary to bear them; and when ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea! when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. YOUR HANDS ARE FULL OF BLOOD; cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek judgment; relieve the oppressed; judge for the fatherless; plead for the widow.”

I ask: where are we guilty of ignoring injustice? Of late, I see guilt as we ignore victims of sexual violence and uphold the cause of the perpetrator. Where else are we guilty? Where else do we commit, as Douglass saw, the sins of commission AND omission?

The American church is guilty, when viewed in connection with what it is doing to uphold slavery; but it is superlatively guilty when viewed in connection with its ability to abolish slavery. The sin of which it is guilty is one of omission as well as of commission.

Where is our superlative guilt?

July 4th celebrates the ideals of a nation which led men to shed blood. Juneteenth celebrates the continual process of purification necessary to uphold and expand those ideals. I will do, as Douglass asked,

Let the religious press, the pulpit, the Sunday school, the conference meeting, the great ecclesiastical, missionary, Bible and tract associations of the land array their immense powers against slavery and slave-holding

Now substitute slavery and slave-holding for… what? What is the just need of the hour? Who needs freeing today?

and you have the perpetual question of Juneteenth, at least for me.

Happy Juneteeth!