October Seminar: Greg Thompson on “Race, Public Memory, Imagination, and the Gospel”

Peacemaking

October Seminar: Greg Thompson on “Race, Public Memory, Imagination, and the Gospel”

By Ryan Pemberton

November 6, 2025

Justice is an Act of Memory

When author Greg Thompson spoke to our Mosaic cohort of pastors and church leaders earlier this month, he began by turning our attention to a familiar biblical story: the story of two brothers, Cain and Abel, from Genesis 4.

In this first recorded instance of criminal human violence—Cain’s murder of his brother Abel, fueled by jealousy and anger—there is a concentrated effort to hide what was done and to forget it. But that’s not what happens in this story. In the face of such violent injustice, God gives Cain the opportunity to tell the truth. When Cain refuses responsibility, God insists on the truth—about Cain’s actions and about Abel’s life and dignity. God remembers, and God invites us to do the same.

“In these fields of forgetfulness that Cain tried to create, God remembers!” Greg Thompson noted for our cohort. “And [God] seeks to make the truth of Abel’s life forever known.”

This reading of a familiar text revealed something about the work of justice that Thompson had not seen before.

“Justice is at heart an act of remembrance, an act of memory,” Thompson noted. It was this realization that set Thompson on a different course. Following 20 years of pastoral ministry as a Presbyterian minister in Virginia, he set out to pursue a path at the intersection of moral imagination and social change, fueled by a commitment to revitalizing public memory and telling the truth about ourselves. Today, he serves as co-director of Voices Underground, an organization committed to helping local communities honor their African American histories. Among other projects, he has co-created a musical inspired by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s work with the 1968 Memphis sanitation rights strike: “Union: A Musical.”

Imagination, narrative, and memory have become the key focus of Thompson’s work. This work has led him to reconsider our nation’s history, and to write an award-winning book on the case for Christian reparations.

“White supremacy is a form of theft, endemic to this culture, and that theft has stolen truth, wealth, and power. As every six-year-old knows: when you take something, you give it back!”

“Part of the moral obligation is that reparations are about truth, wealth, and power. Churches have not only the opportunity but the responsibility to engage in that.”

A Captive Imagination: Renarrating Our Nation’s Past & Our Present

Working through a detailed account of post-Civil War era history in his Mosaic seminar, Thompson outlined for our cohort the intentional efforts undertaken to renarrate our nation’s history of racial violence in general and slavery in particular. This renarration is seen in the postwar efforts to recast the Civil War as two sides equally committed to democracy, and as an attempt to save the nation from Black people who were attempting to take over the nation. These efforts are seen in such narratives as The Birth of A Nation, the spike in memorials to Confederate soldiers erected in civic sites across the country between 1890 and 1930, and the endemic of lynchings across the U.S., which went largely unpunished.

These efforts, Thompson noted, are not merely a historical movement at the turn of the twentieth-century; they are powerful forces that continue to our present day. Such intentional efforts are visible in the removal of Harriet Tubman from the National Underground Railroad website, the assault on our national media (e.g., the cancellation of Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel), and the audit of “politicized content” at the Smithsonian Museum. These efforts are all attempting to tell a story about the United States and its people, Thompson argues, which is inherently hierarchical, dominative, displacive, extractive, and sanctimonious. This movement to renarrate our national history attempts to bless itself even while committing great violence. This is not the creation of a national narrative, however, but the nourishment of a narrative that is indigenous to our self-concept: that of American exceptionalism.

And the North American Church, Thompson notes, is complicit in it all.

“[The Church] should have contested this effort, but rather than resistance we see willed amnesia and a lack of courage, while smugly congratulating itself on its own greatness. In this way, the Church has been allies of Cain rather than the servants of Abel.”

In a 2015 chapel homily offered at Wheaton Chapel, the preeminent theologian Dr. Willie Jennings spoke on the power of narratives, insisting that storytellers hold the most power in our culture.

“If I have the power of story, that’s all I need. I will give you weapons, any kind of weapons you want, and if you give me the power of story, I will win every time,” Jennings preached. “The real struggle in this world is always against the storytellers.”

Church leaders must not overlook the power of stories—for shaping our individual and collective imaginations, for our discipleship, and for the sake of the gospel.

Cultivating Faithful Imaginations

In the face of repeated attempts to erase a history of racial violence in our country, as well as ongoing efforts to ignore, deny, or hide ongoing violence from public memory, there are practical ways we can respond—homiletically, economically, and politically—to help ourselves and to help others remember.

In our Mosaic seminar, Thompson named the importance of taking the time to listen and lift up the stories of one’s community, especially those stories that are often overlooked or ignored.

“Part of your local missions project needs to go toward shaping public memory,” Thompson told one pastor friend. “Identify the stories of the forsaken and the forgotten and begin memorializing those.”

Storytelling has been a practice of the Christian tradition since its earliest days. We have the accounts of Jesus’s topsy-turvy teachings, radical acts of hospitality toward outsiders, and courage in the face of the Empire precisely because they were committed to memory and passed down from generation to generation. These stories are read and re-read in community and on our own, week after week, precisely because they form us into a particular people: the embodiment of God’s in-breaking Kingdom on earth.

Similarly, centering the voices of the marginalized in our own communities and amplifying their voices helps with the counter-formation of our public memory in critically important ways.

Thompson encouraged intentionally seeking out and reading accounts of those who lived countercultural lives. Biographies of those who moved toward love and toward the poor when the world no longer makes sense can stir, shape, and inspire our own imaginations against malforming narratives.

“What’s happening is a global grab for control: psychological control, discursive control, economic control,” Thompson notes. “But if you read Julian of Norwich, if you read Bonhoeffer as he returned to Nazi Germany, if you read Gustavo Gutiérrez and people like this, they’re writing from a position not of control.”

To that end, Thompson also encourages reading Contemplative and Liberation Theologies, both of which are written from the perspective of a loss of control. In our current moment, such counter-cultural perspectives are critical for the formation of our discipleship and our imaginations.

“Control is a lie… It can make you massively destructive!” Thompson said, concluding our time together. “When you renounce that [attempt to control], there’s a lot of freedom in that. That’s part of what’s helped me, as I’m trying to find my way.”