Soul Molesting in Upstate South Carolina's 4th Congressional District/Greenville News
I submitted the column that follows as a guest oped to the Greenville news. They rejected. It would be a little of a reach to say the News is as struck mute on the matter of guns and mass shootings as SC newspapers were on matters of race in the 1960s but friends tell me a book of the last ten years, Newspapers Wars, makes a compelling case journalism in South Carolina was asleep at the wheel in the heyday of Strom Thurmond and George Wallace.
A recent book by Marty Cohen, Moral Victories in the Battle for the US Congress suggests the religious right has co-opted the Country Club Republicans in the SC Fourth District. It recounts the "jew Baiting" of Lee Atwater and Carroll Campbell in 1978 in the sad tale of how Trey Gowdy and Bob Inglis displaced Liz Patterson into something of a gentleman's agreement William Timmons of Christ Church Episcopal now has with Bob Jones and FBC Spartanburg on the social issues as a foundational district for the GOP control of the current US House.
I have alerted my alma mater, Furman, with a letter I hope they will publish in their first edition this academic year. I am not alone in my concerns about the dark money politics of the Gun Lobby. The Dean of Baptist Historians, Wake Forest's Bill Leonard, a key contributor to the conversation in Furman's recent Seeking Abraham initiative, had a piece just last week on the venality of gun lobby politics in the wake of the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton.
What follows is the letter the Greenville News turned down.
Furman Historian Courtney Tollison has the opening essay in the 2015 Furman booklet celebrating 50 years of Desegregation at the School. A timeline in this look back reports in 1962 The John Birch Society erected a big sign outside Furman's gates fearful there was a communist infiltration of the school as it considered integration. Students tore the sign down but the Birchers came along and put it back up.
Furman and its sister schools in the Upstate, Wofford and Presbyterian and the assorted pulpits affiliated with these historically church related institutions now face a comparable adversarial values politics as the religious right, infected by the Far Right now passes itself off as mainstream in this Trump era in the politics of Trey Gowdy, his successor, William Timmons, and Jeff Duncan.
Lee Atwater in the late 70s teamed up with Carroll Campbell to run a Not One of Us Campaign against Greenville Mayor Max Heller, at the time endorsed by Furman President Gordon Blackwell. Max Heller was a Jew. Atwater boasted in the early 80s in his infamous NWord memo that you cannot play race baiting politics like you once could so you have to code and revamp in the politics of taxpayer groups, abortion and school prayer politics, which now has evolved into the dark money politics of the gun lobby and NRA.
Some of this history is recounted in a just released book by Marty Cohen, Moral Victories in the Battle for Congress. Cohen looks at three pockets in the US where the religious right is now mainstreamed into the once Country Club precincts. In Thirty plus intriguing pages he goes deep in the weeds and history of Greenville, Spartanburg's 4th district. In his words he aims to prove " the Republican party took advantage of the polarization growing out on moral issues growing out of the watershed election of 94 and leveraged it toward flipping congressional seats ultimately taking and then keeping the US House of Representatives."
Key in Cohen's compelling case in the 4th is how Bob Jones activists and then Bob Inglis used the politics of abortion to unseat Liz Patterson with the help of Ralph Reed and his scorecard. Whatever a person's gut convictions on abortion are, the politics of abortion as used in the SC 4th and elsewhere especially as embraced by the Country Club Republicans of Greenville and Christ Church's Timmons are chocked full of mendacity. (google Stansell, Holy War).
Mendacity is not a Christian virtue.
My friend at Dartmouth, Randall Balmer, says as he was reading Nixon and Reagan Paul Weyrich papers of the late 70s, it was almost as if they began to "sizzle" as Weyrich honed in on abortion as a wedge issue to replace race for Nixon's Silent majority that became Falwell and Reagan's Moral Majority.
Those politics are now conflated with the Dark Money Politics of the NRA. Google Jill Lepore's piece Battleground America, New Yorker and ask yourself where is the righteousness in weaponizing the 2nd Amendment for assault weapons and Stand your Ground laws that made the Trayvon Martin incident inevitable. Talk to Deanna Hollas, newly appointed by The Presbyterian church PCUSA of Westminster Presbyterian and Presbyterian College; talk to Deanna about America's Gun Policy. Bring her to Christ Church to talk to Congressman Timmons.
In November of 1963 LD Johnson, likely the closest thing Upstate SC ever had to Abraham Lincoln in virtue and wisdom, spoke to the South Carolina Southern Baptist Convention in Charleston as Furman was about to embark on its roughest two years in the desegregation conflict with the SCSBC. He said: "The pulpit is not to be used for partisan, provincial, and unchristian aims."
In the 70s many of us at Furman knew of LD Johnson, and Wofford's Will Willimon --a product of Buncombe Street UMC--and Presbyterian great preacher and trustee Frank Harrington, their network to the justice work of Will Campbell.
Campbell had a phrase for the mendacity of abortion politics, the dark money politics of the NRA, and the race baiting politics of which he was most familiar in the Civil Rights era: soul molesting.
With a thorough reading of the suggestions of this piece ask yourself what good is a Destination City, a Suspension Bridge if it is compliticous in soul molesting in its Delegation to DC.
As for the Birchers sign at Furman, in 1963 after it was re erected, five Furman students Burned it down. I'm glad they did.
posted by foxofbama | 1:09 PM
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