MindSpinner

At the county high school and in this community, a controversy has unfolded. A sole Muslim student objected to the assorted Christian invocations and benedictions traditionally said at graduation-related ceremonies. The school administration has responded by respecting the law regarding the separation of church and state and removing prayers from programs for honors night, graduation, etc.

They have done the right thing, of course. Separation of church and state preserves freedom of religion because it refrains from imposing religion. The last thing I want is somebody else’s version of religion imposed upon me. During the graduation season, baccalaureate services held in churches can offer graduates who wish to attend a Christian celebration of their achievement, and students can, of course, gather at school to pray - as long as prayer remains private and not institutionalized. (Likely, a group of Christian students will follow the example set by students at another school and stand up to recite the Lord’s Prayer in the middle of the graduation program anyway. In my own unlikely fantasy, students of other faiths follow suit with their own prayers, so that diversity finds its voice and makes its point.)

But now, who should be protesting the school’s Muslim students and the administration’s decision but the KKK. They’ll be outside the school on Tuesday. The students will be kept in classes, well clear of the protestors.

Nothing strikes a deeper horror in me than the sight of those white KKK robes, not even a snake at my bare feet. The KKK represents the worst of what we human beings can become, after all, while a snake is merely an animal with no design beyond survival. What the KKK has to do with defending Christianity, I cannot fathom. Hatred of more than half a world “God so loved” doesn’t square with the gospel message.

In the medieval morality plays, a frequent fixture was the Mouth of Hell, a stage prop constructed to reprepresent a ravening maw the height of a man, out of which devils could leap to snatch the wicked and drag them to damnation. When the KKK protests outside my daughter’s high school on Monday (while I’m stuck elsewhere with responsibilities I cannot hand off), I can only imagine them marching straight out of Hell’s Mouth. That the KKK still functions in parts of this country in this day breaks my heart and makes me hang my head in shame over how far short we still fall from spiritual enlightenment.

And though I am as white as a grub in the garden, it is not my race that needs defending; it is this entire species, all of us together along with our delicate, exquisitely beautiful ark of a planet - that indeed needs defending most of all from our own blindly destructive, short-sighted pursuit of self interest over common good.