Civil Commotion

What do you know? Albert Mohler’s startling announcement that he is now a Trump supporter is no surprise to those who know him best: it seems he’s always been an opportunist.

The leader’s about-face has mystified many, given that none of his current justifications for endorsing the president address his previous criticisms. But others, including some of Mohler’s friends and colleagues (full disclosure: I have known Mohler since childhood), have pointed out that his decision is consistent with a career marked as much by ambition as conviction.

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But Leonard, founding dean and professor of divinity emeritus of Wake Forest University School of Divinity, says that Mohler’s theology quickly evolved in the ’80s when theological conservatives moved to take over the Southern Baptist Convention. Mohler pivoted to the right just as it became clear that conservative factions were going to win.

“I think you can make the case that there was an expediency to Al’s hard-right turn in those days,” says Leonard, author of “Baptist Ways: A History.” “He saw where things were headed in the denomination and turned toward it.”

It’s hardly a secret that I’ve never thought much of Mohler, but my dislike has always been grounded on the ridiculous and degrading theology he peddles; I’ve wondered often, and publicly, if he actually believes that stuff. Apparently, it’s enough for Albert the Pious that Ma and Pa Kettle believe that stuff.

Has the entire country gone mad? The headlines sure seem to point in that direction.

• Many Americans are too stupid to understand, for instance, that proscription of all assemblies, including churches, are not breaches of religious freedom because they do not single-out churches; churches are merely one type of assembly that is forbidden. Opposing Church Closures Becomes New Religious Freedom Cause. True: You can’t expect much from people who believe in talking snakes and hope to spend eternity with a psychopath who’s got more blood on his hands than Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot combined, but … still.

• Natural selection is clearly at work at Pastor Tony Spell’s church, however. According to police, traffic was down about 75% after a congregant died, and its lawyer died of coronavirus. There will doubtless be more.

  And the hit taken by The Church of God in Christ has been brutal.

• Certainly, social distancing works. After all, you can’t catch a sickness from people you never encounter. But Governor Cuomo is catching grief from some pious loon for saying the obvious: It isn’t Our Invisible Friend who flattened the curve, but thinking, conscientious citizens who isolated themselves — we did that. If an Invisible Friend is involved, that’s who sent Covid-19.

  But, you know, take that for what it’s worth; I’m well-known to be extremely wicked.

• On the other hand, here is a guy who confronted the Covid-19 demon face-to-face and vanquished it by invoking Jesus’ name. Or, something.

• Meantime, Pat Robertson has been thinking deeply about our troubles and — What do you know? — says it’s all the fault of same-sex marriage. Unfortunately, Robertson doesn’t explain why anti-gay pastors and congregations are dying like flies as they insist upon assembling.

  It’s just one more example, I guess, of the Mysteriousness of His Ways.

• The White House, which has degenerated into a bad cartoon under the First Felon’s management, is redirecting the U.S.’ contribution to WHO to — get ready — Franklin Graham’s Samaritan’s Purse. This can’t possibly be legal, but they’ll probably get away with it because the good guys are busy fighting more grave offenses against the law.

The Pious aren’t the only unhinged people out there. The anti-government cranks are energized, too.

• An Idaho legislator says her state’s governor is just like Hitler because he has issued a lockdown order.

Just so’s you know, there is some good news out there.

• The University of Chicago is setting-up a live webcam at Botany Pond, the home of Dr. Jerry Coyne’s beloved ducks. I’ll post a link to the cam just as soon as Dr. Coyne does.

• “That woman in Michigan” is trouncing the First Felon in the polls. This is good news, because Trump seduced Michigan into his camp in 2016; there would be a sort of poetic justice in it if his abusive characterizations of her prove fatal to re-election this time around.

Last, I pointed a few days ago to a recent issue of Philosophy Now that focuses on Friedrich Nietzsche. In my follow-up discussion of Nietzsche, I alluded twice to his sister, who didn’t have a clue what her brother was all about.

Here’s a book review that discusses Elizabeth’s role in screwing-up her brother’s legacy.

You Will Know Them by Their Fruits.
Matthew 7:16

You may have found yourself wondering recently, “What’s with ol’ Albert Mohler? Does he still go around saying painfully stupid things all the time?”

Yes. In 2016, Mohler rightly recognized that Donald Trump is a thoroughly repellent human being and refused to support him. What do you know? After …

• Family separations

• The failed pandemic response

• Thousands of lies

• The utter destruction of American credibility

• Cozying-up to dictators and weakening the NATO alliance

• Uninterrupted hostility to the First Amendment, especially freedom of the press

• Grotesque ignorance of the Constitution and the operation of the American government

… Mohler has decided ol’ Donald is his kind of guy.

I’m not making this up: One of America’s most prominent Holy Men just announced that he’s cool with Trump.

But in a lengthy video recorded on Monday, Mohler, who is president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, said he plans to vote for Trump in 2020 and for the Republican presidential candidates for the rest of his life, unless the party changes its platform.

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“Whoever has theologians’ blood in his veins, sees all things in a distorted and dishonest perspective to begin with.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, §9

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Mohler argued in the video that conservative Christians should vote based on a party’s view on abortion, Supreme Court nominees and protecting religious liberty. He said former vice president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, had character issues for reversing his position on the Hyde Amendment, a provision barring the use of federal funds for abortion.

Character issues! The jokes write themselves …

Never forget this: The incandescent hypocrisy of Albert Mohler et. al. is the truth about the Evangelical Right; this hypocrisy and dishonesty is who they really are. They are hostile to American ideals, they are malicious, they hate science — and Donald Trump is their hero.

As the pandemic drags on and one public official after another promises to “follow the science,” I find myself recalling this passage from Galt’s speech in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

Whatever else they fought about, it was against man’s mind that all your moralists have stood united. It was man’s mind that their schemes and systems were intended to despoil and destroy. Now choose to perish or to learn that the anti-mind is the anti-life.

As church after church makes itself the locus of regional outbreaks — and one idiot, howling, bellowing preacher after another dies of the disease — it appears clear to me that Rand knew what she was talking about.

Some related thoughts, in no particular order.

• Good for the governors. It is science, not thoughts and prayers, that is going to find a route back to something resembling normalcy.

• It galls me something fierce when I think of scarce resources being consumed to save nitwits who deliberately exposed themselves to an often-fatal sickness — as smart, hard-working nurses, EMT’s, doctors, police, et cetera, do without.

• When this is all over, don’t forget the needless suffering caused by Godly fools. The anti-mind really is the anti-life, and I’m not kidding when I talk about death-wish theology.

Because real [name of religion] put [insert deity’s name here] first, and everybody else can make do with the leftovers.

This is the same thing the Moonies preach, and the Scientologists preach, and the Nazi’s in the 1930s preached, and the same thing preached by every other cult that has ever fouled the earth. It takes a failure of both brains and character to passively listen to this sewage. Bah.