"It will be a very cold day in hell before an offensive statue will be forced on us to be permanently erected on the grounds of the Arkansas state Capitol."
If state Sen. Jason Rapert's words above are accurate--and he assures us regularly that he is God's direct spokesman--then it would stand to reason that it has been a long winter of discontent already in the wasteland of once-eternal flame.
Teeth presumably have been chattering in the icy winds of the devil's domain ever since April.
That's when the brightest engineers of state government came up with a blockade to keep Dodge Darts from crashing into "an offensive statute" that was "forced on us to be permanently erected" on the state Capitol grounds.
Rapert had just managed to get the monument to the Old Testament's Ten Commandments re-erected to his glory.
(That's a lower-case "h" on "his" in the preceding sentence because I speak of Rapert, not the Lord Himself, asserting a difference.)
In case you'd forgotten, though surely you couldn't: A Dart steered by a troubled man had felled Rapert's original erection in a pre-dawn crash in June of '17.
What had stirred Rapert to these huffy words Thursday morning--not that his huffiness requires much prompting--was the nuisance of outside Satanic-worshipping agitators. Rascals of that bent were coming to the Capitol that afternoon to demonstrate against the attack on free religion represented by Rapert's religious idolatry on public property.
The outside Satanic-worshipping agitators were bringing with them that hideous Baphomet sculpture that represents their belief. They had made noises about getting Baphomet himself erected on our Capitol lawn, now that we've let Rapert open our official grounds to honor personal religious beliefs.
All of that was as unnecessary as a Trump tweet, and as ridiculous.
I went over for the street demonstration Thursday afternoon. The Satan monument arrived on a truck trailer on Woodlane in front of the Capitol. A woman screamed "abomination to the Lord." The Satan side chanted "hail Satan." Police hovered. A guy held a Rebel battle flag. The God side broke into hymns.
No conversions were evident, although it was hot enough in the bright sun on the steamy pavement that the God side could have saved Satanists' souls if they'd brought in a portable baptistry for people to jump in.
It's all Rapert's fault. And it is impossible to quantify the disparate elements in his behavior in this affair, meaning those that are genuinely religious and those that are brazenly political.
I personally detect a sizable quotient of the brazenly political.
Rapert picks a political fight he can easily win in Arkansas, where Satan's approval ratings are lower than Trump's in a sanctuary city.
As for the element that might be strictly religious: Brother Rapert, bless his spiritually simpleton heart, doesn't seem to understand that the Lord does not seek idolatry's glory in a statue on Caesar's lawn. The Lord is honored and exalted by the glory of his reflection in the example of well-lived lives.
Now, you might ask: Where do I get off presuming to tell Rapert what the Lord prefers?
I answer that question very simply: I get off at the same place Rapert gets off. I have fully as much right to be correct and spiritually enhancing about the Lord's positions as he has to be wrong and narrowly restrictive about them.
I got an adult dose of Rapert-caliber evangelical fundamentalism as a child. I absorbed it fully. But I outgrew and rejected it, perhaps with a mild vengeance, leading former First Lady Janet Huckabee to quip that I must have been run over by a church bus as a child.
Once, as I was settling in to backslid status as a young adult, my parents sent the preacher to try to prod me back into the pew. The preacher reported to my mother, as she related to me, that I was so spiritual he wasn't sure what he could do with me.
I regret that a troubled man drove a Dodge Dart into Rapert's original statue. I regret that Satanists made a spectacle at the Capitol on Thursday.
We should crash our Dodge Darts into religious intolerance only by soaring metaphor, and make our freedom-of-religion spectacles the same way--by living good lives, by advancing more expansive and more positive ideas, by explaining that, if it's Christianity you are claiming to practice and honor, then the only monument to your Lord that is required is yourself, in body and spirit, wherever you go and in all that you do.
Dueling graven images are less entertaining and no more religiously relevant than dueling banjos.
I hope I haven't been too spiritual.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 08/19/2018