Civil Commotion

I don’t know how to introduce this, so I’ve decided not to try. I’m just going to give you one of those clickbait-y intros and hope you trust me — You won’t believe this.

Nope. There was no Adam and Eve, there was no Fall, there is no such thing as Original Sin, and there is no need for salvation. If Piper’s readers are emotionally dysfunctional, it’s for some reason besides they were born no damn good.

My advice is to get the hell out of church and stop listening to crap like this.

Albert the Pious discusses the flare-up yesterday between The Donald and Russell Moore.

It is clear that Donald Trump will have a great deal of difficulty winning the support of many American evangelicals, including prominent evangelical leaders. In Sunday’s edition of the New York Times, Russell Moore, President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, offered a rather stinging critique of the Trump candidacy, and he did so in an opinion piece that was brought to the attention of the nation, at least in part by none other than Donald Trump himself.

This is interesting. Many, not … most? Where is Mohler’s usual bragging about the importance of the evangelical vote?

Gone, because most evangelicals have already gone to Trump. And so far as evangelical leaders go, trust me: The names of Jerry Falwell, Jr., and Mike Huckabee, who have already declared for Trump, are far better known to American evangelicals and the general public than Albert Mohler and Russell Moore.

Pay attention, Albert, and I’ll tell you exactly what’s going on — again. There are theological evangelicals — luckily for the rest of us, a minority — and there are demographic evangelicals. Theological evangelicals are people like yourself, the poor benighted fools who actually believe that nonsense you peddle. The demographic evangelicals are the rest of the people who sit in your churches, bored stupid except when you’re howling about the wickedness of those … OTHERS, those people who aren’t as messed-up and straight-jacketed as themselves.

Did you envy all the dancers who had all the nerve?
Crosby, Still, and Nash

Trump gives them the malice without all the polite pretenses and stick–in-the-mud rules; therefore, they listen to him instead of you. Simple.

Albert the Pious, garbed in the armor of Jesus, gingerly tries to say a few kind words on behalf of his buddy Russ without drawing any attention to, you know, himself.

I especially like that last one. Just last week, evangelicals stood-up and began singing Jesus Loves Me when an attendee at a school board meeting tried to speak in support of transgender rights. Because, you know, evangelicals can be trusted to support intelligent public discussion of issues.

Honestly, it’s as if all of my favorite cartoon characters have been fitted with defective Artificial Intelligence modules and set loose to write their own cartoon strips.

Seriously: It gets no better than this. Evangelicals have broken for Trump in a big way, because he gives voice to their subterranean malice, and Russell Moore and Albert the Pious have been frantic to somehow distance themselves from evangelical support for him. Trump has already destroyed forever the fiction that they are kingmakers who control the evangelical voting bloc; now, they just want to escape without being somehow linked in the public mind with the ambulatory cesspool that is The Donald.

So Russell Moore did what anybody with access to a television studio does these days: He went on television to denounce Trump as an exemplar for “reality television moral sewage.”

This from a man whose own denomination can’t be trusted to report it to the police when Pastor Bubba is caught being extra-friendly with the children’s choir, but will write dozens of letters to the judge pleading for leniency when Pastor Bubba gets caught and is about to be sentenced. And which will never, ever, lift a finger on behalf of Pastor Bubba’s victims.

Now, take a look at the re-tweets of Trump’s denunciation of Moore: as of this writing, 1581 and climbing fast; likes, 5113 and climbing fast.

I imagine @DrMoore is getting a lot of hate-tweets, too.

And how goes it for Moore’s not-exactly-eloquent rejoinder to Trump?

These clowns deserve each other. As somebody or other once said, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”