For America still attempts to make the biblical claim of being a city set upon a hill as a beacon of hope and moral guidance for peoples of the world. But Nana Douglass recognized, then as now, that it is a society built on a mountain of mendacity and morally monstrous practices, and an official and unofficial litany of daily lies that seeks to hide its past, deny its current radically evil racial and social injustice and unfreedom at home and complicity in genocide, unjust war and empire abroad. And he tells us, as we say so often, that in a context of oppression, there is no reliable remedy except righteous and relentless struggle. For he says, in his classic teaching on the ethical imperative and urgency of struggle, “Without struggle there is no progress. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Thus, let’s continue the struggle, keep the faith and hold the line.
