Denounce the government: Practice Resurrection Stories
I keep writing and re-writing this and can’t quite figure out how to frame what I’m hoping to say. Please accept this as a rather rough draft of what’s buried in my heart and mind. I’d love to hear what you’re noticing as you read today’s story! You can reply in the comments or email me your questions or feedback.
“So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.”
- excerpt from "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" by Wendell Berry
On my 18th birthday, I visited my father in jail. In the evening my grandmother made a cake for the rest of the family to celebrate but before that I drove the next parking lot over from my community college campus, signed a register, walked through a metal detector, and sat in a room of tables and chairs and made small talk with my Dad. I wish I’d thought to take a photo the day he was released but, until recently, it’s not something I was proud to share.
I don’t make that statement lightly. Few people want to talk about a parent’s jail time. One of my best friends lived through her father’s conviction and sentencing to life in prison for a horrible crime. Early in our friendship, she told me the part about visiting her Dad in jail and how much she missed him now that he was dead. She said little about the offenses that locked him up in the first place. Just the minimum. I’ve been trying to reconcile the version of her Dad she misses and the version his crime reveals ever since.
In hindsight, my father’s arrest reveals rather than contorts his character. Yet my disenchantment with pro-life activism hampered me from telling this story for a couple of decades. Before that, I didn’t talk about my father’s jail time because it made him unpopular in a job that got enough criticism. I’d learned implicitly that our family’s literal welfare depended on just enough people happy with the preacher to pay our bills.
In the years of his public activism and eventual jail term, my father found little support among his peer clergy and their congregations. The demographic forming the self-proclaimed moral majority of the 1980s and 1990s - the same population now known as “right-wing evangelical” voters who fill our social media news feeds with politicized commentary - were hard to find in the years my father picketed, protested, and - yes- broke the law in order to make a public stand against legal abortion. Whether we felt proud of him at that time or not, we knew implicitly not to talk much about it in public or in church.
The radical trail my father burnt in the late 1970s to leave the local dominant conservative Baptist denomination to form a house church (turned non-denominational congregation) hit peak scrutiny a decade later. I felt the heat of both the explicit criticism and the implicit disregard blistering my father’s reputation. When I sat in Bible class at my Christian high school or visited my friends’ churches or homes, I instinctively knew to avoid people’s eyes when they recognized me as Pastor Doug Hill’s daughter. In occasional spurts of activism, some of those friends would join me making signs and marching in picket lines while my Dad prayed loudly outside women’s clinics.
Roe v. Wade framed almost my entire view of both the religious and political worlds in which I grew up. On any given day during my childhood and young adult years, I could be found protesting the politics of reproductive choice, picketing abortion clinics in my hometown and across the northeastern U.S., petitioning state congressional leaders, or writing opinion articles for religious newspapers. I tagged along with local religious folks-turned town politicians and conservative journalists to watch pro-life films or lobby our state capitol. It felt like a niche I was born to fill - the young face of pro-life morality.
The white-hot indignation boiling all the rhetoric simmered my understanding of good versus evil and there was nothing to form my imagination between the two sides. During a high school civics class field trip to our state capitol, I stood awkwardly outside a class photograph taken on the lobby steps with our regional representative. I’d refused my teacher’s instruction to get in the photo because I couldn’t fathom why we’d want to document a civil encounter with this pro-choice politician. In the end, I had to join the group. I smiled for the camera while my conscience imploded.
I’ve never jettisoned a deeply-formed conviction that human life begins at conception and that any attempt to intentionally end that life is a human tragedy by both biblical precept and civic moral code. I have, however, spent most of my adulthood distancing myself from the sort of activism that framed my youth. I became severely disillusioned by the community of people who identified as pro-life on one issue only while fiercely opposing matters of life on so many others. In my secluded Protestant upbringing, I knew little of the long history of Christian teaching on a consistent life ethic which spanned the range of life-threatening issues I intrinsically questioned: war, abortion, poverty, racism, the death penalty, gun control, and euthanasia.
Among those whose actions shattered my idealism was one of the key leaders of a nationally-known pro-life organization based in our hometown. His rhetoric was the basis for my father’s activism and his name was splashed in our newspaper headlines for years. He sent his kids to the same Christian school I attended and organized protests in our area and across the United States. I can trace my decision to separate myself from this particular brand of activism back to two defining moments: the mid-90’s abortion clinic bombings and news that the pro-life leader we’d followed had abandoned his wife and children in order to marry his former church assistant. If this is what it meant to be “pro-life”, I wanted to get as far away from the label as possible.
When I was seventeen, I watched through a fence line while police officers arrested my father for trespassing at a local abortion clinic during a nonviolent protest. On my eighteenth birthday, I visited him in the county jail where he served a one-month sentence for that protest. For good behavior, he was able to leave after one week. Turning eighteen the week my father spent in jail gave me the distinct privilege of being able to visit him without a parental guardian. I drove to the jail, signed the register, went through the metal detector, and sat in the waiting room until a warden called my name. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I do remember feeling awkward and a tiny bit awed by my father’s courage. A couple of years ago, asking my Dad his memory of the day, he admitted mostly recalling the strip search he had to endure in order to get a visitor.
The evangelical imagination in the last decades of the twentieth century somehow missed any formation in the Christian tradition of civil protest. A devastating loss of memory since the etymology of our fundamental identity as protestant originates from the Latin word protestari, meaning "declare publicly, testify, protest”. The churches in my hometown behaved as if the Ten Commandments taught a spiritual practice of law and order and anything close to civil disobedience declared “too Catholic” (i.e., not biblically Christian). Christian activists like Father Daniel Barrigan, Dorothy Day, Dr. King, and the entire U.S. civil rights movement never came up in any theological discussion, sermon, or Bible class I attended. Nor did we hear about Bishop Desmond Tutu who in 1984 - the very same years my father was picketing abortion clinics - received the Nobel Prize for Peace for his role in the opposition to apartheid in South Africa. Completely isolated from the global and historic church, no category existed for my dad and the few pastors in our area who joined him in civil disobedience within the church communities around us. Not even the poster-preachers for the Moral Majority and evangelical pro-life platforms risked the loss of income or personal freedom with their political championing of the unborn. While we’ve made an entire subculture of Christians protesting each other, protesting culture, and protesting political loss of wealth and power, the abuse of our inheritance of righteous protest is a tragedy with damning consequences.
As I’ve grown, I’m more aware of the flaws in the public rhetoric of those within my father’s cohort. It’s possible my own compulsion to better understand the history and political dynamics forming the theology of sanctity of life took root while I was simultaneously walking picket lines and hiding my last name from church people in our town. The tension grew into a deep desire to understand not only the Gospel but also the tradition of the church. This study kept me Protestant, but just barely. Now, as a confirmed member of the Anglican church, I plant my feet in a denominational history full of contradictions, not unlike the non-denominational and Baptist roots of my father’s church. Luther started a Reformation, and my Dad started a Bible study. The Church of England said no to Rome with the Act of Supremacy, and my Dad said no to some Baptists by starting a non-denominational church in our living room. William Tyndale wrote a Bible and gave up his life, my Dad wrote church by-laws and gave up his salary.
My entry into the Anglican communion is about more than this, of course. Among other things, it's also about honoring my mother every time I open the Book of Common Prayer because she’s the one who first taught me to form prayers right from the scriptures. By adding my name to the same denominational family as George Whitefield, it's about honoring the undying, holy hopes of my father to see Holy Spirit revival in his own lifetime. It’s also about honoring my father who spent my eighteenth birthday in jail for causes of social justice by standing in the Anglican Communion line with Bishop Desmond Tutu, William Wilberforce, Hannah Moore, Archbishop Janani Jakaliya Luwum and the Ugandan martyrs, Pandita Ramabai, and so many more.
Recently I casually mentioned my dad’s jail time during my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration. I’d talked about the story with my kids a couple of times and only in the last couple of years. To my surprise, my kids who are now adults bent on distancing themselves from conservative evangelicalism as much as their consciences will allow expressed admiration for their grandfather’s courage. Unfortunately, I hadn’t thought all the way through making this remark in front of my young nieces and nephews leaving my siblings with some explaining to do after our family video call. It’s time to talk about this story again.
Maybe rather than a fanatic, my dad was just ahead of his time in the white-evangelical American church landscape. I wish there’d been more of his character in the 1950s and 1960s and I give thanks for the Catholic and Jewish clergy who filled those shoes walking, sitting, and spending time in jail along with Dr. King. When I timidly step into realms of Christian protest police brutality, white supremacy, unjust war, death, unequal pay, unfair housing and voting laws, unequal health care, unjust treatment of women, mistreatment of the earth and its resources, the death penalty, and abortion I like to think I learned this from my dad. It’s not tidy because he learned some of what he did from people I no longer admire. But I’ve watched my dad from those early adolescent suspicions to early adult deconstruction and now at mid-life reconstructing of a moral ethic. I’d say a lot of things differently, but it’s his shoulders I’m standing on.
To practice resurrection, I die to the status quo expectations for clergy families. While I give thanks for the country that legally permits my protest, I denounce all kingdoms opposed to the kingdom of Christ on earth as it is in heaven. I embrace my calling of advocacy as a friend of Jesus who lives to advocate and pray for us all.
