You may have paused to wonder during the past week: Now that any tapioca-for-brains moron can see that Donald Trump is nothing but a lying, stubby-fingered gasbag and empty braggart, are the Southern Baptists still mad at Russell Moore for trying to warn them?
Ho-ho — You bet! After all, he was right! … and morons never forgive a thing like that. Never forget this, either: These are Baptists, and their life’s work is the degradation of anybody who isn’t as pathetic as themselves.
“Seriously? When one spends eighteen months insulting an entire class of people, one cannot simply offer something like this:
“‘Not long ago, I was in a small group of people and made a statement, only later to learn that people thought I meant something else. If THAT’S what you heard, I truly apologize.’
“Believe me, we KNOW what he said that was insulting and he said a WHOLE LOT and it wasn’t to a small group at the water cooler.
“Accept it or not, but what I’m telling you is this: ‘NO true and genuine apology has been HEARD from our side.’ I’ve read the so-called Moore apology article TEN TIMES. He gave no evidence of “getting” the offense.
“One brother said that if he had apologized to his wife the way Russell Moore apologizes, he’d STILL be sleeping on the couch.”
“Would I like to see a new ERLC President who doesn’t insult those of my generation embracing the Moral Majority Religious Right conservative Christian philosophy?
“Yes, I would. I hope that people are looking into this, and that they will continue to do so. I look for better days in the SBC in the future as a result of making this change, which I hope will one day come, not as a war, but as a Personnel decision.”
“Dr Moore, eminently qualified in so many ways, seems to lack the temperament for his present position.”
Honestly, I’m loving this. Not only did 81% of evangelicals back Trump, though he is the blinking-neon antithesis of what Christians claim are their values, now they are demanding the head of the only prominent Baptist who had the backbone to say so.
Got flaming hypocrisy on a stick?
There is a lot to dislike about Russell Moore. His death-wish theology, and complementarianism, are harmful and offenses against both reason and ordinary decency; I wouldn’t allow the man in my home. But, notice — those aren’t the things he is in trouble for. He is in trouble for standing up for ordinary decency — and that says something about the ol’ Southern Baptist Convention, and who is sitting in their churches on Sunday morning. Does Russell Moore truly not know how ignorant and mean-spirited they are out there in the pews? I’m afraid he’s going to learn, then.
I pointed toward the real problem months ago.
Mohler and Moore are struggling to enforce a meaningless distinction, hewing to evangelicalism as a theological stance while sniffing piously at the doomed and dying culture in which it is embedded and from which it draws its strength — chiefly (though of course not exclusively) the racist, anti-intellectual, anti-modernity, misogynistic, south. I am not kidding y’all: That sweet old lady who hasn’t missed a Sunday since that glorious day she was saved 60-years ago once delivered picnic-baskets of sandwiches to the menfolk who stood at roadside and threw rocks at the civil rights marchers — and she doesn’t know bupkus about what’s in the Bible, or what ‘evangelical’ means theologically. What she knows is that the world is changing, that the culture of her community, even her church, is changing, and in a way that she doesn’t like — and that it’s all the fault of those uppity dark people who don’t even speak good American half the time, and those sluts who went to college, and those snooty smarty-pants perfessers, and those newspaper people, and those gay people who want to get married and adopt kids and be a family.
Again — and the sad case of Dr. Moore is the exemplar — southern Christianity is cultural far more than theological. I doubt very much, in fact, that the average Southern Baptist could even enumerate the Baptist distinctives; certainly, that minority who can would probably stop in puzzlement at the memory of squalling children being baptized, and the recollection that the ‘priesthood of the believer’ hasn’t been mentioned by Pastor Bubba in a long while.
But, in the south, culture and religion are a continuum — and both are dying. This is why white evangelicals are able to deceive themselves into believing they are more persecuted than Muslims.