Thread by @blackrepublican

🔥HISTORY THREAD🔥

The Lily White Church ⛪

“Southern conservatives discovered that they could preserve white nationalism through a proxy fight for Christian Nationalism."

— Chris Ladd

#LilyWhiteChristianity
#BlackTechTwitter
#WalkAway
#BlackConservatives
-- Pastor W.A. Criswell" src="/images/1px.png" data-src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUI0_E0WoAIxnfI.jpg">

"Why the NAACP has got those East Texans on the run so much," he said, "that they dare not pronounce the word 'chigger' any longer. It has to be 'cheegro.'"

-- Pastor Robert Jeffries with his mentor the late Southern Baptist pastor, W.A. Criswell (1909–2002).

“For all that is secret will eventually be brought into the open, and everything that is concealed will be brought to light and made known to all.”

— Yeshua,

The Middle Eastern Jewish Founder of “The Way,” later called Christianity ✝.

"He who sells my sister, for purposes of prostitution, stands forth as the pious advocate of purity."

― Frederick Douglass

White supremacy always invokes a response: The Black Church is race-concious, radical, Christian conservative RESPONSE to white-supremacy in the Christian church!

#TheBlackChurch is a theological critique of Lily White Christianity.

It ask, “If the God of the universe can be unjustly found guilty and sent to die on a wooden cross — surely this is a God that sympathizes with those unjustly lynched on a wooden tree?"

“…for, between the #Christianity of America, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest difference--so wide, that to receive the one as good and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked."

-- Frederick Douglass

“White Democrats will desert their party in droves the minute it becomes a black party.”

Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority, 1969

forbes.com/sites/chrislad…

"In the “lynching era,” between 1880 to 1940, white Christians lynched nearly five thousand black men and women [mostly Christian] in a manner with obvious echoes of the crucifixion of Jesus. Yet these “Christians” did not see the irony or contradiction."

"For Mrs. Bradley, the voice she heard was the voice of the resurrected Jesus. It spoke of hope that, although white racists could take her son’s life, they could not deprive his life and death of an ultimate meaning.

Race, not abortion, was the founding issue of the religious right bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/0… via - Boston Globe

"The Black Church affirmed dignity, instilled confidence, and fought for justice for slaves in the land of the free."

#BlackChurchesMatter

“The Negro does not want integration. He realizes his potential is far better among his own race.”

- Rev. Jerry Falwell

#libertyuniversity

Agent of Intolerance

Jerry Falwell is best known for crusading against abortion and homosexuality. But early on, he skillfully used race to galvanize the Christian right.

thenation.com/article/archiv…

"Decades before the forces that now make up the Christian right declared their culture war, Falwell was a rabid segregationist who railed against the civil rights movement from the pulpit of the abandoned backwater bottling plant he converted into Thomas Road Baptist Church."

Rev. Jerry Falwell on M.L.K.

"I question the sincerity and nonviolent intentions of Dr. King, who is known to have left wing associations."

"It's amazing to me when "Christian" conservatives support racist evil under the guise of opposing leftist ideologies."

-- @VOICEOFCHID

In speaking of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, he said, in 1958:

"If Chief Justice Warren had known God's word and had desired to do the Lord's will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made. The facilities should be separate ...

... When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line."

"Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell have taken the man from Galilee hostage. He does not know them and they do not know him."

— James Baldwin

“Jerry Falwell was against him. Pat Robertson was against him. Dick Cheney was against him, and William F. Buckley was against him, and George Will was against him, and Grover Norquist travelled to South Africa to be against him, and the Heritage Foundation was against him, ...

.. and of course Ronald Reagan was steadfastly and famously against him.”

m.dailykos.com/stories/2013/1…

Jerry Fallwel & South African Apartheid

“Jerry Falwell denounced Desmond Tutu as a "phony" and led a "reinvestment" campaign during the 1980s.

Pay Robertson on Apartheid

"At the late hour of 1993, Pat Robertson opined, "I know we don't like apartheid, but the blacks in South Africa, in Soweto, don't have it all that bad.""

Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of #libertyuniversity discussing how "integration" would destroy "our race". 👇🏿 #tcot #tlot

Falwell in an effort to sidestep integration opened his Whites only school, Lynchburg Christian Academy.

In his 1964 sermon, Ministers and Marchers, Falwell attacked The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a Communist subversive and questioned “the sincerity and intentions...

...of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations."

“It is very obvious that the Communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed.”

For Falwell, Civil Rights were not only anti-Christian but also anti-American.

Jerry Falwell Sr., Laying Racist Foundations

rcwilkinson.com/2019/05/09/jer…

Religion, Money, & Racism

“Jerry Falwell started Lynchburg Christian Academy in 1967, when his town’s public schools integrated. Because Brown did not apply to private schools, institutions like Falwell’s could practice segregation while still receiving federal tax benefits.”

“But all of this changed with the series of Supreme Court decisions in the late ’60s and early ’70s that forced public schools to integrate and declared racially discriminatory private schools ineligible for tax-exempt status.”

Pastor Criswell: The Godfather of Lily White Evangelicalism

“Criswell 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.”

forbes.com/sites/chrislad…

"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. Let me build my life. Let me have my church. Let me have my school. Let me have my friends. Let me have my home. Let me have my family."

"Indeed, reading quotes like this makes it clear that Criswell believed that Southern whites were the victims and that they were the ones whose rights were somehow being infringed."

beggarscanbechoosers.com/2008/12/rick-w…

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.

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.

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."

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. All they needed was a spark to light a new wave of political activism.

The Spark 🔥

"In 1967, Mississippi began offering tuition grants to white students allowing them to attend private segregated schools. A federal court struck down the move two years later, but the tax-exempt status of these private, ...

...segregated schools remained a matter of contention for many years. Under that rubric, evangelical churches across the South led an explosion of new private schools, many of them explicitly segregated."

"Battles over the status of these institutions reached a climax when the Carter Administration in 1978 signaled its intention to press for their desegregation."

"It was the status of these schools, a growing source of church recruitment and revenue, that finally stirred the grassroots to action. Televangelist Jerry Falwell would unite with a broader group of politically connected conservatives to form the Moral Majority in 1979."

"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."

“W. A. Criswell, in a discussion of racial integration, stated that he expressed astonishment at the cowardice of ministers “whose forebears [sic] and predecessors were martyrs and were burned at the stake” ...

@drantbradley @timkellernyc

.. but who themselves refuse to speak up about “this thing of integration.”

@drantbradley @timkellernyc

“True ministers, he argued, must passionately resist government mandated desegregation because it is “a denial of all that we believe in”.”

skeptic78240.wordpress.com/2018/08/26/mor…

@timkellernyc @drantbradley

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"