Can Trent Lott’s Soul Be Saved?
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I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry. He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure. He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God. Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the Lord.
Blessed is the one who makes the Lord his trust, who does not turn to the proud, to those who go astray after false gods! Thou has multiplied, O Lord my God, thy wondrous deeds and thy thoughts toward us; none can compare with thee! Were I to proclaim and tell of then, they would be more than can be numbered.
Sacrifice and offering thou doest not desire; but thou hast given me an open ear. Burnt offering and sin offering thou hast not required. Then I said, “Lo, I come; in the roll of the book it is written of me; I delight to do thy will, O my God; thy law is within my heart.”
I have told the glad news of deliverance in the great congregation; lo, I have not restrained my lips, as thou knowest, O Lord. I have not hid thy saving help within my heart, I have spoken of thy faithfulness and thy salvation; I have not concealed thy steadfast love and thy faithfulness from the great congregation.
Do not thou, O Lord, withhold thy mercy from me, let thy steadfast love and thy faithfulness ever preserve me! For evils have encompassed me without number; my iniquities have overtaken me, till I cannot see; they are more than the hairs of my head; my heart fails me.
Be pleased, O Lord, to deliver me!
[For] I am poor and needy; but the Lord takes thought for me. Thou art my help and my deliverer; do not tarry, O my God!
The real struggle in the world may be not between good and evil but rather between hope and evil. Hope seems more active and creative than the somewhat nebulous good. Hope aspires; good has arrived. Good, like God, lives outside time; hope keeps people alive, moving forward, inside time. As long as hope remains healthy, it is a match for evil; about good, no one can be so sure.
How can history be redeemed? In order for it to be redeemed there must be hope. And hope does not lie in changing the facts of history. The past cannot be changed, but its unchanging character does dissuade it from impacting present events. Wherein doth hope lie then when the facts of history cannot be changed?
“How long?” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would rhetorically ask repeatedly, and the congregation would repeatedly respond, “Not long,” echoing a call and response that may have been elicited by the Psalmist’s query: “How long, O Lord?”
One of my favorite professors from the University of Chicago, Martin Marty, sometimes begins his public lectures by pulling out the local paper, reading a story from it, and giving that story a theological interpretation in order to show the religious dimension of mundane events of our lives. I won’t randomly pull out a section from this morning’s paper, but when I was reading last Monday’s paper I couldn’t help but notice this story.
The officials of yesterday’s professional football playoff game admitted after the game was over that they had made a mistake that had cost one of the teams, the New York Giants, a victory that would have kept alive their dream of playing in the Super Bowl. The team’s season is over, in part not because of what they did or did not do, but because someone else had made a mistake that cost them the game!
One of the reasons I like sports so much in our culture is that it brushes up against theology all the time. Religion sometimes brushes up against theology, but religion is so mired in confusing loyalties and declarations of God’s truth, as if we could know that, that you don’t often see real-life theological issues. Politics always brushes up against theology but the political loyalties in our time hide theology so well you can’t discern theology from partisan posturing.
But, this is just a sport, eh? The theological issue is clear: The game cannot be played over! The mistake is ingrained in a past that cannot be changed. So what do we do with a past that cannot be changed? Forgetting it disrespects it, and changing the present and future as a way to erase it may lead to forgetting it and, eventually, redoing past mistakes in even more insidious ways! Wherein can we find hope in the face of the mistakes humanity has made that cannot be erased? “The past is never dead,” wrote Mississippi novelist William Faulkner, “It’s not even past.”
This is the meaning of the controversy over the remark Trent Lott made recently concerning Strom Thurmond’s politics of racial segregation. They aroused deep theological issues!
Can Trent Lott’s soul be saved? The man who shares a history with the novelist Faulkner, other Southerners, all other Americans, made a remark at the 100th birthday of Strom Thurmond that looked longingly to this nation’s segregationist past. It is a past we all share. It’s a past we mistakenly think is only past. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Lott since has resigned his position as leader of the Republicans in the Senate, although he has not resigned his Senate seat. He has taken to the public penitence circuit, even claiming in a BET interview that he supports Affirmative Action, which one would never had surmised from his voting record. He probably has rehabilitated his political image enough to win re-election in Mississippi. But, a deeper, much more disturbing question remains: Can Trent Lott’s soul be saved?
The deeper, more disturbing dimension of that question hides the question of whether America’s soul can be saved.
To read the situation with Trent Lott religiously requires the capacity to extricate theology from politics, which may be the hardest thing to do in our time. If this question is asked politically, then the response is something to this effect: Are you a Trent Lott supporter? If you are a Republican, then the answer can either be yes, because you agree with all or most of the political stances he takes, or no, not unless he returns to the policies of the party of Lincoln. If you are not a Trent Lott supporter, you can answer either it makes no difference, or no, his soul cannot be saved. You listen to his interview on BET, where he makes the startling statement that he has always supported Affirmative Action, and you think he is simply lying to gain political favor. If you are his political advisor you tell him to make appearances through various media, apologizing for the remarks, trying as best you can to support your record until the frenzy blows over because you know the public’s attention will be placed elsewhere, like North Korea or Iraq. Politically, then, the question, Can Trent Lott’s soul be saved?, is answered, it depends on what is the political persuasion of the answerer. And anyway it is answered politically is just not very satisfying.
Those who are uncomfortable with religious language might respond that they don’t believe in sin, which leaves one with the prospect that nothing that Trent Lott did was sinful or had any ramifications beyond his personal life and the public “bump” it created in our country’s history.. I would argue that this option is no better than a political response in disguise, because it leaves judgment in the hands of whether you agree or disagree with his politics or his personality as you have come to know it through the media. To ask the religious question, Can Trent Lott’s soul be saved?, is to ask, “What is sinful about Trent Lott’s life as we can know it and make a judgment of it?”
So, to begin to answer the question religiously one needs address first whether he has committed any sin. In some traditions sin is an act, freely chosen, that cuts off human beings from the love of God. Thus, sin is freely participating in immoral acts. So, we choose to sin. So, has Trent Lott freely chosen immoral acts?
You can’t answer that without looking at a past. He worked to keep African-Americans out of his college fraternity. He supported discrimination at Bob Jones University, “cheerleading for the white segregationist Council of Conservative Citizens, in standings against the Voting Rights Act, in rejecting an array of minority judicial candidates, Lott,” writes one political analyst, “has made it clear that the moment in which he lives is one most Americans have left behind.” (“Lessons of the Trent Lott Mess,” Ellie Cose, Newsweek, 12/23/02) Yet, at one time in history that past was a moment that American society supported and upon which much of American society was built.
So, maybe Trent Lott didn’t freely chose to sin but had to because of the society he was born and raised in. In other words, in other religious traditions, sin is a condition of being alive. So, we sin by the very nature of existing, a condition that can be compounded or ameliorated by our choices, but never eliminated by them. So, is the fact that Trent Lott was born in a culture that has this past, beyond his or anyone else’s capacity to change or overcome it, so removed his personal freedom that he could do nothing but sin? Did his remarks twist comedian Flip Wilson’s brilliantly funny justification for any wrongdoing, “The Devil made me do it,” into a comment on a kind of predestined condition for anyone growing up in this culture?
There is the old story of the farmer’s wife who came home from church and was asked by her husband, himself a fervent non-church goer, what the topic of the preacher’s sermon was. She stared her good for nothing husband in the eye and said, “The preacher preached on sin!” The husband sheepishly and nonchalantly replied, “Ahhh, sin, eh? Was he for it or agin' it?” In the Western religious tradition the issue of what is sin, and what our response is or should be to it, is a basic issue. So, to be in a religious conversation, rather than a political one, about Trent Lott, is to confront what is Lott’s culpability in what he did and how he has lived his life. It is to confront what is our own culpability in what we do and how we live our lives. Could he have known that what he was doing, in supporting segregation by politically preserving it and by personally participating in it, was wrong? Could he have changed? I think that segregation has been proven sinful by the measurement of a free faith because it is an enemy of fair treatment and justice. I think that segregation has been proven sinful by the measurement of a free faith because it builds a cage to keep races confined within their own socially proscribed prisons. By the measurement of other values, drawn from other understandings of religion, segregation has been affirmed as a means to keep “lower” races from infiltrating and diluting “higher” ones. But, separations that divide humanity into “higher” and “lower” forms cannot be supported by a faith rooted in freedom because they form boundaries that hinder the free exchange of affection, sentiment, and creativity that invigorate the unfolding of life.
But, that creates a problem, a deep, deep problem that is hidden beneath the deepest level of uneasiness that everyone harbors when confronted by the question, Can Trent Lott’s soul be saved? And this uneasiness is a religiously related anxiety, which is shared by those who were directly affected by the referees’ decisions a week ago. We live in a society with a past that was segregationist and we cannot change that fact. We live in a society shaped by racism and we cannot change that fact. The referees call was made generations ago. It is our history and we cannot change that. We can’t go back. We can’t play the game again. We are stuck with what history has given us. We are the products of a segregated past and Trent Lott’s comments are distasteful because, in part, they remind us of who we are and where we have come from. Trent Lott told us of our common past as Americans! And that is the source of a deep level of uneasiness and anxiety.
We can ignore that past. We can claim that because it is past it does not affect the present or the future. We can claim that it is just “one interpretation,” and that there are others, or that it is a part of the present only for certain people of certain skin color. We can deal with our past in a variety of ways, but haunting reminders remain: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
We can smooth that over by saying that, “Had I lived during the time of segregation I would not have participated in it.” Maybe you wouldn’t have. But I can recall, like some hazy dream, going down to Mississippi to spend time in Jackson with my aunt and uncle, a career man in the Marines, and being told as a little boy not to drink from one drinking fountain, but to use another. As an adult I realized what had happened was that I unwittingly was shaped by a segregationist society I supported by doing what I was told; which, of course, was being a good boy!
Can Trent Lott’s soul be saved? Any answer must be related to history and must somehow take into account the fact that history cannot be changed. Trent Lott grew up in a society formed by a segregationist present and past. I grew up in a society formed by a segregationist present and past. My children grew up in a society formed by a segregationist past that cannot be erased. The hidden anxiety the question elicits, which is the religious anxiety all humanity bears, is this: How can history be redeemed? In order for it to be redeemed there must be hope. Wherein doth hope lie when the facts of history cannot be changed, when there are no “do-overs?”
In Western religious traditions the reality of sin in history is dealt with by confession and repentance. Confession doesn’t change what is past and neither does repentance. But in Western religion confession is an attempt to gauge the past for what it was and our unwitting or freely chosen participation in it sinful dimensions. I confess. I have not regarded men and women of different ethnicities, as children of God, unwittingly and by my own free choice.
Repentance is another matter, although in Western religion confession without repentance is just so much talk. To the Catholic, confession is made to the priest, who intercedes with God on behalf of the one confessing, and pronounces to the one confessing what God wishes to be done in repentance to counterbalance the sin. This is because the church and its doctrines stand between the individual and God, and thus, between wrongs and doing right. That is not our religious tradition because we know deeply how the church as an institution can itself become the vehicle for sin. In our tradition the access to what God wishes to be done in repentance is the vehicle of the individual conscience and the human heart. But, we are radically Protestant. We remove not just the church as an institution that can itself be the vehicle for sin. We remove church doctrine, creed, and church generated belief, because they, too, can be just as much a vehicle for sin. In our tradition the regenerate person must be contrite in heart, and through an expanded conscience turn away from sin and toward virtue. But that is not all.
James Luther Adams, in his essay, “Five Smooth Stones of Liberal Religion,” identified the theological characteristics of our way of faith. “We deny the immaculate conception of virtue and affirm the necessity of social incarnation. No one can properly put faith in merely individual virtue, even though that is a prerequisite for societal virtues. The “holy” thing in life is the participation n those processes that give body and form to universal justice.” Trent Lott’s heart may change, but so also must change his understanding of the aim of our common life.
Political policies change. Political stances change. Politicians change. The Democrats, who once in the South supported segregation, changed. The Republicans, the party of Lincoln, changed, too. But, religion is about “something more,” that doesn’t change when human opinion does. Some liken that something more to absolute laws that don’t change or an absolute will of God that doesn’t change, but our religious tradition wants something even more than that. We seek a possibility, a chance, an opportunity for regeneration and a greater wholeness to life than our guesses of what God’s absolute law and will is. We seek to be made new.
There must be something more than the pinch between a past we cannot change and the guilt we carry over that! There must be something more than wishing for a good that is the opposite of the evils of the past, because wishing for that good ignores the way the “past is never dead, [and] its not even past.” Wishing for good hides the deeper evils that still exist when it comes to race in this country. There must be a something more that confession takes us to the verge of, and repentance fulfills in the form of building institutions of justice. There still must be something more, which satisfies the heart’s longing for freedom and justice for all, which the psalmist’s words pointed to and inspire:
I waited patiently for the Lord; he inclined to me and heard my cry. He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure. He put a new song in my mouth.
Sacrifice and offering thou doest not desire; but thou hast given me an open ear. Burnt offering and sin offering thou hast not required.
Do not thou, O Lord, withhold thy mercy from me, let thy steadfast love and thy faithfulness ever preserve me! For evils have encompassed me without number; my iniquities have overtaken me, till I cannot see; they are more than the hairs of my head; my heart fails me.
Be pleased, O Lord, to deliver me!
[For] I am poor and needy; but the Lord takes thought for me. Thou art my help and my deliverer; do not tarry, O my God!
But show us, in the quiet regions of conscience, the way of freedom and justice.
AMEN.