Facing crowded pews and heavy hearts, Dallas clergy took to the pulpits on Nov. 24, 1963 to try to make sense of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy just two days before.
“The ministers saw the assassination as an unwelcome opportunity for some serious, city-wide soul-searching,” said Tom Stone, an English professor at Southern Methodist University, who has studied the sermons delivered that day.
“Though Dallas could not be reasonably blamed for the killing, it needed to face up to its tolerance of extremism and its narrow, self-centered values,” Stone said.
Why should the entire population of the city of Dallas be held accountable for the actions of one man? Despite Stone saying that “Dallas could not be reasonably blamed for the killing”, he promptly turns around and does just that by painting a picture of an environment of hate.
Oswald was unstable his entire life; coming to Dallas didn’t plant any new ideas in his head. And the reception that Kennedy got at the airport and during the motorcade (before Oswald’s crime) showed that far from being a vicious, Democrat-hating city, there was a tremendous amount of support for Kennedy. Those preachers who addressed topics other than the death of the President or the basic facts of Oswald’s actions were working from the “never let a good crisis go to waste” meme. It’s just plain wrong to link the Kennedy assasination to ” a nation that has grown greedy and selfish and complacent”, or ” no city in the United States … in recent months and years has been more acquiescent toward its extremists than Dallas, Texas.”
You can’t apologize for what you didn’t do (and that’s not meant in the “failed to have done what we should have done” way).
RE: “it needed to face up to its tolerance of extremism and its narrow, self-centered values . . . ”
I smiled over that line as well. *Love* how the media makes the killing of a president from the party of the Democrats by a constantly-unemployed, avowed Marxist, desperate for some attention to his sorry life, all about Bad Old Dallas’s “tolerance of extremism” and “narrow” values.
The good news is that most of the informed recognize what the media is doing, with the political liberals approving of the propaganda and the conservatives not. So the only thing we need to worry about is the low-information folks — and they hopefully aren’t doing all that much reading of newspapers anyway.
What constitutes sinful speech? In what ways does sinful speech encourage sinful actions?
From the article quoting a United Methodist preacher…
“Much of the hate and discord that has been poisoning our nation has been preached in the name of Christ and the church. In Dallas entire sermons have been devoted to damning the Kennedy administration and the United Nations, and they have been delivered from Methodist pulpits. In the name of the church, men and women have sown seeds of discord, distrust and hate and have called it witnessing for Christ. As a church we are sick. God have mercy on us.â€
Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2013/11/22/3115769/what-dallas-pastors-preached-the.html#storylink=cpy