Civil Commotion

Yes, that’s really in the transcript; it’s not a joke.

But future historians will probably think it’s a joke, because who the hell is ever going to believe that an American Secretary of State had to call an emotionally disturbed television personality to find out why one of his diplomats is being fired? The Trump administration has become a rolling farce, masquerading as serious adult drama.

That’s why all of us who are Christians certainly see this is not a political skirmish. This is a battle between good and evil.

Robert Jeffress, on impeachment

Granted, Jeffress is a Southern Baptist and can’t reasonably be expected to say things that aren’t painfully stupid, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t typical of evangelicals; he is. The modern world — automation, artificial intelligence, humanism — has left them behind. Though we are mindful of looming problems arising from those technologies and philosophical shifts — in employment, for instance, and the corresponding distribution of resources — people like me tend to welcome the changes; they signal a safer workplace and less violence in the world. But it is also a world incomprehensible to people baffled by the steady decline of the Abrahamic faiths; modernity is, to them, an existential threat. Thus … Trump.

I was looking-up a quote from Nietzsche’s The Antichrist a few days ago, and noted a striking fact: In a lot of places, some variation of ‘Trumpism’ or similar can be painlessly substituted for ‘Christianity’ and its variants.

It is indecent nowadays to be a Christian [Trump supporter].

Christianity [Trumpism] is the revolt of all things that crawl on their bellies against everything that is lofty; the gospel of the ‘lowly’ lowers …

And so on.

And the implication of that observation holds: 1^st-century Christianity was a cult and often corrupt and self-serving, and recall how casually the Christians turned-on their former co-religionists following the failure of the Jewish Rebellion. Trumpism is not a new religion — at least, not exactly — but it is a social movement that appeals to the same frustrations and subterranean malice that fueled Christianity’s birth and spread.

Cincinnati Christian University is closing at the end of the fall semester.

Founded in 1924, the university will close at the end of this semester, reports the Enquirer.

In the same letter, CCU announced a new ‘collaboration’ with Central Christian College of the Bible to provide ‘accredited ministerial degrees.’

The announcement comes just a few months after news broke that CCU was in danger of losing its Higher Learning Commission accreditation due to several financial and academic issues.

Ho-hum. This is the inevitable fate of many Christian schools — to be as abandoned as the Oracle at Delphi. How else could it be? The storyline is not true, and the Evangelical Right has utterly destroyed the notion that they’ve cornered the market on ethical thought. Clearly, an ambitious young man or woman needs to go to a real school that offers a real education.

Albert the Pious publishes today a long and dishonest screed about “sexual revolutionaries” and their baleful effect upon Christian-run adoption and foster care services.

In other words, the Obama administration requirement meant that agencies that had anything to do with the federal government or with federal agencies that were involved in foster care or in adoption, they could not discriminate on the basis of LGBT identity relationships or behaviors.

The important thing here to recognize is that that language needs to be turned around and Christians need to learn how to reverse the language. This means that Christian organizations, some of the most venerable, and frankly, some of the largest of these organizations in American history would have to deny and compromise their own convictions, and they did have to do so, at least under the Obama administration’s policy.

The Trump administration policy announced on Friday, would reverse that and reverse the situation to the reality prior to 2016, but you can understand why this is now going to be a flashpoint in America’s cultural controversy because after all, we are talking about something that really does stand in the center of the firing line here.

The policy forbade the use of public money to discriminate, and that’s all. Just why, pray, should LGBT people be taxed to support a program that denies them the full rights of citizenship?

He insists this is a matter of religious liberty, which is preposterous on its face; he can still be a Baptist — he just can’t use public money to enforce his Bronze Age nonsense.

I’ve wondered for years: Do people like Mohler actually believe the crazy things they say, or are they merely cynics exploiting idiots? But that’s a binary set of alternatives, and I’ve begun to wonder if the truth is more complicated. Maybe the burden of attempting to reconcile all the incandescent nonsense in Christianity, and of insisting it is inerrant, has exhausted their capacity for clearheaded thought.

For example, we’ve all seen those National Geographic images of that tribe which believes long necks are beautiful and, obviously, there is no undoing it. Maybe being raised on a steady diet of fundamentalist nonsense renders the mind incompetent to operate properly?

The canine loyalty of Senate Republicans will keep Trump in office. But until he complies with House committee subpoenas, the House must not limply hope federal judges will enforce their oversight powers. Instead, the House should wield its fundamental power, that of the purse, to impose excruciating costs on executive branch noncompliance. This can be done.

In 13 months, all congressional Republicans who have not defended Congress by exercising “the constitutional rights of the place” should be defeated.

George Will

It may be timely to recall that George Will and Ronald Reagan were buddies; there really was, once upon a time, a conservative party that wasn’t craven and intellectually corrupt. Unhappily, that party has been displaced by the Ellsworth Tooheys of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, rather than the John Galts — and so much for “going Galt.”