By Ric Hudgens, a pastor and author rooted in Northern Illinois

*Note: Three years ago as the covid pandemic was just picking up speed we observed the funeral of John Lewis. I wrote this essay that week. The lessons abide.

The funeral of John Lewis at Ebenezer Baptist Church last week was like an event from another world. Lewis was literally on the frontlines of some of the most remarkable years in our nation’s history. He not only lived a long life (“longevity has its place” said Dr. King, who was killed at 39), but remained engaged, relevant, and prophetic to the end. Case in point perhaps, the editorial Lewis wrote for publication on the day of his funeral (“Together We Can Redeem the Soul of America,” New York Times, July 30, 2020).

Everyone gathered in that historic church where King, Jr, and King, Sr were once ministers (and Rev. Raphael Warnock so ably serves today). I watched the entire service remotely, yet savoring the familiar contours of Black Baptist funerals. Despite the pandemic, everyone was masked, and microphones were switched after each speaker. It was a funeral, much like many others I’ve attended—unique perhaps only by the guests’ notoriety and the length of the service.

I was anticipating Obama’s eulogy because he performs well on these occasions and did so again. I noted how he moved from eulogizing to preaching to “meddlin’” as the political edge of his eulogy grew pointed and specific (see “This was a Different Obama: A Stick-Swinging Old Testament Obama”, by Charles P Pierce, Esquire Magazine, July 30, 2020).

But even at his best, Obama is always the voice of reform, not revolution, the embodiment of politics not protest. I don’t want to minimize reform or politics. Lewis gave the last half of his life mainly to reform while serving as the Representative for Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District. Reform has its place. But Lewis was not only a reformer, not did he ever completely disavow protest for politics.

The one voice in Ebenezer who reminded us of that was the iconic James Lawson. His appearance was a surprise and a delight to me, although, at age 91, he could barely walk on his own. But he needed no assistance speaking. Lawson has always been about more than reform, and he reminded everyone that Lewis was too.

Charles P. Pierce wrote “First, there was James Lawson, 91 years-worth of unbanked fire and unbridled righteousness, the man who instructed Lewis, and Diane Nash, and Marion Barry, and James Bevel, and the young people who gathered in Nashville to learn from him satyagraha, the power of Gandhian nonviolent protest that Lawson had learned as a Methodist missionary in India. There were few more consequential Americans in the 20th century than Jim Lawson and, as evinced by the thunder he brought on Thursday, he isn’t finished yet. He came to Ebenezer Baptist to make sure that John Lewis would not be transformed in death into a statue of cool, white, petrified marble.”

Lawson set out to correct the historical record (you can find the full transcript here and recorded video here): “John Lewis called what we did between 1953 and 1973 the nonviolent movement of America, not the Civil Rights Movement.” Lawson connected Lewis with nonviolent activism and the prophetic Christian tradition and linked both to the revolutionary remnants still present in America’s founding documents.

Said Lawson: “‘John Lewis practiced not the politics that we call bipartisan. John Lewis practiced the politics that we the people of the USA more desperately than ever are hoping for—the politics of the Declaration of Independence, the politics of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States…We do not need bipartisan politics if we’re going to celebrate the life of John Lewis. We need the Constitution to come alive: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident.’”

The Christianity of Lawson and Lewis is not the Christianity that elected Trump. Lewis boycotted Trump’s inauguration (which is no doubt why Trump boycotted his funeral). But Lewis had also boycotted the inauguration of George W. Bush in 2000.

The funeral made clear how the Christianity of Lewis was deeply personal and profoundly political. His was not a Christian faith easily manipulated by what Lawson called “the forces of spiritual wickedness” and, lest there be any misunderstanding, further specified those forces as “racism, sexism, violence, plantation capitalism”. (For Lawson’s definition of “plantation capitalism” see Truthout, Laura Flanders, September 13, 2013).

Here is a strain of American civil religion that is not that of John Wayne and Ronald Reagan (See the new book by Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, 2020). Lawson even criticized Reagan in this eulogy, condemning the Reagan administration for reversing the enormous gains Lewis and others had won on behalf of “we the people”.

As we pass 150,000 American deaths, it would be a mistake to think COVID-19 is the sole cause. Numbers around the world testify not to the virus’s deadliness, but the failures of our response. As other nations resume their daily lives despite COVID, the United States remains overwhelmed. Hundreds of thousands are not dying solely from a pandemic, but from a combination of behavioral and institutional patterns of injustice that show no sign of changing very soon.

Likewise, with all the well-deserved disgust Christian faith has attracted during the Trump administration, perhaps religion is not the cause. The enobling, prophetic faith embodied by John Lewis and James Lawson stands in sharp contradiction to the enabling faith of those pastors who flock to Trump. The version of faith that leads toward Trump ends in literal death.

John Lewis and James Lawson lived their entire lives in the shadow of death. They feared no evil, and acted upon the good of “we the people”. Lawson concluded his eulogy by quoting the poem “I Dream a World” by Langston Hughes. Then he said, “Celebrate life. Dream and labor. For Atlanta and Los Angeles and the United States and the world. That is to celebrate the spirit and the heart and the mind and soul of John Lewis, and to walk with him through the galaxies, seeking equality, liberty, justice and the beloved community for all. “

There is a pandemic faith modeled in these words, in these lives, that can speak to us all during these troubled times.

Ric Hudgens

August 2, 2020