“We need more Howard Thurman in our politics: The theologian and often-overlooked civil rights hero would have warned us against politics as a zero-sum game.”

 

Howard Thurman: Theologian, Mystic, and Overlooked Civil Rights Hero

A version of the following essay was published in Religion News Service on February 7, 2024. The following is the essay before it was edited for publiscation.

Our System needs to be Healed 

“Our system needs to be broken,” says Ted Johnson, profiled in a recent Politico Magazine article. Although I don’t recall ever meeting Mr. Johnson, we grew up just a few years apart in the same hometown, Centralia, Illinois. 

Centralia, named for the Illinois Central Railroad which formed the town in 1853, is in south central Illinois and surrounded by rich farmland. Centralia was also formerly known for its oil fields and coal mines; one of the latter, Centralia number 5 coal mine, exploded in 1947, killing 111 miners and is memorialized in the Woody Guthrie song, “The Dying Miner.” 

When Mr. Johnson and I grew up, Centralia’s population was almost 16,000, but by 2020, had fallen to about 12,000, symbolic of its decline. One of many examples of Centralia’s economic ill-fortune is that the Hollywood Candy Company, maker of the Payday candy bar (now made by Hershey), closed a few years ago—one of my summer jobs during college was at the Hollywood factory, unloading railroad cars by hand, making caramel, and roasting peanuts. 

I left Centralia to attend the University of Illinois and now live in Atlanta. Mr. Johnson, after 22 years of military service, retired at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and now is in New Hampshire, working as a senior project manager for an IT security company. He knows the pain of Centralia’s decline—his father died because he couldn’t (because of a snowstorm) be airlifted to a hospital in St. Louis (about 60 miles away) in time to save his life. 

Mr. Johnson voted for Barack Obama twice but now wants the system to be broken by Donald Trump. When asked the reason, he answered, “I got pissed.” 

The article notes that Mr. Johnson and other Trump supporters seem to be driven by “an explicit sense of vengeance.” Mr. Johnson, for example, feels that people—apparently “other” people since Mr. Trump is not included—should be held “accountable" for breaking the law. 

Mr. Johnson concludes that “it’s a zero-sum game,” and he wants “somebody that’s going to take care of the average guy.” 

One photo in the article caught my eye; it shows a cross prominently displayed in Mr. Johnson’s home. That image led me to reflect again on how the teachings of Jesus are the opposite of a zero-sum game and, colloquially put, should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. 

As Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited demonstrated, Jesus of Nazareth was an impoverished, first-century Jew who was a member of a politically, militarily, and economically oppressed minority. That book captured the essence of who Jesus was and what Jesus meant for those disinherited, like him, with their “backs against the wall,” including the ethical imperatives for those whose backs—like Mr. Johnson, apparently, and me—are not against the wall. 

In Jesus’s parable of the sheep and goats, for instance, human beings are judged based on how they treat the “least of these”—the hungry, thirsty, stranger, immigrant, ill-clothed, and imprisoned. Jesus offers one way for the “comfortable” to avoid this judgment: He told people not to invite their friends or neighbors to dinner, but instead to “invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.” If they would help the disinherited without expecting anything in return, God would reward them “at the resurrection of the righteous.” 

A “zero-sum” mentality, in contrast, has negative effects on society, and anger and desire for vengeance have inherent costs, not just on society in general, but for those consumed by anger and vengeance—which sometimes corresponds with ill-will toward or even hatred of the “other.” 

As Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited argues, the “hounds of hell”—fear, deception, and hate—often triumph over Jesus’s message of love—his teachings about justice, reconciliation, restoration of community, and the resulting humanitarian actions toward all people. 

Thurman often spoke of how such ill will and hatred could become a foundation on which people attempt “to establish a dreadful emotional security”—giving energy and strength like a form of neurosis—which supports and helps one implement a “position” from which to attack perceived enemies and which even wills their “nonexistence” as human beings (cf. Adam Serwer’s “The Cruelty Is the Point”: such cruelty helps bind the “in-group” into a “community” that celebrates punitive actions against marginalized people who, in their eyes, “deserve it”). 

Ultimately, however, Thurman argues that hatred 

destroys finally the core of the life of the hater. While it lasts, burning in white heat, its effect seems positive and dynamic. But at last it turns to ash, for it guarantees a final isolation from one’s fellows…. Hatred bears deadly and bitter fruit. 

I recognize how fortunate I am, and I cannot accept that we are doomed to live in a “zero-sum game.” I believe, as Paul Wellstone said, that “We all do better when we all do better.” 

Thurman often made a similar point. He stressed the connectedness of humanity and argued that “I cannot be satisfied in Heaven if my brother is in Hell.…I cannot be at peace in my wholeness, if you are in part; I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.” Members of the human community, all of whom are of infinite worth as children of God, participate in a collective destiny. 

Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us shows how a zero-sum game perspective usually benefits a small group of wealthy individuals, because the oppression of the “other” usually is a “canary in a coal mine,” where systems exploiting the disinherited usually expand to exploit other groups. Therefore, people who support oppression because it hurts the “other”—and falsely believe it helps them—ultimately find themselves similarly oppressed by the powerful. 

For me and, I hope, Mr. Johnson, the “canary in a coal mine” metaphor is particularly poignant; the Centralia number 5 coal mine disaster happened because the wealthy and powerful people owning and overseeing the mine refused to respond to safety warnings, and 111 innocent people died. 

McGhee observes, like Thurman, that exploitative practices against other human beings are made possible by an “in-group” severing human ties between them and other human beings, an exploitation rationalized by the social distance that results from the “in-group” being unable or unwilling to empathize with the group they are exploiting. 

Instead, McGhee argues, a healthy, functioning society rests on the foundation of a “web of mutuality,” a sense of social solidarity, “a willingness among all involved to share enough with one another to accomplish what no one person can do alone.” The result is a “solidarity dividend” of benefits for all in society when people unify and work together for their common good. 

Similar to how Thurman argued that Jesus’s Jewish love-ethic—loving God and loving one’s neighbor as yourself—is the needed corrective to hatred and that it can benefit all of us in the human community, McGhee’s convincingly argues that altruistic Good Samaritan behavior can create a web of mutuality and a solidarity dividend that benefits all of society (cf. the conclusions of the “World Happiness Report”: when people’s well-being rises through experiencing altruistic help, they become more likely to help others, creating a “virtuous spiral.”). 

The teachings of Jesus challenge us to envision new possibilities in our relationships with others. Perhaps they can even persuade us to work toward bending the arc of history toward justice, acting in ways that help create a web of mutuality, and participating in an ever-expanding virtuous spiral of altruism. 

In other words, loving our neighbors as ourselves. 

As Thurman urges us in quite a few of his sermons, “Let’s try it and see.” 

For more, see the forthcoming book: David B. Gowler, Howard Thurman and the Quest for Community: From Prodigals to Compassionate Samaritans (Paulist Press; Nov 2024).