Whose Church? Whose State? Who’s Right?, Pt 1 of 3
Posted by: terrance in bush, current events, politics, religionI kept filing away the stuff I read, sometimes chuckling, sometimes shaking my head, and knowing I wanted to write about it. But then I thought maybe most of it wasn’t news anymore, and maybe I should move on to something else. Then, last night I watched the video of Tammy Faye Messner (nee’ Bakker), on Larry King last night. The last I’d seen of her was on her son’s show, One Punk Under God. I knew her cancer had recurred and was untreatable, and I knew what that meant. When I saw the Larry King Video, I thought to myself, “Days. She’s got days.” Sure enough, this evening I heard the news that Tammy Faye is dead.
I was sad when I heard the news. I guess because Messner had been a part of my life since I was a little black gay boy growing up in Georgia during the Reagan era, flipping the channel and inevitably stopping on PTL. It was a big difference from the jowl-shaking and finger-wagging of Jerry Falwell gloating over AIDS, and a world away from Jimmy Swaggart waving a Bible over his head and yelling “Don’t tell me about the constitution of the United States of America. This is the Constitution of the United States! The holy word of God!” Having been raised Baptist, as well as having taught Sunday School, I knew what that meant, and that Swaggart was likely a strict constructionalist when it came to that “constitution.”
Some people are still trying to write that “constitution or make the one we currently have more closely resemble the one they prefer. When Chuck Colson said Paganism isn’t a “real religion,” and questioned whether it should be recognized by the government as such (and thus treated as equal to any other faith), it piqued my interest. Kip questioned just what “court tests for religion” would consist of, and I wondered just a legal definition of religion would consist of. So I went looking.
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