In the wake of the Jacksonville shooting this month that left three Black people dead, carried out by racist Ryan Palmeter, Salon published an op-ed written by two religious leaders who say that, despite the fact that there's no evidence the shooter was influenced by far-right Christianity, the ideology "quietly fueled" his rampage.
"We've heard from our leaders time and time again that we need to end racism," write Rev. Dr. Serene Jones and Rev. Dr. LaKeesha Walrond. "But we can't just keep giving the issue lip service. To create true change, we need to peel back the layers, understand how we got here, and defeat the forces that have allowed violence against Black bodies to proliferate."
According to Jones and Walrond, people of faith need to acknowledge the "perverse role of a distorted Christianity in fueling rampant racism."
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"This distorted Christianity is at the core of our nation's deep history of racism," Jones and Walrond write. "Starting from the very beginning of European settlement, colonists used the Bible to claim Christian explorers had a divine right to seize lands that were not inhabited by Christians. They also argued that they had a godly duty to bring the Bible to native lands. These "Biblical" missions left fields of blood and fire behind them."
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Far-right Christians are continuing their "hateful crusade" to this day, the pair write, adding that the age of the internet allows them to spread their hate even further, resulting in massacres like the one in Jacksonville, or, for example, the one at a Charleston church in 2015.
Read the full op-ed over at Salon.