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Oh, those Baptist fatwas of yesteryear

By PHILIP GAILEY
Published August 7, 2005

I'm beginning to wonder if the fundamentalist Baptist church I attended as a child in the backwoods of north Georgia was an offshoot of Islam. I didn't realize it at the time, but the Baptists of my acquaintance in those days had a lot in common with today's Muslims when it came to the treatment of women, the consumption of alcohol, strictures on dress and other lifestyle matters.

This blasphemous thought came to me after reading a Wall Street Journal story last week on how Muslim immigrants in Europe are struggling to integrate in Western societies and remain true to the teachings of Islam. Apparently there is no single voice or authority that speaks for Islam, and the result is confusion as a flood of fatwas, or religious opinions, come from self-appointed experts, Internet sites, television shows, local clerics and Islamic councils from around the world. They don't always agree.

The Journal story included a sample of the questions and fatwas found on IslamOnline.com. One Muslim wanted to know if it was permissible for a man to wear a silk necktie. "There is almost a scholarly consensus that wearing clothes made of pure silk in the form of a shirt or tie, etc., is forbidden for men." What about wearing shorts when playing basketball? "The correct view is that young men must cover their thighs, and it is not permissible to watch players when they have their thighs uncovered in this manner." The Web site also advised that it was haram, or forbidden, for Muslims to sit with people who are drinking wine or to have cosmetic surgery to "increase beauty." Is there a Botox loophole?

Those Islamic fatwas don't sound all that different from some of the sermons I heard in the small Baptist church of my youth. Any man who owned a Bible (he didn't even have to be able to read it) and claimed to have been "called" to preach the Gospel was allowed to rant from the pulpit about the sins of wearing makeup, watching television, dancing and drinking whiskey - none of which, as I recall, is found in the Ten Commandments.

It was considered an abomination for a woman to wear her hemline too high, her hair too short or to use lipstick and rouge. A woman wearing shorts? She might as well have been nude. Drink a beer or swig a little whiskey and you were cast out of the church. Actually, you didn't even have to drink it. Just being seen coming out of a bootlegger's house or a beer store was enough to bring the deacons down on you. I remember my mother pinching the ear of her smart-aleck son when he asked a preacher how he reconciled the church's total ban on alcohol with Jesus' first miracle - turning water to wine?

Then television came along, and the next thing I knew, it was being denounced from the pulpit as the devil's own invention. Good Christians, we were told, would not allow a television set to come into their house, with all of its decadent programming (this was before Elvis shook up some pastors with his hip gyrations on the Ed Sullivan Show) and images of those bare-legged June Taylor dancers kicking up their heels. One man tried to conceal his television set by putting it in a back room and covering it with a blanket. His secret was exposed when someone spotted the outside antenna. Imagine having to choose between your church and your television set?

I know . . . my memory is reaching back a half century to a primitive Baptist church that may have been outside (but not too far outside) the Southern Baptist mainstream at the time. However, the fact that such religious teachings did exist - and not all that long ago - in some parts of this country makes it easier for me to understand some Muslim lifestyle practices. I don't mean to pick on Southern Baptists. They were relatively permissive compared to New England's Puritans, who burned suspected witches at the stake, or Pennsylvania's Amish community, where people choose to live without electricity and all the modern conveniences that come with it.

As I recall, our preacher's fatwa against watching television didn't last long as people quickly became addicted to the tube. The poor fellow couldn't have known it at the time, but the devil's invention, with its global reach, would turn out to be the best thing to happen to evangelical Christianity. Just ask Billy Graham.

Philip Gailey's e-mail address is gailey@sptimes.com

[Last modified August 6, 2005, 01:04:02]