Civil Commotion

This seems to be a day for departures: a reader points me toward news that Tullian Tchividjian, pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian, has resigned his pastorate due to an extramarital affair.

I resigned from my position at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church today due to ongoing marital issues. As many of you know, I returned from a trip a few months back and discovered that my wife was having an affair. Heartbroken and devastated, I informed our church leadership and requested a sabbatical to focus exclusively on my marriage and family. As her affair continued, we separated. Sadly and embarrassingly, I subsequently sought comfort in a friend and developed an inappropriate relationship myself. Last week I was approached by our church leaders and they asked me about my own affair. I admitted to it and it was decided that the best course of action would be for me to resign.

Some thoughts, in no particular order:

• To mention his wife’s indiscretion at all, especially as a device for explaining his own … ummm, not a very gentlemanly thing to do; it suggests the vanity, or character failure, or plain-vanilla immaturity, that may have helped her decide the grass is greener elsewhere. He should have left her out of it, taken his lumps, and departed.

• Cheating pastors are common as dirt; I have seen estimates which place the incidence of it in the 50% neighborhood. We would do ourselves a lot of good, and probably them, too, if they weren’t installed on pedestals. There are of course exceptions but, as a class, clergy are neither well-educated nor reflective men.

• But every cult needs a cult leader, somebody to herd the insecure and childish people who are drawn toward “you’re no damn good, so just do as you’re told.”

• Pastor Tullian was a regular star of the “Dismal theology tweet for the day” series, regularly reminding his fans that they are no damn good. Pardon me if I wonder — not for the first time — if these clowns who bear down hard on Original Sin are, in fact, projecting.

Detroit violence included 24 shootings over weekend

A violent and bloody weekend was the result of 24 shootings in the city, according to figures released Monday by Police Chief James Craig.

The shootings included 12 people shot — including one fatality — at a block party Saturday night, three people shot in Greektown Saturday and Sunday —one fatally — and the deadly shooting of a gunman intent on robbing a coney island restaurant early Sunday morning.

Jeri Massi is done once for all with documenting abuse in IFB churches.

This is my swan song, my goodbye. I am retiring from the work of documenting clergy sex abuse of children. I do this at the advice of every doctor I have seen in the last year, and also two veterinarians. I don’t want this to come across as “Oh poor me.” War is war. It sucks, and you only fight a war because every other option is worse than war. I knew when I began to document clergy sexual abuse of children in Christian Fundamentalism in 2001 that it was going to be a sucky role to play.

Well … dang. Jeri is a genuine-article hero of the effort to expose abusive pastors and hold them accountable.

Go read the entire piece. Anybody acquainted with Christian fundamentalism — whether the IFB or SBC variety — will recognize at once that she knows what she’s talking about.

• It was common for Christa Brown and me to exchange comments on how frustrated we were that our message was not reaching a wider audience. She was doing meticulous work on her own in the SBC, trying to get justice and safety for young people in SBC churches. The man who had sexually abused her as a teenager was (and still is) in church office in the SBC. Christa was going in person to meet with SBC officials at every level. The sheer weight of indifference of grassroots level people, pastors, and executives in the SBC was chilling.

• If you want to show what’s wrong with Christian Fundamentalism, start from their own starting point. Christian Fundamentalist preachers, as a general rule, don’t have a clue about what the Bible actually says. They preach an infrastructure of traditions that they adorn with individual, out of context, Bible verses. And they make their sermons popular by filling them with stories and jokes and shouting spells.

“The sheer weight of indifference …” Here, Jeri understates the case; confronted with dispositive evidence — even confessions! — that Pastor Bubba has been raping their children, congregations tend almost invariably to rally around the pastor and re-victimize his victims. That’s the psychology of the cult at work, and the unhappy truth is that an awful lot of religious life is no more than predatory exploitation of the insecure, the troubled, the damaged.