B206. Open Letter to Dr. Robert Jeffress

 Dear Dr. Jeffress,

I write this open letter in response to the July 2 Baptist Press article in which you state, “If being a Christian Nationalist means loving Jesus Christ and loving America, count me in.” Shame on you, sir, for trying to manipulate every Southern Baptist who reads your words.You and I both know that that is not the definition of Christian Nationalism, and by trying to redefine the label, you have identified yourself as part of it.

As you know, Dr. Jeffress, Christian Nationalism has nothing to do with Christianity, except to manipulate it. (Billy Graham famously said this in 1982 calling it the Far Right.) Christian Nationalism, also called White Nationalism or just plain Nationalism, is an extremist movement that predates our nation’s 250 years - an extremist movement about absolute white male power. Under a Nationalist government, no one would have voting rights except white males. Women would have no rights of their own, no birth control (because being constantly pregnant is its own control), no work outside the home, and total dependence on their husbands. Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native people would have no rights and no means of climbing, but would work the manual labor jobs that support the white men for minimal pay.

We have seen Nationalists, disguised under various names, throughout our nation’s history. They are the KKK. They are the slave owners. They are the Confederates, the neo-Conderates, and the Neo-Nazis. They are the lynch mobs. They planned and carried out the massacres in Wilmington and Tulsa. They are the assassins of Lincoln, Kennedy, and King. They are the marchers in Charlottesville. They are the mass shooters. They are the January 6 insurrectionists at the nation’s Capitol. They are the men who make up names for anyone else who wants rights: feminazis, women drivers, old maids, wetbacks, chinks, coons, the N word, gooks, and more recently DEI hires, liberals, or woke, for name calling is a childish but effective means of dehumanizing and disempowering. And in the church, they are the sexual predators, the protectors of the sexual predators, and the leaders like you who keep women out of positions of decision-making and change.

And as you know, Nationalists for the past 250 years have been working strategically to gain the full control they desire, spreading their base through male-only organizations, brotherhoods, and lodges; supporting and elevating each other; and placing each other in positions of decision-making authority like judgeships and congress, and completely taking over organizations including the Southern Baptist Convention and more recently, the Republican Party. No small feats. Credit given. But, Dr. Jeffress, as you know, the movement, regardless of its success, is not of God, but rather in opposition to everything lived and taught by Jesus the Christ.

Now I say shame on you, because there are only two reasons a man of your power position would make the statement you made: One, because he is ignorant and has fallen for the lies, or two, to intentionally manipulate the trusting church-goers who don’t have the time or the means to sift through all the propaganda being thrown at all of us. If you are ignorant, well, now you owe your readership a big apology. And if, as is my guess based in part on the Dr. label in front of your name, you are intentionally using your power to manipulate and to redefine a label, then you have chosen to serve, not Jesus Christ, but the purely evil power-mongering machine that threatens to destroy our nation. 

As you know, Christian Nationalism is neither about loving Christ nor loving America. It has nothing to do with love. It is power and control and whatever manipulation it takes to get there.And it is the very real threat to the survival of the merely 250-year-old experiment that is our nation. Dr. Jeffress, if Christian Nationalism means all of this, and it does, count me out. What about you? Are you still in?

B159. White Man Secrets

The Cosmic Clash of 2020. The perfect storm. White Male Supremacy finds its savior, but the savior is an outsider who knows nothing about protecting the fraternal secrets. Suddenly centuries of seemingly separate struggles make sense, and everyone wonders how we overlooked this critical piece of the puzzle. How are systemic racism, sexism, religion, politics, and attitudes toward LGBTQ and abortion all interwoven? Pour yourself a cup of coffee, and sit back to explore with me this important piece of the puzzle that’s been hidden in clear view, a piece that links it all together.

Once upon a time, white men sailed to this “new world” from Europe with dreams of being free of the oppressive governments and religions of their native lands.They came from different countries and many different life circumstances. Many of them were members of secret male societies which they continued on their new soil, fraternal brotherhoods built on tiered secrets, opened one level at a time, and on brotherhood loyalty as the supreme guiding virtue. The vision was a masterful one of guaranteed power, and it worked for centuries until that chosen savior exposed the secrets.

The basic vision was this: The brotherhood was for men only, and all white, with such an intricate network of leadership that whatever need one had, legally, professionally, or maybe a career position for his son, someone within the network could meet the need. The levels within the organization began with shared ritual as the new members developed and proved their loyalty, then progressed to multiple successive keys of power, intricately woven into each other’s power to form an unbreakable power network. The organization was for leaders and laborers of all kinds: elected officials, attorneys and judges, business owners, ministers, police, entertainers, writers, military personnel, landowners, slaveholders, even framers of our beloved Constitution . . . all white and all male.

The fraternal loyalty, which took precedence over everything else including religion and family, was a cemented commitment to each other’s power and to white male power in general. Only white men would be decision makers in this constructed civilization. They alone would vote. They alone would be allowed a college education. It was the law. They made the laws. They were the courts. They were the police. They were the controllers of what children were taught in school and the framers of religious indoctrination.

Another brilliant part of the plan was that hundreds (Dr. Robert Forrey says thousands) of organizations would spin out from the original, each taking new names, thus ensuring that if one organization should get into trouble or fall into negative reputation, it would not soil the name of all the others. These ranged from seemingly unrelated fraternal lodges like The Kiwanis, The Shriners, and The Grange, to organizations like The KKK which began as a "respected" and "Christian" organization.

What They Needed from Black People

From black people they needed manual labor. Large landowners needed their crops planted, their cotton picked, their dinners prepared, their houses, businesses, and churches built; and because they bought and sold slaves as if they were work horses or mules, their wealth was very literally tied into them. Female slaves were regularly used for sex, which had the added benefit of creating more slaves/property.

After slavery was abolished, the black population became a threat to the white brotherhood power. The last thing in the world they ever wanted to see was black people getting to vote.That could threaten the white male systemic control and design of society; so throughout the nation’s history to now, laws have been forged and lines drawn to keep black people from voting or obtaining any other power, even including owning a house or land.

Between 1877 and 1950, more than 4000 black people, mostly men, were lynched. These murders were events that sometimes brought 4,000 - 5,000 white spectators, sometimes with souvenirs and even postcards made of the hangings, and spectators often lined up to pose for photos with the hanging dead man. Often it was no secret who the mob instigators were, but they were protected by their brotherhood. After the Civil Rights era, white on black murders changed in nature, becoming fewer and more discreet, but they never stopped.

In 2008 when a black man became President of the United States, the white supermacist arms of the white brotherhood came out in full force from their hiding places; and in 2016 they were instrumental in the election of one who would give them whatever they wanted in exchange for their loyalty to his own personal power. This has unleashed a culture of black murders like we haven’t seen since the lynchings. With the motivation consistently to keep black people from getting to vote, the loyal brothers are turning a blind eye to the most egregious and heinous of murders, most noted by police officer brothers, but also by blatant white supremacists who are literally hunting black people as if they were deer, shooting or running over and disposing of any who are spotted alone. I’m making no assertion here that the mainline fraternal lodges condone such behavior, but the protective network of each other is there nonetheless. “Self defense” they say, or “he was just a lone wolf,” to divert any thought of a network. Then they might put him on leave, maybe even suspend his pay for a time, maybe even let him go to jail for a couple of years, but ultimately the network has his back.



What They Needed from Women

From women their needs were twofold. They needed sex, and they needed a wife to cook and care for them at home. It would seem their strategies could be simpler here, right? But they aren’t. 

In order to keep a woman at home, she must be dependent on her husband for survival. Thus the early laws that only men could attend college and the cultural expectation that a woman’s place was in the home. Outside work was a threat to that dependency, giving her money with which she might support herself.  A sinister aside to this education strategy is that now, because there are more women than men graduating from college, there is a white male strategy to disavow college education, making it meaningless, and encouraging instead church schools, some of which are being named “colleges” without any credentials or legitimate accreditations. The goal: men remain in control.

The best way to keep a woman from working outside the home is to keep her pregnant and busy with child-raising. Read that again. The biggest blow to this strategy was the birth control pill in 1960. Anything that can stop pregnancy is the enemy to the brotherhood power. Thus the current political manipulation of religious groups about abortion. Taught that “liberals” are “baby killers,” rather than that “liberals” are against elected men making decisions that control women. Nobody, by the way, is pro-abortion; and the “partial-birth abortion” propaganda being shown and touted in churches comes out of right-wing politics as a manipulation of the vast population of so-called evangelical voters. Real pro-life and pro-choice are not mutually exclusive of the other.

Now stay with me here. This gets deeper. What better way to keep women under control than to convince them that it’s God’s idea. Southern Baptists, for example, have an annual preaching and Sunday School teaching rotation that regularly reminds women that the man is the head of the home, that wives are to submit to their husbands, and even that they are to say yes to sex anytime their husband wants it. God says so, because the men wrote and designed the doctrines and the study curriculums.

Women are not left completely out of the fraternal orders. They have their own companion organizations, often called auxiliaries. Auxiliaries by their very name are supplements or add-ons to something else. They don’t stand alone, and their teachings are controlled by the main (male) organization. The role of women’s (or ladies’) auxiliaries is subordination, support, and assistance to the main (men only) organization. This distinction begins early. In Southern Baptist mission training of children, for example, the boys’ organization was originally named Royal Ambassadors (RAs) and the girls’, Girls Auxiliary (GAs). 

Until 1920 women also were not allowed to vote (and then, only white women). Just as with black people, voting is power, and women had no business with that kind of power. When the women’s movement won the women’s right to vote, another of the learned white fraternity strategies came into play. Intimidating. Manipulating and belittling woman into believing that only men need to care about politics, and only men can properly understand it. Then, not only does the woman’s vote not make a difference, but it can even be two votes for the man as he instructs his wife in how to vote.

Take-overs

In the 1970s a power marriage took place between conservative politics and fundamentalist religion. This was a carefully conceived strategy led by Jerry Falwell Sr., father of the Jerry Falwell of recent “pool boy” fame. This union would be a boon to the Republican Party and a political infusion to denominations like the Southern Baptists, who would be led to focus their religious fervor on the white fraternity political issues of abortion and homosexuality, both threats to white male control. 

Although the brotherhood members were in the framework of the establishment and on-going organization of the Southern Baptist churches from the Convention’s 1845 inception, in a fierce denominational battle that spanned from the 1970s through the 1990s, the male power network officially gained full control, one entity at a time, of all the SBC resources, boards, and seminaries. Control of the seminaries, the educational grounds for future church leaders, ensured perpetuation of the political takeover. All administrators, leaders, and individual churches that refused to embrace their ideology, were ousted from the Convention. With the SBC being the largest Protestant religious denomination in the country, with currently over 14.5 million members (2019), this was no small victory for the white brotherhood network. 

Despite its large membership, the SBC was in some ways an easy target. Already, with few exceptions, only men were allowed to be pastors or deacons, and denominational education materials indoctrinated church members to believe that God set men in power over everything. Still the take-over was a huge undertaking; but it would not be their biggest.

2009 saw the beginning of a spin-off extreme right political group that called itself the Tea Party, set out to take over all the local, state, and national politics. The ultimate power grab. And, although the Tea Party name didn’t hold a respectable reputation for long, they successfully overtook the mainstream Republican Party, much of which was already a part of them.

Election 2020

Therefore . . . Are you still with me? . . .Our current political storm. It’s not an isolated battle of black vs. white, or men vs. women, or even Republican vs. Democrat, in any traditional sense, as neither the president nor the Republican party is traditional Republican. Rather, it is a war, and quite a nasty one, between white male control for absolute economic, political, and social power, and Democrats who are fighting against that complete power grab.

I’m not sure there’s any such thing as a “normal election,” but this one is definitely not that. The thousands of white power brotherhood organizations will be voting for the Republican Party, which now belongs to them until traditional Republicans can find a way to take back the party. The rest of us MUST vote Democrat. Not because Democrats get everything right, but because, in this particular moment in history, Democrats are trying to save our very Democracy from an internal white power terrorism like we cannot begin to imagine.

Friends and family, we have all been manipulated and brainwashed. Yes, white men included. So many white men in the lower levels of the fraternal organizations, or in leadership positions in their churches, are not aware that they are being played as pawns on a chess board, perpetuating a worldview completely contrary to that of the biblical Jesus that so many of them profess and passionately desire to follow. Maybe pride, or too many decades of indoctrination, or maybe the fraternal bonds themselves, will keep them from hearing this alarm, but the rest of us must break away. Vote Republican again after the Republican party reclaims itself, but this November, all true US patriots must vote against this takeover, even if it means voting separate from your husband, son, or pastor.

White Brotherhood Strategies

Allow me to shift gears here. For the sake of your reading time, I will skip here the analysis of the current president and how he fits into this whole white male power system. He doesn’t fit neatly into any party or any fraternity or lodge. The strategies he brings to his corrupt politics overlap but are not identical to the institutional strategies of white male power. I will highlight here six major strategies that are easily recognized if we begin to watch for them. These are not new strategies, but tried and true strategies that have manipulated and controlled people like us across many centuries and cultures.

1.Gaslighting and Intimidation take many forms. The idea is to question the speaker in such a way as to make them question their own intelligence or sanity. Gaslighting might be overt or very subtle, making us doubt ourselves or feel like we are less intelligent. It can be as simple as the criticism of “women drivers” (coined because driving was another way women gained their independence), or as deeply woven into us as religious doctrines of depravity and guilt. Now we are seeing it constantly in social media in the laughing emoji to intimidate / laugh at those who post anything “liberal.” 

One strategy that has worked effectively for centuries is name calling. If we give a group of people a label and use that label derogatorily, we dehumanize the group, making them less intelligent, less important, or less human than “us.” Women drivers. Old wives (and their tales). “Baby killers.” “Feminist” and “Feminazi” are the names pinned to women who don’t accept that women are subservient to men. Vietnamese soldiers were brainwashed to call their enemies “gooks,” making them less human and easier to kill. And the N word. 

The current president uses this strategy constantly: the Chinese virus, Crooked Hillary, Sleepy Joe, Pocahontas, nasty Women . . . Perhaps the greatest current example is the word “liberal,” which comes from the same root as “liberty” and “library,” meaning free or open to views different from one’s own. It has become a derogatory word, though, used to describe anything or anybody that disagrees with extreme white male politics. It works as a dehumanizer because we have fallen for the gaslighting.

2.Terrorism and Threats are the ultimate intimidation. Cross burning. Lynchings. Church shootings. Cowardly anonymous threats on the lives of People of Color and/or Women running for office or speaking out in power. Ask any of them. They have stories.

3.Truth has no meaning. Lying has no meaning. Say whatever might save you at the moment, whatever might get you a vote, whatever might keep you out of trouble, whatever pops into your head, no matter how ridiculous, no matter if you said exactly the opposite yesterday. For example: Following the 2020 Democratic National Convention , the president tweeted that the DNC left “under God” out of the pledge of allegiance. Then later the NC Republican Party mailed cards to households across the state repeating this blatant lie. Why? Because if people see it in writing, they will believe it without question, and it will anger them against voting for “liberals,” and if anyone were to sue them for blatant lies, they know the voting damage has already been done, and also that the case would take longer than the election.

Denial fits into this strategy. Just deny every accusation, even if it’s right there in plain view; even if you just said the opposite to a different group of listeners and it’s on record for all to see.

Another form of this is Accusation, accusing the opposition of the corruption you yourself committed, before they can accuse you. Then, when they do accuse you, it becomes a “he said, he said,” farce, as if neither is truthful. This is another favorite of the current president. Want to learn his secrets? Listen carefully to the out-of-the-blue accusations he makes about his opponents.

4. Another strategy, especially of our current presidential administration is Bombarding, or shooting so much corruption without pause so that it’s impossible for opponents or outsiders to keep up with or to react to all that needs reaction.

5. Strategy number five: Distraction or diversion. When something damaging is being exposed, it’s a strategy to distract attention from it, with whatever might divert people’s attention.

6. Finally, Education is critical to the longevity of any ideology, especially through the institutions of school and church. If we wanted to perpetuate the superiority of white men, we could fill children’s history books and curriculum with photos and stories of mostly no one except “dead white men,” particularly those the secret societies know belonged to their own. The best way to perpetuate any thought into the future is to make it a part of every child’s education, including the important job of textbook writing. A quick Google search, for example, will bring up innumerable shamefully whitewashed textbook descriptions of American slavery and “happy” slaves.

Second only to schools, places of worship are the most strategic institutions for perpetuating whitewashed history, politics, etc. Especially in the denominations in which leaders have little or no educational requirements, or in which their educational institutions are self-contained (i.e. taught by their own), this is a relatively easy target now, thanks to centuries of carefully laid groundwork. Find an isolated passage in the Bible that appears to make your point, and preach/teach it repeatedly as coming straight from God’s mouth. In the SBC, for example, all 47,500+ churches celebrate a Sanctity of Human Life Sunday every year, in which they reiterate the evils of abortion, using two verses (Psalm 139:13-14) for which the writer had no thought whatsoever of abortion. Yet, because of the indoctrination, the mere mention of the verses automatically takes the more than 14.5 million Southern Baptist minds to their politics of abortion.  Any teaching can perpetually and repeatedly be spread to thousands of churches through the Sunday School curriculum, and through the training curricula of future ministers.

The deteriorating quality of educational testing has also made indoctrination (or brainwashing) simpler. When a unit on the Holocaust, for example, is tested objectively with “How many Jews died?” rather than “What could make an entire nation follow the orders of such a corrupt man?” the higher order levels of thinking are not being trained. Memorization, not analysis, synthesis, or problem-solving, becomes the goal.

And, because public schools teach science, which is a threat to some of this brainwashing, many church groups are being encouraged to open their own church-supported or home-based schools, in which they can perpetuate and control their own church teachings, similarly insulating what the children will be taught.

Summary and Final Thoughts

We are living in a frightening time of unprecedented political divisiveness. We see voices of color crying out. We hear young voices and women’s voices yelling to be heard. We identify the politics and sometimes the religion. These cries are not separate from each other. The connecting thread is the centuries old white male fraternal network, the brotherhood of white male power and loyalty, divided into many names for its own posterity, but no longer secret.

The white fraternity lodge culture is losing ground in American society  as the younger generations of men are finding their relationships and identities elsewhere. Freemasonry in the US has declined from 4.1 million members in 1960 to fewer than 2 million at this writing. While this is good news to “liberty and justice for all,” the fraternal mindset is so woven into our nation’s framework that we rarely recognize its face when we are looking squarely at it.

Fraternal orders have made great contributions to our communities, states, and nation. For much they are to be commended and appreciated. Against the insular hoarding of wealth and power, however, the time has come for us to take a stand, to finally make good on our American dream of “all humans are created equal." Daddies, brothers, and uncles, will you join us, side by side, in this movement for change? Your mothers, your sisters, your daughters and granddaughters, your black and brown and Jewish and Muslim coworkers and neighbors are watching for your courageous response.

Disclaimers

1. This article is not saying that white men are bad. This article is not saying that members of white male secret societies are bad. This article is not saying that all members of white male secret societies condone the evil racist acts and ideologies of the KKK and neo-Nazi organizations that use much of their ritual and teaching. This article is not saying that white male fraternal organizations do not also use their wealth and power for valuable contributions to society. It IS saying that the most threatening terrorists and the greatest danger to our democratic republic are white and male, and that they are not “lone wolves” but a long and strongly established network of intentional power.

2. Most of the mainline fraternal organizations have made valuable contributions in the building and framing of our culture, and some have abandoned the racist and sexist philosophies embedded in their beginnings. The writer of this article says thank you for both, and adds a strong challenge that those lodges that now know and do better will openly own their past and intentionally work to tear down and rebuild what has proven detrimental to our national, spiritual, relational, and political health.

The Writer

The writer of this article is a Republican-turned-Independent and writes out of love for our country and our democracy, not for any political party, although in this election she will vote almost entirely Democrat. She grew up in a rural one-stoplight town and has always lived in the South. Her religious background and seminary training are Southern Baptist.

Through several decades she has been in close relationship with freemasons and other fraternal lodge members. She has read a number of books and magazines published by the organizations themselves and by men within them. The information within this article, however, can be found on-line freely accessible to all.

Suggested Reading

1984, by George Orwell, 1949. Sometimes dangerous warnings have to be presented as fiction, to protect the author

Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson, 2020. If you only have time for one book, this one.

When Everything Changed, by Gail Collins, 2009. HIstory of Women 1960s to 2009

White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, 2018. Why it’s hard for white people to talk about racism

White Too Long, by Robert P. Jones, 2020. White American Christianity’s shockingly intimate relationship with white supremacy

Suggested Watching

13th 2016 documentary about the 13th Amendment and how law enforcement, the courts, and the prison system by design perpetuate racial inequality

The Handmaid’s Tale 2017 TV series based on Margaret Atwood’s novel; society where women are property

B124. Seminary Reflections and a Lunch Postponed

To my memory I never met her, although her name calls to me with familiarity and kinship, and we walked the same brick walkways across the Southeastern Seminary campus, the paths that devoured many of my shoe heels and likely hers.  Donna Forrester was a doctoral student at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, then from 1984 to 1989 the campus chaplain, controversial because of her gender, during those most painful years of the seminary’s fundamentalist takeover.

Denying the Bible. Destroying the Faith. These were the accusations ricocheting through the walls of fundamentalist churches across the nation. The seminary had to be cleansed and saved, they were saying.  Among other grievous sins, it was training women as ministers, and even had a woman theology professor and a woman chaplain, they said.

Donna knew what she was getting into. She was warned before taking the job that she was entering a warzone. I was far more naïve, entering as an MDiv student in the summer of 1989 as a wide-eyed life-long Baptist, expecting to live the next 3 years of my life in a Jesus-loving paradise on earth.

My Southern Baptist upbringing had been almost a checklist of rules: Attend church every Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday evening. Give to the church the first 50 cents of your $5 weekly allowance. Don’t drink. Don’t smoke. Don’t “cuss.” Don’t have sex. Don’t question God.  Ask Jesus into your heart, and you’ll be saved once and forever.

I hungered for more. My private relationship with God called me to something deeper, something more life-sustaining. Once in a while I caught a glimpse. When I was nine years old, my mom taught the children’s January Bible Study on the book of Job. It was the first time I’d ever heard an entire book of the Bible and talked about it. Later sometime in my teen years, Mrs. Evelyn Wilson, our pastor’s wife, taught the youth Vacation Bible School class in the living room of the parsonage, and we learned about other books that didn’t make it into the Bible. I was fascinated and longed to learn more.  In college I took a class on the New Testament in which we studied the Scripture from a historical perspective: What was going on in the context of the writings? What did first century Middle Eastern life look like? Who were the writers?  How did they write, and to whom? I loved that class like no other and was sad to finish it. I was hungry, thirsty – perhaps like a deer panting for streams of water.

At age 28 I enrolled at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary with a foreign missions dream. I loved seminary. I studied Theology, Apologetics, Issues of Ministry to Youth and to Older Adults, Other Religions, Pastoral Care (including courses in counseling for addictions and counseling in sexuality issues), the Bible in context, Church History and Baptist History, Missions, Church Administration, even Church Libraries . . . I visited Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Halls and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. I spent one summer church planting for the Home Mission Board. Another summer I spent eight hours every day translating Scripture from its original Hebrew into English, eleven hours if I count class time.

Despite some valuable and life-changing intentional learning in seminary, my greatest lessons might be the outside-the-classroom ones with which I’ve been wrestling for 25 years as I’ve tried to make sense of the denominational war on whose battleground I unintentionally found myself. I am still processing but have come a long way since my 1991 graduation.

 I have learned that we never know the entire story of any controversy if we have only heard the story from one side. I’ve learned that all of us are products of what we have been taught and of our own experiences. I’ve learned that God is greater than any human mind can fathom and that those who claim to have all the answers might be the ones who know the least. I’ve learned that what we often pass as Christianity is merely “ianity,” missing the Christ for whose life and teachings we are named, the Jesus whose main message is to love God and each other and to care for the oppressed, the poor, the forgotten. I have learned that the most difficult lessons are those we have to first unlearn – like that white people are God’s favored, or that women’s purpose is to serve men, or that God favors America, or that Christianity is Republican, or that everything in life is black or white, right or wrong, clear and simple.

This week I read Servant Songs (1994, ed. Thomas Bland), a book of reflections on Southeastern Seminary, written by several of the faculty and administrators who were replaced during the takeover,  one of the chapters of which was written by Dr. Forrester. I fell in love with her, bonding with her every word, until I knew I must meet her. I finished the chapter, determined to find where she is now and make a road trip, even if just to meet her for lunch. But a quick google led first to her obituary. I missed her by just a few months. New Year’s Eve, 2015, following a battle with cancer. Age 66. I wept. As if a part of me had just died.

The story is a beautiful one though, a God story. For even after death, God continues to use true servants – like Mother Teresa, Lottie Moon, Martin Luther King Jr., Dietrich Bonhoeffer -  and Donna Forrester - to teach, to heal, to exemplify sacrificial Christ following, walking across hot coals or heel-crunching brick walks.

In Servant Songs Donna describes Southeastern’s late 1980’s students as falling into one of three categories: those sympathetic to the fundamentalist takeover, those supportive of the previous seminary faculty and administration, and a third category of students who tried to stay out of the controversy, who must have, according to her, buried their heads in the sand. I think she missed this one.

I was in this third group, a definite minority, but not because I chose to ignore the war. It was because I didn’t know which voices to heed. I began a popular weekly prayer and praise fellowship in the basement of the women’s dorm, with one rule – that we would pray and sing together without mention of the controversy. Although a few from the second category attended occasionally, one finally informed me that my one rule was hurtful to only them as they were the ones being hurt by the controversy. The war was their prayers. It was their song of lament before God.

Early in my first semester I thought I was going to a Missions fellowship meeting, and as the meeting progressed I realized I was sitting in a Women in Ministry meeting. Mostly women sitting in a large circle, a few men also, all angry and hurt. They were surprised and glad to see me there. I never told them it was an accident.

I remember a research paper I wrote for my Old Testament class in which I processed and synthesized some challenging reading assignments, then let a friend read before I turned it in. The fundamentalist friend complimented my work and suggested I add a disclaimer statement to the end letting the professor know I had satisfied the assignment but that the paper was not a reflection of what I believed.

 Another day I was visiting a woman in the dorm, of the moderate camp, who was frustrated with my ignorance about the whole denominational war. She told me one day I would get it. At that time I saw her as arrogant and insulting, but she was right. Eventually (and slowly) I did get it.

Most of my professors were those who would soon be leaving. Yet I never met any professor who fit the accusations that bounced off all the walls. All my professors and instructors exemplified great depth of content  knowledge, profound respect for Scripture, and deep spiritual maturity. I am so grateful for those years in which there is no doubt my Christian faith, my biblical understanding, and my own spiritual formation were strengthened. My sincerest thank you (and apologies for any paper disclaimers!) to Sam Balentine, Bill Clemmons, Albert Meiburg, Dick Hester, Richard Spencer, Thomas Bland, Thomas Halbrooks, Glenn Miller, George Braswell, Fred Grissom, John Eddins, Michael Hawn, Robert Culpepper, and Furman Hewitt. Also Jacqueline Anderson, Charles Beckett, Charles McMillan Jr., Hal Melton, RG Puckett, Russ Bush, and Roger Nix.

And to Donna Forrester who inspired these reflections with her own, and with whom I still hope to have lunch once I get to where she is.

Note:  Dr. Donna Forrester died Dec. 31, 2015 at age 66, following a 14-year battle with brain cancer. She held an MDiv from Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville KY and a DMin from Southeastern Baptist Seminary in Wake Forest where she returned to serve as campus chaplain 1984-1989 leaving in the exodus following the fundamentalist takeover. Then she served as Minister of Pastoral Care and Counseling 1989-2006 at First Baptist Church Greenville SC, and in 2000-2001 as national moderator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

Photo credit: from SEBTS' 1988 directory

B109. Remembering My Baptism

The stone is my reminder. During the worship service this morning, the pastor invited us to remember our own baptisms as we took a stone from the baptismal font.  As I remembered, I also realized that most of those sitting around me probably did not have a literal memory of their own baptism (as babies) but a corporate symbolic memory and a contemplation of what it means to their lives. As a life-long Baptist until a couple of years ago switching to Presbyterian, I contemplated both.

It was 1970, and I was eight years old. Southern Baptist from birth, I attended with my family the same small rural church that my father had attended with his family when he was a child. We were fixtures there. If the doors were open, we were there – every service, every training, every event. Everything I had known or experienced was filtered through my understanding of the Church.

I was always a thinking child, insulted at age three and a half when the hospital nurse brought my new baby sister out to the car and asked me if I wanted to see my new baby doll. Did I really look like I didn’t know the difference between a baby and a baby doll, I wanted to ask her, but I just smiled.  And I can remember some of the contemplative moments of trying to find who I was in the world in relation to who everyone else was. Though the answers weren't clear, I would contemplate how others might be seeing events in my life, based on how I saw the events of theirs. I remember realizing as a young child that others were not constantly thinking of me, just as I was not constantly thinking of them, and that what interested or mattered most to me did not necessarily interest or matter most to everyone else.

And I was always a spiritual child, interested in all I could learn about God, and internalizing at a very young age that God was about shaping our entire lives. I hungered for deeper understanding. Hypocrisy confused me, and I didn't understand how someone could possibly not be passionate if s/he internalized the call to live for God.

Second grade was an especially spiritual year for me. My best friend was also Christian and Baptist, and the two of us became little evangelists of sorts that year. During recesses we would walk around the playground singing hymns as a witness to all our classmates. Our favorites were “There’s within my heart a melody . . .” and “Just As I Am,” probably because between the two of us we could remember all the words to all the verses. And often we would ask our teacher to let us sing for the class, to which she consented.

Mrs. Jessup herself taught us blessing songs that we sang as a class as we lined up to go for lunch, like the Johnny Appleseed Blessing;* and we memorized a poem** that we recited to the class individually about God painting the trees. I don’t remember either of those being meaningful to me in a spiritual way, nor even ever thinking about the meaning of what we were saying, but looking back, it was all a part of the culture of my year.

The grass on our playground that year was covered with those little white flowery clovers that attract bees, and I remember entertaining my schoolmates by catching the bees in my hand to show them that God would protect me from being stung. I remind you here, I was raised Baptist, and I don’t know where I got that charismatic streak! My parents would not have been amused!  Miraculously I was never stung, and thankfully I don’t remember the others wanting to try it for themselves!

I also remember praying a lot that year for a Native American girl on the playground. She always kept to herself, and I wanted to be her friend. I remember she would run, fast, like a deer, from one end of the playground to the other, over and over, and I used that a couple of times to try to befriend her. I was fairly athletic for an 8-year-old, but I couldn’t begin to keep up with her, nor was I able to win her friendship before she moved away almost as quickly as she had come.

I was so interested in pleasing God (to my level of understanding) that I "broke up" with my boyfriend that year (We had a history all the way back to first grade!) because he said he didn't go to church, and I didn't want to be "unequally yoked."

In April of 1970 my church was in its annual week of Revival, which meant a visiting preacher would lead services every evening of the week, and of course my family was there every evening. These services usually featured high powered sermons followed by lengthy emotional altar calls, giving everyone a chance to accept Jesus right now because none of us could know if we had another day. It was during those services when most people would make decisions to join the church and be baptized.

I don’t remember being especially moved by the services, but I had decided this week would probably be my week to join the church. I knew I wanted to live my life for God, whatever that might come to mean, and while I was terrified at the thought of being dunked under the water, I accepted that that was part of the deal, and I reasoned myself through it. I had never heard of anyone drowning while being baptized, and I could put it off indefinitely but eventually it would still have to happen. I might as well put that dreaded part behind me.  

On Monday evening several responded to the altar call, but I chose to wait, not wanting anyone to think I was just copying someone else; so on Tuesday evening, despite being disappointed that the invitation hymn was not the usual “Just As I Am,” which I thought would’ve made the moment more perfect for me, I walked down the aisle and whispered to Pastor Broadway the only thing I knew to say. Having watched my entire short life as people walked the aisle and whispered something privately to the pastor, and having never been privy to hearing what they said, I had tuned in one recent Sunday on the drive home from church when my four-year-old sister had asked my mom what she had said that day when she responded to the altar call. My mom explained in child speak that she had said (obviously in retrospect a personal rededication)  she needed to love Jesus more. So that’s what I said: "I need to love Jesus more." Pastor Broadway thought that was cute and repeated my words to the congregation as the innocence of simple childlike faith. I thought I was just saying what everyone said.

Less than two weeks later, on Sunday afternoon, May 5, we had a baptismal service for the 16 who had made decisions during the Revival week. We ranged in age from eight to adult, and all of us lived through the dunking.

Fast forward almost 45 years to today.

I’m pretty sure my pastor this morning didn’t mean to send me on such a literal memory, but it was fun to go there too as I contemplated with the others about the meaning of it all. Being set aside to represent Christ in a world of confusion, to serve in whatever ways God might place before us, to take the road less traveled, to share God’s love. I turned the wet stone over and over in my palm, and I remembered.

*The Johnny Appleseed Blessing:
Oh, the Lord’s been good to me
And so I thank the Lord
for giving me the things I need
the sun, the rain, and the apple seed
The Lord’s been good to me.

**The poem (Thanks Al and Becky!!)
In my back yard the master works. He works among the trees. 
With lovely tints of every shade he’s painting all the leaves. 
He paints some red, he paints some green and some a golden hue. 
Some are shining in the sun, some glistening in the dew. 
The blackgum tree is turning red, the oak is burnish brass. 
The hickory tree has turned to gold, old gold a shimmering mass. 
I do not have to travel far nor make my journey hard to see the master’s handiwork.
It’s in my own back yard. 
For in my yard the master works, he works among the trees. 
With lovely tints of every shade he’s painting all the leaves.

B93. Southern Baptists Are At It Again

The Southern Baptist Convention is at it again, in session this week in Baltimore, this time adding transgender people to its resolutions.

I don’t know when I first became interested in Jehovah’s Witnesses, maybe as a child when my church always warned against them, yet they continued regularly to walk the neighborhoods knocking on every door.  Later as I began to study them seriously though, I asked myself over and over, how can anyone choose a religious group with such a history.  

Several times the organization announced exact dates for the end of the world. The dates came and went, but the predictions brought dramatically increasing numbers into the society, with people not wanting to be left out should the world really end.  And by the time the next end of the world date was set, it was to a new audience, a new generation, who knew nothing of the previous times.

I understand now that their exposure to their own group and my exposure to it were very different experiences.  From the outside, I studied their almost 150 year history, their founding leaders, their beliefs and practices in comparison with those of other religious groups, etc.  The JWs though had never been taught their own history, but rather what was needed to perpetuate the group in the present: which verses of Scripture to use as talking points and how to interpret and explain them, public speaking skills, treating others with respect and kindness . . .

Now, I was never a JW, but for the first 49 years of my life I was Southern Baptist, a very devout and involved Southern Baptist, and often I find myself asking the same question: How can anyone remain in a denomination with such a history? But as an insider, I think I know.  It’s the same as with the JWs.  The church members know very little about their own denominational history, and if at some later point they encounter it, they are so entrenched in the SBC culture that they are able to ignore it, especially if the friendship bonds within the church are strong.  (Unlike the JWs though, they can leave without being formally shunned by family and friends!)

 

Like the JWs, they focus repeatedly on certain Scripture passages and how to interpret them (although they focus on different ones from the JWs).  They are taught weekly that the Bible was spoken directly from God and that every word should be taken literally as a daily instruction book for life.  (If some of the words don’t make sense, just ask the pastor to interpret them for you.)  They are taught, at least on an annual rotation, that God designed men as the heads of the home, and that if wives submit to their husbands, and husbands treat their wives with love, all is in perfect order.  And their teachings are presented, not as Baptist teachings, but as Christian teachings; thus anyone who questions the teachings is also questionable as a Christian.

In the past 30-40 years, the Southern Baptists have blurred with conservative party politics, making anti-abortion and anti-gay politics indistinguishable from the “all have sinned / repent and live forever” culture.  This marriage has created a very different denomination from the one my grandparents knew.

But even before the political mix, there was a history that is not advertised from the pulpit.  The denomination formed in 1845 in response to slavery tensions.  The Southern Baptists were pro-slavery and increasingly in disagreement with the Northern Baptists, leading to a denominational split.  To their credit, in 1995,  132 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the denomination apologized for its racist history and elected in 2012 its first black president, whose two-year stint ended this week.

So why even talk about it now?  Because, although I have never heard a racist comment made from any Southern Baptist pulpit (well, OK, there was once, and perhaps the fact that I witnessed a gun being pointed at a young black man after a worship service counts for something), racism is not dissolved by mere words or resolutions; and, for probably a collection of sociological reasons, the people who make up the Southern Baptist churches overlap greatly with the very present white supremacist population of the South.  Racism is so entrenched in Southern rural culture that it is unnoticed by most, and most would surely label themselves non-racist and believe it.  In their defense, having been enclosed in the Southern Baptist fence, often for a lifetime, they have not seen themselves through any other lens.  In their view, they would not intentionally treat a black person unkindly, thus they are not racist.

Now add to that, the patriarchal culture of men as the “head.”  In Southern Baptist culture, women cannot be pastors, deacons, or teachers of men.  They are to teach children and other women, and do the behind the scenes church work.  In 2000, the SBC leadership revised the Baptist Faith and Message  to reiterate the submissive role of women in church and family.

And then, thanks to the political blur, there are the gay issues.  The SBC has consistently taken a hard right position on all issues involving homosexuality.  While other denominations are grappling with issues like marriage and ordination, in 2006 the NC Baptist State Convention voted to throw out any church that advocated homosexuality in any way, including knowingly having a gay person in its membership.

Which brings us to the new issue this week: transgender people, an estimated 700,000 in the U.S.  Let it be known, says the apparently omniscient denomination, that these people do not exist.  God created two genders, distinguishable by genitalia, and any gender-confusion is sin. Just like with sexual orientation though, prayer and repentance can change you and save you.  You tried prayer and repentance and it didn’t un-confuse you?  Well, that’s because you didn’t have enough faith, Southern Baptists would tell you.  Pray harder.

Ironically, also in Baptist dialogue this week was the lament over declining baptism and membership numbers in recent years, and the attempt to deal with the question of why.  Rather than listening to the many readily available voices of youth, women, gay people, and people who synthesize the changing world around them, who are exiting the SBC in droves, leaders are concluding that the denomination has not been diligent enough with evangelizing the unchurched.   More irony: the convention delegates sang Amazing Grace.

Oh God, the things we do and say in your name . . . We have surpassed our allotted 70 times 7.  I hope those numbers were not to be taken literally.

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Note 1: Southern Baptists are the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. with a membership of almost 16 million.

Note 2: This blog is about the Southern Baptist Convention polity and leadership, not meant to be a blanket statement defining every SBC church or member.  Autonomy of the Local Church has been a traditional mainstay in the SBC, but in the past 20-30 years, it has been chipped away.

Note 3:  On transgender people: I certainly don't pretend to understand everything, and I think that's an OK place for most of us to be. For denominations too.  Why make a resolution about transgender people, unless it happens to be one of grace?  Here's the story of one of the 700,000: Ryland's Story (I found the music distracting. You might want to turn down the sound.)

Related blog posts:

B3. God Did Not Write the Bible

B8. Leaving Church

B24. Why You Can't Reason with Evangelical Christians

B24. Why You Can't Reason with Evangelical Christians

Hi.  I’m Kathy, and I’m a recovering Southern Baptist.  I was born that way, or at least into that path of experience.  I was raised in a devout Southern Baptist family in a small rural community in the heart of the Bible Belt.  I listened well to the teachings and remained an exemplary Baptist until I left my church this past April at age 49.  I have not and will not leave the Christian faith, but have come to realize there is a vast chasm between that which is truly of God and that which is human indoctrination and tradition, alongside the realization that few in the Christian Church ever question that distinction.

Such Christians are not bad people.  In fact, they are extremely committed to being the best people they can be, based on their taught understanding of what that means.  Nor are they necessarily uneducated people, but their religious indoctrination often erases their capacity for acquiring and applying knowledge outside of the evangelical box in which they live.

Fundamental Christians are taught from birth to see the world and everything in it as good or bad, us or them, right belief or wrong belief, everything clearly black or white.  “If you believe what we tell you to believe, you are on God’s side.  If you don’t believe what we tell you to believe, you are on Satan’s side.”  They are taught an idolatrous attachment to the Bible, worshiping it as written by God in God’s exact words to be understood literally in answer to every issue of our 21^st century American lives.  To propagate such an understanding though, like every other Bible teaching group, their leadership must carefully pick and choose which passages they will stress, and explain to the learners how to interpret them.   This is done through weekly Bible Study materials distributed to all the churches and through the deliberate training of future pastors in their own educational institutions. 

Now the scariest part of Evangelical Christianity is what has happened to it in the past few decades.  Beginning in the 1970s under the power of men like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and James Dobson, the face of Christianity in America took a drastically wrong* turn.  These men, seeing the potential power of the Christian Church and its sheeplike ability to follow, constructed a new bulwark of conservative political power, deceiving the Christian community into accepting that to follow God meant to follow their version of ultra-conservative politics.  Thus Republicanism and political issues such as abortion and homosexuality suddenly became Evangelical Christian issues, with “right belief” being indoctrinated by the Church and “wrong belief” meaning one was outside God’s favor.

Soon, every issue, whether political, moral or doctrinal became a war of words.  No longer was faith a personal mystical search for God, but rather a recitation of all the right words.  Saying we love our neighbor took the place of actually loving him.  Voicing agreement to give our lives to Christ saved us for eternity, taking the place of struggling daily to actually live such a life.  Worshiping the Bible and fighting for it took the place of actually reading, studying and striving to understand it.  Being a good Republican took the place of personally thinking through and struggling with issues.

Now, as a direct result of that 1970s power movement, Evangelicals no longer have a need to think or reason.  They get all they need from such power-mongering pontificators as Rush Limbaugh, Shawn Hannity, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and any political leader of the far right.

Still all human beings have the capacity to reason, don’t they?  Maybe not.  We can be indoctrinated/brainwashed (same thing really) to do or not to do anything.  Evangelicals have been so indoctrinated that they have lost their ability to reason, or perhaps better said, they see such reasoning as sinful before God.  If God (through church interpretations of the Bible, through Fox News, through Republican politics) has said black, then to consider white or gray or purple, or to listen to someone reason about it, is to oppose God.  There is no argument of reason that can stand up against what God has clearly said.  Therefore to reason with a Fundmental Christian is a frustrating and futile experience.

 To my evangelical/fundamental friends and family:  We desire the same thing.  Political culture is not God.  God existed long before ultra-Republicans or Fox News or gay bashing, and God will exist long after all of these have become just ugly blots in the face of American history.  What will endure is the love Christ so fervently taught and demonstrated.  Can we live it and share it in more than just right words?



Disclaimer:  This blog makes a generalized observation of Evangelical Christianity.  It is not meant to be a description of every evangelical church nor of every individual with them.  Likewise, it is not meant to be a statement against any political party in and of itself.

*I am not making a judgment here about these men's politics, but rather about the marriage they brought about between right-wing politics and Christianity, via the formation of the Moral Majority, the Religious Right.