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?

B204. Renee Nicole Good

satanic powers murdering

kidnapping

terrorizing

selling

raping our neighbors

friends

fellow journeyers

where have the playing children gone

their little songs

the laughter

the cashier with the accent doesn’t smile

or meet our eyes

the doctor with the hard to pronounce name

seems unable to hear

wounded and afraid

at our white awakening

the grief of seeing our own reflection

the black friend  unshocked nods 

wondering if this might awaken us

for longer than a minute

Renee

Nicole

Good

is

us

445     1/8/2026

B192. I Called My Sister a What??

“You dil#o!” I yelled to my little sister. It was a new insult the kids at school were using to call someone stupid. Of course I had no idea what the word meant, but it sounded funny, and I picked it up. My mom sent me to the dictionary to look up the word, then to decide if that was something I wanted to call my little sister. (Impressive parenting moment there!) It was not. I was embarrassed.

I don’t know who started that ridiculous use of that word, or how widespread it was. Was that just my little school circle, or were children across the nation calling each other sex toys? Thankfully, to my memory, it was as short-lived as wearing elephant-leg pants or hairy socks, and I probably wouldn't remember it at all had it not been for that dictionary moment.

As a linguist, what I do know is that words and language, at their roots, are intentional, and a powerful tool for shaping or manipulating our minds. Following are a few words I remember from my childhood that meant little to me at the time but were quietly shaping my prejudices.

The term, jew or jew down, used pejoratively as a verb, meant to bargain down a price to the point of cheating the buyer/seller. “Don’t let him jew you down.” I understood the term as a child, but I knew nothing about Jewish people, and, to my knowledge, there were no Jewish people anywhere near the area where I grew up. Still, the bargaining language I was using was prejudicing my mind for the later time when I would become aware of Jewish people.

Another term I heard as a child was Indian giver. This referred to someone who gave you something and then took it back. Again, as a child, I used the term with my schoolmates without realizing that the term was prejudicing us into thinking that Native American people could not be trusted.

There was another term I used to hear that meant that something broken was not really fixed but was rigged to function a little while, like maybe with a rubber band holding it together. The blatantly racist term was later softened by one letter change to jigger-rigged. As a child, this language taught me that black people weren't smart enough to properly repair something.

My schoolmates also used to tell polack jokes. I had no idea what the word polack meant, that it had anything to do with Poland or Polish, or that it was a pejorative term. The jokes were just about foolish people, similar to the more recent “blond” jokes. How many polacks does it take to screw in a light bulb, etc. Yet, at whatever point in my life I learned what the word polack meant, I already had an ingrained impression about the people.

Let's look at one more. Several of my childhood friends, myself included, had a deck of Old Maid cards. This was a children’s matching game, in which every card had a match except for the Old Maid card, which was forever being traded around, because whoever ended up the Old Maid at the end of the game was the loser. Again, the term old maid meant nothing to me as a child. It was just a game. But whoever originated the idea to market such a game to children had a strategy - to feed into children’s minds that there was something bad about women who did not marry. Otherwise, would he not have chosen to make the unmatched card a skunk or a rotten egg or almost anything else? Why an unmarried woman, which is not even a childhood concept.

Our schoolmates, our parents, and our communities did not make up these terms. The language was passed down to them as children just as it was passed to us, and that earlier generation got it the same way from their elders. My childhood community was agricultural and hard-working, not analyzers of language or studiers of people groups.

At some point in history, each of these terms was deliberately, intentionally, and strategically set into motion by someone or a group of someones who wanted to plant seeds of prejudice into our minds. New terms are continually invading our brain space, coming from politics, social media, religion, etc.

We don’t have to invite them in to stay. We can train ourselves to recognize the terms as invaders and to block them from setting up tents or constructing castles to live forever in our minds. And we can ask ourselves who is benefitting from poisoning our minds with such prejudices, and what is behind such manipulation.

What other prejudicial terms have you encountered?

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Questions for deeper thought:

1. Why target children with terms they don't even understand?

2. How else does this happen? In songs for example.

3. If someone wanted to manipulate the minds of an entire culture, where/how would they make such an attempt? To what ages? Might certain segments of the population be easier to manipulate than others? Why (not)?

4. How can similar strategies be used for good, to teach us love, compassion, and care for each other? Where have you seen examples of this?

B180. White Nationalism: It's Not of God

 You know the men who stormed the Capitol building in 2021? And the men who marched with torches through Charlottesville in 2017? This is White Nationalism, American Fascism, and they are everywhere. In recent years they have taken control of the Republican party. In the 1980s they took control of Southern Baptists, the largest protestant denomination in the country.

Have you ever wondered why people stay in cults. How could women believe that God wanted them all to have sex with the cult leader? Why did everyone drink the poisonous Kool-Aid? Because it happens slowly and methodically. What they hear, what they read, even what they sing, are so controlled that it becomes all they know, and they are indoctrinated to believe that those who speak against their reality are of the devil.

The children born into the system never knew anything different. Many of us are those children.

Have you been indoctrinated to believe that God says men are to be the head of their wives? Have you been indoctrinated that Roe v. Wade is primarily about babies, or that LGBT people are sinners destined to hell? Do you believe God is partial to America, or that college education is detrimental to spirituality? Do you use the word liberal (from the same root as liberty) as a slur? Do you believe that black people and Hispanic people are hardworking good people but created a little lower than you? Dear friend, these indoctrinations are not of God. They are of White Nationalism and White Fascism, and they are about Power and Control. Yes, I know this is not what you have always been told . . . That's what we are both saying.

Once we see it, we can never be un-woke. And if you don't see it, dear friend, you are probably caught inside it, religiously, politically, or both. It is not your fault, but if we don't vote these people out of their positions of power, we are in real danger of becoming a fascist nation where none of us will have basic rights or basic protections.