The Fundamentalist at Heart
Yesterday started off okay, but went downhill quickly. In addition to my own personal prednisone hell (the intense muscle pain has arrived), the scheduled murder of Marcellus Williams weighed so heavily on me.
Poplar Bluff, Missouri is the headquarters for the General Baptist denomination, the evangelical denomination I grew up in.
When I was in my teens in the mid-90s, a year or two before I was old enough to vote, the church passed out a voter issue card.
I don’t remember much about that card except that it was arranged in such a way that abortion was the thing we should all be paying attention to. It was the central issue to voting like a real Christian. (Which is why Moreno’s comments are laughably dangerous to those of us paying attention.)
I didn’t understand then how intentionally the card was designed to prevent the General Baptist Church from rendering unto Caesar.
At that same time, my best friend’s parents had a bumper sticker on their van that said “Save the baby humans.” Again, I didn’t realize until I had moved away years later—and started putting the pieces together—the sticker wasn’t a genuine plea to stop clubbing baby seals. The graphic of the baby seal pictured to the right of the text was meant to be provocative.
When my friend’s family was shopping for a new church, she asked her parents why they couldn’t go to my church instead of First Baptist. (She had a crush on a boy in my Sunday School class.)
“They don’t believe ‘once saved always saved there'” my friend told me. That was the answer her parents gave her.
The Southern Baptist Church they’d landed on was just a few ticks south, but still on Main Street. I went there a couple of times with her, once for a Bible themed costume party because Halloween was satanic or something. I don’t recall the reasoning anymore.
If you can call something like that reason.
My childhood church’s pastor was recommended as a friend to me on Facebook in the 2010s. He had an openly gay son, which Facebook also taught me. The pastor was not Facebook friends with only one of his own children, which seemed cruel. (I checked his mutuals to see if I should follow through with the add.)
When I Googled the pastor out of morbid curiosity, I learned the pastor worked for General Baptist HQ in Missouri, and he had written some theological rationalization for why homosexuality was wrong.
Fundamentalism.
Though I couldn’t have defined fundamentalism in my tweens and teens, in my adulthood it all made so much more sense. Not in the logical way, but in the “dude, that’s fucked up” way. I had grown up in a small town surrounded by uncaring, unchristlike bigots. I was sheltered from most of it, being a homebody, so the awakening rocked my world for a while.
After high school, I learned that one-time best friend went to work for a faith-based crisis pregnancy center. When she got married, she tried to have her own child without success, until (praise God, I guess?) a doctor figured out the reason for her body’s refusal to carry a fetus to term.
I wonder now how that one-time friend feels about Amber Nicole Thurman, but I don’t honestly have the heart to investigate. Maybe she, like me, has eschewed fundamalist bullshit, but it would be too much to learn she hasn’t. So I live in a different kind of ignorance now.
Similarly, it took me hours to summon the courage to look at the headlines about Marcellus Williams this morning. Leaning into that sorrow after spending hours last night in extreme pain and fatigue, might be too hard for me.
See, I contacted Missouri Governor Parson’s office yesterday trying desperately to appeal to his better angels, but when I saw on the official governor’s page that “Governor Parson has a passion for sports, agriculture, Christ, and people”?
I instantly knew I’d be grieving this morning. For Williams. For his family. For the fundamentalist at heart.