True To Our God, True To Our Native Land

In Los Angeles local soccer moms adopted Home Depots where they could video the masked men who showed up in SUVs with out-of-state tags. In Chicago locals hosted community trainings to mobilize neighbors with whistles who could alert one another when their blocks were invaded. In Charlotte, North Carolina, neighbors gathered in local churches to learn practices of nonviolent resistance when Greg Bonino’s CBP officers marched through their streets. In Minneapolis, folks who grew up waiting through long winters for the ice to melt have called for a national shutdown to refuse to cooperate with an illegal and immoral occupation that all of our tax dollars are funding.

You can find the people coming together in your community to demand “ICE Out” today, January 30th, here.

As we link arms with neighbors to resist assaults on the people and places we love, it is worth pausing to consider how a distorted vision of home brought us to a place where a tyrannical regime insists it has a “mandate from the people” to occupy our streets, violate our Constitutional rights, and shoot our neighbors in cold blood.

In Vanity Fair this week, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about the myth of “The Homeland” that has been used to justify the increasing encroachments on our homes.

Securing The Homeland is the central feature of the Trump administration. In Los Angeles and Chicago, Trump seeks to cleanse it. With Greenland and Venezuela, Trump seeks to expand and enrich it. Heterosexual men are the rightful defenders of The Homeland. Lesbian agitators, such as Good, are its nemeses. Christians are the lifeblood of The Homeland. “Stupid Muslims” are its cancer. A characteristic of The Homeland is that its foes must be subhuman—members of the LGBTQ+ community are “freaks,” disagreeable women are “ugly” pigs, and the residents of DC are “cockroaches”….

Securing The Homeland, they tell us, is an existential priority. It is also content.

Though he is no longer directing operations on the ground in Minneapolis, Greg Bovino has left Americans with ample “content” to make clear what myth animates the men behind the masks who have come - or are coming soon - to tell you that your block does not belong to you, but to them. [Warning: their language is as vulgar and violent as their actions, which are now well-documented.]

In the biblical imagination, Bovino’s notion that a government has some divine right to take a place from its people is associated with idol worship. King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, after forsaking their God and bowing to Baal, famously offer to exchange royal lands for the vineyard of a man named Naboth in the book of Kings. Naboth refuses because the land is not “property” to him. It is, as he says, his “inheritance.” He belongs to the place as much as it belongs to him.

But the corrupt regime of Ahab and Jezebel shares the Greg Bovino view of the world. They concoct a lie about Naboth, incite a mob to kill him, then move to take possession of his land. In response, the prophet Elijah is sent to proclaim God’s judgment: “I will bring disaster on you,” the Maker of heaven and earth declares to the tyrants who falsely claim divine authority.

It is a passage that should compel any God-fearing ICE agent to repent and resign - if not for anyone else’s sake, to save their own skin from the accountability that is coming.

But it is, more importantly, an enduring testimony to the bonds of love that connect us in our places. Authoritarians have always created myths and told lies to lay claim to the places that people call “home.” But home, Naboth understood, is not a piece of property that can be exchanged to serve the regime’s interests. Home is a place that exists because of the memories people share, the meals they’ve eaten together, the children they’ve nurtured and the elders they’ve buried, the storms they’ve endured and the triumphs they’re celebrated. Home is an inheritance.

Myths about “The Homeland” have led us to this dark place. But the love that connects us to our homes is more powerful.

In 1909, Gandhi wrote a 271-page treatise on the stationary of a steamship that was taking him back to South Africa after a visit to his home in India. When his right hand gave out from exhaustion, he wrote 50 pages of the manuscript with his left hand. He called the concept that he was so determined to share with his fellow Indians living under British occupation “home rule.”

The bonds of love that connect us to the places we call home, Gandhi insisted, were more powerful than the modern weapons of the British Empire. After his visit home, Gandhi was determined to share what he’d learned about “the gospel of love in place of that of hate” with the people he knew and loved. At that time, violent movements to overthrow British rule were growing. Gandhi knew the British would always have more guns. He wanted his people to understand that they still possessed a force more powerful. “It replaces violence with self-sacrifice,” he wrote to them. “It pits soul force against brute force.”

This is the gospel that Americans are rediscovering in this 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence. It is often said that America is an idea more than it is a place - a commitment to liberty and equality more than any particular geography. But our present tribulation is clarifying how these truths we hold to be self-evident are not disembodied ideas. They are as real as neighbors meeting up on corners to walk all of the kids to school so the parents who are being hunted don’t have to risk being snatched in the streets.

To know one’s people and place as a sacred inheritance is not the contradiction of America’s best ideas, but rather the necessary context for their fulfillment. Liberty and justice cannot live in the ghost of some imagined past any more than they can survive in the tyranny of occupied streets. They must be fleshed out in the places we call home.

This is why, after being denied the promise of American freedom, abolitionists like Frederick Douglass refused to believe that a new home in a colony in some other part of the world could be freedom. Black people had built this country. However unjustly they’d been treated, they had made a home here. Douglass chose Valentine’s Day as his birthday because he knew that his mother’s love had kept him alive. The bonds of love that made America home were his inheritance as much as anyone’s.

In his love-letter to his people in 1909, Gandhi wrote, “By patriotism I mean the welfare of the whole people, and if I could secure it at the hands of the English, I should bow my head to them. If any Englishman dedicated his life to securing the freedom of India, resisting tyranny and serving the land, I should gladly welcome him as an Indian.” Love of country, he understood, is not about skin color or ethnicity or religion or language. It is about how we take responsibility for the people and the places we love. “What others get for me is not home rule,” Gandhi said. Home rule is when we decide it is our responsibility to reclaim the places where we know we belong.

Home rule is what the people of Minneapolis stood for last Friday, when they came by the tens of thousands to reclaim their downtown.

Home rule is what we are reclaiming as we insist that Donald Trump cannot just take the First Congressional District of North Carolina - an inheritance bought with blood and passed down to us as a sacred trust. He’s not from here. It’s not his inheritance to claim. [Learn more about how you can join and support the Love Forward Together campaign in North Carolina.]

Home rule is the very real and costly antidote to the myth of “The Homeland” that has led us to this low point in our nation’s history. It will not be easy, but the way out is clear. It has been walked by many before us “over a way that with tears has been watered.” Rooted and grounded in love, home rule invites us to stand, each in our own beloved place, “true to our God, true to our native land.”

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We will be on Substack live today, January 30th, at 4pm ET with Ezra Levin of Indivisible to talk about the growing movement for home rule across the US, including the Love Foward Together march and mass assembly in North Carolina and the upcoming No Kings 3 that was announced yesterday.