By Alan Bean

According to a front page, above-the-fold, article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary has launched a twelve-year project that will see 69 heroes of the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention celebrated in stained-glass.

This ambitious enterprise follows hard on the heels of a 20-minute documentary produced this year to consecrate the 20th anniversary of R. Albert Mohler’s role in the conservative takeover of Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville Kentucky.

My initial reaction to all this eulogizing of faith heroes, most of whom are still with us, was distinctly negative.  It seemed tacky and a bit presumptuous.   Shouldn’t we wait for the verdict of history?  Don’t we normally reserve stained-glass windows for genuine heroes of the faith who are acknowledged inside and outside the limited circle of our faith tradition?

I do recall seeing E Y Mullins, a Southern Seminary president who died in 1928, incorporated into a “great cloud of witnesses” set of stained-glass windows in Louisville’s Highland Baptist Church; but Mullins was celebrated worldwide as a Baptist Statesman, inside and outside his denomination, and appealed to conservative and moderates alike. Besides, I suspect a few decades separated his death and the creation of the window.

On reflection, though, I think Paige Patterson and his Southwestern colleagues are making the right move at the right time.  The concerted antics of men like Patterson, Bailey Smith, Adrian Rogers and W.A. Criswell may appear glorious, bold and compelling to the good people within the fundamentalist wing of Southern Baptist life.  But to virtually anyone outside that particular tribe, the conservative resurgence looks like a ruthless power-play accomplished by manipulating fear and ignorance.

No one outside the tribe is going to celebrate these men, so they might as well celebrate themselves.

Moreover, Patterson et al were right to move quickly.  The verdict of history will not be kind.  It is hard to imagine Baptists fifty years hence remembering these folks or rejoicing in their strong-arm tactics.  Folks like Joseph McCarthy and Theodore Bilbo (the race-baiting Mississippi Governor) had their day, but no one is building monuments to their memory.

At least, I hope not.

Please check out this Jon Stewart clip about “a white Santa”.  Santa, obviously isn’t any color because he is a harmless fiction.  He can be any color we want him to be.  Saint Nicholas is an historical figure; Santa Claus is a creation of Coca Cola.  But the historical Saint Nicholas lived in either Greece or Turkey (depending on whom you believe) so he was far from white as well.

But Megyn wasn’t finished.  Here’s her full comment:

“Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn’t mean it has to change, you know?” she added. “I mean, Jesus was a white man too. He was a historical figure, that’s a verifiable fact, as is Santa — I just want the kids watching to know that.”

Unlike Santa Claus, Jesus of Nazareth is a real historical figure.  He was also a Palestinian Jew of the first century, which meant his skin was dark and his hair was likely dark brown or black.  If you saw the historical Jesus in a security line at the airport, you would get nervous.  If you worked for the Border Patrol and saw Jesus walking in Brownsville, Texas, you would ask for his papers.

Sorry, Megan.  Just because Jesus’ color, or the fictional identity of Santa makes you uncomfortable . . .

By Alan Bean

Facebook is blowing up with righteous indignation over the case of Ethan Couch.  And you can’t blame people for being upset.  The kid was dead drunk and under the influence of prescription meds when his truck plowed into another vehicle, killing four innocent people.  Yesterday, a judge handed Ethan Couch ten years probation.  He won’t have to serve a day in jail.

But what really has folks riled up is the reason Mr. Couch caught a break.  Defense counsel argued that Ethan is the victim of “affluenza”.  His parents gave him everything he wanted and never forced him to live with the consequences of his decisions (this wasn’t Ethan’s first DWI).  Since you can’t put the parents on trial for bad parenting, why should their sins be visited on the child?

If the comments section following most news reports are anything to go by, Ethan Couch and his parents should have been drawn and quartered, their bodies burned and the ashes scattered to the four winds.  Consigning sinners to hell is above our pay grade, the reasoning goes, but we should be looking for the next best thing.

Other readers argue that if Ethan had been Black or Latino, or simply poor, he would be looking at decades behind bars.

Jim Schutze with the Dallas Observer agrees that the Couch boy should be looking at prison time, but he questions the logic of over-sentencing the rich kid simply because we are so terribly harsh on poor, minority kids.  Here’s the meat:

And, look, all that stuff about the “affluenza defense” offered by his lawyers — how his parents had failed to teach him right from wrong so it wasn’t his fault? You just have to toss that stuff in the verbal Dumpster as the kind of courtroom trash-talk that lawyers say when they have no conceivable real defense to offer. I heard the same thing once in a case in Florida where the lawyers said the defendant teenagers had been scarred by callous suburban culture. The judge blew it off as the “fear of lawnmowers” defense.

Everybody knows it’s junk. The real defense is: “This kid’s parents can afford a very expensive whiskey school for him, so why toss him onto the human trash heap of a brutal state prison system? Maybe he can be saved by the whiskey doctors. Why not try?”

I know what the answer is. You should dump him onto the trash heap, because you dump everybody else’s kid on the trash heap. And as one of the loved one’s of the dead said on TV last night, “At some point there has to be justice.”

I get all that. I believe all that. I’m just not convinced that justice is what we have to offer. And if I put myself in the shoes of Ethan Couch’s parents, then, yes, I’m going to do whatever I can to keep him out. Maybe what the rest of us need to do is work to provide a more dignified and decent system of punishment for all kids.

It doesn’t take much experience with the criminal justice system to realize that Americans get all the justice they can pay for.  A few days ago, I told you about Kareem Serageldin, a former top executive with Credit Suisse, who got 2.5 years for contributing to the mortgage meltdown of 2008.  The judge cut the Wall Street swindler some slack because “He was in a place where there was a climate for him to do what he did.  It was a small piece of an overall evil climate inside that bank and many other banks.”

Actually, two or three years in prison might be a reasonable sentence for a white collar criminal, but as I pointed out in my post, when we’re throwing young black males away for twenty, thirty or seventy years for non-violent narcotics offenses, something is seriously out of balance.

If the Credit Suisse hot-shot hadn’t been named “Kareem” he might have sidestepped prison altogether.

And then there is the case of Ken Anderson, the corrupt Williamson County prosecutor who put an innocent Michael Morton in prison for a quarter century by withholding exculpatory evidence.  Anderson resigned his position in September and, two months later, was sentenced to ten days in prison and 500 hours of community service.  In addition, Judge Kelly Moore found Anderson in contempt of court for withholding evidence.

“This seems like paltry punishment for having ruined another man’s life,” a Dallas Morning News editorial observed.

But what would be adequate? The best judge in this situation is Morton himself, who has long insisted that he sought justice and accountability — not vengeance — for what Anderson and his cohort did.

Morton was present in Moore’s courtroom Friday. “It’s a good day,” he stated. “I said the only thing that I wanted, as a baseline, is Ken Anderson to be off the bench and no longer practicing law. And both of those things have happened and more.”

Michael Morton is an exceptional man. He didn’t want anyone else victimized by a reckless and amoral prosecutor, he wasn’t out for revenge.  That’s admirable.

But Judge Moore may have granted Anderson a modicum of mercy for the same reason Mr. Couch and Mr. Serageldin dodged bullets.  We must remember that Anderson served in Williamson County, possibly the most tough-on-crime county in the great state of Texas.  He was part of a punitive community spirit and maybe he shouldn’t be blamed for being corrupted by it.  Prosecutors generally reflect the values of the electorate.

This may surprise you, but I find some merit in this argument.  Our virtues and our sins often say more, for better or worse, about our environment than about us.  That’s why conservatives talk so much about moral values–they make a difference.

The problem is that these “bad environment” arguments only seem persuasive when we’re discussing white sons and daughters of privilege.  If the defendant is a young black male, we respond in fear.  That’s why most white people (not all, mercifully) worked so hard to believe that Trayvon Martin was a punk; it enabled them to see his death as just deserts.

One thing is certain, treating wealthy white people with the same contempt and disregard poor minority defendants generally receive from the justice system accomplishes nothing.  To paraphrase Mr. Schutze: Maybe what the rest of us need to do is work to provide a more dignified and decent system of punishment for all Americans.

By Alan Bean

It has been heartening to read gracious statements from a number of conservative American leaders acknowledging the greatness of Nelson Mandela.  Consider these kind words from the Facebook page of Senator Ted Cruz:

Unfortunately, many of the senator’s Facebook buddies were deeply offended by these sentiments.  In their eyes, Mandela was a communist agitator who advocated violence and torture.

On the other hand, the post garnered over 5,000 likes, so the reaction from the Cruz constituency was mixed.

When the hateful comments on the Cruz Facebook page were noted by outlets like MSNBC and ABC, the tone of the comments section changed markedly.  Go to the comments section now and you will find a raft of liberals hating on the haters.

I wish more of the left-leaning commentators had thanked Senator Cruz for acknowledging Mandela’s contribution to the cause of freedom.  Culture warriors rarely know much about the folks they oppose.  Most of what passes for common knowledge is culled from “look what the bastards’ are up to now” email subject lines.  What emerges is often a crude, unbalanced caricature of what the other side believes and why they believe it.

Liberals visiting the Ted Cruz Facebook page were driven there by news stories about the senator’s hate mail, so that’s what they focused on.  Still, when our ideological opposites do the right thing, they deserve our praise.  If we criticize the bad stuff, we should be prepared to celebrate the good.  And what Cruz said was admirably good.

That said, you can’t really blame the haters or the folks hating on the haters.  Both sides have been primed to respond as they do.  On the excellent Talk to Action site, Bill Berkowitz reminds us that the conservative movement, in both its political and religious expressions, supported Apartheid and demonized Nelson Mandela for decades.  After pointing out that conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Dick Cheney viewed Mandela as a terrorist thug, Berkowitz turns his attention to the Religious Right:

The Religious Right in this country — and the Rev. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson in particular — were steadfast in its support of apartheid as well as  counter-revolutionary movements in Angola and Mozambique. “The liberal media has for too long suppressed the other side of the story in South Africa,” he said. “It is very important that we stay close enough to South Africa so that it does not fall prey to the clutches of Communism.”

“South Africa is torn by civil unrest, instigated primarily by Communist-sponsored people who are capitalizing on the many legitimate grievances created by apartheid, unemployment and policy confrontations,” Falwell said.

David John Marley noted in Pat Robertson: An American Life that Robertson said the ANC was “led by communists and was hostile to Israel” and “far too radical an element to ever work with,” while “his campaign literature made similar claims for the need to support the white government.”

In an infamous segment on “60 Minutes,” the Institute on Religion and Democracy excoriated the World Council of Churches (WCC) over its support for Mandela. The John Birch Society called Mandela “a communist terrorist thug.”

People who grew up listening to folks like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell took their inflammatory rhetoric to heart.   They go to the Ted Cruz Facebook page because it reinforces their antipathy for all things liberal–Obamacare in particular–and they aren’t disappointed.  But what do they make of the gracious memorial to Nelson Mandela?  All they know about the South African leader comes from religious right propagandists.  In other words, they are woefully misinformed.

Unfortunately, conservatives aren’t the only people who get most of their information from biased sourced.  In essence, the culture war amounts to two well-oiled and highly-financed propaganda machines speaking past each other.  Everybody shrieks soundbite mantras.  Concepts too complex for a bumper sticker shrivel and die in this world.  Messages aren’t intended for mixed company; messages are targeted to the passions (and ignorance) of “the base”.  Politicians voice their focus group-tested talking points.  Pundits weigh the soundbites in the ideological balance and render a verdict.  No wonder our national conversation has become so impoverished.

We need to learn how to speak in mixed company, because we live in an increasingly diverse world.  We need a real sharing of ideas grounded in respect for our ideological adversaries and a genuine desire to understand the social and emotional worlds they inhabit.  If we must disagree–and at times, we certainly must–let’s know enough about the folks on the other side to engage their actual position.

Next time you see a “look at what the bastards are up to now!” subject line, delete the email.   You are being propagandized.  Poorly paid interns have been browsing the web looking for ill-considered statements and inflammatory comments from leading figures on the other side that, taken out of context, can be used to fire up the troops on your side of the issue.  The intention is not to inform but to manipulate emotion.

I have written a great deal about “messy middle” churches.  Messy middle churches are home to folks embracing the full gamut of opinion on every conceivable issue; paleo-conservatives, radical liberals and everybody in between.  Pastors of messy middle churches rarely address the Christian gospel to hot-button issues like immigration, social security, the plight of the homeless and the wealth gap because they fear the inevitable disagreements these subjects elicit might prove divisive and unproductive.

If we approach these issues with bumper sticker slogans culled from media culture warriors the result will be divisive and destructive; but that isn’t the way real people of faith talk, especially in the presence of people who are likely to disagree.

Mixed company forces us to choose our words carefully, to think before speaking, to anticipate counter-arguments.  In mixed company, we are inclined to put the most gracious spin on our comments because we don’t want to be misunderstood.  In other words, mixed company encourages genuine communication.

Ted Cruz honored Nelson Mandela for at least two reasons.  First, Cruz sees himself as a freedom fighter and is willing to grant the same status to the great South African.  He could have enumerated the points on which he and Mandela disagree, but chose to emphasize commonalities.

Secondly, Cruz is smart enough to know that his Facebook comments would be scrutinized by the media, so he put a gracious spin on the ball.  He was speaking in mixed company, and he was smart enough to know it.