America Is Due for a Deep Clean

This country cannot deliver on its promises until we collectively act to to ensure equal protection for all.

The Social Gospel: The minister and reformer Graham Taylor, shown here addressing a crowd in Chicago in 1924, was one of the many activists who have sought to push this nation toward greater justice. (Chicago Historical Society, ICHi-018401)

I love America—the place where I was born, the people who have loved me, the songs that have shaped my soundscape, and the story in which I’ve had to negotiate my own existence. I also know America well enough to know her deepest flaws, and I know she will never be all that she aspires to be until she repents of the marginalization of some people from her beginning.

Langston Hughes wrote, “America never was America to me, / And yet I swear this oath— / America will be!” At this 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we have a nation we love, founded on a great dream and the words of men who, even when they signed their names, knew that they were empty phrases for poor men, women, Indigenous people, and Black people.

It is as though our great Declaration and Constitution represent a great political house with empty rooms. There have been empty promises and empty dreams for so many. The quill wrote “freedom” and “justice,” but the same quill enshrined counting an enslaved human as three-fifths of a person; it also lessened women and never ensured that the right to vote and the right to public education were guaranteed by the Constitution. Still, some people have always kept believing they could fill the house according to the instructions of the grand design.

For 250 years, every moral movement that has pushed this nation toward greater justice has tried to fill the house according to the promise on its deed. This was supposed to be a turnkey job, but so much was left undone and unfulfilled. So the abolitionists tried to fill the house with the justice and freedom promised to enslaved people through the Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, and the work of the Reconstruction. The Social Gospel and labor movements tried to fill the house with equity for poor people, and the suffrage movement tried to fill the house for women. The civil-rights, women’s-rights, immigrants’-rights, and LGBTQ-rights movements all tried to fill the rooms of the house that remained empty for so many people. Today, movements for a living wage and healthcare and action to address the climate crisis are still pushing to fill the empty rooms.

All of these movements have been trying to fill the house with what was promised would define the house from the beginning—the rights that the founders said were endowed by God and thus inalienable. At times over these 250 years, we have been successful in partially filling this house, but we have also seen effort after effort to remove any progress and to reject what we thought was finally, permanently in this house called America.

As a theologian and student of Scripture, I want America to hear a message from Jesus right now. In the New Testament, Luke records that Jesus said:

When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, “I will return to the house I left.” When it arrives, it finds the house swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first.

Current Issue

Our Constitution and founding documents and creeds are clean and in order. They promise so much of what we all know to be right and good. This is why Dr. King was able to say he believed in a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. But unrealized and spoiled, this dream leaves some rooms of our body politic vacant and subject to other spirits that are wrong, unjust, mean, deceitful, fascist, authoritarian, and immoral. These spirits come in and take over the house with even greater malice than some of the former occupants.

Could this be the root of our crisis today? Because we didn’t fill the American house with fully secured voting rights and equal protection for all, immoral and mean spirits have swept in to reverse fundamental voting rights , birthright citizenship , and the basic civil rights of people on the streets, who are now subject to search and seizure by masked men . Because we didn’t fill the house with healthcare as a human right, now we have forces that want to take away Medicaid and SNAP and other basic protections that we thought were secured. Because we didn’t fill the house with living wages, a new political majority brought forces who give the greedy more tax cuts , who are overturning labor rights and have granted corporations the status of people, and who allow those corporations to pay unchecked amounts of money into our political system, treating people like things and corporations like people.

Could this be…