Editors at the Associated Press were on to something big with that recent story that ran with this headline: “Baptists and Walmart criticize rebel-themed Mississippi flag.”
That’s a story. If you were listing major forces in Sunbelt life, you’d have to include the Southern Baptist Convention and Walmart.
But the AP team did downplay a key angle to that Mississippi flag fight, one that many locals would — with a chuckle — say was a “religion thing.” I’m talking about this recent story, seen here in a New York Times headline: “SEC Warns Mississippi Over Confederate Emblem on State Flag.”
Religion? You bet.
If SEC football isn’t functionally a “religion” down here then I don’t know what is. Some kind of ban on SEC events taking place in Mississippi? That would be like the end of the world. The AP folks put a passing reference to the SEC action way down in the story.
Think about the clout of this trinity of social forces in a Bible Belt state — SEC sports, Walmart and the Southern Baptist Convention. Add Chick-fil-A and NASCAR (speaking of racial tensions) and life would come to s stop.
All of those topics were in the mix as host Todd Wilken and I recorded this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in). We decided that it was pretty clear that folks behind the AP story really didn’t understand some of the forces affecting the battles over the Mississippi flag.
But let’s start with a chunk of the AP story that was spot-on accurate:
Mississippi has the last state flag that includes the Confederate battle emblem: a red field topped by a blue X with 13 white stars. …
The conservative-leaning and majority-white Mississippi Baptist Convention has more than 500,000 members at more than 2,100 churches. Mississippi’s population is about 3 million, and 38% of residents are African American.
