At the Center for the Repair of Historical Harms, fidelity to the Gospel involves breaking the Miller Cycle of outrage over the racialist legacies of Europe’s colonization of the land currently called the United States. To be clear, the Center does not seek to dampen the tumultuous eruption of righteous anger. Without that anger, many of us would never have awoken to one critical fact: liberation is a basic spiritual process in creation, one that is violated only at great peril to the human beings who cling to what must be broken down and reconceived. Among the things to be broken down, however, is the cynical (if unspoken) consensus that surrounds trafficking in buzzwords, lamenting on cue, posting the right hashtag, acknowledging (and thereby increasing) White privilege, greenwashing environmental crimes, kneeling in other people’s Kinte cloth, endorsing non-White people’s bad ideas and lowering education standards for communities that have been systemically and historically prevented from discovering their own true aptitude and, thereby, from meaningfully contributing to their communities’ own healing.
Instead, as a ministry of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Center focuses on growing the number of human beings who can work to spread the Good News that reparatory justice and reparations make common sense for the common good, and growing that number as soon as possible and for as long as it takes to get the work done. But how exactly do we grow that number?
The privilege of working in fidelity to the Gospel sets our work in motion and inspires us to persevere in faithfulness to that which the Gospel makes possible. Just as Jesus and his mother, Mary, willingly submitted their lives to bear the will of the Creator into creation – according to their natures, and during their only opportunity to be human on earth – we respond in kind during our own time to be human on this planet. Moreover, Presbyterians in this land have helped teach that the very existence of the United States requires citizens to respect the nation’s right to hold human beings and stolen land as private and state property. Thus, the Center affirms that conducting sovereign relations and land repatriation processes with Indigenous nations, as well as offering reparations to Afro-Americans, is right, necessary and possible.
At the same time, we pray with our ancestors that we will conduct the affairs of the earth in the right relation to the way of heaven. For this reason, the Center rejects any notion that the administration of peace and plenty requires compromises that manifest as false choices between labor exploitation and progress; reparations denial and race relations management; national security and support for apartheid; or national cohesion and Indigenous genocides. Each of these false choices represents the transgenerational impact of national and individual self-deception, intellectual laziness and the willful denial of providence.
