Civil Commotion

Like every decent adult, I’m thrilled that Sarah Sanders is leaving government service.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary who fiercely defended President Trump through one of the most tumultuous periods in American politics while presiding over the end of the iconic daily news briefing, will step down at the end of the month.

Mr. Trump announced her departure on Thursday on Twitter, the presidential tweet having supplanted the role that a White House press secretary played in previous administrations.

Sanders lied to the country as a routine matter, and cooperated with The Donald’s efforts to turn the free press into an obsequious house organ; she was a press secretary who doesn’t believe in a free press. Good riddance.

There is a downside, though. Since competent, decent-minded grown-ups want nothing to do with a man whose ‘golden touch’ turns everything to sewage, the next press secretary is all but certain to be something lower and fouler than the ambulatory putrescence that’s leaving. Imagine that, if you can.

Clearly, with Paige Patterson in disgrace and Paul Pressler under suspicion of pederasty, the Southern Baptists are leaving the so-called Conservative Resurgence behind — and a lot of folks don’t like that at all.

Consider, for instance, this tweet thread:

Yeah, well — ho-hum; what is there to say to, or of, a man who thinks theology is actually a branch of knowledge? Evangelicals squandered whatever moral credibility they had with their all-in support for The Donald, and if they want to spend a while beating-up each other instead of dragging the country down to their own debased level, that works for me.

This is in connection with the complementarianism dispute that is such a big part of the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting this year. Basically, there is an older group that dragged the denomination back to the Stone Age during the so-called Conservative Resurgence, and there is a younger group that wants to propel denominational thinking into the modern world. Since the Pious folk at both ends of the theological spectrum don’t do the hard work of establishing their premises, with the result that they have no idea that theology is bullshit, I don’t have much sympathy for either group’s hurts. But indignation and hurt is what you get without intellectual rigor; the hard feelings on display at #SBC19 are an exemplar for what is wrong with religion and the harm it does.

As Baptists gathered in Birmingham, Alabama, for their annual meeting — which this year will include a resolution proposing the ‘disfellowship’ of churches that fail to respond properly to complaints of sexual abuse — the New York Times goosed the denomination with a prominent story of egregious abuse and cover-up.

Her Evangelical Megachurch Was Her World
Then Her Daughter Said She Was Molested by a Minister

Christi Bragg listened in disbelief. It was a Sunday in February, and her popular evangelical pastor, Matt Chandler, was preaching on the evil of leaders who sexually abuse those they are called to protect. But at the Village Church, he assured his listeners, victims of assault would be heard, and healed: “We see you.”

Ms. Bragg nearly vomited. She stood up and walked out.

Exactly one year before that day, on Feb. 17, 2018, Ms. Bragg and her husband, Matt, reported to the Village that their daughter, at about age 11, had been sexually abused at the church’s summer camp for children.

The resolution before the annual meeting proposes that churches which fail to act to protect victims be ‘disfellowshipped’ — in essence, kicked-out of the convention. It will probably be approved — and will probably be valueless.

Ask any reporter, lawyer, police officer, social worker — anybody with first-hand professional experience of abuse in the church environment — and every single one of them will tell you the exact same thing: When congregations learn that Pastor Bubba is raping the children’s choir, the all-but-invariable reaction is to rally to the pastor and drive-off the victim. That is a fact, and it is a fact about the people in the pews. ‘Sheeple’ fits.

The people who are drawn to Christianity’s degradation, and who find a compensating welcome in that club, are not people who are suddenly going to grow a backbone; there will be a new rule, but the same old culture of craven submission. That is part of the ontology of Christianity — what it is.

For his role in defeating Germany’s Enigma cipher during World War II, Alan Turing belongs on any shortlist of brilliant men whose efforts were indispensable to the defeat of Nazism. When the war was over, though, his country betrayed him because he was gay — an affront to Pious fictions about the nature of sexuality and ‘good’ behavior.

Turing’s reputation has been restored — but there is no undoing his suicide upon public humiliation.

The New York Times offers a retrospective obituary.

His genius embraced the first visions of modern computing and produced seminal insights into what became known as “artificial intelligence.” As one of the most influential code breakers of World War II, his cryptology yielded intelligence believed to have hastened the Allied victory.

But, at his death several years later, much of his secretive wartime accomplishments remained classified, far from public view in a nation seized by the security concerns of the Cold War. Instead, by the narrow standards of his day, his reputation was sullied.

Well worth reading.