Rhetoric Race and Religion
After the Spartanburg Soup Kitchen in Spartanburg, S.C., turned atheists away last spring when non-believers approached the group and offered to help feed the poor, secularists are hitting back with an outreach plan of their own.
Upstate Atheists, a local cohort of non-believers, said that they were just trying to help and that the ban truly surprised them. And activist Hemant Mehta, a well-known secular blogger, was so stunned that he quipped that “Jesus would be so pissed off” as a result of the decision.
Despite the group’s promise not to market their non-belief while helping the soup kitchen, they claim they were turned away.
“I told them we wouldn’t wear our T-shirts. We wouldn’t tell anyone who we are with,” Upstate Atheists President Eve Brannon told The Spartanburg Herald Journal. “We just want to help out. And they told us that we were not allowed.”
The soup kitchen’s executive director, Lou Landrum, reiterated and defended the decision in an interview with the Journal.
Doubling down, she reportedly said she’d rather resign before allowing non-believers to volunteer with the Christian group.
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