Iona Community, Scotland

There’s a wicked cool connection in my family history that has been glowing with relevance for me recently.

Way back in my line of great-great-grandmothers is one of the so-called Salem “witches”, hanged on Salem, Massachusetts’ Gallows Hill in 1692.  She’s been my default fun fact in icebreakers for years, and now I want to write my senior thesis about one of the judges who convicted her. And I happened to be in Salem this weekend.

I leave for Iona on June 24th but was visiting my aunt and uncle, their kids Eliza and Gus, and my good friends Kevin and John who are working in Boston. It’s another coincidence that my aunt and uncle who live in Salem aren’t actually related to my grandmother-witch, who comes from an apparently impudent Puritan strain on my mother’s side.

John, Kevin and I haven’t hung out significantly together since we were a trio eating vats of tomato soup and brainstorming screenplays in my kitchen when we were fifteen.  I had an awesome weekend seeing them, the whole of which included a cold and buggy beach walk, a crust punk party, my first legal beer (Urban Wheat Ale), and my uber-fascination with walking the streets of Boston and Salem, which are not only loci in my family history but also form a cross-section of events surrounding early American religion and race.

My ancestor-witch? Susannah Martin.  Her crimes, according to a book my uncle cracked open, “malefic” (re: devilish) behavior.  That is, afflicting people with bites, scratches, and swoons, appearing in the shape of an animal, etc.  One description of her trial appears in Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World.  Mather, the most influential figure in American Puritanism, doesn’t appear to have thought much of my great-great grandmother.  Of “Goody Martin” he wrote, “[she was] one of the most impudent, scurrilous, wicked Creatures in the World.”

Susannah was sixty-seven and a widow, living in Amesbury, Mass. and evidently bothering her neighbors there.   She was hanged in mid-July, 1692, less than a mile from where my aunt and uncle live in painfully cute yellow house…

Now here’s where my nerddom really  takes off.

Judge Samuel Sewall, a Boston  merchant, orthodox Puritan and  Harvard man, was the only magistrate  involved in the witch trials to publicly  apologize for the convictions.  In 1700,  eight years after the trials, he also  printed the first protest against slavery  in New England, one of the earliest anti-slavery essays printed on American shores.

I’m not interested in Sewall just because of my DNA, though that certainly makes early Boston compelling to me.  But after stumbling across Sewall’s essay, “The Selling of Joseph” last semester, I was reeling with questions about his notions of liberty, race and God.

Surprised by the early date of Judge Sewall’s emphatic plea, I realized that it is his hyper-devout Calvinism that leads him to his conclusion about slavery: that it is against God’s will because all people are sons and daughters of Adam, saved by the “last Adam” (Christ), and therefore have “equal Right unto Liberty” on earth.  While he shows signs of racial prejudice, Sewall reads the story of Jesus to be a story of political liberation.  Sewall also shows a penchant for prophecy, not unlike James Cone.  And he wasn’t just some nut.  Scholarship says that Sewall’s way of interpreting scripture was coherent with the most orthodox thinkers of the day.

So why did protests to slavery like Judge Sewall’s fall out of favor in only a few years, when instead the mindset represented by a slaveholder’s vehemently supremacist response become victorious in the mainstream?  How did Sewall’s piety compel him to issue such a powerful protest for the rights of black slaves to basic liberty, as it also did for him with regard to women’s and American Indian rights?

I don’t know yet.  But I do know that Sewall never read Locke (nor other Enlightenment philosophers), whose social contract would become the gospel for America’s decidedly deist founding fathers and documents seventy-six years after he printed his essay.  He read sermons and scriptures; he looked for signs in the weather and the sea of the end of the world.  He wasn’t a “modern man”, yet it took until the mid-eighteenth century for Americans to take moral arguments against slavery seriously.

Sewall was radically religious and also radically liberal.  He was a privileged, well-educated man yet his vision of the liberating Christ was deeply uncompromised and political.  This is why I wonder what liberation theology might be able to recover from his vision today. It’s essential to most liberation theologies (black, Latin American, queer, etc) that one take a view of God from the perspective of the oppressed.  While maintaining this key piece, how might those who are not oppressed, ones often in positions of political or economic power, feel the same prophetic urgency to their politics?

If Sewall’s God is white and Cone’s God is black, can Sam and James want the same things? If it’s essential to black theology to know the black God and essential to queer theology to know the queer God, how can someone who is black and not queer or queer and not black interpret the Gospel as the breaking down of all categories, all social restrictions and weights, without undermining the particularity of their own experience?

It’s all a difficult, amazing puzzle I’m just beginning to unravel.

Ancestor Susannah's memorial, cousin Gus's speeding blur

Salem's historic Common

this street is probably named after Samuel Sewall's son, or brother Stephen, clerk of the witch trial proceedings

When East Indies and China trade came in through the Salem Custom House in the late eighteenth century, the seaport city was as prosperous as Boston. (This is not my aunt's house, though it looks like it!)

Witch kitsch dominated Salem businesses for years, but now new, fashionable places like this cafe are sprouting

Ipswich, Mass

John in search of ticks

Crane Beach, Ipswich

today's Harvard. Sewall was elected president of the college but declined, though he was always passionate about Harvard's future.

Kevin contemplating public transportation

Old South Church, whose congregation was founded by dissenters from Boston's First Church in 1669. In 1697, Samuel Sewall stood in the original Old South building while the minister read his apology for the condemned sentences in the witch trials. This weekend, rainbow flags blew on the campanile for LGBTQ Pride Week.

I don’t often hear people equating religion to music or language but I think they’re helpful comparisons.  More often than not, we hear different comparisons: religion v. science.  Myth v. fact.  Superstition v. proof.

But when I try to explain why despite every problem religion has caused I care about it, I’ve found that first I have to make it clear that what I’m not talking about is not some opposite of modern science.  In The Case for God, Karen Armstrong’s project is to explain to a skeptical public how “belief” and “faith” went through a transformation of meaning since the 1500s.  As Descartes and Locke became the principal gods of metaphysics, religion became a counter-narrative that increasingly butted heads with scientific claims about nature.  As “what you see is what you get” became the key to advanced science and industrialism, faith in a sacred reality became faith in fiction.  Belief in an unprovable, infinite love of God became belief in myth.

That’s why I work against the grain of hundreds of years when I say to friends that I like to study religion as a language instead of religion as a fact.  Portuguese or Igbo are not correct or incorrect, music is not proved or unproved.  Instead of psychological terms to explain that we feel happy, we sing.  Notes and adjectives are the finite things with which we can express what feels endlessly complicated inside.  They’re symbols that you use, not that you defend.

Of course, just like they argue about the meaning of words, people argue about the meaning of religious symbols.  While saying “blue” or “love” may express a general universal, there are always particulars to work out.  And unfortunately in religion, the imposition of one interpretation over another or one religion over another has been dangerous and even deadly.

So why the specificity?  Why for some people are Jesus, Moses, Esther or the Prophet Muhammad more useful ways of framing their lives than secular self-help books?  What’s the value of plot points, mythos instead of logos, in the modern world?

Stephen Crites, formerly a professor at Wesleyan, believes mythos matters because experience happens to us through narrative.  When he says that the “formal quality of experience through time is inherently narrative” he means that the way we act out our lives, like musicians blowing through holes or painters striking brushes to a canvas, is through storytelling.  It’s impossible to describe what anything means to us without telling a story, without choosing a beginning, middle, end, and a line, a melody that runs through it all.  Physicists and biologist have to describe what happened in an experiment and what it means with narrative.  Infinity is not our language.  As finite beings we speak in finite terms.  Without narrative we swim without direction, lost in a slough of a thousand meanings.

Crites claims that narrative can even function to create our consciousness, rather than just to describe it.  That’s why he says people in traditional folk cultures lived “in” their sacred stories.  They were not myths but dwelling-places, so essential to experience that “men’s sense and self and world is created through them”.  Crites distinguishes a sacred story as a story you live instead of a story you tell.  A writer may spin a world of fantasy and characters, but people’s ritual reenactment of sacred stories takes place in their own world – the stories live in their own bodies.

At Bryn Mawr, freshmen go through a sequence of initiation traditions that to outsiders seem totally inane.  But for many Bryn Mawr students, from beginning to end the traditions formulate their college experience.  In the Roman Empire mystery cults initiated people into stories that they would live, ways of framing their lives, as an alternative to state-standardized religion.  In God of the Oppressed, James Cones writes that when people in the black church sing, preach, and tell stories, they are talking about another reality, a reality “so high you can’t get over him, so low you can’t get under him, so wide you can’t get around him.”

Sacred stories are different from science.  They function on different planes.  We’re people who need meaning as much as we need proof.  Religion, although not the only way, is a language for expressing it.

I was at the helm of the Bi-College News this semester, so I decided to ease off on courses.  I took Latin, creative writing, and an independent study with Dave Dawson at Haverford.  My semester visiting Professor Dawson’s office with readings in hand was by far one of the best academic experiences I’ve had in college.

I went in with ambitious goals: to decode ways in which the Reformation and Enlightenment contributed to modernity and American history.  Luckily, I had a few other guiding points to narrow things down.

There was a day that haunted me in a class I had taken a year before with Tracey Hucks, Varieties of African American Religious Experience.  Among many other powerful moments in her classroom, this particular one was when Professor Hucks read from White Over Black, Winthrop Jordan’s paradigm book about the history of race in America.  The section was about English perceptions of blackness, not from during the height of the transatlantic slave trade but from before, the time leading to Francis Bacon, Elizabeth I, and pilgrims en route to America.

“Long before they found that some men were black, Englishmen found in the idea of blackness a way of expressing some of their most ingrained values.  No other color except white conveyed so much emotional impact.  As described by the Oxford English Dictionary, the meaning of black before the sixteenth century included, ‘Deeply stained with dirt; soiled, dirty, foul…Indicating disgrace, censure, liability to punishment, etc.’…White and black connoted purity and filthiness, virginity and sin, virtue and baseness, beauty and ugliness, beneficence and evil, God and the devil.” (White Over Black, pg. 7)

For English Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and planters in the southeast, strong cultural and literary references to blackness were alive and in place so that slave-trading and slave-holding could become institutions protected by legal and political authority.  Before the Mayflower, the European mind was already subject to ideas about color that would lead to the proliferation of slavery in the New World, and for religious and scientific stories alike to justify its persistence.

In a class a year later, Blacks and Jews in America, we were talking about how on the National Mall there is an American Indian museum, the nearby Holocaust museum, a tiny African Art museum, but no African American museum.  I spoke without knowing exactly what I was going to say, stringing together conclusions I had scrawled in my notebook: “I don’t believe that white America would allow an African American museum to be located on the Mall.  Letting blacks tell their story of America would overthrow the narrative structures on which America was built and continues to exist.”

I remember the room fell silent, and overall, people looked uncomfortable and grim.  I felt uncomfortable too.  I’m white, after all.  I, and my family, have benefited from the exclusion of black Americans from this country’s story and economy since our Massachusetts Puritan ancestors to my mother’s childhood in Birmingham, Alabama.  But as someone who believes very strongly in the power of stories and public education to change politics, and also as someone who has a growing sense of religious faith, I felt it was very important that I face the truth of what I was realizing.

Moments like this have rechartered the course of my academic interests from propositions about reason and free will to the experience of being in America and the world today.  Race and inequality is something we live daily, something about our bodies as well as our minds.  They are realities that are political, economic, and as I’ve learned from reading James Cone and other liberation theologians, transcendent.

Little did we in the Blacks and Jews class know that there will indeed be an African American museum on the National Mall (or that President Bush was the one who signed it into being).  The National Museum of African American History and Culture, the newest Smithsonian museum in Washington, is scheduled to break ground in 2012 and be ready for visitors in 2015.  Check out what they’re planning.

The museum will play a huge, exciting role in exactly what I feared couldn’t happen – a significant change of course in the way we tell the American story – right on the Mall.

In my studies with Professor Dawson, one of my primary concerns was to decipher what ideals lay at the heart of the European Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the founding of America.  Which ideas actually created, rather than demolished, the categories by which people were and are excluded from the American dream? It’s not the kind of thing you can answer in a semester, or in a summer.  But I think figuring it out is important.  White Americans must be politically and culturally ready for what it means to take black American narratives seriously.  White Americans must be ready to come to terms with the assumptions in our own history that permitted slavery, Jim Crow, and that continue to allow for shocking statistics of inequality based on race.  History books need to change.  The education gap needs to change.  We must understand that giving African American history and culture the place (and funding) it deserves is central to understanding ourselves as Americans, because as the founding director of the NMAAHC Lonnie Bunch says, we are all shaped “by this story, by this culture, by this history.” And if we change the narrative, it will help change our politics.

"a lie is not a shelter" Lorna Simpson, 1989 (part of NMAAHC collection)

design for the NMAAHC