Civil Commotion

I pointed a few days ago toward Albert Mohler’s unseemly introduction of C.J. Mahaney at the Together For The Gospel conference. Though Mohler has not acknowledged a word of it — Southern Baptists blithely refuse to acknowledge unpleasantness, ever — the reaction from non-cult members has been fierce.

You might be thinking to yourself, “D-a-a-a-m-n, I bet those guys are home hiding in bed under the covers.” If so, you’d be mistaken. In fact, C.J. Mahaney went back to his church on Sunday and — this is absolutely true — exhorted the Pious that they have a moral duty to protect their pastors from criticism.

“Any slanderous comment about the pastoral team should be challenged, and if necessary resolved,” Mahaney said. “Why? Because the pastors are just sensitive souls, because pastors are so sensitive? No. That protection is needed in order to preserve the trust, in order to protect the unity of this church. That’s why that’s needed ultimately, for the advance of the gospel from this church.”

Well.

It is rarely put so explicitly, but this is, in fact, a Biblical teaching. Upon the failure of the Jewish Rebellion in 70 A.D., the Jews did exactly what every other group in the history of the world has done: They went looking for somebody to blame. The conservatives believed God had allowed them to lose in order to chasten the Jews for tolerating those who believed that Jesus was the long-promised Messiah, and they won the argument; the Christians were thrown out.

They were the despised of the despised, and first- and second-century Christianity was no more than another subterranean cult; the New Testament is the literary production of a cult. And, like any cult, it survived only by demanding loyalty to itself above every other institution and relationship. This is why preachers howl and bellow that good, decent, godly people must always put the pleasure of Our Invisible Friend — meaning, the well-being of the pastor — ahead of even wedding vows; that’s what the Bible says. That’s what Scientology says, too.

Christianity is merely a cult that managed to survive, and it is returning to its cult origins as it shrinks.

C.J. Mahaney is the Calvinist founder of a network of Maryland-based churches known as Sovereign Grace Ministries, now re-organized as Sovereign Grace Churches. The original organization disintegrated amid a barrage of sex abuse scandals, and Mahaney decamped to Louisville, Kentucky, where he hangs-out with Albert the Pious, pastors another church, and mourns the wickedness of “the world.”

Mahaney’s rehabilitation following the collapse of Sovereign Grace Ministries followed the usual course: He was neither seen nor heard for a brief while, then began to make occasional appearances, and is once again a celebrated headliner. Meantime, decent people rage that he and his abusive organization skated with no penalty but some bad publicity — a nearly meaningless consequence here in the United States of Amnesia.

Just this week he was a speaker at the biennial Together for the Gospel conference, and introduced by no less than Albert Mohler his Very Self, the Mightiest Theologian Of Them All.

Before Mahaney’s appearance there was a lot of blog commentary, a petition that he be withdrawn as a speaker, a handful of protestors outside the meeting venue, all to no avail. The show, you know, must go on.

Then came Albert the Odious’ Pious’ introduction:

Mohler referred obliquely to the pushback in his introduction of Mahaney, getting laughs with the line: “I told C.J. that in getting ready to introduce him I decided I would Google to see if there was anything on the Internet about him.”

Har-har! Good one! Everybody knows there’s a lot!

Pastoral care for the hurting? No. Mohler’s snark, and that roomful of pastors who laughed, is and has always been, the truth about Christianity.

Religion is in the control business.

Bishop John Spong

What these fools with their heads stuffed with pious clichés instead of brains can’t understand is that they’ve already lost control.

I’ve openly loathed and ridiculed Albert Mohler for years, since long before the fringe Southern Baptist outsiders realized how vicious he actually is — so what I have to say will be dismissed as more of the same. Even so, it must be said: It is time for Mohler to go, to be cast into Outer Darkness and, with that uniquely Southern Baptist refusal to ever acknowledge unpleasantness, never spoken of again. He is a disgrace, utterly unfit for the company of decent people, and a Southern Baptist Convention incapable of seeing that deserves only contempt. He makes the words “I am a Southern Baptist” a badge of shame.

I spent most of Monday in Superior Court, Granville County, North Carolina, in connection with a murder case I’ve been following. Perhaps it would make a good longread, I thought, or at least a feature for some magazine somewhere.

It turns out … No. There is no mystery, there is no drama, there is just a depressingly familiar tale of two young lives stupidly lived and thrown casually away. I doubt very much that the names of either of the primary actors has been spoken aloud, except in that courtroom, in months. The dead man is gone more than a year now, who killed him is well-known, and by Monday there was nothing left to do but levy the penalty and file the paperwork.

Sitting there, I found myself wondering how much Joe Citizen actually knows about our justice system.

Court began at 10:00 AM, and the first order of business was for the clerk to read-out a list of the cases on the docket (there were 91). The clerk called attendance at the same time and, if a party had failed to appear, the judge issued a bench warrant for an arrest. The cases of the dozen or so people who weren’t there for the reason that they were jailed in another jurisdiction were re-scheduled.

The idea is for everyone to be present before judgin’ begins in earnest so the court can gallop right along. Indeed, court personnel were strolling around and murmuring to each other and passing files back and forth the entire while; you had to pay close attention to know who was an actor in the case at hand, and who was just there to see why such a crowd had gathered.

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.

On Monday there were a handful of spousal-abuse cases, some bad checks, some theft, one murder — and a whale of a lot of drug cases; overwhelmingly, in all categories of cases, the majority of the accused were black. All but one of the defendants had a publicly appointed attorney. It has been about the same in every criminal court I’ve ever visited, too. I don’t know why that is. I don’t doubt that more white people than black people are let go with a wink and a warning, but I doubt that alone explains the disparity.

The so-called “war on drugs” has been a colossal and expensive failure; the sooner we declare victory and quit the field, the better off we’ll all be. We need to get over the Puritan impulse to punish the wicked and start treating addiction as a sickness instead of a sin.

A reader sends a link to yet another appalling story of a child condemned to a life of ill health because of her nitwit parents’ refusal to seek medical care because the Bible promises a cure for those who have sufficient faith, yadda-yadda-yadda.

Mariah Walton’s voice is quiet – her lungs have been wrecked by her illness, and her respirator doesn’t help.

[ … ]

All this could have been prevented in her infancy by closing a small congenital hole in her heart. It could even have been successfully treated in later years, before irreversible damage was done. But Mariah’s parents were fundamentalist Mormons who went off the grid in northern Idaho in the 1990s and refused to take their children to doctors, believing that illnesses could be healed through faith and the power of prayer.

These stories exemplify the reason I believe that faith is a serious moral error. So what if a ridiculous old book says that praying will cure disease? This is 2016, and modern medicine does know better than those Bronze Age goatherders. But belief without evidence is supposed to be some sort of virtue — Every Holy Man says so! — and now Mariah suffers. Faith is not a virtue; the only people who benefit from that teaching are the Holy Men who peddle it.

Even so, the prospect of prosecuting the parents who do this makes me uneasy. The parents are no threat to society writ large and, in all likelihood, sincerely believed they were doing the best thing for their daughter. They suffer her illness, too, and have probably mentally cataloged their entire lives searching for the act or mean-spirited thought that caused Our Heavenly Father Who Loves Us to visit such misery on their daughter. They aren’t dangerous; they’re ruinously stupid.

Nor will they be punished, even if they are sent to prison. They live in a shoebox-sized world having a culture which teaches that suffering is to be expected for those who uphold the Bible; being sent to prison proves they’re genuine-article followers of Jesus, the Real McCoy. The cult-members who remain at large will conclude that the foretold persecution is at hand.

It’s not that they’re mentally ill, exactly, but neither do they have a firm grip on reality.

They are a danger to their other children, if there are any, and I wholeheartedly endorse removing those children and irrevocably terminating their parental rights.

Just so’s you know, Gina Miller is still the queen of screechy adjectives.

This reiteration of our natural rights in Mississippi’s law is a response – a defensive response – to the vicious, militant homosexual/”transgender” movement’s aggressive, coordinated assault on Christians and Christian business owners across the nation. For years now, homosexual and “transgender” activists have been targeting small businesses and individuals with demands that violate common-sense decency and rationality, demands that would directly conflict with the knowledge and beliefs of the Christians targeted. When Christians decline to violate their consciences, the homo-activists have a waiting team of lawyer vultures with the lawsuits ready to go.

So there.