Thursday, July 5, 2012

Celebrating Heritage, or Promoting Race Hate?

My opinion? You'd have to be there to know whether these pastors are celebrating their Euro-American heritage, or expressing hate for other people.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/racist-whites-only-christian-pastors-conference-sparks-outrage/

\I'll share this: Before they married each other, my parents were studying the Bible for themselves. Their respect for pastors and religious teachers was based on how much those people shared their understanding of the Bible. Churches where they found fellowship included Seventh-Day Adventists, the Worldwide Church of God, and also an "Anglo-Israelite identity" group known as the Lord's Covenant Church.

We discovered the Lord's Covenant Church by accidentally tuning in a radio broadcast of a sermon on one of my parents' favorite obscure Bible topics. We wrote for more information. At first it seemed to us, too, as if they were some sort of hate group. What Pastor Sheldon Emry was actually preaching, during my lifetime, was that Christians needed to follow the guidance contained in the law of Moses. "Read, believe, and obey Christ's holy Commandments," was his phrase.

But he'd got there by growing up during the years of race hate, and was known for having published some vicious denunciations of Russians and Russian Jews. On the unprovable (but also irrefutable) historical theory to which he described, being White proved that Russians were descendants of Abraham like us, but their penchant for the color red proved that they descended from Abraham via Esau Edom. (Edom means red.) This meant that, as a group, they were destined always to be the enemies of European and Euro-American Christians. Russian Jews were basically just Russians, genetically, and therefore came under the biblical descriptions of people who "say they are Jews, and are not, but are of the synagogue of Satan."

We weren't prejudiced...against anybody. We considered the history in these books, checked it out, and decided that, well, that wasn't what Pastor Emry was preaching now. He'd written these books, which most booksellers wouldn't touch, and he'd never disowned them. In fact, around that time Arthur Koestler's Thirteenth Tribe prompted him to broadcast a radio sermon mentioning how much of the same material he and Koestler had used--which I'm sure Koestler really appreciated, NOT!

But by now Emry was an old man, and was more interested in encouraging people in biblical practices like getting out of debt and helping others avoid debt, celebrating biblical rather than Pagan holidays, and working toward biblically based reforms in local law. (That's not as harsh as it may sound to you; Emry favored capital punishment for murderers, but also favored supervised work to compensate victims over prison sentences for thieves.)

So it happens that the pastor with whom I was actively corresponding, when I committed myself to Christianity at age thirteen, was one of those "White Identity" types. Yes, he was a Christian. No, he didn't have any weird Mormon-type notions about Native Americans--he didn't have much to say about them, actually. Yes, he did affirm that any person of any race or nationality could be saved, could practice whole-Bible Christianity, and could be a member of his church. I asked. I wouldn't have been interested in his church if they hadn't baptized African-American members.

Yes, Pastor Emry did seem to think Mother's "Anglo-Saxon" heritage was more special than the Irish, Scottish, Welsh, French, and German ancestors she and Dad also had, or the Cherokee ancestors only Dad had. How did we Euro-mutts handle that? We laughed about it, mainly. We understood that people of a certain age just picked up certain ideas and were subsequently vulnerable to certain other dubious ideas.

When unusually severe winter weather prompted lots of since-discarded theories about how this or that was going to trigger an ice age, and Pastor Emry seemed to take seriously a belief about Russian cloud-seeding experiments sending Russian-type weather to us, we chortled. One evening there was a burst of static on the radio. My brother stepped outside, and the static crackles subsided. Possibly body movements had altered the static electricity in the room. My brother--was he seven or eight years old?--explained, "I just chased those Russians away from the power line."

A lot of us were living with people who had the emotional reactions Archie Bunker parodied on TV, at that time. You didn't hate them. You couldn't censor them, because they were part of real life. It was easier to laugh at them, or if possible laugh with them, rather than blame them.

We were absorbing images of Russians too...by now I've seen as many photos of Russian athletes and models as everyone else has, but the first mental image that comes to mind when I think of Russian people is gloomy older people, bundled up in bearskins so that they all looked about a yard wide, usually seen against backgrounds that included snowdrifts. Who knew that, when the young girls were allowed to come to California and wear lightweight cotton clothes, they'd look exactly like the stereotype of what California Girls were supposed to be?

Which I don't, by the way. I was born in L.A., albeit of Virginian parents, but one of the many reasons why I identify with Virginia is that everybody in California always agreed that Real California Girls are blonde. I am not blonde. I am a natural-born test case for any group or event that purports to celebrate European heritage. If people really are celebrating their ancestors, they have no problem with the idea that similar ancestors, or even the same individual ancestors, might have produced descendants who look like me. And you can tell the Irish-American League really are about celebrating Irishness, not about hating non-Irishness, because they didn't even have a real problem with the Irishness of Ishmael Reed.

So when I read Billy Hallowell's story, I'm seriously interested in going to this conference, or what's left of it...although this group would have a valid reason not to let me in: I am not and have never been a pastor.

I know it's hard for some people to understand, or imagine, but although he never completely worked through the fears that prompted him to write what have been read as hate spews, by haters, Sheldon Emry was not a hater. He was a Christian minister and a serious Bible scholar. He didn't baptize me (didn't live long enough), but he did more than any other minister to prepare me for baptism. That wouldn't have been possible if he'd been a hater.

There are other people, still alive today, who believe that a person's physical ancestry may have some spiritual significance. The belief is not necessarily racist or nationalist; some of these people teach that people predestined for some special role in global history may have been shaped for their destiny by descent from any of several great ancestors, around the world. Personally I'm too skeptical about the possibility of tracing anyone's real ancestry very far back to pay much attention to this idea, but who's to say that some form of it may not be true?

Certainly this belief does not, by itself, presuppose hate. At worst it may involve something like a belief in karma: "This nation's leader did X in the year Y, and that's why God has allowed this nation to suffer this current crisis." And when people state the belief in those terms I think most of them can see what's the matter with it. But if people are sincerely trying to practice the teachings of Jesus, even if they believe that this summer's wildfires are God's judgment on people in Colorado, this still means that they are called--predestined, if they still want to call it that--to help and pity the victims of the wildfires, not to hate them.

How do I know? Because, although I have more recent non-White ancestors than I have British aristocrat ancestors, and more Irish ancestors than all other kinds together, some of these "heritage" types do accept me as one of their own...and "their own" isn't even defined as Irish.

If you really want to find out whether an event is a celebration or a display of hate, I recommend finding some other multiethnic type, who does qualify for admission to the event, and sending that person to report on it. Then you will know.

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