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Michael Marking said:
"I, too, was raised in a Baptist home, and remember well the song, "Jesus
loves the little children..." It was taught to me by the same folk who
expected me to provide, on a school test, some of the reasons that the
"Negroes" were better off as slaves. Some of the same folk who took in
an occasional cross lighting. (That school was in Florida, in the
1960s.) I could go on, but…"
I think Michael is entirely correct to point out the glaring contradiction
between an anti-racist message and other behaviour by some fundamentalist
Christians. I observed this in the church I grew up in.
If the church was going to do outreach among non-whites they had to discourage
racist expressions among their congregants. An uncle of mine told us that he
had one day in Sunday School referred to some housing as “not fit for a
Chinaman.” He was a decent man and felt bad when he realized that he had said
this in front of a Chinese boy.
Our minister tried to discourage the use of the word “Chinatown” to refer to a
part of our small town. He referred to it as “Glendale.” So I was surprised
by an odd statement by the same minister one Sunday. Speaking of interracial
marriage, he said why would a white woman want to be one of the wives of an
African chief.
It was not until many years later that I understood what was being said. I
learned the our church, The Christian and Missionary Alliance was quite strong
in the southern US. Presumably, that part of the church was asking their
church in the north and in Canada to come to the defence of segregation. Given
the widespread sympathy for the civil rights movement, it was hard for the
church to do this explicitly and so we had this puzzling and tangential
reference to what was happening in the US.
I caught a whiff if this on one other occasion when one lay activist in our
church explained to me that black people preferred to stick to themselves.
Again, a roundabout way of referring to segregation.
ken h
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