An Alabama Christian Interviewed By The Washington Post

The Washington Post wrote an article recently about Southern Baptists (the largest Protestant denomination in the United States) in Alabama trying to reconcile their faith and their love of Trump. It included this interview:

And there was Sheila Butler, who sat on the sixth pew on the right side, who said “we’re moving toward the annihilation of Christians.” 

She was 67, a Sunday school teacher who said this was the only way to understand how Christians like her supported Trump. 

“Obama was acting at the behest of the Islamic nation,” she began one afternoon when she was getting her nails done with her friend Linda. She was referring to allegations that President Barack Obama is a Muslim, not a Christian — allegations that are false. “He carried a Koran and it was not for literary purposes. If you look at it, the number of Christians is decreasing, the number of Muslims has grown. We allowed them to come in.” 

“Obama woke a sleeping nation,” said Linda. 

“He woke a sleeping Christian nation,” Sheila corrected. 

Linda nodded. It wasn’t just Muslims that posed a threat, she said, but all kinds of immigrants coming into the country. 

“Unpapered people,” Sheila said, adding that she had seen them in the county emergency room and they got treated before her. “And then the Americans are not served.” 

Love thy neighbor, she said, meant “love thy American neighbor.” 

Welcome the stranger, she said, meant the “legal immigrant stranger.” 

“The Bible says, ‘If you do this to the least of these, you do it to me,’ ” Sheila said, quoting Jesus. “But the least of these are Americans, not the ones crossing the border.” 

To her, this was a moral threat far greater than any character flaw Trump might have, as was what she called “the racial divide,” which she believed was getting worse. The evidence was all the black people protesting about the police, and all the talk about the legacy of slavery, which Sheila never believed was as bad as people said it was. “Slaves were valued,” she said. “They got housing. They got fed. They got medical care.”

The rot remains in our nation and it runs very deep in many places.