Chapter 17

“The road to Baltimore is hopefully nice and boring, but I fear that it won’t be. Nobody mentioned anything about the open countryside, though if we stick to I-70, that should be less of a worry, if not entirely nonexistent. I suppose that it could just be my worrywart nature or a little hillbilly superstition, or else the fact that the trek has gradually, but steadily grown more dangerous for us. I guess that we’ll find out soon enough, one way or the other. I just don’t like surprises, you know. They’re rarely pleasant in my experience,” I grumbled, even as I enjoyed the way that Willa sat on my lap and kissed me.

As for my wives, Xia Delan was busy grinding her ass into Autumn’s face while Hannah sat and laughed at their antics. If Autumn was bothered, she didn’t show it, especially when she began rimming her sister-wife in earnest. Tara and Leah made out while Bonnie let Ryan and Till DP her for several minutes. Becca, Sardha, Lewis, Jared, Leah, Eileen, and Raquel were engaged in a spirited game of Risk, a rather ironic choice of board games under the present circumstances. It looked to me that Sardha had the upper hand for now, given her seizure of the Ukraine in the latest roll of the dice.

As for Anwyn, Gabby, Stacy, Wilbur Jr., Xavier, they were all reading something. Anwyn and Gabby had some lesbian erotica in hand, while Stacy read that American classic Tom Sawyer, of all things, Wilbur Jr. had the Bhagavad Gita, an admittedly surprising choice for a typical redneck, and Xavier went for the Book of Mormon, which also perplexed me. Naturally, he had his reasons, which he didn’t hold back.

“I’m writing a sort of essay or pamphlet on how Western religion is the cornerstone of American racism. The Book of Mormon is the poster child for this. The racism is so deeply woven into the text that one cannot understand Joseph Smith or Mormonism at all until one grasps the racism at its core. With all due respect for the Ballards, Christianity is the primary offender in the West. Nothing that any pagan sect or branch of Islam or whatever could do has even a tenth of the impact of any one Christian sect, let alone the aggregate of them,” Xavier expounded on his thesis.

“White Christianity. Black Christianity is different,” Becca asserted.

“To a degree, yes. Our civil rights leaders were heavily drawn from the ranks of the clergy. Not just Dr. King, but Dr. Abernathy, Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, etc. The trouble is, of course, that they were part of a religious tradition that attempted to fix things peacefully. As near as I could tell, nonviolence had only limited success. Gains for civil rights in the much maligned Reconstruction era, as temporary as they were, were more pronounced when done at the point of a bayonet.

“White Christianity glorifies violence, by contrast to black Christianity. The latter tries to deal in good faith, to be good citizens, good Americans, good neighbors. White Christianity deals in bad faith, with very few exceptions. White evangelical Protestant Christianity is the heart of the white racial and cultural hegemony in the former United States.

“White Christianity, at least in the most influential Protestant form, was the chief sponsor of the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, the very backbone of anti-busing initiatives, and the main cause of moral panic of possible intermarriage between the races. It was the basis for the Republican Southern Strategy exploited by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. It was the main force behind the anti-gay and anti-choice political movements so prominent in the GOP.

“And even now, Mormonism, the illegitimate, red-headed stepchild of white, evangelical, Protestant Christianity, remains the dominant cultural force in much of the American West. Especially Utah, but it has an extensive presence elsewhere. The fact is that in America, at least, violence to preserve the existing social order is winked at by Christian clergy even today. They are very fond of violence in entertainment, even as they seek to suppress expressions of nudity or sex.

“In short, white Christianity is a bad faith actor, a chaos agent, rather than a peaceful, stabilizing force. It is the banner and cause behind which white Christians in many cases will likely fight to the death against racial justice in North America. It champions and lionizes segregation as much as it still can. That is not to say that individual white Christians are automatically bad. I just mean that the creeds, dogmas, and institutions are handy weapons in the arsenal of white racial supremacy in North America.

“It’s no accident that many of the earlier reformers in revolutionary America were Deists, not Christians. The Bible is a blood-soaked history and mythology, after all, and following its precepts tends to help con blacks and other minorities into docility and nonviolence, even as it exhorts their white overlords to use deadly violence to maintain their domination of the North American continent,” Xavier continued explaining his rather controversial notions, to put it mildly.