It’s Saturday.

America has never been a land of the free.

I confess that I was neither surprised or enraged by the decisions that #SCOTUS handed down this week.

These decisions are exactly what the conservative supermajority promised they would do if they ever had the chance. So, here we are. This is not a free country. This is not a fair country. This is a nation of and for the privileged few. People of color are second class citizens. Women are second class citizens. LBGTQ+ folx are second class citizens. Black people are still not free. They are still bound by the memory of our nation’s original sin, slavery. The only citizenry that SCOTUS will defend is the conservative white Evangelical Christian male.

Let’s not expect anything else. Once we come to terms with our reality we will be better able to change it.

Here’s a thought experiment: It wasn't until 1974, when the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed, that women in the US were granted the right to open a bank account on their own. I was four. I was getting ready to embark on Kindergarten. Though that was almost half a century ago, it was within my lifetime. I am not actually all that old in spite of what my Middle Schoolers might think. Given the current trajectory of the Originalist overthrow of SCOTUS, how long do you think it will take, for example, for them to strip these rights from women? It’s not in the Constitution. Your financial freedom may have once been understood as a reasonable expression of individual liberty, but that liberty is on the chopping block now. Mark my words, we’ve only just begun to see the roll back of individual freedoms for women, blacks, POC, and +LBGTQ+ people. If it wasn’t a right in the 1700’s…absurd? Perhaps. Yet, here we are.

I want to say something Jesusy about it all, of course. I want to say that God is love and that love liberates. Leonardo Boff wrote, “The eternal destiny of human beings will be measured by how much or how little solidarity we have displayed with the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, and the oppressed. In the end we will be judged in terms of love. Solidarity, compassion, caring, communion and loving.”

I want to think that such a message would have some traction in this country. But, it doesn’t. It’s considered Marxist. I shit you not. Late capitalism combined with constitutional Originalism combined with white Christian nationalism means less freedom, not more. It means less liberty, not more. It means less shared wealth, not more. Any message that states an alternative vision of human flourishing is anathema to those presently in power. Health care, for example, is not a human right. It is a commodity.

So, what do we do? Here’s a start. Christian communities should stop shoring up their own wealth (see: endowments, physical property, etc.) for their imagined futures. Instead, they should be supporting people who are at present losing their liberties. They should be bailing people out of school debt, for example. They should be paying medical bills. They should be supporting businesses that support same sex marriages. They should be following the black, female, POC, LBGTQ+ leadership within their communions. And where there is none, repenting of their institutional failures. Many Christian communities need to stop acting like bastions for the white Middle Class.

Divestment. Reinvestment. Reparations. Solidarity. I am willing to say that all the efforts to maintain our buildings and institutions will be fruitless if “the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, and the oppressed” remain so.

Right now, I don’t know what else to say except to repeat myself and say that we have to come to terms with our new reality. We have to stop pretending that America is somehow something different. Only then will our vision of what it could be have a chance of being born.

Tuesday is the 4th of July and we are not free. Not all of us.