Column: Understanding America's history

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” So wrote Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), more than 200 years ago. Far-fetched, perhaps, but worth pondering.

Noted poet Joyce Sutphen, who grew up on a farm near St. Joseph and was Minnesota’s Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2021, provides focus for legislating the world in these fraught times. The lines are the first verse of a poem called “Homesteading.”

“Long ago, I settled on this piece of mind, clearing a spot for memory, making a / road so that the future could come and go, / building a house of possibility.”

Our politics seem homesteaded on a piece of spleen, not of mind. Anger, victimhood, resentment, umbrage – the landscape of emotion and language is littered with stones that are picked up not to clear the land but to hurl at neighbors.

“Clearing a spot for memory.” What does this mean today?

Some say that such memory is like what I learned in school back in the 1940s and 50s – portrayal of an America that was quite literally whitewashed. Pilgrims feasting with Indigenous people but not exterminating them. “Manifest Destiny” as a divine mandate. Jim Crow as “the natural way of things” (I grew up in Texas with “colored” and “white” drinking fountains, and for a long time didn’t question the distinction). Women’s having the right to vote was all the equality needed.

The memory was of white male domination. America had found – and founded – the way things were supposed to be, especially when the system laid claim to Christian authorization. White male Christians – who could ask for anything more? The goal of “a more perfect union”? – just keep being what America was, even more so.

I am fortunate to have lived long enough – 85 years – to witness, and champion, a widespread movement to build “a house of possibility, making a road so that the future could come and go.”

Project 1619 has made clear that the Black experience from Jamestown is every bit as much a part of the American tapestry as the white experience from 1620 at Plymouth Rock. I don’t recall hearing anything when I was growing up about the three-fifths compromise in the Constitution, or about President Andrew Johnson’s efforts to undo Lincoln’s achievements for Black people, leading to Jim Crow and the Klan and lynchings, including in Minnesota. During World War II and for years afterwards I never heard about the incarceration of Americans of Japanese descent. And as recently as 1987 pundit George Will was writing of "this nation, which began relatively recently on a continent that was a blank slate to be written on,” thereby obliterating with a single swipe of the eraser all the ancient, rich and varied Indigenous cultures.

But there are people today who see these truths not as a foundation for “building a house of possibility” but as a memory that must be squashed. Stating these truths about our country is derided by Central Minnesota Freedom Advocates, who say, “Our students have been taught to hate our nation and are being equipped to bring down our nation from the younger generation on up.” Facing the truth is not “hating our nation” or “bringing it down.” It is the precondition for loving it, for building it up.

What the Freedom Advocates promote is resonant with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which clears a spot for memory that will build a house not of possibility, but of uniformity, exclusion, inequality and white male Christian domination that I believe is truly a hating of our nation and a bringing it back down to depths from which in recent decades it has started to be lifted.

One of many realms in which Project 2025 turns back the clock is the advances that have been made in our understanding of gender and identity.

Here is a Project 2025 goal: “Maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family” (p. 481), elaborated in the declaration “that married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them" (p. 489). No. All children have the right to thrive, and to be reared by people who love them – including single, adoptive, foster, gay or straight.

In a First-Amendment nation, “biblically based”" constitutes a prohibited “establishment of religion.” The Advocates endorse the “Watchman Decree,” which asserts, “We, the Church, are God’s governing Body on the earth.”  Whose church? Even “biblically based” isn’t clear-cut; there are plenty of Jewish and Christian thinkers in whose “piece of mind” a championing of LGBTQ+ identity has settled. And social science is not a monolith either.

When it comes to legislating for the world, I’ll take poet Joyce Sutphen’s homesteading over the Heritage Foundation’s bulldozer.

— This is the opinion of Patrick Henry, retired executive director of the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research. His website is IronicChristian.org . His column is published one Sunday each month.

This article originally appeared on St. Cloud Times: Column: Understanding America's history