The Reverend John H. Cross, Jr., former pastor of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, died yesterday at the age of 82. It was the Reverend Cross who was in charge the night of September 15, 1963, when a bomb went off at the church in the middle of a youth service, killing four girls: eleven-year-old Denise McNair, and three fourteen-year-olds, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. Reverend Cross presided over the mass funeral of three of the young victims.
Looking at this archived page of newspaper photos brings the reality of those cold sentences just a little closer. I wasn't born yet in 1963; I grew up in the North, and took for granted the classmates of different races I had at the parochial schools I attended even when my family moved South. That such vicious and terrible hatred could flourish in the seemingly not-so-distant past seems almost incredible to me; it seems on a par with the hatred that turned jet planes into flying bombs aimed at the heart of New York City.
We haven't done away with hate, not by a long shot. I don't believe that we ever will, not in this earthly existence of ours, anyway. Since Cain first raised his arm to strike down Abel there have been people willing to see the face of an enemy where a brother should stand; there have been people willing to resort to violence and mayhem, justifying it to themselves as the proper response of righteous anger to tyranny.
But violence that targets the innocent is never righteous. Hatred that spreads like a bitter and destructive poison over its objects is motivated not by purity of heart but by the isolation of despair. Acts like these are not the acts of people who believe themselves directed by God, but of people who have judged God, and found Him wanting. In that moment of truth, in the darkness of their souls they realize that they have never worshiped, but only idolized--and the object of their idolatry has let them down, by refusing to be on "their" side, by failing to destroy the ones they see as enemies, by thwarting them in their vile and secret purposes.
It is no accident that the blast which killed four innocent children and badly damaged a house of worship also ruined a stained glass window portraying Christ surrounded by children. It is no accident at all that the figure of Christ remains behind--but He has lost His face. The men who set those charges and covered themselves with the blood of the innocent had never seen His face in the first place; and the only countenances they had ever worshiped were their own.
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"But violence that targets the innocent is never righteous. Hatred that spreads like a bitter and destructive poison over its objects is motivated not by purity of heart but by the isolation of despair. Acts like these are not the acts of people who believe themselves directed by God, but of people who have judged God, and found Him wanting. In that moment of truth, in the darkness of their souls they realize that they have never worshiped, but only idolized--and the object of their idolatry has let them down, by refusing to be on "their" side, by failing to destroy the ones they see as enemies, by thwarting them in their vile and secret purposes."
Certainly things would be far more problematic and difficult to make sense of if this were not the case. You would have people acting to gray, sometimes seemingly self-contradictory ends.
But is this universal to the human condition, Erin, or just confined to particular quarters of it, and if the latter, which ones?
I remember this event well. I was a college freshman in 1963, and we were much involved in the civil rights movement.
I was in school in California, and racial discrimination seemed like another world to us, even then. We had black classmates and no one thought much of it. And still it's hard to convey the spirit of that time. In Mississippi, in Alabama, in much of the South, blacks were being denied the vote. Some of my classmates went down to Mississippi that summer, to register and organize black voters; one of my closest friends was beaten almost to death. (Of course the real heroes of this struggle were not northern youngsters from privileged families who went down for the summer; the real heroes were the organizers on the ground, most of them black themselves.)
It seems a different world now. As Brad hints, those times were painfully clear. Denying American citizens the vote? And the rational justification for that would be what again? Of course there just isn't one, there wasn't one then either, so all the other side had was, "well, come within range and we'll beat you to death," not the most stunning or persuasive argument in the world. Blowing up a church and killing small children? And this would be why exactly?
All very clear. There is no conceivable justification for behavior like that. Everyone involved, including the perpetrators, knew that at the time.
The problems we face now, especially in the area of race relations, just don't seem so clear as all that. Take affirmative action. The affirmation of one group inevitably involves the disaffirmation of another: the minority candidate, less qualified on paper, takes the place of the more qualified majority candidate. That doesn't analyze out so easily, does it. Subtle discrimination, subtle hate, is alive and well, but not so easy to attack as the Birmingham bombing.
Our wars too seem more problematic now. World War II, at the time and in retrospect both, seemed fairly clear. Not so Vietnam (the uncertainty principle hit war before it got to race relations) or any war since. I'm here to testify that at least as regards the civil rights movement, that past clarity is not a function of these events being in the past. They seemed perfectly clear at the time too.
Hard to know where to mount the barricades now; hard to figure out where they ARE exactly.
You think the 9-11 attacks were not motivated by faith? -- That's odd, because I seem to remember that some of the hijackers left video recordings claiming that they believed this was the right thing to do for their imaginary friend; and if I recall correctly, at least some of their co-religionists celebrated the attacks precisely because they believed these statements.
Funny how memory works, isn't it.
>>Acts like these are not the acts of people who believe themselves directed by God, but of people who have judged God, and found Him wanting.
History suggests otherwise - acts like those have indeed been perpetrated by those who believe themselves to be directed by God.
"Kill them all, God will know His own."
Erin:
This is a far more eloquent statement about racism than I admit 99.9% of self-described liberals (including this one) could ever make.
Another reminder that Crunchy Cons have more in common with Crunchy Libs than Crunchy Libs like me sometimes give CC's credit for. (Maybe because Rod is a bit more ornery than you in pointing this out, LOL.)
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