Coming up Sunday is the seventh and final session in the current series of the online adult faith formation group Debi and I co-facilitate for our parish church. It wraps up our discussion of a book on healing the divisions caused by political discord, and it couldn’t come at a better time as the dust settles after a particularly polarizing, disturbing election.
Basically I’m hurt, angry, depressed, exhausted — hitting all of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ Five Stages of Grief, and then some. I had hoped for so much better an outcome. I thought, and still think — hope might be a better word — we are so much better.
The book, The After Party: Toward Better Christian Politics by Gordon Chang and Nancy French (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2024), offers guidance for evangelical congregations that have been wounded by today’s politicization — and polarization — of religion. I think the dynamics are a little different in our mainline Lutheran parish, but Chang and French have some good advice for everybody. Not all of us are evangelicals, and not all divisions are political.
The title is a play on words — the “After Party,” as I understand it, is the kind of community people can have when they put political ideologies aside. In other words (Chang’s and French’s), when they turn from the “what” of politics — platforms and issues — to the “how.”
Sounds hokey? Remember it was written for small group discussions, and a little hokum isn’t always a bad thing. (I probably shouldn’t admit this, since I co-facilitate a small group discussion! But I digress.) “The how of politics begins with the spiritual values that Jesus taught,” say Chang and French, “including love, forgiveness, mercy, justice, truth, and two more values The After Party will especially focus on: hope and humility” (44). I might edit that a little — instead of the how of politics, I’d talk about the how of human relationships.
From the git-go, The After Party didn’t really speak my language. It’s written by evangelical Protestants for other evangelical Protestants, and I grew up in an Anglo-Catholic faith tradition. (I’d better explain that — my home parish was decidedly low-church but I noticed the cool kids from Nashville and Memphis bowed and genuflected at our diocese’s church camp. So I was drawn to the high-church “smells and bells” of the Anglican tradition, and, later, to Anglican writers like CS Lewis.) It’s no accident I wound up, still later, in another liturgical mainline Protestant church.
Nor was I particularly inspired by many years of reading about the self-proclaimed “Religious Right,” by jakeleg TV evangelists like Jerry Falwell and what seemed to me a steady drumbeat of homophobia and transparently partisan Republican talking points. In fact, one of my learning objectives as we tackled After Party was to get a better attitude about evangelical Protestants. In that, I’m happy to report, I was largely successful.
Several principals in the After Party project, in fact, suffered for taking a stance against President-elect Trump and the kind of racism and misogyny he encourages. Nancy and David French, her husband and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times, were drummed out of their church near Nashville after they adopted a Black girl from Ethiopia. (David also said things about Trump that weren’t taken kindly.) Russell Moore, a key backer, was forced to resign his post as public affairs director of the Southern Baptist Convention after he criticized Trump, and probably more importantly, openly criticized racial and sexual abuse issues in a way other SBC leaders found uncomfortable. And Curtis Chang had his own run-ins with anti-vaxxers during the pandemic.
Anyway, even though I found the After Party folks’ style of writing to be annoying at times, I wanted to give them a chance. (Besides, if you’re facilitating a book study, it helps to read the book.) In the last chapter, which I read after Tuesday’s debacle of an election, Chang utterly redeemed himself in my eyes.
Sunday’s reading of The After Party is the last chapter, titled appropriately enough, “The After Party.” No, that’s not a party for invited guests that follows a main party or event, as Merriam-Webster defines it; nor is it a hokey TV whodunnit that folded after two seasons.
Chang’s and Nancy French’s conception of an “after party” is patterned after the prophecies of a time of peace and harmony after the wars in the book of Revelation, as well as the prophet Isaiah’s vision of a feast at which the people of Israel and the neighboring kingdom of Moab, among other gentile nations, would gather:
On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine,
of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. (Isaiah 25:6 ESV)
But as much as I admire the poetry in Isaiah and Revelation, the party that speaks loudest to me is Chang’s description of a gathering he attended in South Africa soon after the Boipatong massacre in 1992. It was a fraught time, when Nelson Mandela’s party, the African National Congress, was negotiating an end to apartheid with the white Afrikaner government.
The negotiations reached a crisis point June 17, when 45 ANC members in the Black township of Boipatong were murdered by members of a rival Black nationalist group. It was widely suspected (and later at least partially confirmed) they were assisted by Afrikaner police, and the ANC pulled out of the negotiations. An American citizen of Chinese heritage who was doing mission work in Soweto, a Black township near Johannesburg, Chang would later recall the rising tension and all the government armored vehicles ringing Soweto.
But he also recalled a party at Johweto, an interracial church he belonged to. (The name is a mashup of Johannesburg, where its white members lived, and the Black township of Soweto whetre the church was located. Residential segregation was strictly enforced.) As he tells the story in The After Party:
A handful of brave White members from Johannesburg drove to our house [in Soweto] to join about a dozen equally brave Black members from Soweto. We were crowded in our living room, shoulder to shoulder. We then proceeded to do what Johweto terms “bleed over each other.” Blacks gave expression to their rage and despair. Whites voiced their guilt and fear. We laid hands on each other in prayer; we sang worship songs that came to mind. We cried and moaned. We digested each other’s pain.
Then something happened that seemed miraculous:
As we bled over each other in this fashion, we felt a presence lifting us. The sensation ws practically physical in nature, as we spontaneously got to our feet and started to dance in the township style of rhythmic clapping, where everyone circles up and locks arms, kicks and sways, hops and hangs on to each for the dear life. Someone started to laugh, and that laugh spead around the circle. It was nonsensical — this party breaking out amid the darkest of political crises — and yet it somehow made perfect sense.
I stood back for a moment to take in the scene. And inside me, I heard a voice say, This is my body. (185-86)
Now that’s the kind of party I can get into! Especially as I work through my anger and grief in the aftermath of Tuesday’s election. I think it also helps to remember in America we have been spared — so far — the kind of violence that accompanied the dying days of apartheid in South Africa. Chang doesn’t tell the rest of the story. After all he’s writing about a 21st-century political crisis in America, not a history of South Africa. But I think — I hope — that history might have a bearing on the current debacle.
Within three months of the Boipatong massacre, negotiations resumed Sept. 3, 1992. The talks, primarily between Mandela’s ANC and the white Afrikaner government led by F. W. de Klerk, had begun with Mandela’s release from prison in 1990. They would last until November 1993, when an interim constitution was approved. On April 27, 1994, Mandela was elected South Africa’s first Black president. The lesson? The worst of times don’t last, and sometimes it takes time — lots of time — to get past them. There was a saying around the Statehouse when I was a reporter there: “If you want to have eternal life, come back as a bill in the Illinois General Assembly. You’ll never die.” Sessions come and go, and the important bills will be re-introduced session after session. It’s the same with city councils and county boards.
In an unexpectedly graceful and moving concession speech Wednesday, Kamala Harris sounded a similar note. She was speaking to supporters at Howard University, a leading HBCU and her alma mater, but she spoke to me as well:
To the young people who are watching, it is OK to feel sad and disappointed, but please know it’s going to be OK. On the campaign, I would often say, when we fight, we win.
But here’s the thing – sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn’t mean we won’t win, that doesn’t mean we won’t win. The important thing is, don’t ever give up. Don’t ever give up. Don’t ever stop trying to make the world a better place. You have power. You have power. And don’t you ever listen when anyone tells you something is impossible because it has never been done before.
You have the capacity to do extraordinary good in the world.
In the meantime, even in the darkest of times, we may as well have a party. I don’t think that’s exactly the message Chang and French were trying to get across, but it works for me.
Links and Citations
Curtis Chang, several items in the directoy at Christians and the Vaccine https://www.christiansandthevaccine.org/.
Curtis Chang and Nancy French, The After Party: Toward Better Christian Politics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2024). See website at https://redeemingbabel.org/the-after-party/.
David French, “The day my old church canceled me was a very sad day,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, June 12, 2024 https://www.twincities.com/2024/06/11/david-french-the-day-my-old-church-canceled-me-was-a-very-sad-day/.
Isaiah 25, English Standard Version, Bible Gateway.
Paul O’Donnell and Bob Smietana, “Leaked Russell Moore letter blasts SBC conservatives, sheds light on his resignation,” Religion News Service, June 2, 2021 https://religionnews.com/2021/06/02/leaked-russell-moore-letter-blasts-sbc-conservatives-sheds-light-on-his-resignation/.
‘Sometimes the fight takes a while’: Kamala Harris concession speech – in full,” The Guardian, Nov. 6, 2024 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/06/harris-concession-speech-transcript.
[Uploaded Nov. 7, 2024]
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