Dear Editor,
I completely agree with the sentiments of Eric Phillips expressed in his letter, “The Church needs to regain it’s moral compass” (08.01.23). As someone brought up in the folds of Christianity, it is sad to witness the moral chasm between the message of Christ as expressed in the biblical chronicles of his life, and the utterances, attitudes, and conduct of many who profess to be Christians or Leaders of Christians. Taking cognizance of what is being accepted nationally and internationally as manifestations of Christian conduct today, one can understand the caution issued in Matthew 6:5, to wit, “And when thou prayest, thou shall not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the street corners, that they may be seen of men……….”.
There is today a lot of chest beating and loud proselytizing, but very few attempts to walk a mile in the moccasins of Jesus Christ, so to speak. The moral courage that allowed Martin Luther King to stand up to the powers of the mightiest nation in the world at that time, and demand payment on a promissory note of inclusion, is sadly lacking in many of his counterparts in Guyana today.
Yes indeed Eric, the Christian Church worked out its penance for its affinity with slavery by creating avenues of education, not only for the descendants of the previously enslaved, but also for the descendants of the indentured and others, regardless of their spiritual belief system. The free inculcation of Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic was a responsibility willingly shouldered by the Christian Churches in Guyana, becoming the foundation for an educational system that was once parallel with the best in the world. What exists today is a mere shadow of the institution that was. The politics of power and meanness, as exemplified in the withholding of the Critchlow Labor College subvention, poignantly illustrates the changes in mentality as it relates to education of the poor and powerless between then and now.
The Christian Church was never without its faults as it relates to its history in Guyana. We can come up with a litany of things to critique, ranging from its tardiness in recognizing the existence and importance of other cultural religious belief systems, to its never issuing a joint apology for its role in the enslavement of African and Indigenous Guyanese. But which other cultural or other institution in Guyana is without sin in the context of prejudice, racism, and oppression. The Christian Church for all of its faults exercises a greater level of self policing than most other institutions in the world. Of course that might be considered a subjective opinion based on my association with this particular religious belief system. Still, there is no other religious institution in Guyana, in my view, that has undertaken a task like freely educating a population without serious consideration of whether they are members or not.
Those who profess to be the inheritors of the responsibility to do the work of Jesus Christ in Guyana need to get up and walk that distance in his footsteps. They need to take their Christian expressions beyond the symbolic routine of “talking the talk”, and begin to “walk the walk”. In his letter from a Birmingham Alabama jail, Martin Luther King advised his fellow clergymen who had excoriated him over his civil rights activities that ” I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid”. Our Christian leaders need to understand that, to paraphrase the late Reverend King, “Change will not roll in to Guyana on the wheels of inevitability. It will come through continuous struggle to straighten the continuum of inbalance and unfairness until the rights of all of Guyana’s Children can be measured by a 180 degree angle of equality. Christian leaders need to straighten their backs and work for the freedom of all of Guyana’s Children. A man cannot ride you unless your back is bent”.
Yours faithfully,
Robin Williams