Testimony for Oklahoma’s Charter School Board By Bruce Prescott, PhD April 11, 2023

I am a retired Baptist minister. Before retiring, I served as Executive Director of a religious non-profit organization called Mainstream Oklahoma Baptists for more than twenty years. At Mainstream Baptists, we worked to preserve the Baptist legacy of the equal right to religious liberty for all people and fought efforts to undermine the constitutional separation of religion and government in this country.

I am also a retired educator. In public schools, I taught Police Science courses for public High School students for Albuquerque Public Schools through the Technical Vocation Institute. Later, I taught philosophy and religion courses at Tarrant County Junior College in Texas and once served in an adjunct capacity at the OU College of Liberal Studies. In private schools, I have taught at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth and at Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa.

One of the hallmarks of the American public school system is that our public schools are secular and nondiscriminatory in their acceptance of all students -- regardless of their faith or belief. Oklahoma charter schools are public schools. To treat them as private schools would up end the entire educational landscape in Oklahoma. For public schools to require students to receive religious instruction, to go to chapel services and pray would violate the religious freedom of students, families, and taxpayers.

The applicant for this charter school openly declares that its mission is to evangelize through its educational curriculum and instruction, and it seeks public funds for this purpose. If this is permitted, then every religious group in the state will be seeking public funds for their own religious schools. This is a recipe for the kind of religious strife and conflict that led many of our ancestors to leave the countries of their birth in search of liberty of conscience and religious freedom.

Approving St. Isidore’s application would introduce other problems as well. The school’s application makes clear that it plans to discriminate in admissions and employment. The government should never fund discrimination -- no taxpayer-funded school should be allowed to turn away teachers or students because they are of the “wrong” religion, or are in a same-sex relationship, or have a gender identity different than was assigned to them on a birth certificate, or have a disability, or simply become pregnant.

Oklahoma is a religiously diverse state, and all public schools, including public charter schools, must be open and welcoming to all. Religious education—like houses of worship—should be funded through voluntary contributions from members. That is why I urge you to deny the application for this charter school.

Christian Nationalism and the January 6th Insurrection

This was the cover story for the March 2022 issue of the Oklahoma Observer.

By Dr. Bruce Prescott

I grew up in an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist church – the J. Frank Norris and Jerry Falwell kind of Baptist churches. The kind of Baptists that I heard snidely call Billy Graham a graham cracker because he preached to audiences of mixed races. I have known about the racist roots and the enduring influence of what is now being called white Christian nationalism all my life. Recently, however, I was surprised to learn how deeply involved the white Christian nationalist movement was in orchestrating, organizing, and participating in the January 6th insurrection at our nation’s capital.

First, a little background about myself. From the time that I was a teenager I was opposed to what is now known as white Christian nationalism. To me this heritage is clearly ignoring the teachings of Jesus and runs counter to the entire thrust of the gospels and the New Testament. So, shortly after I got a driver’s license, I left the Independent Baptist church I was attending and joined a Southern Baptist Church (SBC). I knew the denomination began by defending the institution of slavery, but I also knew that the Southern Baptist Convention of the late 1960’s and 70’s had repudiated that legacy, was then opposed white Supremacism and was promoting a Baptist legacy worth preserving. I was most proud of the historic Baptist heritage as champions of religious liberty for all and as advocates for separating church and state in the U.S. constitution. It seemed like the right place for me to be -- for a time.

After I got my college degree, I went to seminary and entered the Christian ministry. Before I finished my graduate degrees, the white Christian nationalists within the SBC had organized themselves to take over the denomination and were well on their way to making it a base for the “religious right” wing of the Republican party. I noted that the beginning of this takeover movement coincided with Jerry Falwell’s launch of the Moral Majority. The Moral Majority was prompted by an ultimately unsuccessful IRS challenge to an Independent Fundamental Baptist school’s tax-exempt status. The challenge was due to a Bob Jones University policy that prohibited interracial dating among students. The policy was based on a white racist interpretation of 2 Corinthians 6:14. The Carter administration favored the ruling. Reagan was against it and SBC takeover leaders helped Falwell and others get the vote out for Reagan. The rest is history. Ten years later, when the takeover of the SBC was complete, Falwell disbanded the Moral Majority saying it was no longer needed. He had his church write a check to the SBC making it a member church.

After seminary I became the pastor of a Baptist church in Houston where Louis Beam, the KKK and Aryan Nations leader who coined the term “leaderless resistance” to thwart FBI attempts to infiltrate subversive organizations, had once been a member. While there I discovered that one of the church’s Sunday School teachers was peddling white supremacist Christian Identity theories akin to those in the Turner Diaries that inspired Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. I also learned about the Christian Reconstructionist movement and the teachings of Rousas Rushdoony and his son-in-law Gary North. Houston appellate court judge Paul Pressler, mastermind of the takeover of the SBC, introduced me to that movement. Once Pressler’s cabal of preachers had complete control of the SBC, he was a guest on Gary North’s radio program where he unveiled the strategy behind the takeover of the SBC. Throughout the interview, North held Pressler’s strategy up as a model for how Reconstructionist Christians could takeover a political party as a prelude to taking over civil government.

Shortly after listening to a recording of the North-Pressler interview I got a video tape in the mail at my church from a Christian Reconstructionist organizer, The title of the video was, “Restoring America: How You Can Impact Civil Government.” It was from a Dr. Steven Hotze, an allergist in Houston. The tape was filmed at an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist church in my neighborhood. The pastor and his wife were participants in a video that revealed how churches could organize to takeover a political party precinct meeting and influence the party’s platform. Months later, many of the leaders of Republican party precincts in Harris County Texas lost elections in their precincts to authoritarian Christians. They wasted little time before stripping all the meaningful responsibilities from the county’s duly elected party chair and handed them over to none other than Steven Hotze.

I left Houston in 1998 and came to Oklahoma to lead Mainstream Baptists in opposing the influence of Christian nationalism and Christian Reconstructionism in Baptist life and to promote the Baptist legacy separating religion and government in civil society. The most public example of my efforts was as a plaintiff, along with Baptist layman James Huff, now deceased, opposing the erection of a ten commandments monument at the Oklahoma State Capital. Ten Commandments monuments are viewed as one of the primary symbols for the union of church state by Christian nationalists and Christian Reconstructionists. Fortunately, the Oklahoma state constitution explicitly rejects any union of religion and government and the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled in favor of our complaint.

Meanwhile, the program of Christian Reconstructionism has been popularized under the label of “Christian Dominionism.” The strategy of the movement is for authoritarian Christians to take control of the seven mountains of dominant influence in culture and society – government, business, education, arts and entertainment, family, media, and the church. Oklahomans who take the time to investigate this movement will find an uncanny resemblance between their objectives and what has been quietly happening in the culture of this state, particularly in the legislature and state capital, over the past few decades. It is all laid out openly on the website for The Oak Initiative (https://www.theoakinitiative.org/strategy-and-objectives). The Oak Initiative was founded by Norman attorney Marc Nuttle who unsuccessfully ran as a candidate for Oklahoma’s 4th U.S. Congressional District in 2002 and recently served as the head of the Governor’s transition team when Gov. Stitt was elected in 2016.

I share this long story about my experiences with Dominionism and Christian nationalism to demonstrate how seriously I take these movements to be a threat to democracy. I try to keep informed about their leadership and their activities. That is why I was taken aback recently when I attended a webinar on the role of Christian nationalism in the January 6th insurrection. The webinar was sponsored by the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty (BJC). BJC is a non-profit organization founded by Southern Baptists in 1936 (but no longer supported by them) to preserve the Baptist legacy of religious liberty for all and to defend the separation of church and state.

Anyone who has seen video footage of the January 6th insurrection at our nation’s capital could see the plethora of Christian flags, crosses and signs that many of the insurrectionists carried. I thought most of them were misguided souls who got caught up in the emotional heat of the moment, and no doubt, many of them were. Perhaps a lot of them were little more than pawns being manipulated by religious leaders and others that they trusted, but those bold enough to fight capital police and enter the capital building were certainly very willing pawns.

What I did not realize until I heard the speakers in the webinar and read their report was that some key Christian nationalist and Dominionist leaders worked for months before the election to undermine confidence in the election results. After the election, these leaders helped orchestrate and plan for an insurrection by broadcasting and spreading lies about the election being stolen, then, in the weeks before January 6th, they feverishly created and promoted several rallies and protests with increasingly militant rhetoric, some of which involved post rally acts of violence. Ultimately, they were preparing their followers to join cadres of organized and armed militants in storming the capital with its horrendous and deadly levels of violence. Their goal was to obstruct the peaceful transfer of executive power by threatening and intimidating the Vice President and Congress enough to convince them to deny the certification of the lawfully elected President. Or else, some of them made a gallows after an incendiary speech by Roger Stone at a pre-insurrection rally held on January 5th.

I was dumbfounded at what I learned on the webinar and in this report. Don’t take my word for it. View a video of the webinar and read the 66 page report for yourself. Here are the links:

Report: https://bjconline.org/jan6report/

Webinar (One hour): https://youtu.be/U3aA19cwI3s

Solar Schools Team Presentation for Norman RF100 and the Sierra Club

In May 2018 our City Council passed a resolution for Norman to achieve 100% renewable energy by 2035.

In the fall of 2018 the Norman RF-100 committee issued a call for volunteers to assist the city in working toward that goal. They hosted a meeting and got volunteers assigned to one of several committees. The solar school committee met for the first time in November 2018.

From the beginning, the solar schools committee set a goal to get a small pilot solar system installed at one of Norman’s schools. Our plans changed to something more ambitious as soon as we had an opportunity to talk with Jerry Privett who is the Energy Specialist for Norman Public Schools. We first talked to him in early January 2019 – about a week after the school board had successfully passed a bond issue to get new roofs on several schools. Mr. Privett advised us that putting anything on a roof was off the table. He gave us information about the energy usage and electricity cost for each of the schools in NPS. When asked about the possibility for a place for a ground mounted solar system, he advised us that the district had a forty acre lot near 60th and Robinson that was not projected to be used for a school building and was being leased out to someone baling hay.

In early February 2019 we contacted Nick Shumaker who is the Manager of Systems Engineering for Oklahoma Electric Cooperative which provides service to the property at 60th and Robinson. He gave us information about the energy production of the 250 KW solar garden that OEC has on I-35 near Tecumseh. He thought OEC might be interested in using the NPS vacant land for another solar garden. The committee agreed to arrange a meeting between the committee, Shumaker and Justin Milner, COO of Norman Public Schools to see if the school district was interested in pursuing such a project.

The meeting with Justin Milner was held on February 21, 2019. The committee presented information based on the productivity achieved by OEC’s solar garden that projected how much energy various sized solar systems might produce at the 60th and Robinson location. We gave energy projections for systems that ranged from 250 KW to 40 MW solar systems and suggested the amount of money each system might save Norman Public Schools. Milner indicated the school district was interested in pursuing a project on a portion of the land but had no money in its budget to contribute to a solar system.

Nick Schumaker agreed to arrange a meeting between the committee and Patrick Grace who is the CEO of the Oklahoma Electric Cooperative to see if the Cooperative was still interested in pursuing the project.

On April 1, 2019 the solar schools committee and mayor Breea Clark met with Patrick Grace and Nick Shumaker. The committee presented the information on the projected energy possible at the 60th and Robinson location. Patrick Grace said he was interested in pursuing a 1 MW project and would try to secure the funding for it. He indicated he would work with Justin Milner to work out the myriad details of leases, financing, bids, approvals, and contracts that would be needed to make a collaboration happen.

On September 9, 2019 the solar schools committee met with Justin Milner to discuss our further efforts to secure a pilot solar system on location at Irving Middle School. At that meeting Milner advised us that he and Patrick Grace would be presenting a proposal for approval by the NPS School Board for a solar farm at the 60th and Robinson location that would be fully funded by OEC and Western Farmers Electric Cooperative.

On November 18, 2019, by unanimous consent, the Norman Public School Board voted to lease 15 acres of vacant land to the Oklahoma Electric Cooperative. At no cost to the school district, OEC will begin construction of a 2 MW solar farm using 7,208 solar panels at a projected cost of five million dollars. When completed, the system will produce around 95% of the annual current usage for electricity at Norman’s two High Schools which is 30% of the school district’s total annual usage.

Most of the electricity to Norman Public Schools is provided by OG&E and not by OEC. NPS will be receiving net metering fees for the energy that the solar farm produces. We do not know the rate they will receive. At an estimated net metering rate of 3 cents per KWh we project that NPS may receive around $153,000 annually from the energy produced by the solar farm.

Defining Progressive Faith

I think progressive faith has at least ten characteristics. It is conscientious, chastened, hopeful, strong, humble, growing, questioning, dialogical, active and interdependent.

1. First, and foremost, a progressive faith is a conscientious faith.

I understand conscience to be an exercise of human understanding or imagination that involves three steps.

The first step is an act of intellectual (mental) distantiation that produces self-consciousness -- it is the ability to step outside yourself (whatever "self" is) and look back at yourself (as though you were looking at yourself in a mirror).

The second step is an act of sympathetic imagination by which you look at the world from the perspective of another.

We often hear this described by the phrase, "Walk a mile in my shoes." My good friend Foy Valentine, now deceased, once told me jokingly that doing this had proven highly profitable for him. He said that, whenever he did it he got a new pair of shoes and was a mile away before the poor guy he took them from knew what was happening. That's one of the reasons why I think conscience formation requires a third step.

It requires an act of reflexive self-consciousness. In simplest terms, this is the ability to put yourself in the place of others and to look at yourself through the eyes of others.

Essentially, this defines progressive faith as a faith that practices the Golden Rule.

Jesus of Nazareth gave the rule a positive formulation when he said "Do to others as you would have them do to you," (Luke 6:31 (NIV)) but the Golden Rule is not unique to Christianity.

Judaism teaches, "What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow man." (Hillel, Shabbath 31a.)

Islam teaches, "No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself." (Hidith)

Even Buddhists, some whom deny the existence of any God, teach, "Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful." (Udana-Varga)

Some formulation of the Golden Rule or some principle of respect for other persons seems common to all religions and philosophies.

2. Second, a progressive faith is a chastened faith.  It is a faith that sorrowfully acknowledges the pain, suffering and injustice that its own community has inflicted on others.

Chastening occurs when persons of faith look at themselves and their faith through the eyes of people of different faiths.

Christians need to look at themselves through the eyes of Jews -- particularly, through the eyes of those who were herded into boxcars and slaughtered like cattle in the holocaust.

Jews need to look at themselves through the eyes of Muslims -- particularly, through the eyes of those who were displaced from their homes in Palestine.

Muslims need to look at themselves through the eyes of Bahai's.

We all need to look at ourselves through the eyes of the hungry and the homeless, the impoverished and the imprisoned.

All of us need to summon the courage to honestly look at ourselves through the eyes of others who are strange and foreign to us and/or who have been injured and ignored by us.

If we do that, I believe that we will begin to view things the way that God views them.

3. Third, a progressive faith is a hopeful faith.

It is a faith that exercises a sympathetic and creative imagination to transcend the past and present realities of self, family, community, and nation to envision a world with a more benevolent, loving and hopeful future.

Guilt, shame and sorrow all summon us to search for forgiveness, reconciliation, restoration, regeneration, renewal, recreation, transformation, a new birth, -- i.e., some better way of living.

If life is just an endless cycle of violence, conflict and strife, then there is not much reason for a hopeful future.

4. Fourth, a progressive faith is a strong faith.

It is a faith that is strong enough to demand both equal rights in civil life and genuine respect in social life for those who have other convictions and different worldviews -- while remaining firmly committed to its own convictions and worldview.

Fundamentalist faiths can achieve power, but they can never be strong. All fundamentalisms are weak faiths that compensate for their inadequacies by scapegoating those who differ from them.

Fundamentalists fear differences and social change and the "other." They react to their fears by fight or by flight. Whenever they fight, they demonize and destroy whatever makes them afraid and insecure.

Faith can never become strong until it overcomes its fears and insecurities and begins to respect the integrity of conscientious difference.

5. Fifth, a progressive faith is a humble faith.

It is a faith that acknowledges the finitude and fallibility of all humanity. It recognizes that all forms of interpersonal communication and understanding fall short of perfect comprehensibility.

Different faiths privilege different expressions of faith as conveyed by different texts, practices, and rituals. Some make absolute claims for the authority of their competing texts, practices, and rituals.

Generally, it is not necessary to directly challenge the authority of these differing truth claims. It should be enough for all to acknowledge that no matter how sacred, perfect and privileged these texts, practices and rituals are believed to be, all historical faiths are subject to differing interpretations and understandings by adherents within their own faith tradition. Humility, therefore, is proper for people of all faiths.

No system of communication is adequate to fully express the meaning of the Divine. No language is perfectly transparent.

While some interpreters of religious traditions may be considered authoritative, infallibility is an attribute that is best reserved for the Divine.

6. Sixth, a progressive faith is a growing faith.

It is a faith that is growing, expanding, striving for depth and never satisfied with its progress. It is a faith that is incomplete, unfinished, and has never arrived.

Progressive faith does not lay claim to human perfectibility in this life.

7. Seventh, a progressive is a questioning faith.

It is a faith that is undaunted by critical thought. It is not a blind faith that expects adherents to surrender their intellect.

Instead, it practices what Paul Ricouer calls the "hermeneutics of suspicion" because it desires to be more than a projection of human wishes and desires, more than an opiate for the masses, and more than merely a slave revolt by which the weak seek to gain power over the strong.

Progressive faith welcomes doubt and raises questions because it knows they are necessary for the extension of understanding, for spurts of growth and for the testing and strengthening of genuine faith.

8. Eighth, a progressive faith is a dialogical faith.

It extends itself both by random acts of kindness and by deliberate acts of compassion and mercy.

It refuses to extend itself by force of law or arms.

Whenever it seeks to convert others, it seeks to do so by persuasion and example shared in moments of genuine dialogue.

9. Ninth, a progressive faith is an active faith.

It gives more than lip service to love.

It puts love in action by waging peace and working for justice.

It is faith with the courage to put itself at risk by publicly opposing injustice and by actively resisting it by non-violent means.

10. Finally, a progressive faith is an interdependent faith.

It recognizes both the value and the interdependence of all life on this planet.

It is a faith that affirms and honors the claim that future generations have on the present by responsibly stewarding the resources that make life possible on this planet.

(This is reposted from a July 15, 2006 blog from the Progressive Faith Blog Conference.)

The State of Our Society

The State of Our Society

By Dr. Bruce Prescott

First Congregational Church of Norman

November 12, 2017

^{1 John 3:11-18}

For this is the message which you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another; not as Cain, who was of the evil one and slew his brother. And for what reason did he slay him? Because his deeds were evil, and his brother’s were righteous.

Do not be surprised, brethren, if the world hates you. We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren. He who does not love abides in death.  Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer; and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.  We know love by this, that He laid down His life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.  But whoever has the world’s goods, and sees his brother in need and closes his heart against him, how does the love of God abide in him?  Little children, let us not love with word or with tongue, but in deed and truth.

Near the beginning of every year it is customary for members of both houses of congress, members of the Supreme Court, and other high ranking government officials along with a national audience over radio, television and the internet to gather to hear our nation’s President give a state of the union address.  The new year is a good time to make an honest appraisal of the decline or improvement in the health and progress of the nation that took place the previous year and to project a vision and a plan of action for the ensuing year.  I think this is one of the healthier rituals of our democracy and I think something like an annual state of the congregation sermon would be a good practice in our churches. 

I don’t know enough to make comment on the health and progress of this congregation over the past year, but, as you are looking for your next pastor, I know that you are turning the page to a new chapter in the life of your church.  And, I have some comments to make about some drastic changes that have taken place this past year in the state of the society in which the members of this congregation must live and worship and provide a Christian witness. 

Eleven days ago the American Psychological Association published the results of the 2017 poll “Stress in America: The State of Our Nation.”  The survey was conducted in the month of August.  This year’s poll revealed that:

Nearly two-thirds of Americans (63 percent) say the future of the nation is a very or somewhat significant source of stress, slightly more than perennial stressors like money (62 percent) and work (61 percent).

More than half of Americans (59 percent) said they consider this the lowest point in U.S. history that they can remember — a figure spanning every generation, including those who lived through World War II and Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Clearly, a broad majority of the people in our society are apprehensive about the future of our society.  I share their concerns and I suspect that, whatever your political persuasion, most of you do too.

I was a child during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  In grade school I was taught to duck and cover under my desk in the event of a nuclear attack.  At home, my father talked openly about putting a fallout shelter in the back yard.  Eventually, he just decided to stock the basement with saltine crackers, canned spam, and water.  I was a child at the time, I did not fully comprehend the gravity of that situation.

I was barely a teenager at the height of the civil rights movement.  I learned the dangers of hate and racism watching the evening news with Walter Cronkite. I saw black students being harassed by angry white adults as they integrated the high school in Little Rock, Arkansas.  I saw dog’s and fire hoses being used on students in Birmingham, Alabama.  Those images registered on me.  I had no trouble comprehending the dangers of white supremacism and it was stressful to know that my maternal grandparents harbored such racist attitudes.

I was in High School when college campuses erupted with protests against the war in Viet Nam.  At the beginning of 1968 it looked like the country was poised for some significant political changes.  Then, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated.  By the middle of 1968 all my naive idealism about the social and political environment in our country had turned to cynicism. 

For a long time, 48 years, 1968 marked, in my mind, the lowest point in U.S. history during my lifetime.  My mind has changed over the past year.  This past year some of my deepest fears and some of my most widely expressed suspicions about the Religious Right have been confirmed. 

I grew up in an Independent Fundamental Baptist church – the kind that labeled Southern Baptists liberals.  They called Billy Graham a graham cracker because he preached to crowds that were racially mixed.  Racism was no secret in those churches.  It was out in the open.  That is why I knew from the beginning that the Religious Right’s embroilment in secular politics had more to do with racism and a lust for power than with a concern morality.  Jerry Falwell may have called his movement “The moral majority” but he was the most prominent leader among Independent Fundamental Baptists and he had a well deserved reputation for being a racist himself.

I left Independent Baptists and joined Southern Baptists while I was in High School, but I found racist fundamentalists there too.  While serving as a police officer in 1974 a fellow officer bragged to me about his church refusing to receive a racially mixed couple into the membership of his Independent Fundamental Baptist church.  That bothered me so much that as soon as I got off work that morning I drove to his church -- which was down the street from my apartment -- and asked the church secretary to give me the name and address of that couple so I could invite them to the Southern Baptist Church that I was attending.  The good news is that after my pastor and I visited the couple, the couple joined our church and invited several of their friends to join the church as well.  For the first time in its history, a church that was within a couple miles of an Air Force base had a sizeable group of members who were stationed at the base.  The bad news is that a few long time members of our church left the church over it. 

A year later I enrolled in a Southern Baptist seminary, resigned from the police department in Albuquerque, NM and moved to Fort Worth, Texas.  When I arrived I gave a resume to the placement office at the seminary.  I was hoping to find a position at one of the hundreds of churches in the North Texas area.  Within a week they sent me to a church in Rockwall, Texas whose pastor had moved on to another church.  No sooner had we arrived -- as I was being greeted by one of the deacons -- a black woman opened the front door of the church and stuck her head in -- only her head.  In an instant, the deacon told her “Your church is down the street.”  After preaching that Sunday, I’ve never been in that church again.  I didn’t preach against racism that Sunday, but I would have if I had ever been given another opportunity to preach to them.  Alas, they were no more impressed with me, than I was with them.

In 1979, the year that Jerry Falwell started the moral majority, fundamentalists started a political takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention.  I knew from the get-go that this movement had less to do with doctrine and theology than with racism.  Key leaders of the movement were racists.  They were led by prominent fundamentalist preachers who were stymied by prominent moderate preachers who for years had used their influence to block the election as president of the Convention anyone who refused to admit African-Americans into the membership of their churches.  In 1975 the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas – the largest SBC church in the nation – finally agreed to admit African-American members into his congregation, and was subsequently elected President of the Southern Baptist Convention. 

But that presidency proved frustrating to the SBC’s racist fundamentalists.  They discovered that the President did not have the power to change the course of the convention in one year.  It took a few more years for an appellate court judge in Houston to show them that they had to elect likeminded presidents for at least six consecutive years to get control of the convention’s institutions.  In 1979 the takeover leaders pledged to do just that as they partnered together with Jerry Falwell to impact secular politics.  Ten years later, Jerry Falwell disbanded the moral majority and joined the Southern Baptist Convention.  The rest is now several chapters of U.S. history.

What about the churches?  Are Baptist churches full of racists?

In 1987, I took my first full-time pastorate at a church in Houston, Texas.  The church was in a blue collar, working class neighborhood. Many of the men worked in oil field related industries like the chemical plants that dot the ship channel. That church was one of the first Southern Baptist churches in the nation to start a daycare for working mothers.  Then, in 1957, a year after the Supreme Court integrated the public schools, they were one of the first Southern Baptist churches in the nation to open a private school.  It was a church that was just down the street from what once was the national headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan.  Among its former members was Louis Beam, Grand Dragon of the Texas chapter of the KKK.  He, more than anyone else, is credited with inventing the strategy of “leaderless resistance” in response to the FBI’s ability to disrupt their racist work by planting informants within their organization.  The church voted to remove Louis Beam from its membership shortly after the FBI placed him on its 10 most wanted list. 

A younger generation of leaders in the church repudiated the racism of the past and before calling me to be their pastor agreed to work with me to get the school integrated and accredited – which we did.  We even hired an African-American teacher at the school.  We were also successful in getting a few very faithful and brave African-Americans to join the church.  Then, to my surprise and theirs, I discovered that the man who for years had been teaching the Senior Adult Bible Study class was propagating the beliefs of the white supremacist Christian Identity cult.  We moved him out of his teaching position within a month. 

Christian Identity uses coded language to teach that all people of color are the spawn of Satan who must be exterminated in a great race war to make the nation pure and safe for God’s chosen people – White Christian Americans.  It is the doctrine of Timothy McVeigh’s handbook, “The Turner Diaries.”  It is also the doctrine of many in the “alt-right” movement that has come out into the open and using less coded language this past year.

So, one reason why this past year has been so discouraging for me is that racism has been openly ascending again in our society.  It is a message of hate that actively opposes the message that we as Christians have been called to proclaim.  That is what our text for the sermon this morning says. 

John returns to a familiar message.  It is a message that is familiar to all of us because we have heard it from the beginning of our pilgrimage as Christians.  The message is simple and direct -- even the smallest child can understand it.  The message is that we should love one another.

But there is a competing message, a message that is anathema to all of God’s faithful children, and a message that has also been around from the beginning.  It’s as old as Cain and Able.  It is a message that sows discord and division instead of welcoming and affirming acceptance and community.  It is a message that is spawned by fear and insecurity, that is nurtured by envy and resentment, that hardens the heart to produce hatred, then explodes in anger, and, that sooner or later, leads to homicide and/or genocide.  It is the way of death. 

“He who does not love abides in death.  Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer; and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.”

The way of life is the way of love and genuine Christian love is not some sentimental feeling or a fleeting emotion.  The love John is talking about is defined by the cross:

“We know love by this, that He laid down His life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.”

And, just to make sure that we don’t think we are off the hook until we are face-to-face with a martyr’s death, John gives a practical, everyday application of what it means to lay down your life for the brethren:

“But whoever has the world’s goods, and sees his brother in need and closes his heart against him, how does the love of God abide in him?” 

“Sees a brother in need” – that is the crux of the issue.  Some want to define brother as narrowly as possible.  Is it a blood brother?  Or a Christian brother?  Or a conservative fundamentalist brother? Or a straight white anglo-saxon brother?  Just exactly who is the brother we are commanded to love?

I think if John were here today he would be asking, “How does the love of God abide in those who support a vote to limit disaster assistance to our brethren and fellow citizens in Puerto Rico?”  In American society, I think that at the very least fellow citizens ought to be counted among the brethren – or, since the people in Puerto Rico are predominantly of Hispanic descent, is this just another example of the ascent of racism in our society?

If John were here today I think he would be asking “How does the love of God abide in those who support a vote to limit and cut off financial assistance and services to those who are impoverished, elderly, sick and disabled in our state?”  At the very least fellow citizens of our own state ought to be counted among the brethren -- Or, is this a sign of the pharisaical attitudes that prevail in our society. After all, it was the Pharisees -- not Jesus and his disciples -- that viewed poverty, illness, and disability as evidence of divine punishment for sin. 

Didn’t Jesus say that inasmuch as you have ministered unto the least of these – his brethren – you have done it unto him.   

Matthew 25:37-40

 Lord, when did we see you hungry, and feed you? or thirsty, and give you drink?  When did we see you a stranger, and take you in? or naked, and clothe you?

And he answered them saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

The least of these – that’s who Jesus calls his brethren.  Those who are strangers at the gate, poor and sick, down and out, outcast and neglected.

The truth is, for Christians the command to love is universal.  We are not commanded to love only those who are close to us, those who look like us, those who think like us, or those who share the some exclusive, narrow band of faith.  We are commanded to love everybody – particularly those who are strangers, impoverished, widowed, disabled, and outcast. All people are our neighbors – even our enemies.  Yes, Jesus commanded us to love even our enemies.

And John finishes by getting right to the point.  He tells us to stop giving lip service to love and make sure we put love into action.

“Little children, let us not love with word or with tongue, but in deed and truth.”

There’s a lot of lip service to love in American Christianity.  Many modern Christians, particularly those who call themselves Baptists and evangelicals, have lowered the bar until the Christian faith is losing its credibility.  They are turning the “good news” of the gospel into bad news.

We need to make the message of the gospel “good news” again.

Sacrificial, self-giving love in action is the bar.  Lip service love is worthless. 

John didn’t belabor the point and neither will I.  We all know what we need to be doing. 

Loving in deed and in truth is where the rubber meets the road.  It’s time that we get going and get busy.

Just do it.