Civil Commotion

If a man possesses some advantage, or thinks he does though he does not, he is bound, if he be uneducated, to be puffed up because of it. The tyrant, for instance, says, “I am the mightiest of all men.”

Epictetus, Discourses, 1.19

Well. What do you know? According to the Washington Post, y’all are feeling unloved.

Many of President Trump’s most dedicated supporters — the sort who waited for hours in the Florida sun this weekend for his first post-inauguration campaign rally — say their lives changed on election night. Suddenly they felt like their views were actually respected and in the majority.

But less than one month into Trump’s term, many of his supporters say they once again feel under attack — perhaps even more so than before.

I know: It’s unseemly to gloat. But — I told you so.

Third, 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump, and that will eventually sink into public consciousness, as in, Wait a minute! What are you saying? The church people gave us that piece of sh*t p***y-grabber?! Yep, they did — and that will be the tale of how the Evangelical Right and ‘movement so-called conservatism’ committed political suicide. They might make some noise, occasionally score a small victory — but they are done. The Trump administration, with its inevitable serial indecencies and corruptions, is their achievement, and they will never live it down.

Ever since Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority w-a-a-a-y back in 1979 — almost 40-years ago, now — y’all have single-mindedly devoted yourselves to the restoration of some imaginary, bucolic, deeply anti-intellectual Sunnybrook Republic that never existed in the first place. You have frustrated education, you have presumed upon the most intensely personal and painful life-and-death decisions that may confront a family, you have lied ceaselessly in underhanded attempts to fashion laws compelling your neighbors to live according to your backward-looking catalog of barbarisms — the Bible.

Now, you have soiled and stained and imperiled your — Our — country by exploiting an ill-considered Constitutional oddity to install in the presidency a man who is manifestly, conspicuously, egregiously unfit to sit at a dinner table with decent adults — never mind the White House, for almost two and one-half centuries the centerpiece of humanity’s aspirations.

Now, you are surprised to learn that you are more despised than ever?

How did you delude yourselves into believing you could stop the spinning of the earth? That even as my alma mater leads a global consortium of scientists and engineers searching for the materials that will protect astronauts during a years-long mission to Mars, you could impose a Bronze Age fairy tale, Genesis, upon schoolchildren? And do you think that Darwin’s great insight can be forgotten? Or will you be content if America produces a generation of ignoramuses incompetent to co-exist with, and compete in, an ever-learning world?

Do you honestly imagine that you will someday force reluctant women to carry to term, and deliver and rear, children they don’t want or can’t afford when the means of safely avoiding it are known to every doctor on the planet earth?

And just why — exactly, please — is the world a better place when gays and lesbians and transgenders are compelled into the closet, their hopes frustrated and their talents wasted and lost?

You and that sociopathic white-trash sewer-god you’re so proud of have a lot to answer for and, so far as I’m concerned, y’all deserve every bit of the odium coming your way.

Like it or not, America is leaving behind the decadence of Christianity; you cannot stop it — and your perverse triumph, the election of Donald Trump, helped to speed that. For that, I gladly thank you.

Now get out of the way and let the grown-ups fix the mess you’ve made.

The SBC continues to be roiled by Russell Moore behaving like a Baptist and a Christian.

Unless Russell Moore resigns from his post between now and summer, the controversy surrounding the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission will most certainly show up at the convention in Phoenix this June. While there are some who will never be satisfied, I am hopeful that Dr. Moore and those who have been offended can sit down in the same room together and agree to walk together as brothers even if they do not reach a place of agreement on the issues that have caused the current rift.

Moore has given offense on two fronts. First, he supported a mosque that was having difficulty obtaining a construction permit, the chief problem being … MOOZLIMS!! Second, he made no secret of his dislike of Donald Trump.

Ho-hum. I can’t help feeling badly for Moore, but I don’t feel too badly. He’s a grown man, and hasn’t any good excuse for not knowing that Christianity is grounded on resentments and held together with marketing lies.

What makes this dust-up so interesting to me is how blatantly the Southern Baptists have turned their back on their Baptist heritage, that they are Baptist in name only.

Historically, there are three great theological distinctives associated with Baptists:

1. The doctrine of the priesthood of the believer, the teaching that, with study and prayer, Biblical meaning is accessible to all. That doctrine was effectively overturned by the Southern Baptists in 1988.

   Be it further RESOLVED, That we affirm that this doctrine in no way gives license to misinterpret, explain away, demythologize, or extrapolate out elements of the supernatural from the Bible; and

   Be it further RESOLVED, That the doctrine of the priesthood of the believer in no way contradicts the biblical understanding of the role, responsibility, and authority of the pastor which is seen in the command to the local church in Hebrews 13:17, “Obey your leaders, and submit to them; for they keep watch over your souls, as those who will give an account;” and

   Be finally RESOLVED, That we affirm the truth that elders, or pastors, are called of God to lead the local church (Acts 20:28).

2. The second great distinctive is the rejection of baptism before the age of reason. But look at this.

   In last year’s Annual Church Profile, 60 percent of the more than 46,000 churches in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) reported no youth baptisms (ages 12 to 17) in 2012, and 80 percent reported only one or zero baptisms among young adults (ages 18 to 29). One in four Southern Baptist churches reported zero baptisms overall in 2012, while the “only consistently growing” baptism group was children under five years old.

   And so much for that. Only a drooling idiot imagines that a child less than 5-years old understands what he or she is buying into.

3. The third great distinctive is the separation of church and state, which Moore upholds and his critics have clearly rejected.

   There should be no confusion on this point: If you truly uphold the doctrine of separation of church and state, you don’t approve of messing with zoning permits in order to frustrate construction of a mosque.

The uncomplicated truth is that the Southern Baptists are not baptists any more; they’ve morphed into something else. In fact, given their authoritarianism and disdain for conscience, I’m not sure they should even be considered Protestants. They aren’t Catholic, because all good Southern Baptists know that the Pope is the Whore of Babylon, but they sure don’t have much in common any more with the spirit of Martin Luther, either.

What do you know? Sally Hemings is, at last, about to be formally recognized by Monticello as the mother of six of Thomas Jefferson’s children.

The room where historians believe Sally Hemings slept was just steps away from Thomas Jefferson’s bedroom. But in 1941, the caretakers of Monticello turned it into a restroom.

The floor tiles and bathroom stalls covered over the story of the enslaved woman, who was owned by Jefferson and had a long-term relationship with him. Their involvement was a scandal during his life and was denied for decades by his descendants. But many historians now believe the third president of the United States was the father of her six children.

I think this is a healthy development. History should not be whitewashed in order to maintain sentimental and misleading fictions.

DNA tests performed in 1998 showed a strong likelihood that Jefferson was the father of Hemings’ children, though diehards hold out for the possibility that the actual father was the brother of Jefferson’s dead wife, of Virginia’s Randolph family. In order for that to be true, however, one would have to believe that, years after his wife had died, Jefferson …

• Allowed his former brother-in-law to regularly entertain himself with one of his slaves …

• Just a few steps from his bedroom, which …

• Caused Hemings to bear multiple children with red hair and a striking resemblance to the ex-president, whom …

• Jefferson gladly supported, and …

• Made provisions for in his will.

Not. They were Jefferson’s children.

In recognizing that, and restoring Hemings’ room and providing a more accurate picture of Jefferson’s life, we should not transform his relationship with Hemings into a Forbidden Grand Passion. Hemings was a slave, Jeffferson’s property, and his sexual relationship with her probably began when Hemings was in her mid-teens — possibly as young as 14-years old, and almost certainly by the time she was 16-years old. She was certainly not his intellectual peer or presentable as a companion in that time and place. Though it may be the case that a bond of affection formed over the years, it’s difficult to imagine how that affection could have overcome the bald fact that he owned her and could visit her for sexual release whenever it suited him; the close proximity to his bedroom was probably no more than a device for assuring his exclusive and convenient access.

Even after blithe hand-waving about Jefferson being a man of his time, when misuse of slaves for sex was relatively common if little-discussed, it isn’t believable that the author of the Declaration of Independence didn’t recognize the hypocrisy and squalor of it. Though it isn’t possible to know what was in either Hemings’ or Jefferson’s head, it isn’t crazy to contemplate the irony that Hemings may have counted herself lucky for capturing the Master’s eye, and that Jefferson despised himself for it.

In a closely related vein, Yale University has announced that it will rename Calhoun College after Grace Hopper, the admiral and early computer sorceress. They are not, however, going to attempt to expunge the name Calhoun from memory.

More important than the individual decision, though, are the broader principles Yale employed to reach it. By focusing on understanding how a figure fits into his era, our own and the years in between, these principles rely on a respect for history rather than a compulsion to erase it. Future petitions for name changes, Yale says, will rest on arguments grounded in archival research. And in the case of Calhoun, Yale has chosen to contextualize symbols of the college’s former namesake where they still appear — adding, for example, plaques that explain his place in the country’s past and in Yale’s — rather than remove them.

Yale is doing the right thing. When we look at our own domestic turmoils today, we see egregious misapprehensions about American history and, from appearances, comprehensive ignorance of the 20^th-century — a time when beleaguered peoples imagined that benevolent strongmen would restore a fictional, sentimentalized past. Good for Monticello and Yale, then, for understanding that we can learn from history only when we see it clearly.