Reclamation Part 5

This is the fifth installment about my multi-section poem responding to Robert Frost's "The Gift Outright."

I guess if I were to try to pin down my first explicitly political opinion, it’s got to be connected to the necessary separation of church and state, which has mostly disappeared these days if you’re part of the right church (i.e. a brand of religion favored by at least 5 sitting justices on the Supreme Court), less so if you’re in one of the others. As someone raised in one of those generally less-favored churches, it makes sense that 1) I would prefer a big wall keeping the state from interfering in my faith practice and 2) that I would feel that at a relatively young age. We had a history of being persecuted for our beliefs and practices, so we were taught. Members of the Governing Body went to prison during World War 1 for sedition based on our teachings; municipalities passed laws forbidding our door-to-door preaching and brothers and sisters endured nights in jail for it; our stance on refusing to pledge allegiance to the flag got kids suspended and expelled from school and led to a Supreme Court decision that stands to this day protecting the right to refuse (West Virginia State Board of Education vs Barnette, 1943 if you’re interested).

Vachon, John, photographer. Reciting "I pledge allegiance," etc., public school. Norfolk, Virginia. United States Norfolk Virginia, 1941. Mar. Photograph.

The Witnesses claimed to be neutral in the workings of secular governments. We didn’t vote, didn’t run for office; didn’t support candidates or belong to political parties, didn’t celebrate nationalistic holidays or sing patriotic songs. DIdn’t join the military, sought religious exemptions when drafted and if those were refused, went to prison rather than join.

The theory was that since Jesus had said “my kingdom is no part of this world” that his followers should swear allegiance only to that kingdom and no other. It was another way of showing the world that we were different from those other, corrupted churches who mixed religious and secular power. The dogma was that Witnesses obeyed laws that did not directly conflict with God’s law (as interpreted by them), following the direction of the Apostle Paul in Romans 13 to be subject to the superior authorities. We also leaned heavily on Jesus’s words about leaving Caesar’s things to Caesar and God’s things to God.” If it sounds like this is one of the few things I still believe in from my Witness days, that’s because it is. I think if you truly consider yourself a citizen of God’s Kingdom, the one mentioned in the Lord’s Prayer, then you should separate yourself from secular authority. But that’s a theological argument.

But I had other reasons for wanting a big wall between church and state. And for those, we have to go back to the 80’s, which is appropriate since so much of what we’re seeing now in contemporary politics gets its first real taste of power then.

Y’all know Jimmy Carter is an evangelical Christian, right? Southern Baptist even, though he publicly distanced himself from some of their tenets in 2000 and given their continued movement to the conservative right I can’t imagine he’s changed his mind any. Thing is, when he ran for and won the presidency in 1976, being an evangelical didn’t exactly help him. And it really didn’t help him when he ran for re-election against Ronald Wilson Reagan in 1980 because that’s when evangelicals decided they were going to take an active part in Republican politics. This is where you get things like Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and when abortion becomes a top-level issue, replacing opposition to school integration.

An aside: has there even been a former president who has tried as hard as Jimmy Carter to get right with God for what he did both to become President and as President? He has lived the last 44 years like he knows Hell is right there. More loudly-Christian politicians could take some advice from that, honestly.

Okay, so there was a huge vibe shift in the way religion and politics became mixed in the 80’s. Reagan himself wasn’t loudly Christian, but he gave voice to people who were. More than any other elected official, I think Reagan successfully pushed the idea that conservative Christians were the only real Americans, and that anyone else was both an enemy of faith and of the country. And his political descendants have run with it. Reagan didn’t invent Christian Nationalism, but he sure gave it a push toward respectability.

The place I saw all this happen was in school, and I want to be clear that it’s not like my schools were bastions of secular humanism before Reagan came along. This was Louisiana, after all. The school bus that took me home stopped at the local Catholic school on the way to drop off kids who were going to Catechism. Every school year started with a prepared conversation with my teachers about how I wouldn’t be saying the pledge or participating in any holiday activities like exchanging Valentines or dressing up for Halloween or singing Christmas carols in music class. (We did sing “You Light Up My Life” for a school assembly once in 4th grade and I think I deserve compensation for that.) The fact that school holidays are much more secular now is a good thing.

But then there was Civics class. I want to say 10th grade. One semester on government and citizenship and the evils of communism and how lucky we were that Reagan was president now because he was strong and so was the Pope and that’s what’s got the Russians on the run and if that sounds bonkers let me tell you that I am underselling it a little. I don’t know what the expected curriculum for the class was but I’m pretty sure it didn’t include McCarthy era Red Scare booklets on communism that were crumbling with age. She’d rescued them from a closet, she said, and so we couldn’t take them home but she felt it was important for us to know the enemy and so we read them in class, not as history to be learned but as important knowledge for RIGHT NOW.

She also spent a lot of time railing about taxes and welfare queens and also suggested that maybe emancipation wasn’t as good for black people as it was made out to be since slave owners often treated them like family fed and clothed them and plus they were valuable so who would damage their own property even though they were more like family and once the war was over you know a lot of them liked their lives so much they stayed on the plantation because it was all they knew only now they had to feed and clothe themselves and for a lot of them it was harder and honestly I’m leaving out the punctuation here so I can finish typing this shit faster.

And look, I’m not going to pretend like I was some super-knowledgeable teenager in this class, refuting her claims as quickly as she made them. I swallowed more of them than I care to admit, even though my congregation was more than half Black and I had seen firsthand how they were treated differently than I was when we were out knocking on doors or in convenience stores getting a coke.

My Civics teacher didn’t get much into how laws were made or checks and balances but she was all about spreading the Gospel of the Lost Cause and connecting what the south went through during the War of Northern Aggression and afterward to the way conservatives had been treated in the 60’s and 70’s and now Reagan was leading them out of the wilderness and yes I know I’m mixing my Biblical references here but so did she.

When I was writing this poem, I wondered what that teacher had been up to in the now 40 or so years since I was in her classroom. I fully expected to see her on social media wearing MAGA gear, possibly engaging in some light treason in January of 2021. Or maybe she’d have mellowed some. I mean, I was a very conservative person in my early 20’s—Jehovah’s Witness, remember—and I am what most conservatives today would call a radical socialist Marxist so I’m just generally liberal. Who knows how people can change, right?

Well I can report to you…nothing. I can’t find her online at all. Which is probably for the best. More of us should be impossible to find online.

This section of the poem mostly aims at that classroom experience. The line about “our town’s / namesake had begged for backup” is a reference to John Slidell’s failed mission to convince England to back the Confederacy during the Civil War. I hope you like it.

Here’s part 5 of Reclamation

I guess our Civics teacher saw potential,

so she preached us Reaganomics, tax cuts,

hyper-patriotism. She taught the bravery

of eking out an independent life.

But we were England’s, still colonials,

she said, tax slaves told by God to spread

freedom down the seaboard, then west to

the Mississippi and beyond, wherever

blood and soil made wealth from cotton baled

white and high as the chalk cliffs on the southern

coast of the country we pulled away from

two hundred years ago, country our town’s

namesake had begged for backup when we

fought a second war of independence.

She said we’d lost our chance at freedom then

but now here was a chance to take it back.

Thanks as always for reading. I’m interested in your stories about feeling like an outsider or separated from a wider group. Or even about your wildly inappropriate teachers.