September 27, 2007
Jena Prosecutor Credits Own Personal Jesus
So Mychal Bell is going to be tried in juvenile court. OK, fine — you can read the rest of the story at the link. What made our jaws drop during this morning’s press conference was this:
District Attorney Reed Walters … credited the prayers of people in this small central Louisiana town with averting a “disaster” during the demonstration. Some critics of Walters considered that a slap against the peaceful marchers.. . .
An estimated 20,000 to 25,000 protesters marched in Jena last week in a scene that evoked the early years of the civil-rights movement.
Walters said the demonstration had no influence on the decision he announced Thursday, and ended his news conference by saying that only God kept the protest peaceful.
“The only way let me stress that the only way that I believe that me or this community has been able to endure the trauma that has been thrust upon us is through the prayers of the Christian people who have sent them up in this community,” Walters said.
“I firmly believe and am confident of the fact that had it not been for the direct intervention of the Lord Jesus Christ last Thursday, a disaster would have happened. You can quote me on that.”
When the Rev. Donald Sibley, a Jena pastor, called it a “shame” that Walters credited divine intervention for the protesters acting responsibly, the prosecutor said: “What I’m saying is, the Lord Jesus Christ put his influence on those people, and they responded accordingly.”
After the news conference, Sibley told CNN that Walters had insulted the protesters by making a false separation between “his Christ and our Christ.”
“I can’t diminish Christ at all. But for him to use it in the sense that because his Christ, his Jesus, because he prayed, because of his police, that everything was peaceful and was decent and in order that’s not the truth,” Sibley said.
Filed under: Radical Religious Right
