The news came this past Wednesday that conservative radio personality Rush Limbaugh has died after an extended battle with lung cancer. Rush Limbaugh was a boon to the talk radio industry,
but he was a bane to the community and a blight upon the broadcasting landscape. He tapped into our worst, most selfish actions and reactions and gave multitudes permission to abide in their hatred and bigotry. When his radio
program first came to the Birmingham area it aired on the most widely listened to talk
radio station, WERC. I would often listen in to find out what the brouhaha was all
about. This was in the day when one could hear informative interview programs
that were nationally broadcast, as well as local talk, of which Tim Lennox was
a favorite in the city. It didn’t take much listening to the spouting of Rush
and the fawning of the “ditto-heads” calling in to understand what was
happening. Nevertheless, I kept my car radio tuned to WERC Talk Radio because I felt it was important to hear what was being said what others were thinking.
The other part of my story was that
I had been a Baptist seminarian who was so dismayed by the fundamentalist
takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention that I had left the denomination 5 or 6 years earlier. I
guess I still had some lingering hope for “my people,” why else would I have
wandered into the Baptist Bookstore one day? As I entered the bookstore, which
at the time was still on University Boulevard near UAB, there on prominent
display was Rush Limbaugh’s newly published first book, The Way Things Ought to Be. I had listened to Rush enough to know that he made no claim
to any religious faith and had stated as much, yet here in the store that once
presented only what was considered to be aids for Bible study and Christian
living was a book by a man who made no attempt to hide his narrow-minded
bigotry and expressed no love at all for any faith practice.
That moment simply re-affirmed for me the rightness of my
decision to have parted company with the church of my childhood. Moreover, it
showed me that the core beliefs of the denomination rested not on the Bible, as
was publicly stated, but on bigotry, xenophobia, and hate. It also showed me
that you don’t have to be religious to be a racist bigot, but a racist bigot is
readily welcomed by many religious folks. I walked out that day with no further
desire to even look back, though I have carried the grief that good-hearted
people can be so easily led astray.
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