The March 28, 1924, edition of the Muncie Post-Democrat, the newspaper run by George Dale that consistently exposed members and activities of Indiana's Ku Klux Klan.  

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A reader wrote to me about Micah Beckwith. His question stuck with me: "What's the proper Christian response? I'm angered by everything Beckwith represents, but saying I hate him seems to make me no better."

Many Hoosiers are carrying that question right now.

Anger is often what we feel when something precious is violated. Jesus got angry. Scripture shows him confronting religious hypocrisy, exploitation, hardness of heart and the use of religion to burden people.

His anger wasn't the opposite of love. I would say his anger was love refusing to look away from abuse.

In May, Beckwith told a Christian talk show that Americans need "permission to hate again," calling Islam a "demonic death cult." He has also said government could stop mosques from broadcasting the call to prayer. He said all this, and more, as Indiana's lieutenant governor.

Leaders at Indiana's largest mosque told reporters that no mosque here broadcasts the call to prayer outdoors. Beckwith wants a law against something nobody is doing, and he wants you to be afraid of Muslims.

That should make you angry.

America promises that government will not decide which faiths may be heard in public.

Scripture doesn't ask us to feel warmly toward cruelty. Paul writes, "Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good." The same passage tells Christians to bless their persecutors, refuse vengeance and overcome evil with good.

Beckwith has an answer, and it sounds a little like mine. He says he loves Muslims and hates Islam. Love the person; hate the thing.

But Islam is not an abstraction detached from Muslim lives. It is what his neighbors pray, fast, celebrate and bury their parents by. Condemning their entire faith and then calling it merely an "idea" does not make the contempt acceptable.

His approach is also fundamentally different from mine. I object to what he does with a public office on the record. He can stop any day he wants.

Indiana has run a version of this before, and we know who came out well.

A century ago, the Ku Klux Klan helped elect an allied governor, a Klan-backed lieutenant governor, and a legislature crowded with its members and sympathizers. Journalist Harold Feightner later recalled Lt. Gov. F. Harold Van Orman joking that he presided over "the best Ku Klux Klan Senate that money could buy."

One hundred years later, Micah Beckwith assumed the same office.

The Indiana Klan attacked Black and Jewish Hoosiers, but it considered Catholics especially dangerous. Plenty of Protestant ministers joined the Klan. Plenty more kept quiet.

George Dale ran a weekly newspaper in Muncie. He started the Post-Democrat in 1921 and spent years publishing the names of local Klansmen and mocking them relentlessly as "all those Koo Koos in their nighties."

In 1922, masked men invaded his home and attacked Dale and his son. Four years later, bullets were fired into the family home, passing within inches of another son. Dale was jailed for accusing a judge of being a Klansman and stacking juries. The Indiana Supreme Court ruled that truth was no defense to the contempt charge.

Dale claimed in his own paper that, during the fight intended to silence him, circulation rose from about 2,500 copies a week to 16,000. In 1929, Muncie elected him mayor.

Dale wasn't a theologian. He was a newspaperman with a mean sense of humor and no particular interest in being admired. He understood that telling the truth and protecting a neighbor can be the same act.

We don't have to hate Micah Beckwith to oppose him.

Civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer knew the difference. Mississippi jailers ordered other prisoners to beat her while officers watched. The assault left her with permanent kidney damage, a blood clot behind one eye, and a limp she carried for the rest of her life.

Still, Hamer said, "Ain't no such thing as I can hate anybody and hope to see God's face."

She never mistook refusing to hate for agreeing to be quiet. She kept registering voters. She testified before the country about what had been done to her, and she sought public office in the state that had tried to beat her into silence.

Beckwith isn't a demon. He is a person made in the image of God - exactly why he is accountable for how he uses his office.

His humanity doesn't excuse his conduct. It is what makes holding him responsible mean something.

I don't hate him. I grieve that he knows only a theology and politics made so small by fear.

I don't want his ruin. I want his repentance. I pray for his reconciliation with his Muslim neighbors, with God, and with America's constitutional promise of equal religious liberty.

We can pray that he changes while also working to limit the damage if he doesn't. We can defend our Muslim neighbors, and insist upon constitutional government. We can defeat his politics without becoming what his rhetoric needs us to be.

Those who wield power unjustly would rather love look like silence. An authoritarian prefers that peace mean compliance. A demagogue insists that accountability is persecution. We are not obligated to accept those definitions.

Sometimes love comforts. Sometimes love confronts. Sometimes love stands in the doorway and says: "You may not use Christ to bless contempt. You may not claim religious liberty for yourself while taking it from someone else. You may not teach Hoosiers to fear their neighbors and call that faith. I will not hate you. Micah Beckwith, I promise to oppose you in public and at the ballot box. I will stop you."

Then guard your heart anyway. Don't let this man teach you to dehumanize anybody, including him.

But don't mistake the absence of anger for the presence of love, either. Love isn't indifference. Mercy isn't surrender. Christian grace doesn't require us to stand quietly while our neighbors are taught to fear one another.

George Dale had a printing press. You have so much more than that.

You have social media, a phone, a ballot, a pew, and a neighbor who needs to hear about love and American freedom from you before somebody else's hate and fear reaches them first.

So, to the reader who asked whether he can oppose Beckwith without hating him: yes, you can. More than that, if love means defending your neighbor and calling the person harming him to repentance, opposition is exactly what love requires.

Please pray with me. God, keep our anger honest and our resistance loving. Free us from hatred and cowardice. Teach us to confront what is evil without denying anyone's humanity, to protect our neighbors without counting the cost, and to seek justice without letting go of mercy. Amen.

The Rev. Kate Penney Howard of Columbia City is a genetic genealogist and speaker.

An expanded version of this piece is available at jg.net/opinions.

Mississippi civil rights champion Fannie Lou Hamer is seen during an appearance before a subgroup of the Democratic National Committee in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in 1964. Hamer, who suffered imprisonment and physical abuse for her advocacy, understood the difference between blind hatred and focused, passionate anger.

The March 28, 1924, edition of the Muncie Post-Democrat, the newspaper run by George Dale that consistently exposed members and activities of Indiana's Ku Klux Klan.  

Beckwith