RICHMOND, VIRGINIA: Last year, the Southern Baptists offended in turn Muslims, Jews and Hindus with their prayer booklets designed for each religion. Next, former president Jimmy Carter, a member since childhood, quit the huge Christian church because he no longer agreed with their increasingly fundamentalist stance. Then the Southern Baptists of Texas cut off US$5 million in funding to the national organization for the same reasons Carter quit. Now the Southern Baptists have insulted the world’s Blacks. They’ve come up with a poster advertising their overseas missionary program (the world’s largest) “using symbolism some members, including African Americans, are calling racially insensitive,” according to the Washington Post. The poster shows an African man, his bare chest draped in beads, sitting in a dark room. His unshaven face concentrates on a piece of paper; his hands hold a pen and a book. A beam of light shines down on him. Above him large letters read “Dispel the Darkness.” “Given the Southern Baptist Convention’s history on race, the image just seems loaded, grossly insensitive,” Robert M. Parham of the Baptist Center for Ethics, a progressive Southern Baptist group, told the Post. “Why couldn’t they use a blond Scandinavian, to avoid sending this cultural message?”
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