an open letter to president trump

Dear Mr. President:

I join you in your recently stated admiration for Frederick Douglass and welcome the growing appreciation for all that he has done. Mr. Douglass was an amazing man. As a boy he taught himself to read and to write, and then took it upon himself to see that other enslaved blacks also learned. After he won his freedom, he worked tirelessly as a writer and newspaper editor for the cause of abolition and also for women's rights. He served as an adviser to President Lincoln during the Civil War and later served as an ambassador to Haiti.

I once heard a legend about Frederick Douglass' ghost and how he torments the dreams of racist men in power, particularly at the White House. According to this legend, such men have terrifying dreams where a black man accosts them and harshly reprimands them in a powerful oratory. Supposedly it was after one such visitation that President Lyndon B. Johnson abandoned the cause of segregation and ultimately became our nation's highest public official to push Congress to enact the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts.

If there is any truth at all to the legend, I must say I look forward to seeing what Frederick Douglass does next.

George Whitefield's complicated legacy of race relations, Donald Trump and the evangelical church

George Whitefield, a well-known preacher in the 18th century, had a life-changing experience while at Oxford, Christ Church, while attending the so-called Holy Club prayer meetings run by John and Charles Wesley. While there he became convinced that mere identification with the church was insufficient, that one needed to have a personal experience with the risen Christ.


​Whitefield took this gospel of personal conversion to the Colonies, where he became a well-regarded preacher. He had a stunning oratory voice. During one in Philadelphia, Ben Franklin found that Whitefield's voice carried effortlessly for 500 feet. From this he estimated that at a single one of his open-air oratories, Whitefield could be heard by about 30,000 people at a time.

Whitefield carried the gospel of personal redemption and personal relationship with Christ up and down the Colonies, making him one of the leading architects of a movement that historians of religion refer to as the Great Awakening. His preaching, it has been said, engaged not just the head, but the heart as well. In many ways, he is one of the founders of the evangelical movement. His is an interesting and compelling story for what a man can do when he is committed to the cause of Christ.

For all that, Whitefield had an interesting track record when it came to blacks and race relations.

On the one hand, he was one of the first evangelists to preach to the enslaved. He also took to task slave owners in Maryland. Virginia and South Carolina for how they treated their slaves. In one letter addressed to such slave owners, he wrote, "Your dogs are caressed and fondled at your tables; but your slaves who are frequently styled dogs or beasts, have not an equal privilege."

Good so far, right?

How about this, then: Although Whitefield considered black people to be as deserving of the gospel and as fully human as white people like himself; he had no objection to slavery itself. In fact, from 1748 to 1750 he campaigned to see the Georgia colony re-establish slavery, which it had outlawed in 1735. Whitefield argued that the colony would never be economically successful without slavery, and he further lamented that an orphanage he had founded was struggling financially because it couldn't rely on unpaid slave labor. When Georgia finally reinstated slavery in 1751, Whitefield saw the legalization not only as a personal vindication of his efforts but also as a reflection of the divine will. When he died, he owned some 50 slaves. He didn't set them free, but left them to someone else.

Let's sum it up this way. Whitefield saw blacks as human, but he was willing to see them suffer the indignities of slavery, as long as they weren't treated too badly, because their suffering made it possible to accomplish other, good things.

Now it's a common defense of flawed heroes that they were a product of their times. That's really a poor excuse, though; we're called to transcend our times, and while Whitefield did this in some respects, he failed horribly at the crucial moral test of opposing slavery. This wasn't an impossible test. Groups like the Society of Friends (Quakers) had begun to oppose the enslavement of Africans in the latter half of the 17th century, not long after the practice had begun.

I'll put it blunty: Whitefield was wrong, horribly wrong. Much as all of us who engage in hagiography would lke to suggest it otherwise, there is no excuse for what he did. He sinned, and in his sin, he helped to persuade others to excuse the treatment of human beings as chattel, consigning hundreds of thousands of other humans to the chains of slavery until the Civil War, and beyond, through jim crow-era injustices like sharecropping and labor camps like Parchan Farm. If his legacy includes the spread of Christianity across the Colonies and even into the durability of the Union after the Revolution, then it also includes the brutal exploitation and oppression of black women, men and children for more than the next century. If his labors for the gospel brought glory to God, then his labors for slavery also added to the defamation of Christ.

Please hear me out on this.

What the church just did about a month ago in throwing its support behind Trump is the same thing that Whitefield did. More than four in five white evangelicals voted for Trump, despite the racist rhetoric he spewed about blacks and Hispanics. He described black neighborhoods in our cities as war zones, shared white supremacist lies about black-on-white crime, attacked the legitimacy of our first black president, got sued (twice!) by the Justice Department in the 1970s for refusing to rent to black people, condoned the day after the beating of a black protester at one of his rallies and called the protestor's First Amendent actions "disgusting," and on and on. I'm sure I don't need to detail the racism he has directed at Hispanics, or the horrible things he has said about women.

Since the election, in New York alone, bias incidents have spiked 400 percent since the election. Let me repeat that: Just in New York there have been four times *more* incidents aimed at ethnic or religious minorities since Trump was elected, over the number of incidents before. Many of these have included direct references to Trump as seeming justification for the incidents and the behavior. Look around the news and you'll see stories of bullying in kindergartens, in high school, in public by adults. A Muslim cop yesterday was called a terrorist and told to go back to Saudi Arabia. Children are being told by their classmates that they're going to be deported. Bigotry has been given license.

We need to own this, because it's ours. The support Trump enjoyed from white evangelicals more than put him over the top to win, not the popular vote, but the electoral vote. When the church voted for Trump, the church said it was OK with his attitudes and these actions. Why did evangelicals vote for him in such numbers? Among the reasons I've heard given: he's going to be a friend to Christianity, and he's going to appoint conservative (or) pro-life judges to the Supreme Court, while a President Clinton presumably would not have.

In other words, like George Whitefield 260 years ago, the evangelical church that he helped to found has continued to carry his legacy, both good and bad. We'll bear with and even justify the continued oppression of an entire group of people (or more) if it helps us to further other goals that we consider righteous.

Whitefield was wrong, horribly wrong, to support slavery. The evangelical church was wrong, horribly wrong to support Trump. It put its faith in a man who has broken his word in hundreds of business contracts, and to each of his wives. Trump is not going to do God's work. Already he has an attorney general nominee whose history suggests he would dismantle what is left of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts; a chief counsel who is known for white supremacy and anti-Semitism, a secretary of education nominee with no support for public education; and on and on. He has continued his shakedown style of "negotiations" with Boeing that he used to destroy small businesses all over New Jersey and New York. In supporting Trump, a man with no values, the evangelical church has supported a man who opposes everything Christ stands for. The church is often quick to point out its legacy of hospitals, famine relief and other such projects. Trump is also part of our legacy.

Today's theme for Advent is "repent." Repentance is not easy, but it is necessary. It involves turning around and changing direction from where we are going. In order for repentance to happen, it requires awakening. We need to awaken not only to what Trump represents, but what the church's support of him has done to the authority and respectability of the church.

If what I'm saying here resonates with you at all, please take a look around your church. If it's a church that is on board with a Trump presidency, and sees it as a good thing, do yourself a favor. Don't try to change it. Just leave. Find a black church, join it, and discover the gospel from a different point of view. Find a church that celebrates racial diversity and actually looks like what we see in the book of Revelation, a community drawn from every tribe, nation and language. Dr. King famously described Sunday morning as the most segregated hour in America. Not much has changed in the past 50 years.

If your church has its reservations about Trump, now is the time to talk with your church leaders and elders about how to respond. Can your church offer physical sanctuary to families fearful of being deported, as the Reformed Church of Highland Park did 16 years ago? Can your church begin buying debt with the express purpose of canceling it, and setting people free? Can your church adopt a local pocket of immigrants, or start partnering with a church of a different ethnicity? If you're in the middle of a pastoral search, can you make it a priority to hire a pastor who comes from an ethnic minority?

Whitefield screwed this up because he was content to be a product of his times. Let's do better.


Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Not that anyone asked, but ...

I really don't like the term "racial reconciliation."

Reconciliation implies that there are two sides or more or less equal footing, like if a friend of mine and I got into an argument over something and had to patch things up. That just doesn't apply when it comes to the history of race relations in America, I draw a complete blank at anything African Americans have done, tolerated or turned a blind eye toward that comes anywhere close to a fraction of what they have endured from white society, starting in 1619 in the Jamestown colony.

Why don't we call for "racial justice" instead?


Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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So you voted for Donald Trump

I'm writing this to all my friends and family who voted for Donald Trump to be president.

Let me start by saying that I'm not mad at you. We've known each other for years. We've broken bread together, watched one another's kids, laughed at one another's jokes, and even worshiped together. Through the years we've learned to trust one another, and sought one another out when we needed wisdom and guidance.

Your friendship means the world to me, and this election has not changed that. I'm not mad at you. But I am terribly disappointed.

Why? Because of what Trump is and what he represents. Because of what he's going to do over the next four years to our country and the people who live here, and because of what he's already doing. It wouldn't bother me nearly as much if he had presented himself as an angel of light and tricked you, but he didn't do that. He showed himself for what he is, and you still voted for him.

I could go through a litany of his abuses, but I won't.

I could regale you with example after appalling example of his racism toward Hispanics and blacks, his anti-Semitism, and the ways he has mocked the disabled and vilified Muslims.

I could remind you that he encouraged violence at his rallies, telling his supporters that in the good old days, protesters would have been carried out on a stretcher.

I could remind you that we all heard him boast about sexually predatory behavior, that he has cheated on every one of his wives, and that he once described his own daughter as “a piece of ass” and even said he would date her if she weren't his own child.

I could get into all this with you, but why bother? You already know it. Many of you were appalled by these very things, and yet you were willing to vote for him anyway.

That's the part that I don't understand. Trump made it clear that in his America, ethnic minorities and minority religions are second-class and viewed with suspicion. I know you don't feel that way yourself, but when you voted for him, you said it was OK that he does.

You've taught your kids to treat everyone with equal respect, but you voted to have a president who wants to institute a religious test for immigrants and who shares racist, inaccurate statistics from white nationalists.

You would ground your son for a month of Sundays if you heard him talking with friends about grabbing my daughter “by the pussy.” If he tried to explain it was just a joke or “locker room banter,” you would scream at him so loudly that they would hear you in the next ZIP code. You heard Trump say that, and you voted for him to be president.

Trump insults those who criticize him, loses his temper if they one-up him, and mocks anyone who opposes or disagrees with him. If your daughter were dating someone like that, you'd want her to leave an abusive relationship. Instead, you just agreed the country should marry him for at least the next four years.

What's the message people should take from this? That as horrible as all these things are, you can live with them? That the dignity of your black neighbors, your Hispanic neighbors, your gay neighbors, your female neighbors, your Muslim neighbors, your Jewish neighors, is something you're willing to see take a hit? That their respectability is negotiable?

That's not the message you wanted to send but that's the message that was received.

I know the response: Hillary Clinton is just as bad. We both know that's not true. For years Trump has been as involved in the political system as she is, and when it comes to lies and corruption he has been playing in the majors for years. It's time to stop arguing for moral equivalence. We're too honest for that.

Being paid money to give speeches is is not the same thing as regularly refusing to pay bills to small businesses and threatening to bury them under an avalanche of litigation if they protest. Using a private email server is not the same as dealing in one oversize lie after another and stoking racial hatred.

For that matter, being married to an adulterer and forgiving him is nothing like being the adulterous spouse and leaving your partner for the woman you cheated with, and then repeating that process a few years later.

I've heard some of you cite abortion as the reason why you just couldn't vote for Clinton. That's a complicated issue, and it's one we can and need to discuss some time soon, but let's admit that this has become an idol on the Right.

Abortion is an ancient practice, but it is never once condemned in the Bible. The behaviors Trump practices are condemned roundly and repeatedly. In fact, Scripture makes that condemnation a major theme throughout.

But here we are. There is nothing to gain by arguing the merit of one candidate or another now, and that's not the point anyway. The dilemma is that we are being asked to accept a president-elect whose conduct and attitudes are morally abhorrent and have left people legitimately frightened for their safety and security.

Already the ugliness reported in Britain after the vote to leave the European Union is rearing its head here. Muslim women — easily identified by the hijab they wear — singled out and attacked. Kindergartners telling their peers they'll be deported soon. Blacks being called by the N-word openly.

Donald Trump did not create this ugliness, but through his campaign he brought it out into the open and gave it legitimacy. This is not something you wanted, but it has happened. By electing him, we have affirmed that this behavior is something we can live with.

We should not.

With the Republicans now in control of both chambers of the Congress and the White House, we likely will see a repeal of the Affordable Care Act, which means that millions of the most vulnerable members of our society are going to lose their health insurance. We also may see further cuts to the protections of minorities as the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts are chipped away.

And that's just the beginning. The Republican Party in the last 16 years has systematically opposed both maintaining our social safety net and opposed setting watchmen over big business. Expect more children to go hungry, more school funding to be slashed, and more abuses by big business as wages drop and the wealth divide grows.

From where I'm sitting, it looks like our country is entering a dark time. I'm appalled that many of my fellow Christians – a reported 80 percent of white evangelicals, who claim to have a close and personal relationship with Jesus – decided that they could live with all that Trump has said and done about women and minorities if it means they might have a say in appointing Supreme Court justices.

As a Christian myself I have to note that the people likely to suffer under a Trump presidency are the people whom Jesus stands with and among.

On Jan. 20, Donald Trump will be our president. I understand that, and accept that there is nothing I can do about it. I cast my vote, and though a majority of Americans agreed with me, Trump has won the election by the book.

But let us remember that dissent is the highest form of patriotism. There are times patriotism means standing firm and saying "This is wrong."

Yes, let us come together. There is work to be done. There are people who will need advocates and there are things coming that we must oppose. I'd like to start by inviting you, my friends who voted for Trump, to get on board. Come together and stand with us, for the good of the nation.



Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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keeping the faith in a trump presidency

Let's talk for a moment about our president-elect.

During the past year, Trump has maligned Hispanics, villified Muslims, mocked the disabled, spread racist lies about blacks and Jews, advocated violence against his critics, and bragged about sexually assaulting women.

He has attacked the legitimacy of major institutions in this country: the news media, the Congress, both parties, our political process, our intelligence agencies and our military. He has indicated he would like to weaken the protections of the First Amendment itself, to make it easier to sue people who criticize him or who he feels treat him "unfairly." He has shown support for ending marriage equality, and for chipping away at the recently enacted protections for transgender youth at schools.

His business record is an open drain, one where he once lost nearly $1 billion in a single year and and where he has filed for personal bankruptcy not once but multiple times. He regularly has cheated small businesses by reneging on contracts and burying them in litigation to prevent them from collecting what he owes them. He also is subject to ongoing litigation over his business practices, particularly Trump University. This is someone whom we have elected to preside over our economy.

He has run a campaign not on substance and ideas but on innuendo, personal attacks, and one outsize lie after another. We have entrusted him with our international standing, our military and economic alliances, and with partnerships that go back decades if not centuries.

He has advocated violence at his rallies, directed it toward protesters and minorities; and when his supporters have engaged in violence he has praised them for their enthusiasm. As president, Trump will be the chief law enforcement officer of the nation.

Trump's supporters have commended him for "honesty" and not bowing to "political correctness"; but he has not pushed aside the bounds of political correctness to allow a free exchange of ideas, but to mock, humiliate and belittle others. He has not emboldened us toward greater discussion or honesty. He has instead encouraged us to indulge our worst impulses. We have given him the largest bully pulpit in the world.

And now that he's been elected to the presidency, I'm hearing from people that we on the Left are acting hysterically. Conservative Christians are telling us that we need to have faith, that God is on the throne.

Let me be clear: This is not hysteria. This is a reasoned, calm and rational assessment of the existential threat a Trump presidency poses to the Republic.

My 6-year-old is worried that her friends are going to have to leave the country because their parents are here without proper documentation. I comforted my 14-year-old today because she is worried about the increased bullying she fears her LGBTQ friends will face now, and because of the heightened threats to her friends and classmates of color.

Yes, God is on the throne, and by faith we attest that all these things work toward his greater glory. But God was on the throne on Aug. 20, 1934, and we all know what cold comfort his sovereignty proved to be to those who lived under the Führer. God also was seated on the throne on Oct. 29, 1929, when Herbert Hoover presided over the greatest economic crash in world history; and he was on the throne when George W. Bush presidend over the second greatest. God's sovereignty does not lessen the burden of enduring the things that happen in this world.

This isn't about faith or lack of faith in God's sovereignty. It's a recognition that we're about to see a lot of progress ripped up as millions of our most vulnerable citizens likely will lose their health insurance, as a right-heavy Congress votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act; as it further rips up the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts; as our gay and trans neighbors, friends and relatives face losing the legal protections and recognition they had begun to win; and as an unpredictable demagogue very possibly will get to make multiple lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court.

This is not panic, and it is not hysteria. This is recognizing what our country likely will have to endure, and it is the start of understanding the monumental task God has called us to in pursuing his justice here on earth under an unjust government.


Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.

color blind

Yesterday I read my younger daughter a book of poetry by Langston Hughes.

Rachel sat on my lap, lost in the cadence of "The Weary Blues," warmed by "Aunt Sue's Stories" and deepening as I read "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." This little girl, who has trouble sitting through a Bible story, dived headfirst into the Harlem Renaissance and let the current carry her far downstream. When her mother came home, Rachel couldn't wait to tell her about  the book of story poems we had read.

I never cared for poetry until I discovered Emily Dickinson, well into college, but her discovery -- at the age of 4 -- isn't what touched me most.

No, what I loved most is the way Rachel saw her life in the art that accompanied Hughes' poems. She saw a black woman in a headscarf, telling stories to a child cuddled in her arms, and she felt the connection immediately.

"Look, daddy. It's mommy holding me!" She saw the family that stood next to "My People" and knew at once that they were her people as well -- her father, her mother, her sister, and herself, all painted in black.

To Rachel, the color made no difference, nor did she seem to see that it should or even could. And I thought to myself, "Maybe there's hope for us yet."




Copyright © 2007 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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