Is American Healing Even Possible?
On November 7, after four days of counting votes, Democrats celebrated the end of a “long national nightmare.” And when former Vice President Joe Biden took the stage in Wilmington, Delaware, to deliver his victory speech that Saturday night, he quickly extended a hand to President Donald Trump’s supporters, who may have felt demoralized by the loss.
“I understand the disappointment tonight,” Biden said. “I’ve lost a couple of times myself. But now let’s give each other a chance... This is a time to heal in America.” Prior to the November election, Trump and Biden supporters alike argued that if the other candidate were to be elected, “it would result in lasting harm to the country,” according to a survey from the Pew Research Center.
A week after Biden’s victory address, as the Trump campaign worked to challenge and discredit the election results while trying to get hundreds of legally cast votes thrown out on outlandish claims of fraud, the Reverend William J. Barber II took a different tack.
[Read: The evangelical reckoning begins]
On November 15, Barber—a co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, a movement based on the idea that America is in need of a moral revival—stood in the pulpit at Greenleaf Christian Church, in Goldsboro, North Carolina, preaching to a live-stream audience about unity. But his idea of healing looks different from Biden’s. “Don’t think I’ve come to make life cozy for you,” he preached, reading from the Book of Matthew. “I’ve come to cut—make a sharp knife-cut between son and father, daughter and mother, bride and mother-in-law—cut through these cozy domestic arrangements and free you for God.” It seems a strange place to start, but that’s the point, he said. “There has to be division for healing.”
I called Barber five
