Numerous conservative pastors and commentators have declared to their flocks that true Christians must vote Republican if they are faithful. Chief among those is Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who told a conservative political action group this…
After Uvalde, let us dream of impossible things
Tuesday night, May 24, 2022. Election night. I turn on the TV to watch the returns come in. The polls close in five minutes. Before I can even get comfortable in my easy chair, the “Breaking News” sign, the crawler…
The Civil Rights leader nobody knows on his 100th birthday
On March 18, 2022, Fred Shuttlesworth, one of the least known but most impactful figures in the Civil Rights movement, would have celebrated his 100th birthday. Unless you are a historian of that movement or one of my friends, you probably…
The long, dry line from 9-11 to Jan. 6
Every year, just before the end of the old year and the beginning of the new, my wife and I always watch CBS’s annual broadcast of the Kennedy Center Honors. We love it. We weep with the honorees, the masters…
Color-blindness, consistency and the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict
Right there in the middle of the most famous speech in 20th century American history —Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech — was essentially a pipe-dream prayer that King’s “four little children will one day live in a nation…
George Floyd and the silence of white evangelical America
This God-forsaken red stain on our white hands will never be washed clean until we white Christians repent and through peaceful, nonviolent protest declare, “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take any more dead black men at the hands of white police.”
Parallels between the racist rhetoric of Trump and Wallace are undeniable. But there is one important difference
Donald Trump rode to political power on words even more inflammatory and vitriolic than those of the early George Wallace in the 1960s. At least Wallace, late in life, demonstrated the moral capacity to re-evaluate himself. To this point, at least, Trump has not.
A Memorial Day reminder for the 81 percent
“Kyrios Christos!” (literally, “Lord Christ” or Christ is Lord!) The 81 percent of Evangelical Christians in America who voted for and still support Donald Trump are desperately in need of a reminder that “Kyrios Christos” is Christianity 101. It is the first central…
Making dreams come true
By Andrew Manis Some years ago, when I taught at Averett College in Danville, Va., my friend Thurman Echols, pastor of the Moral Hill Missionary Baptist Church in Martinsville, often came to speak on the civil rights movement to my American…