Civil Commotion

Count me as one person who is glad he walked away from Christianity and its denial of self and personal worth.

Bruce Gerencser

This remark comes in the course of Gerencser’s analysis of these remarks by a young woman who is a Calvinist.

Well, sorry, culture, but we don’t deserve happiness. We’re human beings who lie and cheat and steal and fight and hold grudges and hurt our loved ones, and we don’t actually deserve anything.

Remember: Y’all were born no damn good, deserving eternal punishment even as you sucked for milk, and there isn’t anything you can do about it.

That is Christianity’s indispensable metaphysical claim. Calvinists obsess about it, and Methodists rarely think about it, but for both the fact remains: If you don’t believe in Original Sin, and more bizarrely that Jesus’ crucifixion was a blood sacrifice to a different 1/3 of himself as propitiation of that Original Sin on your behalf, Christianity has nothing on offer.

I can’t think what might be done about it, in view of our First Amendment, but raising this young woman to believe something so degrading and crippling seems to me to be a form of psychological abuse. There is the further problem that her parents doubtless intended good, to spare her an eternity on fire; they are painfully stupid people, that is — not malevolent people.

The rest of us need to be clear-headed about something, though: Christianity cannot flourish where men are healthy.

A couple of years ago I wrote a piece for ISSSource.com which takes-up the increased use of ‘permatemps’ in industrial environments. A ‘permatemp’ is a temp worker steadily employed by a single company, using a work arrangement which denies them employment– and benefit-protections.

Often, permatemps don’t receive the safety training they ought. Further, companies sometimes hire permatemps to do especially dangerous work because they don’t want their regular employees exposed to hazards (or for the company or the employee to be stuck with the cost of injuries).

Well, what do you know? The Trump administration has decided that OSHA’s safety regulations are too onerous and plans to start rolling them back.

This means that permatemps, day laborers, and regular employees, will soon face a more dangerous and less accountable workplace. Make sure you let the Values Voters in your life know that you appreciate their efforts to Make America Great Again.

It is evident that a man with a scientific outlook on life cannot let himself be intimidated by texts of Scripture or by the teaching of the Church. He will not be content to say ‘such-and-such an act is sinful, and that ends the matter.’ He will inquire whether it does any harm or whether, on the contrary, the belief that it is sinful does harm. And he will find that, especially in what concerns sex, our current morality contains a very great deal of which the origin is purely superstitious. He will find also that this superstition, like that of the Aztecs, involves needless cruelty, and would be swept away if people were actuated by kindly feelings towards their neighbors. But the defenders of traditional morality are seldom people with warm hearts, as may be seen from the love of militarism displayed by Church dignitaries. One is tempted to think that they values morals as affording a legitimate outlet for their desire to inflict pain; the sinner is fair game, and therefore away with tolerance!

Bertrand Russell, 1925, What I Believe

Almost 100-years later, you might think — Wouldn’t you? — that Russell’s words wouldn’t have such a contemporary sound.

Ypsilanti and Detroit are about 40-miles apart.

You may have paused to wonder during the past week: Now that any tapioca-for-brains moron can see that Donald Trump is nothing but a lying, stubby-fingered gasbag and empty braggart, are the Southern Baptists still mad at Russell Moore for trying to warn them?

Ho-ho — You bet! After all, he was right! … and morons never forgive a thing like that. Never forget this, either: These are Baptists, and their life’s work is the degradation of anybody who isn’t as pathetic as themselves.

• “Seriously? When one spends eighteen months insulting an entire class of people, one cannot simply offer something like this:

  “‘Not long ago, I was in a small group of people and made a statement, only later to learn that people thought I meant something else. If THAT’S what you heard, I truly apologize.’

  “Believe me, we KNOW what he said that was insulting and he said a WHOLE LOT and it wasn’t to a small group at the water cooler.

  “Accept it or not, but what I’m telling you is this: ‘NO true and genuine apology has been HEARD from our side.’ I’ve read the so-called Moore apology article TEN TIMES. He gave no evidence of “getting” the offense.

  “One brother said that if he had apologized to his wife the way Russell Moore apologizes, he’d STILL be sleeping on the couch.”

• “Would I like to see a new ERLC President who doesn’t insult those of my generation embracing the Moral Majority Religious Right conservative Christian philosophy?

  “Yes, I would. I hope that people are looking into this, and that they will continue to do so. I look for better days in the SBC in the future as a result of making this change, which I hope will one day come, not as a war, but as a Personnel decision.”

• “Dr Moore, eminently qualified in so many ways, seems to lack the temperament for his present position.”

Honestly, I’m loving this. Not only did 81% of evangelicals back Trump, though he is the blinking-neon antithesis of what Christians claim are their values, now they are demanding the head of the only prominent Baptist who had the backbone to say so.

Got flaming hypocrisy on a stick?

There is a lot to dislike about Russell Moore. His death-wish theology, and complementarianism, are harmful and offenses against both reason and ordinary decency; I wouldn’t allow the man in my home. But, notice — those aren’t the things he is in trouble for. He is in trouble for standing up for ordinary decency — and that says something about the ol’ Southern Baptist Convention, and who is sitting in their churches on Sunday morning. Does Russell Moore truly not know how ignorant and mean-spirited they are out there in the pews? I’m afraid he’s going to learn, then.

I pointed toward the real problem months ago.

Mohler and Moore are struggling to enforce a meaningless distinction, hewing to evangelicalism as a theological stance while sniffing piously at the doomed and dying culture in which it is embedded and from which it draws its strength — chiefly (though of course not exclusively) the racist, anti-intellectual, anti-modernity, misogynistic, south. I am not kidding y’all: That sweet old lady who hasn’t missed a Sunday since that glorious day she was saved 60-years ago once delivered picnic-baskets of sandwiches to the menfolk who stood at roadside and threw rocks at the civil rights marchers — and she doesn’t know bupkus about what’s in the Bible, or what ‘evangelical’ means theologically. What she knows is that the world is changing, that the culture of her community, even her church, is changing, and in a way that she doesn’t like — and that it’s all the fault of those uppity dark people who don’t even speak good American half the time, and those sluts who went to college, and those snooty smarty-pants perfessers, and those newspaper people, and those gay people who want to get married and adopt kids and be a family.

Again — and the sad case of Dr. Moore is the exemplar — southern Christianity is cultural far more than theological. I doubt very much, in fact, that the average Southern Baptist could even enumerate the Baptist distinctives; certainly, that minority who can would probably stop in puzzlement at the memory of squalling children being baptized, and the recollection that the ‘priesthood of the believer’ hasn’t been mentioned by Pastor Bubba in a long while.

But, in the south, culture and religion are a continuum — and both are dying. This is why white evangelicals are able to deceive themselves into believing they are more persecuted than Muslims.