What Freedom Means

A story from Berlin as we mark Juneteenth

Today is Juneteenth in the United States, a federal holiday to remember the day in 1865 when General Granger’s order in Galveston, Texas finally brought the liberating message of the Emancipation Proclamation to the last enslaved people in the re-uniting states, some two and half years after it had been issued – and two months after its author had been killed. In this 250^th year of the American experiment, when the contested nature of our nation’s story is on display for the whole world to see, Juneteenth offers us a chance to remember that the greatest champions of freedom in US history have been those people who believed in the promise of liberty - even when it was denied them - and worked to build a better world for all.

“What to slave is the fourth of July?” Frederick Douglass asked his hometown of Rochester, New York on July 5, 1852. He had been asked to deliver a Fourth of July address by progressive white neighbors who wanted to renew, as Lincoln would put it, their dedication to the proposition that all men are created equal. But a dozen years before the events that we remember as Juneteenth, Douglass articulated the reason this day on our calendar is important: not all Americans have experienced the liberty to which the signers of the Declaration pledged their lives, fortune, and sacred honor. In fact, July 5^th had become Emancipation Day in New York State because, when the legislature named July 4^th as the final date of a gradual emancipation process, the threat of retaliatory violence kept Black people from holding public celebrations until the day after. Douglass remembered this, as did Sojourner Truth, who had decided not to wait for gradual emancipation but found her own way to freedom. Douglass asked his neighbors in Rochester to consider what American freedom meant to someone like him – to someone like Sojourner Truth.

Juneteenth in this 250^th year offers us a similar invitation: what does freedom mean when a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” is held captive by authoritarian forces that claim to celebrate liberty while they weaponize the justice system against their critics and try to suppress the vote and subvert electoral accountability?

We are spending the season between Juneteenth and July 4 this year in Germany, where we have been invited into several conversations about how this history of the Holocaust informs our struggle against the crisis of authoritarianism today. Jonathan is working for two weeks in Germany and Poland with a group of clergy fellows who are part of the Fellowship at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics – a program that invites early career clergy, doctors, and journalists to explore the role of their professions in supporting the Nazi regime as way of wrestling honestly with the ethical questions they face in their own contexts. At the same time, Bishop Barber has responded to an invitation from Bishop Heinrich Bedford-Strom, Moderator of the World Council of Churches, to be in conversation about the role of the churches in response to authoritarian regimes, past and present. Next Sunday, June 28^th, Bishop Barber will preach at the Holy Cross Church in Berlin.

We look forward to sharing both our conversation with Bishop Bedford-Strom and Bishop Barber’s sermon with you here in the days to come.

But as we begin this journey with the question that Juneteenth asks of all of us, we wanted to share one story from Berlin. Any honest assessment of the church’s role in the rise of the Nazi regime must acknowledge that Germans who worshiped together through the Holocaust did very little to stop it. In fact, most German Christians – Protestant and Catholic – saw Hitler and the Nazis as good for Germany when he rose to power. When Hitler was named Chancellor in 1933, a celebratory service was held at the Berlin Cathedral.

When the “German Christian” movement tried to throw out the Old Testament and remove all Hebrew words from hymns to eradicate Jewish influence from church life in Germany, a Confessing Church movement formed to take a stand for traditional Christian teachings. (This was the occasion for the Barmen Declaration.) But the German churches, including the Confessing Churches, never took a stand against the attacks on their Jewish neighbors. While they taught their children, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself,” the churches did not act to interrupt first the attacks on their Jewish neighbors, then the kidnappings that sent them to killing centers.

But just blocks from the Cathedral where Hitler’s rise to power was celebrated, there is a memorial to the roughly 600 women who led the only recorded public protest against the Nazis in Germany. For years, Germans had watched as any one accused of even “friendliness” to a Jewish neighbor was arrested and jailed for three months. By the end of February in 1943, the SS and Gestapo decided to make one final push to round up the remaining 8,000 Jews in Berlin. About a quarter of the group – some 2,000 Jewish men who were married to Christian women – were taken to a building on Rosenstraße, across from the oldest synagogue in the city. The building had been a Jewish social service center. The Nazis turned it into a detention center.

But the wives of the men taken and detained there refused to be silent. They went to the street en masse and demanded, “Give us our husbands back!” When they were threatened by SS men with guns, they scattered to find others and returned. “If you had to calculate whether you would do any good by protesting, you wouldn’t have gone,” one of them, Elsa Holzer, later said, “But we acted from the heart. We wanted to show that we weren’t willing to let them go.”

The Nazi authorities calculated that mass public resistance was more dangerous to them than 2,000 Jewish men. Within a week, they released every one of them to their families. In a small park on Rosenstraße today, you can visit a monument to the women who demonstrated the power of collective nonviolent action in the face of authoritarian violence.

What does freedom mean when your government is held captive by authoritarian forces that claim to celebrate liberty while they weaponize the justice system against their critics and try to suppress the vote and subvert electoral accountability? The women of Rosenstraße are a reminder that freedom in the face of authoritarianism means remembering that, even when our institutions fail, the bonds of love can lead us to faithful moral resistance.

None of us can be free until we recognize how our lives are knit together by bonds of love across lines of race, class, and geography that the powerful try to use to divide us. Juneteenth is important for every American because the denial of Black people’s freedom has kept all Americans from realizing our full potential. Emancipation wasn’t an act of charity; it was an act of justice that led to Reconstruction amendments, without which we would have never had a women’s movement, a civil rights movement, a disability rights movement, or an LGBTQ movement.

When we remember the bonds of love that tie us together, we find the courage to fight for one another. To stand up together like the women of Rosenstraße and demand, “Give us our country back.” This Juneteenth, we pray for enough love in our hearts that we’ll refuse to accept anything else.