God's Equal Protection Clause: The Biblical Basis for Social Justice

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The Equal Protection Clause (EPC) is the prime guarantor of civil rights in the United States Constitution.  It reads:  

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The EPC was originally created to protect the rights of newly emancipated African American slaves after the Civil War.   Basically, the federal government was afraid that states would treat blacks unequally following the abolition of slavery by passing racist policies and laws against them.   The EPC was constructed, at least in theory, to prevent the states from denying African Americans “the equal protection of the laws.”  As we know from history, states blatantly disregarded the EPC, discriminated against African Americans in every horrible way imaginable, and found legal loopholes to justify their racism. 

Although originally designed to protect African Americans, the reach of the EPC was eventually extended to protect Asian Americans, Latinos, and other minorities from governmental discrimination.   In the present-day, the EPC guarantees the civil rights of all people (including whites), based upon race, national origin, gender, and religious affiliation. 

One controversy surrounding the EPC is that it has been interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court to offer little protection to the poor.  Poverty is not a "suspect classification" according to the highest court in the land, and the result is that the federal government, states, and cities can pass almost any type of law which discriminates against the poor and it will be found constitutional.  With the current conservative shift of the U.S. Supreme Court it is likely that the same might become true for the civil rights of undocumented immigrants as well. 

         Thankfully, the Bible has a very different view than the Supreme Court of the United States.   The Bible is very clear that any discrimination against the poor and immigrants violates God’s Equal Protection Clause.   In fact, the Bible is also abundantly clear that God’s equal protection extends to every individual regardless of race, nationality, gender, or socio-economic status.  More than 2,000 verses of Scripture establish the biblical basis for God's Protection Clause. 

         A summary of biblical teaching on the civil rights of the poor and immigrants (God’s Equal Protection Clause) might be summed up in this way:

All persons born in the world are made in My image, and subject to the jurisdiction of Heaven… No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of immigrants and the poor who are made in My image; nor shall any state deprive them of life, liberty, or property, without consideration of My rigorous ethical standards; nor shall they deny any immigrant or poor person the equal protection of the laws.  Those who violate My Equal Protection Clause will be subject to divine judgment. 

As expressed by this reiteration of the Equal Protection Clause, Scripture teaches that oppression of immigrants and the poor is offensive to God.  At the same time, the Bible is also clear that such injustice is the defining reality of a humanity which has chosen to turn its back on God.   

Tune in in a few days for a specific discussion of the Scripture which forms the basis for the biblical EPC... 

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In solidarity,
Robert

Proud, Unburied, and Deported: Latino Veterans in the U.S. Military

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I come from a proud line of Latino war veterans.  My father and two uncles are Vietnam War vets, and I have a relative who lost his legs in combat during World War II.  I also have cousins who were West Point grads, Green Berets, Army Airborne, and National Guardsmen.   As a Latino, I’m not alone in having a long tradition of family military service.   More than 1 million Latino vets are alive and well in the United States today, and Latinos comprise 11% of the U.S. military. 

Beginning with the American Revolution (yes, the war with the wig-wearing Brits more than 200 years ago), Latinos have bravely served in the U.S. military.  Latinos have fought in every war since, including the Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean “conflict,” the Vietnam War, Operation Desert Shield/Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation Enduring Freedom.  Much to my surprise, Latinos even fought in China (and won a Congressional Medal of Honor) as part of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900!  I wonder, did one of my Mexican ancestors fight in China one hundred years ago having no idea that one of his own would end up marrying a Chinese woman in Los Angeles 70 years later?  :)

A higher percentage of Latinos fought in WWII than any other ethnic minority group.  Latinos also won more medals during WWII, including Congressional Medals of Honor, than any other ethnic minority group.  This led many of us to shake our heads in disbelief when Ken Burns failed to honor the specific military service of Latinos in his famous WWII documentary series which came out in 2007.

As proud as us Latinos are of our brave history of military service to the United States, there’s also a bit of tension which many of us experience when we talk about it.  This is because, historically, though we’ve fought our hearts and souls out on the battlefield, we haven’t always found open arms when we’ve returned home. 

The Felix Longoria incident is a tragic example of this which deserves commemoration this Veteran’s Day.  Felix Z. Longoria, a Texas native, was killed in action in the Philippines in 1945.  After fighting and dying bravely on the battlefield for his country, his body was transported back to his south Texas hometown of Three Rivers for honorable burial.  Unbelievably, an Anglo funeral home in Three Rivers refused to allow his family to conduct funeral services for him there because of his Mexican ancestry.   This raised a national controversy and spurred the political intervention of then Senator Lyndon B. Johnson and Dr. Hector P. Santiago, founder of the American G.I. Forum (a Latino veterans organization created to advocate for the civil rights of Latino war veterans).   Justice was served , and Private Felix Longoria was granted an honorable burial in the Arlington National Cemetery. 

Thankfully, things are much better today for our Latino veterans.  Our country has indeed come a long way since then.  I’m proud of that.  But, unfortunately, many Latinos have recently come back from service in Iraq and Afghanistan and have not been given their just recognition.  In fact, thousands of Latino veterans have faced deportation proceedings in the past two years in the United States.  In 2011, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) reported that 3,000 veterans were in deportation proceedings!  This is a modern-day Felix Longoria travesty.   May we remember Private Felix Longoria and these 3,000 veterans facing deportation on this Veteran’s Day. 

Obamanos!

Obama is still the 44th President of the United States.  President Obama slid into home base last night with an overwhelming victory in the electoral college due in large part to the Latin@ vote (303-206 at last count).  One huge lesson emerges:  You can't stomp on 52 million Latin@s in your campaign and expect to win the Presidency.  In the Republican primary race, Mitt Romney went out of his way to be mean-spirited and harsh towards undocumented immigrants--repeatedly using the offensive term "illegal alien" as a cuss word intended to rile up the Republican base.  52 million of us were listening.  You can't make fun of our moms, dads, abuelitas, abuelitos, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, friends, madrinas, and padrinos, and expect to gain our support.  Moreover, whether you have undocumented family or friends, or not, most compassionate people favor a balanced form of comprehensive immigration reform.

It doesn't work to politicize the painful struggles of undocumented students--or "Dreamers"--either.  While criticizing President Obama for not passing the Dream Act, Mitt Romney had the audacity to go on to the presidential debate stage and advocate for a version of the Dream Act which only involved military service.  Apparently, to Mitt Romney, we're good enough for cannon fodder, but we don't deserve to go to college or medical school.

Think I'm just making this up and stuck in my Chicana/o Studies/ethnic studies bubble?  71% of Latin@s voted for President Obama yesterday.  Mitt Romney would have won last night if he could have garnered the same amount of support as George W. Bush did among Latinos.  What's more, 50,000 Latin@s turn 18 every month in the United States.  Buenos dias, America.

Student Stories from the Revolution

Carlos was raised in an immigrant Latino community in Santa Ana, California.  He first came to know Jesus when he was a child at a local church in Orange County.   As a Chican@ Studies major at UCLA he learned about the many injustices experienced by Latin@s in Latin America and the United States over the past 500 years.   He learned about the Spanish Conquest which led to the decimation of 90% of the indigenous population of Central Mexico—more than 20 million people.  He learned that the conquest was justified by many (though there were notable exceptions) in religious terms based upon the belief that God had ordained for the Spanish to slaughter the indigenous people so that they might become converted to Christianity.   Carlos was also taught about the unjust Mexican-American War which led to the violent seizure of half of Mexico and which was justified by Anglo-Americans based upon a belief in “manifest destiny.”  Manifest Destiny was the idea that it was God’s will for Anglo-Saxon Americans to conquer and colonize North America from “sea to shining sea” in order to spread democracy and Protestant Christianity.  Carlos learned that these same settlers created a segregated American society in which those legally defined as “white” received special socio-economic and political privileges, while Latinos, African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans were segregated and treated as second-class citizens.  Carlos also came to learn about the structural inequalities within education, healthcare, politics, and law, which have their roots in this historic discrimination, and which persist to the present-day.   Sadly, Carlos fell away from the faith of his youth because he came to understand that many of the injustices just described were perpetrated by self-professed “Christians.”   As a result, he believed that Christianity was a “colonizer’s religion” and that it was a tool of oppression used by white men to perpetuate social, economic, and political hegemony. 

         Elena, a Chicana single mom, was another student of mine with a similar experience.   As part of a faith-based inner city training which we led for students, she confessed her internal wrestling with God:  “The need to be a part of urban justice is huge to me.  Being a Chicana/o Studies major many injustices have been brought to light for me.  I’ll be honest, I have cried many times in class while watching videos or reading books and I have often asked God why…I would like to understand through His words/teachings.  [I hope to gain][u]nderstanding and hopefully an answer to the many ‘why’s’ I have.  I can cry all I want but my tears won’t bring understanding nor change.  I recently started going back to church so I’d like to be surrounded by others who also have faith in Christ.”

Francisco was a student in a small Christian liberal arts college in the Midwest.   He came from a mixed-race Guatemalan-Middle Eastern background.   Similar to Carlos and Elena, Francisco was passionate about promoting change for the socially marginalized.  Being a natural leader, he made the decision in his junior year to run for student body president of his predominantly white Christian campus.  Tragically, Francisco’s main opponent, a white male, opposed him on racist grounds.  His racially-tinged rallying cry against Francisco was: “don’t vote for Francisco; if you do he will do all these radical things for minorities.”   These scare tactics apparently worked because Francisco lost the race.  As you can imagine, Francisco was also deeply wounded by the hateful rhetoric which was waged against him.    Unfortunately, the hostile racial campus climate did not stop with that election.  To make matters worse, the following year one of his professors devoted an entire chapel session (a weekly church gathering on campus with students, faculty, and staff), to challenging the findings of an outstanding Christian book called, Divided By Faith.  This path-breaking and well-researched book by professors Michael Emerson (Rice University) and Christian Smith (Notre Dame) examines the different perceptions of white and African American Christians with regards to race.  Drawing upon extensive interviews and solid methodology, they found that, although most African American Christians recognize the existence of racism in contemporary U.S. society, most white evangelical Christians do not.       

When I met Francisco at an annual meeting of the Christian Community Development Association (CCDA), he was actually preparing to hold a public debate with his professor!   In a unique act of divine providence, Francisco got a chance to meet with author Michael Emerson at that CCDA conference, and Emerson gave him some coaching to prepare him for the debate!  Despite this encouraging turn of events, Francisco was quite demoralized when I met him and it took great effort on his part to hold on to his faith and remain enrolled at his Christian college in the face of such racial challenges.   

Carlos, Elena, and Francisco have all had their belief in God shaken because of what they’ve learned about history, and because of the present-day misrepresentations of many self-professed followers of Jesus. They’ve learned the hard cold truth that many of the worst acts of oppression against people of color over the past 500 years have been committed by “Christians.”  Sadly, they’ve had this message reinforced through encounters with living and breathing Christians who, intentionally and unintentionally, perpetuate racism through their actions. Tragically, they are not alone.  Thousands of students in the United States and throughout the world have had the same experience and have lost their faith in Jesus. 

I’m sympathetic to this negative perspective of Christianity.  For reasons that will be explained in upcoming blogs, I don’t agree with it, but I do understand it.   In fact, if I had not had my life totally transformed by Jesus 16 years ago, I’d probably feel the same way.  This view of Christianity as a racist, classist, and sexist religion is unfortunately backed up by about 1700 years of historical misrepresentation on the part of many self-proclaimed followers of Jesus.  As a person who supports his family as a historian, and as an avid watcher of cable news, I am all too familiar with these kinds of misrepresentations.   Almost every day I hear about someone somewhere in the U.S. who claims to be a Christian but who says racist things or publically advocates for some sort of social policy which has a discriminatory impact upon people of color and the poor. 

As a historian, however, I know that sincere followers of Jesus have also led some of the most transformative social justice movements of world history.  This inspires me and makes me hopeful.  I’ve also found an encouraging principle at work in global history:  Every time Christianity has been misrepresented to the world as a racist, classist, and sexist religion, sincere followers of Jesus have forcefully challenged the misrepresentation and declared emphatically that God is a God of justice and compassion.  Just as important, they have acted upon these convictions and changed the world.  An important aim of this blog is to highlight some of my Christian heroes who have championed racial, socioeconomic, and gender justice over the past 2,000 years. 

This blog is for Carlos, Elena, Francisco, and the thousands of students and individuals of conscience like them who have never received a proper introduction to Jesus, the Ultimate Revolutionary.  This blog is intended to be a manifesto and concise manual for them and the many others who care passionately about issues of race and justice, but do not know how to reconcile faith with a deep concern for social change.    It is also my bold hope that this blog will launch a global student movement of faith, justice, and racial reconciliation. 

Calling All Revolutionaries!

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I have never felt so impassioned to write.  I have never felt a deeper urgency to write until this moment.  And so this blog is born.

I recently gave a talk to a Christian group about the need for comprehensive immigration reform in the United States.  I shared about the brokenness of our immigration system, the current power struggle between states and the federal government over the issue of undocumented immigration, and about how unauthorized immigrants are caught in the middle of this political firestorm.  Drawing from scripture such as Psalm 146:9, Deuteronomy 24:17, and Exodus 23:9, I argued that it is unjust to scapegoat undocumented immigrants and to discriminate against them.  In particular, I talked about how state legislation such as Arizona SB-1070, Alabama HB-56, and Georgia HB-87 are mean-spirited and unbiblical pieces of legislation which unfairly target undocumented immigrants.

Nothing could prepare me for what happened next. 

Although the overwhelming majority of those in attendance were open-minded and sympathetic to the perspective I shared, I was profoundly disturbed by the presentation of another speaker and by the attitudes which were shared by several people during the group discussion which followed.  People spoke of the criminality and sexual promiscuity of undocumented immigrants and other Latinos, and about the supposed threat which undocumented Latino immigrants pose to national security.  They asserted that all immigrants need to assimilate, shed their God-given cultural identities, and speak English in order to be accepted in this country.  I even heard a romantic and historically false claim that America, in its wonderful beneficence, has always accepted the “huddled immigrant masses.”

In response, I brought up painful counter-examples which have affected my own Chinese and Mexican communities, as well as other communities of color.  I mentioned the genocide of millions of Native Americans, Manifest Destiny, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the massive deportations of hundreds of thousands of Mexican Americans as part of historical campaigns like Operation Wetback.  I was told that it wasn’t good to keep bringing up past examples of historical racism.  Even worse, I heard some downplay some of the most horrible racist actions perpetrated against people of color in our nation’s history.  One person tried to minimize the genocide of millions of Native Americans by saying that most of their deaths were caused by diseases like small pox (and therefore unintentional).  The claim was also made that “there weren’t many people here” when the Europeans arrived.  Disgustingly, someone even minimized the rape of Native American women as part of European conquest by saying that “rape happens all over the world.”    

When I tried to make the argument that history matters and that present racial inequalities in the U.S. are the direct result of historical injustices, I was told “well neither I nor my father were a part of those wrongs, so I can’t be blamed.”  Someone also remarked that minorities were to blame for the poverty and socio-economic degradation of their own communities because of things like promiscuity and the breakdown of the family. 

We also had an interesting conversation about the appropriateness of the term “illegal alien.”  The question was first posed by a sincere individual who did not understand why the term is offensive.  I and others explained that we found the term offensive because it dehumanizes immigrants and essentializes them to a legal status, thereby stripping them of their humanity.  Someone in the other camp insisted upon the continued usage of the term “illegal alien,” arguing that it was an accurate way of describing the political relationship of some immigrants to the state.  When I shared that I and millions of other Latinos were incensed by Mitt Romney’s repeated use of the term “illegal alien” as a cuss word intended to elicit the support and strong emotional reactions of voters on the far right, I was told, “How do you know that he meant it that way?”  After clarifying again that I was not alone in my sentiment and that millions of other Latinos interpreted Mitt Romney’s comments in a similar fashion, this individual continued to insist so vociferously upon his position that the moderator had to walk over to him in order to intervene.   

As you can imagine, on many levels I AM DEEPLY DISTURBED BY WHAT I EXPERIENCED. On a personal level, I am deeply wounded and will need much grace from God to forgive.  With God’s help, I will.

 MOSTLY, HOWEVER, MY HEART BREAKS BECAUSE I KNOW THAT THIS TYPE OF FOX NEWS CHRISTIANITY HINDERS MILLIONS OF STUDENTS IN THE UNITED STATES FROM COMING TO EXPLORE A PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP WITH JESUS CHRIST.  These individuals from the conference were unable to get past their own cultural assumptions, and, as a consequence they were incapable of giving a fair hearing of a perspective other than their own.  As a consequence, to myself, and the other Latinas and Latinos in the room, they came across as being deeply closed-minded at best, and racist at worst. 

If these misguided perspectives are all that students of color and consciousness hear from the church in America, they will be led to believe that Christianity is a racist, classist, and sexist religion.  I wouldn’t blame them.  Tragically, if this is the only viewpoint they are exposed to, it is unlikely that they will ever come to know the real Jesus who is the author of justice and compassion, and who loves them more than they could ever hope for or imagine.  When I think about this my soul weeps.  Then my blood boils.  Then my soul weeps again. 

MY SOUL WEEPS BECAUSE I KNOW THAT THESE CLOSED-MINDED PERSPECTIVES MISREPRESENT THE TRUE JESUS OF HISTORICAL AND BIBLICAL CHRISTIANITY.  JESUS IS THE AUTHOR OF JUSTICE, ADVOCACY, AND COMPASSION.  He cares more about immigrants, the dispossessed, and the poor than we can ever even begin to imagine or comprehend.  He’s been given a bad rep. 

As a follower of Jesus, and as a member of the church in America, I realize that I have to take ownership of these terrible misrepresentations of Christianity, too.   I know that I am culpable as well.  I apologize to the millions of students of color and socially-conscious individuals who have already been hurt and wounded by such racist and insensitive statements. I apologize for those who call themselves Christian but who misrepresent the name of Jesus in such profound ways when it comes to issues of race, gender, and social justice.  I apologize for the ways in which they, and I, and the church in America have hurt you.  Please forgive us.

I believe now, more than ever, that something has to be done to change this situation.  Thankfully, there are many socially conscious Christians who agree with me (even many who were in that room with me last weekend), but a new space has to be created in our colleges and universities where issues of race, social justice, and faith can be freely explored and examined without the baggage of institutional Christianity.  No more Christianity wrapped up in the American flag (or any flag for that matter).

I hope that this blog can be one small, but meaningful step in this direction.  Will you join me?

Join me on a journey of learning together about Jesus and His heart for justice, racial reconciliation, and the poor.  Let’s create a space where we can talk.  Where we can share.  Where we can form community.  Let’s START A REVOLUTION.  Together. 

CALLING ALL REVOLUTIONARIES!

Robert Chao Romero

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