The United States must be transformed to find the moral compass it needs to survive the deep-seated fear and anger dividing Americans and threatening constitutional democracy, Sojourners President Adam Russell Taylor said.
“Part of what we need in this moment is a kind of conversion experience, an experience of being renewed and born again. We desperately need a road map, a moral vision of Beloved Community to serve as a North Star,” said Taylor, author of the newly reissued A More Perfect Union: A New Vision for Building the Beloved Community.
Adam Russell Taylor
The notion of Beloved Community emanates from the Civil Rights era and specifically from Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech at the March on Washington in 1963, when he called for a racially and economically just society in which “all men are created equal,” Taylor explains in the book first published in 2021.
“Building on this vision, our task is to reinterpret and contemporize the Beloved Community in our social and political moment,” he writes. “Reenvisioning the Beloved Community calls us to draw on foundational religious and civic ideals. It means that we create deeper commitments that allow us to build that community today. “
Beloved Community as needed in the present context also demands an ethic “equality rooted in imago dei (the image of everyone), radical welcome, e pluribus unum or unity in authentic diversity, ubuntu interdependence, restorative stewardship, nonviolence, and dignity for all.”
But the currents pushing against unity and democracy run even deeper than when the book was initially released, Taylor told BNG.
White evangelical acceptance of the January 6 insurrection as a patriotic rather than criminal act, and Trump’s Big Lie about the authenticity of the 2020 election helped further deepen their embrace of the MAGA movement, he said. “It was so deep-seated and powerful the Religious Right movement morphed into a white Christian nationalist movement supercharged with enough grievance and anger and fear to bring Trump back into office.”
While the threat is about more than an individual president or party, the forces fueling the MAGA movement have to be taken seriously because so much harm is being done to vulnerable communities “and literally moving our country down a cliff into autocracy and authoritarianism,” he added.
“What I have been thinking a lot about in this current moment is how do we engage in much deeper relationship building with people tied to Christian nationalism and swayed by more of an ideology than a theology, and influenced so much by Trump’s rhetoric and policies?”
It is possible to heal the distrust and divisions by starting with a scriptural approach to redemption, he explains in A More Perfect Union.
“Being born again is not limited to individual experience.”
“Being born again is not limited to individual experience,” the American Baptist minister says. “Communities and societies can also be reborn as a result of shared transformational experiences. Our shared struggle through the COVID-19 crisis could be such an experience, creating new possibilities for the rebirth of a more united ‘we the people’ and a renewed social contract.”
Likewise, the country’s character and identity, its contradictions and pain can be “reimagined, transformed and even reborn. I have the audacity to believe this because, from my Christian perspective, God can make all things new.”
He continues: “Our nation’s rebirth will require coming to terms with our past and making amends while we embrace a new set of commitments for the future. None of this is inevitable, and there will likely be backsliding into old habits, attitudes and temptations. But if we remain steadfast in claiming and living out our best religious and civic ideals, we can and shall overcome.”
Earlier examples of such transformative movements, although sometimes short lived, include the nation’s original founding, the Reconstruction period following the Civil War and the Civil Rights struggle including the 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Rights acts, Taylor said separately.
“Of course, these transformations came with backlash. From the progress of the Civil Rights Movement came the birth of the Religious Right opposed to desegregation, and we are still living through that period.”
A More Perfect Union presents numerous approaches to moving forward despite resistance, including promoting truthful American history, pushing back against toxic polarization and redeeming patriotism.
“When patriotism starts to bleed into nationalism, it becomes poisonous and destructive. A healthy patriotism is animated by a love for one’s country and an ongoing commitment to realize the country’s deepest ideals,” he writes.
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