NAACP’s Rev Dr William Barber: Alabama’s Child Poverty Rate Is ‘Policy Pedophilia’

Saturday on MSNBC’s “AM Joy,” Rev. William Barber, pastor at Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, NC and NAACP board member and chair of its legislative political action committee, railed against those supporting former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore under the banner of Christian evangelicalism.

Barber criticized GOP policies, which he blamed for the woes plaguing Alabama and went as far as calling Alabama’s poverty rate of households with children “policy pedophilia.”

Transcript as follows:

First of all, I heard a lot of what your panel has said today. Seem true orthodox evangelicals would not be supporting Roy Moore or this extremism in what I call ‘Republican religionism.’ It is not orthodox evangeliscalism. They try to hijack that term. White evangelicalism is connected to white nationalism, it’s connect to white supremacy. It is the backbone of racism that has happened in this country. Now, you understand why white nationalism, white supremacy that promotes racism. Racism is twisted. And so this notion of white evangelical values is twisted anyway because so-called … I call them Republican religionist, because they’ve given him cover and so many others on non-Christian policies like blocking health care is a non-Christian policy.

Blocking living wages is a non-Christian policy. Blocking and suppressing voting rights is a non-Christian policy. Hating gay people is a non-Christian policy. Promoting guns a non-Christian policy. And so if you embolden these people by giving them support and trying to call their support on those issues ‘Christian,’ then it should not surprise us that they have – they’re emboldened in this issue.

So, now you have people trying to compare this with Jesus and the Virgin Mary and saying that he’s under some spiritual attack like Jesus was under spiritual attack and he’s in a spiritual battle. Well, a real spiritual battle would be addressing the fact that in some counties in Alabama, 40 percent of the people in poverty. There are 24 percent of children living in households that are poverty. That’s policy pedophilia, when you’re hurting children and not addressing that. It’s one of the lowest states in public education.

You’ve got 900,000 people in poverty. Twenty percent with no health insurance. Those are the things that Christians should be dealing with if they were dealing with orthodox evangelicalism. This is heretical. It’s hypocritical. It’s a term they have hijacked like they hijacked the term ‘the right versus the left.’ We get caught up in all these terms. And they get to use the terms as if they are valid when they are not valid anyway.

Lastly, Moore himself, he got involved in trying to keep the state from overturning past segregation laws.  And it was so-called the Alabama Christian coalition. Just because you use the name doesn’t make you Christian. There are scriptures that say people can say, ‘Lord, Lord,’ but their hearts are far from him. You have to understand the distinct connection between so-called even white evangelicalism and racism and white nationalism and white supremacy to understand how people can get this twisted in their moral aspects and moral perspectives that is so contrary to orthodox Christianity and orthodox evangelicalism as it’s laid out in scripture.

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor

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