(RNS) — Not every proclamation is true. Some we must struggle and keep the faith to make true.
On June 19, 1865, U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and issued General Order No. 3, announcing that “all slaves are free.” He was conveying news of the Emancipation Proclamation, which President Abraham Lincoln had issued two years earlier on Jan. 1, 1863.
Granger’s declaration of freedom was aspirational. While the enslaved were legally emancipated, they remained bound by entrenched systems of white supremacy and enduring prejudices that denied their humanity and reduced them to property. In the years that followed, African Americans continued to live in the “afterlife” of slavery, as new and more insidious shackles emerged.
Vagrancy laws, convict-leasing schemes, debt bondage and the expanding architecture of Jim Crow segregation all served to reproduce many of the conditions of the old slave order under new legal and social guises.
Neither the Emancipation Proclamation nor General Order No. 3 was yet true. Both ushered in a new reality of “unfreedom.” Both expressed the enduring tension within the American freedom experiment itself: the gap between our proclaimed ideals and our lived realities.
This paradox lies at the heart of the American story. It is the story of a nation whose Declaration of Independence announced that “all men are created equal,” even as it restricted the promise of freedom to propertied white men, enslaved more than a fifth of its population, and pursued the genocide of Native peoples.
The story of freedom is unfinished in a nation that pledges “liberty and justice for all,” while it systematically advances policies, practices and ideologies that diminish human dignity.
We know these gaps and indignities too well, as women of color in this nation, and especially as ordained women of color in the Episcopal Church. Our tradition has often mirrored and blessed American systems of white supremacy, elitism and patriarchy. But our tradition also proclaims a commitment to Jesus and to God’s beloved community, where all human beings are sacred.
We are compelled by this faith to name the gap between what our nation promises and what our nation does, to recognize the same gaps and untruths in our own churches and to join in shared struggle to make freedom real.
Here is what we know: Freedom is not an achievement to be declared and celebrated once and for all. The work of freedom is perpetually unfinished because the forces that threaten it continually take new forms, as we see today in restrictions on voting rights, challenges to citizenship and the denial of due process to immigrants.
We know the work of freedom dies when we believe that we are powerless, that we are alone, that certain lives matter less than others, that my gain is your loss, that despair and defeat are inevitable, that not everyone deserves to be free.
But we also know this: No matter what political, social or even religious institutions may proclaim, we are all human beings created in the image of a God who is free. True freedom — God-given freedom — liberates us from illusions of superiority and entitlements of privilege. It calls us beyond the domination and exclusion of any people. Our freedoms are bound up in one another.
Faith does not permit us to be passive observers of history, remaining silent and on the sidelines while others proclaim and enact untruths in the name of God. Indeed, faith compels us to participate in God’s liberating work in the world. Faith calls us to lead the struggle for freedom. Faith propels us to refuse to be divided against one another.
Faith urges us to attend to our well-being, to nourish our capacity to risk together, and to shield our joy so we can stay in the struggle. Faith demands that we proclaim freedom in word and in deed.
As our nation marks 161 years since the proclamation of emancipation to enslaved peoples — and as the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approaches — we can never forget that freedom remains unfinished business. We have soul work to do and truths to proclaim and make real.
The truth is, we must be honest about our history as a nation and church — we cannot heal what we have not named.
The truth is, all institutions — political, social and religious — must work for the freedom of all people.
The truth is, every form of oppression is a desecration of the image of God.
The truth is, we are endowed by our Creator with freedom, love and power that the world cannot take away.
The truth is, until all God’s children can live with dignity, justice and genuine freedom, the 1865 Juneteenth proclamation is not yet true.
This Juneteenth, we recommit with you to the work of making it true.
(The Rev. Kelly Brown-Douglas, the former dean and interim president of the Episcopal Divinity School, is a visiting professor of theology at Harvard Divinity School. The Rev. Canon Stephanie Spellers is an author and Episcopal priest. She was canon to former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry and will become priest-in-charge of St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco this summer. The Very Rev. Winnie Varghese is dean of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. The opinions expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
