I'm researching Spirituals today, getting ready for a sermon to go with our Choir's Sunday Celebration of the music they've been working with all year. They'll be singing mostly old favorites; but I've been struck with several spirituals that I've never heard and with the layers of meaning and sly humor they contain. Here's one...a celebration of Nat Turner's slave rebellion, which seems an appropriate last word for the Rev. Jerry Falwell
You might be a Carroll from Carrollton
Arrived here night before the Lord made creation
But you can't keep the world from moving along
and NOT TURN HER (pronounced Nat Turner) back from the gaining ground.
Jerry Falwell believed he was the Entitled One of Christendom, and was comically willing to speak for God about the reasons of things. He was particularly inclined to blame homosexuals and feminists for the ills of the world, for which I hold him no love.
But he couldn't keep the world from moving along.
(Nor did most Evangelicals think of him as an appropriate spokesperson for their increasingly diverse and more spiritually oriented causes any more. If our media wasn't so religiously color blind, they would have quit giving him their attention long, long ago.)
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