Civil Commotion

The Republican Party has so slowly and incrementally abandoned conservatism and become a party of nihilist vandals that I occasionally wonder if they have any idea how un-conservative they actually are nowadays.

First, a serviceable definition that hearkens back to Edmund Burke: Conservatives … conserve, protect what is good and useful, even as they prepare for the future with pragmatic, forward-looking realism.

Teddy Roosevelt, anticipating the growth of industry and well-acquainted with the rapacity of moneyed interests, created the National Park Service, conserving America’s natural resources while supporting commercial use of timber and mineral resources. Our national parks are a treasure — and now endangered by Republicans.

Dwight Eisenhower created NASA — insisting, over loud protests, that it be under civilian control — and began construction of the Interstate Highway System. Today, the Interstates are falling apart and NASA is driving-off climate scientists. He also funded and strongly promoted research into computing, and DARPA was created during his administration. Richard Nixon oversaw the creation of OSHA and the EPA. and both are now in Republican crosshairs. He gave us, too, the Earned Income Tax Credit, intended to help the working poor — and today’s Republicans are shifting the cost of government to the poorest among us.

These were all conservative acts, acts which aimed to protect something valuable while making realistic preparations for the future. Republicans, once upon a time, were strong supporters of education; today, they are strangling university funding, replacing their ideologically impure boards of governors, and demanding that Creationism be taught in grade school.

Even the Affordable Care Act, which originated in (formerly) conservative think tanks, and was successfully implemented by a Republican governor in Massachusetts, built upon the pre-existing and functioning insurance markets while attempting to anticipate and short-circuit the looming disaster of health care costs. But, though it is inherently conservative in nature, Republicans have worked nonstop to cripple the Act’s operation because they are no longer conservatives who believe in preserving what works even as they prepare for the future.

The Republicans have become angry and baffled vandals with no aim but to destroy a world which has left them behind, and it’s difficult to imagine the great Republican leaders of times past regarding them with anything but contempt.

Here’s a story of clergy misconduct that is more irritating than most.

We’ve all learned the song Kumbaya at some time or another; it’s a sweet if somewhat cloying song and it is routinely disparaged by the Loony Right, as in “There isn’t going to be a Kumbaya moment in this fight.” Ho-hum.

But a piece about the song in yesterday’s New York Times includes an annoying detail.

For decades, the dominant narrative was that a white evangelist, the Rev. Marvin V. Frey, had originally composed “Kumbaya.” This story was spread in part by Mr. Frey himself, who got a copyright on the song in 1939, claiming to have written it in 1936 based on a prayer he heard in Oregon.

Something about that story never sat right with Stephen Winick, who has a Ph.D. in folklore. For one, the song sounds like something from the African-American tradition. Mr. Winick had also heard rumors that there was an earlier recording of the song in the archives of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, where he works.

“I think it’s important to restore cultural materials to their communities of origin,” he said. “Give credit where it’s due.”

Several years ago, Mr. Winick dug up that old wax cylinder recording. It was captured in 1926 by Robert Winslow Gordon, the first head of the Archive of American Folk Song. It was the recording of H. Wylie singing “Come By Here” in an accent that sounds like “kumbaya,” a decade before Mr. Frey claimed to have written “Kumbaya.”

In other words, a white Holy Man dishonestly claimed he had written a slave song, copyrighted it, and pocketed the proceeds.

Frey gulled even the New York Times:

The Rev. Marvin V. Frey, an evangelical minister who wrote many well-known songs of faith, died on Saturday at Phelps Memorial Hospital Center in North Tarrytown, N.Y. His best-known song is “Kum Ba Yah,” which he wrote at 17 while attending a Christian Crusade camp.

Seriously: We need to get over the idea that the devout are special, that they are somehow ‘better’ people, more honest people, more virtuous and trustworthy people. The unhappy truth is that only deeply-embedded intellectual corruption makes belief in the Christian narrative possible, and that corruption inevitably manifests itself throughout the rest of a person’s activities.

Well.

Telescammer Gloria Copeland made headlines yesterday by telling her listeners that they don’t need flu shots. No. What they need is a megadose of Jesus, who will protect them from the virus.

An evangelical minister who advised President Donald Trump’s campaign sparked an uproar Tuesday by suggesting that Christian faith makes people immune from the flu.

Texas minister Gloria Copeland, who sat on the Trump campaign’s evangelical executive advisory board, denied the country is in the midst of a severe flu outbreak in a Facebook video that went viral because, “Jesus himself is our flu shot. He redeemed us from the curse of the flu.”

This is painfully crazy, but at least has Biblical justification.

James 5:15 “And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.”

This is just one more thing that the Inerrant Bible is wildly, grossly, grotesquely wrong about.

Inexplicably — and to his credit — Albert the Pious gets it right and says you should pay no attention to Gloria Copeland.

The word faith movement is a particular perversion of biblical Christianity that appeared and became wildly popular in the middle decades of the 20th century. Kenneth and Gloria Copeland are now type A examples of the word faith movement and even as they and their ministry continue now well into the 21st century the arguments are virtually the same as those that emerged in the very beginnings of the movement. The argument is that power is given to believers in the Lord Jesus Christ to defy physical reality, to make things materialize by visualization and by claiming them by the power of faith alone, claiming even material wealth and health. And furthermore this then morphed into the kind of arguments that you see here. Arguments that relying upon God means that we do not turn to modern medicine. Arguments that actually defy biological realities such as the existence of viruses and how they operate.

Mohler, by the way, denies the biological reality of evolution, so his criticism of Copeland is constrained by his own problems with biological reality.

Wouldn’t you think that the Inerrant Bible, which in the words of the Southern Baptists “is totally true and trustworthy,” could get a simple thing like this right?

This is a serious question: If the Bible is inerrant, why can’t theologians agree on a simple matter like whether or not you should get a flu shot?

I’ve predicted often through the years that the Loony Right would grow even crazier than they already are as they are inexorably pushed toward the margins of society. Here is an example of it, a push for more widespread “church discipline.”

Church discipline is, basically, a demand by the club for more stringent observance of the club rules.

In recent years the SBC has experienced a resurgence of interest in church discipline, both in publication and practice. I believe it is fair to attribute this resurgence to 9Marks Ministries. Mark Dever has spoken and written on church discipline on many occasions, and the January issue of the 9Marks Journal focuses on church discipline.

Most would agree that church discipline is both biblical and necessary. Several New Testament passages address church discipline. Jesus gave instructions about the procedure for church disciple in Matthew 18:15-17: “If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private; if he listens to you, you have won your brother. But if he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you, so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses every fact may be confirmed. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector” (NASB). In these verses Jesus prescribes a three-level approach to disciplining a wayward brother—one church leader goes alone; several church leaders go together; and the matter is brought to the church.

Notice the comments:

• “I am of the opinion that the state of the church in the USA is where it is due to lack of proper church discipline.”

• “It [discipline] was forgotten because churches and pastors started caring more about numerical growth instead of spiritual growth. Churches that have either no membership or a membership that is accountable to nothing is not a church modeled after New Testament churches.”

The problem, of course, is that evangelical Christianity is in its sad condition because it rests upon an untrue narrative and its decadent, cult-like ethics do harm. Christianity cannot be saved except by returning to the Bronze Age in which it was born — which won’t happen.

The more interesting problem is shaping the post-Christian world.

So: Fresh from complaining that people who don’t applaud his clumsy banalities are traitors, The Donald intends that the Good Ol’ U.S.. of A. should have a smart and spiffy military parade to rouse the unenthused (or, is that frighten the unenthused?).

Just like North Korea.

And the Nazis.

And the Russians.

Franco enjoyed a good parade, too.

And Mussolin’s fascists.

It’s one thing to welcome the troops home following an important military victory, and it is quite another to simply make a show of military strength; the former is an expression of respect and gratitude, and the latter is a public threat. Trump, who means to advertise the size of his button, is making a threat — and sane Americans should refuse to applaud.