American Heretics: The Politics of the Gospel (Christian Nationalism Documentary) | Real Stories

i think that's an interesting thing this one piece will make 52 layers watch on mobile devices or the big screen all for free no subscription required download veli now [Music] good morning welcome to the good ship mayflower it's a very important day for us a congregation in covenant with the united church of christ where we believe that no matter who you are or where you are on life's journey you are welcome here [Music] nobody has the absolute truth and that would be that would be to put it in sort of old religious language that would be idolatry to say you know the truth you're absolutely certain and by the way an interesting thing about people who say they're certain then you need no faith [Music] there are no historical errors in the bible all that we know confirms the truth i would cite you to the apostle paul and his clear and wise command in romans 13 to obey the laws of the government because god has ordained the government for his purposes [Music] [Music] i arrived here 32 years ago and thought to myself what am i doing in oklahoma i came to build a liberal protestant church in oklahoma knowing there wouldn't be one on every street corner but i made the mistake of using the word liberal and so a woman on the search committee said to me i just wish you wouldn't keep using that word i said well liberal means open-minded tolerant of divergent opinions and exceedingly generous that's what it means if you look it up and i would like this church to be liberal in that sense and just no i don't like it i don't want you to use it i said well what word would you prefer that i use and she said conservative that was my introduction to oklahoma oklahoma is arguably the reddest state in the country so we didn't have a single county for example that went for barack obama in either election and all counties went for trump in the last election we are southern baptist in our political orientation so that means that there are certain messages that get sent to young people who are gay for example or who are democrats i'm always joking when i'm out lecturing that in oklahoma you can be a democrat or you can be a christian but but you can't be both right that would be peculiar we've entered a time where the power of negative partisanship has sorted us along lines of race and religion so that if you look at republicans they're about seven and ten white and christian democrats are only three in ten white and christian and what it means is that the two parties have exploited race and religion two of the most visceral things you could think of in terms of human experience and they've locked them into partisan identities this gets to be called the bible belt largely because the kind of religion that was in the south was created in the civil war and came out of the support of slavery [Music] it's a kind of religion that's stark in many ways and and it's centered on the bible they think the bible is the essence of religion which is if you think about it historically kind of odd that means jesus can't really have anything to do with it because there wasn't any bible in his day [Music] most people who drive through a landscape don't really see much but the more you know the more you see the same thing's true in a text [Music] it's kind of flat it's barren the colors are subtle although they can be spectacular it's a beautiful landscape in its own and it's it's kind of primordial in ways [Music] it's also the most damaged landscape in the world you know we only have about five percent of prairie left so it's very it's a very damaged ecosystem somewhat like the bible which is a highly damaged ecosystem [Music] oklahoma is viewed by the rest of the country as being distinctive we're either your future or or your past i'm not sure which i taught for 26 years at phillips theological seminary which is in oklahoma a lot of students would come here and they they have lived in a culture that has been largely christian and largely unthinking about its christianity they don't really question it the bible's a moving target if people who say well you have to have a bible in order to be christian well you can't have any christians until the fourth century because that's when you get the canon canon is a fourth century creation masquerading as a first century eyewitness report the various compositions that were are in the new testament never thought they'd be in a new testament they're occasional paul's letters are clearly occasional they're just written specific people the gospels are quite local the canon takes them out of their historical context by force and they become kind of self-referential just kind of referring to each other so then the text is cut free of its historical context and you're then free to put it in any context you want to over and over again which which is what happens the christian right has defined christianity for us and a god that's very judgmental and vindictive gets angry punishes people is a lawgiver and a judge hands down these laws if you break them you get punished if you follow them you get rewarded there's a very parental and punitive model of christianity i don't see that when i study the new testament in the early church at all i see the opposite there are female apostles poor people are brought to the table and fed you know communion was especially presented to feed poor people who otherwise wouldn't eat [Music] why do you not judge for yourself what is right jesus said it he put a lot of a lot of emphasis on individual action he the idea that god's going to do everything and that everything has been determined by god i think it's a very harmful idea in religion and that there's nothing we can do to change anything and i think one of the things that protestants were supposed to tell the world is with their whole protestant work ethic you can change things you can make a difference but look at what's happening now we have the largest gap between rich and poor in the history of the united states and it's getting wider all the time we have more churches than almost anyone and yet some of the worst social statistics in the country teen pregnancy addiction domestic abuse one in four oklahoma children face food insecurity oklahoma incarcerates more women than any other state in the nation we have for over 25 years we have the highest divorce rate of most cultures this county is 67 percent the buckle of the bible belt well that tells you something is really really wrong with our whole approach to religion be with us as we determine our next faithful step and then see us through we pray in the name of our teacher jesus amen we've operated under this hierarchy of humans are better than animals whites are better than blacks men are better than women straits are better than gays and if all those other groups which are further down the ladder start to rise up we push back using all kinds of fear tactics and quoting scripture out of context to sort of hold on desperately to what we have because we're living through sort of the last days of the privileged white male and i think that's part of what the trump presidency represents white people won't even be the majority in another 50 years we don't really like the way that feels but that's what's coming i'm fourth generation classical pentecostal fundamentalist christian so i can i can address this not as an outsider but as an insider carlton pearson the world knows me as bishop but i don't look like a bishop so i look like a son of a bishop that's what they think pastor carlton pearson will tell you that tulsa is the city of his prime and of his crime his ministry was a sudden and bright supernova before it burned out in a spectacular crash that left pearson shattered for straying from the story as it had always been told i think that the the the church itself in america has become corrupt and eroded and tired and we have an elite attitude of superiority christianity itself feels that it's the chosen group we're the chosen people this is the chosen country this is the chosen culture we must own it and control it and keep it pure so we can evangelize the world that's why they like trump trump is the closest thing to their image of an angry vengeful god who says vengeance is mine said the lord i will repay i'm a jealous god i shall have no other god but me you're my chosen people we were really never a christian nation our constitution made certain of that it was a rare thing to have kind of non-religiously identified you know people in in power all the way from the beginning of the country but yet this kind of general sense of a theistic belief that was roughly christian christianity was kind of assumed because it's just in the water there's not a lot else around but but they're not founding a christian nation washington is a really interesting example on the one hand he really does see religion as tied up with morality and morality tied up with the success of the democratic experiment in in the u.s he also though is very clear from the beginning that it's not overtly christian the early jewish community saw themselves and experienced themselves as this extreme minority non-christian group and they were wondering where's our place in the country and he wrote this beautiful letter back to them where he said we are founded as a nation based on the constitution and the only thing required for one to be a good citizen is to affirm the principles of the constitution we will not be a place where bigotry takes root [Music] it wasn't just these lawmakers saying this they had allies in the clerical community there's a baptist minister of this period this colonial period named john leland he believed in his religious convictions very strongly but he absolutely insisted that everybody should have the right to make their own decisions about religion one place where you really see the power of christianity really on the negative side of us's history is the issue of slavery we really don't get the civil war and the kind of moral arguments around justifying slavery without it being rooted in biblical arguments looking at sermons that were preached during the civil war it's really clear that those who were for slavery had the better arguments from the bible the bible's pretty clear slavery's okay the abolitionist had a terribly difficult time overturning them because they really had to disagree with the bible there's another way to look at it oh the whole exodus experience for israel is israel coming out of slavery and that becomes a kind of primary theme you know that this freedom from slavery you have paul saying in galatians there is neither jew nor greek there is neither slave nor free there is neither male nor female for you are all one in christ jesus he says within this body of christ there is no distinction now it took the church a long time to figure that out virtually every white protestant domination split over the civil war in the slavery question most of them came back together in the early part of the 20th century southern baptists have remained split to this day from their northern brethren that began to be the fault line really we've been living with through the 20th century and that is still largely with us today that you can see in voting patterns you can see in political activity and even in theological differences i was born and raised here in oklahoma and so the fact that we're a very religious state and that our population expects their legislators to be very religious and quite frankly expects them to be christian does not surprise me i came up with a phrase the rev and the rep in our 2014 campaign when when colin ran the first time unsuccessfully but i thought oh man that would be a really that would be such a fun way to to connect us and and to talk about how our work is really not that different the republicans hold about 68 of the seats while democrats hold about 28 of the seats so we are outnumbered a lot of young people are leaving the state of oklahoma because of regressive taxes of close-mindedness of the conservative culture here and we thought about it but came to the conclusion that our family is here we love this place oklahoma has a history of being a populist state we have a history of being proud of our ability to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and so it's our responsibility to insert ourselves in the conversation my name is colin walkey i represent house district 87 in northwest oklahoma city in 2017 three bills ran to raise the minimum wage in the state of oklahoma and not a single one received a hearing as a result this year i'm running my own minimum wage bill that would raise the minimum wage to 11 dollars per hour in oklahoma we talk about family values all the time meanwhile we pass legislation that makes it harder and harder on families we have passed nothing but shameful budgets for the past six eight years we continue to cut education we've cut education spending more than any other state in the nation we've cut aid to dhs to the department of mental health there's two reasons why i think a lot of these conservative social spending cut oriented bills get passed from a religious perspective the first one is is that the individuals who run these bills have a sincere belief that what you believe as far as whether jesus is your lord and savior is more important than what you actually do most christians think jesus came and he founded christianity and the church started and you're off to the races and depending on what your denomination is that's what the early disciples were doing so for methodists they're all singing hymns you know and for catholics they're all saying mass and none of these early folks in what you might call the jesus movement think they're christians they think they're some form of jews they're in a jewish reform movement in one way or another all of these reform movements phariseeism what becomes christianity the jesus movements and that they're all they're all dealing with a coup couple of similar problems one is the thing nobody wants to talk about but determines everything and that's wrong they're living in the roman empire and the roman empire is an empire it's not pox romana roman peace is only pox if you're a romana if you're something else it's called oppression it's too dangerous to be jewish and and the empire keeps this pressure on and one of the big drivers in the second century is the rise of martian who comes along and and he really reads paul as being anti-jewish and he makes a collection of paul's letter and something looking like the gospel of luke and that becomes his gospels and that becomes his new testament so you've got this political pressure you've got this emerging new set of scriptures that begins to push the group to identify itself quite differently as over against what is now trying to identify itself as judaism so both movements are engaged in self-identification which pushes them apart the key player here is constantine in 321 he calls the council of nicaea he begins to favor christianity he doesn't make it the official religion of the empire that comes later but he does favor it he wanted christianity to help unify the empire because the empire really lacked a kind of coherent ideological foundation and he thought christianity could provide that the problem was christianity was divided itself because it's doing all this self-definition it's you know it's not all that unified and so he calls the council of nicaea which is fascinating the first ecumenical council is called by a roman emperor who wasn't even christian they meet in an old pagan temple and they argue and argue and argue they don't really know where they gonna go eusebius who was there describes it you know he surrounded the temple with troops and cut off the food supply and you get the nicene creed [Music] that's a little quick and facile but there is a certain amount of force to him he will not let them out until they agree and so the point of the creed is to create unity the point of the creed is also to exclude those who don't agree so a creed has both a unifying aspect to it and an exclusive aspect it gets rid of folks and it still functions that way today the other thing that's really important to notice about the creed is it changes what becomes the new christian movement and it's really in a way you can say who invented christianity the nicene creed constantine because it shifts christianity from being a religion of praxis like judaism it's what you do that matters into being a matter of belief we don't throw people out of church because they don't sell everything and give it to the poor we will throw them out of church if they don't say the nice in greek [Music] my dad grew up in this very conservative world and actually at one time was very enamored of it wanted to be one of the church of christ great boy preachers and in that denomination you didn't have to go to seminary you just had to show promise and elders would lay hands on you and say go get them sick them you've got the gift and my dad started driving around in the little towns in eastern oklahoma preaching at age 15. and he was quite the spellbinding preacher and then he went off to world war ii he left the farm he met all kinds of people willing to die for him who were methodist presbyterians they would take a bullet and they weren't even going to get into heaven according to his childhood theology but my dad said i saw this world that was bigger than i had ever been taught the world was and all these people believed in different things and surely god loved them too surely the presbyterian had a chance to get into heaven maybe even the buddhists could get into heaven or the jew could get into heaven surely the world i've been shown is too small and he just sort of outgrew it and left it and became a congregational minister after he left the church of christ then i sort of heard him in a free pulpit questioning the vietnam war conventional nuclear power pushing for women's rights and civil rights and i thought whoa this is kind of exciting this might be a good way to spend my life doing that if i could do it without getting fired one of the first things we did at mayflower was we started marrying gay people long before it was legal we just made up our own marriage licenses because we couldn't get one from the state we thought we might drive a hundred people out and what happened was a hundred more people came and so i learned something at that point about going ahead and saying what i really thought and the hunger for that in in people's lives and for them to feel like church was going to be an honest place they could agree they could disagree but they could believe that what was being said is what the preacher really thought that sort of set this church on a new trajectory i have only one announcement but it's a very important one notice is hereby given of a special meeting of this congregation to be held today at noon in this sanctuary to discuss and vote upon a plan to join the sanctuary movement your attendance and participation will be deeply appreciated so here we are on the edge of a congregational meeting and a congregational vote to discern how we as a church will respond to the crisis faced by our undocumented neighbors who are threatened by heightened ice activities and oppressed by unjust immigration policy since the beginning our country has used race and ethnicity to determine who can come who can work and who can stay even though i wanted to keep it brief the history of racism in this country is long the 1790 naturalization act excluded non-white people from eligibility to naturalize in 1882 congress passed the chinese exclusion act the 1917 immigration act banned immigration from most asian countries prior to 1965 residents of only three countries ireland germany and the united kingdom all overwhelmingly white were given nearly 70 of the visas available to enter the u.s the policy was clear white people in brown people out i believe mayflower church should be a sanctuary church both on paper and in practice i'm not in favor of partisan politics in the pulpit nobody ever is told here who to vote for or what side of an issue god is on there is however a politics of the gospel and everybody's free to interpret that the way they see fit i'm not trying to get other people to interpret it the way i do but i think not trying to interpret the politics of the gospel which has to do with how we treat people how we relate to our enemy whether we're compassionate whether we're forgiving all those things has to be interpreted and applied to the current political economic social situation of america or you're not preaching you're just sort of offering people a history lesson that's usually pretty boring growing up as a southern baptist my family's life really revolved around the church i can distinctly remember um before the age of eight just standing or sitting in the pew while everyone else received communion around me and and noting noting the exclusion without praying the sinner's prayer and asking jesus to be your personal savior if you die you're gonna go to hell and spend eternity in that place where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth the other option is for you to have accepted jesus as your savior and that is your ticket to heaven saint peter lets you in and you get a mansion which we you know we sing hymns about that i could sing you a couple of over the hilltop um i've got a mansion just over the hilltop in that bride land where i mean and the the examples go on um we grew up singing songs like that [Music] i had lunch with my friend she said your granddaughter was in the paper again this morning so but i hadn't read the paper that morning but there you are and i thought that was a real good picture and of course i've never seen a picture of robin of the lead yeah we don't actually get very many pictures together a lot of it's not fair for the persons involved and my my opinion is who am i to judge and that's what i think people are mostly doing is judging and i'm not for that maybe i should have said that at the press conference you think you should have yeah well i'll i'll do that i'll say that next time i like that well lori and i have always been talkers and we've talked about all kinds of things even stuff we don't see completely eye-to-eye on and from my perspective one of the things that i am most grateful to you for is is the idea that you should talk about it you should talk about things even if you disagree i agree you know you were an important part of my spiritual development and faith formation and it happened without me you know really knowing it was happening so i have sort of encyclopedic knowledge of hymns and uh that's that's your that's your doing can you sing a little bit of it grandma will you sing with me sure oh dim golden slippers oh them golden slippers them golden slippers i'm gonna wear walk them golden streets oh dim golden slippers oh dim golden slippers golden slippers i'm gonna wear and walk them golden streets can you see me with three little girls going down the road and pick up and uh singing songs like that but they all say em [Music] before you guys came in and i came in the house how i knew she was nervous about this because she knew that we were going to ask about me being in the paper and particularly about you know the headline minister decries lgbtq discrimination i come in give her a hug tell her thank you for doing this and she says i just want to know one thing are you going to go to heaven when you die which is her way of asking me are you saved do you do you still consider jesus to be your personal savior and yeah i do think i'm gonna go to heaven when i die i did not also add i don't think that there is a hell so i don't think anybody is going to hell because that kind of conversation well it doesn't do anybody good any good at this point she's not going to change her mind and i'm not going to change mine and what i do appreciate is that she cares enough to ask she she cares enough to ask because it matters to her and if i didn't matter to her she wouldn't worry about it but she is [Music] hmm ah [Music] it was not until college that i was completely removed from my environment of origin and experienced some new people and new situations that really pushed me to to question the things i had been taught about god and about people who are different than i am i'm on the basketball team and developing relationships and friendships with my teammates some of whom happen to be lesbians and this was really the first time i was able to develop a genuine friendship with someone who wasn't straight and i won't pretend that i would have said to them i'm an open and affirming person for all lgbtq people that's not where i was at the time and um you know i was still i was struggling with what i had been taught to to think about homosexuality but but having in this this other hand my teammates who were real people and good people and people who were compassionate and and kind and hardworking who also loved god and so that was a really that was a really transformative time for me are you going up to the church today uh yes that clinic starts 10 and i think it lasts until 4 or maybe 5. i started at oklahoma city university school of law where i ran into colin who i would eventually marry and it was very clear to me early on that he was someone who encouraged questions and was ready to explore new ways of thinking and and had done some of that work himself already he actually was a mayflower member at the time i started going to mayflower in about 2006 2007 after reading some articles by robin myers at that time i wasn't particularly diligent in my religion if you if you will and i started reading about this this minister who was in favor of lgbt rights uh who was against the war in iraq and i just thought this this guy can't be real and he certainly can't be a christian minister in the heartland of america so we would go to this 8 30 a.m service at mayflower and hear robin myers offer this new theology [Music] and then we would go to the 10 30 service at grand boulevard baptist church where we were hearing theology like god sent hurricane katrina to new orleans because of the sin uh in that city it did not take me very long to say you know what we've got i've got to take myself out of this other situation i'll find a way to serve this a new church and offer my gifts to god in a different setting [Music] i have never had an associate minister before i had laurie walkey as an associate minister and that's been just like a gift that's just been dropped in our laps and not only because women preach differently understand the world differently but a whole group of people are now listening and understanding christianity in a way that's different because laurie is explaining it to them [Music] from what we can tell early christianity is very open to women paul knows female apostles not many christians know that but in fact if they would actually read the bible instead of just look at it they would find that out so you have women in positions of authority you have women well into the second century into positions of authority you have the gospel of mary for example and some of these kinds of texts which didn't make it into the canon but which christians ought to read if they want to know what's going on there's some wonderful art pieces they're called the praying women the most distinctively christian images in pre-constantinian art is of a woman praying and you find them in tombs and catacombs all over the place we have a large number of these this praying woman in the romans pray like this with their handout is a distinctively christian image it's never discussed in the male literature but it occurs in these catacombs and it represents the christian so you know what do you make of this the most distinctive image is of a praying woman that's what a christian looks like that's how a christian sees himself or herself as a praying woman that's against the values of the roman empire that's very anti-patriarchal that goes away with constantine so we're headed to the oklahoma state capitol i am chaplain of the week for the house of representatives last year when i was chaplain of the week my prayers were a little different than what they were used to i guess and uh upset a few of the ultra conservative representatives we begin each day in the state house of representatives with a prayer it's typically always a christian prayer and it's typically always from a conservative viewpoint there's some resistance in the capital to women clergy and colin had to fight for me to be able to pray this week despite the fact that we do have separation of church and state there's always been this little carve out for certain ceremonial practices that occur in government chaplains are one of them and that sounds great on its face but it can be problematic when somebody comes in and says something controversial or when a member of an unpopular religious group wants to come in and give this right there was controversy about the new chaplaincy policy which said that you had to be um invite somebody that was a member of your own faith so they changed their policy and they said that they would hire a house chaplain and that would be the chapel of the day for everyone and anyone who had not been confirmed up until that point would uh not be allowed to be minister of the day even though i had submitted lori at the beginning of session they had not yet confirmed her so i went to the representative who's in charge of the chaplaincy program and i told him he had two choices he could either identify my wife as the minister of the week or i was gonna go to the press and call him out for being a sexist that's sexist and what else did you say xenophobic bigot all of that because at the end of the day that was that was the problem with the with the chaplaincy policy as they instituted it we do not have any muslims in the house we do not have any jews in the house we do not have any hindus in the house so it's already a christian only club and that's not the way this should be it should be ecumenical in nature white evangelicals they make up 17 of the population they made up 26 of voters in the last election cycle the way to understand some political space is that our ballot box acts a little bit like a time machine it takes us back about 10 years in in terms of our history and demographic change and the main reason for that is that white uh christians vote at higher rates uh than other citizens do so it means that they are able to be over represented at the ballot box in a way at much higher rates than they are in the general population members offering our invocation this week is reverend laurie walkey of the mayflower congregational church in oklahoma city oklahoma reverend milwaukee you're recognized this is our hope holy one as the representatives in this room make decisions for our beloved state that these women and men remember that they have one job and that's to make this corner of the earth a little brighter dark shadows threaten to overwhelm so many the seventy five thousand low-income oklahomans who need health care for their families our teachers who need money not just the motto printed on it these representatives depending on how they light up the voting board could turn this place into a city upon a hill evangelicals used to think that you took care of your own soul and you did not sully yourself with the things of the world you did not get involved in politics jerry falwell senior for example as late as the mid-1960s was still delivering sermons saying you know political stuff is not the realm of pastors uh we should stay out now he was mostly motivated to say that to criticize reverend martin luther king jr let us march on battle boxes till brotherhood is more than a meaningless word at the end of the prayer but the first order of business on every legislative agenda let us march on ballot boxes let us march on ballot boxes till we are able to send to the state houses of the south men who will do justly love mercy and work humbly with that god let us march on ballot box if we've been having this interview a generation ago we would still be talking about the solid democratic south right now today it's the solid republican south well how did that happen the real mark for this shift is when the democratic party becomes identified with civil rights let us close the springs of racial poison let us pray for wise and understanding hearts then what begins to happen is that whites in the south who have been voting democratic for generations largely because the republican party was the emancipation party and they were the slave owning party began to take flight to the republican party the parties began to shift their positions so the democratic party becomes the party of civil rights the republican party begins increasingly to become the party of law and order and really pushing back on civil rights this is a nation of laws and as abraham lincoln has said no one is above the law no one is below the law and we're going to enforce the law and americans should remember that if we're going to have law white evangelicals can see that the tide of history is shifting and they're on the losing end of the racial argument the kind of precipitating spark here was actually bob jones university having a dating policy that prohibited interracial dating on on campus and that ran afoul of federal civil rights laws so there was a lawsuit filed if they were going to take government money they couldn't then have this ban on interracial dating on campus mr chief justice you may have pleased the court i speak for the petitioner bob jones university it was a evangelical christian college so they really took a religious liberty argument on this and said this is federal intervention into a religious issue and we have a right to make these kinds of bans and keep the races apart because we understand that to be a biblically mandated thing all of the policies followed by the university are obligatory upon the university as dictated by scripture white evangelicals really pushed back into the national scene after this incident with bob jones university you immediately see like in jerry falwell senior for example within you know two or three years he has completely flipped his position becomes one of the architects of the christian right political movement there is no bible built in america there's a bible cloak in america that covers the whole whole blooming republic and they're everywhere ready for the leadership preachers that you and i can offer them and let's give it to them we have a threefold primary responsibility number one get people saved number two get them baptized number three get them registered to vote the christian right political movement basically picks up other issues as it goes so it picks up um opposition to gay rights and it picks up opposition to abortion when the roe v wade abortion issue really hit hard the main group that was opposed to abortion were catholics the first big meeting of the southern baptist after roe v wade they actually affirmed the roe v wade decision it's only much later that evangelical protestants got on the bandwagon of roe v wade [Music] in traditional religion in traditional cultures a woman does not control her body a man does whether her father or her husband and you know virtually nobody would own up today to say a woman was a male property but that's the way it was up until fairly recently but a lot of the artifacts of that are still in place birth control the woman's right to control her own fertility her own fertility not to have her husband control it has become a fundamental issue maybe the last straw in women being co-equal and it wasn't until the political movement picked up steam that that issue got kind of inserted into the political platform and really push down from the top here in dallas the religious right and the political right formally wed the 1980 religious round table was dominated by baptist pastors and evangelists and w a chris will perform the vow ronald reagan now i know this is a nonpartisan gathering and so i know that you can't endorse me but i only brought that up because i want you to know that i endorse you and what you are in ronald reagan the fundamentalists found a politician who read the bible as literally as they do that i continue to look at the scriptures today for fulfillment and for guidance indeed it is an incontrovertible fact that all the complex and horrendous questions confronting us at home and worldwide have their answer in that single book i'm sick and tired of hearing about all of the radicals and the perverts and the liberals and the leftists and the communists coming out of the closets it's time for god's people to come out of the closets out of the churches and change america we must do it christianity is deeply inculcated and and woven into the the fabric of this country's nature um we sing the star spangled banner one nation under god and part of our allegiance there's always references to god and most of the voters are passionate when they have fear i've noticed that when even with offerings now i'm sort of in the new thought community there's no fear of god or fear of hell and so the offerings are smaller because they're they they you don't you can't use fear to say you know god is going to judge you if you don't do this there's no more powerful force in politics than fear we see it now all the time be afraid be very afraid of muslim extremists uh immigrants who are going to take your job women who are going to take your masculinity you name it we tell people to be afraid all the time religious folk preachers use this divide and conquer strategy you know in the days before my father passed away in 2007 he joked with cnn that he dreamed that chelsea chelsea clinton had interviewed him about the three greatest threats facing this nation he replied those three greatest threats are osama obama and yomama [Applause] the u.s has become a dumping ground for everybody else's problems on day one we will begin working on an impenetrable physical tall powerful beautiful southern border wall they're sending us not the right people it's coming from more than mexico it's coming from all over south and latin america and it's coming probably probably from the middle east i had this introduction all planned about the theological rationale of the sanctuary movement and then laurie preached that sermon and so it becomes completely redundant so what laurie said this is obviously an important decision that the congregation should be making and each of you who are members of this church in good standing are allowed to cast a vote on the ballots that we will be providing you and now we have some special guests here my name is judith i'm a beneficiary of deferred action for childhood arrivals daca and i've been working with oklahoma city public schools the way that i'm involved with my community is organizing through dream act oklahoma and getting information out there to my community what is the church going to do to protect the community there are over 800 churches in the united states that have declared themselves to be sanctuary churches so we're not going into this alone i'm going to read the ballot that you're going to be looking at so you'll understand the three choices that are provided a do nothing at this time option b declare mayflower to be a sanctuary church with the understanding that this includes the full meaning of sanctuary which includes knowingly hiding individuals who are in the midst of a deportation action or transporting them subject to a felony to a charge or felony or c join the sanctuary movement and join together with all kinds of organizations providing all kinds of resources in this church and outside this church as part of that movement those are the three choices and i know you have questions and we're going to try to answer them i don't want to go to jail i would miss my husband i would miss my dog i'm extremely risk averse but if we follow the teachings there's no choice but to vote for me that is my intention to vote for b i'm willing to risk my license as a nurse but fortunately my boss is japanese american whose parents were in an internment camp i don't think he would fire me for having a felony and i guarantee you if you guys are in jail it's going to be a pretty darn crowded jail cell [Applause] i am a kindergarten teacher on november 9th i did not teach i held crying hispanic children the entire day i worry a lot for a lot of my families it's it's hard for them and for me all of their energy if they're scared if they're worried all 22 of them it just comes with them and we unpack it how we can and we try to learn to read we refer to counseling like divorce death and deportation is an actual like counseling referral for us for an external counseling service because it is a frequent experience of our kids here in oklahoma city public schools okay three two one the rest of you feel ready to vote please cast a vote we're going to accept whatever level of risk you authorize so please go ahead and mark your ballots and pass them forward and we'll get a count going and we'll let you know what the results are right now we've got people fooled into believing that if you are a christian you automatically vote conservative conservative family values but just look at the gospel itself and see what jesus was up to everything he does indicates that it's what you do that makes you a religious person not what you believe most evangelicals and pentecostals believe that god loves everybody but he only likes us because we accepted christ everybody else is going to hell now ladies and gentlemen it's my happy privilege and pleasure to present the man that god has raised up with a message for your deliverance god's man for this hour the reverend oral roberts you really can't understand the religious right until you look into its early roots in the early 70s oral roberts was pulling in something like 50 million a month in 1970 the amount of influence that he held on a national level he was an integral part of creating the whole structure of the religious right big mama picked me up just like i was took me out into the living room that's the way jesus does he goes into the bedroom of your defeat of your illness of your bad self-image he pulls the blankets of sin off of you scoops you up into his arms and brings you out into the living room of life and washes you with his blood and tells you you're his he loves you just the way you are and somehow you qualify i'll never forget that i was affiliated with the healing ministry of earl roberts here for 40 years the laying on of hands the anointing with oil all my parents and grandparents and godparents on both sides did that kind of thing [Music] oral roberts really kind of saw him as his successor in ways which for oral was a revolutionary move i love this man i mean i loved him like family he took me in from the day i met him in august of 1971 the first thing he said to me do you sing and i said i try talk to my son we want to get you in the world actions because he wanted an integrated team not just blacks but hispanics and everything he was and oral was always for the underdog he grew up in abject poverty and ignorance as a poor little pentecostal boy he always hated that aspect of his life he understood it and was happy when his audiences became not only pentecostal but methodist and baptist and catholic as the holy ghost movement this the charismatic movement was moving into non-pentecostal church we call it neo-pentecostalism and he was like the godfather of that movement we used to get 32 000 average 32 000 pieces of mail a day at oro's peak when i was there as associate evangelist we were on nationwide television christians pentecostals owned all the major christian televisions not the baptists and the the non-pentecostal oral had the highest viewership anybody sacred secular on sunday mornings from the time people started walking watching until about noon we had our university jim baker had heritage usa second most visited tourist spot in america uh pat robertson had the regents university in the 700 club and a whole network man we were just kicking button taking names we we we had it covered so we thought we're the most evangelistic people on the planet [Applause] underneath all of that fundamentalism that kind of nativistic charismatic religion there's a dualism that really comes out historically of neoplatonism they're about saving your soul uh and they talk about being soul savers and the soul is the real you it's the authentic thing uh and actually in neo-platonism it's divine christianity has to kind of do away with that but it still has it in many ways the body becomes evil men become the soul part women become the body part i mean this just plays out in horrendous ways they have a kind of literalist view of hell that people will go to hell and pay for their sins see that's oral's physical hand on the right your physical replica none of that was here when i came the chopper wasn't here howard auditorium the quad this was all um just woods and uh weeds carlton in reading the bible kind of got onto this notion it's you can't really find that in the bible i mean most of the imagery that most people have of hell comes from dante and bunyan not from the bible it's the bible's really pretty modest and non-existent on this topic and carlton began to see that like a lot of mystics became kind of overwhelmed i think with the love of god and therefore could not envision a loving god destroying evil people in hell and that was a no-go and he started preaching universalism from his pulpit and his congregation didn't like it at all and it shrank down and shrank down to almost nothing he lost all of his standing because he allowed himself to keep growing theologically and then was unafraid to say what he really believed my old parents you know they were they were so proud of me because of what what i'd done you have to take all that into consideration my sisters everybody was embarrassed you know everybody was proud to be my cousin that's that's my cousin carlton that's my brother and one of my nephews left the country moved away didn't talk to us for a long time called me an educated fool we hurt so many people and that it wasn't about me being hurt it was about me inflicting pain on innocent people they had believed this stuff all their lives i talked them after they taught me now they're old and tired and and they were so proud of me because i talked at oh and sunday school look what he's doing today i saw him on television those kind of things those were precious to them i would hold those little ladies and there was no way i could fix it the hardest part of that whole thing was losing the church the physical plant and being basically a churchless like a homeless family they're more panicky about the no hell thing because if you say there's no hell then there's no need for jesus and oh my god you got to have jesus i never thought anybody would ever attribute the word heresy heretic to me it just wasn't wasn't in my mind at all it just means choice or opinion or you to choose differently from other hairy isis in in hebrew greek so the whole idea of of getting out of the traditions or the traded down ideologies and ideas and you know developing an independent way of thinking is dangerous here are the results of the vote of mayflower church those who voted for a which was to do nothing at this time 12. those who voted for b declare ourselves in the fullest sense a sanctuary church 112 and those who voted for c which are activities all of which are subsumed under b 63. so by a two to one margin the congregation has voted to declare itself to be a sanctuary church here we go [Applause] we're the first congregation in oklahoma to declare itself a sanctuary church when you preach the gospel you have to be political but it's the politics of the gospel it's not partisan politics like god's a republican or a democrat which is an absurd idea to begin with if all of us do matter and that's what we choose to believe then that means not just privileged white people sitting alone cloistered in church and worrying about their souls over and over again we kept hearing that they needed us to be public and very clear publicly that we were going to fight for laws that were just and treated immigrants as the human beings that they are thank you hello hi hello hello john hello yo we have a pediatric oncologist in our church who made us aware of a child that has a sort of juvenile form of hodgkin's disease and is also on the autism spectrum his mother is undocumented and she is terrified that she's going to be deported and there's nobody to take care of her son john many people there to support you meet us one of the things that gets talked about over and over again there's a kind of saying there are three people who for whom god has special care widows orphans and foreigners the foreigners are the illegal aliens in your land okay because those are the three people who have nobody to protect them so if god doesn't protect them they're in real trouble and it's kind of odd here we are three thousand years later and we're still arguing about the three same three darn questions jesus and the joseph and mary are forced into egypt which historically for jews is the place of slavery see but now it's going to be the place of liberation that's going to be the place of safety they are from our point of view crossing the border illegally you know now if there had been a wall they would have been trapped on the wrong side and the whole story was stopped so if you're going to take a bible position certainly you should be for illegal immigrants that's where the bible comes out it's on their side did you did you tell them what happened okay okay it's not it's not terrible i mean yeah a little a little small stay until we can do some more advocating letter writing political pressure sort of thing so we're going to get to work on that we're going to put a tracker on her ankle not house arrest just right right right right so she knows she has friends and and people helping her out and that meant a lot to her that's where we are all we were saying was we're not going to let what's happening in this country to our immigrant sisters and brothers go unnoticed we're not going to just be silent because we've been silent at some pretty critical moments in american history and we wished we hadn't been you know one of the i guess the biggest marks of of today's religious landscape is the rise in the number of people who are not religious if you go back to the 1990s it's still only less than 10 percent of the country claims no religious affiliation today that's a quarter of the country and if you look at young people it's four and ten i happen to believe the church is dying in its old form and will continue to die in its old form nine churches a day close their doors on average in the united states that doesn't worry me that doesn't worry me social justice churches will thrive especially now bye [Music] yes [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] have you been following the legislature's hurtful and heartbreaking bill 1140 it's proposed to give private adoption agencies the right to take public funding and then discriminate against people based on the agency's religious beliefs now what this means is that a qualified family can be blocked from adopting by a religious agency because the family is muslim or atheist or single or a same-sex couple we still have time to stop this from going through and i would appreciate your help in doing that i'm inviting you into an act of religious freedom here at all souls our focus is not to try to save people from a hell in the afterlife that we cannot see but to save people from very real hells in this life that we can see robin myers reached out to me pretty early and said we need as many progressive thinkers in this state as possible i'd read some of his books i saw what he'd done and i really admired robin and looked up to him good morning church you're in the right place this is all souls church this is a beautiful day in which we are living when dr king said yes the road to justice requires sacrifice suffering and and and struggle and and you got to have some passion of by dedicated individuals when dr king was speaking like that he was trying to say so therefore don't sit on the side and whine uh-huh he was trying to tell you come on now because we are moving towards something that's transcendent we are moving towards justice i don't want to preach this morning but i'm trying to tell y'all that you in for it we got we got reverend dr bishop carlton pearson coming up yeah so get ready for this let us hear this song cause if you listen to it you might learn something come on [Applause] [Music] long as you're living always remember you will never beat life so don't try and cheat life sisters and brothers do want to others loves foreign joy and hates for destroying never forget it or you'll regret it as long as you're living [Music] forgive me if i seem to preach but there is something that i have to say a message you dangerous like girl yellow would would uh walk down that aisle and just kiss you we were raised with a bible and a belt they couldn't preach the gospel until they beat the devil out of it they'd go to jail for that today but you can also carry guns they're trying to put forth legislation in this state where people who've had no no vetting no no preliminary examinations no questioning any random person can walk around like in cowboy days and carry guns that that that's insane especially while the psychologists are telling us that one out of five people you meet are mentally ill count down the rules [Music] if that one has a gun so there's there you can go out today when we finish and ask governor fallin to veto permit less carry but we talk about faith in god and but it's really fear and guns and um bible or bullets or ballots it's a there's this we've never had such polarization in our country or in our culture before it i think that all souls is a part of a new spiritual paradigm right here in the city of tulsa the first time that carlton pearson came onto my radar i had just come to tulsa a year or so earlier and there was a the issue of bush's faith-based initiatives became a big national issue i was speaking against them he was speaking for them and then a few years later carlton came out with this new gospel of inclusion and so i reached out to him because he was being denigrated in the media and in all kinds of other ways in the churches and so i reached out to him to say hey there are a lot of others who think like you and about a third to a half of his members joined at that time i used to go drive by there and say it looks like such an innocent little place how could all those demons live in there they didn't like all of us black pentecostals coming in there first i was willing to go and he wouldn't have it marlin would not have it and a lot of their people wouldn't have it all sold started in 1921 at this the same year as the tulsa race riot happened the founder of all souls unitarian church owned the tulsa tribune and initiated the terrible massacre that took place because of the way he reported things in the newspaper the first time i found out about the tulsa massacre i was almost 30 years old i'm sitting in a church in chicago illinois and the pastor begins to talk about the excellence of black wall street and i'm like oh well this sounds interesting well then he says that the black wall street takes place in the greenwood district in tulsa oklahoma and i'm like wait a second i'm from tulsa and he tells the story of how just two generations out of slavery african americans built this incredible city in the shadows of jim crow [Music] there are doctors there are lawyers and there are black teachers black schools and these people are excellent nobody knows about it i didn't know i was here for years before i ever heard of that on may 31st in 1921 a girl by the name of sarah page is an elevator operator in a building downtown and a young african-american boy who was a shoe shiner um had to go to the restroom and so he chose the building that i guess sarah paige was in and he's going up the elevator and the elevator supposedly jerks there's a scream and dick roland comes running out of the elevator after sarah page screams some people say that dick rowland assaulted sarah page and um there's a warrant for his arrest the next day there's a warrant for his arrest the tribune was published in the evening and so when dick roland was arrested the the paper that day that night said you know nabba negro tonight was the headline of the paper right on the front pages and they're telling this story about dick rowland supposedly accosting a white woman and in 1921 in america that was grounds often for lynching and all kinds of mob violence hours later there are angry white tolsons coming across the railroad tracks to burn down this community [Music] it was 34 blocks of businesses and homes and people that were destroyed and killed in that devastation it's known as the tulsa race riot but in essence it was white people coming into the black community and wholesale destroying that community and so massacre is a more appropriate word for what happened because tulsa kept silent about the events of 1921 for so long there was a conspiracy of silence both in the white community and in the black community and still today it's it's hard work to bring people together across race in tulsa i come from a very uh pentecostal background my upbringing was in the pentecostal church the church of god in christ and i was a church of god in christ born and bred and would never have imagined myself at my age now being with a unitarian congregation in august it'll be 10 years that we've been here as a part of all souls i will say that it is not without some challenge when these black people are perceived as invading a space that has been pretty exclusively white for you know eight decades [Music] it's one thing to put your dollars to it to march towards it to sign legislation and to do a sermon i said but it's another thing when someone brings in their luggage and open your drawers and put their stuff in there and they're not leaving that's a completely different dynamic to deal with none of us asked for this none of us wish this but this is the most divinely inspired thing that could have happened to any congregation or church and it's hard to see that sometimes when you're when you feel a sense of loss so here we are with our worship music we're hugging each other and it's all spirit-filled and heartfelt and we're asking people to do something that they're not used to there were some people who thought that marlon was doing too much racial stuff you know but the difference became you can now no longer say that you don't know people who have been impacted by this in light of the the beginnings 1921 to 2021 the arc of that story that goes from uh our founder and his role in in the race riot all the way to this congregation that is deeply committed and it's been working for decades for the unity and equality of all people here in the community and so moving into downtown allows us to be in what we might call culturally neutral space in downtown that's everybody's tulsa where's the entrance the entrance will be right here like we'll come right in here it's gonna be beautiful this whole side is gonna be gorgeous and then you have the main sanctuary right here facing greenwood where the arch window will have all that stuff facing greenwood right here so the crowd will be looking that way looking right at him which is that was the segregation and that was the black wall street that's right black wall street so we really see this role as being border walkers between cultures and between theologies and religious expressions as something that gives us a role in society that can help us to to help lead the community and the country towards its promise i think that that churches like mayflower and all souls will be the premier mega churches in the next 10 years i think people are going to come from everywhere saying i relate to this because there's no judgment there's no dogma in this place i can be me i could be proud of being me i can come here unapologetically if it was la or frisco or even new york everybody expects it nobody expects it what good thing can come out of oklahoma since oral we're making a little tiny difference but i have this new theory about god that god doesn't do anything in my theology but without god nothing gets done so every single action changes something which changes something else which changes something else which changes everything and you can depend on that and that's what faith's all about [Music] welcome [Music] you can snap your hair [Music] this is the song about being grateful [Music] um [Music] so um your question how why why do we support or how can we how can you support criminals we're not here supporting anyone who's breaking the law we're here trying to stand with human beings that are very frightened right now i completely understand where you're coming from but i'm a veteran i'm a former military i'm a military brat i appreciate you so [Music] i follow the law right and so when i see groups here they say oh we stand with illegal immigration i stand with americans first we're standing with human beings we're not making the distinction for us it's are they humans are not because if they're humans they're children of god and i think just at a human level we have to remember that the problem is we don't even have a coherent immigration policy so you have people trying to come to this country for the same reason you would or i would and that's to make a better life for our families but there's a lot of hypocrisy to go around and right now it's it gets deeper and deeper every single day i actually appreciate somebody finally talking to me good i i come from california i live my life mostly in california and all i get is you're a racist you're right i know i and i never thought that i don't think that now and i think it's more because you have the caller you have that and i get a more respectful answer from that and i do have to say thank you again you're welcome that you're welcome i hope you have a wonderful afternoon all right we we can solve our problems but only together only together and with talk bye bye bye easter bunny that just that just didn't happen did it yeah [Music] [Music] [Music] me you

Channel: Real Stories

Views: 353,334

Keywords: Bible belt, Christian activism, Christian heretics, Christian social justice, Christianity in America, Christianity today, Gospel of Inclusion, LGBTQ rights, Real Stories, church and state, church leadership, defiance against dogma, gospel activism, liberal Christianity, ministry and advocacy, modern Christianity, religious acceptance, religious activism, religious extremism, religious pluralism, social justice

Id: B-ePCiUgD0Y

Length: 87min 8sec (5228 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 21 2022