The piece is more of the predictable same: Our Invisible Friend must always come first, and your spouse and family can have the leftovers. Membership in our cult must always be the center of your life. What is more, the clergy will grow more strident about this as we get deeper and deeper into the post-Christian world.
Most people have too much sense to take this stuff seriously — but most is not everybody. It is not a coincidence that evangelicals have the highest divorce rate in the country.
The New York Times notices that jury trials are disappearing.
Jury Trials Vanish, and Justice is Served Behind Closed Doors
The criminal trial ended more than two and a half years ago, but Judge Jesse M. Furman can still vividly recall the case. It stands out, not because of the defendant or the subject matter, but because of its rarity: In his four-plus years on the bench in Federal District Court in Manhattan, it was his only criminal jury trial.
He is far from alone.
Judge J. Paul Oetken, in half a decade on that bench, has had four criminal trials, including one that was repeated after a jury deadlocked. For Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who has handled some of the nation’s most important terrorism cases, it has been 18 months since his last criminal jury trial.
Recall what I wrote here:
Here is the thing that few people understand, I imagine: What goes on in court is, overwhelmingly, merely the ratification by the judge of deals already worked-out between the accused and the district attorney; actual television-like trials are relatively rare and, though absolutely a right, not actually welcome. They, you know, get in the way of, and slow down, the important work of dispensing justice.
Your day in court lasts about 10-minutes, if it’s a complicated matter, and is not really public at all. Yes, a passerby — me, for example — can go in and sit down, and watch and take notes, but all that happens is that the judge approves deals that have already been settled — and everybody involved will claim an ethical duty of silence. The approval of the deals is public; the working-out of justice is not. That might as well occur on Mars.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I am certain the biggest contributor to our production-line style of justice is the so-called War on Drugs. We need to be done once for all with the pious backward-looking yahoos and get serious about running a modern country that works.
The best summary of Trump’s business career that you’ll find, by one of this country’s preeminent business reporters.
Donald Trump was thundering about a minority group, linking its members to murderers and what he predicted would be an epic crime wave in America. His opponents raged in response—some slamming him as a racist—but Trump dismissed them as blind, ignorant of the real world.
No, this is not a scene from a recent rally in which the Republican nominee for president stoked fears of violence from immigrants or Muslims. The year was 1993, and his target was Native Americans, particularly those running casinos who, Trump was telling a congressional hearing, were sucking up to criminals.
Albert the Pious published a lengthy essay at his Web site this week which argues that, even as Christianity declines throughout the educated West, Baptists might shape the future of post-Christian thought. It’s an inherently aggrandizing piece, and tedious whistling past the graveyard, so I’m not encouraging anybody to go take a look; I want to draw attention to just one section.
Will Southern Baptists embrace an identity that is more theological than tribal? The older I get the more I recognize the value of the tribal inheritance I received as a young boy. This is why I phrased the question “more theological than tribal” rather than “theological instead of tribal.” In fact, I believe it is impossible to survive as a community of conviction without having a certain amount of tribal identity. But, as many young Southern Baptists now realize, tribal identity is not enough. Tribal identity alone will eventually give way to theological accommodation. Our identity must be more theological than tribal, and that requires a change in the logic of the Southern Baptist Convention, certainly a change from the logic employed during the middle and late decades of the twentieth century.
This is an astonishing passage. Mohler explicitly acknowledges that the Southern Baptists are more strongly shaped by ‘tribalism’ than theology. He goes on to say that the persistence of tribalism is necessary to the denomination’s survival.
And then he urges that Southern Baptists retain their tribalism but be more ‘theological,’ which seems to mean that he wants the folk in the pews to learn a thing or two about their religion. Recall that I hooted at Mohler when he was complaining that evangelicals were flocking to Trump, evidencing that they are a social, not theological, grouping.
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.
And Donald Trump, bless his heart, hates them all just as much as she …
I guarantee you: Southern Baptists are not going to get more theological. What is going to happen is that their hateful culture, their tribe, is going to grow more malice-eaten and subterranean.
And notice the not-too-subtle smack at the so-called Conservative Resurgence (in which Mohler was a willing participant).
Our identity must be more theological than tribal, and that requires a change in the logic of the Southern Baptist Convention, certainly a change from the logic employed during the middle and late decades of the twentieth century.
The 20-years long war within the denomination ran off all the smart and principled people, and left their seminaries with nobody but howling yahoos foursquare for that Old Time Religion (and rigidly-enforced employment contracts which demand that) — and now they’ve got a denomination which is a tribe that knows almost nothing about its religion.
Like nobody could have seen that coming. Enjoy the fruits of your labors, y’all.
No, not all of us are Hitlers and Bin Ladens; but we share the twisted nature of their dark hearts. We all aren’t as bad as we could potentially be, but even our best works — to be kind to neighbors, to care for our children, to pick up litter, to clothe the naked — are no better than polluted rags. Our sin is so staining and corrosive that it taints our best acts. Even if you were to add up all the good that we do, it could never tilt the scales back in our favor.
Remember that as you set about making your weekend plans: Y’all are no damn good, and probably ought to be daydreaming about doing something else, which would also be sinful and wicked but probably not as bad as what you want to do.
So there.
