Lynden (2024). Documentary directed by Chris Baron and Bryan Tucker. Limited release in theaters in the Pacific Northwest.
I grew up in Lynden, Washington. The town was much smaller then than now. The sign at the city limits gave the population as 2500. Now it’s something over 15,000, but it feels still like a small town.
The buildings of the one-street downtown are mostly the same from when I grew up, but where once there was a department store at which a farm family could buy almost anything they needed except groceries, there is a boutique hotel with a bookstore and a sandwich shop on the lower level. And where the town newspaper once printed its weekly edition, there is now a trendy bar with patio seating. And just down from the bookstore, there’s a yoga studio. Lynden seems on its way to becoming urban cool.
The churches are still there. Lynden once prided itself as having the most churches per capita of any city. Many of these were large, serving not just the town itself but the surrounding countryside. Prominent among them were Reformed churches: four CRC (now five) and two RCA. Changes have occurred for the churches, too. Several of the CRC churches are noticeably smaller than they once were. The RCA churches are no longer RCA, having departed for other affiliations. The largest church in town is now an independent evangelical church that has taken over what once was a grocery store. And in the surrounding countryside are scores of mostly small congregations that have popped up over the past several decades. The religious scene has changed and is changing.
Still, on first introduction, Lynden can put itself forward as idyllic. The Lynden movie captures this with a few scene-setting shots: the countryside with its well-kept small farms, Front Street framed by overarching oaks, the manicured lawns, the perfect houses, and hovering over it all, the massif of Mt Baker under its glacial dome. But don’t entirely believe it. It may seem placid, but underneath that idyllic exterior there have always been tensions. Or, at least, complications of a certain sort.
When I grew up, these complications included a divide between those whom we called “Americans” and us, the large Dutch community that filled the Reformed churches. Most of the time, the divide was handled with civility and good cheer, but when the Christian school played the public school in basketball, there was then and still is a quality to the rivalry fueled not only by the proximity of the schools but the sense that they represent two communities that do not entirely like each other. This, too, has changed over the years, lessened perhaps—the Christian school is not so Dutch anymore and the public school team usually has good players with Dutch names—but at least the shadow of the old rivalry remains with all its cultural complications.
There were other tensions. In my day, the settled population of Lynden was almost entirely white and European. In the summer, sad little cabins tucked away in the berry fields were occupied by Hispanic migrant workers, mostly Mexican, as I recall. A few Hispanic families had settled in Lynden. They and two native tribes, the Lummi on the coast and the Nooksack towards the hills, constituted what diversity existed for us as we grew up. We Christian school kids met kids from other ethnicities mostly in Little League. Not in church or in school.
Growing up, as I did, white, Dutch (on my mother’s side), Christian school, CRC, middle-class (in my case, lower middle-class), was to breathe a pervasive smugness. We were, our theology told us, the chosen ones. Our ethnic culture, so we thought, was superior to other ethnicities (people tended especially to contrast Dutch neatness with what we regarded as the messiness of other ethnic groups). We belonged to the truth and God and right living in ways that other groups did not. I suppose that other ethnic groups thought the same, but they, we thought, were wrong.
This smugness can still be found in Lynden, but something has dramatically shifted in the Lynden culture, broken open the old fissures and laid open a divide that now runs through the community. The new divide is of a piece with the political and cultural divide that roils America. The always somewhat illusory notion that Lynden is a place apart can no longer be maintained. It’s this new divide that the movie Lynden artfully and sensitively explores. In doing so—in exploring what happened and is happening in Lynden—the movie becomes an exploration of what’s happening in the broader culture. The movie speaks beyond Lynden.
I first noticed that something had changed in Lynden when I served one of its congregations as an interim pastor for six months in 2020-2021, just as the community was beginning to emerge from the COVID shutdown. I had served the same congregation five years earlier, in 2014-2015. Even then, the congregation was conservative—small town conversative—but it was generally soft and genial. The congregants knew that they—the majority with notable exceptions—saw the world somewhat differently from the way I saw it, and they were mostly okay with that as long I preached scripture, honored the tradition, and loved them as well as I could. I could imagine them saying about something I might say from the pulpit or elsewhere, “That’s just Clay,” and give themselves permission to ignore it (which should be the right of every congregant everywhere).
When I returned for my second stint with the congregation, COVID still very much on everyone’s mind, something had shifted. There was a deeper suspicion in the air. When, say, I mentioned something I had read in the New York Times from the pulpit, they complained to the elders, and the elders instead of talking to me held closed meetings without me. Among some people—not all, of course, not even most—the old comity had vanished. It had been replaced by a harder partisanship.
Lynden explores in depth a single event that, in the words of a person interviewed in the film, “ripped the veneer off” from what had been the illusion that the divisions of the broader society couldn’t touch a town like Lynden—the idea that Lynden was somehow above the contentiousness of the world around. The occasion was a march, organized by a handful of Lynden high school students for July 5, 2020 in response to the May 25, 2020 police killing of George Floyd. The organizers called it a “March for Black Lives,” avoiding the more inflammatory “Black Lives Matter.” Among the organizers was 17 year-old Amsa Burke. The movie is her story. She’s the movie’s star, a she lights up the screen.
Amsa was born and lived her first six years in Ethiopia. After her mother died, her father, overwhelmed with responsibilities, thought it best to put her up for adoption. A Lynden couple, Roger and Linda Burke, became Amsa’s adopted parents. The movie captures both the joy of their life together, their deep and abiding love for each other, Amsa and the Burkes, and the sadness of Amsa’s separation from her father and Ethiopia. At a point in the movie, we follow Amsa and the Burkes back to Ethiopia where Amsa once again meets her birth father and falls into his arms.
Along with the complexity of such adoptions, into Amsa’s life comes all the complexities of being black in Lynden—well, in Lynden and in America. It’s being black in America that brings this home to her. She had grown up, she says, as if she were white with a black skin. There were a few incidents along the way. A classmate tells Amsa her sister hates her because she is black. Studying slavery in the US, a fellow student turns to her and says, Years ago you would have been my slave. For the most part these sorts of remarks little affect her but slowly, as she grows into her own identity, she comes to own her blackness. Being black is not incidental to who she is. The police murder of George Floyd, May 20, 2020, brings this home to her in a new way. Black in America means something quite different from black in Ethiopia. Or white in America.
It’s then that she decides, along with some other students, to hold a march for black lives in Lynden. She had marched elsewhere, but it seemed important to her to do it in Lynden, in her adopted hometown. And so her little group of young people began to organize a march for July 5, 2020, the day after Independence Day.
Prior to this, in the wake of the George Floyd killing, there had been protests in Seattle and Portland, some violent, which may in part explain what happened next. Once the march was announced, a flurry of alarmist posts appeared on social media about the upcoming march. Antifa was coming to town, the posts suggested. Lynden was about to be invaded by a pillaging mob. The Lynden police chief, alarmed by what he saw in social media, posted a public letter saying that he had met with the planners for the march and that he was assured they intended no harm. He noted that they were young and from Lynden. Nothing to fear, he urged on social media. His words were roundly ignored. Word spread to the militant right: time to deploy. Burke, just 17 and new to politics, received death threats. Someone on social media posted a picture of the spreading oak trees on Front Street, saying, “Enough trees to hang them all.” The stage was set for July 5 (see the admirable coverage by Sandy Robson in The Searchlight Review).
When the day came, Burke and the marchers met a large and aggressive crowd of counter-protesters, many of them riding up and down the march route in pickup trucks, waving flags, shouting at the protesters—some, ominously, carrying assault rifles. Pickups, illegally modified to produce clouds of sooty diesel smoke, “rolled coal” over the marchers. Things turned ugly.
Much of the footage for the July 5 march and the counter-protest in the movie comes from an independent videographer, Wylin Tjoelker (the movie makers give him a credit). Tjoelker, Revolutionary War reenactor, dance instructor, self-described history buff, forms the counterpoint to Amsa Burke: she 17 and black; he fiftyish and white.
The movie first introduces Tjoelker with a dance class in what appears to be a retrofitted barn loft. The space is filled with families sitting on the side of the dance floor as Tjoelker instructs a young man in a suit how to approach a young woman for a dance. She’s seated, surrounded by other young women, all in dresses. All very 18th century. All very retro.
For Tjoelker, the Black Lives Matter movement punctures his construction of reality. The story he tells is a sort of Eden story. America—not the cities; he seems to regard the cities as foreign kingdoms—has been a paradise born of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence (itself of Christian origin, according to Tjoelker) only lately punctured by those who would say otherwise—the serpents in the garden. In his footage, Tjoelker rides around, his camera pointed at bystanders, talking, always talking. For those he perceives to be on the right side—take that as you will—he asks again and again, Is this a good town? Do you love Lynden? Isn’t this a wonderful place? He seems to need reassurance that all is well, that all has always been well, that all will be well.
As the march is about to commence, Burke along with a few others stands to speak. She begins by saying that growing black in Lynden was hard. But you can hardly hear her on Tjoelker’s camera as the counter-protesters chant USA, USA, USA. And that’s the story the movie has to tell: the utter failure of the crowd to listen to Amsa Burke and her story of being black in Lynden. She is not asking them to do anything, only to listen.
Perhaps the most evocative shot in the movie comes the next day, after the march. The streets are clear. It’s as if nothing had happened, but we know differently. The movie asks, Can Lynden ever be the same again? This is what Tjoelker fears. Despite all his talk about history, he fears knowing. He fears the death of the illusion.
And indeed Lynden is not the same. Shortly after the march, a group formed to address what happened. They call themselves RUN: Racial Unity Now. The movie pauses briefly on a RUN rally in the place where the counter-protesters gathered to “protect the monuments.” Hope.
The movie ends as Amsa Burke prepares to leave Lynden for Howard University. Her tearful leaving points up the central ironies of the clash between the marchers and the counter-protesters. Everything the counter-protesters claim is also true, more true, of the marchers: that they belong to Lynden, that they love Lynden, that they want to protect Lynden. And everything the counter-protesters fear from the marchers is true, more true, of them: they are the ones who seem at every point on the edge of violence. They are the ones carrying guns. They are the ones who seem to threaten the peace and stability of Lynden.
In all of this, what emerges is not Lynden as unique but Lynden as a microcosm of the larger movements of our time. Even if you are not from Lynden, it’s a movie worth pondering for what it may say about your town.
Clay