The Wake of Injustice

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” said the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., compressing an observation by the 19th-century Unitarian minister Theodore Parker. Although I greatly admire King, I’ve always thought this oft-quoted remark is nonsense. It’s a comfortable fantasy that many have wanted to believe (especially as we often portray ourselves as the active agents of that trajectory), but I think it has little basis in history and encourages a kind of simplistic self-righteousness.

Perhaps if, in a thousand years, the impressive victories for justice that have been achieved in the last hundred years stand, I’ll revise my opinion from the afterlife. But now it seems premature to assume any of our moral achievements will endure forever. Time, after all, is rather long, even in a world that seems bent on shortening what remains of it.

The simplistic self-righteousness to which I refer is our tendency to divide the world between those of us who want to ride the wave of enlightening history in the face of those who are trying to build dams against it. This can very often be a regurgitated version of 18th- and 19th-century view of civilized people surrounded by savages. But perhaps one good thing about social media is that it can disabuse us of this fantasy. We now can see that a salient characteristic of those most vocal about injustice is how unjustly they often treat those who disagree with them.

Be that as it may, let’s for the moment accept that the moral universe does, in fact, bend toward justice. What then do we do with the non-rectifiable injustices that it leaves in its wake? What can we do for those for whom the very mention of “justice” can only ever be an insult? Let me give you an example of what I mean.

During the past few weeks, I have been listening to The Rest is History’s 11-part podcast series on Custer’s Last Stand and the subsequent plight of the Lakota Sioux. Since I’m a Southerner with a great deal of sympathy for Native Americans, I’ve never cared much for George Armstrong Custer. Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook’s series offers nothing to change my mind. It’s a heartbreaking tale of how the Plains Indians were systematically (though often incompetently) bullied, betrayed, and butchered as they were driven off their lands and corralled into ever-more constricted reservations.

Amid this sordid history, smaller acts of injustices piled up as the power of the white man, armed with modern technology and drunk on capitalism, learned that he could act with impunity against Native Americans. The tragedy culminated in the massacre at Wounded Knee, where 300 Lakota men, women, and children were mown down by American soldiers, 19 of whom were awarded Medals of Honor for their drunken barbarism. Perhaps the most telling part of this tale was how many Lakota Sioux only escaped imprisonment by signing contracts with traveling spectacles such as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show — a peculiarly American way of adding insult to injury.

The Lakota, of course, were only one of the final instances of what happened across the United States. Every square inch of our beloved country was unjustly seized from those who had lived on it for millennia. At the end of the podcast, Sandbrook comments that the plight of the Native Americans has never incited the same passionate reassessment of our history as slavery — there has never been anything like the 1619 Project for them. I suspect there are two reasons for this. The first is that we’ve never afforded Native Americans even the modicum of political power required to influence our social agendas. The second reason is starker: there is no scenario in which the injustices committed against Native Americans can even begin to be rectified. Thus, the people whom E.L. Baum (of The Wizard of Oz) thought should be put out of their misery (i.e., “wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth”) remain the open sore of injustice that we dare not face.

The tragedy of the Lakota is but one example of the injustices that have been left in the wake of history. Europeans, whites, and 19th-century imperialists aren’t their peculiar perpetrators. Irremediable injustices stretch back to the beginning of time and are woven inextricably into human history. The blood of our brothers and sisters has been crying out to the Lord from the ground since Cain killed Abel.

Injustice has morally compromised every people who has ever claimed hegemony as assuredly as it has each of us when we fail to treat our neighbors with dignity. The injustices committed against categories of people (race, ethnicity, sexuality, etc.) are only the clusterings of the countless acts of injustices committed against individuals. Very often no level of reparation can even begin to pay adequate recompense for what has been done; and even when it can, it does nothing for the dead who never knew justice in their lifetime.

In the case of the Lakota Sioux, it appears the moral universe reached a cul-de-sac. In which direction was it bending for them before the white man came? We will never know. All we can do now is seek to make a place for them within our world. It’s impossible for us to give their world back to them. History can never be undone.

The obvious Christian response is forgiveness. One of the remarkably unnatural things about forgiveness is that it often begins with our acknowledging that some evils can never be healed, at least on this side of Judgment Day. It recognizes that harm is often permanent, that even after new life has been granted, the wounds remain visible in our hands and feet. To accept that and yet forgive is about the most heroic gesture one can imagine. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” is perhaps the most necessary and unmerited prayer ever uttered for humanity.

Still, forgiveness can never be demanded of the other. This is why Western claims to let bygones be bygones are risible, and our attempts to absolve ourselves invariably place us in the role of Pontius Pilate. We can’t so easily wash our hands of past injustices, especially while, at the same time, failing to acknowledge these evils we’re committing now. In either case, we pretend that our universe isn’t moral, which it is, even if it doesn’t necessarily bend in the direction we would want.

How then are we to respond to a world misshapen by injustice? I can offer no answer to this moral conundrum. This world is unjust. That is a fact with which we must contend. But perhaps I can offer a perspective. First, I take it as read that Christians must accept that, despite all evidence to the contrary, our universe is indeed moral. We cannot but speak about the things that occur within it as being good or evil, just or unjust, kind or cruel, reasonable or senseless. We sit in judgement over human deeds and usually find it impossible not to do so, even with natural disasters and calamities. I don’t know if that universe bends one way or the other, but I do know that it is moral.

In fact, my view is that history doesn’t have an arc, that our universe doesn’t bend. The Lord’s return is not a progressive process, as though his approach is heralded by waxing human enlightenment. John’s Revelation suggests quite the reverse, if we’re to take it on these terms. My view is that the disease of sin is such that no earthly achievements will prove more enduring than our evils and that utopias are even more fleeting than empires. The best humanity can do is engage in the struggle so that the world isn’t as evil as it might otherwise be and that at least some may heal. At the same time, we must also accept that all “earth’s empires pass away,” including our own. Our moral victories and failures may a thousand years hence be entirely forgotten. Perhaps it is just that they should be so.

I have just finished reading Janine di Giovanni’s The Vanishing: The Twilight of Christianity in the Middle East. Hers is a story about the Christians of Iraq, Gaza, Syria, and Egypt whose lives have for centuries (and especially since 2001) approximated those of the Lakota Sioux. They have never held much power under Islamic rule, and thus have regularly experienced the injustice of the vulnerable. For them, questions of justice must be altogether different from ours in the West. Theirs is a solidarity, not only with all who suffer, but also with him who suffered death upon the cross. I wonder how different public theology would be if it had been written primarily by Syriac or Coptic Christians? I presume it would be humbler than that of British and American theologians.

But what if we’re asking the wrong question? What if the question we need to ask isn’t about injustice but about our worldly power? What if the Christian response to our participation in past justices is to forsake the power to rectify them? It seems to me that part of the problem in the West is that we refuse to recognize that we remain in charge. Be it Native Americans asking for land rights, the descendants of slaves for reparation, or others for decolonialization, each involves them approaching us with metaphorical hat in hand, to appeal to our better nature. In the end, only those in charge — and comfortably so — have the luxury of debating how to respond to past injustices. Can those who have barricaded themselves against the possibility of suffering injustice ever truly heal the injustices they themselves have committed?

Fortunately for us, the church is swiftly losing its secular power. However much our archbishops, bishops, and synods may pontificate or legislate against the injustices of the world, almost no one is listening or cares. But as our voice grows soft and our political strength wanes, perhaps we now have the potential to live more fully into our redemptive vocation. God never intended us to be the project managers of this world, nor has he offered us anything other than to take up our cross and follow his Son.

The Christian response to injustice is therefore very often simply to stand alongside those who suffer, to experience with them the frustrating impotence that is the human condition in a fallen and often senseless world. When we take that pain and those wounds and offer them to God — when even our failures and weaknesses are included in our “living sacrifice” to him — then we find the possibility of redemption, transformation, and even thanksgiving. In that joy, which can only come from the truly just God, can we then find healing. And experiencing such healing, even amid injustice and suffering, remains the surest way to find hope.