The rise of the Jim Crow theobros
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(RNS) — Michael Spangler does not look like a white supremacist and antisemite.
He has no visible tattoos, no shaven head, no black overcoat or jackboots. No hood, no Confederate flag and no Nazi images appear in the background as he sits in front of a screen for a recent Zoom interview.
Instead, the soft-spoken Christian school teacher and pastor of Piedmont Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, sporting a neatly trimmed beard, was dressed in a charcoal suit and sat in front of a fish tank that seemed straight off the set of Pixar’s “Finding Nemo.”
Then he began talking about Jews. And a broad smile broke across his face.
“You’re asking if I oppose the Jews who murdered Christ?” said Spangler as he paraphrased a verse from the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, which he says labels Jews as “the enemies of God and all men.”
“We need to consider them and treat them accordingly.”
A segregationist and “race realist” whose start-up church, which has a handful of families, bars Black people out of fear of “harmful race-mixing,” Spangler is one of a small but…
