RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY IN SMALL TOWN OHIO

It's all about the love; always is

Ohio's 18th congressional district is pretty conservative. In 2000 it gave Bush 55% of its vote. After watching him in action for 4 years, Bush's percentage of the vote increased to 57%. The 18th CD is the only congressional district in Ohio that switched parties in 2006, having elected Zach Space, a Democrat, to replace longtime Republican Congressman Bob Ney, who currently resides in a nearby West Virginia penitentiary after pleading guilty to corruption charges. (He denied all charges until confronted with highly incriminating tapes of himself supplied to the FBI by his chief of staff.) Anyway, central Ohio's Licking County is divided roughly in half and the eastern half is part of the 18th. And one of the village in Licking County is Granville, which sounds like a nice enough place to live if you like places with a population around 3-4,000. It wouldn't be correct to call it all white. There are about 100 nonwhite living in the village too, mostly Asians. About 60% of the households in Granville are made up of married couples. It's a prosperous town with the median income per household bring nearly $70,000 (and per family being close to $90,000).

But Granville's in the news today-- in a bad way. I don't know if there's a single gay man or woman in Granville, but I would bet there are at least some. What I do know is that one of Granville's churches, the First Baptist Church, has been open-minded and openhearted towards gay people. They believe in Jesus Christ's message of love and acceptance and the pastor, Rev. Kathy Hurt, has tried to sensitize her flock to family diversity.

Ohio is notorious for politically extremist hate groups masquerading as religious groups. One paid a little visit to Granville's First Baptist Church (as well as to nearby Columbus' King Avenue United Methodist Church, which also preaches Jesus' message of love. And nothing drives Satan or his minions crazier than love. The hate group here is called Minutemen United and they are an offshoot of a Satanic "church" in nearby Warsaw, Ohio called the New Beginnings Church.

Warsaw is much smaller than Granville (population: 781 people) and even less diverse ethnically. It's a far poorer town, with a median per household of $33,000 and with a smaller percentage of nuclear families and in many ways, certainly geographically and, arguably, philosophically is the heart of the 18th congressional district. And New Beginnings Church's Minutemen United is exporting its hatred and intolerance to Jesus-oriented churches. For the last month the right wing extremists and purveyors of Republican-type hatred and divisiveness have been harassing congregants every Sunday at Granville's First Baptist Church.

On one of the first Sundays, six people came to the church's 11 a.m. service and addressed the congregation during a time designated for prayer requests and comments.

Hurt said a man, who introduced himself as a minister from the New Beginnings Church in Warsaw, Ohio, started to give a sermon about how the church was acting against God's word by accepting homosexuals.

Members of Minutemen United also visited King Avenue United Methodist Church in Columbus that same morning, said the Rev. John Keeny.

"They rebuked me as a pastor for preaching that God's love is for everyone," Keeny said.
The pastor said he was proud of the way his congregation responded to the interruption, and he asked them to pray that the hearts of the Minutemen would be open.

"At our church, we welcome all people," he said. "We would welcome them in worship, too, but we expect hospitality and acceptance to be demonstrated by all who come to worship here."

The deranged Satan worshipper who has led his poor Warsaw flock astray is a right-wing fanatic and kook named Max Erwin, Sr. A typical servant of Satan, he claims his message of hatred and bigotry is all about love. The Devil has always sought to confuse people. Erwin serves his master well and he claims he will bring his message of intolerance to Granville every Sunday rain or shine.

Actual churches in the area are praying for the misguided Warsaw wingnuts. Today's NY Times has a major piece by Columbia University Professor Mark Lilla, adapted from his upcoming book, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West.. He makes the point that "we have progressed to the point where our problems again resemble those of the 16th century, as we find ourselves entangled in conflicts over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine duty. We in the West are disturbed and confused. Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong."

Lilla's warning about the rise political theology wasn't especially aimed at the nutcases from Warsaw, Ohio specifically. But the shoe fits, especially when you have a political culture willing, and even eager, to exploit the delusions of paranoid, self righteous religionists.