I worked in a rural church very much like this community, long ago. When I arrived I was startled to see a handmade sign on one classroom door that said, “Ladies Bible Study - No Sinners Allowed.”
That’s pretty much the opposite of the Gospel, but these nice very elderly ladies had been taught for decades that Christian is a synonym for good. Most of them had never even met somebody who didn’t identify themselves Christian. I can’t imagine what they would do if they suddenly had to teach a class that included one Buddhist kid.
Some people call this Christendom - a society where everybody and everything is identified as “Christian.” Pretty quickly it goes from meaning everything to meaning nothing. Homogeneity is actually kind of nice, as long as nobody rocks the boat, kind of like Lake Wobegon.
When that one Buddhist kid shows up (or more often a Jewish kid) it forces everybody to actually think about what they believe, and that makes some people very angry. It will probably lead some to lose their faith, and others to become deeper and more philosophical Christians. It would make one hell of a novel.
To the right, the charming logo of Negreet High, whose school team is the “Negreet Indians.”
I don’t think you have any idea how common this is, all across the USA. In cushy suburban Connecticut there are plenty of HS teams with Indian/native American mascots.
For clarification, sometimes this phrase is used sarcastically, but not always. I’m using it sincerely. It’s similar to “Bless your heart”, which many (including some Southerners) have concluded is always meant as a subtle insult. It’s not. My grandmother would say “Bless their heart” when she heard of someone’s misfortune, and always meant it as the deepest possible expression of sympathy.
What kind of utterly incompetent denomination was running that show? Aside from the whole ‘I’m pretty sure that Jesus didn’t spend page after page hanging out with sinners just because he was into slumming with hookers’ thing, the implication that there are (contemporary) non-sinners, much less that you are one, is easily one of the more heretical positions one could take.
Back in the good old days, you could have gone to the stake for less. Kids these days…
Remember: These places aren’t homogeneous, or you wouldn’t be hearing this story. I’ve been atheist since childhood, and I was born and raised in rural Alabama in a Christian family in a school just like this one where I was once brought before the principal to be accused of Satan-worship. There are many people like me, but they have difficulty making themselves heard, because, like Boundgear said, “Christendom.”
The broader political implications of this are nasty. The people who are doing the persecution have an outsized martyr complex, too, so we’ve created a scenario where if we stand up for the bullied kid and do the moral and right thing, it feeds into their view of themselves as persecuted, and the backlash will be big.
That’s not a reason not to do it, but Akbar’s Maxim applies. It’s a trap.
Actually, it makes perfect sense. They study bible sinners (if any, cynical me assumes that most of their time is spent chatting about neighbors and family) which are so much sexier than real sinners.
Kinda like people adoring the lifestyles of the Middle Ages of Renaissance fairs and romance novel, where mysterious sicknesses never mean shitting your guts out and the protagonists never really rapes because the heroine secretly liked it /but was too proud to admit).
Are there actually protestants so bad at protestantism that they (except, of course, the unitarians, who obviously aren’t) don’t know that they are also trinitarians who assert the necessity of salvation, certain disagreements concerning faith and works and a tendency not to use the word ‘concupiscence’ very often, aside?
I think they just want other gods to be nothing more than in the realm of mythology… Since no one (or maybe very few people) worship Hermes, than that’s okay. Plus, it probably does help that it’s a greek god, since that’s “white”. So I’d say it’s a combo of the two things…
I think what annoys me about this, other than everything, is that these same people would probably bitch and moan about other places where Christians are excluded, marginalized or actively persecuted as a minority group. It’s sad that they can’t see that they are doing the same to others who are doing them no damage by practicing a different faith.
Exactly. My adult friends got in a huff after a high school didn’t allow 'Merica Monday because it might offend some people. They hated the administration for not allowing people to show pride in America - if it offended some liberals from another country, they should leave. I explained that 'Murica was shorthand for the “worst” things about America - big macs, moonshine, and nascar rednecks. Then they got deeply offended that I disparaged those three things.
And that, people, is why the school administration didn’t allow 'Merica Monday - because it would have offended my conservative friends to be made fun of. Except they didn’t know they’d be made fun of and they got offended none-the-less. Fox news.
