Hate, Alive and Well In 2021

I … well, I was going to say ‘hate’, but my grandmother used to get on me for  saying it, and so I began using loathe with every fiber of my being—See? That sounds better; so, I loathe, with every fiber of my being, organized religion.

I have always thought its main purpose was to ‘us’ and ‘them’ the world; set ‘us’ apart, and supposedly above, ‘them’.

I’ve told this story before, but it bears repeating: when we first moved to Camden and began meeting people, we got all sorts of questions: Where are you from? Where will you work? Where do you worship?

Screeching halt. Worship? I wasn’t expecting that, and because I tend to speak my mind, shoot from the hip, talk first and think later, I’d say I wasn’t much of an organized worshipper.

Well then, they’d invariably ask, how do you talk to God? And, again, not thinking, perhaps, I’d say that, if you believed in that sort of thing, isn’t God everywhere, and if He, and sometimes I’d say She just to mess with folks, is everywhere, why do I need to sit in a church and worship? I could talk to Him or Her anywhere at any time.

That was almost always met with silence, followed by, ‘Well, have a nice day.’

So why talk about his, again, today? It seems the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee voted this week to expel two churches for being LGBTQ-inclusive.

Yes, both the Towne View Baptist Church in Kennesaw, Georgia, and St. Matthews Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky have “been removed from the convention [because they] affirm homosexual behavior. 

Those two churches; they like The Gays; they think God likes The Gays. And so, they’re out.

In 2021.

You know, I don’t know much about organized religion, but even as a child, going to church with my parents, we learned that God loves everybody.

And then I learned that it’s just the bigots that run the churches that hate.