This side of fiction, it would be hard to find a bigger failure than John Brown. His raid of the national armory at Harpers Ferry with only a score of men was an utter disaster: half-cocked in every sense, without prior canvassing of the surrounding Black population to gauge interest in joining his rebellion, he assumed enslaved people would suddenly risk everything they had to join a strange old white man in overthrowing their oppressors. This is hardly the strategic genius and savvy leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture. The recent TV series The Good Lord Bird (based on the 2013 novel by James McBride) explores the abolitionist’s curious kind of faith in spite of repeated failure. It is easy to dismiss him as a raving madman or a naïve buffoon, and the series smartly begins there, where most discussions of Brown end: that he is crazy. It feeds into the commonsensical interpretation that Brown’s ends were noble—of course slavery should be “fought,” respectable people will make sure you hear them say—but his methods were both despicable and self-defeating (quite fortunately for white liberals unsettled by the idea that “dialogue” cannot fix injustice). It is nonetheless disturbing to see this most indigestible side of Brown’s story right in the first episode, where Brown and his ragtag army seize a Kansas farmer, who turns down multiple chances to renounce slavery. Hoarse with holy wrath, John Brown roars out Ephesians 5:14: “Wake up, sleeper! Arise from the dead, and Christ’s light will shine on you!” Then screams mingle in three crunching strokes of his broadsword and all we see of the beheading is blood spraying up onto the face of a Black boy nicknamed “Onion,” agape and aghast as we are.

This kind of wokeness does not pair well with Sunday brunch mimosas.

As much as “we” (whoever that is) might quail at Brown’s vigilante execution of pro-slavers without a trial, the ongoing extrajudicial police murders of Black people are by any objective measure more terrorizing than anything Brown ever did. It raises the question, however, of why so many feel such complacency with the one and voice such eager disapproval of the other—why we rationalize patience with the one and impatiently dismiss the other as irrational. I wish to extend this question into the category of rationality itself, and how it is defined in such a way as to weaponize whiteness. The very suggestion of “fanaticism” becomes enough to squelch denunciations of long-established institutions eager to normalize their failings as fixable by incremental reform. The liberal urgency to “keep religion out of politics” knows what to do when religion is conservative but loses its cool the second a religionist denounces the violence of capitalism as ungodly. One can only imagine what they’d do if someday there’s a religion that worships a deity who arms themselves against moneychangers. The convenient thing about any fanaticism to the liberal mindset is that it is unbalanced—the ultimate insult in the mind of any fence-sitter.

Such facile attitudes amount to a collective agnosia about such as Brown, an inability to comprehend as rational or even internalize as possible anything like Brown’s spiritual commitment to abolitionism. By frontloading the series with our most uncritical critiques of Brown, we are challenged as events unfold to overturn the preconceptions of common sense and ask ourselves whether it isn’t Brown who’s irrational, and instead those who insist social change come incrementally. As Herbert Marcuse might gloss it, Brown’s nonsense gives the lie to one-dimensional society and “the rational character of its irrationality.”¹ By the time Brown bellows “I am the sanest man you have ever seen!” during his last stand, his claims to rationality are harder for the viewer to dismiss—as is the idea that God, should any exist, would have to be more like the one Brown hears than any of those abstractions we idolize (Power, Profit, Security, etc.). Brown is a gunpowder gadfly surrounded by youth he corrupts into the sacrilege of throwing the gods of the United States into question. By trying the impossible, he slices through our idolatrous presumptions about what is and isn’t possible. Wake up, sleeper, indeed.

Yet possibility and certainty are two very different things, for almost the same reasons that there is a difference between what ought to be and what is. Because of our culture’s proclivity to confuse faith with dogmatism, we can flatten Brown’s religious conviction into a mechanical assurance about the divine whispers he hears, and in so doing miss that Brown was well aware of the possible futility of his mission. In the show, we see Brown in a near-constant state of improvisation, eating nuts and opossums out in the wilderness with a price on his head, wandering from town to town trying to scrape together funding only to lose it to swindlers, starting again from scratch, facing skepticism from friends and bullets from foes. Ralph Waldo Emerson once described Brown as “a pure idealist, with no by-ends of his own.”² This idealistic willingness to persist in spite of hardship does not denote an unflappable cheeriness; far from it, Brown is recurringly distressed by significant setbacks.

Again and again, Brown encounters failure and grapples with it—just as the God of Christianity is not detached from history but participates in it, and cares about what happens to us in it, for passion is involvement in and with another’s possibilities of freedom. Brown’s God is not the divinity of ancient Stoic philosophy: above all things apathetic, unmoved by suffering, such that rationality is defined by apathy itself. His God is passionate, forcing him to pick a side just as he forces us to pick a side. This is the divinity that both secular and religious people call “the angry Old Testament God,” against which one may easily adopt the “non-judgmental” smugness of those who can afford to stay indifferent to oppression, preferring to overlook the implications of what it is that God’s angry about. Theirs is a white bread Christ, the milquetoast of humanist niceness, not the vulnerable Messiah whose heart for justice threatened Empire: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). If your God never gets worked up about anything, then no wonder God never seems to be at work: “Pathos means: God is never neutral, never beyond good and evil. He is always partial to justice. …The characteristic of the prophets is not foreknowledge of the future, but insight into the present pathos of God.”³ It is not dauntless certainty about the future but prophetic depth of com-passion that sustains Brown in and through every setback redirecting him toward God and the poor God loves, the oppressed who are themselves having to somehow find courage in spite of discouragement. In one scene, upon hearing Brown has a modest farm, Onion asks if he’s rich, and he responds:

“You know what I have in my pockets? Grief. That’s my wealth: grief. My first wife…we were so in love. When I dug her grave, it was raining. I’d already buried nine of our children. Can you imagine that much grief? I’m a rich man. Then came financial ruin, disgrace, shame. …Loss of faith.”

I cannot imagine such grief myself. Brown’s familiar wince when he admits a loss of faith reveals a humbling faith-experience: Brown is a loser, even in a spiritual sense. He has moments of spiritual pride, and as several reviewers have rightly noted, a white savior’s obliviousness to the humanity of the Black people right in front of him; only after Onion confronts him does he see the self-contradiction in using Onion as a theatrical prop on the abolitionist lecture circuit. Upon making it to Canada—having entrusted all his money to a swindler—Brown sorrowfully admits he’s been a hypocrite to denounce slavery but hold onto Onion like a surrogate child. After directing Onion to an orphanage where he can get a new start, Brown heads out with no money and no friends, trundling off alone to speechify against slavery and his shoulders heavy with feelings of fraudulence, to the apropos tune of Elvis’ version of “Where Could I Go But to the Lord?” Only upon honestly facing being brought low in this way does Brown’s despair reach the inflection point of what Metz calls “poverty of spirit,” a self-acceptance of the fact that being human is an existence of incompleteness.⁴

“To become human means to become ‘poor,’ to have nothing that one might brag about before God. To become human means to have no support and no power, save the enthusiasm and commitment of one’s own heart. …With the courageous acceptance of such poverty, the divine epic of our salvation began. Jesus held back nothing; he clung to nothing, and nothing served as a shield for him. Even his true origin did not shield him: ‘He…did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself’ (Phil. 2:6).” ⁵

Being human is an inherently kenotic experience, according to Metz, and we frequently evade this calling to grapple with deprivation, nonbeing, and poverty; Jesus is the only one to have become fully human by becoming “utterly poor,” and in so doing, he modelled true humanity for us at the same time that he incarnated divine love. The existential courage latent in self-acceptance of poverty is far from glorious. The sacrifice it demands is often not the cool nobility of the Stoic with “head bloody, but unbowed,”⁶ Even something as “unremarkable” as love entails the poverty of risking your very heart, with no guarantee of reciprocation; as any lover can tell you, there’s little glory in the perpetual possibility of heartbreak.⁷

When we see Frederick Douglass (quite reasonably) refuse to help Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, Brown’s spirit collapses; he knows he is now doomed. Crying afterwards, he tells Onion: “I guess we all have those moments, when the cotton turns yellow and the bowl weevil eats your crops, and you’re shook down to your core with disappointment. If you reach down and touch it, you touch that disappointment, you can feel God opening the doors of your heart.” For Metz, these doors are open because Christ has gone out ahead of us and endured the poverty to open them, but we typically shut them out of the anxiety our human vulnerability instills in us. The predetermined security we idolize is what Paul calls “the Law,” and those “rich in spirit” like the Stoics and the Pharisees present the most insidious temptation to conflate faith with willpower, an indomitability whitewashing our mutual Moloch, Domination.⁸ The institution of slavery is a refusal of our innate human poverty, as are so many institutions, an interconnection to which Brown contrasted God’s preferential option for the poor at his trial. Had he taken up arms on behalf of “the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great,” he would’ve been rewarded, and is only being punished for commitment “to have interfered as I have done…in behalf of His despised poor.”⁹

The poor are God’s poor, and Brown’s heartfelt familiarity with spiritual poverty informs his conviction that the poor belong to God. God’s poor are disenfranchised by slavery, capitalism, and other systems of pseudo-solidarity between “the so-called great” to play pretend that they are infallible, ingenious, pure, etc.—whatever we think might assure us that we never have to feel the incompleteness of being human, that we are settled, “all set.” This gentlemen’s agreement known as the Law is a refusal of the vocation to accept our human unfinishedness, to take responsibility for it and thereby take responsibility for being our sibling’s keeper in the human family.¹⁰ There is sad irony in the fact that Brown’s level of commitment to the mutuality of God’s kingdom means standing alone. As Brown says farewell to Onion in his jail cell awaiting execution, he explains the significance of the bird that peppers the narrative: “The good lord bird doesn’t fly in a flock. You know why? The voice of our spirit is gentle. And sometimes you have to fly alone to hear it.” As hard as it is to hear the still, small voice of conscience through the lullaby of the Law, Brown’s prophetic thundering splits through our sleepwalking, his message reverberating to this day: wake up, sleeper! Arise from the dead, and Christ’s light will shine on you!

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