On a recent Saturday, a couple of hours before my wife and I took our youngest son on his weekly trip to our public library in Durham, North Carolina — an outing we all love —someone threatened to blow up the place. A neighbor told us later that she knew something was wrong when police cars pulled up with flashing lights. Officers entered the front doors, spoke to the manager briefly, then cleared the building, which remained closed for the rest of the weekend. According to news reports, the threat was in response to a planned Rainbow Story Hour, featuring a book by an LGBTQ author. “I guess they don’t realize it’s a public library,” our neighbor reflected as we stood in her front yard. “We serve everybody.”
According to news reports, the threat was in response to a planned Rainbow Story Hour, featuring a book by an LGBTQ author.
I am a Baptist preacher from the South. For my whole life, a reactionary political movement in the United States has tried to weaponize my Christian faith in the name of “traditional values.” This movement has been called various things, from the “religious right” to “Christian nationalism,” but it has always been a cynical ploy by monied interests to pit neighbors against one another for political gain. Though the movement has never represented a majority of Christians in America, it has targeted for recruitment white Christian communities in the South. Today, its radicalism threatens to blow up our public life.
A new documentary film, “Bad Faith,” which is being released on multiple streaming platforms Friday and in which I appear, tells the story of how this radical anti-democratic movement took over the Republican Party and aims to undermine the basic structures of government in the United States. I can say with confidence, as someone who has studied and taught the Bible, that the fear of LGBTQ people that leads someone to send a bomb threat to a public library isn’t a “biblical value.” It is a wedge issue cultivated by people who misuse the Bible for political gain. Jesus taught us to love our neighbors. This movement tells us we may have to kill some of them.
According to data from the Public Religion Research Institute, white evangelical Christians — the demographic most directly in the cross-hairs of this movement — are notably more likely to agree with the statement that “true American patriots” may have to resort to violence to save our country. As my neighbor and I know, a public library, like any public good, is something to be shared by all people, whatever their beliefs. But not so for adherents of this radical movement: If a public good doesn’t line up with their personal convictions, however manufactured by mass-produced messaging campaigns those “values” may be, they would rather shut it down for everyone. In this way, leaders of the far-right Christian movement are not unlike the white people of the South who tried to resist desegregation by closing the public schools, draining the public swimming pools and closing the parks that federal law insisted all people had a right to enjoy. We ought not forget, those people, too, thought God was on their side.
For one Saturday, at least, this movement was successful in shutting down our public library. So my family decided to have our own story-time at home. I told my son the somewhat troubling story from the book of Genesis, when God gets so angry that God decides to blow up the earth — not with a bomb, but with the waters from above and the waters from beneath that God had lovingly held back in order to make space for all life. At the end of that story, after Noah, his family and a small zoo of animals survive the Great Flood in an ark, the Bible says something striking. God makes a covenant with all flesh to never destroy the earth again. The sign of the promise that God will bear with “all flesh” — not just my people or your people, but all people — is a rainbow. As someone who believes that we are, all of us, created in God’s image, I told my son that I think that story is in the Bible to remind us that anger can get the best of any of us. I don’t know who made the bomb threat that shut down our library, but my guess is that I’ve known people like them. People who are afraid. People who’ve been lied to. People who’ve lied to themselves. People who think the things they love most depend on taking a stand and fighting for their values. Those people may want to blow everything up in God’s name, but the Bible doesn’t give them permission. Instead, it gives us a rainbow sign as a reminder of God’s promise to bear with “all flesh” until creation’s breaches are repaired and the wounds that divide us are healed. Turns out Rainbow Story Time may be something a lot of white Christians in America need to hear.
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is a preacher and spiritual writer in Durham, North Carolina, and assistant director at the Yale Center for Public Theology and Public Policy. With the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, he is author of the forthcoming book "White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy" (Liveright). 
