Our Minister

Thoughts from Rev. Marguerite Lovett

One of the magazines that I subscribe to is “Sojourners.”  The Editor-in-Chief and Executive Office is Jim Wallis, a progressive Evangelical minister.  His column in the April issue was about paradigm shifts.  He writes that the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy were turning points in a change of direction for our nation.  Like many of us, he believed that the door to real social change in the U.S. had closed.
Recently, while teaching a course at Harvard titled “Faith and Politics: Should They Mix and How?”  a student asked him a question about how many times had he been arrested (for civil disobedience).  His answer was 22 times, but the question got him thinking. Protesters are criminalized when social movements confront closed political doors.  After so many years of working to open those doors, he believes that a significant paradigm shift is about to occur.
What is the evidence for his belief?  He looks to the election of Gordon Brown in the U.K. and Kevin Rudd in Australia, those countries, he writes, “now has political doors that are open to the fundamental issues of social justice.”  Prime Minister Rudd, in the first act of his new government, delivered a speech of apology to the aboriginal people.  
“Today we honor the Indigenous peoples of his land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history.  We reflect on their past mistreatment.  We reflect on their past mistreatment.  We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were Stolen Generations – this blemished chapter in our nation’s history.  The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future. … We apologize especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities, and their country.  For the pain, suffering, and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants, and for their families left behind, we say sorry.”  
Wallis notes that Australians have worked for years for this response from their government.  Prime Minister Rudd has given hope to his people that he will be a new kind of political leader who seeks to practice moral politics.
There is in our own country a strong sense that people want change.  What kind of change is at this time unknown, but change is coming.  I believe, like Wallis, that we are at a turning point in our national journey and that political doors are beginning to open.  It is an opportune time to build up and strengthen movements for social change.  
I am waiting for my copy of Wallis’s new book, The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America.   Here Wallis puts forth his argument that there is evidence that we may well be on the verge of a “great awakening” like the religious revivals that also changed society.  He describes how we might be “on the verge of another such movement to make dramatic change on issues such as poverty, pandemic diseases, climate change, human rights, and war and peace.”
Of course, this will take more than hope, as Wallis knows, it will take putting our “shoulders to the plow,” becoming more involved than we are, and having faith that by standing united we will get the country we deserve, a fairer and more just society.

Love, Marguerite

 

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