Let Your Light Shine

A week after the brutal political assassination of Charlie Kirk, Bishop Barber was on NPR’s Morning Edition yesterday to insist that, at this critical moment in our nation, Americans must reject every form of political violence. We must despise the assassination of anyone if we value human life. And, at the same, we must challenge policies that hurt and harm our neighbors – also because we value life.

You can listen to or read the full conversation with NPR’s Michelle Martin, but her final question is one we must continue to answer – not just with words, but in our collective actions.

If people who hold political power insist on exploiting a tragedy to stoke further division, what can we do?

This is an existential question for every American right now.

Bishop told Martin: "I think this is the time when preachers and those of us in pulpits that have a responsibility to challenge a nation and its morality must say to those in power, "Stop it. Stop lying."

He wasn’t just speaking for himself. This has been the insistence of every moral fusion movement that has pushed this nation toward a “more perfect union” since that confession of our ongoing need for reform and reconstruction was penned by the framers of the US Constitution.

In order to be free, we must insist upon the truth about our shared life.

The freedom of speech and freedom of religion that are guaranteed in our Constitution’s First Amendment are a testament to the fact that people who experienced the tyranny of authoritarianism under King George understood how their freedom in a new nation depended on the right to report facts and proclaim moral truths no matter who is in power.

The freedom movements that we celebrate in US history have exercised these freedoms as abolitionist newspapers like The Liberator and as mendicant preachers like Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass; as muckraker journalists and as truth-tellers like Mother Jones; through TV footage from the Edmund Pettus Bridge and in sermons from preachers like Dr. King and Fannie Lou Hamer.

Hamer proclaimed the public theology of the Southern freedom movement when she led crowds in singing, “This Little Light of Mine, I’m Gonna Let It Shine!” If the movement did nothing else, it was going to shine the light of truth on Jim Crow’s hypocrisy and violence.

Donald Trump has demonstrated that he has the power to remove some comedians who mock him on national news networks and to punish journalists who tell the truth about him and the agenda he is enacting. But he is not the first authoritarian in US history to abuse power while he invests in propaganda to spread lies and distract attention from the way their policies harm most Americans.

We are both from North Carolina, where authoritarians manipulated the truth for generations to cling to power. Plantation owners were outraged when a democratically elected legislature, made up of Black and white citizens for the first time, imposed taxes on their extreme wealth in order to guarantee public education to everyone in the state after the Civil War. Because public education was popular, those authoritarians did not channel their anger into a political campaign to cut education. Instead, they invested in propaganda that played on racial fears to pit white people against Black neighbors. Their lies inspired lynch mobs that terrorized generations of citizens in the Jim Crow South.

Lies that are told to divide people for political gain always seed political violence. But moral movements know that the truth will set us free.

When we say, “Stop lying,” we are saying no to the violence that has too often plagued this nation.

We we say, “Stop lying,” we are pledging our allegiance to the freedom that can only come by insisting on the truth.

When we say “Stop lying,” we are loving our country, where people who disagree can work out our differences in open debate and fair elections.

When we say, “Stop lying,” we are also committing ourselves to tell the truth that those in power are trying to suppress and distract us from paying attention to.

When Fannie Lou Hamer led Black and white people in singing “This Little Light of Mine” together, they weren’t just defying the silence of Jim Crow’s lies. They were committing, however small their individual efforts might seem, to use what they had to shine a light on the immoral acts that were being done under the cover of darkness. They would expose segregation’s violence by nonviolently sitting in. They would show reporters what happened to Schwerner, Goodman, and Cheney when they tried to investigate a church burning in Philadelphia, Mississippi. They would nonviolently insist that the press corp at the Democratic National Convention bear witness to the way Black people had been excluded from the democratic process in Mississippi.

In short, they took nonviolent direct action to shine a light on the violence that the regime was trying to deny.

This weekend, we are headed to Los Angeles – the City of Angels – for the same reason. With the support of a military occupation, masked agents have been in LA for months, disappearing people from their neighborhoods and workplaces without due process. We have listened to stories of citizens who’ve been wrongfully detained for days, workers who’ve been disappeared to detention centers, and children who live in fear. LA is a city that has experienced horrors.

But it is also a city that risen together as a powerful demonstration of nonviolent moral resistance. In the Bible angels are messengers sent to the people in times of crisis. We believe the City of Angels has an important message for all of us as we face an authoritarianism that depends on lies about immigrants. Their message is simple: solo el pueblo salva el pueblo. Only the people save the people.

The answer to our present crisis isn’t coming in a messiah candidate who will save us in the next election or in a single organization that can bring us all together. No, the answer to our authoritarian crisis is already among us in everyday people who have discovered that they can let their little light shine by nonviolently challenging and exposing the evil that is being perpetrated against immigrants in our name.

We are going to LA to help launch “Liberty Vans” that will work with the community to send video crews to sites of ICE raids to shine a light on the immoral actions of masked agents and to spotlight the moral response of neighbors who are standing together to say, “Not in our name.”

Exercising their first amendment right to document what is happening in their communities, chaplains, veterans, lawyers, and concerned neighbors will ride with camera crews on these Liberty Vans, letting their light shine in nonviolent witness to the immorality of unidentified agents raiding communities and snatching away neighbors without due process.

They will remind fellow Americans who’ve sworn an oath to protect and serve that they do not have to obey unlawful orders.

They will make sure people who are being questioned or detained know their rights.

And they will document the assaults our tax dollars are funding for all to see.

In the face of official lies, we need an honest account of what’s happening in front of us just to stay sane. It’s truth-telling time, and we must demand it from ourselves in a moment when we cannot expect it from the White House.

The Liberty Vans will do this in partnership with LA’s angels because we know that, even when we cannot immediately stop an authoritarian regime’s violence, we can shine a light on it. A free people can tell the truth in the face of lies, and we can trust that truth to set us free.

This is why, whenever angels show up in the Bible, the first thing they say is, “Do not be afraid.” Authoritarians want us to be afraid so we will obey in advance, so we will stay quiet, so we won’t come together and remember what we know to be true – that we’re stronger together than when we’re divided by lies.

America must hear this from LA’s messengers: don’t be afraid. Yes, the horrors are real. Yes, the raids are spreading to other cities. Yes, this is authoritarianism, and it is growing bolder.

But we do not have to be afraid. Agelinos have shown us a way of nonviolent truth-force that can expose the lies and bring us together. They have shown us how to let our little lights shine. And when a whole lot of little lights get together, they can drive out the deepest darkness and illuminate a way to something better than any of us could achieve by our own strength. It’s why we sing, “Let it shine.”

Light has an inherent power to drive out darkness. They say it’s the best disinfectant. The truth is the light, and it will show us the way whenever and wherever we let it.

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If you are in the LA area, please join us for a mass meeting with the community on Friday night, 6:30pm. The service will also livestream here.