White and Right: The Weight of Christian History

I’ve noticed an interesting trend in recent weeks, as the influence of the religious right in American politics wanes. The trend is an increasing—and increasingly shrill—emphasis on that movement’s support of the civil rights of African Americans, as opposed to its resistance to the notion that LGBT Americans deserve civil rights.

This is all the religious right has left, frankly: the possibility that it can engineer deep resentments and suspicions of LGBT Americans, in order to get the faithful into the voting booth in the coming elections, and to assure that the faithful will pull the right lever. If the price to be paid for drumming out the vote is a little lie here and there—as in, the religious right has promoted and supported the civil rights of African Americans—what’s that, in the grand scheme of things? When we’re fighting devils, God surely winks at our picayune misstatements, no?

The argument for the noble intentions of the religious right in the area of civil rights for African Americans has gotten so ludicrously divorced from reality and fact in recent public discourse that some rhetoricians are even suggesting that William F. Buckley invented civil rights! William F. Buckley: the mater si magistra no man, who rejected Catholic social teaching about human rights; the man who told us that his job is to stand astride history and shout no. The man who hissed at Gore Vidal in a t.v. interview in my youth, calling him a vicious queer, or words to that effect . . . .

This is the noble inventor of civil rights for African Americans. Not Martin Luther King, Jr., or Rosa Parks, or Sojourner Truth. William F. Buckley, with that patrician drawl of the social elite of the Northeast, the disdainful frozen face that barely suppressed his distaste for the base-born opponents he sought to decimate over the years.

I’m thinking today of these ludicrous claims of the religious right, and the willingness of members of this movement to depart from the truth in the service of the right, in light of yesterday’s California Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage. Already, the blogs are popping with fireworks provided by the religious right. This is going to be a useful tool, they think, for getting out the righteous vote in the coming elections. It will play well (they assume) in the heartland, with its churches of the radical middle.

And perhaps it will. If so, I hope that those churches begin counting the cost of their refusal to oppose the lies and tricks of those with whom they’ve cast their lot politically and theologically, in this ugly use of gay and lesbian persons to make political points.

What interests me in particular is the willingness of fundies to log onto even liberal websites in the past day, to spread disinformation about and hate for gay people—in the name of Christ, of course. The weblogs are full of Leviticus today. They’re peppered with scriptural quotations. They’re dripping with spite.

I have racked my brain to think of any comparable cases in recent American history, in which people purporting to speak for the churches feel so free to vent hate and tell lies, in the name of Christ (of course). I remember some of this from my youth, growing up in the middle of the struggle against segregation in the American South. I remember the lurid fliers that circulated in my school when integration finally happened, with their pictures of blond white Southern girls dancing with black men, the ultimate nightmare of the Christian South.

I remember the dire warnings of what was going to happen to Christian civilization if we permitted the racial line to be crossed—the interracial mingling that would take place, the mongrel race that would ensue, the infection of the toilets of pious white Christian school children by hordes of dirty immoral black children who would pour into the schools when they were integrated.

And I remember the use of the bible to support all of this venomous hatred—the lies, the distortions, the lurid warnings about lines that must not be crossed if we wished to maintain our Christian culture. I remember the discussion in my own church, in which the bible was used by some members of the church as a weapon against anyone who proposed that we had hardly built an admirable Christian culture around the practice of racial exclusion.

In other words, I remember what the fathers and mothers, the grandfathers and grandmothers, of the current religious right were doing some forty and fifty years ago, to—well, as they now say—to promote the civil rights of African Americans. As I recall this not-so-distant history, I have to wonder why African Americans like Crystal Dixon, the University of Toledo H-R officer on whom I reported recently, would allow themselves to be duped by the arguments of people who decidedly do not have the best interests of African Americans at heart, and who are trying to use African Americans as pawns in ugly political games as cynically as they use gay Americans.

As I reflect on these games, I think back to the long, long history behind American support of slavery. Two factors loomed large in the social foundation of slavery. One was scripture. The other was longstanding, taken-for-granted custom. These are the same two factors being exploited by the religious right venom dispensers on blogs following the California Supreme Court decision yesterday.

Scripture: I remember a discussion Oprah had a few years ago on her talk show, with several African-American men who were adept at quoting the bible to bash gays. Oprah probed their knowledge of other portions of the bible. As she pointed out, though their knowledge of the tiny set of texts that have been used to beat gays into submission was impeccable, when it came to anything else in the bible, they had a decidedly deficient knowledge.

Love? Justice? Mercy? The 99.99% of the bible that unambiguously stands on the side of those virtues and makes them—not bashing of already stigmatized brothers and sisters—central to religious life? Oprah concluded (and told her African-American brothers this) that their use of the bible was not only selective and hateful: it was politically engineered and had long since departed from any religious intent at all.

Just as our use of the Noah and Ham story, or the New Testament admonitions for slaves to obey their masters, did in the American South of the civil rights period . . . . Oh, yes, though slavery had ended some 100 years prior to the integration struggles, we had not forgotten those useful texts about slavery, and about the need for slaves to obey.

The point being, the biblical texts are full of everything in the world. That tiny handful of texts that falls so easily out of the mouths of right-wing homophobes today, while the bunches and bunches of texts about love, justice, and mercy never reach the lips of these folks: it’s really no different from the tiny handful of which we who wanted to hold the line against African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s were so certain.

We had, after all, the weight of history on our side. We had longstanding, taken-for-granted custom on our side. The bible had always been used as it was used in the American South in slave days and in the Jim Crow era. Throughout Christian history, the scriptures were used to support slavery.

Why? Because slavery existed in the culture of those who wrote the biblical texts—as did patriarchy and the subjugation of women to men. In defending slavery, Christians of the American South were not defending some aberrant, novel departure from scripture and tradition. Slavery was taken for granted by Christians because it is biblically endorsed, and because it was part of the social fabric taken for granted by the writers of the biblical texts.

We were defending what had been normative throughout most of Christian history. We were defending normative uses of scripture throughout Christian history.

Just as opponents of gay rights are today, in their use of their handful of bash-texts . . . . This misuse of scripture can seem plausible—it can go without any challenge from the churches of the radical middle, to their eternal shame—because it is bolstered by longstanding, taken-for-granted custom.

We changed our minds, we Christians of the righteous South, only when the Supreme Court forced us to do so. We changed our minds only when culture changed. Our churches did not lead cultural changes towards a more humane society.

To their shame, they carried up the rear, kicking and screaming about lines that should not be crossed, about the scriptures that have to remain intact if civilization is to endure, about “orthodoxy” and “purity” and “the truth.” Just as they do today . . . .

The churches of the radical middle will one day see the light about their hateful abuse of LGBT persons at this point in history. They will do so when culture itself changes to such an extent that they have no choice.

Then, when they rewrite history to try to imply that they led the way to gay civil rights, will anyone still be listening? Where will the descendants of this generation of advocates of “orthodoxy” be, some 100 years from now? Inside the churches of Main Street USA? Or outside them, having given up hope for the churches to stand for countercultural positions informed by ideals of love, justice, and mercy?