This year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism links South Carolina’s high incidence of domestic abuse to the Bible — and the Southern Baptists are not happy about that.
Pulitzer winners tie domestic abuse to Christianity
The South Carolina newspaper that won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism has drawn criticism for linking the Palmetto state’s domestic violence problems with its residents’ belief in the Bible’s teaching about gender.
“Just because the Bible describes [gender] roles is not any excuse for any type of abuse,” Mike Hamlet, pastor of First Baptist Church North Spartanburg in Spartanburg, S.C., told Baptist Press. “To suggest something otherwise is to misinterpret or deliberately misuse the Scripture. I think that’s what [the Pulitzer winners] have done.”
Sorry, but the link holds. Consult any survey of family and social pathologies and, invariably, they are most intense where the churches are strongest: drug abuse, venereal disease, domestic abuse, divorce … on and on.
Christianity’s indispensable claim is that you’re no damn good, and so self-annihilation should be your goal — the absolute elimination of your self-interest and self-direction, because your self is innately evil and depraved. Why should anybody be surprised that, in a culture where this degrading nonsense is taken seriously, the subterranean struggle against it takes unwholesome and destructive directions?