Five Steps Back of the Day: A church in Pike County, Kentucky, voted this week to ban interracial couples from becoming members of the congregation, as well as from participating in worship services.
Melvin Thompson, a former pastor at the ironically named Gulnare Freewill Baptist Church, asked that a proposal stating unequivocally that “the church did not condone interracial marriage” be brought to a vote. It passed 9 to 6, with several members abstaining.
Thompson was apparently incensed that the daughter of church secretary Dean Harville brought her Zimbabwean fiancé to church. Harville said the decision was clearly motivated by racism. “It sure ain’t Christian. It ain’t nothing but the old devil working,” he told the Lexington Herald-Leader.
“Most of us thought that we’d moved well beyond that,” said Pike County Ministerial Association president Randy Johnson. “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance,” responded 18th century Irish orator John Philpot Curran.
