James Baldwin once said that to be Black “in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time.” In the present moment, that sense of frustration can extend to much of the populace. We are right to be deeply disturbed by the actions of ICE over the past few months, especially the use of lethal force against Renee Good. But there is a danger to anger, one that I have learned about through personal experience.
Growing up, I had good reason to loathe my father. He was abusive and struggled with addiction. He cycled in and out of jail, and that sent my family tumbling down the economic ladder.
Before he died when I was in my mid-30s, I realized that my sense of my own righteousness had callused into something cruel. I didn’t want him to change, because his poor behavior formed a central part of my identity. He left his family; I built one. He was addicted to drugs; I barely drank alcohol. As long as I compared myself with him in this way, I needed his brokenness to provide direction. I was not running toward the good; I was fleeing him.
I have thought of my feelings about my father repeatedly as I have navigated the past decade of Trumpian politics, and I have often struggled with deep anger at the unfolding injustices. I feel less safe in President Trump’s America. I worry that my children, whose complexion is fairer than mine, might get stopped by the ICE agents who have been an ominous presence in the Midwest, where I live, these past several months. I feel for people who have been detained and who report having been denied due process or humane conditions in detention centers.
But I also worry that for some of us, our antipathy to Trump has, like my disdain for my father, become part of who we are, and it can be something of a personal poison. I find myself being angry and simply looking for fellowship among other infuriated citizens. There is a community that has formed not by hope but by loathing. And I’m not sure it’s any different on the other side of the political divide.
I remember the day that my father apologized to me. We hadn’t spoken in years but were now reunited at my sister’s wedding. During a lull in the rehearsal, I asked him the questions that had been with me my whole life: “Why did you leave, and why did you stay away?” He replied, “Son, I don’t rightly know. After I left, I saw that you all were doing better without me, so I stayed away. I’m sorry.” In the coming months, he would have similar conversations with my mother and my siblings.
What shocked me most was how difficult it was to accept this new version of him even as he tried to make amends. Who was I if I wasn’t a person with a wicked father? I was confronted with a miracle that I was not sure I wanted.
Forgiving my father forced me to create a positive, and not merely a reactive, vision of my life. It also taught the valuable lesson that not all lost causes are irredeemably lost.
If everything changed and a majority of Americans decided to vote for politicians who promised to remove ICE from our streets, could we forgive? If there were a real attempt at righting the wrongs that have been done to some people in this country, would that offer a path toward healing for all of us? Have we become too comfortable in our national malice toward one another? Do we want repentance or revenge?
My father died a few years after that apology, and my family asked me, a member of the clergy, to perform the ceremony. I am an Anglican priest, and the Book of Common Prayer provides a recommended list of texts to preach at funerals. I broke from that list and preached about the Pharisee and the tax collector, who feature in a parable in the Gospel of Luke, my oldest child’s namesake. In that narrative, the two men go up to the temple to pray. As a Pharisee, the first man adhered to Jewish law as an expression of faith and devotion. Tax collectors used violence and coercion to take from their own people to line their Roman colonizers’ pockets.
The Pharisee prays: “God, I thank you that I am not like other people — robbers, evildoers, adulterers — or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.” The tax collector, by contrast, humbles himself. He stands at a distance and beats his chest, saying, “God have mercy on me, a sinner.”
The story turns expectation on its head because it is the loathed tax collector who, troubled by the things he has done, receives mercy from God.
I told the congregation that I had been like the Pharisee, so caught up in self-justification that I failed to view my father with compassion. I did not see him as someone lost or trapped by his own wrongs; I saw him as someone whom I couldn’t wait for God to judge. He had been on a spiritual and moral journey that I could not see.
What if some in the MAGA movement are trapped, just like the tax collector or my father? Does any ICE officer think, after watching a colleague drag a woman out of her car or use tear gas on civilians: This is not what I signed up for? Are none of them moved after seeing the harsh treatment of largely peaceful protesters and the arrest of clergy?
I refuse to believe that there are no troubled souls in the whole of MAGA.
I am a pastor and a public theologian. By vocation, I have a duty to hope. To hope, as a Christian, is never to concede that wickedness must be the end of any person’s — or any nation’s — story. To hope does not imply accepting a false peace that laments divisions without naming the evils done. Instead, hope demands a certain doggedness, a refusal to let go. The same patience that God showed me must, in principle, be available to others.
Mutual hatred is a national wound that we will have to work to heal, and that will require letting go of who we’ve become. It’s the only way forward for all of us.
Esau McCaulley (@esaumccaulley) is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South” and the children’s book “Andy Johnson and the March for Justice.” He is an associate professor of New Testament and public theology at Wheaton College.
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