Civil Commotion

Oh? Who has said that? I have CNN on almost continuously, and download the New York Times and Washington Post as my first cup of morning coffee is brewing, and I haven’t heard anything of the sort.

What is actually going on here is that The Orange One is trying to shift attention away from himself and onto the media he so despises for reporting — accurately — about the embarrassments that follow him around.

And I”m wondering about something, too: If The Donald misconstrued a FOX News report to be an account of a terror attack, then why didn’t he summon the head of one of our almost two-dozen intelligence agencies and issue instructions that he was to be kept abreast of developments, particularly as they might concern the United States?

Seriously: Something inside the man is misshapen.

A new piece by Bruce Gerencser introduces what is to be a series of posts that take-up the changes in his life since he and his wife left church behind.

Fifteen months ago, Polly’s dad had ill-advised hip replacement surgery. The surgery was a miserable failure, resulting in Dad spending almost a year in the nursing home. Unable to walk for more than a short distance, Mom and Dad were forced to sell their two-story house they had lived in for almost 40 years. Polly suggested to her mom that they could move up here so we could help take care of them. Polly’s mom replied, we could never do that, our church is here. Ouch. Such is the insidious nature of Evangelical Christianity, especially the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) variety. The church “family” is Mom and Dad’s “real” family, even though this real family of theirs has largely ignored them during Dad’s recovery from hip surgery (and some of this is due to their unwillingness to ask for help, a fault that Polly and I suffer from too), Polly’s mom has wounded her with words many times over the years, but telling her we could never do that, our church is here was a step above the other in-Christian-love verbal assaults. This one caused a deep emotional wound that has yet to heal. When I suggest that we go visit her parents, I am often met with a frown, a look that says, Why bother. They have their church “family.”

Now recall this odious passage from a column by Albert Mohler:

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.

Again, then, ‘family values’ is a marketing lie, and Christianity is not a family-friendly religion. To the contrary, Christian teaching deliberately undermines ordinary, wholesome family loyalties because they are a barrier to the church’s total ownership and control of its members.

First-century Christianity was a cult, and the New Testament is the literature of a cult; it cannot flourish where men are healthy.

Bruce Gerencser has a new installment of Christians say the darndest things that might be the best one yet.

It seems that some church recently had something called a “week of prayer.” The local Baptists have occasionally done that, too. The godly go to the church every night and pray for something. They pray that He will feed the homeless, they pray that their children will get good grades in school, they pray that the Trump administration will enable them to seize control of their neighbors’ gonads and reproductive life, et cetera, et cetera.

So: This guy is at church with his wife, eager to get to the serious business of petitioning Our Invisible Friend, when it is discovered that — GASP!! — his wife doesn’t have a head-covering. Oh … N-o-o-o-o-o! What to do?

When she came upstairs to the prayer room, I noticed she didn’t have her covering on. For those who don’t cover all day, it’s an easy mistake to make. So I quietly got up to let her know she had forgotten. She placed a hand on her head to confirm and said “oops”. We’re prepared for situations like this, and store a couple extra coverings in the glove box of our minivan, so she headed out to grab one. A few minutes later she came back to let me know, the back-up coverings were gone. I figured they were as the previous week we had forgotten as well. So on Sunday we used the back-up coverings in the glove box and forgot to replace them. So here we are, at church, about to spend some focused time to prayer and my wife doesn’t have her covering. What should we do? I’ve thought about this situation before, but this is the first time it wasn’t just hypothetical. There are two options 1) My wife sits in the foyer and doesn’t join us for prayer or 2) she comes in and joins us uncovered.

Just reading that makes me want to smack this nuisance. Just so’s you know, the li’l woman was allowed to pray uncovered, and the husband has added replacement of the emergency backup scarves to his to-do list.

What makes this story worthwhile is that it reveals the painfully childish conception some people have of the Creator Of The Whole Big Universe. Abraham’s god, the god of the Old Testament, is a sort of supersized human being with a few magical powers. He is discomfited by the heat of the day, for instance, and prefers to take his strolls around the Garden of Eden in the cool of the evening. He doesn’t know where Adam and Eve are hiding when he drops in for a visit on that fateful day when they stole the bad piece of fruit. He has a butt, and permits Moses a glimpse of it.

He gets peevish when a woman immodestly displays her hair. That’s who this guy is praying to, the god of the Old Testament.

The god of the Old Testament is absolutely not the ‘ground of all being’ now so popular amongst theologians. The god of the New Testament, and the ‘ground of all being,’ have seen this schmuck’s wife … naked! Yes — NAKED!! That god isn’t foiled by a head covering, and knows that the men in the congregation have all seen a Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition and their imaginations aren’t foiled by a head covering either.

Seriously: What is it like to go through life imagining oneself under constant surveillance by a testy supernatural being who cares about a head scarf? To feel that one must apologize for not having an emergency backup scarf? That’s the world an awful lot of people think they live in. As The Orange One would say — SAD!

With all of the focus on the deranged character now occupying the White House, you’ve probably been too busy scanning the horizon for a mushroom cloud to stop and ask yourself, “What’s that bunch of nutjobs at the Southern Baptist Convention up to?”

I suppose that whether the latest is good news or bad news depends on your perspective.

Do y’all recall this item from December, remarking upon the heat that Russell Moore was getting for his frank criticisms of Donald Trump during the recent election?

Seriously: How can you not love this? The only Southern Baptist leader who had the nerve and moral compass to say frankly that voting for Donald Trump is to disgrace oneself is being publicly eaten by other Southern Baptists — the overwhelming majority of whom did vote for The Donald.

The attacks against Moore are heating up, with Prestonwood Baptist, a megachurch, escrowing a donation of $1,000,000.

Prestonwood Baptist Church has announced its decision to escrow gifts previously forwarded to support Southern Baptist cooperative missions and ministries while the congregation discusses concerns about the direction of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Mike Buster, executive pastor for the Plano, Texas, church, provided a statement to the Baptist Message explaining that the action had been taken because of “various significant positions taken by the leadership of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission that do not reflect the beliefs and values of many in the Southern Baptist Convention” and that it is a temporary move “until a decision can be made on current and future funding.”

That’s as subtle as a club: “Moore has to go if the SBC wants our million bucks.”

I can’t help feeling sympathetic to Moore. He did the right thing regarding Trump. A second complaint about Moore is that he gave ERLC support to a mosque that was denied a construction permit because, you know … MOOZLIMS!!

So Moore is friendly with a false religion, and disapproves of a ‘baby Christian.’ Y’all can see the problem, I’m sure.

But my sympathy for Moore is checked by the same thing that checked my sympathy for Larycia Hawkins, the Wheaton College professor who got fired for saying that Christians and Muslims worship the same god. Russell Moore is not a kid, and he’s got no excuse on earth for not knowing what sort of mean-spirited, simple-minded characters he works for. As Winston Churchill so famously said once, if you try to ride a tiger you stand a good chance of being eaten.

Right. I don’t doubt there are people in America who watched that unhinged farce and cheered — “You get them goddam reporters!” — but I don’t doubt either that a majority of Americans watched with sick disbelief. I don’t know what is the correct name of the psychological problem that afflicts Trump, but there is something seriously amiss in his relationship with reality.