Reply #24: Very true, belle

[kweerwolf]

Most of the evangelicals/fundamentalists started out as segregationists ... a fact I don't see how African-Americans can overlook.

Consider this from Southern Poverty Law Center's report on the religious right:

At the height of the civil rights movement, in 1965, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, an ambitious young minister in Lynchburg, Va., gave a sermon called "Ministers and Marches."

Falwell laid into Christian leaders who were actively supporting civil rights, reminding them of a Bible verse that fundamentalists often invoked as evidence that God did not want them to participate in politics: "For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh" (II Corinthians 10:13).

Fourteen years later, Falwell co-founded the Moral Majority, the first national effort to stimulate fundamentalist political participation and elect candidates who would, in the words of co-founder Paul Weyrich, "Christianize America."

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=522

Also, with so many poor black churches, it gets tempting for their clergy to buy into the right-wing agenda in order to grab a piece of the "faith-based initiative" pie. You have to admit, that was a smart move by Bush, Rove, or whoever to attract black voters by letting the ministers promote the right's wedge issues for them.