Wealth gap ‘tool of separation,’ black preacher says

Campbellsville, Ky. — Economic inequality is a “tool of separation” that continues to divide races in America 150 years after slavery, an African-American Baptist leader said in a recent lecture at Campbellsville University in Kentucky.

Stephen Thurston, former president of the National Baptist Convention of America, described the gap between rich and poor as “the fundamental foundation for many of the inequities that we face in this day and time.” 

He prescribed what he views as the proper Christian attitude toward wealth in the New Testament story of Zacchaeus the tax collector, who after recognizing his sin promised, “I’ll give half of my possessions to the poor and if I have cheated anybody out of anything I’ll pay back four times as much.”