The news has to do with the ongoing revelations of massive sexual abuse in the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). The most recent and comprehensive revelations were publicized in a report released this month by an independent investigating committee; however, this is by no means the first report of sexual misconduct and rape by clergy and members among the Southern Baptists. (See this also.) To me, the most notable case of Southern Baptist sexual misconduct concerns Paul Pressler, a retired Texas judge and Republican Party operative who figured prominently in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. It has been revealed that during Pressler's most active political periods, he was also raping boys in his church youth group, and that he was soliciting sex from adult men. (He is by no means the only SBC pastor guilty of homosexual acts and pedophilia. See Frankie Wiley and John Langworthy also.) Paul Pressler had marketed himself as a champion of conservative Christian family values, which brings up a very interesting point that I will address shortly. But before I address that point, let me add an item of news which falls on the heterosexual side of the rape/abuse line, namely, that many female victims of SBC rape were later forced by SBC leadership to get abortions in order to hide the evidence of the crimes committed against the victims.
And now the point I want to make. People who study the history of the intersection of religion and politics in the United States should be well able to trace the means by which the Christian profession was transformed, from 1979 onward, into a political weapon of the Republican Party. The overall strategy was quite simple, consisting of the following elements:
- The loud, strident proclamation that America is in danger of moral decline caused by "liberal" elements and the loss of "family values", particularly those values centering on sexual morality
- The loud, strident proclamation that America is in danger of losing its "liberty" due to threatening outside agents such as the Soviet Union (before the Soviets rolled over and died conveniently in 1989), or Muslims or illegals (who replaced the Soviets as bogeys after the Soviet collapse) or "socialists" (Oops! I mean, sssssssocialistssssss...) (One more parenthesis under this point - Soviet Russia was truly a thug nation, and I do not want to minimize the danger they posed. But they were a gang that couldn't shoot straight much of the time, just like Putin's thug Russia is now.)
- The loud, strident proclamation that only the Republican Party could save America from losing its identity as a "city on a hill", because only the Republicans were willing to openly confess faithfulness to Jesus Christ
- The loud, strident proclamation that the duty of Christians in the United States was therefore to vote Republican and to support Republican solutions to the "crises" being sold to us - solutions which, of course, always involved building more prisons, locking up more people (especially the poor and nonwhite, regardless of whether or not they were actually guilty of any crime), procuring more guns, killing more "enemies", and giving more power to the obscenely rich.
I am ashamed to admit that for many years, I drank that Kool-Aid. But even in my most Kool-Aid-intoxicated state, I had to notice that whenever I saw Republican candidates for office, they always seemed to be a "disease cure" that had massive undesirable side-effects. For while the so-called "Christians" who handed out their so-called "Christian voter guides" to people of color like me always told us that we needed to vote for their candidates so that they might "save America from moral decline", closer observation always revealed that these candidates pushed policies designed to murder and oppress the poor and the nonwhite in this country. Yet we were told that we needed to bear with these side effects because of the much greater importance of the disease these candidates were ostensibly seeking to "cure," the "great issues of our time" which these candidates were promising to address.
The ongoing revelations of ongoing sexual abuse - not only in the SBC, but throughout most of mainstream American evangelicalism - are yet one more proof that all of the assertions of the American Religious Right are utter crap, to borrow a phrase from Liu Cixin.
Listen up, white American evangelicals. Your real message to all the rest of us is that God supposedly chose you from the foundation of the world to rule all the earth, and that He chose all the rest of us to be your punching bags, your doormats, your slaves, and your trash cans. The reasons you offer for this supposed choice are that you are supposedly morally superior to everyone else, and that therefore God has granted you the right to re-enact the violent conquest by ancient Israel of the land of Canaan - except that nowadays, you take the place of the "people of promise" and that gives you the right to use the rest of us for target practice in order to "punish us for our evil." However, you're just as evil as the people you want to kill. Your real agenda is and always has been white supremacy over the entire earth. The "side effects" the rest of us suffered from voting for your candidates were always your real aim. This is why you have the gall to tell us that we need to vote for your political candidates who promise to stamp out homosexuality even while you secretly practice the very sin you condemn. This is why there will always be an avenue for abortion in the United States even if Roe vs Wade is overturned, because when your pastors rape each other's wives and daughters, you will always need some means of destroying the evidence of your crimes. This is why you so zealously supported the presidency of a serial sex offender, serial adulterer, and serial crook named Donald John Trump.
And this is why you have lost all legitimacy with me. Believe me, the loss has been a long time coming. In 2006 I first began to see through you, and your support of Donald Trump was merely the icing on a poisonous cake. Today, instead of attending any of your churches, I have done some housecleaning and some private Bible reading of my own, and I think I'll sit in my backyard and enjoy the sunshine while I make out my schedule for next week. But I'll never again listen to any of your sermons. Do you want to help the proclamation of the Gospel of Christ? Then shut up. Just. Shut. Up.
