I used to say I was the most self-righteous person in the world because I was totally self-righteous about self-righteousness. Haven’t said that in awhile but unfortunately I think it still holds true for me. I could not stand some of the members of the First Baptist Church where I grew up because to me as a teenager they were so judgmental about everything and everybody. Self-recognition!
I loved those early ministers that I experienced though, Dr. P.D. O’Brien and Dr. Bob Pollard. They were such gentle men and such great theologians, St. James Bible version, but that was their time and their place in history. They were seldom fire and brimstone preachers although some of the deacons certainly were and that was who I had so much disdain for.
“ Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world! Red, brown, yellow, black and white! They are precious in his sight! Jesus loves the little children of the world!” I loved that song as a child, but I could not understand why our town had a track and why people had to live on the other side of it, why some children could not go to school with me, why the braceros from Mexico would walk in their huarache sandals through our town, sometimes walking all the way to Kansas and Nebraska just to find jobs working in the fields. It just didn’t make sense to me and it did not fit with what I was learning on Sunday at church!
I was a big reader like my mother and younger sister and Mother and I always were discussing different books. I discovered Leon Uris and Herman Wouk and learned about the horrors of World War II and the concentration camps! How could that happen? How could people build Auschwitz and Treblinka and all the other monstrous facilities where so many innocent people were murdered, thousands and thousands? Six million people! How could these Nazi monsters exist? Probably considered themselves good Christians too!
I learned about Jesse Owens, an incredible athlete who was so maligned by Adolf Hitler in the 1936 Olympics!
I read Gone With the Wind and was entranced with the passion and beauty of the Old South but could not understand the duplicity and depravity of slavery. This did not compute with “Jesus loves the little children…”! Why were there foreign mission boards when people were suffering horrible discrimination and segregation just across town?
As I became an adult, I learned of sit-ins and marches and Selma, Alabama! This was wrong! How could this be? My little old Louisiana-born grandmother of almost a hundred years of age once said in my presence, “ There sure are a lot of good ole white Southern Christians that are going to burn in Hell because of the way they have treated colored people!” Today, if she were, PC, politically correct, she would probably have said “people of color”, but that was then, this is today!”
I shall probably write about this subject forever or at least for several weeks because this is a topic for all eternity, but now I will just stop with a question, “How can any God-fearing, “Good Christian” believe in White Supremacy?” Must have missed all those words written in red!