Civil Commotion

Like Bernie Sanders, the Southern Baptists just can’t understand that the game is over.

Assembling in St. Louis for their annual meeting next week, they will be confronted with some grim realities:

• Membership declined by more than 200,000-people in 2015.

• Weekly attendance is down by almost 100,000-people.

• Small-group participation is down by almost 120,000-people.

• Baptisms declined more than 10,000 below the 2014 level.

• The number of SBC-affiliated churches is up almost 300. Since overall attendance is down, the growth in the number of churches can come only from cannibalizing existing churches; they’re eating their own.

The only happy news they’ll hear is that donations for missions increased in 2015, almost certainly a transient event associated with the revelation that the International Missions Board has lost tens of millions of dollars over the past decade and thousands of missionaries would have to be recalled.

If those numbers aren’t bad enough, there looms a fight over a resolution which condemns display of the Confederate battle flag. I thought it would pass without controversy, but apparently it is a commonplace for Southern Baptists to wish to have it draped over Uncle Cletus’ coffin. Confederate flags are routinely displayed in church-affiliated cemeteries, too. Since few young people want anything to do with the SBC, and the older generation is still mad at Lyndon Baines Johnson for the civil rights legislation of the 60s and holds fond memories of good times throwing rocks at the freedom marchers, the resolution cuts both culturally and generationally.

There are still many Southern Baptist churches which won’t conduct interracial marriages.

So the SBC will soon come face-to-face with the exact dilemma I pointed toward here:

He [Albert Mohler] operates within an infrastructure of religious tradition which has long been the primary engine of southern racism and, however desperately its leadership wishes to change that because it is indispensable to the denomination’s very survival, the laity who pay his salary and once threw rocks at the freedom marchers aren’t going to be good sports about being told they were and are wildly, morally, wrong.

He has a further problem: The Southern Baptists, often with unseemly aggressiveness, claim to be the keepers and guardians of Eternal Truth — which cannot lightly be updated.

There is the matter, too, of Albert the Pious and Russell Moore going around denying that Trump supporters are r-e-e-e-a-l evangelicals. Most of the attendees in St. Louis are going to vote for Trump, because he hates the same people they do, and they don’t care for the idea of the pointy-headed seminary boys who are supported by their donations looking down their noses and sneering at them as C-team Christians.

It’s going to be a fun couple of days.

Muhammed Ali is burning in Hell!! A Christian pastor was so moved by this distressing news that he couldn’t even wait until after the funeral to write and publish a song all about it.

The Sinner’s Ballad

Words from empty men, they are vain. To the righteous, full of truth, they can even cause pain.
They have no power to help the man. They give him a false comfort; this is the devil’s plan.
All these high and mighty commendations that those who knew him pull,
Are clouds without rain, just a bunch of bull.
Trees that bear no fruit are words disconnected from Jesse’s root.
Wandering stars in the blackest night are the pretentious words of men that offer no light.
All that can help a sin-sick men like Ali is the Blood of the man that came out of Galilee.
Islam is a big fat lie from the pit of hell.
It is demonic, and deceptive and can never make a man well.
Many mighty men through generations of time,
Would give anything now dead, if out of hell they could climb.
Hell opens its mouth wide and swallows them up,
Disbelieving in the Savior who already drank that cup.
Even though they’ve been slaves to their sin and master,
When they die without Christ, it’s the most tragic disaster.
You can laud their skills and accomplishments in life;
Say pretty words at their funeral that hide your strife.
You can even tell humorous stories and make his mourners laugh,
But if they knew where the man now is they wouldn’t resort to such a gaffe.
For any man that dies without Christ should make one weep,
At the misery of a hopeless destination, that plays to keep.
From such there is no exit from beyond the deep.
Go ahead and say your soothing R.I.P.s,
And pretend he now rests on flowery beds of ease.
Pretend that his false gods can be appeased
And save his soul even after he leaves.
No, my friend, no. One thousand times, no.
To the wicked, says God, peace does not flow.
They are all a ship of fools who don’t believe in sacrificial substitution,
But only trust law and rules scripted by some dead institution.
Be good to your neighbor, they say.
Let each man find his own happy way.
They tell you every religion leads to heaven,
Unaware that this is in fact the devil’s leaven.
Always help the poor and suffering humanity,
And you’ll enter heaven’s door to a blissful eternity.
Who you worship doesn’t really matter.
If it’s Muhammad or Mary, they’ll help you climb that ladder.
Those who think they can save themselves by heeding these lies
Will die the eternal death never to part those heavenly skies.
It’s only holy Blood that can save a man’s soul;
The Blood of one born to a virgin is what will make him whole.
Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ is more than a curse word;
He’s the One and only God and Savior of the world.
Any other word is the devil’s dope,
Lies you’ve heard that give no hope.
I hope men like Ali discover this, so they won’t descend forever into the awful abyss.

Or, as the famously impious Mark Twain once said, “Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.”

A Pakistani woman burned her daughter alive because she married a man of whom the family disapproved.

A Pakistani woman was arrested Wednesday after dousing her daughter with kerosene and burning her alive, allegedly because the girl had defied her family to marry a man she was in love with, police said.

I’ve speculated through the years that evangelicals aren’t, in fact, interested in ‘saving’ anybody. Perhaps, I’ve wondered, what they really want is affirmation from yet one more person that they aren’t still hopelessly screwed-up, that they’ve finally got it right?

Well, what do you know? Reflecting upon posthumous conversion claims of intellectual luminaries (e.g., Charles Darwin, Christopher Hitchens), the physicist Lawrence Krauss speculates along similar lines.

Evangelicals don’t seem to care what these ordinary Christians think; no one tells stories about their achieving a proper understanding of Christianity on their deathbeds. Attention is focused, instead, on atheists who are also luminaries, like Hitchens.

In a conversation we had a few years ago, Hugh Downs, the television anchor, suggested why this might be so. One of the reasons people go to church, he said, is intellectual validation. People attend church for spiritual and social reasons, of course: to pray and to see friends. But they also want to hear their religious convictions affirmed — convictions that, as the Dawkins survey suggests, may seem a little dubious during the rest of the week. Could it be that evangelicals seek to convert the famous dead because they’re insecure about their own beliefs? If they can claim that people they admire as intellects — Darwin, Wilde, Hitchens — ultimately agreed with them, it validates their own faith.

I think there is something to this. The intensity of the impulse doubtless varies from one person to the next, and I can’t think for the life of me how one might construct a test to investigate it — but I think that desire is probably there and animates a lot of recruiting activity. And when you say “No, thanks,” you’re not rejecting Jesus (and too bad for you) — you’re rejecting them and wounding their already fragile self-esteem.

George Will gets it exactly right: Paul Ryan disgraced himself when he endorsed The Donald.

Some say in extenuation of Ryan’s behavior that if he could not embrace Trump, he could not continue as speaker. But is Ryan, who was reluctant to become speaker, now more indispensable to the nation’s civic health than Trump is menacing to that health? Ryan could have enhanced that health by valuing it above his office.

In March, Trump said of Ryan: “I’m sure I’m going to get along great with him. And if I don’t, he’s going to have to pay a big price.” Ryan has now paid a staggering price by getting along with Trump. And what did Ryan purchase with the coin of his reputation?

There are all sorts of things on Ryan’s agenda that I don’t like, but I did imagine him to be a man of (misguided) principle.

Alas, encouraged by Ryan’s capitulation (and so many others’), Trump has spiraled off to la-la-land, transmogrifying into a grotesque cartoon character. Wouldn’t it be a stitch if the Republican surrender of all principle, and even ordinary decency, had the result of freeing the “inner Donald” and inspiring the nationwide revulsion that he deserves?

There is this: Nobody can fail to see now how squalid, unprincipled, malicious and ignorant the Republican base really is since the party became the political arm of a religious movement.