The Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II - Revive Us Again: Vision and Action in Moral Organizing

In the fall of 2017, I traveled to El Paso, Texas, to participate in a Hugs Not Walls action with the Border Network for Human Rights. Early on a Sunday morning, after listening to the stories of families that had been impacted by extreme anti-immigration policies, I waded into the Rio Grande with Maria, a grandmother who has been separated from her husband and children. She had not seen one of her sons in sixteen years. We were up to our knees in muddy water, but Marias tears rebaptized me as she held the child shed borne and raised for five precious minutes in the middle of a river.

I thought of James Baldwins words: We made the world were living in and we have to make it over.

Remaking America will require nothing less than a moral revival. Our inhumanity toward families like Marias is about something deeper than policy difference or economic transition. It is a moral crisis rooted in this nations original sins of the genocide of indigenous people and race-based slavery. Though this is not the first time weve faced the demons of systemic racism, their capacity to consume us has rarely been more palpable in our common life. To survive, America must be born again.

The fundamental values of our deepest moral and religious traditions are love, truth, grace, justice, care of family, community, and shared prosperity. But these values are under assault. As systemic racism deconstructs our national reality, more and more people are pushed into poverty while the rich get richer. Hard-won voting rights are under constant assault: lawmakers target African Americans with almost surgical precision to gain partisan advantage in elections, as the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in overturning a 2013 North Carolina law limiting voting options. Similarly, emergency-manager laws in Michigan and elsewhere are replacing elected leaders with appointed technocrats. The wealthiest get ever greater tax cuts while life-saving social programs are threatened and cut off. Public education is undermined by underfunding, by attacks on teachers unions, and by the undemocratic influence exercised by wealthy funders.

Growing numbers of people cant go to the doctor or get their medicine because of the cost; supports that do exist are under attack and insurers, drug companies, big hospital chains, and their financiers are making billions in the process. Job training, food security, and community economic development programs are on the chopping block. Women are too often abused and assaulted, while people of color, immigrants, and members of the LGBTQIA community are treated as scapegoats to distract from devastating political and economic policies that keep wages low, employment insecure, and workers unorganized. Our air and water are poisoned by hugely profitable corporations who are almost never held accountable for their actions. Hundreds of billions are spent on a permanent war economy, escalating violence around the world and lining the pockets of military contractors.

The only remedy for our moral crisis is a transformed national heart, a moral movement for families and communities rooted in the constitutional and sacred values of compassion, empathy, and courageous dedication to the common good. This movement must be broad-based and welcoming to all, embracing the great diversity of religious and nonreligious moral traditions of our people. It must be grounded in a fundamental commitment to the general welfare, the basic moral conviction expressed in Leviticus 19s call to love your neighbor as yourself and to love the immigrant worker as yourself. It is rooted in the call of the great Jewish text Isaiah 58 to be repairers of the breach.

The scope of this moral vision is universal. The common good we promote is not limited by family, ethnicity, political philosophy, or religious belief. It demands a relentless dedication to the flourishing of all.

The basic vision guiding a moral movement is rooted in both religion and the principles articulated in Americas founding documents. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all [people] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, Thomas Jefferson wrote, announcing the formal independence of the American colonies from British rule. The Virginia Declaration of Rights, adopted shortly before the Declaration of Independence, states the economic dimension more explicitly, defining the inherent rights of human beings as the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. For the founders, civil, political, and economic rights were to be tightly bound. The enjoyment of life and liberty depended on the right to share wealth and live in safety.

More than a decade after the Declaration of Independence, a sufficient number of American states ratified the Constitution of the United States to create the federal governmental system that survives to this day. The preamble states the Constitutions rationale:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

According to what was written, the American form of government should promote a stronger sense of national identity, a more vigorous national community. It should establish justice, ensure peace and security, and promote the material well-being and liberty of all, including future generations. This is not a random list. These ideals are closely related to and essential to the success of the democratic republic the Constitution establishes. Liberty is rooted in community. Peace is founded on justice. The general well-being of the nation is secured by shared prosperity and principled concern for the well-being of future generations. These core national and international convictions motivate a moral movement for social, economic, and ecological justice today. They lie at the heart of the moral revival we seek.

But, as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, in a speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, America has suffered from the high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. This is the great American contradiction: the leaders of the Revolution meant their lofty ideals only for white, land-owning Americans. They were flawed messengers for these ideals. Many justified chattel slavery, which rendered black slaves as subhuman property and free blacks as not being endowed with the rights of whites. Many of the founders believed slavery was God-ordained, while others tolerated it, though they claimed it was morally abhorrent. These men lived on land taken by genocide, deception, and brutal force from the people who had resided there for centuries before Europeans came. They denied the rights they claimed for themselves to their wives and daughters.

Clearly, many of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence did not believe that every human being had inherent and unalienable rights. The power of the idea, however, transcends the shortsightedness and hypocrisy of the men who declared independence and founded the United States of America. The words (and contradictions) contained in these founding documents would ultimately inspire American reformers and revolutionaries to lead moral revivals to abolish slavery, build the economic and political power of workers and their families, and win fuller political and civil rights for women and African Americans. The sentiments expressed in the founding documents of the nation served as the cornerstone of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent international human rights covenants and declarations, including the UNs Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.