The article removed from Forbes, “Why White Evangelicalism Is So Cruel”
"Why the most noisily religious people you know also tend to be the cruelest: Their preference for an antiquated order favoring their interests over all others requires them to disregard the evidence of science and the senses, systematically blocking others from discovering that evidence. That’s not stupidity, it’s cult discipline."
By Chris Ladd
(Political Orphans) -- There is still today a Southern Baptist Church. More than a century and a half after the Civil War, and decades after the Methodists and Presbyterians reunited with their Yankee neighbors, America’s most powerful evangelical denomination remains defined, right down to the name over the door, by an 1845 split over slavery.
Southern denominations faced enormous social and political pressure from plantation owners. Public expressions of dissent on the subject of slavery in the South were not merely outlawed, they were a death sentence. Baptist ministers who rejected slavery, like South Carolina’s William Henry Brisbane, were forced to flee to the North. Otherwise, they would end up like Methodist minister Anthony Bewley, who was lynched in Texas in 1860, his bones left exposed at a local store to be played with by children. Whiteness offered protection from many of the South’s cruelties, but that protection stopped at the subject of race. No one who dared speak truth to power on the subject of slavery, or later Jim Crow, could expect protection.
