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Notes -
Atlanta is a strange city. It simultaneously has a distinct old-south vibe, inner-city blight, an aggressive ("vibrant"?) and mainly white LGBTQ community, and a modern skyline dominated by the headquarters of Fortune 500 companies. It is also separated from some of the most "southern" rural areas in the USA by a drive of mere minutes.
It was to Atlanta that I drove for the Peach Bowl, the first-time ever match between my favorite college team and my second-favorite college team.
There are plenty of culture war aspects to the game that I could describe. There are the homeless tents and camps scattered beneath crumbling ruins of houses and former businesses in the old Downtown while across the street is one of the most expensive and luxurious stadiums ever made. There were the two mostly rural (but wealthy!) fanbases completely out of place in south Atlanta: what seems perfectly normal in the Grove or in State College becomes grotesque when placed next to either a homeless camp or a glistening 5 star hotel. There is the transfer portal and opt-outs wreaking havoc to bowl games and the rise of Name Image Likeness (NIL) shell companies that effectively launders alumni donations to pay college athletes which enable rich and (mostly) conservative alumni to buy championships rather than elections.
Instead I will describe the invocation given before the game. Before every American sporting event the crowd is invited to stand for the National Anthem. Most know to place their hands over their hearts during the anthem. This time as we were invited to stand, I was anticipating the anthem to start playing and put hand over heart. Instead the announcer asked us to bow our heads for an invocation. This was the first time I had experienced a prayer prior to a football game and in my cynicism I expected a universalist crowd-pleasing platitude. As a serious Christian, I was willing to listen respectfully but did not want to intimate that I thought the prayer was actually being made to the God of the universe. The first word from the black preacher disabused me of my cynicism: "Father", he prayed. I adopted a more reverent posture as I recognized this preacher genuinely believed he was talking to God. He prayed that the athletes would perform to their best of their abilities, that there would be no serious injuries, and finally for an attitude of gratefulness that we had the opportunity and means to enjoy such a venue. In light of the blight and ghetto surrounding the stadium, I especially appreciated this last sentiment.
As he was concluding his prayer he delivered his most potent and shocking affirmation: "we pray this in the name of Jesus Christ our Savior, who died for our sins, and on the third day rose again! AMEN!".
Seventy thousand people were dead silent, stunned. Then a significant portion (possibly a third to a half) broke out in applause. An Ole Miss fan next to me chortled, "I don't think that went according to script!". The band struck up the anthem, and hands were placed over hearts. The anthem is often my favorite part of a sporting event: two teams may hate each other but they become unified in support of a shared nationality and identity. This time, it was a distant second place compared to the invocation.
AMEN!! No matter what the LEGACY MEDIA tells you, real American PATRIOTS stand up and let their FAITH in GOD be known to all! White black or otherwise, we are ALL children of GOD on this blessed day!!!
~ Mrs. Cirrus
Sent from my iPad
Holidays always seem to be terrible for moderation. I banned someone on thanksgiving. I banned someone on christmas. And you have made a good attempt for getting me to ban someone on new years eve.
I'd rather not go for the hat trick, so this is just a warning. You don't post here often, and you don't have any past warnings. This kind of post is bad, don't do this.
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Cirruscels have nothing on Cumlonimbuschads with their fetch anvils and everything...
Cirrus: thin and wispy
Cumlonimbus: thick and volumnous, only clouds imbued with the power of Zeus™.
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Ah yes, blacks and rednecks getting along. Institutional collaboration between the two usually involves serious Christians in the limelight because it's high status in both communities.
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A great story; I appreciate you recollecting it here.
A Christian-specific invocation is definitely a surprise (and, I imagine, will be “prepared for” in the future by the admins who were in attendance), even if it shouldn’t be given the fanbases and location. One of the most interesting dichotomies of the modern culture war is the differing reactions to public displays of Christianity based on whether the zealot in question is black or white.
Black Christianity, despite being far more charismatic, superstitious, and money-grubbing, gets a pass in the public sphere for two reasons: 1) soft bigotry of low expectations and 2) its platform elevates Blue Tribe politicians rather than Red ones (I’m reminded of Barack Obama putting on an AAVE affect on the few occasions when he discussed Christianity in a non-academic way).
But even the congregates of American Christianity seem to understand this dichotomy without the framework of PMC/Media Culture; Sunday mornings are one of the last remaining public displays of (voluntary) racial segregation. Indeed, I wonder if the Black Church (perhaps along with the leftist safeguarding of Islam) is the one poison pill guaranteeing the survival of White Christianity in a progressive society… at least until the day that the bold partisanship seen in the last week in the courts of Maine and Colorado finally feels confident enough to openly enforce racist practices limiting constitutionally-protected exercises of faith.
I give it a year.
The black church is ‘tolerated’ because firstly, like you say, it still broadly supports Democrats, and secondly because most high status black Americans still aren’t public religious conservatives. Either they’re Christians in the social justice progressive sense, which the monoculture also tolerates among whites, or they’re Christians in name only like Obama, which is irrelevant. There are certainly exceptions but they’re rare enough.
The black equivalent to conservative Christianity is probably black Hebrew Israelites/nation of Islam, which the monoculture hates more than it does ordinary red tribe fundamentalists. I mean there certainly are black baptist KJV-onlyist churches not much different from white-majority KJV-onlyist baptist churches, but they're a lot more marginal and I think generally older than the mixed/white majority ones, in large part because the kinds of African Americans who would become independent fundamental baptists are more attracted to black Hebrew Israelitism.
AFACIT the monoculture is unaware of the existence of the Black Hebrew Israelites & puts them down to some sort of right-wing psyop when and if they sneak into the national conciousness. It's sinful to notice them, so people don't.
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Is this true? Louis Farrakhan gave remarks at Rosa Parks’ funeral in 2020, and I didn’t see any major mainstream media outrage about this. Frankly I don’t think mainstream progressives give much thought to the Nation of Islam or to the Black Hebrew Israelites or other hotep organizations at all.
The progressive elite, which obviously includes a lot of Jews, essentially decided to tolerate black nationalist conspiracist ideologies after the 70s. There were some prominent fights around eg NYC public schools, but after that it was generally decided that it wasn’t an important enough religious movement to threaten any existing political leadership.
And that makes sense. In the South, traditional black machine politics remains the dominant black form of political expression, dominated by older congregants and middle aged church-going women. In the rest of the country black people are a small minority that is usually pretty electorally irrelevant outside of a handful of cities like Chicago and Detroit.
You are very good at writing! I've been binge reading your comments and they're very interesting. You should consider starting a blog.
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