Civil Commotion

I’ve remarked on a few occasions over the past week, as Paige Patterson flamed out for decades of misogyny, that the Southern Baptist Convention is in the midst of a severe public relations debacle. They’ve figured-out what to do about it: Adopt a resolution that’s friendly to women at the Annual Meeting next month!

It’s as tedious as you’d expect, but I’m enjoying this element of the resolution a lot:

WHEREAS, the evil one who steals, kills, and destroys is actively seeking to ruin lives, render asunder marriages, destroy ministries, tarnish God’s glory in the church, sow discord and disunity in the Southern Baptist Convention, and harm our collective mission and ministries; and

No. There is no “evil one” lurking around the corner, drooling at the prospect of sowing “discord and disunity” in the SBC, or destroying marriages. That is the work of self-serving power-mad preachers who have names.

Undoubtedly, Albert Mohler and the thousands of preachers he has trained over the decades have harmed more marriages than an entire zoo of phantasmagorical supernatural beings.

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.

As I’ve said repeatedly through the years, anybody who thinks that pleasing an Invisible Friend is more important than his or her wedding vows isn’t actually married at all. Basically, a healthy marriage is a threat to the preachers’ power, and long in the distant past they adopted a teaching which corrupts and undermines marriage. Most, however, are not so cynical as that remark may seem to suggest; they have grown-up listening to this claptrap, and are unreflective.

It’s no accident, however, that Evangelicals have the highest divorce rate in the country; that’s a direct and predictable consequence of the gaudy, degrading, and corrupt nonsense they howl and bellow in their churches.

Nobody will be surprised to learn that Albert the Pious is unhappy about Ireland’s repeal of its abortion ban; in saying so, he reveals the theocratic premises that animate the Evangelical Rightt and make them such a threat to this country.

As Paul Hannon reported for the Wall Street Journal, Irish voters repealed a constitutional ban on abortion, a sweeping change that caps an emotion-filled debate and marks another significant step away from the country’s historic Catholic influence but, of course, the headlines tell a great deal of the story.

Yes, Ireland is a secular state of the people rather than a nation of sheep whose affairs are governed by Holy Men.

Behind that moral change, there is also the almost universal recognition that this is a huge theological change.

But, of course, theology is not an actual branch of knowledge grounded on documented premises; it’s all hand-waving. So Good for the Irish! for refusing to be guided any longer by Bronze Age superstitions and the parsing of those superstitions by pettifoggers. Theology is intellectually disreputable, and deserves the disdain the Irish gave it.

We are talking about the decline, indeed we might now say the collapse of Catholic authority within Ireland.

This is a striking passage; after all, the Catholic Church has never, never in its benighted history, exercised any authority but the authority of the sword. The Christian Church, in all of its flavors, has been in retreat since the Enlightenment — when the sword was taken away.

And on and on. I doubt that Mohler would ever admit it in so many words in a million years, but he wants a theocracy guided by his specific understanding of The Inerrant Bible, and I doubt he even has the intellectual capacity to understand that he is who the First Amendment protects us from.

When passersby noticed a child dangling from a 4^th-story balcony in Paris, one of them decided to do something about it.

Who but The Donald would attempt to turn Memorial Day into a celebration of himself? The man is a national disgrace.

Ireland has voted to amend its Constitution in a way that legalizes abortion.

Ireland has voted by a landslide margin to change the constitution so that abortion can be legalised, according to an exit poll conducted for The Irish Times by Ipsos/MRBI.

The poll suggests that the margin of victory for the Yes side in the referendum will be 68 per cent to 32 per cent – a stunning victory for the Yes side after a long and often divisive campaign.

A nice win in a country that, not all that long ago, was merely a small department of the Catholic Church.