Want an example? Here’s an example. A few years ago - let’s say 2014 or ’15, because I know it was on my mind during General Convention in ’15 - I read Prayer #18 as part of our Sunday morning worship, probably as an extra collect at the end of the Prayers of the People, ...
.... probably on the weekend closest to the 4th of July. Like you do.
Prayer #18 is “For Our Country.” It’s the one that begins, “Almighty God, who hast given us this good land for our heritage: We humbly beseech thee….” And so on.
Prayer #18 is “For Our Country.” It’s the one that begins, “Almighty God, who hast given us this good land for our heritage: We humbly beseech thee….” And so on.
As I finished the prayer, one of my members called out from the back of the church, “And we are standing on Hochunk ground!”
I was startled (people don’t normally call out additions to the collects in worship) but only for a split second. I got it. And then I was mortified that I hadn’t gotten it sooner.
(Side note: I SHOULD HAVE GOTTEN IT SOONER. I have a fecking Ph.D. in cultural anthropology. I can’t believe I ever read that prayer aloud in liturgy without pause or emendation. They should come take away my degree.)
I like a lot of what Prayer #18 says after that first phrase. But that first phrase is a lie, and not an innocent lie.
I am agnostic regarding whether or not the land that became the territory of the United States was given to European settlers by God, but it was most certainly taken by European settlers from Native people.
The “us” in that prayer is a white settler “us,” and that text is pure manifest destiny. To keep this language in the prayer book of a church that renounces the Doctrine of Discovery, a church that at least *tries* to acknowledge and celebrate its Native members, is nonsensical.
(Second side note: This is not NEWS. I learned later that the honorable Byron Rushing has been talking about the racist & imperialist language in the BCP for *decades*. But it doesn’t seem to have made much of an impact.)
My understanding is that “memorializing” the 1979 Book of Common Prayer means everybody will always have the option to use texts from that book. There will never be a BCP that fixes the flaws and errors of the ’79 book.
Using prayers that aren’t implicitly genocidal will always be a matter of clergy choice, in the Episcopal Church.
And that’s why I feel some urgency around my clergy colleagues’ capacity to listen to those of us calling for revision - and to those who are just making the changes that their consciences tell them they need to make.
What if those who feel fearful or defensive or just kind of bored by the idea of revising our liturgies, stopped policing and censuring, and started wondering?
(Ugh I'm having second thoughts about this tweet in the thread. Agnostic is the wrong word here. What I'm trying, badly, to say, is that I kinda believe that God wanted there to be something like the United States, a nation based on the best of our principals and ideals -
- BUT God as I understand God would absolutely not have wanted the founding of this nation to be so tied up with dispossession, murder, and bad faith towards its native peoples. Nor with the enslavement of African peoples.)
