I grew up fundamentalist Christian, in a small town of about 6000 people. Nearly everyone was white. Nearly everyone was affiliated with one of the dozen or so churches in the town. The church I went to was small- about 100 people, and one of 3 or 4 fundamentalist churches in town. It was common to hear fire and brimstone sermons about how the faithful needed to get out and preach the word to the unsaved.
While I was aware that our denomination had missionaries that went abroad to preach to the brown-skinned heathens in the rest of the world, (because of course the US and maybe Canada were the only true Christian countries- and we weren’t too sure about Canada either) our minister encouraged us to proselytize to the unsaved that we met too.
Witnessing to the unsaved in a small, white, almost completely Christian town is hard, so we adjusted our definition of ‘unsaved.’
While we were sure that most of the people who attended our church were saved, we were less sure of other denominations. Other fundamentalist, evangelicals were probably in the Elect, but Lutherans and Methodists might not be. We called them the Frozen Chosen. And Episcopals and Catholics had practically a different religion than us, so of course they were heathen. Nuns were particularly suspect, for some reason. Seventh Day Adventist? Heathen. Latter Day Saints? Deceived Heathen. Christian Science? I had never met one, but I knew there were some a couple towns over. They were Heathens.
When a family migrated from one of the other evangelical churches to ours, the tally board at the front of the church added their number to the ‘souls saved’ number. During testimony time, people would tell about how they told someone in the grocery store the salvation story, or shared a Child Evangelism wordless book with the babysitter, and while everyone hallelujah’d, the minister would add bump up the number on the board.
I grew up internalizing that the people who needed Jesus were white people from more liberal denominations. They believed the Biblical edicts were merely suggestions and stories from the Word of God were not the literal truths that we knew them to be. We witnessed to people who were practically the same as us. They spoke our language with the same drawl as us. They ate what we ate, shopped where we shopped, wore what we wore- the only difference was that they went to church only once on Sundays while we went twice on Sundays and once on Wednesdays (and then to Dairy Queen after Wednesday night service).
The people in my church sprinkled their conversations with biblical quotes and ‘bless you’s’. They saw God and the Devil in everything. It was all very black and white. Things could be put neatly into piles of Good and Bad.
I see these same people in social media today. Their Facebook pages are full of pictures of butterflies superimposed with scripture in flowery fonts, and they often comment with Biblical passages or those one liners you see on church signs- You know, like:
“Don't put a question mark where God put a period.”
It seems to me that these same people are the ones that post the most anti-refugee stuff. Over and over I would see a particularly unsympathetic post only to follow it back to their home page full of Jesus memes (usually a Western-looking Jesus with light brown hair and blue eyes) and Bible verses.
It took me a few days of mulling it over to figure out why: they don’t see the refugees as the people that the Bible says to help.
For years now they’ve been witnessing to their Catholic acquaintances, letting visiting ministers stay in the guest room, giving cans of Aldi’s green beans to the local food pantry, donating old clothes to the Salvation Army, and visiting the elderly and hospitalized from their church. In their eyes, they have checked off the boxes from Matthew 25:
For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, (Greenbeans-Check!)
I was a stranger and you invited me in, (Visiting Minister- Check!)
I needed clothes and you clothed me, (Salvation Army donation-Check!)
I was sick and you looked after me, (Visited Old People- Check!)
For them, showing hospitality to Muslims from war-torn countries is not what they Bible tells them to do. That is a missionary’s job, not theirs. And how can a missionary do their job if all the brown-skinned heathens are here? No, they need to stay ‘over there’ where they belong.
I think these people truly do not see that they are hypocrites, and I wonder what will happen when a Muslim family moves into a small town like the one I grew up in. I hope they will grow and be kind and accepting but I won’t hold my breath.
It makes me pity the refugees even more.