Help, the KKK Is Back!

As Te’andrea and Charles Wilson were about to get married in their regular church, in the south of the United States, the pastor informed them that a group of parishioners were against their union taking place in that church because they’re black. Our associate blogger, Lait d’Beu, outraged, takes a look at the controversy.

Deogratias, a novel that inspired French film director Jean-Pierre Mocky, is about a man who decides to loot church collection boxes. But while the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs in Mississippi didn’t decide to rob the collection boxes in his church (which, by the way, has happened on that side of the Atlantic in recent years), it would shock me if at the end of his days, he were invited by Saint Peter — Heaven’s gate-keeper in the Christian tradition — to sit at “the right hand of God,” rather than sent to roast until the end of time in the flames of Hell with other damned souls. His conception of Christian charity conforms more to Ku Klux Klan ideology than to the Christian charity taught by the gospels; it is racist, profoundly racist. The struggles of Pastor Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks for the equality of blacks, a principle to then be adopted by President Lyndon Baines Johnson, went right over his moronic, prejudice-filled head, as stated in the article by Le Monde: “An American pastor refuses to marry a black couple.”

He sticks to backward positions from another era, refusing to marry Te’Andrea and Charles Wilson in “his” church under the pretext that no blacks have ever gotten married there since its creation in 1883. Big deal! Everything must begin somewhere; this is not surprising if he has always refused them. He agreed to marry them, but in another church where the faithful are mostly black, which means that there are white Christians exempt from racist prejudices and for whom praying to the Lord is the only thing that matters, regardless of skin color. The ceremony took place the next day in a different church. The article doesn’t say whether it was Pastor Stan Weatherford who presided. As for myself, I would have downright told him, “Go to Hell.”