Civil Commotion

Promise Keepers, the now-fading evangelical recruitment movement popular in the late ’90s and early years of the 2000s, has now gone totally around the bend. Just look at the splash for their upcoming conference in Dallas, Texas:

You can view the original in all its detail at the link. You really should go take a look, because easy-to-follow connecting lines in the large view make clear that these camoed warriors advancing through a dystopian bleakscape are the good guys — the people who really need this conference.

BATTLE LINES: No Compromise!

Today’s culture nurtures a popular misconception that tolerance is the only reasonable worldview. Unfortunately, this spirit of compromise on key moral and biblical issues has permeated both our culture and the church. Divorce and co-habitation rates continue to rise. Same-sex marriage is now accepted and abortion is still legal in our nation. Scripture is quite clear how we are to respond whenever the foundations of the Christian faith are under attack: our duty is to contend for the faith, without compromise.

In 1 John 1:5 John wrote, “This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.” This is a very definitive statement. God is light. There are no shades of grey with God. He is Light and in Him, there is no darkness. What is light? It’s truth, and there is no compromising God’s Truth. There is no middle ground.

Considering the current times, as Promise Keepers, we must boldly and courageously stand for truth. We must defend biblical marriage, champion the life of the unborn and protect religious liberty. We cannot stand back and allow moral relativism, cultural decadence, spiritual apathy and ecclesiastical indifference to hinder us any longer. We must draw our battle lines without compromise.

That text, in combination with that imagery, is frightening stuff; these people are out of their minds, and it is only a matter of time before some ignorant yahoo, stoked on malice for a world he no longer understands, decides God wants him to go shoot-up a gay bar or who-knows-what.

The recklessness is downright breathtaking.

Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
IV: How Virtue Is Made to Dominate

§328   In the end, what have I achieved? Let us not close our eyes to this wonderful result: I have imparted to virtue new charms — the charm of something forbidden. It has our most subtle honesty against it, it is salted in the “cum grano satis” of the scientific pang of conscience. It has an old-fashioned, antique odour, so that it is at last beginning to draw refined people and to make them inquisitive — in short, it seems like a vice. Only after we have once recognised that everything consists of lies and appearance, shall we have regained the right to uphold this most beautiful of all fictions, virtue. There will then remain no further reason to deprive ourselves of it: only when we have shown virtue to be a form of immorality do we again justify it, it then becomes classified and likened, in its fundamental features, to the profound and general immorality of all existence, of which it is then shown to be a part. It appears as a form of luxury of the first order, the most arrogant, the dearest and rarest form of vice. We have robbed it of its grimaces and divested it of its cowl; we have delivered it from the importunate familiarity of the crowd; we have deprived it of its ridiculous rigidity, its vacant expression, its stiff false hair and its hieratic muscular system.

The Southern Baptist Convention released today its annual metrics, just in advance of its annual meeting — and the news is all bleak.

The number of cooperating churches within the Southern Baptist Convention rose for the 15th consecutive year, but the churches lost more than 200,000 members, the biggest one-year decline since 1881, according to the Annual Church Profile (ACP) compiled by LifeWay in cooperation with Baptist state conventions. Average attendance, baptisms and giving also declined.

[ … ]

One of the biggest declines last year was Southern Baptist church membership, which fell 1.5 percent to 15.5 million — still the largest Protestant denomination by far, but at the lowest level since 1993. Weekly worship attendance declined 2.75 percent to 5.67 million Sunday worshippers.

The Convention reports it has 46,499-churches. So, a little math and … voila: The average attendance at SBC church services ~122-persons. But: Some of their churches attract thousands of attendees, meaning some of the other churches have much lower than the average attendance, amount in fact to no more than home study groups.

If you click on the graphic to the right, you’ll be taken to a large, spreadsheet-like graphic that details the grim news — including, interestingly, the fact that North Carolina has the second greatest number of Southern Baptist churches, just behind Texas; can’t say I’m surprised. I checked Michigan, too, because a few years ago there was a lot of talk about ‘planting’ there because of the Detroit bankruptcy; 284. And when I checked the Upper Peninsula, I learned there are only 8 churches — 3 of them without pastors.

Those who understand it will never acknowledge it aloud, but the fact is in plain sight: The SBC is in decline, and the decline is accelerating. How else could it be, really? The founding narratives are false, and the authoritarian cult-like values are bad.

Pat Robertson helpfully suggests that a parent might be consoled upon the death of a child with the thought that it was just God’s way of stopping the next Hitler.

As far as God’s concerned, he knows the end from the beginning and He sees a little baby and that little baby could grow up to be Adolf Hitler, he could grow up to be Joseph Stalin, he could grow up to be some serial killer, or he could grow up to die of a hideous disease. God sees all that, and for that life to be terminated while he’s a baby, he’s going to be with God forever in Heaven so it isn’t a bad thing.

So how could God do that? How could a good God let happen? Well, the good God is going to take that baby to heaven right now, and that isn’t a bad thing.

So there you go: Maybe your Li’l Precious was going to grow up to be a sociopathic killer, and God did a good thing by WHOOSHING him up to Heaven before that could happen.

The other possibility is that Pat Robertson is totally barking insane, and millions of Americans are so pathetically stupid that they don’t see it.

Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
IV: How Virtue Is Made to Dominate

§327   The domain of morality must be reduced and limited step by step; the names of the instincts which are really active in this sphere must be drawn into the light of day and honoured, after they have lain all this time in the concealment of hypocritical names of virtue. Out of respect for one’s “honesty”, which makes itself heard ever more and more imperiously, one ought to unlearn the shame which makes one deny and “explain away” all natural instincts. The extent to which one can dispense with virtue is the measure of one’s strength; and a height may be imagined where the notion “virtue” is understood in such a way as to be reminiscent of virtu— the virtue of the Renaissance, free from moralic acid. But for the moment how remote this ideal seems!

The reduction of the domain of morality is a sign of its progress. Wherever, hitherto, thought has not been guided by causality, thinking has taken a moral turn.