Our American Horror Story

We are all living in an American horror story. As we navigate this era of The Great Deportation, it will serve us well to glean lessons from Ida B. Wells. Wells covered the Southern horrors of lynchings during The Great Migration.

Lessons From Ida B. Wells’s Depictions of Southern Horrors

By 1892, Ida B. Wells had become a widely known investigative journalist, who had covered many of the lynchings that occurred across the South. She was a co-owner and writer for the Memphis based newspaper, The Free Speech. After being terrorized by Memphis whites and driven from her home, she took to publishing her work in the New York Age. By the end of 1892, much of her collected research was sponsored for publication by over 200 African-American peers. Entitled Southern Horrors, Wells’s research and reporting became a compelling analysis of and argument against the culture and practice of mob lynchings across the South.

It is the March 1892 People’s Grocery lynching of her dear friends in Memphis that offers an uncanny resemblance to our current American horror story. In this incident, recently deputized, white goons ruthlessly invaded a grocer to inflict maximal harm upon its 40+ African-American occupants. These occupants had armed themselves and hunkered down to protect the local black business establishment and its owners from a mob.

When armed, unidentifiable deputies invaded the business, the owners and occupants reasonably defended themselves and opened fire on those who threatened their lives. Not knowing that these rather hap-hazard, untrained, plainclothes men had just been deputized by the local law—they knew not at the time that their use of force was being used against the law. Once these circumstances were known, they put down their arms and fled the grocer.

Eventually, with a large force of numbers, a posse rounded up thirty-one of the agitants, arrested them, and detained them. Three conspirators: the president, manager, and clerk of the grocer were secretly taken by a mob of white men from the jail to a trainyard where they were ruthlessly overkilled by gunfire.

The People’s Grocer Lynching was a watershed moment for Ida B. Wells. She advised her fellow black citizens of Memphis to flee from this Southern horror and migrate to the North. If you think the Great Migration was just about African-Americans seeking opportunity in Northern metropolitan areas, you’re mistaken. Migration was also driven by sheer terror and horror.

Wells draws a couple of conclusions that serve as fresh reminders for those of us living in today’s American horror story. She aptly encapsulates her context well:

This cry has had its effect. It has closed the heart, stifled the conscience, warped the judgment and hushed the voice of press and pulpit on the subject of lynch law throughout this “land of liberty.” Men who stand high in the esteem of the public for christian character, for moral and physical courage, for devotion to the principles of equal and exact justice to all, and for great sagacity, stand as cowards who fear to open their mouths before this great outrage. They do not see that by their tacit encouragement, their silent acquiescence, the black shadow of lawlessness in the form of lynch law is spreading its wings over the whole country. (Wells, Southern Horrors and Other Writings, Bedford Series, 128)

In reference to her dear friends, who were ruthlessly lynched, she described these unfortunate souls in this way:

On March 9th, 1892, there were lynched in this same city three of the best specimens of young since-the-war Afro-American manhood. They were peaceful, law-abiding citizens and energetic business men. They believed the problem was to be solved by eschewing politics and putting money in the purse.

You don’t have to cross the Atlantic and tap into the history of Nazi Germany to describe our American horror story. There is a genetic connection between ICE/CBP with our own history of white supremacy.

Our American Horror Story

During the past year, we have watched in real time the rapid crumbling of our democracy. It has become our own American horror story. Unless we’ve completely unplugged from the web, we relive in our minds videos of the world’s largest paramilitary force attacking the American people in the name of “Law and Order” and “immigration enforcement.” The number of citizen shootings and slayings that have been videoed are piling up from Chicago, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles.

These incidents look strangely familiar to those who have read the accounts of southern lynchings. There is a large force of newly deputized, masked, untrained, out-of-condition but armed men. They move around in groups, intimidating people, and damaging people’s personal property—giving little attention to the law and acting well outside the purview of their role. They regularly provoke and instigate, brandishing weapons haphazardly, firing into crowds, inciting horror and terror of citizens.

And the establishment narrative of what’s happening is also strikingly familiar with the lynch law myths that spread. Rather than being rapists, deviants, and ill-mannered blacks—it’s murderers, sexual predators, and gang members. As U. S. citizen’s have mobilized in protest, the threat has expanded and evolved into including leftist, antifa terrorists—which, at this point in time, is no longer a radical subset of democrats but the caricature of all democrats.

Marimar Martinez. Carlos Jimenez. Keith Porter. Renee Good. Alex Pretti.

U. S. citizens. Casualties. Three murdered.

No. One. Feels. Safe.

While some Christian activists and private citizens have spoken out, made signs, marched, and taken to social media activism—numerous institutional leaders and some of the largest evangelical personalities, who have great influence, have failed to speak out unequivocally about the unfolding events that have occurred.

We can be thankful for the courageous stance of notables like Jemar Tisby, Angela Denker, David French, Lisa Harper, Shane Claiborne, Kristin Du Mez, Charlie Dates, and Peter Wehner. History will remember their brave voices during the past months.

They are the horrified half of Christians that Frederick Douglass referred to in his striking preface to Wells’s Southern Horrors:

If American conscience were only half alive, if the American church and clergy were only half christianized, if American moral sensibility were not hardened by persistent infliction of outrage and crime against colored people, a scream of horror, shame and indignation would rise to Heaven wherever your pamphlet shall be read. (Wells, Southern Horrors and Other Writings, Bedford Series, 108)

Unfortunately, there is still the unaffected other half. Some Peter Wehner have parsed, recently and rightly, as those with MAGA sensibilities that are incompatible with Christianity. Their proclivity for Christian National-Populism (totalitarianism by another name) has kept them unmoved by recent atrocities. Others are merely apolitical, apathetic, and unaffected white evangelicals. What’s happening hasn’t change their lives. The American horror story hasn’t applied to them, as of yet, so they’ve stood by silently endorsing the terror. Their cry of outrage has not come…until now.

Cities Church, Minneapolis

For over a year, citizens of color have felt unsafe in public spaces, places of work, and even their homes. Families of color have had their homes invaded, their Miranda Rights disregarded, and their families broken up. They have been racially profiled and detained in poorly maintained facilities, in inhumane conditions.

Yet, much of suburban, white evangelical life has continued unaffected by these circumstances. Until recently, many have remained unmoved by the American horror story.

However, after a protest group invaded a church and disrupted its Sunday morning service in Minneapolis, evangelicals like Albert Mohler suddenly broke their silence, raised the alarm, and signaled their chagrin about the American horror story. The ignorable political activism in the public square, encroached upon and became an unwelcomed guest in their sacred space. Their safe white sacred space was disrupted.

Cities Church, pastored by a previous Desiring God editor and regular contributor, Jonathan Parnell, became the targeted location for protest activism. The church was chosen because one of its lay pastor/elders, David Easterwood, is the field director of operations for immigration enforcement in St. Paul.

Another previous elder/pastor of the Church is Joe Rigney, once President of Bethlehem College and Seminary, and now co-belligerent to Douglas Wilson in Moscow, Idaho. Rigney is a Fellow at New Saint Andrews College and Associate Pastor at Christ Church, two key institutions that Wilson founded and are part of his Christian Nationalist infrastructure and program.

 It would be gross negligence to dismiss the political affinity of a past elder/pastor and to understate the conflict of interest of a current elder/pastor of this church.

Admittedly, a non-violent protest in a white evangelical church is indeed problematic. Church members rightly might have staged a silent and orderly walkout to signal their disapproval in leadership that gives tacit endorsement to our American horror story. Though all ought to be welcome in an evangelical church, not all are welcome to disrupt the right and orderly execution of the offices of the church and the administration of its sacraments and worship. As others have indicated, children and families should feel safe and secure in a house of worship.

But, also, shouldn’t every one of our citizens and neighbors feel safe and secure in their homes, vehicles, places of work, and every other space that constitutes the public square? Is it possible that these activists, while meaning no physical harm, have merely shook the asleep awake and confronted them with the undeniable horror story that more and more Americans are waking up to every day?

The protesters and their sympathizers have rightly pointed out that their actions were merely consistent with Jesus’s activism. He is the one who fashioned a whip, turned over tables, and drove out corrupt profiteers in the Temple, on more than one occasion (Mt 21:12; Mk 11:15; Jn 2:15).

Regardless of where you sit today along the political or evangelical landscape, it has become an irrefutable fact that you can no longer ignore the American horror story that has unfolded.

Of chief concern for evangelicals should be evangelical leaders’ response. Will they behave like Bishop Fitzgerald or Governor Tillman, apologists of Southern lynching (Wells, Southern Horrors…, 122)? Will they remain unmoved and unaffected? Or will they cry out against injustice, as Wells and Douglass beckoned leaders of their era to do? We must listen to the silence of evangelical leaders and interpret it as their tacit approval of the American horror story.