Civil Commotion

We are s-o-o-o doomed.

Here’s a story from the Wartburg Watch that, if I encountered it someplace else, I’d probably dismiss out-of-hand as make-believe.

Today, I spent some time going back over the stories surrounding the lawsuit that James MacDonald/HBC (hereafter knowns as JM/HBC) have filed against the bloggers. An action by JM/HBC made me sit up and take notice. Religion News Service posted Harvest Bible Chapel sues bloggers for spreading ‘false information’ on 11/8/18. How had I overlooked this? Many people who read this blog, myself included, like to discuss theology and this one fits the bill. I highlight the section of particular interest to me.

The plaintiffs asked a judge for a restraining order to stop the defendants from publishing information about MacDonald and the church while the lawsuit moves forward.

“Defendants’ false and defamatory statements have a negative impact on Plaintiffs’ ability to convert new persons to the faith, maintain their congregation and raise the funds necessary to operate,” the petition claims.

The judge denied the request.

So … I guess evangelicals’ enthusiasm for the First Felon is grounded partly in a shared hostility to a free press.

Though Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker plainly positioned himself to secure the top job by actively and loudly criticizing the Mueller investigation, the Department of Justice ethicist has cleared him to superintend the increasingly fruitful investigation.

Since Whitaker was well known to be hostile to the investigation at the time of the remark on the right, it can’t reasonably be construed as anything but an implicit promise to scuttle the investigation if he controls the department; there is no way that he can be cleared ethically; the quid pro quo is in plain sight. The ethicists are wrong — and probably cowed.

After all, recall the experience of White House ethics lawyer Stefan Passantino.

“I am amazed he made it as long as he did. His client was the White House, but its head, the president, is as difficult an ethics subject as has ever occupied the Oval,” said Norm Eisen, the White House ethics czar in the Obama administration who’s emerged as a vocal critic of Trump. “No ethicist could thrive in that environment.”

Spending and conflict of interest scandals have plagued Trump’s Cabinet secretaries, past and present, including former HHS Secretary Tom Price, former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.

Even so:

Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker has consulted with ethics officials at the Justice Department and they have advised him he does not need to recuse himself from overseeing special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, a source familiar with the process told CNN Thursday.

It is bad enough that Trump has succeeded in corrupting the Republican Party; we are in very grave danger if he has succeeded in corrupting the Justice Department.

Brian Brown, who for years has made his living by railing against same-sex marriage, has issued a fund-raising letter that blames George Soros for wanting to destroy the ‘natural family.’

As we approach the Christmas holiday and then the end of the year, it’s a time to reflect on the great gift that God gave us – the natural family, one modeled on the Holy Family.

Some two millennia ago, a mother, father and baby huddled in a manger, in the company of animals and a choir of angels, as wise men followed a star to pay homage to them, and evil men conspired to destroy them.

The family was under heavy attack even then, as it is today. Please help IOF build a worldwide movement that brings together wise men and women, and wards off evil ones who wish to destroy the family.

George Soros has been hard at work for a very long time trying to remake societies in his leftist image.

His vision is a world without borders where the family is deconstructed and replaced by the state and where universal institutions – such as marriage, parenthood and the complementariness of the sexes – are replaced by political policies unmoored from history, tradition or reality itself.

Puh-leeze. Christianity views healthy marriages and families as a threat to its ownership and control of people, and can’t shut up about the wickedness of putting your family ahead of the cult.

Seriously: How often have you heard some preacher say, “Put your family first, and Jesus will be happy”? Never — that’s how often. Now, how many times have you heard some preacher say, “Jesus comes first, and your family can have the leftovers”?

One thousand? Ten thousand?

Albert Mohler, who has no idea what an odious and repellent man he is, puts the Christian expectation precisely:

The third theological fact about the family is the continued affirmation of the family within the redeemed people of God – the church. As the Gospels make clear, loyalty to Christ exceeds that of any family commitment, even as the church becomes the family of faith, embracing within its life all who come to faith in Christ and into the life of the church. And yet, Christians are explicitly instructed to honor marriage, to raise their children in the faith, and to order their family according to the Scriptures.

It looks to me as though Brown is projecting here, imputing to Soros what Christianity explicitly aims for — the displacement of the family by the cult.

This is fun: It seems that someplace called Southwest Baptist University has fired a faculty member for being too conservative and doing as the Patterson/Pressler group did during the so-called Consrvative Resurgence — surveilling colleagues’ doctrinal purity.

Clint Bass served as a professor of church history in the Redford College of Theology and Ministry at Southwest Baptist University from 2009 – 2018. Prior to November 28, 2018, he never had a negative review nor had disciplinary action ever been taken against him.

Early on in his teaching career at SBU, Bass observed certain signs suggesting that the Redford College in which he taught was not well aligned with the supporting churches of the Missouri Baptist Convention. Every now and then he logged examples to substantiate this view.

Well … ho-hum. Since evangelicals are too intellectually corrupt to bother with establishing their premises — Our Invisible Friend is real, and the production of the Inerrant Bible was somehow superintended by Our Invisible Friend — theological disputes are innately doomed to go unresolved because they cannot be appealed to undisputed facts. This is, incidentally, the same reason that Donald Trump’s fact-free governance is so dangerous, and probably the reason that evangelicals adore him.

Strikingly, a lot of students and their families seem to be backing the purist professor — which means there is another generation of idiots out there.