It is always a mistake to go long against the common sense and decency of the American people but, suckled on that great engine of malice — fundamentalist Christianity — the south appears determined to do it again.
Pastor Mac Brunson, of First Baptist Church–Jacksonville, for instance, instructed his congregation1 last Sunday that, by affirming the right to same-sex marriage, the Supreme Court had achieved what the British failed to do in our Revolutionary War, and what Germany failed to do in World War II, et cetera, et cetera. In a similar vein, the administrative head of the Alabama Supreme Court issued a letter lecturing that state’s governor that it would be sinful to obey the Court’s order.
“I must follow the law,” you say. Law? What law? There is no law anymore, there’s just opinion. One day this, one day that. When the law becomes merely the opinion of a handful of people on the courts, there is no longer any law. There is tyranny. There is chaos. But there is no law.
The young and the weak, those that are caused to stumble by courts that approve of what is evil, are those whom Jesus referred to when he said, “It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.” Luke 17:2. You don’t want to be complicit in allowing such stumbling blocks.
Just as 50-years ago the black churches nurtured the civil rights movement, white churches in the south are now, not so honorably, nurturing sedition and mayhem.
And it is no coincidence that racial antagonisms are flaring-up just as gay rights are progressing, for the latter reprises the former defeat, and both bespeak the same thing: Widespread public rejection of slavish submission to the scribblings of Bronze Age anonymities. The present discontents are not merely about gay rights; that is only the focal point. It is the wholesale rejection of the innately degrading premises of the Abrahamic faiths writ large which provokes, to the mind of believers, the existential crisis alluded to by the mantra “religious liberty.”
Mac Brunson, Albert the Pious, and all the rest, know perfectly well that their religious liberty is not threatened. Their churches will remain open for business, they will continue unimpeded to humiliate themselves with preposterous claims that the Bible is inerrant, nobody will arrest them for standing in a pulpit and howling that the Invisible Wizard’s (poorly expressed, locally interpreted) rules must precede the laws of legislatures and their interpretations by the courts.
The pastors understand, however, that their day has ended — that they are no longer their community’s wise man, sage, informal moral leader without portfolio, and their congregations understand that they no longer enjoy the presumption of goodness, that they are somehow “better” people. They can still believe whatever they like, they can still preach whatever they like, they can still enforce whatever rules they like in their clubhouses and homes — but they should expect ridicule and disdain from “the world” rather than admiration and deference. They have sustained not merely a political defeat, but the rejection of an entire culture.
It is not true that all cultures are created equal; some lift up, and some degrade. Christianity’s indispensable metaphysical claim that we are all born no damn good and unfit to even exist — e.g., Original Sin — is an innately degrading, life-sapping view of reality; that is why it has been able to sustain itself all these long centuries only by recourse to the most appalling violence, and why the Holy Men have been in retreat ever since the Enlightenment rejection of religious governance.
Ahhh … phooey. History is littered with dead gods — and their dead, too. It is time to be done with them all, and live like men rather than dumb farm animals.
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1 Mutiny of the Boundaries