Editorials & Other Articles

And they've picked Barabbas every time.

I grew up in a Southern Baptist church, and got my fill of the mysticism, the rigid legalism, the literalism and the influence of a lot of Southern folk religion and superstition before I went to college. But I didn't have to do much deconstruction of all of that for myself. The theology professors at the Southern Baptist university I attended did most of that for me, destroying, with an in-depth historical and cultural context, separating out each book of the Bible and looking at it as it was originally written, to whom, what prejudices and historical factors affected the context, placing the teachings of Jesus Christ, the Christian gospel as it were, as the interpretive filter for the whole thing. It completely changed almost everything I'd ever been taught in Sunday School and in church, where most of our pastors lacked a theological education.

Some of the best allies in what is going to be the coming war against Trump Fascism and populist oligarchy will be the Baptists of the more moderate to liberal branch of that denominational family. There are organized groups of churches like Carter's Maranatha Baptist, that are as liberal and progressive, and committed to living by the principles of the Christian gospel, as exist in all of American Christendom. They will be the ideological counterpoint to Trump's darkness and Evangelical evil.

I've settled into a comfortable Quaker conscience, but disciplining myself as a peacemaker, when this kind of haywire politics is raging has made it difficult to stay inside the guardrails.