This news popped up on my FB message account this past Sunday just ten minutes before I was to preach a sermon on the theme “Love Thy Neighbor:” “League of the South announces formation of ‘Southern Defense Force.’”
Found on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch blog, this article calls for “traditionalist southern men” to take up arms. Here is a direct quote attributed to Michael Hill, director of the League of the South:
”[T]he League of the South is calling for all able-bodied, traditionalist Southern men to join our organization’s Southern Defense Force for the purpose of helping our State and local magistrates across Dixie combat this growing leftist menace to our historic Christian civilization. As private citizens in a private organization, we will stand ready to protect our own families and friends, our property, and our liberty from leftist chaos. Moreover, we will be ready to assist our local and State authorities in keeping the peace should they find it necessary to “deputize” private citizens for that purpose.”
As the leader of a denomination that is part of the leftist menace to which Michael Hill directs his attention, a denomination that is deeply embedded within an historic Christian expression of the faith, I am appalled at what this article reveals.
I won’t be the first to observe that Mr. Trump’s immigration policy that discriminates against Muslims is opening up safe space for fringe voices to gain more purchase in the marketplace of ideas. With hate crimes on the rise, the Michael Hills of the world are feeling emboldened. They are sensing that it is time to come out of the rat-holes in which they hide and try to take more political and cultural territory. This call to arms is reminiscent of earlier times when the enslavement, torture, lynching, murder, rape, and abuse of black and brown bodies went unpunished – if not outright celebrated – by what passed for law enforcement and government at the time.
White supremacists have gone from hating a government whose leader was a black man (and hating it for precisely that reason), to fomenting enough white rage to elect a president who can’t muster the courage to speak out against their racist, homophobic agendas. The White House’s policy of silent complicity in the face of rising white power is making every single one of them feel ‘at home’ in an America that they can only imagine will be made great again by the descendants of other white supremacists.
Decades of accomplishments to bend the arc of history towards racial justice are being undone. The Black Lives Matter movement, a grassroots response to the epidemic of black bodies being gunned down by mostly white cops, has been met with defiance by conservative whites who buy into the ‘get tough on crime’ agenda and by liberal whites who want to participate in a movement that features them as the heroes of their own narrative.
Michael Hill is a disgusting parasite with an audience that he has conditioned to swallow his garbage. I utterly disown everything he stands for; and deplore whatever use he makes of the free speech clause to spew forth his hatred. Any connection between this brand of white supremacist vitriol and the faith entrusted to the disciples of Jesus is purely coincidental. There is nothing in his teachings that could be contorted into an acceptable Christianity. It is, in short, an abomination.
It is not so much who Michael Hill is and what his League of the South represents that scares me. What scares me is how many white Americans are no longer interested in refuting what he stands for. If whites showed as much anger about his vitriol and hate as they do to the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement, our pathway to justice and race equity would be much straighter than it is now. Blue lights are more likely to adorn their front porches than editorials are to be written condemning the rising tide of racism across the landscape of America.
Why can’t the White House devote even one response to disowning this rising tide of race hate that is resurfacing across this country on their watch? Only when the perpetrators of violence are black, Muslim, or Mexican and the victims are white do they seem motivated to speak out. Black and brown lives really don’t seem to matter there – and that is far more terrifying than anything cowards like Michael Hill can do, say, or threaten.