Aberdeen American News: Leonard Pitts; Modern Christianity out of step with Jesus' teachings

Published on Sunday, April 27, 2008
James Lawson is out of step with modern Christianity.

Take gay marriage. Speaking in support of a proposed state constitutional ban on same sex unions, one Rev. Hayes Wicker of First Baptist Church in Naples, Fla., was recently quoted by the Naples Daily News as saying, "This is a tremendous social crisis, greater even than the issue of slavery."

As asinine as that remark is, it is perfectly in step with much of modern Christianity, which has spent years demonizing gay men and lesbians. And then there's the Rev. Lawson, who is scheduled to speak this weekend at the 10th anniversary conference of Soulforce, a group that fights church-based homophobia. Few things could be more "out" of step.

Lawson, you might know, is an icon of the civil rights movement; it was he who invited Martin Luther King to Memphis to support the striking sanitation workers. He sees his longtime involvement with Soulforce as part of the same struggle. "The human rights issue is not a single issue," he told me recently. "It is about all human kind. And all human kind has been endowed with certain inalienable rights."

My interview with Lawson was set before Wicker's remark, but I leapt at the chance to ask him about it. "Obviously," said Lawson, "he does not know anything about the 250 years of slavery or the 143 years since slavery as the nation has largely failed to deal with the issue of slavery and its consequences. ... And he knows even less about the gospel of Jesus. ... Jesus broke all the social etiquette in terms of relating to people and bringing people into relationship with himself. He acknowledged no barriers or human divisions ... no category of sinners from who he would isolate himself."

Sadly, Wicker's brand of intolerance cloaked in faith has lately made inroads in black America. King's daughter, Bernice, has marched against gay rights. Others have peevishly rejected the idea that there are parallels between the black struggle and the gay one.

Lawson finds the antipathy appalling. "To unite with white Christian fundamentalism like Pat Robertson is an absolute disgrace. For black people to pretend that kind of Christian fundamentalism, which justified slavery and justifies racism, is a colleague in anything is to be blind to the realities that we're facing. We who have suffered and do suffer should be the most sensitive to the suffering of others. We don't want this undeserved suffering put on us, and we should therefore, clearly, not participate in putting such suffering on others. We ought to know better."
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