Reason to Believe
Election Reflections #10: Why Celebrating the Holidays - Especially When the Struggle Is Tough - Matters More Than We Can Possibly Imagine.
I still do believe in the bigger table, but it’s more difficult than ever to keep that faith, probably because the resistance to it is so great. We have to be the resistance to that resistance. – Pastor John Pavlovitz, A Bigger Table
“When it seems that we have lost our way, we find ourselves again on Christmas Day.” – Believe, The Polar Express
“We are faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words ‘Too Late’.”
This is, in my opinion, one of Martin’s most affecting quotes. It’s from Beyond Vietnam: Time to Break Silence, the speech he gave at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before he was assassinated. Over time, we’d realize that Martin was right. For every society, there really is such a thing as “too late”. And though ours hasn’t passed that threshold yet, if the New Year doesn’t find us both ready to fight and keenly aware of what we’re fighting for, it’s only a matter of time.
But, that’s also why you’ll probably find my advice today to be counter-intuitive. Because, instead of rushing off filled with anxiety and anger and righteous indignation, I think we should do the opposite. We should take a moment to stop, breathe, and reground ourselves, sinking our roots deeply into the things that make us human, that make us better. To, once again, find reason to believe.
This is why holidays, especially like the ones now upon us – ones filled with whimsy and goodwill, bolstered by the heart of humanity and moved by the spirit of benevolence – are so important. We need them. Like we need air. And food. And love. It’s why everything from chestnuts on an open fire to rocking around the Christmas tree, from snowman-building to visions of sugarplums dancing in our heads matter. (You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen, Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen. But, do you recall – the most famous reindeer of all?)
It’s why every year, we need the Grinch to remind us that a heart really can grow three sizes in one day, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come to show both Scrooge and us where greed and selfishness inevitably lead. Celebrating the holidays, even in, and especially in the midst of grief or suffering, pain or peril isn’t giving up. It’s an act of resistance. It’s how we “gird up our loins”, how we get clear on what matters, and how we find the strength to stay in the struggle – no matter what. The more Herculean the task, the more important this becomes.
It’s why the participants in the Birmingham Campaign gathered at the 16th Street Baptist Church long before the marches downtown began, and why those who hadn’t been jailed reconvened there each evening, why they sang songs and recited prayers, heard testimonies and shared food. They were reminding themselves of who they were and why what they were doing mattered. They were contextualizing themselves not just in the American story but in every triumph over oppression throughout human history. In his last sermon the night before he was killed, Martin reflected on that glorious time, years prior:
I remember in Birmingham, Alabama, when we were in that majestic struggle there, we would move out of the 16th Street Baptist Church day after day; by the hundreds, we would move out. And Bull Connor would tell them to send the dogs forth and they did come; but we just went before the dogs singing, "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me round. And old Bull would say, "Take them off," and they did; and we would just go in the paddy wagon singing, "We Shall Overcome." And every now and then we'd get in the jail, and we'd see the jailers looking through the windows being moved by our prayers, and being moved by our words and our songs. And there was a power there which Bull Connor couldn't adjust to; and so we ended up transforming Bull into a steer, and we won our struggle in Birmingham.
It’s why the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, though only a symbolic show of solidarity, was so important. And, it’s why 25,000 Selma to Montgomery marchers gathered in the pouring rain, in a mud-sloshed field to be encouraged and spurred on by an incredible roster of stars, everyone from Harry Belafonte, Tony Bennett, Nina Simone, Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, to Leonard Bernstein, Johnny Mathis, Frankie Lane and Peter, Paul and Mary. Because, when we know who we are, we also know where we’re going. That’s what holidays, even ones involving talking snowmen and flying reindeer do. They bolster our capacity to believe. And believing is half the battle.
When I started this series of letters, it was to articulate some of the reasons we ended up in this precarious place and to contribute a counter-rationale to the one supremacists were trying to sell the American people. I wanted us to understand that the things they’re asserting are patently false, that they’re turning squares into circles, and that their only real power is convincing us that we don’t have any.
That’s still my goal. But I’m also, with this letter, beginning the shift from how we ended up in the pit to how we get out, which is less about the election and more about what’s required of you and me if we’re to form a more perfect union, a society that works for all of us. Because, while democracy can’t be taken away from us, we can give it away – simply by not defending it, by not being the resistance to their resistance.
Our starting point was how the story of the 2024 election didn’t begin in 2024, or even 2016. It’s a story that stems all the way back to statements like the one Pat Robertson made: "With the [voter] apathy that exists today, a well-organized minority can influence the selection of candidates to an astonishing degree," and, as we saw in The Gospel According to Gaga, their strategic shift from attacking marching children to ostensibly acting as children’s protectors from a made-up “homosexual menace.” They went from bombing churches to bombing Planned Parenthood clinics, from Klan rallies to Patriot rallies.
But the sheer genius of their plan was their realization that they didn’t need to BE a majority. They just needed to convince the rest of us that they were one. Still, what’s easy to miss is that this plan, even back then, wasn’t new. People like Kevin Phillips began articulating it in 1968, the same year Martin was killed, and it’s been in effect since the institutional takeovers of the GOP, SBC and NRA in the ‘70s. Just let that sink in. This faction has been running the same set of plays for 50 years.
Before long, this new, whitewashed, imperial, militaristic version of Christianity was everywhere. They audaciously named themselves the “Moral Majority”, which was a twofer – it positioned them as both the truly righteous (never mind those pesky murders of civil rights activists and church bombings) and as the majority, melding religious empire and supremacy ideology with the same avarice that prompted Frederick Douglass, back in 1852, to declare – during an Independence Day speech, no less – that:
“There is not a nation on Earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour. Go where you may,” he challenged, “Search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”
They flooded American culture with apocalyptic propaganda, from offensive Jack Chick gospel tracts to awful rapture movies (check out some of the heartrending user reviews left on IMDB). They had everyone from Bob Dylan to the Doobie Brothers selling blue-eyed Jesus to us, claiming that none of us are free, that we’ve all “gotta serve somebody” (I never understood how I seemed to be the only one who thought that sounded suspiciously like slavery) and that “Jesus is just alright” with them.
Pastors who’d carried on about the dangers of integration and the “Negro problem” deftly shifted their focus. All of a sudden, Pride parades and the “Gay agenda” were the new “big bad,” the greatest threat to America since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Even still, all that preaching and proselytizing failed to make them a majority then and they’re even less of one now. Take the SBC. A September 2020 Washington Examiner article stated; “The [Southern Baptist] convention in June reported its greatest single-year decline in membership. This year is the 13th year of unbroken decline for Southern Baptists, and as fewer young people remain in the church, leaders expect the trend to continue.”
It wasn’t COVID that killed the church. It was religious militants. They might not be a majority. But it also doesn’t matter if we let them behave like one. That’s why we’ve spent so much time learning to see behind the curtain and reject the Really Big Lies. The next step is re-grounding ourselves in our truths, including the truth of democracy.
Bishop Desmond Tutu was famous for a joke that went something like this: “When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray,’ and when we opened our eyes, we had the Bible and they had the land.” That’s essentially what happened here. Without even realizing it, we allowed supremacists to shrink our understanding of democracy down to one presidential race every four years that’s determined by a few thousand “undecideds” in a handful of states.
But calling that “democracy” is like calling a nickel “cash” – true, but only barely. Democracy is about the tens of thousands of races that have been run over the last near-40 years since Pat Robertson’s public statement about rampant voter apathy. It’s about running in those races and sitting in those seats. It’s about both jury duty and holding justices accountable. It’s about fostering a mindset that every public official represents ALL of us, not just those who voted for them, or those from their city, state or district. That’s the oath – allegiance to the Constitution of the United States of America – and to we, the people, who ordained that Constitution.
It’s about ensuring that no law is passed that deprives anyone of their inalienable rights, among which, are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s about making sure that every agency from the police to the IRS understands that they work for us. Those agencies exist by the will of the people and their employees serve at the pleasure of the people. It’s about relentlessly working on our becoming, the forming of a more perfect union – each of us doing our part to make this a society that works for all of us.
This is democracy – true democracy. We’re not one yet. But we could be. I’m a Wikipedia supporter. I have been for about 20 years. In their recent fundraising letter, founder Jimmy Wales had this to say: Wikipedia is not perfect, but also not here to make a profit or influence you. It is written by everyone, for everyone. “By everyone, for everyone.” As I read it, I thought, “That’s as good of a definition of democracy as I’ve ever heard.”
The actions supremacists took to get their candidates elected, in most cases, weren’t illegal. But they were a desecration of democracy rather than a preservation of it. It’s important that we understand this because unless they’re challenged and deposed, this well-organized minority will take our inaction as tacit permission to rule society and enforce their imperial ideology upon us. The future will look back on this as the pivotal point when the United States began its shift from democracy to something else, something less.
Take the composition of Congress. A Brennan Center for Justice analysis revealed how this year’s fight for the House essentially came down to four gerrymandered districts in North Carolina and Georgia — all redrawn since the 2022 midterms. In all four previously Democratic districts subject to gerrymandering, Republicans won in 2024, giving them the majority. Absent the gerrymanders, Democrats likely would have a 219–216 seat majority. That gives this religious faction within one party, control of both the House and the Senate, a staunch ally in the White House and a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court. And that’s led us here.
What’s coming is a race we can’t run solely on adrenaline and a fight we can’t win on our own. That’s why times of remembrance and celebration, telling our shared story and recognizing that we’re far from alone is so important, why renewing our strength and restoring our hope is so crucial. It’s why we need holidays. We’ve got the rest of December to find our center. But by inauguration day, we need to be fully prepared to be the resistance to their resistance. Because their resistance is coming, with the full weight of federal authority behind it.
Nearly 60 years ago, in his Beyond Vietnam speech, the same one we referenced at the start of this letter, Martin delivered a stinging rebuke of our nation for its desecration of its founding virtues and its delusional insistence that there wouldn’t be consequences. It’s uncanny how much that message speaks to our society today:
"We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The 'tide in the affairs of men' does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: 'Too late.' There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. 'The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on...' We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.”
But, it was a speech we Americans wanted no part of. The New York Times called it “disastrous, wasteful and self-defeating.” The Washington Post said Martin had done “a grave injury to his natural allies and even graver to himself.” Life magazine said that his speech “comes close to betraying the cause,” and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the organization he co-founded and led, called a vote to determine whether to condemn him for coming out against the war. Americans across the board reacted with a level of fury that only occurs when we suspect we’re wrong, but can’t admit it. But none of that could cause us to un-hear Martin’s words.
“Nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.” That’s how he framed the choice before us back then. And though he was referring specifically to the war in Vietnam, it holds for all wars. Because, no matter the battle, we can’t sink just their part of the life raft. For Martin, the idea that we were a people on the precipice was a recurring theme, showing up routinely in his speeches. But nowhere is it better articulated than in a lesser-known portion of the historic I Have a Dream:
We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.
That speech, delivered on a hot August day in 1963, was given in an America that had yet to pass either the 1964 Civil Rights Act or the 1965 Voting Rights Act, one where Freedom Summer hadn’t happened, where people were dying of diseases that could be cured, and where defying legally mandated segregation could get you killed.
So, when Martin spoke of the fierce urgency of now, he knew what he was talking about, as did so many listening to him. Medgar Evers, a decorated WW2 veteran and civil rights pioneer had been killed two months prior, the latest in our nation’s long history of murdering African American veterans. This was the backstory behind the fierce urgency of now, as articulated by Martin, there in front of the Lincoln Memorial. And over the next 12 months, that urgency, instead of diminishing, would grow ever stronger.
CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) members James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner would be tortured, executed, and buried on the secluded property of a Mississippi Klansman. Four little girls, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair would die trapped under debris in the bombed 16th Street Baptist Church.
William Moore, James Reeb and Jimmie Lee Jackson would be shot, beaten to death and executed by a police officer, respectively, as punishment for their activism efforts. Twenty-six-year-old Jonathan Daniels, who used his body to shield 17-year-old Ruby Sales from a shotgun blast was instead killed by segregationists in Selma, describing Jonathan as a “race traitor”.
And Viola Liuzzo, an Anglo woman from Detroit whose offense was ferrying people back to the Birmingham airport after the Selma to Montgomery march, would be killed by four Klansmen. Later, the Birmingham News would publish an ad from someone attempting to sell her car. Asking for $3,500, the listing said: Do you need a crowd-getter? I have a 1963 Oldsmobile two-door in which Mrs. Viola Liuzzo was killed. Bullet holes and everything intact. Ideal to bring in crowds.
Their deaths reveal one of the most disheartening things about us Americans – we seem to have to do something truly awful before we can allow ourselves to do something fundamentally good. It took the assassination of President Kennedy and the deaths of all kinds of civil rights activists to finally overcome the decades-long resistance to the Civil Rights Act, and even then, it wasn’t easy.
It took our near-unilateral disregard for AIDS-related deaths in our country for us to start to see LGBTQ+ Americans as human beings deserving of the same rights as the rest of us. And it took being so utterly wrong about Iraq for our consciousness to shift enough that we could elect a Barack Obama. I’m truly hoping that starting now, we can bring this wretched cycle to an end. That’s my prayer for us – that we can become the people who can just skip the horribleness and land squarely on the humane.
Which, gets us back to holidays, and the three reasons why celebrating them is so important – they connect us to our broader story, they renew our strength and they remind us of who we are at our best, without us having to show ourselves at our worst. It’s easy to think singing songs and sharing food, doing good and expressing love is somehow about forgetting. But it isn’t. It’s about remembering and replenishing. It’s about fortifying our souls with resolve. It’s about finding reason to believe.
In Me and Mary, I give this description of the home I grew up in:
After my first semester [at Oklahoma University], I caught a ride with a friend as far as Memphis and took a bus from there to Birmingham; heading home for the holidays. Sitting there waiting for the bus, Kenny Loggins’ Celebrate Me Home was playing, the lyrics reminding me of so much of what I missed and was looking forward to.
Christmas was always a special time for me as a little boy; no doubt because it seemed that at my grandmother’s house, my entire family devoted their every effort to making it memorable for everyone; but especially for me. My granddad Olden put up those old-fashioned colored lights around the roof of the front porch and the living room windows; with Mary declaring that he was going to fall off that old rickety ladder he insisted on using (instead of the new one the kids bought him) and “break your fool neck.” He never did.
I remember the way those lights looked when the windows were fogged up from all the cooking going on; like a winter wonderland. There was a fresh-cut tree that the entire family decorated together and that had far more presents stuffed beneath its branches than it could accommodate. On Christmas morning, when I woke up, Aunt Naomi and Uncle Sid, as well as Aunt Wing and Big Daddy, would already be there, and both Pat and Robert would already be up; helping out in the kitchen.
We couldn’t open presents until Don and Ron [my twin uncles eight years older than me] were up, so it fell to me to remedy that. My grandad had the fire going and was bustling around tuning the radios to the same station playing Christmas music, from Nat King Cole’s The Christmas Song to Bing and Ella’s Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer. This was Christmas to me.
It still is. There’s a resolve lodged deep within my soul from being nestled in the warmth of family like that, from being lavished with love and sharing it in return. We were a working-class family, and I remember this being the one day in the entire year when everyone was off. After presents, we’d have a meal bountiful enough to be called “brunch”, but for us, it was breakfast, albeit, an extra-special one (there are benefits to being from a family of cooks).
Later that afternoon, we’d bundle up, dressed in our Sunday best, and the entire family, with covered plates in hand, would deliver meals or desserts or jams to friends in the neighborhood. It was my grandmother’s way of doing what my grandfather did when he fixed someone’s leaky roof for free. They were enacting the Beloved Community right there on 4th Terrace N.
The slate grey Alabama sky would be dark by the time we made our way back home, and all along the way, we’d see lights on roofs or trees in windows, lighted candles and smoke curling from chimneys. It was quiet enough to hear the wind whisking through the spindly branches overhead, and the smell of Christmas itself was in the air.
My granddad Olden, a remarkable singer, would start to spontaneously sing one carol or another, then, everyone would join in. And there we were, making our way back home to our own Christmas dinner, with hearts overflowing with peace, love and goodwill. Even back then, I knew this was something special.
So, today, whenever I need reminding of who I am and where I come from, I reflect on those memories. That’s what holidays do, they allow us to borrow strength from those who’ve come before us, weaving us into the tapestry of the grand human story – the same one we now get to help write.
There are people who want us to think it’s all over, that the hopes for the future held by those who brought us this far have passed. It isn’t and they haven’t. Though we’ve got an enormous amount of work ahead of us, we can do this. Right now, more than at any time in our history, we have it within us to finally become the America we've always dreamed of being. If only we can rise to the occasion, be the resistance to the resistance.
So, bring on Who-ville and Frosty, latkes and figgy pudding. Bring on mangers and stars in the east, dreidels and gingerbread, Solstice, Julebukking and Roast Beast. Hang stockings from mantels and put menorahs in the windows. Give to Toys for Tots and offer holiday baskets to families who need them.
Let’s carol and make cookies and give gifts and come home. Let’s take this time to appreciate all we have, to share and receive love, to remember those who’ve come before us and to prepare ourselves, come January, to pour our souls into finishing the work they started. We owe the future that; to be the generation that made democracy real, rather than the one that saw it end.
That’s the gift you and I have been utterly blessed to receive – at every juncture in our past when our destiny as a better people was in doubt, they rose to the occasion. We can, too. And we will. Because Martin was right. Now is the time. My hope is that the spirit of goodwill comes alive in everything we see and do, reminding us, this holiday season, of whence we came.
And to send you off in good fashion, I have three great songs for you. The first is Carla Thomas’ doo-wop Christmas tune, Gee Whiz, It’s Christmas, which I fondly remember my mother Bernice singing every year (and my sister Crystal even got her to sing a version of it for me over the phone last Christmas — one of the benefits of being from a family of singers). Second, here’s a rare live version of the unforgettable Nat King Cole singing The Christmas Song.
And, third, I’ve included a Bing Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald jazzy duet on Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer that will not only set your toes to tapping, it teaches an important lesson – “Just keep your red nose a-gleaming,” Bing and Ella sang, “And you’ll go down in history!” We all will.
Finally, a benediction.
“I still do believe in the bigger table,” is how Unitarian minister John Pavlovitz, in the quote at the beginning of this letter, expressed his sense of where we are as a people. “But it’s more difficult than ever to keep that faith,” he continues, “Probably because the resistance to it is so great. We have to be the resistance to that resistance.”
I couldn’t agree more. I’m not sure there’s anything more worthy of believing in than a place where there’s a place for all of us. So, may that be true for you this holiday season. May you find yourself nestled in the warmth of family, both formed and found. May you be lavished with love and find yourself sharing it in return.
May you be captured by joy, moved with kindness and rooted in resolve. May you be woven ever more intricately into the tapestry of our grand human story and may this connection carry you forward into the future.
May you borrow strength from those who’ve come before you and bequeath hope to those who will come after. May we all find reason to believe.