Contradictions between faith, politics and racism still haunt the South | Opinion

I once preached in a church where afterwards I learned that the large leather-bound pulpit Bible had been donated by the Ku Klux Klan.

You can’t explain the South. Not really. William Faulkner tried. So did Pat Conroy. But the deep contradictions that inhabit our collective soul can only be observed – not explained and exorcized. At least not yet.

Politics and desegregation

Take our politics. Can you explain how the “solid South” swung from deep blue Democratic to bright red Republican in less than 20 years? President Franklin Roosevelt was liberal, but he carried the South. Same for Lyndon Johnson. But when he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Johnson famously quipped that he had given the South to the Republican Party for the next generation.

Try three.

When the Voting Rights Act was signed just a year later and Black Americans started signing up for the political party that had furthered their cause, the white exodus from the Democratic Party accelerated. Who wanted to be in a party where you had to share power with your field hands and sanitation workers? Pullman porters and hotel maids?

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When desegregation finally did come, we refused to accept it. I would imagine that most of the private schools still operating in the South sprung up in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to desegregate our schools, which we dragged our feet on year after year after year until left with no alternative. Then private “segregation academies” sprouted up like mushrooms across the South – many if not most of them labeled “Christian.”

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Our bloody religious history

Which brings me to our religion. Boy, do we have one. A bloody one. Soaked in the blood of both a savior who cleanses us from all sin and of a race we kidnapped, enslaved, raped, murdered and literally worked to death on our plantations and later in our factories and farms. The church wasn’t simply complicit. We provided the scriptural-proof texts. In my hometown, Black workers were consigned to the smelting plant, where wages were the lowest while work conditions were the hottest and most dangerous.

Do you think we felt guilty about any of this? Of course we did! Southerners may be the world’s greatest connoisseurs of collective guilt. We are marinated in it.

Why else do we go to church in such large numbers? We’ve got a lot to atone for! We know we’re rotten. But Jesus paid it all, thank heavens!

Only when you understand our weird pathology of sin and forgiveness can you begin to understand politicians like Gov. Bill Lee or U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, who can make a show of their faith, yet support policies that have no more in common with the teachings of Jesus than does Kim Jong Un with the Dalai Lama.

How else do “Christian” leaders criminalize homelessness, ostracize transgender kids and put assault rifles in the hands of mentally unstable teens? Deny health care to thousands of low-income Tennesseans and make it more difficult for hospitals to operate in rural communities yet provide massive tax cuts to the wealthiest among us?

Easy. You devise a theology of cheap grace that slathers on forgiveness like it was NO-AD sunscreen lotion and leaves the hard work of actually following the teachings of Jesus to somebody else. Why worry about actually feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, housing the homeless or atoning for four centuries of white supremacy when you’ve already got your ticket to heaven punched?

Buzz Thomas is a retired minister, constitutional lawyer and member of USA Today’s Board of Contributors.  

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Contradictions between faith, politics, racism still haunt the South