Posted October 29th, 2009 12:18 am

If one googles Lexingtonian Jeff Fugate, search results include pages that are written to show that all religions have fanatical fundamentalist extremists, not just Islam.

Fugate is employed by the Clays Mill Road Baptist Church. He has no college degree according to the report below, but that doesn’t stop him from making all kinds of definitive but false pronouncements and judgments. Those pronouncements are not limited to the area of religion, but also about all areas of the history of the United States.

Fugate also has a flair for using the media to self-promote and draw attention to himself. The latest evidence came yesterday, from Roger Alford’s Associated Press report:. Fugate’s latest stunt involves coming to the defense of that most pagan of winter holiday symbols—the Christmas tree.

From Alford’s report:

FRANKFORT, Ky. — The giant evergreen that will brighten the Capitol lawn later this year won’t be called a Christmas tree. Instead, the Beshear administration has dubbed it a “holiday tree.”
And some people aren’t happy about that.
The Rev. Jeff Fugate, pastor of Clays Mill Baptist Church in Lexington, said Christians find the change troubling.
“If you call it a holiday tree,” Fugate asked, “which holiday are you talking about? We don’t put up a holiday tree for Easter or New Year’s or Thanksgiving. We put a tree up for Christmas.”
Cindy Lanham, a spokeswoman for Gov. Steve Beshear, said the tree will be in celebration of a variety of winter holidays, including Christmas and Hanukkah.
“This is a special time of the year for many Kentuckians,” she said.
The spat is only the latest chapter in a continuing Christmas debate. Some retailers, including Wal-Mart, have returned to greeting customers with “Merry Christmas” after coming under attack for directing employees to say “Happy Holidays.”
In Kentucky, political foes are using the issue to bash Beshear, a Democrat, and his administration.
“Steve Beshear in his continued swing to the left shows that political correctness is more important than Kentucky values,” said Senate President David Williams, R-Burkesville. “It is difficult to see how anyone could take offense at the cherished tradition of Christmas at the Kentucky Capitol.”
Using the term “holiday tree” typically is intended to avoid offending people who are not Christian, said Paul Simmons, an ethics professor at the University of Louisville.
And he said “holiday tree” is the more fitting description, considering that the tradition started among pagans and was later blended into the Christian celebration of Christmas.
“It really is a more generalizable symbol,” Simmons said. “When we adopt a neutralist position, we’re really returning to something like an original position.”
The Beshear administration sent out a public call Monday for Kentuckians who think they might have the perfect “holiday tree” to consider donating it to the state. The solicitation called for a pyramid-shaped tree between 35 and 50 feet tall.
Sounds like a Christmas tree to Martin Cothran, spokesman for the Family Foundation of Kentucky.
“It’s the administration that stole Christmas,” Cothran said. “I think their heart is two sizes too small.”
Fugate said he believes the Beshear administration has caved to political pressure.
“What’s bothersome about this is that it’s not the majority opinion,” Fugate said. “There is a groundswell of Americans who are fed up.”

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Fugate is right when he says that there is a groundswell of Americans who are fed up, but he is wrong about why they are fed up. Many of them go to church on Sunday, or mass on Sunday, or temple on Saturday, or to mosques on Friday. They want God and government to stay separate. They want to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and render unto God that which is God’s. Even if they are not Christian, they want the United States of America to govern on the principles of Christianity—feed the hungry, heal the sick, clothe the poor. They want an end to the false idolatry that comes from Christian extremists worshiping graven images such as governmental displays of the Ten Commandments. They want the United States of America to continue to honor the requests of the Danbury Connecticut Baptists who asked Thomas Jefferson to erect a wall of separation of church and state. They want an end to the American Taliban that try to use government to force their religion on others and in the process cheapen and demean the underlying message of that religion.

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The name Jeff Fugate is embarrassingly familiar to Kentuckians. On July 3, 2002, he conducted a rally at Applebee’s Park, which had been deceptively billed as a patriotic rally. There, Fugate stunned the crowd that thought this was a Fourth of July celebration, saying:

“If you don’t want a Christian nation, then go to one of the many nations that are heathen already, rather than perverting ours.” “You’re welcome to come, but leave your religions, your bibles, all your other things back where you came from.” “Islam and America are opposites. They hate us. They want to kill us. I’m not anti-Jewish or anti-Catholic. I’m anti-Islam because that religion right there is anti-American.”—Jeff Fugate, pastor of Clays Mill Road Baptist Church, Lexington, KY, July 03, 2002
Fugate said he has heard from dozens of people who approved of the rally and his message. He also criticized liberals, homosexuals, cross-dressers, Hollywood stars, rock musicians and the U.S. Supreme Court.

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Nancy Kemper of the Kentucky Council of Churches wrote a response on the positions of Fugate. Reading her entire essay is recommended.

Kemper states:

Freedom of religion has long been a cherished American ideal, but the truth is that we have never practiced it very well. As Oliver Thomas, now Counsel to the Knoxville Legal Aid Society and the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, and also a Baptist minister, has written:
Religious persecution has plagued this nation throughout much of its history, from the Salem witch trials of the seventeenth century to the persecution of Jews in the eighteenth century to the “Bible Wars” inflicted on Roman Catholics in the nineteenth century to the persecution of Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses in more recent times. As late as the 1960s, Jews and Catholics were still the objects of widespread discrimination.
Given the enormous surge of patriotism since the September 11th attacks on the United States by terrorists, who were members of a religion whom Christians once called infidels, it is not surprising that the agenda of many Christian fundamentalists has become a determination to restore this nation’s values and morality. For them that means a return to its supposed “Christian foundations and roots”.
On July 2, a patriotic rally was held here in Lexington at Applebee’s Park, with its Jewish patron Alan Stein and his wife, State Rep. Kathy Stein, and their family present and unknowing what was to come. The program included numerous politicians and patriotic speakers, a fly-over by Black-Hawk helicopters from the Kentucky National Guard, a color guard from the four branches of the Armed Forces. I doubt few people present noted the irony in the singing of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.”
Near the end of the rally, the pastor of the Clays Mill Road Baptist Church which sponsored the event, Jeffrey Fugate announced that non-Christian immigrants “should leave their religions, their bibles [sic], and all the other things back where [they] came from.
Blasting what he called “politically correct” Americans, Fugate, who has no college degree, and was educated in a church-based school from the 6th grade onwards, said: “You’re a thief and a liar if you change American history and leave God out of it…You cannot separate God from America without forming another nation.”
Fugate’s blending of patriotism with his evangelical fervor to save people for Christ, and his deep conviction about the inerrancy of Scripture are not unusual. All across the United States, people who share his theological beliefs were outraged by the 9th Circuit Court’s ruling on the Pledge of Allegiance, largely because they believe also that America was founded to be a Christian nation. Just this past Sunday, in surfing cable TV, I came across Pastor Fugate again, preaching to his congregation and saying that his “patriotism was not founded on pluralism, or cultural diversity,” but on truth; not tradition, but on the very “Word of God.” His patriotism, he said, was based on the fact that the founders of this great nation came here to propagate the gospel.
In one respect, he is not wrong: many of the early settlers from Europe who came to America, from Christopher Columbus on, did so seeking an opportunity and space to propagate the gospel as they understood it and wanted to practice it, in addition to a desire to free themselves from the shackles of European economic and political constraints of the time, and to find new ways to generate wealth for themselves and their benefactors.
Fugate’s mistake comes in his logic: just because many of the early immigrants to these shores were Christian, and came to practice their religion free from state religion of Europe, just because the leaders and educated among them frequently quoted the one book they were likely to possess-the Bible, one cannot make the inference that they decided to make the nation constitutionally Christian, once they got around to that task. It is a non sequitur.
(citations omitted).

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As Emerson, Lake & Palmer said:

I wish you a hopeful Christmas,
I wish you a brave New Year,
All anguish, pain and sadness,
Leave your heart and let your road be clear.

They said there’d be snow at Christmas,
They said there’d be peace on earth,
Hallelujah! Noel!, be it Heaven or Hell,
The Christmas we get, we deserve

As the song suggests, Father Christmas, Santa Claus, and Christmas trees never have been the point in any way, shape, form or fashion. They provide merchants with a chance to sell material items.

Another reminder that Christmas is not about materialism is raised by the quote in the tree story from the Family Foundation. Their reference to a heart two sizes too small was of course from “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” The irony is that the Grinch got it wrong by thinking that Christmas was about the presents, or the trees, or the trappings. It shows that in their efforts to misuse religion to score political points, the Family Foundation, Jeff Fugate and David Williams ignore the most important point: Maybe Christmas doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas perhaps, means a little bit more.

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