Civil Commotion

Taking a cue from Rush Limbaugh’s complaint that Republicans lose a lot because they don’t run as genuine-article conservatives, a Charisma magazine editor complains that the ‘nones’ are growing because Christians just aren’t, you know, Christian enough.

It’s painful for me to admit, but we can no longer rest carefree in our evangelical identity—because it is changing. No doubt you have seen the headlines declaring that evangelicalism is doomed because evangelical kids are leaving the faith. It is no secret that there is an expanding gulf between traditional Christian teachings and contemporary moral values. But the sad truth is that the ideological gulf between America’s evangelical grown-ups and their kids, aka the “millennials,” seems to be widening too.

Somehow the blame for this chasm is being heaped on traditional churches. They are accused of having too many rules as well as being homophobic and bigoted.

[ … ]

Evangelicals and culture warriors in the U.S. do not have to look far to discover what happens when Christian denominations give up on their traditional convictions and teachings. All we have to do is look at the dwindling memberships of mainline Protestant denominations.

In order to safeguard the trajectory of young evangelicals, we must uphold the authoritative Word of God.

Just so’s you know, the mainline Protestant denominations — the Episcopalians, the Lutherans, the Presbyterians and the Methodists — are where the best educated hang-out; since the progress of science has established dispositively that Christianity is untrue, it was inevitable that they would experience the most rapid departure from orthodoxy and, eventually, membership decline.

Charisma is a Pentecostal publication, and their demographic is at the other end of the educational spectrum, somewhere leftward of Southern Baptists on the education bell curve.

But, Hey!, if they want to double-down on the very things that are driving decent, educated people away from church, I say: Good.

Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
I: Criticism of Religion

§244   It is the height of psychological falsity on the part of man to imagine a being according to his own petty standard, who is a beginning, a “thing-in-itself”, and who appears to him good, wise, mighty and precious; for thus he suppresses in thought all the causality by means of which every kind of goodness, wisdom and power comes into existence and has value. In short, elements of the most recent and most conditional origin were regarded not as evolved, but as spontaneously generated and “things-in-themselves”, and perhaps as the cause of all things —

Experience teaches us that, in every case in which a man has elevated himself to any great extent above the average of his fellows, every high degree of power always involves a corresponding degree of freedom from Good and Evil as also from “true” and “false”, and cannot take into account what goodness dictates: the same holds good of a high degree of wisdom, in this case goodness is just as much suppressed as truthfulness, justice, virtue and other popular whims in valuations. In fact, is it not obvious that every high degree of goodness itself presupposes a certain intellectual myopia and obtuseness? As also an inability to distinguish at a great distance between true and false, useful and harmful? Not to mention the fact that a high degree of power in the hands of the highest goodness might lead to the most baleful consequences (“the suppression of evil”). In truth it is enough to perceive with what aspirations the “God of Love” inspires His believers: they ruin mankind for the benefit of “good men”. In practice, this same God has shown Himself to be a God of the most acute myopia, devilry and impotence, in the face of the actual arrangement of the universe and from this the value of His conception may be estimated.

Knowledge and wisdom can have no value in themselves, any more than goodness can: the goal they are striving after must be known first, for then only can their value or worthlessness be judged; a goal might be imagined which would make excessive wisdom a great disadvantage (if, for instance, complete deception were a prerequisite to the enhancement of life; likewise, if goodness were able to paralyse and depress the main springs of the great passions) —

Taking our human life as it is, it cannot be denied that all “truth”, “goodness”, “holiness”, and “Godliness” in the Christian sense, have hitherto shown themselves to be great dangers — even now mankind is in danger of perishing owing to an ideal which is hostile to life.

I’ve said more than once over the years that the role of the church in society in analogous to the role of the personnel department in a business — to keep everybody in line. I realized that when I learned that the meatpackers fought Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle not with facts, or even political skulduggery, but by paying pastors all across the country to distribute more than one million handbills denouncing Sinclair.

Well, what do you know? A piece in the New York Times documents how cynically the churches have allowed themselves to be used by the oligarchs.

Back in the 1930s, business leaders found themselves on the defensive. Their public prestige had plummeted with the Great Crash; their private businesses were under attack by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal from above and labor from below. To regain the upper hand, corporate leaders fought back on all fronts. They waged a figurative war in statehouses and, occasionally, a literal one in the streets; their campaigns extended from courts of law to the court of public opinion. But nothing worked particularly well until they began an inspired public relations offensive that cast capitalism as the handmaiden of Christianity.

[ … ]

In a shrewd decision, these executives made clergymen their spokesmen. As Sun Oil’s J. Howard Pew noted, polls proved that ministers could mold public opinion more than any other profession. And so these businessmen worked to recruit clergy through private meetings and public appeals. Many answered the call, but three deserve special attention.

[ … ]

The most important clergyman for Christian libertarianism, though, was the Rev. Billy Graham. In his initial ministry, in the early 1950s, Mr. Graham supported corporate interests so zealously that a London paper called him “the Big Business evangelist.” The Garden of Eden, he informed revival attendees, was a paradise with “no union dues, no labor leaders, no snakes, no disease.”

Seriously: DO NOT miss this piece. And those of you who still submit to the weekly berating, realize this: They’re laughing at you, just like the people who rent-out your eyeballs to television advertisers.

Never forget, lest you burn in hell FOREVER, more than a billion-trillion years (just for starters): Y’all are no damn good.