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Theology at the intersection of woke and cringe. Subversion detector. Public meme-ologian. Fairly nuanced fundie.

Apr 4, 2022, 16 tweets

JUNE 2020: Panel discussion at Willy Rice's Calvary Church endorses Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility" by name, unironically, without caveat

A lot of SBC people have asked me to clip this for weeks, ignored it until I noticed yesterday that CC made the YouTube link private

Cont'd: "[Cain] says, 'Am I my brother's keeper?' In other words, he was saying, 'That's not my brother. He's my enemy.'"

Speaker is Zelvis Applin, lead pastor of South Hills Church

Willy's question in the first clip is a callback to a previous monologue from Applin. For context, Applin was asked to keep talking about a point from one of Calvary's deacons, who articulates the concept of racism without racists (though not by name)...

The image of Chauvin with his knee on George Floyd's neck says: "This is the condition that you've been in, that your ancestors were in in slavery...in Jim Crow. This is what y'all were in even after the Civil Rights, and this is where you will continue to be. Under my knee."

Earlier: Pastor Jon Matthews of New Philadelphia Worship Center says, "Here's what racism does: In America, it gives white people the benefit. It gives black people the doubt." Tells story of how he was falsely accused of stealing food that he was distributing to the needy.

So, this guy saw Jon at a gas station with a pallet of food + apparently called it in to police. Obviously, no bueno. But both Jon + Willy act aghast that, when the cops call to investigate the report, they want the numbers of ppl who can verify who he is + where he got the food.

What that stranger did to Jon is pretty great evidence that, yes, racism is not a thing of the past, but it's bearing false witness to insinuate these officers engaged in racism or partiality. Why express frustration with people who follow the Bible's command...

...to establish all things on the testimony of 2 or 3 witnesses? Cops investigate tons of hoaxes and spurious police reports. They can't assume that they're fake. They prove that they are fake. Jussie Smollett got caught because cops sincerely tried to find his assailants.

If they got a call about a pallet of stolen food in the next few days and they HADN'T act on that tip, their jobs are toast. What ever happened to empathy? Officers take 20 minutes to make 3 phone calls before they dismiss a report, and a local church smears them as racist?

So, the takeaway from the story is Willy remarking Jeff, a white deacon at Calvary: "If you'd been carrying that in your truck, you and I aren't gonna get stopped."

(Jon didn't get stopped by the police, either)

*to Jeff

One last moment I found noteworthy: Kevin, another deacon at Calvary, says the church should be leading protests right now, just like...Paul and Silas praying and singing hymns in jail???

Let's let him finish that thought.

OK for real this time, last clip: Jeff, a Calvary deacon, says: "Our nation was founded on, essentially, we stole the land of people who were here, and then we took free labor from east Africa to make ourselves rich. That's not stuff you see in our history textbooks."

That stuff *has* been in history textbooks for decades, it just wasn't framed in a Disneyfied "Evil Pinkies vs. noble BIPOCs" narrative. You're dumbing it down by phrasing it this way. You're not becoming more sophisticated.

Anyhow, this is nowhere close to the worst June 2020 panel I've clipped. It's not without serious red flags, though. Like I said, I was hesitant to go through it until the church tried to scrub it. You can still get a copy here FYI subsplash.com/calvarychurch-…

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