Audacious Faith: A Moral Call-to-Action – Angela Sims

Poverty is, as King so aptly articulated in his Nobel Lecture, “one of the most urgent items on the agenda of modern life.”[i]  Yet if, as King insisted, “oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever”,[ii] we cannot ignore that in the last quarter of 2013 and the first quarter of this year “the demand for dignity, equality, jobs, and citizenship will not be abandoned or diluted or postponed.”[iii]

King issued a moral call-to-action that requires us to consider how we appropriate varied points of privilege to confront systemic sins couched in xenophobic rhetoric. Will we, as King so boldly proclaimed in 1964, “not flinch . . . not be cowed . . . not be afraid”[iv] to stand on the side of justice? Renewed calls to understand and apply constitutional rights compel us to consider how the plight of persons ensnared, for example, in global human trafficking networks influence our ability to grasp these and other documented truths. Our responses to these truths that are sustained by capitalistic enterprise are indicators of our moral compass.

King was resolute in his commitment to confront evil with a theologically informed human rights agenda. Although his approach was flawed by patriarchy and its associated societal ills, King was adamant that “there is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.”[v] What he proposed was not a war on poverty but “an all-out war against poverty.”[vi] In other words, nothing short of a dismantling of systems predicated on an economics of poverty would suffice to dispel myths that each United States citizen is granted an equal opportunity to adequate housing, quality education and health care.

As King explained, audacious faith refuses to accept “despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history.”[vii] Instead, audacious faith requires a type of sight that can imagine things as they should be and not as they are so that women, for instance, will not be subjected to draconian attempts to subvert reproductive rights. As King made clear, audacious faith rejects the idea that “the view that mankind [sic] is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood [sic] can never become a reality.”[viii] Instead, with unrestrained imagination, audacious faith beckons us to name unambiguously evil cloaked in politically acceptable rhetoric. Audacious faith demands an accurate interpretation of calls to take back our country so that we do not unconsciously succumb to dehumanizing practices. Audacious faith reminds us that a call to remember is a theological ethical mandate that enable us to move forward as we purpose to value all of God’s children.

When we reflect on an emerging anti-intellectual sentiment that can be traced, in part, publicly to the 2008 Republican Vice Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, audacious faith in the twenty-first century demands that we remember that less than 150 years ago it was illegal for persons of African descent to read and write in the United States. By contrast, King had “the audacity to believe peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.”[ix] Audacious faith in contemporary times must draw attention to de facto segregation that results in educational disparity which leaves more than one child too many ill prepared to engage in public life or contribute to the common good. As grants continue to decrease almost proportionately in relation to increases in tuition, audacious faith demands that we not envision higher education as an elite privilege but rather as an avenue by which many are granted access to dream a world where their ideas are essential to influencing decisions that affect the well-being of the world’s population.

By thinking expansively, audacious faith reminds us, as King remarked, “that in the final analysis, the rich must not ignore the poor because both rich and poor are tied in a single garment of destiny.”[x] This suggests that careful attention must be given to the manner in which moral issues are depicted in the media. With audacious faith, we hone our ability to discern undisclosed motives and in so doing identify strategies which lend themselves to fostering spaces where the superrich might indeed be able to acknowledge the full humanity of impoverished persons. At the same time, instead of an informed naïveté, this commitment to justice is couched in a form of realistic pragmatism that demands an ongoing assessment of human relations. In other words, audacious faith takes seriously a mandate to treat others in a manner that reflects our relation with the divine. Persons with audacious faith, believe as King did, that doers of justice

• Take direct action against injustice despite the failure of governmental and other official agencies to act first
• Do not obey unjust laws or submit to unjust practices
• Persuade without resorting to violence
• Seek as an ultimate goal a community at peace with itself
• Will always be willing to talk and seek fair compromise
• Will suffer when necessary and even risk their lives to become witnesses to truth as we see it  (King, “The Quest for Peace and Justice”)

Informed by the lived reality of persons whose humanity is subjected to gross disregard, often based on factors outside their control, audacious faith suggests that we must cultivate a hope that even if God does not respond as we desire that we will continue to persist in our efforts ever mindful that God is yet with us.

Dr. Angela D. Sims is Assistant Professor of Ethics and Black Church Studies at Saint Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Missouri. She holds a doctorate in Christian Social Ethics from Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. Principal investigator for an oral history project, “Remembering Lynching: Strategies of Resistance and Visions of Justice,” her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Womanist Scholars Program at the Interdenominational Theological Center, the Louisville Institute, the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, and the Institute for Oral History at Baylor University. Dr. Sims is the author of Ethical Complications of Lynching: Ida B. Wells’s Interrogation of American Terror and co-editor with Katie Geneva Cannon and Emilie M. Townes of Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader. A native of Louisiana, Dr. Sims is an ordained National Baptist clergywoman.