Civil Commotion

You’ve probably found yourself wondering from time to time: Am I perfect enough to get into Heaven? Am I in danger of spending eternity as the fuel in a dumpster fire because my hair is a bit too long?

Relex. Bruce Gerencser, formerly a gen-u-ine Holy Man but now an atheist — Nobody’s perfect! It’s in the Bible! — has compiled a bullet-proof list of rules that will keep you on the straight-and-narrow and pointed toward Eternal Glory. My personal favorite, because I like that story about the bald prophet who summoned a she-bear — How do you do that? — to eat some children who were teasing him: Thou shalt be for what the pastor is for and against what the pastor is against, because if you don’t, a bear might come out of the woods and eat you.

Definitely, that’s a rule that would have saved me a lot of aggravation.

A PEW study confirms what many of us could have guessed: Republicans and white evangelicals are least likely to get vaccinated against Covid-19.

Black Protestants aren’t least likely to
get a vaccine; white evangelicals are

[ … ]

A new Pew Research survey suggests that either the campaigns were effective or the worry was misplaced: 64% of Black Protestants, the researchers found, “definitely or probably” plan to get vaccinated — up sharply from November when little more than 40% said they planned to get vaccinated.

It’s not that vaccine hesitancy is a myth; it’s merely strongest among another group: white evangelical Christians.

[ … ]

The larger survey also showed that partisan differences play a big role in assessing the likelihood of getting vaccinated. Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to say they plan to get, or have already received, a coronavirus vaccine (83% to 56%).

[ … ]

The survey also showed that atheists and agnostics scored highest of all the religious groups in their willingness to get vaccinated.

Another big holdout? White males without college education.

Once again, then: The great divide in American life is not race, religion, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, or any other commonplace complaint: It’s education — and it’s no coincidence that it’s the poorly-educated who are rejecting the science.

It was the Southern Baptists who led me to awareness that Christianity is innately degrading, that the Pious will always, necessarily, as an innate theological bias, favor what degrades others — so I always get a thrill of pleasure when somebody looks around and says, “Whoa! These people are some kind of screwed-up!”

Enter Beth Moore. Until she got on the Darker Side of the SBC for her criticisms of Donald Trump, I didn’t know much about her; insofar as I ever thought about her at all, I supposed she was just another empty televangelist mulcting the gullible.

My bad. There’s some real substance to her.

Prominent evangelical author and teacher Beth Moore has said she is no longer a Southern Baptist, a split that comes after her criticism of sexism in the church and condemnation of “Trumpism.”

“I am still a Baptist, but I can no longer identify with Southern Baptists,” Moore, founder of Living Proof Ministries, told Religion News Service in an interview published Tuesday.

“I love so many Southern Baptist people, so many Southern Baptist churches, but I don’t identify with some of the things in our heritage that haven’t remained in the past,” she said.

Good for her. The Southern Baptists have been shrinking for years and, nowadays, the clear-headed have left and there’s hardly anybody left but the loonies; I doubt her exit will have a measurable effect upon membership. But it will further isolate the SBC as the Kingdom of Retrograde Nutjobs, and that’s not a bad thing.

A recent letter to the editor of Biblical Archaeology Review:

I am becoming more and more disgusted with the filth you people publish, namely dealing with pagan religions. The title of your magazine is BIBLICAL Archaeology Review. I don’t need to know anything about pagan religions. Either it’s from the Bible, or it’s garbage. Please amend your ways.

Dan Phillips
Graysville, Georgia

Biblical Archaeology Review is a magazine that I discovered about a year ago, and I am a subscriber; it does a good job of making research accessible to interested amateurs.

I was relieved — and surprised — to notice that the irritable correspondent wasn’t one of my Wake Forest, North Carolina, neighbors; I’m sure that the letter expresses a sentiment that most would agree with.

What the letter-writer, and probably a majority of devout Christians, fail to understand is that Jewish and Christian thought represent points on a continuum of thought; they didn’t spring-up overnight from nowhere, like toadstools. They each had antecedents, and each has descendants. The rise of Judaism was not an endpoint, though people have willingly died for it, and Christianity is not an endpoint, though people have willingly died for it. Each, someday, will be one of those strange things that people believed in olden days.

What do you know? There is a lot of overlap between the Jesus-cult and the QAnon-cult — and Holy Men ain’t likin’ it.

The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, reported in February that more than a quarter of white evangelicals believe the QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that a cabal of powerful politicians run a global child sex trafficking ring, is “mostly” or “completely” accurate. The rate was the highest of any religious group. The same survey indicated that 3 in 5 white evangelicals believe Biden’s win was “not legitimate.”

A poll released this year from Nashville-based Lifeway Research, an arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, indicated that 49% of Protestant pastors often hear congregants repeating conspiracies about national events.

This should not surprise anybody; once reality has been abandoned, one goofy, implausible story is as good as some other goofy, implausible story.

I used to think that the evangelical affection for Trump signified that one cult had somehow displaced another; that was wrong, and rested upon the subterranean assumption that there is a finite amount of crazy that can occupy any one head. No. I now think that the people who can’t see the crazy in any one story can’t see the conflict with the other crazy stories in their head.