Hit the Road, Ye Evangelists

To the Editors:

This is an open letter to Oberlin’s Saturday morning street preachers. These days there are people who, in their confusion and fear, distort the scriptures and end by inspiring hostility and distrust, sometimes even death and destruction. That is what the Sept. 11 killers have done. That is what you are in danger of doing with your messages of exclusion and doom.
I believe that we are required to respect each other and to respect the human impulse toward God wherever we find it, regardless of culture or place. I believe that this impulse can lead to any number of spiritual paths and actions. Your insistence that we must all follow the same path or be damned to eternal punishment implies disrespect to all the other roads human beings take toward enlightenment. And the Bible is only one of the many good books we can use along the way.
Each Saturday you come to one of the most peaceful and open communities in Ohio, and you display your signboards that shout REPENT. Why Oberlin? Of what would you have Oberlin repent? What are we doing that provokes your threats of hellfire? If you want us to take up your idea of God as a small and vengeful spirit, you have come to the wrong town. Most of us have moved on.
So please, go away. Go away somewhere, sit down and be quiet. And open up your hearts and minds.

–Jean Binford
Oberlin resident