Sometimes it takes an act of bigotry to see how far we’ve come. A church in Kentucky took what its members no doubt thought was a perfectly reasonable racist action recently:
When Stella Harville brought her black boyfriend to her family’s all-white church in rural Kentucky, she thought nothing of it. She and Ticha Chikuni worshiped there whenever they were in town, and he even sang before the congregation during one service.
Then, in August, a member of Gulnare Free Will Baptist Church in Pike County told Harville’s father that Chikuni couldn’t sing there anymore. And last Sunday, in a moment that seems from another time, church members voted 9 to 6 to bar mixed-race couples from joining the congregation.
Actually, it’s hard to believe she thought nothing of it, but lets not interrupt the story. No doubt much to his surprise, the act of bigotry set off a firestorm, and the pastor had to backpedal, complete with the now standard denial that acts of religious bigotry don’t mean the religious are bigots:
“We are not a group of racist people,” said Keith Burden of the National Assn. of Free Will Baptists. “We have been labeled that obviously because of the actions of nine people.”
Not really just nine. You really have to count the abstainers, who in a situation like this must be accorded fellow traveler status. There were about 40 people there, so more than half didn’t vote. No doubt the nine active racists are simply stunned at any implication that they are racists, as the prime mover, former pastor Melvin Thomas explains:
“I am not racist. I will tell you that. I am not prejudiced against any race of people, have never in my lifetime spoke evil” about a race, Thompson said last week in a brief interview. “That’s what this is being portrayed as, but it is not.”
Certainly not. It’s something else, though nobody can quite put a finger on what it actually is.
For myself, I think this is a glass half full event. Churches are the last bastions of governmentally sanctioned racism in this country. (It often seems that religion has a monopoly on bigotry and ignorance, but that’s not true. See, e.g., the Republican Party and Fox News) The First Amendment probably requires that the government keep hands off, so only social pressure can bring this sort of thing to an end. The fact that this church is scrambling to reverse itself speaks volumes about how far we’ve come. I doubt they’d have felt the need even 10 years ago, and I’m sure the event would have passed unnoticed 20 years ago. Prior to that, there’s a good chance the church would have been driven out of town if it had allowed mixed-race couples.
We’ll know we’ve almost made it when we hear a similar story coming out of Alabama.
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