This Thanksgiving I’m thankful for The Boston Declaration, issued several days ago by 300+ Christian theologians on the state of Christianity in the United States in 2017 and a call for repentance by evangelical Christians.

Susan Thistlethwaite’s Huffington Post article gives the background and more detail on The Boston Declaration. Click Original Signatories for a listing of the original signers of the Declaration.

Boston Declaration original signatories.

I’m thankful for Rev. Dr. Reggie Williams, Associate Professor of Ethics at my alma mater, McCormick Theological Seminary, and author of Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance, one of the original signers. Reggie is the tall one in the center of the photo.

Rev. Dr. Reggie Williams, professor of ethics at McCormick Theological Seminary, talked of the heavy hearts carried by himself and other African-Americans in this current moment. “These are sinister times, but they are not new. As a black person educated in Evangelical Christian institutions, I am familiar with a Christianity that has a history of ignoring my being, and providing theological justification for my non-being.”

But, he emphasized, what is “new in my lifetime to have such an over embrace of it.” How can people say it is Christianity “to proclaim good news to the rich or push the differently embodied person to the margins? Now is the time to follow Jesus the poor Jewish prophet whose teaching of the Kingdom was the inspiration for the Boston Declaration.” – Susan Thistlethwaite, Huffington Post.

The Trump Administration’s 18-month deadline for 60,000 Haitian refugees to leave the U.S. strikes me as the latest confirmation of white supremacy as the nation’s “original sin.” The order makes no sense apart from shoring up a base that sees white supremacy in peril. What’s happening in America today is only secondarily ‘political’. The primary  issue is theological and ethical — how we understand ultimate reality (God) and ourselves. It is what the Boston Declaration says it is.

Grace and Peace to all on this Thanksgiving holiday.

• Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, November 23, 2017.