The Reverend Rob Lee has an unusual vantage point from which to view this time of deep political polarization.
Ordained in the United Church of Christ—among the most liberal of Christian denominations—Lee defines himself as a progressive Christian. He is also in, and of, the South—having grown up in North Carolina and, until last year, serving a UCC church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. And then there is his heritage. Lee is a fourth-generation descendant of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee.
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Robert Wright Lee IV at the MTV Video Music Awards on August 27, 2017 in Inglewood, California.
Lee, twenty-five, emerged as a distinctive voice last year in the movement to remove monuments to his ancestor and other Confederate leaders. After last summer’s rally by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, at which counter-protester Heather Heyer was killed by an automobile driven by a rally participant, Lee made public statements against white supremacy in his capacity as a church pastor.
Subsequently, he was invited to introduce Heyer’s mother at the MTV Video Music Awards. In the aftermath of that event, Lee resigned his pastorate, noting that some members of his congregation were “uncomfortable with the attention the church was receiving,” a reaction he found “deeply hurtful.”
“I regret that speaking out has caused concern and pain to my church,” he told his congregation. “For this is I offer my heartfelt apology. I understand that my views could be considered to be controversial. I never sought this sort of attention. But, I do believe in God’s role in calling out for positive social change for the good of all.”
The Progressive spoke with Lee in December as part of research for an article on faith-based responses to the election of President Donald Trump.
Q: How did you decide to speak out about Confederate statues?
The Reverend Rob Lee: After Charlottesville, I realized that there were people speaking up, including but not limited to our elected officials, on the matter of Charlottesville. Because of the current administration saying that there were many sides to the story of Charlottesville and such, there has been a tendency to avoid having these difficult conversations, and that bothers me on a deep level. There is a right and a wrong side to history and we have to realize that, and recognize that, and to do something about it.
Q: Do you see a change in how the faith community, at least the Christian community, is grappling with social, political, and cultural issues in the wake of Trump’s election?
Lee: We’re entering a world of cultural evangelicals, not spiritual evangelicals. Those people engage in culture in such a way that they are conservative, they have conservative values, but they’re willing to vote for a man who said he would grab a woman by her private parts. That’s not Christianity to me.
What we’re seeing is almost the de-evolution of the evangelicalism and conservative evangelicalism that started with the Moral Majority. This is a real problem for Christians, especially progressive Christians like myself, who see this as a grave injustice to the faith. This is a real problem.
So I’m trying to gather my folks together, the progressive Christians, and say, “Look, we can’t be the Liberal Quiet any more, we have to be the Liberal Loud.”
“We can’t be the Liberal Quiet any more, we have to be the Liberal Loud.”
Q: You were a parish minister, in a mainline denomination, in a part of the country in which the loudest religious voices are often the evangelicals. How do you process what they have to say?
Lee: Many of the people that I know and love in my community were conservative Christians. They told me that Trump would bring back an era of prosperity regardless of what he was saying or doing. And that for me was problematic. I can stomach someone voting as a conservative Christian based on their values. But Trump didn’t seem to match any of those values.
Q: What about your own congregation?
Lee: Many of the people in the congregation that I was with previously were very conservative. Some would make comments like, “Racism is over, because I saw a white male officer changing a tire for a black woman.” Someone would just say, “There’s no such thing as police brutality.”
It’s almost as if they had blinders on, because they weren’t willing to admit to themselves that there is a problem. And even still when Trump was elected, I would hear church members say, “Gosh, I hope he’s going to do what he said he was going to do.”
I didn’t know what they meant by that, but I think it had something to do with bringing jobs back. This rural part of North Carolina where I lived, and even the suburban part of North Carolina where I live now—people feel left behind. Because the factory jobs have left, they’ve gone overseas, or to Mexico, they feel like they’re losing their livelihood.
Q: You spoke out specifically on the issue of the monuments and what they reflect. What do you see as your particular calling now?
Lee: I’m writing a book on anti-racism and white supremacy in white churches. I don’t know that some of this stuff would have happened the way it did had it not been normalized in the 2016 election. I don’t know that Charlottesville would have happened had we not given permission for it to happen by the normalization of the narrative of neo-Nazis—“that there’s many sides to the story.” That just blows my mind.
What I’m seeing now is more mainliners and more non-churched folks engaging in conversation because they’re just tired of hearing the narrative about evangelicals.
Q: And what does that conversation look like from your perspective?
Lee: We’re all tired of hearing evangelicals talk about President Trump as if he’s a savior. I think this is in my realm of responsibility today. Many Christians have normalized what Donald Trump is doing. That’s really scary. That means we’re getting in bed with the empire. Jesus was very clear about those things that we weren’t supposed to be in touch with, and one of those was the empire. I think some evangelicals are selling their souls to the Republican Party.
“Many Christians have normalized what Donald Trump is doing. That’s really scary. That means we’re getting in bed with the empire.”
Q: What do you see as the most interesting or hopeful faith-based response to Trump?
Lee: There’s many. But I’m thinking of social media and the engagement there, the unification of ideas and proliferation of knowledge because of the advent of Twitter to engage these questions. On a national scale, I think of William Barber especially, the revitalization of the Poor People’s Campaign.
Q: Do you have hope that this is a time the movement will come together?
Lee: I don’t know what the future holds in terms of this movement or this mission, but I know that none of us are going away any time soon. I think there’s a potential for us to come together in a different way, to really work hard. Being in the pulpit—it’s a balancing act there. But you have to remember that you have to be true to yourself as well.
I’d just say that if people were looking for a moment to stand up and be counted, now’s the time. We can’t just rest on our laurels any more and hope for the best. We’ve got to speak up and speak out, in the name of God and in the name of goodwill.