“I was raised in a church of terrorists. The preacher pounded on the lectern while he boomed that all queers deserved to die, that mixed marriages were going to lead to the downfall of ‘our way of life,'” Appalachian Kentucky author Silas House writes for Time.
House grew up in a family of Christian Nationalists: “I knew by then that I was gay and for that alone I’d surely be left behind when everyone I knew was whisked away in the Rapture, God’s chosen people disappearing ‘in the twinkling of an eye.’ Although I felt tremendous love in that church, I also realized how quickly that love would be extinguished if they knew who I really was.”
House said that his childhood nightmares are alive today, “In North Carolina, Lt. Gov. and pastor Mark Robinson has said that being gay or transgender is ‘filth,’ ‘garbage’ and ‘perversion.’ House said he lives in fear of what this country might be like should Christian Nationalists gain control: “It will be a country where women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and people of other faiths will be stripped of their rights in laws justified by scripture.”
How does Christian Nationalism give one group power to terrorize another? Laura Harbert Allen reports on this question in 100 Days in Appalachia: “Robert P. Jones, president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, believes many Christians, especially white Christians, have a responsibility to understand a concept known as the Doctrine of Discovery, based on a papal bull or decree issued by Pope Alexander VI in 1493.”
“The basic idea was that Europeans, who were Christian, had the blessings of the church and the authority of the state to so-called discover any of the lands that were occupied by non-Christian, non-European people,” Jones told Allen, “And when they did they had the right to dominate those people and confiscate those lands.”
“Until the early 18th century, killing Indigenous people and the enslavement of Africans was based on religion. Christians killing ‘heathens’ and ‘heretics,’ after all, was a historic fact long before the colonization of the New World,” writes Allen. “According to Yale professor Phillip Gorski as enslaved and Indigenous people started to convert to Christianity, the justification for their treatment became skin color.”
The Rural Blog is a publication of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues based at the University of Kentucky.
