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Q for current and former fundies, re: mixed marriage


MamaJunebug

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Was reading up on the Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff tragedy/scandal/embarrassment and noted with bemusement that:

- At one time in their attempts to deprive her of her livelihood, her enemies planned to reveal her children as bi-racial because Cheryl's first husband was African American,

while,

- One of her detractors, Gregg Harris, was the father of bi-racial children, since his now deceased wife, Sono, was a Japanese American woman.

Which finally gets to my question: How are/were "bi-racial" marriages accepted in extremist/fundamentalist/dominionist circles? Are some "other races" less "other" than others???

(Apropos of nothing, a very liberal friend of mine, United Methodist for life, is very sensitive to the fact that hers is a bi-racial family, since her children are from Asia. She is quite plain-spoken about which Methodist churches she'll attend and which she won't, since they "are a mixed-race family."

(This confuses the snot out of me, since at my conservative Lutheran church last night there were Japanese Americans and East Indian nationals and nobody seemed attuned to the facts of different skin tones/facial construction at all. No special treatment at the Communion rail and everybody was shaking hands and a few were hugging [there were a lot of German Americans there, after all ;) )

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This might be because I live in the South, but bi-racial marriages between black and white people were the only ones looked down on. I guess all other races were considered "white" enough so it wasn't an issue. It isn't as bad now, but I can remember being out and seeing a black and white couple and hearing the whispers because it was so scandalous.

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My sister married an African American and our folks were vehemently opposed to it. They said the reason was that it would make her and her children's lives more difficult; but truly it was just old-style racism.

Now, 12 years into the marriage, my parents love their son-in-law and have completely accepted the relationship.

The Church told my sister to respect the wishes of our parents; but they were at least decent enough to say that racism is wrong and were eventually accepting of the marriage once my parents grudgingly gave their blessing.

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I briefly dated a half-Haitian half-Jewish coworker many years ago. Upon learning about this, my grandmother, a Catholic from France who is usually quite modern and open-minded, said to "never introduce him to this family" and that my grandfather must never know or else he might have a heart attack. And she was overjoyed when I told her it didn't last, in fact she said she prayed it didn't.

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When Israel was under the Old Covenant, they followed the law to maintain their acceptability with God. Their purity spiritually was bound to their nationality, so they were encouraged to stay away from and to not intermingle with other cultures. It was not a matter of race necessarily. Moses, David, Solomon and others married women from outside the culture -- women of Africa -- who followed YHWH. But as a general rule, it was best to not intermingle and intermarry because of the impact that the religions of other cultures had on the faith maintained by God's chosen group.

When Jesus came and satisfied the law and put those who had faith in God under the law of love through grace instead of the "law of sin and death" (Mosaic Law) that was maintained through works, the need for the observation of anti-miscegenation became antiquated. That which was ceremonially unclean under Jewish law became acceptable, and salvation which was exclusively offered to the Jew was now extended to all nations. Spirituality based on nationalism was broken.

Some Christian groups who are overtly concerned with holiness and tend towards legalism chose to keep the law of the Old Covenant when it spoke about the pre-redemption general rule of avoiding intermarriage with other cultures. This was an older theme in Theonomy through Rushdoony (though interracial marriage was provocative in the culture of his family and in his generation). It was also an issue within the Independent Fundamental Baptists. Bob Jones University didn't repeal the interracial dating and marriage rules until recent years, in response to the culture and recognizing that it was a cultural issue as opposed to a spiritual one, especially for the Christian under the New Covenant (faith in Jesus as the Messiah).

There are theonomists who ascribe to anti-miscegenation today, especially among those who are into the agrarianism and the militias and the desire to see the South rise again. IMO, it is just an excuse for hatred, but because of freedom within theology, they do have a little room to argue for its validity, depending on how you attribute the significance of the Old Testament Law.

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I am married to a Jamaican man who is Methodist, I am mixed white/Latina/Native American. We have 3 kids. I guess you can't really understand the racism in churches (and everywhere else) until you have really experienced it yourself. No church we have attended has been outright racist, it is more subtle: not being included in activities, not being invited places when the rest of the church is invited, assuming since my kids look black they are "slow," many older people are visibly uncomfortable around a black man. At one of the chruches we attended they had a large outdoor amphitheatre and would put on plays in the summer. Lots of people in the community and other churches would come, even from long distances. One of the bus drivers was black, and I guess since the only other black man ever seen at the church was my husband, everyone kept assuming the black bus driver was my husband (who had stayed home with our baby that night).

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It was accepted in the fundie circles I grew up in. Since there was a lot of international adoption from Haiti and other places, it would have been disturbing to say the least if they were adopting children into a circle they couldn't marry within.

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A friend from a fundie background told me that her parents have forbidden her to ever have a relationship with a black guy. As in she would be disowned.

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Didn't Jasmine Bauchman lament that she would have trouble finding someone to court her because she's a minority?

Honestly, I think a lot of the reason Quiverfull even exists is to out-breed the other races. The world is overpopulated, but white Westerners are not growing as fast as other races. Combine this with immigration to the U.S. and constant scare stories about white people becoming a minority, and it's hard to determine whether they care more about having a bunch of fundie Christian children or just about having a bunch of white children (especially since they worry more about reproducing than converting existing people). There's also the anti-Mexican bigotry, and since Catholicism is the predominant religion in Mexico and Latin American countries (and because of poverty) they tend to have higher birth rates. I think a lot of QFs are trying to out-do the Mexican Catholics.

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When we were in reconstuctionist church, there was a black family that would attend sometimes. One of the boys in that family developed an interest in my sister and started calling, etc. He was always really nice and everything (good looking, too!) but my mom freaked out. She told my sister - "what if you get married and have babies - what will you do with their hair???" My sister said that she would ask his mom how to take care of it, duh, which kind of surprised my mom. I think my sister was 15ish at the time? Something like that.

That said, when we were taught about not intermarrying with other cultures, I always took that to mean don't marry someone of a different religion, not a different race. I know other fundies have a different interpretation of that, but that's what I always though. To be honest though, except for that one black family, everyone in the church was white, so it didn't come up.

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When we were in reconstuctionist church, there was a black family that would attend sometimes. One of the boys in that family developed an interest in my sister and started calling, etc. He was always really nice and everything (good looking, too!) but my mom freaked out. She told my sister - "what if you get married and have babies - what will you do with their hair???"

LOL. I DO have a lot of trouble with my daughter's hair. Sadly, all of my kids from an early age (about 2) pick up on society's preference for certain type of hair, certain skin color, etc and lament their own brown skin, curly hair.

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life makes life hard. yes interracial marriages can cause problems but so can regular marriages. There is no one way and no only this way will bring happiness in this world.

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Guest Anonymous

None of us were fundies, but when I was in HS (a year and a half ish ago...) I was 1 of 8 white girls in my class of 80 and most of us were not allowed to date black guys. I'm not sure if I was or not...I did whatever I wanted and made sure my dad didn't hear of it because I didn't want to have to deal with any crap. One of my best friends got pregnant by her black boyfriend of 2.5 years. Their relationship was a secret from her family the whole time and the night her family found out she was pregnant she got kicked out. Her parents called me (because they had kept her phone) in the middle of the night to say they were sorry and wanted her to come home the next day.

Some friends and I were talking about it with a teacher one day and she said what she thinks from what she has seen in our school and others that if you order the race from light to dark (or dark to light) in skin color that for the most part the parents are going to have more of a problem the farther you get from your own color. So in my school it was white, Mexican, black. But this thinking could be specific to our part of the South.

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It depends. I know of a few IFB preachers/churches that are against black/white interracial marriage, but that seems to be more of an attitude that was common in the past and newer generations reject it and see racism as a sin. Other types of interracial marriage tend to be more accepted, but it seems to be that way overall - people accept white/Asian marriages more than white/black.

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I was in a fundie reformed church and we were specifically taught that racism was a sin. There were several interracial couples in the church and they seemed to be accepted by and large (one of the husbands was on session). The kind of "mixed marriage" that would get you shunned would be if you were courting Catholics, non-Christians or even someone from a liberal mainline church who wasn't willing to become part of our church.

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I'm the product of a mixed marriage. My dad is a Republican, my mom was a Democrat. *bucketoffish*

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Racism and ethnic prejudice can be found anywhere. The worst garbage my husband has gotten in America has unfortunately come from African Americans. Never In my wildest dreams would I have expected that, and it's sad. :(

My husband is African, I'm white American. So, we're definitely mixed. :)

The most vocal objections I got were from people who considered themselves socially progressive and would deny up and down any racist feelings, but thought I was young and stupid and falling for a green-card dupe. They were wrong, but whatever. Then there were a few people who are standard "cultural Christians" (pretty much non-religious except on holidays or at funerals, definitely not fundie) who were outright flaming racist, but took a "Well, it's your life, you do what makes you happy" attitude towards me. One of these people was complaining to me about her daughter dating a black guy, and said "If he knocks her up, I will push her down the stairs myself. I don't want any black grandbabies". :shock: Then she apparently remembered who I was marrying, and went all "But I'm not racist, not at all! I wish you all the best with your marriage." :doh:

Nobody in any of the funadmentalist of QF circles we've wandered through has expressed any objection to our marriage, nor treated us in any way other than respectful. I remember listening to Voddie Baucham's sermon ("Table of Nations" or something like that) dealing with this issue. I hope it was heard by many in the VF crowd. My children did turn a lot of heads when we visited our River Brethren friends out near Lancaster. But the children in that church were merely curious, not mean. It wore off quickly and they played together quite happily. I do know a few individuals who have expressed that they would prefer not to marry outside race because of cultural differences--and this attitude is not represented by whites only, but by people of a variety of ethnicities. We had friends who were were refused marriage by their female African American pastor (some kind of pentacostal church, I believe) because she disapproves of cross-racial marriage. They had to go elsewhere, which is how they found our current church. This one is fundamentalist in belief/theologically and socially conservative, but no dress code, not QF, not the type of fundie usually mentioned here. It is a large urban church, very racially mixed, so families like ours are nothing special.

We don't use birth control, and that is part of our faith, but obviously we're not trying to grow an army of white babies, seeing as ours are all decidedly brown. I don't think for most QF it's a racial thing. Because it has developed and been named a movement among mostly white Americans, they mostly tend to be white. But their issue is that Christians are not having enough children. And there are plenty of non-white Christians in various places around the world who chose to leave aside birth control, either for cultural or spiritual reasons, or both. My husband comes from such a family.

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Was reading up on the Cheryl Lindsey Seelhoff tragedy/scandal/embarrassment and noted with bemusement that:

- At one time in their attempts to deprive her of her livelihood, her enemies planned to reveal her children as bi-racial because Cheryl's first husband was African American,

Also, this sounds just weird to me. Maybe because i'm not familiar with the story.

But how does one "reveal" children as biracial? It would seem obvious, I would think. Was she hiding her kids from folks? Did they not have any outward physical features of their father?

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Also, this sounds just weird to me. Maybe because i'm not familiar with the story.

But how does one "reveal" children as biracial? It would seem obvious, I would think. Was she hiding her kids from folks? Did they not have any outward physical features of their father?

I have a few friends who are of mixed ethnic parentage and they can 'pass' for white.

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I know that's possible, though I've mostly only seen that when there were several generations of biracial relationships.

Anyhoo, I utilized google and I understand a little better now. I sometimes forget that 1994 wasn't the same everything's on the internet and our lives are all on facebook kind of world we live in now.

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This might be because I live in the South, but bi-racial marriages between black and white people were the only ones looked down on. I guess all other races were considered "white" enough so it wasn't an issue. It isn't as bad now, but I can remember being out and seeing a black and white couple and hearing the whispers because it was so scandalous.

I think that there is more prejudce against white women marrying outside their race than men. When I was in school, I heard some boys talking about a white girl who had dated a black student as if she had someone become diseased and ruined. They all agreed that she was pretty but because she had dated a black man, she was undateable. :?

For a short while my mom dated a jerk who wouldn't see his grandchildren because they were biracial.

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For those who don't know, Gregg Harris is the father of the man who wrote, "I Kissed Dating Goodbye." He is also father to Brett and Alex Harris who run the Rebolution website and created the modesty survey.

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Guest Anonymous

I think that there is more prejudce against white women marrying outside their race than men. When I was in school, I heard some boys talking about a white girl who had dated a black student as if she had someone become diseased and ruined. They all agreed that she was pretty but because she had dated a black man, she was undateable. :?

For a short while my mom dated a jerk who wouldn't see his grandchildren because they were biracial.

It is definitely like that were I'm from. Notable quotes include: "I would never touch a girl who has had a black dick inside her." :? :shock:

The white guys would get offended/mad/jealous if one of the white girls was even talking to a black guy. (Talking as in the urbandictionary definition, not normal people definition http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=talking)

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