‘Bridgeport Jesus’ incident may have foretold what was to come

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In August of 2006, a portrait of Jesus Christ was stolen from an administrative office at Bridgeport High School, a public school in Harrison County in the north-central region of West Virginia. To this day, I am told, it has never been found and the thief, who was caught on surveillance cameras but was well-disguised, has never been apprehended.

Shortly after the theft, I was asked my opinion of “Bridgeport Jesus,” and when I answered the question honestly, the silence around me was deafening. I kind of cleared the room, so to speak. It was obvious that my opinion was not well received.

I’ll get to that momentarily, but first, as background, here is an abridged version of an Associated Press report of the incident as published in the New York Times on August 21, 2006:

BRIDGEPORT, W.Va. (AP) — A legal battle over a painting of Jesus hanging in a high school here is continuing, even though the painting was stolen last week. Two civil liberties groups…filed suit to remove the painting, “Head of Christ,” saying it sent the message that the public school endorsed Christianity as its official religion.

The Harrison County Board of Education said it would fight the lawsuit (using funds raised by The Christian Freedom Fund…and students at the school). “We have decided to step up to the plate here,” said a school board member. “This is important to us and reflects what our community wants in the schools.”

The two civil liberties groups that filed the lawsuit on behalf of local plaintiffs do not believe it is up to the community to decide. “I think what you’re dealing with is a small group of rabble-rousers that only want to live with people who live as they do,” an A.C.L.U. official said. “My answer to that is, go to a private school, go to a parochial school (but) don’t go to a public school.”

Not long after the incident, I attended a luncheon meeting in the dining room of the Bridgeport Country Club. During our discussion of an entirely different subject, a prominent citizen who had been playing golf approached our table and asked what we thought of the case. He went around the table and then looked directly at me.

“What I think,” I replied, “is if you’re going to hang a painting of Jesus in the school you need to put up one of Buddha, Muhammad, Vishnu, Shiva and maybe Zoroaster as well.” (Or words to that effect.)

He shook his head, turned and walked away.

Fast-forward 11 years to 2017. Several different surveys taken last year showed that white evangelical Christians believe they are more discriminated against than African Americans, Muslims and other people of color. In one, for example, only 36 percent perceived any discrimination at all against black people, and in another, 57 percent said that Christians face “a lot of discrimination” in the U.S. today, while just 44 percent said the same about Muslims.

Meanwhile, 63 million Americans including white evangelical Christians elected to the presidency a man who is well-known for womanizing, sexual misconduct, fraud, narcissism, misogyny, xenophobia, racism, tax evasion and a pathological inability to tell the truth. He has a spiritual adviser who suggests that people send her money or face the wrath of God, a Southern Baptist minister whose choir sang a song called “Make America Great Again” at one of Trump’s rallies and an anti-gay, anti-abortion religious zealot vice president who once signed an anti-LGBT discrimination law, supports conversion therapy for homosexuals to “pray away the gay,” voted to defund Planned Parenthood and co-sponsored a bill that, had it passed, would have redefined rape as “forcible rape,” presumably to differentiate it from calm, friendly, socially-acceptable recreational rape.

This so-called “Trump base” also openly supported a disgraced pedophile judge from Alabama who was almost elected to the U.S. Senate and who no doubt inspired the announced candidacies of a corrupt Arizona sheriff who was pardoned by Trump for a number of crimes and a West Virginia coal baron whose disregard for safety led to the deaths of 29 miners in 2010. He served a year in prison for misdemeanor conspiracy to violate mine safety and health standards, but escaped all of the felony charges against him.

These men believe they can be elected to the U.S. Senate by the same types of voters who put Trump in the Oval Office. This is who we have become in 2018, all of which makes the “Bridgeport Jesus” caper in retrospect nothing more than a prelude to our current culture. That painting of Jesus on the wall of a public school in Bridgeport, W.Va., seems almost normal today.

But I said “almost.”

My daughter is a public school teacher and we were discussing prayer in schools. As near as we can tell, no one is preventing any student from praying silently to his or her god from the third seat in the second row of any public school classroom in America. My daughter, however, cannot and should not lead a Christian prayer every day before starting her classes because in all probability, some of her students would be Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and maybe even Atheists.

One conclusion of the surveys I referenced before is that conservative white Christians looked around one day at an increasingly diverse and inclusive America and discovered they had lost the power, the influence, the cultural center and the demographic dominance they once had – and they are fighting to get it back. To paraphrase a Jack Nicholson line from the movie “A Few Good Men,” they want Jesus on that wall; they need Jesus on that wall. Otherwise, they believe, they are the ones being persecuted, not the people of color that Trump is trying to marginalize, minimize and eventually remove from the United States.

For the record, my comments that day in 2006 were only intended to make a point. I didn’t believe then and I don’t believe now that any religious icons belong on the walls of our public schools. I also believe firmly that my opinion is probably less popular today in West Virginia than it was in 2006.