Baptists

It’s been said that the Christian right is more “right” than Christian. And there’s probably some truth to that. But, seriously, have you seen the Christian left? Back in 2020, we had the saga of White Jesus. An ex-pastor named Shaun King urged Black Lives Matter activists to destroy images that made Jesus look European rather than Palestinian. The trouble is that ancient Jews actually did look Mediterranean, because…well, they were. The big blue thing to the west of Palestine? That’s the Med. Mr. King was probably thinking of the Arab Muslims who now live in Palestine. But they only showed up around the year 640, when the Rashidun Caliphate invaded the Levant and killed most of the Jews and Christians around Jerusalem. Awkward. Anyway, White Jesus is out.

When Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris as his running mate, the Religion News Service reported that she ‘now considers herself a Black Baptist.’ Black with a capital ‘B’, note. The upper-case letter is one of the shibboleths of identity politics: it’s Black, not black, lives that matter. In other places we read that Sen. Harris is just Baptist, with no mention of race — but we can be certain that if Harris describes herself as Black Baptist, it is with a capital letter. The lower-case designation ‘black’ has been regarded as disrespectful in the African American community since long before BLM. (The legendary civil rights activist W.E.B.