Civil Commotion

This is fun: An improbable alliance of five Vancouver-area Catholic and Evangelical leaders have released a letter inviting Franklin Graham to please stay out of their town.

Evangelical and Catholic leaders in Vancouver, Canada, have come together to oppose an upcoming visit by the televangelist Franklin Graham, calling him “incendiary and intolerant” as well as “ungracious and bigoted”.

[ … ]

The letter went on: “We … denounce the frequent incendiary and intolerant statements made by Rev Graham, which he unapologetically reiterates.”

Good for them. Graham is an odious man all the way down and, though they will doubtless feel the sting of charges from the Pious that they aren’t behaving like good Christians, I think it’s high time that decent-minded people of all beliefs start holding such as Graham accountable for their bad behavior. Well done.

But-but-but … Albert Mohler’s livelihood relies on people believing they’re no damn good. If this little girl grows-up confident that she can think her way through troubles, instead of appealing to an Invisible Friend, she’ll never join his club. Wait till some teen points out that the modern world cannot exist as it is if Christianity is true. You know how Mohler is going to answer? Some variation of: “Rely not on your own understanding — ’cause you’re a human being and therefore an idiot.”

John Piper, Holy Man, explains how he counsels infertile couples who want a child.

I would want them to know that God can give life and, therefore, I would covenant with that couple to pray with them every day. I would lay my hands on them, and I would ask “God, give them life. Give them a child, Lord. Whoever is infertile here, work a miracle, O God, if you would be pleased to do this.” I would ask for it.

And if God then chose not to do it, I would remind them “No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly” (Psalm 84:11). That is probably one of the hardest verses for a mom or a dad to hear in that situation. “No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly,” which means that for whatever reason this withholding right now is good. God has something good.

Sheesh … a much saner reading of that verse and the facts is, “So y’all must not be walking uprightly,” which jibes nicely, by the way, with Piper’s constant reminders that we are all no damn good.

As an extremely wicked person who believes that science and reason work much better than boneheaded Bronze Age superstitions, I would advise them to visit a doctor who deals with infertility. If for some reason I wished for them to feel bad about themselves, I might add that only a moron would consult John Piper about anything besides how to dupe simpletons out of their money.

If we cannot imagine [Marilynne] Robinson being invited to preach at a big-box Bible church somewhere in suburbia, that may say less about her than about the anti-intellectual and artistically indifferent culture of much of today’s evangelicalism; but then, those developments may have been exacerbated by Christian intellectuals’ neglect of their responsibilities to the life of their churches. At some point in the past sixty years or so a perverse and destructive feedback loop engaged, and I cannot see how to disengage it.

Alan Jacobs, Harpers

Ahhh … phooey.

This thoughtful piece, The Watchmen: What became of the Christian intellectuals?, seems to me like many of the writings of Karl Marx — an astute diagnosis coupled to a prescription grounded on nonsense. Darwin annihilated Christian metaphysics with the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859 and, just to make sure nobody could say with a straight face that “Maybe it’s not true, but the teachings are good,” Nietzsche put Christian ethics through the wood-chipper soon afterward. Christianity is finished as a respectable, intellectually serious enterprise; that is why there are no name-brand Christian intellectuals.