The Sin of Being a White Right-Wing Christian

    “You should not associate with a brotha [or sista] who is immoral or greedy or worships idols or is a slanderer or a drunkard or a thief. Don’t even sit down to eat with such a person.” (I Corinthians 5:11)

 I’ve seen many PBS specials chronicling how predators stalk their prey. I saw one program in which several wolves stalked a swifter deer across yellow and brown mountains, through dead cornfields, amid grass taller than a basketball player and among trees leafless or green.

They hunted the innocent deer until it breathed so heavily that its breath turned into fog and icicles in the subzero cold. The deer had speed, but the wolves had grit. The wolves wait to devour the deer.

So also does white right-wing Christianity. What do I mean by that, associating white right-wing Christianity with wolves? Well, perhaps I should give a definition of the term first.

I define white right-wing Christianity a little differently than most historians and the definitions you may read in dictionaries and encyclopedias. Is it a movement? No, it is a cult – a puny, sadistic cult. Is it truth? Not even a little bit. It is a heresy, as ruthless and terrifying as any angry, schizophrenic kangaroo.

Let me show, though, how it is a wolf.

I remember an anecdote concerning the daughter of a black Christian Pentecostal woman from Canton, Ohio. The mother had saved thousands of dollars to send her only child to Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. The college is a protestant fundamentalist institution which, through a wicked and satanic interpretation of Acts 17:26, ever since its founding by Bob Jones and Billy Sunday in 1927, taught that segregation was biblical. The school did not renounce its policy prohibiting interracial dating among its students until 2000, when a controversial appearance by then presidential candidate George W. Bush at the campus ignited a national firestorm.

The anecdote tells how this jewel of a black girl grew worn and scarred during her four years at Bob Jones. In the beginning her character was sweet, her morals mild, her theology clean and her beliefs pure.

But by the end of her freshman year, she stopped having her hair braided, wearing corn rows and cutting her hair short. The Bob Jones clan had convinced her that I Peter 3:3 only warranted straight, long hair, like blond and brunette white women wear.

By the end of her sophomore year, she stopped listening to Christian rap and buying Christian hip-hop CDs. At a chapel service one week-day morning, a Bob Jones music professor characterized rap and hip hop as trash and, ripping the original meaning away from Ephesians 5:18-19, argued that God only sanctioned hymns and white spiritual songs.

By the end of her junior year, she rejected the historical and illustrious eloquence of black preaching and joined a white fundamentalist protestant church, where the white ladies encouraged her not to date or kiss the white boys.

By the end of her senior year, she had renounced Martin Luther King, Jr.; civil rights; the Democratic party; love for her fellow human beings; and integration.

If we look at her mutation allegorically, we might feel the damage personally. In her first year, she was a lonely teapot sitting on a stove. By the second year, the teapot was filled with the water of doubt. By the third year, corrosion had turned on the heat, scorching doubt to the point that it changed into rejection of its innocent and wholesome past. By the fourth year, the teapot had boiled with enthusiasm for a new nagging terror.

The sista left Canton, Ohio, a flower; she returned to Canton, Ohio, a cripple. She left as a black pentecostal; she returned as a white fundamentalist. She left as a worshipper of Christ; she returned as a worshipper of idols.