As someone raised a poor people’s Baptist, I heard any number of sermons that declared it is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven, and with none of that liberal wishy washy idea that maybe there was a low gate into Jerusalem called the Eye of the Needle that required people to get on their knees to pass through. The sermons I heard thundered a message that one cannot serve God and mammon, and that the rich, by which they meant people with more money than it takes to pay the rent and put food on the table and to buy some clothing, were all in danger of their immortal souls facing eternal torture.
It has been a confusion to me how contemporary white Baptist Christianity in America, and some notable examples of the black church, as well, have been captured by modern capitalism.
Best I see it the actual historical origins of what would become Baptists were for the most part communist, if not in the Marxist sense (knowing Marx appears to have wanted to claim them for his peculiar version) that they held along with the belief in adult baptism, that the social order in which they lived where the rich oppressed the poor was satanic, and their fix was that goods should be held in common in a society patterned something along the lines of the “poor” of Jerusalem for whom Paul was always trying to raise money among the convert communities.
Today is a marker, I guess, of the beginning of the end of the possibility of that kind of Baptist church becoming a significant force in the reformation. It was on this day in 1525 that forces of order crushed the German peasant’s revolt, a Baptist uprising, led by Pastor Thomas Muntzer in the battle of Frankenhausen. The good pastor would be tortured and then beheaded within five days. Those forces of order can move fast when they want to…
All too bad, I think.
Of course the spirit of that church survives, or has to some degree. There was that poor people’s church of my childhood. And I believe it continues more or less among some African American Baptist churches. We hear hints of it from the current Roman pontiff, as well. And here and there from individuals and small bands.
What a thought.
A Christianity that actually stands with the poor might be quite an interesting thing.
Don’t you think…
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