"We are a society that has been structured from top to bottom by race. You don't get beyond that by deciding not to talk about it anymore. It will always come back; it will always reassert itself over and over again."
— Kimberle Williams Crenshaw
(Thread) Abortion, Evangelicalism, and White Supremacy
Their FIRST “moral” crusade wasn't against abortion or homosexuals: It was against African American Christians.
“Race, not abortion, was the founding issue of the religious right”
bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/0…
#AbortionBan
“In 1971, two years before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, the biggest white evangelical group in America, the Southern Baptist Convention, supported its legalization. The group continued that support through much of the 1970s. “
Pastors, Not Politicians, Turned Dixie Republican
forbes.com/sites/chrislad…
“You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, niggerr.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract."
Early Signs of Trouble - A History of #WhiteSupremacy at First Baptist Church (Dallas).
How a #Dallas church with a history of oppposing civil rights for African Americans formed a long and toxic relationship with the Republican Party.
#BlackTwitter
“In 1956, the Supreme Court had recently struck down school segregation in the Brown v. Board of Education case. President Eisenhower had sponsored sweeping civil rights legislation.”
Dr. King was organizing bus boycotts. Pressure was building against segregation across the South.
At that time, there may have been no more influential figure in the Southern Baptist Convention than W.A. Criswell, the pastor of the enormous First Baptist Church in Dallas.
At a convention in South Carolina, Criswell turned his popular fire and brimstone style on the “blasphemous and unbiblical” agitators who threatened the Southern way of life.
Beyond all the boilerplate racist invective, Criswell outlined an eerily prescient rhetorical stance, a framework capable of outlasting Jim Crow. In a passage that managed to avoid explicit racism, he described what would become the primary political weapon of the culture wars:
“Don’t force me by law, by statute, by Supreme Court decision…to cross over in those intimate things where I don’t want to go.“
Long after the battle over whites’ only bathrooms had been lost, evangelical communities in Houston or Charlotte can continue the war over a “bathroom bill” using a rhetorical structure Criswell and others built.
He had constructed a strangely circular, quasi-libertarian argument in which a right to oppress others becomes a fundamental right born of a religious imperative, protected by the First Amendment.
"Criswell’s bizarre formula, as it metastasized and took hold elsewhere, could allow white nationalists to continue their campaign as a “culture war” long after the battle to protect segregated institutions had been lost."
Southern Baptists remained at the vanguard of the fight to preserve Jim Crow until the fight was lost. A generation later you might hear Southern Baptists mention that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a Baptist minister.
Evangelical resistance to the civil rights movement was not uniform, but dissent was rare and muted. Southern Baptist superstar Billy Graham was cautiously sympathetic to King.
Early in King’s career, in 1957, Graham once allowed King to lead a prayer from the pulpit in one of his campaigns in faraway New York City. Graham advised King and other civil rights leaders on organizational matters and offered ..
.. considerable back-channel support to the movement.
However, in public Graham was careful to keep a safe distance and avoided the kind of open displays of sympathy for civil rights that might have complicated his career.
King was once invited to speak at a Southern Baptist seminary in Louisville in 1961. Churches responded with a powerful backlash, slashing the seminary’s donations so steeply that it was forced to apologize for the move.
"Henlee Barnette, the Baptist professor responsible for King’s invitation at the seminary, nearly lost his job and became something of an outcast, a status he would retain until he was finally pressured to retire from teaching in 1977."
In 1965, after President Johnson’s second landmark Civil Rights Act was passed, the Southern Baptists formally abandoned the fight against segregation with a bland statement urging members to obey the law. In 1968, the Southern Baptist Convention formally endorsed desegregation.
That same year, in a remarkably passive-aggressive counter to their apparent concession on civil rights, they elected W.A. Criswell to lead the denomination.
Defeated and demoralized, segregationists in the 1970’s faced a frustrating problem – how to rebuild a white nationalist political program without using the discredited rhetoric of race. Religion would provide them their answer.
Colorblind Racism & American Politics
" – how to rebuild a white nationalist political program without using the discredited rhetoric of race. Religion would provide them their answer."
"Armed with the superficially race-neutral rhetorical formula Criswell had described, prominent Southern Baptist ministers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson would emerge to take up the fight. "
Continued:
Today, W.A. Criswell’s Dallas megachurch is pastored by Robert Jeffress, who has remained faithful to the most bigoted strains of the olde tyme religion. He has led an effort to withdraw funding for Russell Moore’s organization.
“Jeffress has called the Catholic Church “a Babylonian mystery religion.” He explained that Obama was sent to pave the way for the Antichrist. He has demogogued relentlessly on gay marriage. And naturally, he endorsed Donald Trump.”
Continue Reading “Pastors, Not Politicians, Turned Dixie Republican” by @ChrisALadd
forbes.com/sites/chrislad…
"It will always come back; it will always reassert itself over and over again."
— Kimberle Williams Crenshaw
The following information is intended for lily-white evangelical conservatives who by their actions have turned both Christianity and Conservatism into weapons of evil.
"Satan, Were Gonna' Tear Your Kingdom Down"
"#Oya had become so furious that she wanted to destroy the kingdom with her winds, but controlled herself because she respected her father Obatala.
Sad and lonely, she turned to Yemaya "Iya mi" with your waters & my winds we could end this marriage".
"Oya had always listened to her mother's advise but not on this occasion."
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