Leadership Spotlight: Rev. William H. Lamar IV, Pastor of Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, DC.
Leadership Spotlight: Rev. William H. Lamar IV, Pastor of Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, DC.
This interview is part of a series of blog posts highlighting prominent members of the Smart Surfaces Coalition team. Over the coming months, we will publish interviews with Coalition Steering Committee members as they talk about their work, our environment and the Smart Surfaces mission.
William H. Lamar IV is pastor of Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, DC. Ordained as an itinerant elder in 2000 at the Florida Annual Conference of the AME Church, Lamar has also served congregations in Monticello, Florida; Orlando, Florida; Jacksonville, Florida; and Hyattsville, Maryland. Lamar previously was the managing director of Leadership Education at Duke University Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina.
This interview was conducted by Ivy Moore (IM), Digital Media and Communications intern at Smart Surfaces Coalition.
IM: When was the first time you learned about climate change? And what was your inspiration for taking action?
RL: You know, it's hard to pinpoint exactly when I heard about climate change. I've always been a news junkie. I love information and I love learning. I first learned about climate change through public broadcasting. I think what grabbed my attention is that the earth would flourish without human beings. Nature has a way of flourishing, but human beings have no hope of flourishing without nature. If the earth is ill, sick, and dying we are the dependent ones upon a healthy earth and a healthy created order. Because of human hubris, we have mis-ordered the fact that we are dependent on the earth—the earth is not dependent upon us.
IM: You are the pastor of Metropolitan African Methodist Church in Washington, DC—tell me how your faith influences your actions in regards to our environment?
RL: Oh, definitely. The Hebrew creation story recorded in Genesis is a two-part story. Genesis chapter two, verse eight says, “And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden.” Boom. The God that we serve plays in the dirt. God is a gardener, so when I see people who are working the Earth, like farmers and laborers, they are doing what God did in Genesis—caring for the earth, cultivating the earth, ensuring, with human cooperation and participation, that the earth yields all the bounty that is possible. My faith centers a God who is a gardener who created the heavens—plural—and the earth. A God who has created all of the beauty that we see and all of the beauty that we do not and cannot see. My faith leads me, cajoles me, pokes me and prods me to be one who cares for the earth, cultivates the earth and ensures that it thrives and ensures that human beings, regardless of any of the things that distinguish us, all flourish alongside the earth. For me, this is a theological imperative.
IM: Why does climate change seem to be a controversial topic in the church?
PL: I think, to be honest with you, because our theology has been bought and sold by corporate interests. If you read One Nation Under God by Kevin Cruse he's clear, and fastidiously documents the flaws and racist proposal that was the New Deal in the 30s and 40s. The only way that Franklin Roosevelt could get it enacted was with southern senators who cut black people out. But even with the flaws of the New Deal, corporate America hijacked the language of the church to use it to fight flourishing. They did not want to support unions, they did not want to support high wages and they did not want to support benefits. They constructed, with Christian ministers and leaders, a way of thinking about God and the earth that says extraction is okay—to extract labor from people and not pay them is okay, and that God says it's okay.
The American narrative has been a narrative that has said by force we can exploit those who are weak, we can exploit the earth for the purposes of building wealth, and building power. And the church, the Christian church, by and large, has bowed to the impulse of American imperialism and the impulses of exploitative American capitalism. I think the scriptures argue against this but imaginations have been colonized and purchased.
IM: I saw your recent article in the U.S. News and World Report. In that, you emphasize how Smart Surfaces in communities of color and low-income neighborhoods are needed. Could you elaborate on how different these communities would look with smart surfaces?
RL: Beautiful question. With all of the exploitation that I mentioned, people who have been the weakest, people who have been maligned, people who have been dehumanized, always in the words of my forebears in Georgia, catch the short end of the stick. Communities that are poor are poor not because they are less than, but because there's been disinvestment, exploitation, and systems to keep them poor. When you look at tree coverage in Washington, D.C., wealthier neighborhoods have more tree cover. People have long associated trees and tree coverage with cool temperatures, health, and cleaner air. We [America] have never been about, in a consistent way, the flourishing of all human beings. We've cared about policy, theology and economics, the flourishing of some and the flourishing of the few.
Smart Surfaces can reinvest in a way so that we are concerned about the flourishing of all because here's the thing—when we diminish the earth, you may first diminish poor and weak people, but eventually all human beings are diminished. Exploitation of humans and of the earth diminishes us all.
Smart Surfaces will make for a more just society. Not only will it be cooler, not only will it be safer, not only will it be healthier, but it can make the world in which we find ourselves more just. Tree cover and the coolness of certain neighborhoods make physical activity more possible. I've been to certain neighborhoods where it is literally as hot as hell and people are not going outside and they're not moving. There are health effects that compound with the exploitation I mentioned earlier.
This is an opportunity to make an investment that saves us all billions of dollars, that makes us all healthy. It is proven by science, it is proven economically, it is the smart thing to do. We have before us a smart option that makes all the economic, health and justice sense in the world.
IM: In your opinion, what is a challenge to getting Smart Surfaces to become implemented?
RL: There is an impulse in our nation, a profound selfishness, a lack of a communitarian response to human need and an understanding of the commonweal. The political impulse in America that hoards and says, ‘this is for me, for my people and my group,’ focuses on the needs of the individual, rather than the needs of the community. No one makes it by himself or herself. We build together, we grow together. So the American impulse that says, ‘I've got mine, you get yours’—those kinds of politics will be an obstacle.
America has never really been concerned about justice more than it has been concerned about economics. What might be able to help us with Smart Surfaces is it is the right thing to do financially. Unfortunately, when you study movements in America, part of what happened in the south during the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s is they could not get certain areas in the United States to do what was right until their pockets were affected—so there were boycotts. Doing what was right for human beings has never been a primary motivation in the American Empire. We've got to change that. We didn't do what was in the best interest of natives, Africans, women, and other minority groups. We're going to have to fundamentally change what it means to be an American. Humanity is connected whether we like it or not.
IM: Could you share how you got involved with the Smart Surfaces Coalition, and how your experience as a pastor intersects with the role you have on the steering committee?
RL: Greg Kats reached out to me and explained the work that he was doing. I saw immediately how connecting with this work could help save lives and could help people in my community who are suffering from heat. As a pastor, I am called to care for God's people, but I'm also called to work alongside God in the transformation of a death-dealing status quo in the world. I'm not just called to pray for people and be nice, but I am called to engage with the powers in the world that would keep this disorder that kills the most vulnerable among us. Resurrection is not just about individual Jesus rising from the dead, it is about death-dealing systems dying and something just and beautiful rising. It is about humanity and the earth. I work on behalf of resurrection and not of death. We are spiraling towards death and we have to do something about it.
IM: What gives you hope?
RL: What gives me hope is the conversation we're having now, and that there are people who see there is another way to live. The violent history of this nation does not have to be its future, but only if we're willing to pay a price, only if we're willing to sacrifice, only if we are willing to say every human being deserves a guaranteed income. Every human being deserves safe housing. Every human being deserves health care. Every human being deserves to flourish. I have hope that there are people who are not afraid to envision a nation different than this nation that we have and to envision a world different than the world that we have. That's why I get up in the morning. I am drawn by the poetry of what is possible in the community in which I live, in the nation where I live, in the world where I live, and I am willing to pay whatever sacrifice is required to be a part of the building of that new world.