Rev. Jeff Doucette is a firm believer in the power of music as a form of resistance. The minister at Enniskillen Tyrone United, a rural church on the outskirts of Bowmanville, Ont., decided to host an evening of singing songs in solidarity with Minneapolis on Feb. 19. This comes after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and amid the Trump administration’s widespread crackdown on immigrants.
Doucette says he was inspired by the many videos of people gathered in churches and out on the streets in Minneapolis using song as a form of protest and wanted to bring that movement to his community.
You may unsubscribe from any of our newsletters at any time.
Doucette took to social media on Feb. 4 to share the event on the local Facebook pages in the region. When he returned from work that day, his wife broke the news that there was an outpouring of hateful comments on the posts.
“I was just surprised by the hatred,” Doucette says. “I shouldn’t be, because I know what the world is like with a lot of what’s happening right now. But it still amazes me at the level of fear, the level of hatred, the level of division and how people embrace that. I don’t understand that.”
Within around two and a half hours, the comments got so bad that Doucette decided to take down the posts.
“Some [people told me] like, ‘Well, I’m not surprised, Jeff. You know, from the area, it’s quite conservative,’” he says. “I’m like, this has got nothing to do with politics. This has got to do with humanity.”
More on Broadview:
- This Minneapolis church is providing frontline help amid ICE operations
- Charlie Angus sounds the alarm on fascism
- Why a former evangelical author is challenging faith in firearms
Doucette says the comments spanned from making fun of the concept of the event to denying that ICE officers had murdered civilians. (No charges have been laid against the officers who killed Good and Pretti.) He finds it upsetting that “the world has allowed us to be gas[lit] into hating and looking at people as others.”
“The world needs to push back, and music does that,” he says. “Music pushes back when the world tries to tell us a different way of living, singing just has that power.”
Despite the online resistance, Doucette is even more determined to put on the event, pledging that the comments would only encourage them to sing even louder.
“This is what I keep telling [my congregation], we can’t back down,” he says. “My whole hope is for people to say there are ways that we can be in solidarity, that a small rural church can just say there are different ways that we can stand up to the world and be a voice for a different way of living the gospel.”
***
Sarah Grishpul is an intern at Broadview.
Thanks for reading
Will you help support United Church reporting?
Broadview is the only media organization dedicated to telling the stories of The United Church of Canada — its big decisions, perspectives and the faithful people and communities at its core. But this essential work depends on you.Make a tax-deductible gift today — 100% of your donation goes directly to supporting United Church coverage.
With gratitude,
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-1349-commotion-with-elamin-abdelmahmoud/clip/16197123-springsteen-jesse-welles-protest-songs-connect-moment CBC did a piece on protest songs, topical is always key and some have staying power like Ohio.
I have been greatly inspired by the singing protests. They are peacefully making themselves heard through the power of song. What’s not to love about that? I don’t understand the online vitriol at all. I really hope you move ahead with your event. If I lived closer, I would attend. I wish you all the best and I look forward to hearing about your singing protests.
Thank you, Broadview. You continue to serve us well.
I admire Rev. Doucette’s impulses and the fact he acted on them. Full marks. Such evenings demonstrate our sense that we not only “Stand with” the citizens of Minnesota, but that we recognize that in some non-trivial sense we are deeply connected to them. When they suffer, we suffer. Such is the relational reality of the world that has been revealed to us by Jesus, a host of others through history and more recently by a goodly number of scientists. Such evenings also nurture that sense within us. Today, we desperately need to nurture this sensibility. It marks the only pathway to a humane future.
However, his naivety is not to be admired. His sense that we can put humanity in one silo and politics in another, that never the twain shall meet is not only deeply modern, such siloed perceptions are now utterly misleading and wrong-headed. But the weight of the blame lies with the United Church of Canada, not Rev. Doucette.
Sadly, the UCC’s “Daring Justice” does not yet see this. Overwhelmingly, we are still Canada’s quintessential National Protestant church that teaches/preaches a form of modern (siloed) Christianity. Given that we were formed in 1925 it could not be otherwise. The tragedy is that 100 years later we are still unselfconsciously a modern church which seeks to be a Deeper, Bolder and more Daring modern church. We have not yet seen and taken as the clue to our future what Rev. Doucette felt in his impulse to host an evening of song — our modern cultures writ large, not just churches, are not long for this world. They are already disintegrating within and around us. If there is to be a human future it will not be an extension of modernity. We in the UCC need to be among those who are exploring and marking new paths to new futures. Sadly, today, we do not know that this is our work.