Still, there's a chilling familiarity to their cultic life--the rituals and prayers by which Grand Wizard David Duke invokes blessing and protection for the great white American project, and its great white American mercenaries. Duke calls his kinsmen (and klansmen) 'brothers in Christ.' Solemnly, he calls upon God to energize their witness and work. And then, in a moment I found especially gruesome, he anoints them with water, a moment that echoes the baptismal energies and commitments of my own Christian liturgy.
And rippling, raging through it all: a sustained, bigoted and malignant contempt for blackness, for Jewishness, for any community other than the Klan's great white American tribe. Everyone else--from anywhere else--is unwelcome, inhuman and an enemy of the state. To be destroyed.
I'm reminded--more like belted--by this: how our liturgies are fraught with history, with legacies of hatred and domination and worse. How easily Christian liturgies turn toward racism and anti-Semitism, and how quickly white supremicists turn to baptism, communion, even Jesus to justify their ugly and evil project. So I can find the Klan distasteful (and evil) and I do; but they use familiar language, forms and metaphors dear to me.
What are we to do with this? Christians, I mean? Those who insist on resisting racism and empire and all the projects of supremacy and oppression. Surely it necessitates deep reflection, honest communal reflection, around the themes and symbols, language and practices of faith. For starters. Baptism, for example. Let's be clear and bold and grounded in prophetic truth and generous faith. In our tradition, baptism draws on the memory of a people liberated, a people racing through the Red Sea and leaving Pharaoh's brutal regime behind. It's recalls Jesus' rising--overcoming by grace the vicious violence of empire--and building a beloved community as a blessing for all life in all lands. Baptism is a celebration and a commissioning: grace upon grace, the Spirit calling each into a body of loving and liberating witness.
In Spike Lee's movie, David Duke uses the water, prayerfully, to anoint his mates in their exclusive and violent quest for purity. Instead of embracing the slaves flight to freedom, the Grand Wizard joins Pharaoh's bloody band, thirsting only for vengeance and aching only for privilege and supremacy. Water, yes. Baptism? Are you kidding me?
There's so much more: much, much more in this film--which calls to mind "Do the Right Thing" in its intensity and relevance and closes as it connects its 1970 story to Trump, Charlottesville and the contemporary struggle to overcome racism at last. What I'll be thinking about these next days is my own baptismal commitment: to join the struggle in appropriate ways, in faithful ways, as ally and friend; to risk and love as Jesus risked and loved. Because David Duke had it all wrong. We are called not to supremacy, but to service.
