In a February 24, 1912, letter published in The Outlook (a weekly Christian family magazine), Kelly Miller – the first Afro-American to receive a graduate degree in mathematics – described a feature of U.S. American culture: the outrage cycle, which I here call the “Miller Cycle.” Referencing the thousands of Afro-American citizens already immolated alive in public by “unabashed perpetrators laugh[ing] with ghoulish glee at the nullity of the law,” Miller observed the following response pattern:
The American people look impotently on with a momentary shudder, only to lapse into their accustomed mood, in sure expectancy of another shock. At each horrid happening the press indulges in a heated spasm of righteous indignation, but soon grows cold again. The outlaws are rarely brought to trial, never to justice. The National consciousness is becoming sere. Is this the final expression of our boasted American Christian civilization? Are the energies of the American people so focalized upon material values that the moral sense has become atrophied?
Are the energies of the American people so focalized upon material values that the moral sense has become atrophied?
With these words, Miller offered an image of the national body politic that serves as a passageway. The image depicts a nation of people who have enough moral intelligence to chide – from a distance – savage behavior that undercuts all pretension to being a progressive, civilized and enlightened people, but who lack the courage to condemn terrorist acts committed with impunity against the nation’s most loyal citizens. Moreover, this Miller Cycle highlights one role of U.S. commercial media: the way in which media outlets help one part of the body politic to point the finger at another part. In this way the media creates the impression that the founders’ historical choice to grant some citizens permission and immunity to devour other citizens, as if the latter were human beings, is a historical quirk — not a national characteristic that has threatened the United States since the signing of the U.S. Constitution.
Thanks to corporate media’s ever-tightening grip on the public imagination, today citizens continue to be seduced into that cyclical “heated spasm of righteous indignation” that by design “grows cold again.” The real danger of the nation’s moral imagination “becoming sere” (or threadbare) is managed – though not mitigated – so that our capacity for moral outrage is preserved, in part, through a carousel of outrages. Further complicating matters, media corporations use law to create new social capabilities together by collecting and weaponizing data on public outrage. The goal is to better discern which atrocities U.S. taxpayers will either tolerate or ignore — inevitably with little, if any, scrutiny.
The Miller Cycle disfigures the image of God in humanity. This cycle accustoms us to offering other people’s bodies as living sacrifices by misrepresenting the heavy burdens carried by the survivors of chattel slavery, genocides, continental land theft, reparations denial and apartheid — treating these bur-dens as unfortunate tragedies that cannot be removed. The Miller Cycle disfigures the image of God in ourselves by persuading us to withhold transformative solidarity from the human targets of European colonization, while we also believe corporate media and other cultural forces when they present certain non-White peoples as perennial victims whose oppression has no material remedy. The Miller Cycle identifies how – when we refuse to worship our Creator in a rational manner and be transformed by God’s renewal of our minds – we make our bodies into the passageways through which defilement and unnecessary death attack God’s creation. The Miller Cycle of outrage is the golden calf of U.S. Protestant modernity: one of the dark cycles binding national life to the superstition that we cannot do better.
Good fences make good neighbors: repair vs. reparations, cultural specificity and functional solidarities
Because reparations and reparatory justice are right, necessary and possible, the Presbyterian Mission Agency’s Center for the Repair of Historical Harms actively discerns, negotiates and organizes our unique and appropriate roles in reparations movements as a ministry of today’s Protestant church in the United States. In what remains, I briefly describe the reasons why the Center approaches the ministry of repair in the way that it does, outline some of the Center’s current reparative work and share our current understanding of one way in which reparations and reparatory justice relate to the larger Reformed tradition in our time and beyond.
First, a critical operational distinction grounds the work of the Center: namely, we recognize that Presbyterians (as well as other members of the post-Reformation family) have contributed to historical harms that now lie far beyond our denomination’s capacity to remedy on our own. These harms include the legacies of proslavery propaganda (in the form of plantation sermons), attempts to relegate the choice to enslave human beings to the moral status of private scruples, and efforts to destroy Indigenous languages in the name of national progress and Christian education. For these reasons, Presbyterians simply lack the material resources required to respond adequately to even a fraction of the calls for repair now coming from Indigenous nations, Afro-American people and others. For this reason and many others, the PC(USA) must do two things at the same time. First, we must repair historical harms committed against distinct historic communities within our own denomination. Then we must forge partnerships with Indigenous nations, Afro-Americans, and other national and global communities to discover our own role in the burgeoning national and global ecumenical movement supporting these communities’ calls for the repairs required by their futures.
Presbyterians simply lack the material resources required to respond adequately to even a fraction of the calls for repair now coming from Indigenous nations, Afro-American people and others.
Therefore, the Presbyterian church plots its exit from the Miller Cycle, in part, by acknowledging that the national and global movements for reparations neither begin with us nor depend on us. Instead, our gratitude to God inspires us to admit and apologize for our denomination’s role in historical harms. That same gratitude then moves us to acknowledge (and strive to discover) the critical contributions of individuals and organizations who focus on reparations, such as Callie House, Queen Mother Audely Moore, William Darity, the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA) and the National African American Reparations Commission (NCCRC). Perhaps most importantly, the movement of God’s Spirit in our time inspires us to determine how to become trustworthy comrades to communities calling for the repair of historical harms inflicted, in whole or in part, by members of the Presbyterian family.
To be trustworthy colleagues in the ongoing global movement for reparations, any denomination must tie its ministry of repair to the finite goals identified by those distinct communities calling for repair. Former president Barack Obama once told rock musician Bruce Springsteen that while he believes African Americans are certainly owed reparations for chattel slavery and Jim Crow legislation, he did not champion reparations legislation during his presidency because he believed that White people and recent immigrants would reject the notion, in ways potentially counterproductive to the ongoing pursuit of civil rights. Unfortunately, Obama’s utilitarian and circular logic shields from scrutiny the errant belief that reparations, reparative justice and functional access to civil rights are not intertwined.
To be trustworthy colleagues in the ongoing global movement for reparations, any denomination must tie its ministry of repair to the finite goals identified by those distinct communities calling for repair.
For mainline Christians, the former president’s explanation further reveals a critical fact beyond the baleful state of the U.S. moral imagination: we must fish for our own people. Just as Jesus instructed Peter and John, we must add our colleagues, our parishioners, our students, our constituents, our friends, our families and ourselves to the numbers of people whose reparative activities can tell our elected officials that the era of reparations denial has come to an end. When the Christian descendants of those peoples who committed European colonialism’s originating harms finally show up in public – locally and nationally – to acknowledge that reparations and reparatory justice are right, necessary and possible, the church can then mobilize other community members: members who are perhaps not currently in frequent fellowship with those communities who were already and steadily repatriating ancestral wealth, before current events belatedly woke up middle Americans in the mainline tradition.
Another key aspect of functional solidarity in the repair ministry entails cultivating the habit of respecting cultural specificity by naming it. This consideration defines the ministry of repair in the Reformed tradition as a group of planetary processes. The work of the PC(USA) is inherently international. But by “international,” I refer to both nations and groups whose responsibilities to make repairs, and whose duty it remains to call for repair, demand a shift in the way we discuss racialism. Specifically, because colonial harms were inflicted on particular groups in distinct ways to extract diverse resources and advantages, functional solidarities in the repair ministry require us to shift the conversation from the racialist language of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (an indispensable endeavor itself, in its corrective, protective and defensive functions) and toward an operational respect for the names by which historic communities refer to themselves, as themselves and for themselves. The reparations movement cannot afford to describe its work using the same language that White-dominant institutions use to appear more diverse by association with “people of color,” “Black and Brown bodies,” “minoritized individuals,” “BIPOC,” or “oppressed people.” Such terms are useful in the substantial work of the DEI professional and certain scholarly disciplines — but they are at best obfuscating in the reparations movement.
Another key aspect of functional solidarity in the repair ministry entails cultivating the habit of respecting cultural specificity by naming it.
For this reason, the Center employs a “call and response” repair ethic. This ethic is inspired by the Community of Caribbean States (CARICOM) statement asking the descendants of those who experience colonial harms to make it their own duty to call for the repairs required by their experiences. In response, the Center does not determine what repair and reparations entail. Instead, our repair ethic instructs the Center to respond to specific calls to repair historic harms committed, in whole or in part, by Presbyterians against the Tlingit and Haida nations, the Afro-American people, Indigenous Liberians, Koreans and Puerto Ricans — in addition to harms experienced by individual Presbyterian congregations and ethnic caucuses.
The Center’s repair ethic also encourages the PC(USA) and others in the ecumenical community – even as we ourselves are learning new solidarities – to affirm and amplify Haiti’s call for France to pay reparations in order to repair its hateful legacies of vengeful sabotage and extortion after Haiti succeeded in ridding itself of racial slavery forever. Our repair ethic further requires that we encourage and assist members of the ecumenical family to collaborate in their own response to calls for repair and reparations coming from the peoples of South Africa, the Fiji Islands, the Marshall Islands, Zimbabwe and Caribbean nations, among others. Finally, our call-and-response repair ethic has inspired the creation of the Alliance for International Repair and Reparations Ecumenical. Through AIRRE, the Center can respect the sovereignty and distinction of each group that is calling for the repair of historical harms, while the Center also reveals opportunities for local congregations and faith-based institutions to connect their experiences and work with their counterparts, nationally and globally. They can connect these efforts through the ongoing dissemination of information, contacts, encouragement, research, curricula, liturgical materials and other resources.
What’s happening now?
Since its establishment in fall 2022 by the decision of the 225th General Assembly, the Center has begun responding to multiple calls for repair. In August and October 2023, the Center led an interagency delegation to Juneau, Alaska, to prepare for and offer an official apology and financial reparations for the racist manner in which Memorial Presbyterian Church was closed in 1963, even as the majority Tlingit congregation was steadily growing in numbers. However, Richard Peterson, the president of the Tlingit and Haida Tribal Association, made sure that the Center and the interagency delegation left Alaska with no lingering illusions that the shameful events that took place 60 years prior in Juneau were anything but the tip of the iceberg. In the words of Tlingit activist Jerrick Hope-Lang, the town of Sitka is actually ground zero for Presbyterian participation in the colonization of Alaska.
Accordingly, the Center recently returned from a relationship-building and fact-gathering trip to Sitka. We returned not only with new comrades in the work of restorative justice and intercultural reencounter but with a deeper appreciation of the ongoing legacy of cultural destruction that Presbyterians studiously inflicted on the Tlingit and Haida peoples of Sitka — and ideas about new ways to participate in healing. Because Presbyterian activities in Sitka involved intimate and deadly processes of forced assimilation, our reparative activities will involve helping to repatriate human remains and sacred objects, working on language preservation processes and discovering our own role in revitalizing the Tlingit and Haida traditions of clan houses.
Within the PC(USA) itself, the Center especially enjoys working closely with congregations and mid-councils. Many are discerning how to move from 0 to 1 and continue onward to join national calls for transformative reparations legislation, regional calls for restorative justice initiatives, international calls for reparations awareness and advocacy, and local calls for creative and reparative approaches to church property and congregational histories. The Center is enthusiastic about ongoing collaborations across our six agencies. Currently we are working across the ethnic caucuses to discern and present recommendations to the General Assembly to support, preserve and extend the unique witnesses and diverse legacies of people of color congregations. We are focusing on finally securing resources to empower vital yet historically neglected and underresourced congregations to call and install full-time pastoral leadership as soon as possible.
Many are discerning how to move from 0 to 1 and continue onward to join national calls for transformative reparations legislation, regional calls for restorative justice initiatives, international calls for reparations awareness and advocacy, and local calls for creative and reparative approaches to church property and congregational histories.
Finally, the Center is leading PC(USA)’s response to a recent call for repair from the Liberia Council of Churches. As part of the broader work to repair and revivify the denomination’s relationship with Presbyterians in West Africa, the Center is leading the response to LCC’s call to reexamine Presbyterian involvement in the American Colonization Society. This method is one way to uncover, admit, assess and begin to repair colonial legacies that were set in motion when Presbyterians attempted to preclude multiethnic democracy in the United States by imposing colonial relations on Indigenous Liberians.
Our response will involve the denomination in a process to clarify several questions, including one painful yet pivotal one. Namely, how did Presbyterians’ choice to colonize Indigenous Liberians’ lands – by transporting African Americans who had been released from chattel slavery and encouraging and supporting them to rule over the Indigenous peoples of the Liberian region – contribute to Liberia’s two cataclysmic civil wars that continue to fragment the African diaspora?
Reparations: The passageway to reorientation and the blessed reencounter
Last year I was inspired to revisit a conversation with Irvin Porter, associate for Native American congregational support, who asked what might have happened if the Christians who came to this land encountered Indigenous nations as equals who were capable of responding authentically to the Gospel. Protestantism forced encounters among Africans, this hemisphere’s Indigenous nations, and European settlers to follow the relational logics of genocide, land and labor theft and war — according to what the Eastern Orthodox Church rightly understands as the superstition of race ideology. Protestants participated in cultural and biological genocides by demonizing and destroying African and Indigenous cosmologies, even as the Protestant Reformation’s European children were regressing morally, succumbing to European superstitions about competition, sacrifice and race, to the detriment of the entire planet and all its inhabitants.
The ministry of repair is our passageway to a reencounter after centuries of preventable catastrophe. Once the era of decolonial repair is set in motion toward irreversible outcomes – once Presbyterians make clear our intention to participate in a reset that corrects this denomination’s originating colonial encounters – the PC(USA) will have providence to thank: for new wellsprings of congregational vitality, a theological renaissance, authentic and transformative interactions between Indigenous traditional cosmologies and Protestant traditions, and a vivifying local, national and global witness to new possibilities worthy of being called the Good News.
