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Chapter Sixty-One: Baptists
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Taberah walked in after the first day of classes, excited, alert. He said to Nathella, "What does the word 'Baptist' mean? I heard someone use it between classes, and I couldn't figure it out from context."
Nathella said, "Um, that's not a five-minute question. First, do you know what 'Protestant' means?"
Taberah said, "No."
"There have been any number of reform movements in the history of the Catholic Church, and there will be any number of such movements in the future. With one of them, a monk named Martin Luther nailed ninety-five theses for reform on the door of a cathedral. The authorities questioned him, and finally asked him, 'Do you believe that the Church has actually been wrong in these things for all these years?'
"Luther asked for a couple of days to think about it; that was granted, and at the end of the time the question was put to him again. He said, 'Here I stand. I can do no other.'
"Then all Hell broke loose. Luther was excommunicated, and tried to set up a parallel, reformed church. The church called 'Catholic' was the one that initiated the schism, but they were not the only schismatics. Luther's church splintered and splintered and splintered. There was all manner of invective between the two sides, and they were excluded from each other's communions. It was worse than the split between Latin and Greek -- far worse.
"Over time, people began to realize that the schisms were not a good thing. There were some who said, 'The solution to the problem is simple. Everyone come over to my side, and there won't be any division.' There was the problem of communion: especially on the Catholic side, there was an understanding of communion as implying full membership in the community, which was in turn understood to mean that members not part of a particular schism could not legitimately take part in it -- this interpretation was deemed to be more important than the words, 'Take this, all of you, and drink from it.' that instituted a feast given to all of Christ's disciples. That's still where things are now; Rome has now interpreted Vatican II to mean that Catholics and Protestants whose consciences command full participation in their brothers' and sisters' worship may be -- what's the word, tolerated, in taking communion across the schism. It's a step homewards, I suppose, but we are very far off from organizational unity that once was.
"Baptists are, or rather were, one of the Protestant sects, and they added something to American culture. As to what happened --
"In the fifties, the question of abortion, the question of whether a woman has a right to kill the child growing inside her, came up with the Supreme Court. The court protected the child's life. In the seventies, it came up again, and this time the court legalized abortion, and the movement declared the controversy settled. But it wasn't.
"By the nineties... there were laws in place that offered stiff penalties for abortion protests, and RICO, a law meant to deal with organized crime, was used to inflict massive penalties on abortion protesters. There was one minister who led a protest while cautiously distancing any church involvement or statement on the protest. The courts RICOed the congregation, making a multimillion dollar settlement. Also going on were 'physical compliance holds' -- meaning pain holds used on demonstrators. Nonviolent protests of abortion received draconian punishment compared to the penalties deemed appropriate for violent protest by environmental or animal rights activists.
"When a pregnant woman walks into an abortion clinic, unsure what to do with an unexpected pregnancy, by the letter of the law she is supposed to receive non-directive counseling to help her decide how to handle the situation. What actually happens is very different. Abortion is big business; insurance companies will readily pay thousands of dollars for an abortion rather than deal with all of the expenses of childbirth and a new life out in the world. Even when there is no insurance, a couple hundred dollars is still lucrative for a ten minute procedure. Never mind that the people who perform abortions have the highest suicide rate in the medical profession; it's money, money, money. What actually happens when a girl walks in is that she receives a five-minute sales pitch that slants abortion as the only live option. Most of the abortions that have happened in this country were abortions that the girl was pressured into, that she never was allowed to say 'no' to -- same thing as date rape.
"So there was this big push to have real non-directive counseling at abortion clinics, along with a surgeon general's warning about the emotional scars that abortion can cause -- post abortion stress syndrome and all. It wasn't just Christians behind it; some feminists, especially those who had spent some time working at abortion clinics or talking with women who had gone through that trauma, had begun to suspect that they and their movement were being manipulated as pawns by forces less innocent than -- anyways, the law was passed September 1, 2012, and struck down October 1.
"The Baptists were the fastest to spearhead an initiative to get every church member into a protest -- which they didn't do; it was closer to fifty percent, but there was a massive, peaceful protest, and the police came out -- pepper spray, tear gas, pain holds, the works. The jails were filled up overnight, and it was ugly. The ugliest thing about it was that it wasn't two parties fighting each other -- it was one party attacking satyagrahi who didn't resist. The courts thought this would be a good time for an unambiguous message, and commanded a settlement of over 1.6 trillion dollars. The church could not begin to pay something like that.
"The courts lost something that day. The president of American Baptists called a press conference and said from his jail cell, 'You can force our bodies and our checkbooks, but you can never break our spirits. The denomination of Baptists in America is hereby declared to be bankrupt and disbanded. Baptists, melt into other bodies of believers. You are the heart of our ministry, not a formal structure that can be sued. Courts, you have won this battle. But what is it that you have won?'
"Most other Protestant denominations that participated in the protest did not do much better; Catholics were protected only by the masterful diplomacy of the Papacy. The Pope tried to be an advocate for the Protestants, too, but saving the financial viability of Catholics was making the best of a bad scenario. There were believers who left the Catholic Church -- not out of any rejection of Rome, but as a matter of solidarity, saying, 'We would rather be ill-treated alongside these righteous Protestants than be spared because our denomination happens to be powerful.'
"That single court decision galvanized the body of believers as a thousand sermons could never have done. Before then, there had been talk of an emerging post-denominational Christianity; now, people finally realized that they had bigger things to worry about than labels. It was as if two estranged brother generals forgot their dispute in the face of a battle. The Church was driven mostly underground, yes -- it had been underground at its beginning, and it will be underground again, no doubt. And people are tortured when they protest abortion, infanticide, or euthanasia -- the Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, but the courts have ruled that 'nondestructive incentives to reform' are not punishment. It is still virtually illegal to witness about your faith -- the argument classes it as harassment, and a freedom of religion defense brings a dilemma with it. If you invoke your religion as a defense, the question is which religion, and if you specify whichever area of Christianity you are from, you are slapped with massive penalties for participation in a corporate entity which falls under RICO. All of this is true and more, and the church is healthier than ever before.
"Taberah, in martial arts, I remember hearing something about you and joint locks, but I don't remember what. A joint lock is when someone twists one of your joints so that you will be pain unless you move in a certain way. This enables a martial artist to take your wrist and bring you down to the ground. What the Supreme Court learned in the ensuing years was that joint locks would no longer work against Christians. You could still figuratively twist a Christian's wrist -- break it if you pressed hard enough -- but she wouldn't go down to the ground unless you did so much damage to her that she was incapable of standing. And it is bad publicity if nothing else to do that much damage to unresisting people again and again -- so things have evolved to an unofficial 'Don't ask, don't tell.'
"Abortion is still of course legal, but now there are a lot of Christian women who can pick up on when another woman is pregnant, sometimes even before she knows it -- and tell her, 'You don't have to have an abortion,' and then talk about alternatives. The abortion industry thinks we're worse than termites -- individually not a problem, collectively a major problem, and too many to go hunting for -- and there's not that much they can do. Yes, they have advertising; yes, they control the literature that goes with pregnancy tests; yes, they do a number of abortions -- but we're able to make a sizeable dent. And the legality of killing is something that's hurting the court politically.
"There's a saying, 'Satan meant it for evil, but God turned it to good,' and the final break in dark power is that we are not angry at the court. We pray for them every night, submit to them in what we can, and go about our lives -- for God, not against the court. The court, with the worst of intentions, has created the conditions in America for Christians to deal effectively with problems that we would never have begun to treat.
"Have I answered your question, Taberah?"
Taberah thought, and said, "You have answered it and more. I would like to talk with you more some time, to better understand your form of government. You miss the Baptists, don't you?"
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Chapter Sixty-One: Baptists
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