Welcome to the Liberty Insider.
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This is a program designed
to bring you news, views,
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discussion insights,
and up-to-date information
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all on religious liberty
and the dynamic surrounding it.
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My name is Lincoln Steed,
editor of Liberty Magazine,
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and my guest on this
program is Kingsley Palmer.
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I have to remind yourself...
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myself of your name.
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And you told me the
meaning of Palmer was.
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Pilgrim.
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And you're a
Religious Liberty official,
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designate from the
Adventist Church in...
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Arizona.
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Arizona, because I was
nearly going to say Nevada,
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the same mistake.
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But yeah,
pilgrim is a good name.
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And let's talk about
some of your life story.
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You're the son of immigrants,
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and then you've moved
from England to the US.
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So in a very real sense,
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you're a pilgrim
and an immigrant.
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What does that
experience taught you generally,
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and let's try and relate it
to religious sensibilities too?
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Well, moving here,
came here to study.
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And here at the 3ABN
studio in the United States.
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No, I came to the United States
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38 years ago to
pursue Christian education,
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to accept the call to ministry.
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And while here,
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I began to
develop a broader mindset
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with respect to,
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well, yes, you are an immigrant.
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Yes, you are in an
English speaking country
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but part of a culture,
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part of an ethnic group, right?
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Whose stories,
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the history of our community
and I say our community,
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because essentially,
whether you're born in England,
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and you're from the islands,
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or you were born and raised here
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in the
African-American community,
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we have similar stories,
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similar experiences,
different locations.
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So that was discovery for me
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in terms of my
educational preparation,
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and had no idea that
I would be staying here
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as long as I did, but this,
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I spent more
time here integrated.
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I can say I'm African-American,
bit of British twang
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or what have you.
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Because of few miles
back for you as well.
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Yes, it is.
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Do you know your family history?
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Yes, I know.
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We came from West
Africa just like every other.
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But two are the West Indies.
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To the Caribbean. Caribbean.
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Some of the relatives
were dropped off here.
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That's what I'm finding out.
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And so when I came here
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with a group of
other young people,
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back in 1980.
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We were amazed
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to see not just the resemblance,
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but a lot of the food,
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the culture, all
those other things,
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and it was just like
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I'm rediscovering
another part of who I was,
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or what I belong to in
a totally different place.
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That was very, very
inspiring, painful too
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because there were
some things that were not,
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that we could
share stories about
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in terms of what
has happened to us
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since we left Africa,
the transatlantic crossing,
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and how we were spread.
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Do you...
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Have you been
able to recover details
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of how your
relatives and some of those
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from the same
area were taken or...?
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What I do know
and it's interesting.
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And part of this. Yeah.
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It is... At that
time very sad story.
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Yes, what happened,
you have a group of people
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on a boat taken from Africa,
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families dispersed.
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Some went into British colonies.
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You've got me thinking,
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does that mean they
were from the same village?
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Many of them were
from the same villages
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or the same
areas that separated.
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So what was the dynamic?
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Because there's a variation,
there were wars, they were...
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As even in Europe for poverty,
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sometimes people
would deliver family members
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to the system
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figuring they couldn't
care for them or whatever.
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Other times the Arab
traders kidnapped people.
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There was a lot of kidnapping.
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Yeah, a lot of
funny things going.
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Yeah, it wasn't voluntary.
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Well, no. Exactly.
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Not by the infusion, never.
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So we're
depending on who owned you.
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You got the name of that family.
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Your relatives
would be dispersed
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from Brazil to the Caribbean,
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to North America.
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And if you go to
any of those places,
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you will see like mind
people that look the same.
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But their context
and their experiences
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might have been
a little different.
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But the stories
that are comparable,
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and that's what I've discovered
in the last 38 years here
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that I have a
natural connection.
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Do you know what
religious identity
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those ancestors
had when they came?
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It's kind of hard to know
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because you had a
combination of missionaries
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going to Africa.
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That's why I'm
asking the question.
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Yes, you know, and depending
on where they came from,
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and what they shared.
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You had a sense of,
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you kind of bought
into their theology.
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But a lot of people don't know
that people of African descent
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have known about God,
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understood who He was
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albeit in His
different manifestations.
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So it wasn't too and
it was not too uncommon.
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Okay, we have served
Jehovah from biblical times
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right up until now,
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but now this new
religion, this new Christianity,
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this age of
enlightenment, we accepted it.
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In fact there's a saying
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that when some
of the missionaries
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and this is not for everyone
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came to Africa,
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we had the land,
they had the Bible.
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When we left Africa, right?
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When they left Africa,
we were left with the Bible.
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They got the
land. They got the land.
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So we've seen
these interesting trends,
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transition but to your question
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when you say what religious...
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We had indigenous
religions, but we also have...
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Well, I had to
ask you a question.
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You know, it's the general
historical assumption had been
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when I was a kid
studying all of this.
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These were
animistic religions in Africa,
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but I know that's not true,
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there was a
combination as today,
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animistic religions,
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some peripheral
connections with Christianity,
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but I think that was
minimal at that point.
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Yes.
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And even Islam
though was represented
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in the background of
some of these peoples.
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Yeah, they spread.
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Islam was probably more
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in the eastern
part of the continent.
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Christianity because
of geographically speaking
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but was used as a tool... Yeah.
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To unfortunately
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to kidnap, and separate,
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and then we had variations of it
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when we came to
the Western world
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and interpretations,
misinterpretations,
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miss applications,
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which unfortunately
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kept us deprived
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and there's the rest
of it as you will know.
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They say it's history,
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but there was a
common understanding
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that we understood
who God was in the mix
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of whatever else we believe.
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You know, well,
you know very well
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and you're explaining,
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you know, slavery
and the whole trade
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operated at the
periphery of religion.
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Arabs were
involved in one end of it,
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Christians at the other.
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So there's nobody
gets off Scot free on this.
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No. And it's a very sad thing.
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But removing that,
that religious element,
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it strikes me
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that in the modern
world hardly anybody
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really can know definitively
where they came from
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and everybody's
in the people groups
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they represented,
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we've come a long
way to get where we are.
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You know, our church was
much fixated in its early era
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in trying to decipher
which of the 10 Germanic tribes
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made up the history
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or the modern nations of Europe.
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Because even
within recorded history,
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Europe was made up
with often ravaging tribes
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that displaced another
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and violently did this
and that and the other.
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And in recent history like
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you know my mother was born
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very shortly after her mother
left Scotland, economic issues,
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you know, the enclosure
acts in England, you know this.
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I mean the grinding
poverty of working people
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in England was unreal,
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and when they were
driven off the land
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which they barely
scrambled a living off,
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hardscrabble
living in better times
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and, but with the
Industrial Revolution,
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public lands were fenced off
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and people have no
way to get any living
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and they were off,
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floating off on the
seas for another place.
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We've all...
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I think mankind as a whole
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has been a lost
wandering generation but...
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And mistreated a lot,
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but slavery is as a unique wrong
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against humanity.
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Well, you know, you had
a choice if you couldn't,
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you know, the Irish
famine of the 19th century.
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I was about to
mention that, Potato Famine,
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that's where US then
affected for a lot of those.
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But at least they had a choice.
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We didn't have a choice. Right.
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And that's the sad thing
is and the elements of that,
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I still felt an experience.
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I see it as a pastor,
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as a community leader every day,
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which feeds into
what I was saying
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before about public
affairs and religious liberty.
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They both work
together very, very well,
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when properly applied.
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However,
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there are realities
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that have come
from systemic racism,
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slavery,
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that we find
ourselves, not just us,
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but other people,
even of other religions
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and other ethnic persuasions.
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Yeah.
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Are the same, so
that's very real to me.
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Yeah.
00:10:45.51\00:10:46.84
And being a pilgrim in America,
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it has been eye opening for me.
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It has been emotional for me.
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It has been transformative
for me in my ministry
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in doing what I do.
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Yeah, and you know,
00:10:58.12\00:10:59.75
I was trying to
draw a little parallel
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but not on the...
00:11:01.16\00:11:02.49
Not an equivalence. Right.
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But the comparison
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that I think a lot of
people in the Western world
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are basically
dispossessed wanderers...
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Oh, yeah. From their origin.
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And it's very hard
for people descended
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from slaves to sort of
recover a sense of self
00:11:17.91\00:11:20.38
and identity in
origin, but it can be.
00:11:20.41\00:11:23.71
Most people
don't think about it,
00:11:23.75\00:11:25.08
that's the problem.
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But when they
tried, they don't have it.
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In the US,
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I think it's
suffering from part of this,
00:11:29.22\00:11:31.49
back to my
preoccupations with the Europe.
00:11:31.52\00:11:33.76
In England, there's a sense,
00:11:33.79\00:11:35.66
in Europe there's a sense
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of even a few
might have come and gone
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but this is a permanency.
00:11:38.63\00:11:40.66
You mentioned
parliament in another program,
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goes back 1,000 years.
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Don't have that in America.
00:11:44.40\00:11:45.80
So what do you
substitute sort of mythical,
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sort of sense of destiny,
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and that's comes and goes
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but that the US
is very struggling
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to create the
sense of who they are.
00:11:59.21\00:12:02.42
The Europeans don't know,
when I studied US history,
00:12:02.45\00:12:05.45
this huge denial of the role
00:12:05.49\00:12:07.22
of convict settlement in the US.
00:12:07.26\00:12:10.26
Australia can't deny it,
in fact they glory at it.
00:12:10.29\00:12:12.53
So the British set
that up as you well know.
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Yeah. Botany Bay and...
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Right.
00:12:16.40\00:12:17.73
And it's not the
majority of Australians
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never was nor in the US
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but the US
doesn't even seem to know
00:12:21.60\00:12:23.20
that part of its history.
00:12:23.24\00:12:24.61
There was gross in humanity,
00:12:24.64\00:12:26.64
class struggles and
all the arrest people sent,
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some for their life
but generally for just term
00:12:29.64\00:12:31.81
and that's the huge distinction
00:12:31.85\00:12:33.35
between slavery
and the convict thing.
00:12:33.38\00:12:36.08
For 10 years you were
treated like dirt and an animal
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and killed at will pretty
much but once that was over,
00:12:38.65\00:12:42.42
then you get a bit of land
00:12:42.46\00:12:43.79
and you could have
other lay for them.
00:12:43.83\00:12:45.16
But they did something else...
00:12:45.19\00:12:46.53
But it created a sense
of disposition, I believe.
00:12:46.56\00:12:49.00
There, you know.
00:12:49.03\00:12:50.37
Like there's
that song, you know,
00:12:50.40\00:12:51.73
farewell to all England forever,
00:12:51.77\00:12:53.64
it's Botany Bay.
00:12:53.67\00:12:55.27
Well, I know, we used
to sing the song in school
00:12:55.30\00:12:57.17
about Botany Bay, till
I found out what it was.
00:12:57.21\00:13:00.11
But here's what is interesting,
discovered in my discovery here
00:13:00.14\00:13:04.75
is that black people
came to the United States
00:13:04.78\00:13:08.72
long before the Europeans
00:13:08.75\00:13:10.82
step foot in the US
as we speak, as we know.
00:13:10.85\00:13:16.42
And then subsequent generations,
00:13:16.46\00:13:17.99
of course, were enslaved
00:13:18.03\00:13:19.36
and then the other
things that we had talked about.
00:13:19.39\00:13:22.06
So we've always had,
00:13:22.10\00:13:24.67
and I think
that's with any group,
00:13:24.70\00:13:26.40
some idea on who we
were as human beings,
00:13:26.43\00:13:30.71
believing in something greater
and bigger than ourselves.
00:13:30.74\00:13:34.31
And that is why
you see that in the...
00:13:34.34\00:13:37.98
Particularly when it
comes to worship and expression
00:13:38.01\00:13:40.12
and how we see
society through our lens.
00:13:40.15\00:13:42.22
Remember, I was talking about it
00:13:42.25\00:13:43.59
in a previous program,
00:13:43.62\00:13:45.15
about our
perception or understanding
00:13:45.19\00:13:48.82
and the application
00:13:48.86\00:13:50.19
of what public affairs
and religious liberties means
00:13:50.23\00:13:53.56
as far as a
public affairs activity,
00:13:53.60\00:13:57.53
it's the community,
00:13:57.57\00:13:59.17
it's the God
00:13:59.20\00:14:00.67
in the form of
Jesus doing certain things
00:14:00.70\00:14:03.30
across all lines,
across all groups,
00:14:03.34\00:14:06.74
and engaging with the
public and at the same time,
00:14:06.78\00:14:10.45
having this wonderful message
00:14:10.48\00:14:12.41
that we have based
upon prophecy in Revelation
00:14:12.45\00:14:17.55
that pulls us together.
00:14:17.59\00:14:18.95
Good point.
00:14:18.99\00:14:20.32
We'll take a break now.
00:14:20.36\00:14:22.16
And so stay with us,
00:14:22.19\00:14:23.53
and we'll be back to
continue the pilgrimage.
00:14:23.56\00:14:25.56