Just a few weeks back, I picked up A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America a book that, I must admit, I am still making my way through. I want to take a few lines to reflect on the first few chapters during this Holy Week. Just the other night, my wife was making fun of me: while I am still crawling through these early chapters of a 400-page book, my 10-year-old daughter breezes through 500-page books in a day. My defense was simple. This isn’t leisure reading, it’s dense, haunting, and urgent. It is not for the faint of heart, and it demands something of me. It demands reflection, especially during Holy Week.
This book is hard perhaps even more so for someone like me: a migrant, a brown man, a father, a priest. The question of whether we truly uphold the Constitution is not daunting, because of the civic rituals or patriotic myths it inspires, but because of the moral promise it makes: a framework of equality and freedom that we seem chronically unable—or unwilling—to fulfill. For me, it is not the Constitution but the values of the Kingdom of God that ultimately shape my hope and my direction: mercy, forgiveness, and love. It is these values that compel me to confront the evils of our society—not out of anger alone, but out of deep, gospel-rooted conviction that justice and compassion must meet.
So I offer this post not as a final word or persuasive argument, but as a piece of my own self-reflection, a prayer, maybe, in written form. Whether I’ll write more reflections as I continue through the book, I don’t know. For now, this is what I want to say.
As I read Slotkin’s opening chapters, I am struck by how the dream of a multiracial democracy was crucified in the same way Jesus was slowly, publicly, and with legal justification. The federal government, as Slotkin writes, “abandoned the project of Reconstruction” and handed the work of ‘reconciliation’ to those who had waged war to preserve slavery. The result was catastrophic. “The story of the Civil War,” he writes, “was reconstructed to transform defeat into moral victory, slavery into benevolence, and insurrection into patriotism.” (Slotkin, p. 20)
That betrayal is not merely historical. It lives on.
The myth of the “Lost Cause” has been reborn in our immigration policy in laws like the Laken Riley Act, passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in March 2024. This law allows the detention and deportation of migrants merely for being arrested; not convicted, not sentenced. An accusation is enough. It is the legal equivalent of lynching: punishment without proof, condemnation without due process, and the full force of the state used to make it appear legitimate.
Slotkin reminds us that in the post-Reconstruction South, white supremacy was not simply about prejudice; it was about control. It used myth to disguise violence and law to justify exclusion. “To the white Right,” he writes, “Black political rights were not merely a threat to Southern customs, but a betrayal of the proper racial hierarchy on which the Republic was founded.” (Slotkin, p. 45)
Isn’t this what we see now? Migrants—especially Black and brown ones—are portrayed not as human beings seeking refuge, but as threats to “our way of life.” The law then becomes a weapon used to strip them of rights, detain them indefinitely, and deport them into danger.
We are now deporting migrants—based on mere accusations—into Salvadoran prisons that human rights organizations have decried as brutal, overcrowded, and lawless. These are not rehabilitative spaces. They are punishment machines. Tools of terror.
Slotkin writes about lynching as “a ritual of social control” (Slotkin, p. 67), meant to reinforce white supremacy by making an example of the victim. Today’s deportations serve a similar function. They are not merely about removing individuals, they are about sending a message. The message is this: you do not belong, and no law will protect you.
What mobs once did under trees, our government now does through legislation. We may not call it lynching—but functionally, it is no different. It is the suspension of constitutional protections based on race, status, and perceived threat.
This is why Holy Week is the right time for this reflection. On Good Friday, we remember how Jesus was accused, arrested, and executed by the state, not because he was guilty, but because he disrupted the order of the empire. He was a brown man, a dissident, a poor man from an occupied land. He spoke of the Kingdom of God in a world obsessed with imperial control. He was innocent. And still, they killed him.
Pilate did not act out of justice. He acted out of convenience, appeasement, and fear. The crowd yelled “Crucify him!” and Pilate washed his hands. The state’s violence was wrapped in ritual and law. It looked legitimate. But it was not just.
And so it is now.
When a government deports someone to a place of death or torture based on accusation alone, it is performing the same old liturgy. We may not have a cross on a hill but we do have a detention center, a rubber-stamped removal order, and a child who disappears without a trace. That is our Good Friday.
I look at my Latino Church community and wonder: what kind of world will they inherit? What will they learn from how we treat those who come to us seeking safety? How are we creating a community of love in the face of so much injustice?
They know that Jesus was poor, brown, and murdered by the state. They know that we are called to welcome the stranger. But I don’t just want them to know it, I want them to see a community that lives by it. I want my faith to be more than ritual. I want it to be resistance.
Because the Resurrection does not begin in triumph. It begins with telling the truth about the cross.
Even in the thick of this darkness, I hold onto hope. Not a shallow optimism, but the stubborn, soul-deep conviction that death is not the end. That justice will rise. That the myth of white supremacy, though it adapts and rebrands itself, will not have the final word. Just as with Jesus; death does not have the last word.
But hope requires honesty. And this is my attempt at being honest.
This reflection is for me, first and foremost. Perhaps I will write more as I move through the rest of Slotkin’s book. Or perhaps not. But for today, this is my offering. A Holy Week reflection shaped by history, policy, and love especially the love I hope to mirror in my learning of the Gospel and imitation of Christ.
