Trump, the Birch Society and the Unraveling of the Southen Baptist Convention
Yesterday May 3 Theatlantic dot com posted a Jonathan Merritt story on wife abuse and Paige Patterson who with Jesse Helms and the alleged sodomist Paul Pressler were key players in the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Two blogs below you see the framework of Bush 41 and Lee Atwater's contribution to this miasma, something Jon Meacham whatever the merits of his latest book on the Soul of America, and they are considerable, missed in his recent biography. He had some fine words for Barbara but there are other things to be said about Bush 41 and the fundy leader he nominated to head the office of US Ethics in 1990.
I was talking to a key person on the topic of the Southern Press this morning. He agrees that the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC; if it had happened, that key ingredient hadn't been left to foment with the complicity of Billy Graham and often the encouragement of the Bush family and the outright perniciousness of Rove and the poison of the likes of the Devil's Bargain of Trump and fundamentalists, well quite likely there wouldn't have been Bush 43 and the Iraq war and now Trump.
Garry Wills got it right in his review of Joe Scarborough's book on the GOP in NY Rev of Books about five years ago, and then again with similar treatment of EJ Dionne. Tom Edsall has skirted the matter sporadically since in WAPO 1986 Sat page A4 I think it was June 6 or so: "New Right now Controls Huge SBC". Got Harry Dent's syncophant Ed Young in perspective.
My friend Ellen Rosenberg prophesied it all in 1988 in a letter to me I have published in the History Section of Baptistlife.com
Pressler, a son of a VP of Exxon Oil in Houston, long time friend of the Birch Society and White Citizens Council in cahoots with the Jesse Helms Network and later Atwater and Karl Rove, in the Birch infested Harris County Texas took his resentments against Brown V Board and LBJ and later focused on Bill Moyers and Furman Religion proff Jack Flanders who went to Baylor. His personal grievances and his poisonous right wing hatred of the Catholic Jack Kennedy and Martin Luther King fomented into the 79 through 92 fundamentalist takeover of the SBC.
Bush 41 stood up to the Birchers in 66 in Harris county but by 88 when Barr told him they needed a nutcracker (Lee Atwater--see his notice in Wuthnow's Rough Country) and here we are with Mike Huckabee (also complicitous with Pressler and his Arkansas agent Ronnie Floyd) in the prayer breakfast moment with Trump yesterday.
Yes Mr. Meacham there is a cancer in the soul of America and the Bush family is much more complicitous than you allowed in what to date passes for the definitive biogragphy.
Bill Friday, the chancellor of the UNC system in 88 told FBC Asheville NC pastor Cecil Sherman who told me in 93 in Greensboro, the most significant event in North Carolina the decade of the 80s was the fundamentalist takeover of my Dad's seminary Southeastern. Cause Jesse Helms --Paige Patterson was to be President within five years of Randall Lolley's ouster--and his Bircher network with Pressler knew that in the seminary they could produce a generation of fundamentalist preachers who could get in the heads of every hamlet and suburb in North Carolina with tentacles all along the east coast and flip them on the social issues to the Right.
I hope those days are about over and Dallas in a couple weeks where WA Criswell was the priest to the Birch Society the whole 2nd half of the 20th Century; as Denis Johnson says in the great American novella Train Dreams, Those Days are about gone forever.
Jonathan Merritt may be a little overrated, himself the son of a recent fundamentalist president of the SBC from near Dacula Georgia, but he placed a marker on America's evangelical history yesterday in the Atlantic.
Here is a link to his piece:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/05/sbc-patterson/559532/?utm_source=fbb
May it be so
Two blogs below you see the framework of Bush 41 and Lee Atwater's contribution to this miasma, something Jon Meacham whatever the merits of his latest book on the Soul of America, and they are considerable, missed in his recent biography. He had some fine words for Barbara but there are other things to be said about Bush 41 and the fundy leader he nominated to head the office of US Ethics in 1990.
I was talking to a key person on the topic of the Southern Press this morning. He agrees that the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC; if it had happened, that key ingredient hadn't been left to foment with the complicity of Billy Graham and often the encouragement of the Bush family and the outright perniciousness of Rove and the poison of the likes of the Devil's Bargain of Trump and fundamentalists, well quite likely there wouldn't have been Bush 43 and the Iraq war and now Trump.
Garry Wills got it right in his review of Joe Scarborough's book on the GOP in NY Rev of Books about five years ago, and then again with similar treatment of EJ Dionne. Tom Edsall has skirted the matter sporadically since in WAPO 1986 Sat page A4 I think it was June 6 or so: "New Right now Controls Huge SBC". Got Harry Dent's syncophant Ed Young in perspective.
My friend Ellen Rosenberg prophesied it all in 1988 in a letter to me I have published in the History Section of Baptistlife.com
Pressler, a son of a VP of Exxon Oil in Houston, long time friend of the Birch Society and White Citizens Council in cahoots with the Jesse Helms Network and later Atwater and Karl Rove, in the Birch infested Harris County Texas took his resentments against Brown V Board and LBJ and later focused on Bill Moyers and Furman Religion proff Jack Flanders who went to Baylor. His personal grievances and his poisonous right wing hatred of the Catholic Jack Kennedy and Martin Luther King fomented into the 79 through 92 fundamentalist takeover of the SBC.
Bush 41 stood up to the Birchers in 66 in Harris county but by 88 when Barr told him they needed a nutcracker (Lee Atwater--see his notice in Wuthnow's Rough Country) and here we are with Mike Huckabee (also complicitous with Pressler and his Arkansas agent Ronnie Floyd) in the prayer breakfast moment with Trump yesterday.
Yes Mr. Meacham there is a cancer in the soul of America and the Bush family is much more complicitous than you allowed in what to date passes for the definitive biogragphy.
Bill Friday, the chancellor of the UNC system in 88 told FBC Asheville NC pastor Cecil Sherman who told me in 93 in Greensboro, the most significant event in North Carolina the decade of the 80s was the fundamentalist takeover of my Dad's seminary Southeastern. Cause Jesse Helms --Paige Patterson was to be President within five years of Randall Lolley's ouster--and his Bircher network with Pressler knew that in the seminary they could produce a generation of fundamentalist preachers who could get in the heads of every hamlet and suburb in North Carolina with tentacles all along the east coast and flip them on the social issues to the Right.
I hope those days are about over and Dallas in a couple weeks where WA Criswell was the priest to the Birch Society the whole 2nd half of the 20th Century; as Denis Johnson says in the great American novella Train Dreams, Those Days are about gone forever.
Jonathan Merritt may be a little overrated, himself the son of a recent fundamentalist president of the SBC from near Dacula Georgia, but he placed a marker on America's evangelical history yesterday in the Atlantic.
Here is a link to his piece:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/05/sbc-patterson/559532/?utm_source=fbb
May it be so
posted by foxofbama | 8:59 AM
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