A friend, Episcopal priest, seminary professor and writer, The Rev. Thomas Ferguson, has a searing essay posted about the historical denial of our denomination’s participation in the evil of White Supremacy:

Crusty Old Dean: The Episcopal Church’s Lost Causism:

Thankfully, there have been a number of really great histories written in the past 25 years, efforts to correct the systemic racism in how we have told our history:  Prichard’s “History of the Episcopal Church,” Hein & Shattuck’s “The Episcopalians” among them.  There has been a number of works specifically on the history of race and racism in the Episcopal Church.  Harold Lewis literally wrote the book on this subject in “Yet With a Steady Beat.”  Gardiner Shattuck’s “Episcopalians and Race: Civil War to Civil Rights” is a conscious effort to right some of the historiographic wrongs I note in this post.

But it’s also clear that we have not done enough.  The sheer number of people who say “The Episcopal Church didn’t split over slavery” and sheer number of people who do not know the Church’s complicity with racism, slavery, and white supremacy are evidence of that.

We must name these aspects of telling our history that fail to challenge or acknowledge our systemic racism.  We have to stop teaching people in confirmation classes “The Episcopal Church never split over slavery.”  One of the reasons statements like these persist, despite the fact that most Episcopal Church historical scholarship for the past 40 years has not said this, is because repeating them has nothing to do with history, and everything to do with something else, mainly, the unwillingness and reluctance to address issues of systemic racism.  (A related issue, for another post, is the continued repeating of the whole “The Episcopal Church Constitution is based on the U.S. Constitution and was written in the same city by some of the same people.”  This is utter nonsense, and persists because it reflects the lust for the Episcopal Church to be a quasi-established national church that was a fever dream of much of the 19th and 20th century.  But again, another post for another time, only reinforcing the notion that the real reasons for the persistence of patently un-historical folk wisdom has nothing to do with history, and everything to do with our own prejudices.)

Professor Ferguson references the work of Professor Shattuck above. Father Tuck (as we know him here) is a priest in Rhode Island. I’m thinking it would be worthwhile to get Tom and Tuck together in front of a camera and ask them to talk about things that Tom is pointing out in the long essay linked above. (There’s much more to it than the short excerpt I’ve quoted. Do read it all.)