Civil Commotion

Albert Mohler addresses demands that the names of prominent, and extravagantly racist, founders of the Southern Baptist Convention be removed from the seminary’s campus buildings.

This is a striking piece and, though there is much to disagree with, there also is much else that is needfully and unexpectedly frank. I suspect Mohler is trying to thread a very fine needle here, fully aware that his denomination was founded on racist ideology and that a very strong current of crude racism remains, but that the SBC is doomed if it can’t shed that.

Jeri Massi had an arresting phrase in her post yesterday, “an infrastructure of traditions;” that is exactly what is preached in the overwhelming majority of Southern Baptist churches — and those traditions include egregious racism. Make no mistake: That sweet old lady who hasn’t missed a sermon in 60-years muttered furiously about “those people” during the civil rights movement, and the parents and grandparents of that handsome young couple with the new baby stood on the side of the highway and threw rocks at the marchers who walked from Oxford down to Raleigh. They expect preaching that comports with their infrastructure of traditions, and aren’t going to put up with some preacher who calls ’em out.

I’ll have much more to say about the subject of flags and dishonored names in a day or so.

Honestly, you cannot make up how deranged the Loony Right has become.

Yet how can we ignore the climate of violence that is sharpening conflicts instead of soothing them? How can we ignore a simple truth: Barack Obama and Eric Holder created much of this atmosphere of anger, bitterness and bile with their disdain of whites and not too transparent belief and actions that we must now pay what are in effect reparations to the black community, even though this generation does not practice or advocate slavery. Obama, Holder and their enablers, like Al Sharpton, have become what they accused President George W. Bush of being: a recruiting tool for terrorists thanks to his invasion of Iraq. Obama and company’s biased actions against whites, Christians and Jews have ironically served to draw neo-Nazis and sick Klansman out of their caves and have emboldened them to try to justify criminal acts – people like Dylann Roof. Indeed, Roof was quoted as saying that he struck because blacks had “taken over the country.”

Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
V: The Moral Ideal

§340   The more concealed forms of the cult of Christian moral ideal. The insipid and cowardly concept “Nature” invented by Nature enthusiasts ( -— without any knowledge whatsoever of the terrible, the implacable and the cynical element in even “the most beautiful” aspects), a kind of attempt at reading the moral and Christian notion of “humanity” into Nature; Rousseau’s concept of Nature, for instance, which took for granted that “Nature” meant freedom, goodness, innocence, equity, justice, an idyl, was nothing more at bottom than the cult of Christian morality. We should collect passages from the poets in order to see what they admired, in lofty mountains, for instance. What Goethe had to do with them -— why he admired Spinoza -— Absolute ignorance concerning the presuppositions of this cult -—

The insipid and cowardly concept “Man” a la Comte and Stuart Mill, perhaps the subject of a cult -— This is only the Christian moral ideal again under another name -— Refer also to the freethinkers Guyau for example.

The insipid and cowardly concept “Art” which is held to mean sympathy with all suffering and with everything malformed and ill-constituted (the same thing happens to history cf. Thierry’s): again it is the cult of the Christian moral ideal.

And now, as to the whole socialistic ideal: it is nothing but a clumsy misunderstanding of the Christian moral ideal.

OK, he’s not pulling a @PastorTullian and reminding his fans that they are no damn good, but he is telling them that he is more special than they. So long as the li’l people don’t forget they’re inferior, I guess it all evens out.

I know. Every time Donald Trump appears on your television screen, you want to go get your son’s aluminum baseball bat and just clobber the snot out of him.

Introducing — ♫ Ta-dum ♬ — the Donald Trump pinata. I must have one of these.