A Note from the author: Among my other credentials is my ordination to the Gospel Ministry.  I worked for several churches and was an assistant-chaplain for the US-Army Reserve. In this blog, I will from time to time make Sunday posts regarding Christianity and Christian churches. This is the first of these posts. 

Buffalo Bill Cody is one of the most colorful and iconic figures in US History.   He was a buffalo hunter and US Army Scout for which he was awarded the Medal of Honor, but mostly he was a showman.  Not a huckster like P.T. Barnum, but a man who brought an amazing display of living artifacts from the “Old West” in a show to people in the eastern United States and Europe.  His “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” was the most dazzling show if its day. He had real cowboys and real Indians, and personalities right out of the dime novels, like Calamity Jane.  On one hand he was not a fraud, when Annie Oakley shot the ashes off Kaiser Wilhelm’s cigar in one famous show, it was no optical trick. When he said the stoic Native American in his show was indeed the real Sitting Bull, he was.  But on the other hand his show was just that, a show. His reenactments of Custer’s Last Stand and is presentation of the cowboys and Indians was pure show biz, and he set the standard image for the look of the American Old West that would become “fact” via movies and television to generations of people throughout the world.  But, his presentation was stilted, condensed and dramatized so much as to make it anything but a history lesson. It is very likely that by the early part of the 1900’s Buffalo Bill no longer could tell the difference between the exciting story he had created, or the real life he had actually lived during the Indian Wars.

It was quite a show though.

Fast-forward to the early 1960’s to a gritty industrial city about an hour south-east of Chicago.  A young minister from Texas had recently become the pastor of the very traditional 1^st Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana. However, this young new clergyman was not a typical pastor who saw his job to minister to the needs of his flock. Rather he had both righteous zeal for his unique brand of Christianity; and he had boundless ambition matched by a vision for what he could achieve.   Within a few short years he had purged the congregation of most of its previous leadership and the majority of the members. Then he led the remainder to vote to pull the ¾ century old church out of the American Baptist Convention because it was “too liberal” (i.e. they were supportive of the ongoing Civil Rights Movement among other things).  As a brilliant, driven and visionary dictatorial leader of a church freed from all denominational obligations, he was poised to do something spectacular. Continue reading “Buffalo Bill Cody, Jack Hyles and Modern Evangelical Christianity” →