Civil Commotion

Disapproval of Donald Trump is hard to find on the campus of Liberty University.

The Christian university which dominates the town of Lynchburg, Virginia, has become almost synonymous with Trump. It sits at the heart of the alliance between the president and conservative evangelical Christians – an alliance forged in part by Jerry Falwell Jr, Liberty’s president, Lynchburg’s most prominent citizen and Trump’s close associate.
[ … ]

In Liberty’s coffee bars, random conversations with a dozen or so students found they all backed Falwell’s full-throated support for Trump. But not everyone in the town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains is happy. A minority at the university, along with a few churches in town, are deeply concerned. Some speak of a “toxic Christianity”.

Nobody acquainted with Southern Baptists will be surprised to learn this; it is an ignorant and malicious denomination that is united and animated chiefly by hostility to modernity, not theology, and which has degenerated into, nearly, a cult.

Prime Trump country, in other words.

It’s a lengthy piece, but well worth your time.

Apparently, the Trump administration intends to define transgenders out of existence.

The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a government-wide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.

A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept of sex in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing sex largely as an individual’s choice — and prompting fights over bathrooms, dormitories, single-sex programs and other arenas where gender was once seen as a simple concept. Conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, were incensed.

Because, you know, reality can be defined however you want it to be, and resolute ignorance is an invincible force.

Gender dysphoria is a real thing, and science has known that for decades. The problem is not transgenders, but ignoramuses who just can’t stand that the world is more complicated than their simplistic binary understanding of it. It is time — time past, really — to bring an end to deference and confront evangelical ignorance straighforwardly; their resolute ignorance is a character failure, and it should not be allowed to harm people.

I am a regular reader of the New York Times’ and Washington Post’s book pages, and also the New York Review of Books, but this is a re-cycled release that won’t go on my to-be-read list.

The story: I was raised Catholic in the liberal West Coast church of the 1960s and 1970s. I attended Catholic schools through 12th grade, and was taught my religion by a bunch of wonderful nuns who were determined to raise up a student body of social justice warriors. They tended to slide over the parts of the theology that were disconcerting; the important things in life were to take joy in the gifts of God, be properly grateful for them, and put them to the uses he intended. In college I made friends with Evangelical Christians, and discovered there was a whole other Christian religion out there. They seemed to have a more evidence-based faith, one based on the bible and not the pronouncements of the church hierarchy. I explored that for a few years. Meanwhile I met and married a man who was raised in an Evangelical tradition but was not religious.

I got into serious trouble with the Evangelical message. I couldn’t get my mind around the notion that one could take the entire bible literally. And the constant emphasis on sin, and my worthlessness, fed my depression fiercely. We were attending church regularly, but my husband finally insisted we quit, because the sermon would leave me in tears of despair; not even God could love someone as worthless as I. So I stopped going to church, but the damage was done, and it ate and ate at me for several years.

This comes from a brief compendium of comments by a frequent commenter at Bruce Gerencser’s blog.

I was not raised in the evangelical church, but I now live in Wake Forest, North Carolina, the home of a Southern Baptist seminary, and I am surrounded by bellowing Holy Men whose life’s work is, short version, degrading others in order to later exploit them.

There was no first couple, there was no Fall, there is no such thing as Original Sin — and there is absolutely no educated, intellectually serious debate about that, even if evangelicals do claim to be evidence-based. The unhappy truth is that the people who believe the Bible is ‘inerrant’ lack the intellectual rigor to sort through and weigh the evidence.

If you want to do yourself and your children an easy favor, go to the park on Sunday morning instead of church.

No, no. Some say that [anthropogenic climate change is real] and some say differently. I mean, you have scientists on both sides of it. My uncle was a great professor at MIT for many years. Dr. John Trump. And I didn’t talk to him about this particular subject, but I have a natural instinct for science, and I will say that you have scientists on both sides of the picture.

Donald Trump

Uh-huh. Not only is this dangerous, it’s insulting to the people who actually have done the hard work of understanding science.