By Rev. M. D. “Doc” Bass Special To THE CALL

Beyond slave-trading as a bedrock of capitalism and its beloved free enterprise system, America’s “hate industry,” with its tools of violence and terror, may be the most damning witness against what we once called a “Christian nation.” Had the Apostle Paul been writing to the “saints in America” as he was to those at Ephesus in 62 A.D., he would have added hatred to the “impurities” that “should not be once named among you as saints” (Eph. 5:3). Forty years after its founding, John’s revelation to that “Church of Ephesus” was that they had “left” their “first love” (Rev. 2:4).

As proudly as they now claim to be Americans, John might say the same for those who had been the lead evangelists for a new faith in a “New World.” In this generation, however, even their preachers and political representatives have grown quite proud of being known as gunslingers’ and insurrectionist storm troopers more than what Jesus referred to in His “sermon on the mount” as the “meek…the merciful” and “the peacemakers” (Matt.5).

Unashamedly brandishing these contrary natures today, the disciples Jesus said would be known as His are distinguished by whether they have “love one to another” (John 13:35). Belligerence and the pride of autonomy seemed more fitting, rather, for disciples who, according to their take on “religious freedom,” preferred exemption from tenets of the faith that called for humble submission and obedience to the rule of spiritual law. Though Matthew 22:36-39 remains central to that faith, loving God and “thy neighbor” was apparently not what Christian colonists had in mind as an exercise of their “religious freedom.” Eventually, as it was in times before the authority of a King in Israel, these autonomous saints “did that which was right in their own eyes” (Jgs. 17:6).

With their “first love” having been lost either in translation or in transition between the Old England’s empire and the New England’s colonies, the saints in America now hobble along as poor witnesses to a world to whom God is shrouded in the hypocrisy of violent and venomous hatred, and is still preached as the “one, true God,” superior to their neighbors’ heathen gods.

Exalting power and prosperity over the righteousness of God, purveyors of a “contrary” gospel, as Paul wrote, essentially “changed the truth of God into a lie,” worshipping and serving their political platforms, personalities, and their ideologies “more than the Creator” (Rom. 1:25). That may explain how a prominent Tennessee pastor could read Matthew 11:12, where Jesus said, “the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force,” and find there some divine authority for the next “insurrection.” To him, and those who will listen, “the word” instructs the GOP (God’s Own Party) to take political power, and whatever else they want, “by force.”

Besides other tenets of the Christian faith similarly butchered or choked in the smoke of American business and politics, “unity of the faith” (Eph.4:13) stays at risk. As the primary goal of Christian ministry, “perfecting the saints” is the central purpose of all spiritual gifts to the church. But, just as the Pharisees did in their day, modern zealots occupy themselves with ferocious battles over their personal spin on God’s word. Paul, in fact, had to warn the Galatian Church not to “bite and devour one another,” lest they be consumed in their vicious brawling (Gal.5:15).

That same Tennessee pastor apparently missed that part of God’s “instruction in righteousness” as he very angrily tore into the people, declaring, “You cannot be a Christian and vote Democrat! We don’t even want you around. You can get out!” As tensions continue mounting over Roe v. Wade, we can expect to see and hear a lot more from him in Hate v. Love.

Of the 4,400 words in the Constitution, “love” is not one of them. Except for the ironic appearance of Loving in the anti-miscegenation case of Loving v. Virginia, 1967, which attempted to bar a mixed marriage, only where the U.S. Supreme Court declared such a law unconstitutional is some form of the word love entangled in any debate around Constitutional law.

In 2009, two decades after Matthew Shephard, a gay student who was tortured and beaten to death in Wyoming, and James Byrd, Jr., a black man, who was dragged 3 miles to his death behind the pickup truck of white supremacists in Jasper, Texas, the word “love” finally reappeared at least in conjunction with the Hate Crimes Prevention Act named after them and signed into law six days after approval by the Senate. The Human Rights

Campaign then launched “Love Conquers Hate” to celebrate the victory. “Love one another” (Jn.13:34) didn’t make it this time.

Until next time, public offenses uniquely defined only in America as “Hate” crime stand in the shadow of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Under the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990, the law requires an official counting and reporting of the “incidence of hate crime” so that Federal authorities could “understand and, where appropriate, investigate and prosecute hate crime.” With the reporting of some 3,800 cases of anti-Asian discrimination and incidents related to COVID-19 between March 19, 2020, and February 28, 2021, and a shooter who murdered 8 people primarily of Asian descent in Atlanta, Georgia, there is now the “COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act” of 2021.

With some apparent need to specify that “not all crime is based on hate,” whatever lines there are between them were already blurred in 1966 during the first, frantic terror that put Charles Whitman in America’s history books as the “Texas Tower Sniper.” He’d killed 17 people and injured 31 others. The debates are still muddy, but what is clear is that neither Whitman, Gendron, nor Ramos could have loved any of the 46 people they ruthlessly slaughtered.

Federal law, meanwhile, fights this battle against the hate industry up hill. It fights against the odds with the industry’s gun makers, its lobbyists and with 400 million guns already at its disposal. This Hate law presumes to protect us from “certain crimes motivated by race, color, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity and disability.”

This law will not prevent us from hating one another. The presumption is that it might keep us from killing one another. In reality, it probably won’t. The Department of Justice says Federal “hate law” is part of each of the States’ laws, except for South Carolina and Wyoming. With no legal mandate for “loving thy neighbor,” maybe we should pray that the State of Tennessee is proactive with its protections. They may come in handy where the pastor of a church there, besides threatening a “worse insurrection” than