Guno צְבִי
We fight, We win
Less than three weeks after the 1961 attack on the Freedom Riders, Montgomery's most prominent pastor, Henry Lyon Jr., gave a fiery speech before the local white Citizens' Council, denouncing the civil rights protesters and the cause for which they were beaten — from a "Christian" perspective.
"Ladies and gentlemen, for 15 years I have had the privilege of being pastor of a white Baptist church in this city," Lyon said. "If we stand 100 years from now, it will still be a white church. I am a believer in a separation of the races, and I am none the less a Christian." The crowd applauded.
"If you want to get in a fight with the one that started separation of the races, then you come face to face with your God," he declared. "The difference in color, the difference in our body, our minds, our life, our mission upon the face of this earth, is God given."
Lyon saw himself as a devout Bible believer, and he was far from an extremist in the Southern Baptist world. A former president of the Alabama Baptist Convention, his Montgomery church had more than 3,000 members.
Slavery and the Bible
At an earlier point in American history, some Christian theologians went so far as to argue that the enslavement of human beings was justifiable from a biblical point of view. James Henley Thornwell, a Harvard-educated scholar who committed huge sections of the Bible to memory, regularly defended slavery and promoted white supremacy from his pulpit at the First Presbyterian Church in Columbia, S.C., where he was the senior pastor in the years leading up to the Civil War.
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/01/8831...eas-have-historical-roots-in-u-s-christianity
"Ladies and gentlemen, for 15 years I have had the privilege of being pastor of a white Baptist church in this city," Lyon said. "If we stand 100 years from now, it will still be a white church. I am a believer in a separation of the races, and I am none the less a Christian." The crowd applauded.
"If you want to get in a fight with the one that started separation of the races, then you come face to face with your God," he declared. "The difference in color, the difference in our body, our minds, our life, our mission upon the face of this earth, is God given."
Lyon saw himself as a devout Bible believer, and he was far from an extremist in the Southern Baptist world. A former president of the Alabama Baptist Convention, his Montgomery church had more than 3,000 members.
Slavery and the Bible
At an earlier point in American history, some Christian theologians went so far as to argue that the enslavement of human beings was justifiable from a biblical point of view. James Henley Thornwell, a Harvard-educated scholar who committed huge sections of the Bible to memory, regularly defended slavery and promoted white supremacy from his pulpit at the First Presbyterian Church in Columbia, S.C., where he was the senior pastor in the years leading up to the Civil War.
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/01/8831...eas-have-historical-roots-in-u-s-christianity