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PeterAttwood
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Comments
This is pretty mixed up. It's unlikely that Franklin Graham's reservations about King were because he didn't do altar calls.
It's much more likely to be because King was a whoremonger, and the Bible says that whoremongers can't expect to inherit the kingdom of heaven. This is not a specifically white evangelical concern. In the early 1960s the SNCC people dismissed King as De Lawd due to his sanctimonious and showy piety that they knew was not reflected in his life.
And people doubt that Franklin Graham is a Christian for a similar reason - people who are inhospitable to the poor and weak - as the three parallel parables of Matthew 25 explain - have no reason to get into the kingdom of heaven either. His showy piety doesn't make it either. And there's no reason to think it's repentance when Graham, who shows himself very concerned with his image in the world, issues a shallow apology when people get on his case, like any politician.
Professing to believe different things about Jesus doesn't make someone a Christian. Asking Jesus into your heart has no biblical evidence for doing so either. As James writes, the demons know these things, too, and it doesn't make them Christians.
A Christian is someone that you can find some evidence that Jesus is in his life. A Christian may be in pretty bad shape. But there remains some evidence that Jesus is around, and there is evidence of progress. There is, in short, evidence of spiritual life. There is truth. If you don't see that in someone's behavior, you're not a meanie if you wonder whether the person is a Christian. They're still made in God's image and likeness. What they say, even if they don't live it, may still be truth and should be honored.
There's a lot we can do with people without settling whether they're Christians or not. But I, if I need to know that in some context, will still go by whether the fruit is there.
It's actually much worse than stated. Jim Crow certainly did not end before 1968, when the Fair Housing Act finally outlawed discrimination in housing, but more pointedly, finally ended the federal government's official policy encouraging housing discrimination. And many sundown towns existed all over the north and west. Indeed, Darien Connecticut remained a sundown town into the 1990s. Jim Loewen's Sundown Towns documents the details, and he has a website following the phenomenon. They're not yet a thing of the past.
Also, the ingenuity of white supremacy in abolishing slavery, for instance, and then replacing it with other forms of servitude, continues. Now the "War on Drugs" and other means are used to lock up millions of black men for nothing or close to it, and certainly for things that white people are not locked up for. And when these millions of racially selected prisoners are making license plates at 18 cents an hour, what has become of the 13th Amendment?
It is precisely because there are no meaningful differences between the parties that they are so partisan - the strife over Pepsi and Coke, such that these companies have on occasion fired people for drinking the wrong one, because they're pretty much the same. They agree on giving everything to the banksters in exchange for being bought, kidnapping and torture around the world, corporate welfare, imperial aggression around the world, and destroying civil liberties. Maybe it's as well that these thugs have trouble unting more effectively against the people. The good news is some unexpected pushback from Tunisia to Wall Street, and the prospect that the empire will collapse fairly quickly. Certainly the ongoing slow genocide in Palestine is unlikely to be resolved until American imperial power fails there. Ron Paul's candidacy at least compels the issues of empire and civil liberties to be debated for real, which hasn't happened probably since 1945, when the anti-imperialist Republicans quickly caved and Henry Wallace lost. That's pretty good news. The prospect, however slight, that the US might voluntarily give up its empire, is hopeful beyond what I imagined even last year.