By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO 00 When the newly-inaugurated Alabama Governor Robert Bentley apologized Wednesday for his extraordinarily ill-advised and spiritually separatist comments made on Monday, it was hard to really believe him.
Bentley declared that he didn’t mean to insult anyone. But, egregiously, he told a church crowd on Monday that people who have not accepted Jesus as their savior are not his brothers and sisters. Understandably, this shocked and angered some critics who questioned whether he can be fair to non-Christians.
“Anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister, and I want to be your brother,” Bentley said Monday, just moments into his new administration, according to The Birmingham News.
This little jeremiad took place on Martin Luther King Day.
My hunch is that the vast majority of Christians—folks who take seriously the inclusive and tolerant ethos of Jesus—are as offended by Bentley’s burst of bias as anyone else. It bothers me no less than the unacceptable and decidedly un-Jewish proclamations of fundamentalist rabbis in Israel who routinely prohibit Orthodox Jews from mixing with Arabs, other non-Jews, or even secular Jews who do not observe “Torah-true” rites.
Bentley’s statement was guttural, however. He can apologize a thousand times but it’s what he feels. We whom he framed as not being his brothers and sisters represent “the Other” and the America he envisions is not a nation of mostly Christian residents. It is, in his tragic view, a Christian nation where anyone who does not pray like Bentley is, at best, a guest, or at worst an alien presence unworthy of citizenship in his faux ecclesiastic polity.
The biggest irony here is that Bentley’s view would be an anathema to the Founding Fathers of this great republic. All of them, from Jefferson to Franklin, engraved the charter documents of our nation with the separation of church and state—and a variety of their own statements of skepticism about religion and its often attendant divisiveness.
Alabama, you aren’t so sweet, and you’re still stuck in the bigotry of George Wallace and his assortment of religious fascists.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer in San Diego