My grandfather was a Baptist and he served as mayor of Lebanon Missouri three times.
I met him once when I was around 11 or 12. It was, at best, a very awkward meeting.
Once I’d shaken his hand I was told by my mother that they needed to talk privately. He lived in a crappy little house with his third wife with a propane tank in the side yard. It was probably considered a nice place in 1966. His wife tried talking to me and tried to figure out some way of entertaining me but we both quickly found that we had nothing to say to one another.
So I watched my mother and my grandfather “talk“. I have no idea what she said or he said but it involved a lot of very tense body language and some finger waving in his face until she stormed off and said to me, “come on we’re going home.“ We were living in Springfield Missouri at the time—while my father was in Vietnam so it wasn’t a particularly long drive.
My grandmother was his first wife and he had abandoned her and four children in the depths of the great depression. The two youngest he foosted off on his mother who apparently was a very harsh woman and treated the children like they were slave labor.
I don’t know if my mother was sexually abused or not but whatever happened in Lebanon in the one year that she lived with her grandmother (my great grandmother) scarred her for the rest of her life. My grandmother (her mother) was able to get a job as a city clerk in Springfileld, Mo and was able to reclaim her two youngest (my mother and Uncle
John) after what was apparently a year of sheer hell. My mother was 5 in that year and her brother 2.
It would be impossible to exaggerate her hatred of Baptists. And she taught that to me. It was a casual hatred for me for a long time until I started in on my first degree at Southwest Missouri State in Springfield Missouri (*Now Missouri state). Then I got to be around a whole bunch of Baptists. Then I learned to fully and completely hate them.
The southern Baptist have one of the most twisted belief systems of any of the major denominations that’s style themselves as Christian in the United States. The reason they exist is because of unending racism, overt misogyny, an early form of Christian dominionism. These are the people that are against dancing and pretty much are against any sort of fun. They are the largest protestant mainline church in the US and they are shrinking. I believe they will continue to shrink. But not quickly enough and they still have way too much power..
Whatever policy documents they produce during this meeting will surely be complete abominations and have no resemblance to anything Christ-like.
I’ll leave you with one of my father‘s favorite jokes:
Why don’t southern Baptist fuck standing up?
Because somebody might think they’re dancing.
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