While coverage of religion during the protests surrounding the death of George Floyd has revolved around the antics of President Donald Trump hoisting a Bible, there’s been no mention of it here in “occupied” Seattle.
Living in the suburbs as I do, I wondered if there is some faith-based news happening on Capitol Hill –- the part of the Emerald City that’s been taken over by protestors and devoid of police for more than a week. If so, journalists are not mentioning it. After scouring the pages of the Seattle Times and other publications, I only found one mention, by the Wall Street Journal’s religion reporter, of a group of chaplains on site.
So on Sunday afternoon, I decided to repair to what was known as CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) –- a six-block area -– to see for myself. (As of Sunday, the area is also known as CHOP for Capitol Hill Occupied Protest to signify these folks aren’t leaving the area any time soon. I’ll use the CHAZ moniker).
I’d hung back before, mainly because (1)I didn’t know if I’d be welcome as a white person; (2) The weather has been rainy for weeks here; and (3) I don’t know that area of town very well. Then #VisitSeattle ran this post on their Facebook page last Friday telling everyone to drop on by.
Contrary to what you may have seen in some news reports, Seattle is not under siege. We are healing. We are growing. We are coming together to learn from each other and support our neighbors. This is our community. And it’s beautiful.
Then I saw a widely distributed video showing a white preacher getting beaten by a vicious crowd at CHAZ (shown below). The preacher was hoisting a sign and yelling “Sin is worse than death!” Yes, a mob congregated, flung themselves on him, forcibly kissed him (sexual assault anyone?) and stole his phone. I am not excusing his horrible treatment, but I wondered at the wisdom of this guy trying to use the #BlackLivesMatter space as a Gospel-preaching platform.
CHAZ is not a space for white folks to do street preaching at this point. The emotions are too raw. Why didn’t he team up with black Christian friends and have them preach instead of him? What he did was just stupid.
Yes, he had a First Amendment right to be there, but remember, dear readers, that the mayor has ceded this area to CHAZ, so forget about constitutional rights and police protection as well.
Knowing this, I still headed on down Sunday afternoon together with a husband-and-wife pastoral team and their two kids from my church. The weekend before, the pastoral couple had shown up at another rally on the south end of town that had significant church presence there. The content of the speeches was not religious, but many of the speakers had significant church roots.
One of the pastors behind the scenes there was Clarence Presley-Brown, pastor of Word of Truth International Ministries in Tukwila, which is near the Seattle-Tacoma airport. He rallied a number of people to pray for the gathering and one of his sons was a speaker.
The main difference between that rally and what’s up on Capitol Hill is the addition of white social justice warriors (SJW), some of whom patrol Facebook like commandos.
When a member of my church innocently asked on one feed if “a small religious group” would be welcome at CHAZ, the two folks who grilled her were white techies. One of them, a support engineer for Comcast, was telling off other white folks on Facebook as was this senior tech manager at HBO. I’m curious: Who appointed them as political correctness police?
As my friends and I were arriving at CHAZ, there was a meeting of black pastors south of us who were trying to support the local police — who’ve taken a beating in all this. The police were forced to vacate CHAZ, even though the chief, a black female, told the media she has not wanted to leave. Mayor Jenny Durkan, who calls CHAZ a place with “a block party atmosphere,” overruled her.
About the pastors meeting, the Seattle Times said:
At the Goodwill Missionary Baptist Church in the Central District on Sunday afternoon, a large contingent of Black church and community leaders gave speeches voicing their passionate support for Seattle police Chief Carmen Best and rejecting calls for her resignation…
Goodwill Pastor Garry Tyson recalled how the decision to move the police out of the East Precinct building was made by city officials “over the Chief’s head.” And Victoria Beach, chair of the African American Community Advisory Council for the Seattle Police Department said when she visited the abandoned East Precinct with Best last week, they were booed by protesters.
The senior Black leaders portrayed these slights against Best as slights against the Black community.
“We were booed by mainly white people trying to silence us. They cannot and will not keep us silent,” said Beach. “I love her. I am going to back her to the end.”
Now that is interesting. These black clergy clearly resent how the white Social Justice Warriors are taking over the debate. Wish a reporter could explore that angle more.
Back to the streets of Capitol Hill: As we walked toward 12th and Pine past the boarded up police precinct building, there were no officers in sight. Tons of people were out walking their dogs. The crowd was a mix of races and genders. Everyone wore masks. I could barely catch what was happening on an impromptu stage, but it was about Native Americans and there was drumming involved.
Booths, including a “no cop co-op” were offering free food and clothes were everywhere. I added my contribution: three bags of greens from my garden, but almost wished I hadn’t bothered because of the wealth of things there to eat. Other than most everyone still wearing semi-winter garb (Seattle has had a very rainy, chilly spring), it felt like a Haight Asbury love-in. The smell of pot smoke was everywhere.
On one street were huge 19-foot-tall letters spelling out “Black Lives Matter” on the pavement for much of a city block. A photo of that is above this post. During a day when there was no rain, various artists swooped in and painted them all.
Lest we enjoy think this was some kind of festival, there was a sign warning that: ”If you find yourself thinking this is turning into Coachella, ask yourself: Why am I here?”
Thinking of the white evangelist who got chased off, we figured that at least with this crowd, covert was better than overt. Other than a meditation tent we spotted in a nearby park, there was no religious presence whatsoever. Not even the Later-day Saints or the Hare Krishnas — or even the black Muslims — were around.
So that’s why there’s been no religious angles reported about CHAZ. The area was a place to air out one’s trauma; hence there was a collection of couches at one intersection next to a sign saying “Decolonization conversation café.”
We saw no sign of the chaplains. Instead, as USA Today explained:
In a few short days, Seattle protesters who violently clashed with riot police over the death of George Floyd have had their rough edges dulled by tens of thousands of tourists and sightseers. Once criticized by President Donald Trump and Fox News commentators as a haven for anarchists and the far-left antifa movement, CHAZ has morphed into what looks and feels like a mini-Burning Man festival, complete with its own corps of volunteer street cleaners and medics, as well as dreadlocked white girls blowing soap bubbles and taking selfies in front of paintings of men and women killed by Seattle police.
The autonomous zone’s evolution from a somber protest site to street festival highlights the problem Seattle’s Black residents say they face: The city’s overwhelmingly white population loves to protest but might not be taking the Black Lives Matter movement as seriously as they should.
I’d say that’s pretty accurate. A large sign at one end of the park mentioned “religious freedom” along with some other banners including “women’s rights are human rights” and “science is real.” It was all haphazard slogans that were being thrown on an invisible ethical wall to see if they’d stick.
Seeing that the Seattle situation isn’t solving itself any time soon, other cities have prevented these autonomous zones from forming. Meanwhile, the mayor says she’s hoping for a “summer of love,” like the 1967 event in San Francisco. That vapid remark inspired a furious tweet from Trump calling CHAZ “anarchy.”
As I and my friends left the area, we all wondered if Seattle’s religious community — white and black — has anything to say to these protestors. As one of the country’s lesser-churched regions, we couldn’t come up with an immediate word for this disjointed and distracted crowd.
Years ago in the early-to-mid-1970s, I experienced the Jesus movement in this region. In Seattle and Portland, you couldn’t go downtown without running into a street preacher. I ran into people getting baptized at Golden Gardens Park on Puget Sound. As recently as 2013, Mars Hill Church, once Seattle’s largest congregation, was drawing more than 12,000 people per week to its network of churches. Somewhere in this town, there is a lot of interest in religion.
But the current “summer of love” in CHAZ isn’t one of those places. That’s a story, but not one that is getting covered.
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