Is Donny Reagan of Happy Valley Church of Jesus Christ the Most Racist Pastor in the US? He Claims Interracial Marriages Are 'Not Right'

Not sure how I missed this first time around, but what caught my interest today was the church's response that follows the initial story.

"Today we have so much fussing and stewing about this segregation of white and colored and everything. Why don't they leave it alone? Let it be the way God made it," yelled Reagan from the pulpit in the clip.

"There is a move in the message of blacks marrying whites, whites marrying blacks," Reagan points out from a prepared speech. "And folks think that is alright, but you know, my God still has nationalities outside the city," he added to cheers from his congregation.

"Hybreeding, hybreeding, oh how terrible. They hybreed the people. You know it's a big molding pot. I've got hundreds of precious colored friends that's born-again Christians. But on this line of segregation, hybreeding the people. What, tell me what fine cultured, fine Christian colored woman would want her baby to be a mulatto by a white man? No sir, it's not right," said Reagan.

"If God wanted a man, brown, black, white, whatever color he wanted him that God's creation. That's the way He wanted it," he added.

Is Donny Reagan of Happy Valley Church of Jesus Christ the Most Racist Pastor in the US? He Claims Interracial Marriages Are 'Not Right'

The church in response had this to say, 

This man is not racist at all. And he definitely is not scared to have black in-laws,,,.  And you should mention that most of the statements he quoted were not his words, but were words from William Branham, and thus may sound out of date, or rude or non-politically correct in 2014. But the context is not racial.

So let me get this straight.  Reagan is not a racist, but is "quoting" William Branham.  William Branham, whose teachings "may sound out of date, or rude or non-politically correct", taught that Eve was fucked by the serpent and conceived Cain the son of Satan, followed by Abel and later Seth, the sons of Adam.  This same teaching which is at the heart of the CIM whether Branham liked it or not:

There are more productive points of criticism to be made against Branham, the Message, and the Serpent’s Seed in particular, than the false allegation that Branham was a white supremacist. Let’s be circumspect in our judgments. Like most of his generation, he can be accused of racial insensitivity and ignorance, and even a blind, patronizing “benevolent” racism. However, Branham has never been authoritatively tied to Klan activities, and propagating such a rumor only distracts from the real issues with the Message. <--A very good point and one I will no longer take lightly in my writings concerning Branham especially in light of Barkum's statement.

According to the SPLC,

Branham never made the identity of this race explicit, “but it’s not that far a stretch to begin to interpret it in a racist way,” says James Walker, president of The Watchman Fellowship, a Texas-based evangelical ministry that researches cults and new religious movements. “Any church that teaches this ‘serpentism’ is going to have a tendency to be racist, because it separates people by DNA and bloodline.”

According to Michael Barkun, political scientist and author of Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement, Branham’s theology was also a precursor to the virulently racist and anti-Semitic Christian Identity movement. That movement posits that Eve mated with Satan and began the lineage of the biologically Satanic people who became today’s Jews, and that people of color are soulless “beasts of the field.” 

“Christian Identity has it all worked out who’s the lower people. Branham was not quite there,” Barkun told the Intelligence Report. <--

Not all Branham churches are racist or embrace the anti-race-mixing position Reagan promotes, Walker says, but the theology clearly invites racism,,,. 

What's that old saying?

H/T to Joe Clark of Liberal America,

Kyle Kulinski of Secular Talk has a good take down even if a bit simplistic: