As a North Carolinian, you can probably imagine that Sean Harris' sermon this past Sunday hits a particularly raw nerve with me. Just when we're finally turning the page from the legacy of Jesse Helms, here comes a pastor giving the parents in his church "special dispensation" to deal with gay tendencies among their kids by "giving them a good punch."
To his credit, Harris apologized on Wednesday--no doubt after being told that if anyone actually took him up on his advice, he'd end up in an orange jumpsuit himself., However, almost, if not more, disturbing than the actual sermon is that Harris initially fobbed it off as a joke. Indeed, most of the people who were in attendance that day at Berean Baptist Church in Fayetteville supposedly "knew" their pastor didn't really mean for people to actually beat the gay out of their kids.
Harris said he polled his pastoral staff and members of the congregation Tuesday after he started getting telephone calls and abusive emails once his comments went viral.
From within the church, Harris said, "the response was, 'Pastor, we know you didn't mean that.' "
"We know when you're saying something seriously and when were supposed to just understand the intent and not the application,' " Harris said.
Now, I'm used to seeing disconnect between what fundies and the reality-based world find acceptable. Many of you know that I was suckered into joining a hypercharismatic campus ministry at Carolina that found nothing wrong with out-and-out deceiving people about who they really were so as not to scare people away. But this takes the cake. There is something fundamentally wrong (the pun was intended) with a church where a pastor can even think joking about child abuse is at all acceptable. Even if you allow for the nature of an independent fundamentalist Baptist church like Berean--where the pastor's word is pretty much the law--this is off-the-charts disturbing.
Considering that Harris' church operates a full-fledged Christian school, his sermon makes even less sense. Had Harris not apologized, I'd bet that Cumberland County Social Services would have used that sermon as carte blanche to look into whether the kids in that school--and just about all the kids in that church, for that matter--were being abused. The only plausible explanation I can think of is that Harris still seems to think he can keep the wider world out. Remember, for most fundies of Harris' ilk, life means keeping their kids out of public school (either by sending them to private school or homeschooling them), filtered Internet service, getting their news from Christian radio, and getting television from SkyAngel. Why else would Harris put his sermon--unedited, mind you--on his church's YouTube channel?
I've said on numerous occasions that this sort of thing will become less and less common since born-agains of my generation are starting to get their heads out of the sand. But at the same time, things like this are a reminder of just how deep the older generations' heads are buried.