The Billboard Blitz Continues

 

One of many evangelical billboards which have sprung

up lately in my city...

I have stated several times in this blog that I am a Bible-believing Christian who seeks to follow the New Testament.  However, that does not mean that I support everyone and everything that is called "Christian" nowadays in the United States.  One of the assertions which I have made in this blog over the last five or so years is that the sort of "Christianity" embodied in white American evangelicalism has nothing to do with doing to others what one would wish to be done to oneself, nor does it have anything to do with loving one's neighbor or providing material help to those who are in material need.  Rather, the words and deeds of white American evangelicalism show that these evangelicals have simply made themselves into a tool for amassing secular earthly economic, political, and cultural power.  White American evangelicalism has become an expression of national and ethnic narcissism, a mere civic religion designed to bolster the power of one particular tribe and to justify the bloody deeds which that tribe has done in its bid to Make Itself Great.  (Maybe it was never really anything more than that!)

One of the ways in which white American evangelicalism has made itself a political tool is by its evil marriage to the Republican Party and to those political parties to the right of the Republicans.  The white American evangelical/Protestant church has repeatedly asserted over the last several decades that the Republican Party is the party of "godliness" and that it is the duty of Christians to vote Republican, to salute the Flag, and to be rabid patriots.  Thus it has been interesting to see the appearance of billboards such as the one pictured at the side of one of the streets in my town - especially during this election season.  Like the spread of smallpox pustules, the growth of mold colonies, or the sprouting of mushrooms, these billboards have become ever more numerous during the year and a half from the time I first noticed their appearance until now.

Most of these billboards are at least as shrill as the one in the picture, although a few outdo even this.  I am thinking of one such billboard next to a freeway in my town, which reads something like "Where are you going? HEAVEN or HELL?"  I can agree in the abstract with some of the messages of these billboards.  For instance, I do believe that Jesus is alive and ascended to the right hand of God.  However, I cringe when I hear this statement shouted shrilly from a billboard.  To me, the greatest evidence of the risen Christ is that those who claim to be His followers are being transformed into decent people.  Being shouted at by a billboard is very much less than convincing - especially when so many of the shouters who pay for such billboards have been caught in all kinds of scandals and have backed all sorts of really creepy political candidates.

But shouting billboards do tell us one thing.  They tell us that the shouters likely have lots of money.  To shout from a billboard for one month costs around $1200 for a small billboard of the type typically seen next to a four-lane urban street.  If you want to keep shouting and you want to use the same billboard, monthly costs after the first month run around $1000.  That means that to blast a message from a billboard for an entire year costs over $12,000.  Multiply that by fifteen or twenty billboards and you can see that someone somewhere is paying serious folding money to do his shouting!  And the cost increases even more if the shouter uses large, multi-panel billboards for his shouting.  I don't have an exact figure for the number of billboards now being used for the religious billboard blitz in my town, but I can imagine that the cost for this year alone will run at least $500,000.  If the same sort of billboard blitz is taking place elsewhere in the U.S., that means that the backers of this campaign have deep pockets.  

Yet that money may largely be going to waste, as the burgeoning number of exvangelicals, "Nones" and churchless Christians in America indicates.  I for instance have not gone to church since March 2020.  It may be that American evangelical civic religion is turning into a broken weapon.

Random Sunday Ramblings, Part 2

As readers can guess, I'm still in the midst of a busy period, and am trying hard to tame my schedule.  So today's post will be short.  But I want to mention that I just finished listening to the latest installment of the podcast "In God's Name: An Unseen Cult."  This latest episode dealt with the abuse perpetrated against women by the fringe group known as the Assemblies of George Geftakys.  It is well known that the Assemblies largely disintegrated after the revelations of the horrible domestic violence perpetrated by George Geftakys' son David and the fact that George and his lieutenants covered up this abuse for over two decades.  But the latest episode of the "In God's Name" podcast also sheds light on a number of cases of domestic abuse among rank-and-file members of the Assemblies that did not at first attract notice because they blended into the toxic cultural miasma of these groups.

It's interesting to note how the Bible was used to justify this toxic culture, as well as to note how extreme even some of these rank-and-file cases became.  I can imagine how much of an aversion to the Bible many women might now have after suffering the long-term experience of a group such as this.  I am not a woman but a man, and yet as a Black man I can tell you that over the last few years I too have struggled at times with the same aversion.  The aversion is triggered by the experience of encountering prominent people behind pulpits who waved Bibles in our faces and said (in so many words, even though they would deny that this is actually what they were saying) "THIS BOOK SAYS that God has given US the RIGHT and the MISSION and the MANDATE to MAKE OURSELVES GREAT by trashing everyone we can get our hands on!  Therefore it is the WILL OF GOD for you who are not of our tribe to willingly submit yourselves to us so that we can turn you into our toilet paper, our vomit buckets, our spittoons, our diapers, our doormats on which we can wipe our feet, our beasts of burden, our crates full of china dishes that we can fling against a wall whenever we need to get our angries out, our furniture that we can kick, our clay pigeons, our punching bags!!!"

Regardless of what white evangelicals might say, this has been the message of white American evangelicalism for far too long.  And my, how prominent white evangelicals (and some nonwhite evangelicals who have drunk the same Kool-Aid) have perverted and bastardized Scripture to justify their message and their treatment of the rest of us.  Eventually, however, even the most passive of victims gets tired of being treated like a clay pigeon.  Which is why I'm not attending church today and haven't attended a church since March 2020.  I still read the Bible, as can be seen from the posts I've written for this blog over the last six or seven years.  But I'm figuring things out for myself.  And I have abandoned treating other people like clay pigeons.  I am now ashamed of the times in which I was guilty of dishing out such treatment to others, especially women.

One last note: as has been mentioned frequently, the Assemblies are by no means the only misogynistic conservative evangelical group to appear in American culture.  According to a recently discovered source, Grace Community Church in Southern California has been obstructing the efforts of women in its congregation to obtain protection from abusive husbands.  Grace Community Church is pastored by John MacArthur, a man who has publicly denied that the Bible contains any mandate for social justice toward the poor and those who are not of the dominant culture.  MacArthur seems to be yet another evangelical doofus who has perverted the Gospel of good news for the poor into a message of dinner time for the rich and powerful.

Introducing a New Podcast - "In God's Name: An Unseen Cult"

Today's post will be short.  I still owe a continuation of my series of posts on precarity.  I'm in So. Cal. right now helping an elderly family member with cognitive decline issues.  Perhaps on the plane ride home I can finish the post on frontiers on artificial intelligence...

But I do want to let readers know about an upcoming new podcast series focused on the experience some of us (including myself) had in the evangelical fringe cult of the Assemblies of George Geftakys.  The podcast is being produced by someone who was born into the cult and who left as a young child along with her family just before the Assemblies collapsed.  In recent years she has applied her university education to analyzing our cult experience and shedding light on the implications of that experience.  The name of the podcast is "In God's Name: An Unseen Cult" and the first episode will be out later this month.  

This podcast is one of several podcasts dealing with evangelical/Protestant cults and groups with cultic tendencies which I have discovered over the last few weeks.  To those former members of the Geftakys cult whose primary focus has been on the Geftakys cult experience, I would just point out that many of the things we encountered there - erasure of personal boundaries, hyper-competitiveness in seeking "ministry" positions, forced communal living, long meetings, excessive busy-ness, and child abuse - have by now spread far and wide throughout mainstream evangelicalism.  Thus there has been a multiplication of  podcasts and related books essays, and news articles which examine such groups as YWAM (Youth With A Mission), Teen Mania (now defunct, and similar to YWAM in its tactics and the trauma it caused), the continuing menace of cultic front groups on college campuses, the proliferation of teachings on child rearing that encourage child abuse (such as the books by Michael and Debi Pearl, J. Richard Fugate, James Dobson, and Gary Ezzo), the continuing menace and harm caused by Dominionism, the prevalence of sexual and domestic violence in evangelical churches, and the excesses of the American "troubled teen industry" - an "industry" which is for the most part extremely lacking in governmental regulation and oversight.

That such groups and phenomena are associated so strongly with conservative white American evangelicalism/Protestantism is not surprising.  These groups and their associated phenomena of asserting abusive control over those whose power of resistance has been taken away are a symptom of a larger problem within American society.  That these groups, teachings, and leaders are proliferating now is a sign of the insecurity of the dominant culture and of its willingness to hold onto its dominant position at any cost.  It is vital to understand how this expression of white American evangelicalism is affecting the broader society, and how both this expression and the larger society will evolve as reality continues to impose limits on the unrestrained exercise of American evangelical power.

The Flight Of The Tarnished Superheroes

I've been following Cosmic Connie's blog Whirled Musings lately, and I came across a series of posts about a movie titled Sound of Freedom which was released by Angel Studios this summer.  Angel Studios is an arm of the American evangelical media industry, an industry about which I made a few comments in a recent post.  

The movie purports to document the efforts of Tim Ballard, a Mormon and former employee of the Department of Homeland Security who supposedly formed his own special private organization in order to rescue children from child-trafficking rings.  Both Ballard and the organization he founded are unabashed supporters of the Rethuglican (er, I mean, "Republican") Party and Donald Trump (who "protected" Mexican migrant children at the southern border by violently ripping them from the arms of their parents and throwing them into detention centers where some of them died).  The lead actor in Sound of Freedom is also a rabid Trump supporter and QAnon spokesperson.

The movie is an example of the longstanding strategy of the American right wing, in finding a group of people whom they can brand as monsters while claiming that the champions of the Right (and only they) can and will effectually deal with the monster they have identified.  Now I fully agree with those who say that the present operators of human trafficking rings (especially those which sexually exploit children) are monsters.  But for the Right to claim nowadays that its members are the pure and holy fighters of these monsters is laughable, especially when we see how the recent exposures of the sins of the Right (especially those of the evangelical/Protestant/religious members of the Right) have so severely damaged its credibility.  

This definitely applies to the makers and financial backers of the movie Sound of Freedom.  Let me summarize some of the points made in Connie's posts:

1. Both Tim Ballard and the organization he founded are guilty of factual distortions in their presentation of the problem of child trafficking and of the efforts of their organization in fighting it.
2. These factual distortions have actually made it harder for legitimate governmental organizations to fight child trafficking.
3. Some of the financial backers of Sound of Freedom are themselves involved in child trafficking or have groomed underage minors for sex or have trafficked in illicit drugs.
4. Some of these backers have also committed fraud against government programs.  Among these is Andrew McCubbins, the executive producer for Sound of Freedom, who pleaded guilty to Medicare fraud in the amount of at least $89 million (one source says $100 million) in September 2020, and who was indicted later in 2020 along with other defendants for defrauding the U.S. Government of an additional $4.5 billion in medical billing.  McCubbins has not yet been sentenced and has not yet gone to jail.

If you want all the details concerning these points, please read Connie's posts.  

I guess moviemaking is politics by other means.  (Didn't Clausewitz say that? ... Oh, ... he said it about something other than movies.  My bad!)  But here we are, not even out of the dog days of Summer 2023 and election year campaigning has already begun, courtesy of a movie made by the American religious Right.  As I have frequently already said, the American religious Right is interested in religion solely as a means for advancing white supremacy.  They themselves have no intention of obeying the New Testament.  This is obvious when we see how the white male defenders of "traditional morality" who come from the American Right keep getting caught engaging in pedophilia, fornication, adultery and homosexual behavior themselves.

And this is but one reason why I haven't been to church since March 2020.  Let me be clear about this.  I know that everyone has issues, and that anyone who wants to become a decent person will find himself struggling with his own besetting sins.  That is a tragic consequence of our fallen condition.  I also know that I can't point to others and say that I'm any better than them.  All I can say is that whatever our personal demons, we can band together to support each other in leaving those demons behind.  But when you willfully and deliberately use religion - especially the Bible and the name of Christ - as a political tool for promoting the supremacy of your own people and as a justification to enslave or trash or oppress me - simply because I am not a member of your tribe or skin color or ethnicity - then I say God damn you.  When you portray yourselves as perfect and the perfect upholders of God's holy Law in order to justify your continued oppression of people who haven't done anything to you, I say, to hell with you.  May God punish you not only for not leaving your personal demons behind but also for your hypocrisy in claiming that you and you only are the sole defenders (and thus the sole beneficiaries) of all that is good in the world.  God damn you to hell.

FOTF Is At It Again ...

Focus On The Family (FOTF) is at it again - that is, they are spamming people who don't want their media offerings and who don't support their organization.  FOTF is an American right-wing evangelical organization that has sold its soul to support the Rethuglican - er, I mean, "Republican" party.  On Monday of this week they sent me an email telling me how I could "save children".  I called up their Colorado office and told them in no uncertain terms to take me off their mailing list.  I thought they had agreed to do so, but today I found another email from them in my inbox.  They claim to be a Christian organization, but I guess they have chosen to ignore those parts of the Good Book that say that we're not supposed to tell lies...

By the way, last year the Federal Election Commission allowed political advertising emails to bypass automated spam filters of most email service providers.  This policy change was due to pressure from the Republican Party.  

A Failure Of Performance Art

 

A billboard I recently saw in my city

Lately I've been reminiscing about my years in the abusive church known as the Assembly, and some of the strange teachings and practices which were pushed by this church.  The church I was involved in was modeled in many ways after the Plymouth Brethren pattern, although our head honcho denied that we were an exact copy but he insisted that we were a new and improved model.  (Note to any rabid PB's out there: A. Don't sue me.  You won't get much out of me beside two middle-aged neutered cats.  B.  Don't sue me.  There's already plenty of scathing criticism of you all - including the criticisms voiced by Garrison Keillor, former host of A Prairie Home Companion.  C. Don't sue me.  If you do, the angels of God will put a massive hurt on you on the Day of Judgment!) 

In retrospect, one of the weirder elements of our doctrine and practice had to do with our attitude toward instrumental music in our Assembly meetings.  You see, we firmly believed that in our worship, Bible study, and prayer meetings, any and all hymns sung were to be sung a cappella.  That is, they were to be sung with voices only - with no other instruments allowed.  This was because of a rigid (and frankly erroneous) interpretation of Ephesians 5:19 pushed by one of the granddaddies of Brethrenism, a certain John Nelson Darby, who believed that the presence and use of musical instruments during group worship was a sign of "worldliness".  However, we did believe in the use of musical instruments as a tool of "Gospel outreach" - that is, our attempts to evangelize (or proselytize?) the lost, also known as the "unchurched" in modern evangelical-speak.

Here things get interesting.  Before I met this group, I had been in the military, and had attended a number of live band performances at various bars near my post.  Thus I had acquired a taste for live music.  So when I encountered one of the "outreach bands" of the Assembly at a college campus, I was intrigued.  That bloody band was one of the means by which the Assembly hooked me.  But after a while in the Assembly, I discovered that although the use of instrumental music as a tool of outreach was allowed and encouraged, there was a bit of contention among the leaders and wanna-be leaders about the styles of music that were allowable in our "outreach."  So the Assembly band which I first encountered evolved gradually from 70's acoustic-tinged folk rock (think CSNY, Joni Mitchell, the Eagles before Joe Walsh, or some of the lighter offerings of Jackson Browne or James Taylor), eventually settling on what can only be described as a form of soft country rock.  The countrified phase lasted until some teens from one of the Assemblies in the Midwest formed their own hard-driving high-energy rock group.  (Think of Creed as an example of what these teens sounded like.)  They managed to achieve something that our band had lost the ability to do - namely, that they were able to get passers-by to actually stop and listen to them.  This threatened the narcissism of the long-time leader of the outreach band in my home Assembly, so he responded by amping up his band's performances and pushing his teenage kids to form their own hard-rocking outreach band.  Naturally he made his son the leader of our teen band - an example of living vicariously through one's kids - and talked of them as if they were in the same league as such well-known CCM (Contemporary Christian music) bands as Jars of Clay.

Our music-making for heathen audiences largely came to an end when the Assemblies fell apart in 2003 after the revelations of the criminal activity of our head honcho and his family.  But it is interesting to consider the message we sought to communicate through our outreach, as well as the strategic assumptions behind that message and our delivery of it.  For that message and its strategic assumptions have a parallel among many of the thought leaders in the larger realm of American evangelicalism.

The Message: 

The message we ostensibly sought to communicate was the message of the claims of Christ, namely that He is the eternal Son of God and that God gave Him on the Cross as a sacrifice for our sins so that everyone who believes in Him might be justified from sin and receive eternal life.  We preached that this justification was to be obtained by faith alone, and not by any attempts of our own to do good works.  We preached that this message demanded a response from those who heard it, and that an acceptable response had the following two elements: repentance from sin and receiving Christ as Lord.  Now I must say that although I have said strong things against white American evangelicalism, I am yet a Christian.  Moreover, I would categorize myself largely (but not entirely) as a fundamentalist.  So I have no problem with the Gospel message as I have just now summarized it.  However, I must say that that Gospel has mutated over the last few decades in American society.  (The message has always seemed to suffer from certain distortions as it passed through the lens of American culture.)  For repentance has been confined to merely giving up certain fleshly indulgences, and not to changing the way we relate to each other on a societal level, or the way we relate to money and earthly power. And actually receiving Christ as Lord - as Someone whose words we actually intend to obey - has been replaced by mere assent to "Judeo-Christian (or American) values" as defined by mainstream evangelical preachers. 

Now there are many motives for preaching this message, but in the United States, the motive among evangelicals in recent decades has been threefold, namely, to "reclaim America for God", to "reclaim Christian cultural values", and to "re-establish America as a Christian nation."  This shifting of motive from spiritual transformation to the building of secular, earthly political and cultural power for a certain privileged group is one of the prime causes of the mutation of the Gospel message over time.  

The strategy of delivery:

One of the key strategic assumptions behind our delivery of the message was first and foremost that the Word of God has intrinsic power in itself, apart from any human input.  Therefore, it is necessary only to proclaim the Word in order to fulfill the duty of preaching the Gospel, for the Word is able to do its work all by itself.  Bible verses such as Jeremiah 23:29 ("Is not My word like fire?" declares the LORD ...) and Hebrews 4:12 were used as proof texts for this point of view.  (However, one danger of such a viewpoint is that it neglects those parts of the New Testament which speak of the power of a good example and proclaim that preachers of the Word need to practice what they preach!)

The outcome of this strategic assumption can be seen in the multitude of inventive means which evangelicals, fundamentalists, and similarly-minded Protestants devised for the proclamation of their message.  These means have included preaching (obviously), in churches, Gospel halls, city parks, street corners, circus tents, and other places where people congregate.  But they have also included Gospel tracts and other printed matter, bumper stickers, billboards, T-shirts, movies, music CD's (and later, MP3's), live musical performances, "inspirational" or "faith-based" fiction, and other examples of artistic expression.  The arts have especially attracted the interest of those who have sought to inject "Christian" or "Judeo-Christian" cultural values into our society, as exemplified by a book written in the 1990's by Bob Briner titled Roaring Lambs.  Briner's book challenged those who call themselves Christians in the U.S. to make their mark in the arenas of moviemaking, television, other visual arts, and literature.  (Indeed, I seem to remember reading somewhere that his book was one of the inspiring influences that led to the formation of the band Jars of Clay.  But I can't find the exact reference to this, so don't quote me.)  Thus the "Christian culture industry" has received a massive boost over the years because of this focus.

Another key strategic assumption has concerned the response of the hearers of the message.  It has been assumed that if these hearers reject the message delivered, it is because of a spiritual or intellectual defect.  The assumption of a spiritual defect is too frequently made by those evangelicals or fundamentalists who are too lazy to actually get to know and understand their audience.  Thus their knee-jerk reaction is to automatically say that those who reject their message do so because "they are in spiritual darkness!" Those who assume that the rejection is due to an intellectual failure on the part of their hearers assume that the hearers are held captive by deeply formulated philosophies such as secularism, Marxism, post-modernism, or similar doctrines.  Evangelicals who assume such motives in those of their hearers who reject the evangelical message fail to realize that most people don't usually have time to think hard about various secular philosophies in detail.  (After all, most of us are too busy working like dogs!  We don't have time to read books ;) )   

Such assumptions have not adequately equipped the mainstream white American evangelical/Protestant church for the present times, in which many, many people are abandoning evangelicalism and church attendance, and some are even abandoning faith altogether - a time which has seen the birth of a new term, namely, exvangelical - a time in which the ranks of these exvangelicals are swelling.  (For an example of this, please listen to a recent podcast interview of one of the former members of the Assemblies I used to belong to.)  So let's close with a brief consideration of these times and the reasons for the people who are rejecting evangelicalism in these times.

Flattening, Breakdown and Failure

As I mentioned earlier in this post, the Gospel message has undergone a certain "flattening" in American culture.  This is seen in the things that the Bible put into the message that modern conservative evangelical/fundamentalist preachers have chosen to leave out.  For instance, there's the fact that the fear of God is seen in the way we treat each other - Job 22:6-9; Job 31:16-28.  And that the love of God is seen in the way we treat each other - 1 John 3:16-20; 1 John 4:20-21.  And that racism is sin, because it is an act of murder - 1 John 3:14-15 ("Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer; and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.")  And that God is opposed to the rich - James 5:1-6; Luke 6:24 ("Woe to you who are rich ...").  These are the things which God put into His message which people like Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr. and John MacArthur and other ecclesiastical sycophant followers of Trump have left out.  Meanwhile they have condemned things which God never condemned - things such as critical race theory, "woke-ism", social justice, and every other admonition to them that they should treat other people the same way they themselves want to be treated.  

This has led to a certain unpalatability of both these messengers and their message.  Indeed, from 2016 onward, these messengers have become not only unpalatable but downright nauseating.  I mentioned earlier in this post the need for the messenger of the Gospel to practice what he preaches.  This reminds me of a certain part of the third book in Liu Cixin's Three Body (三体, "San Ti") trilogy in which the people of Earth were tasked with configuring their society in such a way that any alien observers from outer space would be able to see that Earth humans posed no threat to the rest of the universe. The nature of the problem was such that this message (a "cosmic safety notice") could not be delivered by words, but only by actions.  (That part of his third book was where I first encountered the term "performance art", by the way.  Also, I'm not going to tell you how things worked out for the humans.  You'll have to read the books.)   This plot twist was a clever way of pointing out that one can learn much more about what kind of people one is dealing with by looking at what they do than by listening to what they say.  

This point is amplified by another book to which I was recently exposed, namely Haruki Murakami's Novelist As A Vocation.  In his description of the violence which ultimately ruined the student protests in Japan in the 1960's, Murakami wrote, “Uplifting slogans and beautiful messages might stir the soul, but if they weren't accompanied by moral power, they amounted to no more than a litany of empty words... Words have power. Yet that power must be rooted in truth and justice. Words must never stand apart from those principles.”  This is obviously true not only of secular social movements, but of white American evangelicalism and Protestantism over the last several decades.

That the words of American evangelicals have largely proven to be empty can be seen in the racism of the white American evangelical church, its misogyny as seen by the staggering levels of spousal abuse (see this, this, and this for instance), its staggering levels of child abuse, its hypocrisy (as seen in its promotion of religious leaders and political candidates who claim to stand for morality yet wind up getting caught with their pants down), its violence (as seen in the "Christian nationalists" armed to the teeth who stormed state capitols during the COVID lockdowns in 2020 and who participated in the U.S. Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021), and its greed.  

Indeed, if we look at what evangelicals actually do instead of what they say, we see that white American evangelicals (and the sons of Gehenna whom they have spawned in places like Brazil and Australia) care only about amassing secular earthly power to themselves.  The only thing they want is dominion, domination, and control.  Their religious profession is merely a tool to achieve this goal.  Their lust for power over others is seen in the ways they treat everyone who falls into their clutches.  It is seen in their treatment of their own women and children.

And this is what will lead eventually to their downfall and eventual loss of all earthly power.  I am thinking of the power of shared stories to illuminate the true character and nature of abuse.  I am thinking of the power of sunlight to disinfect dirty laundry.  I am thinking especially of the power of exposes, of scandals revealed, of things like the Shiny Happy People documentary of the abuse that took place in the family of Rethuglicans Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar even as they paraded their family on national TV as an example of the perfect American family.  Truly, "...there is nothing covered up that will not be revealed, and hidden that will not be known." (Luke 12:2)

It will be interesting to see how evangelical power-holders react and respond to the dwindling of their power in the years to come.  Suffice it to say that I expect that their response will complicate our attempts as a society to deal with issues of encroaching limits and the erosion of economic, political and military power in general.  

Another Expose of An Evangelical Cult

Here is a link to a couple of interviews of another former member of the Assemblies of George Geftakys, who describes the horrible upbringing she experienced as a child of one of the main leaders in this group.  The interviewer is also a survivor of the Assemblies.  These interviews were very interesting to me because of my former involvement in this unhealthy group.  They are also interesting because of how they illustrate the influence of bad men from the toxic evangelical mainstream, men such as James Dobson.  As I said a while back, all the assertions of the American Religious Right are utter crap.  A caution about these interviews: they contain strong language and deal with triggering experiences.

Why Is Focus On The Family Sending Spam Email To People Who Don't Want It?

It's odd, but over the last two weeks I have received a number of spam emails from Focus On The Family, a right-wing, white evangelical organization whose leaders were vocal supporters of Donald Trump and whose leaders have also been friendly toward Vladimir Putin in the past.  I have tried to unsubscribe from their emails, but this does not seem to be doing any good.  So let me use this blog to send FOTF a message: I reject you and your toxic and false brand of religion.  Please stop sending emails to people who don't want to hear from you.  You'll never convince me to vote Republican.

Gantry Collapse

Gantry (noun): "...an overhead bridge-like structure supporting equipment such as a crane, signals, or cameras." - Wikipedia.

Gantry (as in Elmer Gantry): the surname of the protagonist in Elmer Gantry, a satirical novel by Sinclair Lewis concerning a Methodist minister of the American Midwest during the 1920's.

The threat of American white supremacist theocracy was pushed to the forefront of the consciousness of many people after the overturning of Roe V. Wade in June of this year.  But the roots of the threat have existed for a rather long time, as seen in the teachings and activities of Rousas Rushdoony, Abraham Kuyper, Gary North, Pat Robertson, Tim LaHaye, George Grant (one of whose buddies is a certain contemporary religious musician named Michael Card), and others of like character.  When seen from a historical perspective, 2022 is then simply the culmination of a long process.  I find it natural to want to consider, or even to make, predictions regarding its ultimate success or failure.  My personal prediction is that the white evangelical/Protestant supremacist experiment will eventually fail - not only in the United States, but elsewhere, in such places as Brazil under Bolsonaro for instance.  (Here I find myself at odds with the predictions contained in books like The Handmaid's Tale.)  Why do I say this?  Because according to the Good Book, white supremacist theocracy is evil in the sight of God, even the God Whom the white supremacists claim to worship.  Therefore, the outworkings of damnation are already propagating through white evangelical America and through those elements of white evangelicalism that are aligned with the Global Far Right.  The ultimate end state of white supremacist theocracy is therefore failure, regardless of the path taken to that ultimate end state - rather like the result of a line integral taken over a conservative vector field.  But let's see if we can explore and trace some possible paths for this failure, for these outworkings of damnation - not as wanna-be prophets, but as empiricists making educated guesses.  As always, take these guesses with a grain of salt.

First, the theological perspective.  As I have mentioned in previous posts (here, here, and here, for instance), the American Religious Right has declared that the United States is in great need of a spiritual change, and that the proof of this need is America's tolerance of certain sins which the preachers from the Right hold up as being worse than all other sins.  Therefore the American Religious Right has told all the rest of us that in order to save America from moral ruin, we must vote for "godly" politicians who will preserve America as a "Christian" nation by passing and enforcing "Christian" laws.  My previous writings on this subject have stated my belief that the political strategy of the American Religious Right is the wrong approach to trying to create spiritual change in society, and that the New Testament proves this approach to be wrong.  (Read the Epistle to the Galatians, for instance.)  I have also mentioned that spiritual change is not the actual goal of the American Religious Right, but rather, economic, military, and political supremacy for one group of people at the expense of all the other people on earth.  

So then it is natural to ask what actual spiritual change looks like according to the New Testament.  Let's look first at what this change looks like on a personal level, as illustrated in Luke 19:1-10.  This passage concerns Zacchaeus the Jewish tax-collector.  A bit of backstory: by the time of this incident, the nation of Israel had long since been conquered by the Roman Empire.  The custom of the Romans toward the subjects of their conquered territories was to delegate certain functions of the state to private contractors.  Thus the collection of taxes in the Roman provinces was contracted to wealthy private citizens who bid for the right to serve as official tax collectors.  These private individuals frequently cheated the people from whom taxes were collected, and got filthy rich in the process.  Thus when we first encounter Zacchaeus, the Scripture notes that he was rich.  The Scripture also says that he was a sinner.  But by the end of Zacchaeus' encounter with Christ, the Lord said of him, "Today salvation has come to this house, becaus he, too, is a son of Abraham..."  In other words, Zacchaeus had been converted from being a cheat and a rascal.  How do we know that he had truly repented and believed?  Because he gave back all the money he had taken by cheating.  The spiritual change in Zacchaeus was seen in what he did as a result of his encounter with Christ.  Spiritual change brings a change in the things people do and in the things they stop doing.  And this change covers much more than just repenting of sexual sin.  According to the Scriptures, God wants to deliver people from cheating, from greed, and from committing murder as well.  

How then do societies experience this change?  It happens as that change is propagated from one person to another.  It starts with people who have experienced that change as a result of an encounter with Christ, and it is propagated as these people encounter others who can see the incarnation of Christ in the behavior of the people who have experienced spiritual change.  In other words, the change is propagated through believers in Christ - servants of the New Testament - who practice what they preach.  As that change spreads, it changes the society.  But it does so by changing the people of the society.  That spiritual change results in a change in what societies do and what they don't do.  For an example of large groups of people choosing to stop doing things, we can look at Acts 19, where entire communities gave up practicing magic and praying to idols (thus provoking a bit of civil unrest from people who made money from making idol statues!).  But for an example of large groups of people choosing to do things they had never done before, we can look at Acts 2 and Acts 4, in which rich people who became believers in Christ began to sell all their possessions and share them with the poor and with anyone who might have need.  As Acts 4:32-36 says, "And the multitude of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and not one was saying that anything belonging to him was his own; but all things were common property to them...For there was not a needy person among them, for all who were owners of land or houses would sell them and bring the prices of the things being sold and lay them at the apostles' feet; and they would be distributed to each, as any had need."  However, these societal changes are but the result of an inward spiritual change.  The spiritual change must come first.

When we look at the radical nature of this spiritual change, at its radical end point of producing communities of people who truly and practically and radically love their fellow human beings as they love themselves, we can easily see that the American Religious Right (and its evangelical offshoots in places like Brazil) have no interest in this kind of change.  Indeed, if such change were to occur nowadays, the Right would accuse the instigators of such change of being "ssssocialistsssss!" and would bitterly fight against them.  Trying to produce spiritual change by political action and passing laws is completely backward from God's methods.  The white American evangelical/Protestant church should know this, yet they continue to try to seize political power under the pretext of promoting godly laws.  But the evidence of their own moral failure shows that they really don't care about morality or spirituality, but simply seek to use dirty tricks - including corrupting the Word of God - to obtain political, economic, and military supremacy.  Because the real aim and goal of the American Religious Right is to turn religion into a tool of earthly secular empire, the New Testament declares that they are under a curse (Galatians 1:8-9).  They are thus destined to fail.

Why this failure?  Or, to put it another way, what are the ways in which this failure may propagate? To answer that question. let's zoom out from the spiritual to consider historical and literary perspectives.  On its most basic big-picture level (even before we get to theology), those who want to use religion in any way as a tool of earthly empire are trying to get the rest of us to swallow a certain kind of belief.  The tenets of this belief could be described as a "sales value proposition" served up to us by the missionaries of such a religion.  What is the "sales value proposition" which the white church has historically offered to the rest of the world?  It can be summed up as follows:

• That we should believe in a god who has decreed that one group of people should rule and dominate the world, subjugating and/or dispossessing all other nations on earth because the favored nation is supposedly pure while all the rest of us are defective.  
• That we should believe that when this supposedly favored nation proves by its deeds that it is no more righteous, no more pure, no better than any of the rest of us, it should receive all of the forgiving grace of its supposed "jesus" who dispenses that grace in the form of "Mulligans" for bad behavior (see this also) which serve much the same function as the indulgences which the Catholic Church used to dispense to wealthy penitents.  
• That we should believe that the god whom the missionaries of the supposedly favored nation preach has decreed that all the rest of us should be punished forever for our imperfections, whether those perfections are real or only imagined by the members of the favored nation, and that this punishment should consist of enslavement and extermination of us by the members of the favored nation.  No grace, no "mulligans" for us!  Rather, zero-tolerance, three-strikes, let's-build-a-wall, etc.   
• That it is supposedly the "Christian" duty of us who are not of the favored people to submit to such a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose god and his missionaries, and that we should not complain about or attempt to resist our lot in life.  

Given the cultural invasion which we the nonwhite and non-Anglo peoples have experienced, and given the fact that this Kool-Aid was forced down the throats of many of us from childhood, it is understandable that many of us started out believing it.  But now many, many of us are awakening from our enforced intoxication.  How do the missionaries of the supposedly favored people think such a "sales value proposition" is viewed by us in this present day?  You may as well offer to put a full toilet bowl (or chamber pot, for those who want to be more portable and old-fashioned) on each of our doorsteps!  Who in his right mind would accept such a proposition?

In other words, sooner or later, people who have been victimized by religion used as a weapon of subjugation will reject that religion, or at least that presentation of religion.  Consider a purely fictional example of this rejection, as seen in the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov.  In the first book of the series, we see the use of a fictional religion to advance the political power of the Galactic Foundation - and we see how in this story, over a period of a hundred years, religion as a tool of empire ceases to be effective because the intended victims of the empire begin to see how religion is being used in the attempt to politically and economically subjugate them.  This is a purely fictitious example, although Asimov himself admitted that he wrote the Foundation books "with a little bit of cribbin' from the works of Edward Gibbon" who was a historian.  Yet it has been repeatedly played out in real life, as seen in the loss of the political power of the Church during the Renaissance and the Reformation.  

It is also seen in the novel Noli Me Tangere by Jose Rizal.  This novel describes how the Catholic Church in the Philippines began to lose its legitimacy due to its own corruption and oppression of the Philippine populace.  This loss of legitimacy was a key factor in the Philippine war of independence that shattered imperial Spanish control of that country.  Consider also the loss of legitimacy of the Catholic Church in Latin America during the 19th and 20th centuries, as Catholic clerics far too frequently sided with European oppressors against the Latin American poor.  Some of this loss of legitimacy shows up in the writings of Latin American novelists who used the literary device of "magic realism" in order to provide disturbing commentary on the role of the Church in the daily lives of poor people in Central and South America.  Consider lastly the documented experiences of missionaries like Pearl S. Buck, whose exposure to the arrogant nationalism of many white missionaries in early 20th century China turned her off to American evangelicalism and led to her writing essays that were sharply critical of American and European missionary efforts in China.  (As a result, she became so controversial that she earned the distinction of having J. Edgar Hoover's FBI create a file on her!)  

Let's zoom in a little more closely on China and India.  Both nations were subjugated and ruthlessly exploited by Anglo-European power.  Thus a "missionary door" was forcibly kicked open to both nations.  Through that door many white missionaries streamed.  What were their motives?  It is sometimes impossible to say directly, yet there is much evidence that many of these missionaries were moved by a narcissistic desire to establish themselves as mini-popes, big shots over the only people on whom they had any power to force themselves.  Thus they became shovers of things down other peoples' throats.  Consider the example of Mr. Beaver in Have We No Rights? by Mabel Williamson, as well as the literary example of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.  But even more, consider what George Orwell says in The Road to Wigan Pier about the reasons why many poor British young men of the "lower upper class" enlisted in the British Foreign Service in the early 20th century.  I suggest that perhaps some of these reasons carried over to those who volunteered for the mission field in those days.  Given such "ministers of the Gospel", it is no wonder that the struggle for liberation from Anglo-European rule in both China and India was led by men who disavowed Christianity.  It is also no surprise that now, in the 21st century, we see that those white missionary agencies which spent so much in labor and money in the previous centuries to establish missions in these countries have almost nothing to show for it.  For these missionary endeavors were but the expression of the neurosis of the dominators in response to the alarms of their conscience concerning the treatment of the dominated.

China and India are but two examples of the way in which peoples who have been oppressed liberate themselves by building their own internal power - both culturally, educationally, and technologically - as they learn to successfully navigate the world of "peer-polity interaction."  Their example is being imitated by nations, communities, and forward-thinking individuals throughout the African continent and other historically nonwhite locales.  These individuals are in the process of crafting their narrative according to their own calling and not the wishes of their would-be oppressors.  Thus in their examination of the Scriptures, they have accurately seen a call to a theology of liberation.  One consequence of this will be the emergence of a world in which peoples and nations will have to be polite toward each other in order to live decently.  In such a world, those who truly want to advance the Gospel will have to obey the dictum of James 3:13 - "Who among you is wise and understanding?  Let him show by his good behavior his deeds in the gentleness of wisdom."  But those who want to twist the Bible into a political tool of empire will find themselves increasingly thwarted, because the rest of the world will refuse to swallow any of that nonsense.  And those who want to dominate their fellow human beings will find that they can do so only at unbearable cost to themselves.

Scapegoat Sins and Denial

Once again, I have a post in the works, but do not have time to finish it.  So today's post will be short.  This post concerns my observations of the attempts by the American White Right to use religion - specifically Christianity - as a tool of earthly political and economic domination.  As one might guess, I think those attempts will ultimately fail, for they are built on an unsustainable foundation.  The un-Scriptural elements of that foundation have been the following assumptions:

• That God has chosen religious white America from the foundation of the world to be the absolute masters of the world.
• That God has therefore given these holders of white power and white supremacy the right to murder and enslave all the rest of us because supposedly we are morally defective while the white supremacists are supposedly morally superior to all the rest of us.
• That the proof of this moral superiority is that religious white America upholds Biblical morality and has certain intellectual beliefs about Jesus while the rest of us do not.
• That the sole sum and substance of Biblical morality consists of being monogamous and heterosexual, and that God is absolutely not concerned about how white supremacists treat the poor and the nonwhite.

A very quick look at the New Testament disproves this last point completely.  For while it is absolutely true that God hates sexual sin, it is also true that white evangelical America would have been guilty of breaking every commandment of God even without sexual sin, as noted in the part of the epistle of James which says "Now if you do not commit adultery, but you do commit murder, you have become a transgressor of the law."  There is also an added difficulty for white evangelicals these days: namely the abundant evidence that white American evangelicalism is guilty of adultery (and much, much more!), as seen by the legions of white evangelical pastors and Republican politicians who have been caught with their pants down (often with members of the same sex) over the last few decades.  The most recent evangelical fiasco involves the ongoing revelations of the crimes and corruption of the political darling of white evangelicals, namely, former U.S. president Donald John Trump, and the ongoing refusal of white evangelicals to admit that they devoted themselves to supporting the presidency of a complete piece of garbage.

But I am thinking now of how impossible it has been for anyone to get white evangelicals to see and admit the error of their ways.  From climate change denialism to chants of "Blue Lives Matter!" to COVID denialism, white evangelicals continue to remain willfully blind.  And when they continue to say that they have been put here on earth to violently punish the evil of other people, yet they refuse to see and punish the evil in their own ranks (Josh Duggar and Dennis Hastert, for instance), the blindness becomes even more willful.

Thus I find it fitting to share a video with you my readers.  I stumbled on it entirely by accident, as it was recommended to me by someone I know.  I'm sure you will see the parallels.

A Few Thoughts On The Death of Betty Geftakys

My foray into blogging initially began while I was living in Southern California, in the aftermath of my departure from an abusive evangelical group known as "The Assemblies."  Those who want to find out more about the group can click here.  My first blog was an account of my experiences in that group (especially as an African-American in that group), and my thoughts and reflections upon leaving it.  When I left the Assemblies back in 2003, it was because I had come to realize that the family that was in charge of the group - namely, George and Betty Geftakys and their two sons - were a collection of crooks.  Back then I was under the impression that the Assemblies were an example of a "fringe" group that did not reflect white American evangelicalism as a whole, and that evangelicalism was, by and large, healthy - so that I believed that in order to heal from the damage I suffered, I simply needed to find a "healthy" church after leaving the Assemblies.  What a far cry from my attitude today, when most of the world can now see that white American evangelicalism is a disgusting barrel of monkeys, and that it has been so for a rather long time!

As I mentioned, the Assemblies were abusive.  This abuse was an outworking of the way in which the head family exploited the members, and an outworking also of the way we were taught to relate to each other in our bid to climb the ladder of church leadership.  But some small element of Scriptural truth managed to seep into the consciousness of most of us members - especially the part of Scripture that teaches that when you do wrong to others, you need to repent.  And that this repentance must involve making things right with the people you wronged.  So when the Assemblies were blown apart by scandals in 2003, many of us hoped, prayed, and half expected that George, Betty, and their two sons would sooner or later take that step of repentance.

In the years since my departure, George Geftakys died (in 2014), and his son David died (in 2017).  I learned today that George's wife Betty died just last month.  I am ashamed to admit that upon hearing of the deaths of each of these people, my first reaction was a rather strong feeling of schadenfreude.  Today I have once again needed to repent of that feeling.  For I still follow the Good Book, which says in part that God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked.  Yet as I read that same Good Book, I can't help but shudder at the thought of the legacy these people have left and the future that awaits them.  Their later years remind me of a chapter from a Chinese sci-fi book that I recently enjoyed, namely the Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin.  The chapter in question is titled, "No One Repents."

Mid-Air Self-Destruct

Over the last five or six weeks, I've been very, very busy.  (Being an entrepreneur is not exactly a good way to relax!)  So today's post will be short.  But I was motivated to write today's post by some news items of which I became aware during this past week.  

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.

Random Sunday Ramblings

I owe longtime readers a series of concluding posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  I will try to write another post in the series within the next week or so.  But today I'm feeling a bit lazy and I have the challenge of trying to rein in a schedule that has recently become less manageable than it ought to be.  So I'm chillin' in my backyard right now.  (My cat Koshka is chillin' also next to my right foot.)

I normally shop for groceries twice a week, although I hope to cut that down to once a week as soon as the veggies in my garden start producing.  However, last Thursday I forgot to catch up on some items that had run out, so this morning I made a run to a supermarket.  Along the way I passed three churches and noted the cars in the parking lots.  Those parking lots have had Sunday cars for the last few months, and whenever I've thought of people going to church during a pandemic like that caused by COVID-19, I have wondered at the craziness of some humans.  I haven't been to church (or coffee shops, libraries,  restaurants, etc.) for over a year.

The percentage of people who have received at least one vaccine shot in my state is high enough that a few days ago, the governor's office removed the requirement for people to wear masks in most public places.  That means that one of my biggest excuses for not attending church may go away.  Yet I still feel a curious reluctance to resume my churchgoing.  Part of the reason is that I have become used to taking what I consider to be lifesaving precautions.  In this I am not alone.  Today, for instance, I noticed that perhaps a majority of people in the supermarket I visited were still wearing masks, including store staff.  I feel a bit like the Willie Keith character in The Caine Mutiny after WWII has ended and he's steaming back to the United States - still observing personal blackout practices at night aboard his ship and unable to get used to steaming with the sonar turned off or having his ship's lights brightly blazing.

But another part of my reluctance stems from the fact that the pastors and members of many churches in the United States have shown themselves to be thoroughly, nauseatingly disgusting during the Trump era and especially during the last year and a half.  That stinking disgust burst into my consciousness again just a few minutes ago, as I was reading the Gospel of Luke, particularly Luke 3:15-17:

Now while the people were in a state of expectation 

and all were wondering in their hearts about John, as to whether he might be the Christ,

John answered and said to them all, "As for me, I baptize you with water; 

but One is coming who is mightier than I, and I am not fit to untie the thong of His sandals; 

He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.  

And His winnowing fork is in His hand to thoroughly clear His threshing floor, 

and to gather the wheat into His barn; 

but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.

This passage struck me precisely because John describes Christ as a coming Judge.  It must be noted that Christ, when He came, did not refute or alter anything that John had said about him.  Nor did Christ alter any of John's exhortations to people to prepare for the coming of Christ by repenting - and by bringing forth fruit in keeping with repentance.  This is seen clearly in Luke 19:1-10, when after meeting Zaccheus the tax collector, Zaccheus announces to the Lord that he is giving back to people everything he stole or cheated out of them.  The Lord responds by saying, "Today salvation has come to this house, because he [Zaccheus] too, is a son of Abraham."  In other words, if a person has really repented, it will show in the way they treat others - especially in the way they treat the powerless, the poor and the oppressed.

Now the white American evangelical/Protestant church (and those Stockholm Syndrome-affected pastors of certain nonwhite churches) will enthusiastically preach Christ as a coming Judge - especially as a Judge who is coming to destroy all dark-skinned infidels.  Thus the white American evangelical/Protestant church continues to insist that "Blue lives matter!" and that we need to pray for our men in uniform who continue to use State-sanctioned violence in order to maintain both white privilege and white supremacy.  And their pastors continue to try to validate both themselves and the politicians who are backed by them by appealing to a "culture war" which is being waged to "purify" our society from deviant elements.  Never mind that these "culture warriors" continually prove themselves to be as deviant as the sins they condemn, or that the appeal to "culture warfare" is itself simply a ploy to garner more political and economic power for a privileged minority.

A funny thing happens, however, when anyone dares hold up a truth-telling mirror to the eyes of these people.  When they are forced to look at their own sins, they are suddenly all, "Well Jesus is full of grace!  The wonderful thing about Christ is that He died for our sins!  You're being judgmental for pointing my sins out to me!"  It gets even better if you dare to point out to them the Biblical mandate for social justice and the practical love of one's neighbor.  In Luke 16, for instance, the story of the rich man and Lazarus is routinely misinterpreted by these evangelicals to mean that the rich man went to hell simply because he refused to accept a 90-second catechism from a "Gospel tract."  (Somebody forgot to give that rich dude a leaflet explaining the Four Spiritual Laws!  After all, we're justified by faith apart from works of the Law, aren't we?!)  Many of these evangelical/Protestant types now going so far as to say that anyone who says that Christians are mandated by the Gospel to practice social justice is guilty of "legalism."  (See this, this, this, and this for instance.  And when you say "legalism", say it with the same sinister hiss that you would use when you say the word ssssocialissssmmmm...)

But the best of all whoppers I have ever heard were the assertions by evangelicals during the Trump years that Trump was somehow a Christian.  In order to say such a thing, these evangelicals had to deny almost all of the Biblical teaching on Christian character.  And when it was pointed out that Trump was not even a good example of sexual purity (almost the only purity that evangelicals seem to care about), we heard drivel like "Well, Trump is just a baby Christian" and "If God could use a wicked king like Nebuchadnezzar or Cyrus to accomplish His will, we can be sure that God is using Trump!  So we must support him!"

But what if Christ, when He returns, turns out to be what many evangelicals would call "legalistic"?  What if, moreover, many evangelicals wind up getting incinerated by unquenchable fire?  What if, when the Judge comes, He's coming for you?  Lemme tell ya, it makes me a bit uncomfortable to write this, knowing that for every finger I point outward, there are three pointing back at me!

A Parasite Protection Plan

Many reputable media sources have mentioned the prominent role that white American evangelical and Protestant churches played in the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol last week.  These sources have also noted the prominent role which these churches are playing in the threat of violent white nationalist insurgency in the United States from now on.  This is interesting, given the fact that many of these churches have been ongoing recipients of funds authorized by Congress under the Payment Protection Plan instituted by the U.S. Government in response to financial hardships experienced by American businesses due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  It is also no secret that these churches should never have received these funds (due to the Constitutional separation of church and state as well as the Code of Federal Regulations), and that the only reason why they did is because of the influence of Donald Trump.  And a number of these churches have been guilty of misusing these funds, using them for legal fees incurred in defending the churches from sex abuse scandals, or for buying private jets.  See this, this and this also.

The question that naturally arises is this: why are American taxpayers (many of whom are people of color who are threatened by these far-right white supremacists) giving our tax dollars to organizations that want to violently take over the United States?  And why do churches continue to enjoy tax-exempt status?  At this late stage of the game, what value do these groups actually provide to the American people?  They have shown themselves to be utterly unreliable as a moral compass.  As a moral restraint, they are about as worthless as a set of burned-out brakes on a runaway semi truck.  (For those readers who care about the defense of Biblical doctrine, why are white evangelicals joining forces with Nazi New Age shamans in their pursuit of white supremacy?  See this also.  Doesn't sound very Christian to me.  Remember what I said about the syncretism of these white supremacists?)  Why should they continue to receive free money in order to threaten the rest of us?  Why are U.S. taxpayers being required to give money to religious talking heads such as the Family Research Council, Ralph Reed, or Franklin Graham?

Repost: Fighting With Broken Weapons

This blog, The Well Run Dry, started out to be a blog ostensibly about resource depletion.  I have to admit that it has morphed into something of a social commentary on the tantrums being thrown by a certain demographic of the Global North (and of the United States in particular) in response to the inevitable and irresistible shifting of their place in the world.  For a certain key segment of this demographic - namely, those aligned with white American evangelicalism - the tantrums have been spectacular.  Just this week a former policeman in Texas was arrested after running an air conditioning repairman off the road and threatening him at gunpoint.  Why did he do it?  Because he erroneously believed that the air conditioning repairman was smuggling fraudulent ballots.  Yet another cop goes to jail.  And if you want to see more criminal behavior, note that U.S. taxpayers were forced this past year to support "struggling" megachurches whose revenue took a hit due to the coronavirus pandemic.  Thank Donald Trump for that.  I'm glad we the people of the United States were able to put a smile on Joel Osteen's face.  Otherwise, he might have thrown a great big tantrum.

All this has me thinking of a blog post I wrote over a decade ago concerning the difference between the supposed mission of the white American evangelical church and its actual aims - the aims sought by the politicians whom white evangelical pastors tell us we must support.  Here is a link to that post.  Enjoy.

Link - All The Wiser Interview With Dawn Smith

For those readers who may still be involved in the toxic dump known as White American evangelicalism, I have a resource that may detoxify you.  Here is a link to an interview I just listened to.  The subject of the interview is a person I knew back in the day when I was involved in a toxic, abusive evangelical cult - a cult which made me for a while a toxic, abusive person until I learned to walk away.  The language in the interview is mostly family-friendly (except at the very end), and I agree with almost everything the interviewee says - especially her critique of White American evangelicalism.  As for me, as a person of color I will never join a White church again.

The Fall of Liberty's Libertine

Libertine: a person, especially a man, who behaves without moral principles or a sense of responsibility, especially in sexual matters.

- from Dictionary.com (Emphasis mine.)

I am trying to read a technical document just now.  It's for a proposal I'm putting together for an environmental project, and it is a very dry document.  Dry documents tend to make me sleepy, so I indulged myself in a quick bit of Web surfing to distract me from my overwhelming desire to snooze.  (Yes, I know - a better tactic would be to drop and do 25 push-ups.  I'll try that next time.)

My web surfing (when I indulge in it, which is not often) frequently takes me to a consideration of the 1980's, which were a high point for the Republican Party and for the freak show known as white American evangelicalism.  So I googled "evangelical scandals 1980's pastors" and came across a surprising bit of present-day news.  In case you didn't know it, Jerry Falwell Jr., son of the Jerry Falwell who founded and led the "Moral Majority" of the 1980's, resigned this week from Liberty University.  His resignation was not voluntary, but came as a result of the revelation of his involvement in a few sex scandals, and the revelation of a photo of himself and a woman who is not his wife posing together with their zippers down.  (Literally!)

It is no secret that the junior Falwell is racist.  It is also no secret that he has been a rabid supporter of another serial adulterer named Donald John Trump.  Falwell is like many white Evangelical mouthpieces in saying that we must support Trump because he is "a chosen vessel whom God has raised up for a glorious purpose" - and "if God could use a wicked king like Cyrus or Nebuchadnezzar for His glorious purposes, God can use Trump to carry out His mysterious plan!"  Note that in saying such things, both he and others like him are bad-mouthing not only God, but Cyrus and Nebuchadnezzar.  How ironic that in showing himself to be just as slimy as Trump, Mr. Falwell has brought consequences upon himself.  And I expect that Liberty University will not itself survive unscathed.

In my march through the reading of the Old Testament, I am now reading the book of Micah.  And what Micah says is a direct contradiction of Falwell, and of other sketchy people like him, including Franklin Graham.  But I do not write this to moralize.  Rather, I want to make a psychological observation.  Jerry Falwell Jr. seems to me to be yet another manifestation of the pathological, narcissistic raging of white supremacy against a world that is inexorably changing around those who wish to remain supreme.  Like Trump, Falwell Jr. is a symptom of a larger American disease.  He is also yet another example of the outworkings of damnation.

And now, back to work!

Nihil Nixed

I must admit that many of my most recent blog posts have had a strong spiritual tone.  This may have been a bit of a turn-off to those who are uncomfortable with the spiritual as I define it, or to those who want me to write essays that are focused solely on the observable, quantifiable physical and economic processes of the ongoing decline of the Global North.  While I don't apologize at all for the spiritual element, I promise that today's post will not be just another sermon.  I also promise that in addition to the spiritual, today's post will contain the empirical.  But before you can have your dessert, you must first eat your dinner!

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Let's begin by studying a word: nihilism. The first page of a Google search of this word reveals the following definition at the top of the page: "the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless." According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, nihilism is "originally a philosophy of moral and epistemological skepticism that arose in 19th-century Russia during the early years of the reign of Tsar Alexander II," although the Encyclopedia acknowledges that the concept pre-dates 19th-century Russia. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (woo-hoo!), a product of the University of Tennessee, Martin, states that nihilism is "...the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated." The IEP also states correctly that nihilism as a cultural phenomenon was examined by Friedrich Nietzsche, who concluded correctly that nihilism is the inevitable product of the rejection of the belief in a personal God who gives meaning to the universe, as corroborated by another Internet powerhouse created by a high-powered university, namely Stanford. Nietzsche foresaw the destructive effects which nihilism would have on European and Euro-centric societies which had hitherto relied on Christian ethics and morals as a guide to right action and a restraint against wrong action. His solution therefore was to propose the emergence of an Übermensch (or perhaps a collection of them) who would form a new aristocracy imposing its will on the rest of humanity, thus becoming the creators of the system of values by which the rest of humanity would be obliged to live - often without realizing this obligation. In other words, in the place of God - the Übermensch! These individuals would be able to thus reign over the rest of us by virtue of their more finely developed "will to power", and by means of the power thus conferred by that more developed will.

Now, time for full disclosure: the above paragraph is the result on my part of a rather brief study of nihilism and Nietzsche.  A full study would require weeks, months, or even years of time and the possession of a brain possessed with enough reserves of working memory to untangle really long and knotty philosophical arguments.  I know I don't have the time (mowed the lawn yesterday, need to plant more soybeans in my backyard and finish cleaning the house), and I'm not sure I have even a tenth of the mental firepower needed for such an effort.  But let me break down the above paragraph into a set of propositions.  Nihilism (and Nietzsche) involves the following:

1. The belief that there is no intrinsic master of the universe who imposes meaning and values on the universe;
2. The need to save human society from the anomie that results from Statement 1 above by the emergence of an Übermensch or aristocracy of such individuals who by their own finely developed will to power gain the power to impose that will on the rest of us.
3. The rejection of the notion of impartial treatment of all men (and hence of the equality of all men).  Note that this equality is specifically taught by the New Testament - a source which is rejected by both nihilism and Nietzsche.

The implications of these three attitudes are that if you happen to be one of the fortunate few who can act as an Übermensch,  you can set the rules of whatever part of human society you control according to your own tastes.  And more than likely, the chief goal of your tastes will be to maximize your power as much as possible, even if it means a diminishing of the power of others.  ("Let's divide up the world fairly between us.  One for me, and one for me.  Two for me, and two for me...Heads I win, tails I win...")  You can get away with it, because there is no intrinsic master of the universe who can impose his standards on you - standards which may well contradict yours.

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At first blush, the tradition of thinking embodied in traditional American religious fundamentalism and white American evangelicalism would seem to be the farthest thing from nihilism and from the concept of the Übermensch posited by Nietzsche as the antidote to that nihilism. After all, the rallying cry of American Protestants has historically been Sola Scriptura. And if you're going to cry, "Sola Scriptura!" ("By Scripture alone!") you have to accept Bible passages such as the Book of Ezekiel, which I am currently reading. Ezekiel's prophecy is the polar opposite of nihilism, as seen in quotes like this:

Then He said to me, "The iniquity of the house of Israel and Judah is very, very great, and the land is filled with blood, and the city is full of perversion, for they say, 'the LORD has forsaken the land, and the LORD does not see!' But as for me, My eye will have no pity nor shall I spare, but I shall bring their conduct upon their heads." - Ezekiel 9:9-10

In other words, by crying "Sola Scriptura!" white American evangelicals have stated their belief in a moral universe, a universe ruled by an impartial moral standard imposed externally on it by a Creator who Himself rules over the universe He has created, and who is angered by and ready to punish the violation of His moral standard.  Therefore, this moral standard is not the creation of any mortal man, but rather of the God who created the universe.  Indeed, according to C.S. Lewis, the mere fact that humans appeal to a moral standard at all - even when the standard to which they appeal is of their own making - shows that humans acknowledge the existence of independent moral standards.  This argument is beautifully set forth in Mere Christianity.   (By the way, white American evangelicalism seems to love C.S. Lewis - at least from what they say about him.)

Armed with this recognition of a moral standard that is independent of man and which originated outside of man, white American evangelicalism has branded itself a warrior in behalf of this moral standard to impose this standard on everyone, whether they want it or not.  Thus from the late 1960's until 2016, prominent American evangelical voices such as Charles Colson, Franklin Graham, Francis Schaeffer, James Dobson, Tony Perkins, et al, have spoken tirelessly against the disappearance of Christian ethics and culture from the broader American culture, as well as warning against the rise of popularity of other religions and the loosening of American sexual mores.  I must say that I think they have been partly right to speak out against things which the Bible speaks against.  But when it comes to the fulcrum - the center of gravity - of the New Testament, they have been unaccountably silent.  For Christ Himself (whom they claim to believe and follow) said, "Therefore, however you want people to treat you, you too, do so for them, for this is the Law and the Prophets."  He also said that next to the greatest commandment, namely to love the Lord with all one's being, the second greatest commandment was to love one's neighbor as oneself.

Plenty of other people have explained quite well how it suited American Protestant and evangelical churches to ignore the Scriptural duty each human being has toward his or her fellow human beings, since after all, white America made itself great by trashing, robbing, enslaving and oppressing everyone else on earth.  Under such an arrangement, it would have been highly politically inconvenient for the mass of evangelicals to condemn what Ezekiel would call the gaining of material wealth by violence.  (See Ezekiel 22.)  Indeed, if I might editorialize for just a bit, the Scripture frequently uses sexual imagery to describe the relationship between the God of the Bible and those who call themselves His people.  The true Church is therefore called the Bride of Christ, while those who call themselves God's people and yet are unfaithful to Him are frequently called harlots or unfaithful wives.  In this context, the white American evangelical church has for a long time made itself the spread-legged harlot - the serving wench - of secular, earthly economic and political power, and not the Bride of Christ.

They did so first by teaching that a Christian man's duty to love his fellow man applied only when the two men who needed to love each other were white.  Then they taught that since the rest of us were defective, they could exterminate or enslave us at will, as if to re-enact Israel's conquest of the land of Canaan.  The only problem with this is that they posited that we their intended targets deserved our mistreatment because we were more wicked than they.  (That accusation has since been abundantly proven false!)  And lastly, they redefined evil as being confined simply to certain sexual sins and piety as being confined merely to private observance of religious devotion - thus giving them license to systematically break almost every commandment of God that addresses how people are supposed to treat each other.

I know what effect such teaching (and the treatment I received from white churches who taught it) had on me at first - there was the self-doubt, the questioning, the wondering whether it was actually true that God had created me to be the trash can, the vomit bucket, the toilet bowl, the punching bag of a select subset of humanity, and whether there really was nothing I could (or should) do about it.  One of the things that saved me from that self-doubt and questioning has been that over the years, I have watched the ways in which the leading voices of white American evangelicalism have failed to uphold their own standard.  For they can't even keep their own rules; therefore, they have lost all rights to claim that they are better than me in any way.  So they say that sexual morality is the only kind of morality that matters?  Maybe - but what about the many flag-waving Republicans who voted for Bush, who lost all their retirement savings in the 2008 financial meltdown?  What about the patriotic American soldiers who were killed in the 2003 Iraq invasion which the United States performed to remove weapons of mass destruction that never existed?  These are by no means the only true believers who have suffered from the failure of man to do right by man.  And regarding sexual morality - why is it that the Republicans and evangelicals who were so strident in impeaching Bill Clinton have rallied around Donald Trump?  You who are ready to punish my imperfection, you who accuse me of being a violent thug ready to rape women because I am an African-American male, why have you not stoned Dennis Hastert to death for his sin?  Or Mark Sanford?  Or Josh Duggar?

But I am not here today to editorialize.  I have a larger point to make - first, that the white American evangelical church (and by extension, the entire Republican party) have come to me to be the perfect embodiment of nihilism.  Nihilism in the sense that while they say they believe in an impartial moral standard that originated outside of themselves, they act as if there is no such standard and that the only standard to which they need to submit is the standard which they themselves create and have the power to enforce.  They are the Übermensch aristocracy, whose philosophy is captured in this quote attributed to an aide of former President George W. Bush:

The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

So,... what's the point of all that I have written so far?  As I said a few sentences ago, I am not here to editorialize.  Nor am I here to try to appeal to the better angels of the people now in power in this country.  Frankly, I am tired of that kind of editorializing (although today I found a particularly fine example of it here).  To me it's a waste of time to tell people who do very bad things that they are in danger of thus making themselves very bad people once you see that they want to be bad because they find badness to be ego-syntonic.  My question is much cruder.  Namely, it is this: how long can a society get away with murder before there are consequences?  For the universe is not nihilist!  After all, the Bible does not just appeal to our better angels; it also promises consequences to those people who do not have better angels.  And the consequences are not just that such people will become icky.  The Bible promises that God will break things in the lives of those who continue in evil.  "The soul that sins shall die." - Ezekiel 18:4.  "The wages of sin is death..." - Romans 6: 23.  "Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap." - Galatians 6:7.  In other words, I am looking for the propagation of the outworkings of damnation in a society that ought to be damned.  Moreover, I am looking not only as a Christian, but as an empiricist, a person who has received a technical professional education and earned a technical professional degree and who is familiar with the scientific method.  And this weekend, I think I've found some evidences for the propagation I've been looking for.

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Consider again the white American evangelical and Protestant establishment as the spread-legged harlot - the serving wench - of secular, earthly economic and political power, and not the Bride of Christ.  Consider that church as a key pillar of the power base of Donald J. Trump, and consider that this is so because of the leaders who have risen to prominence in the evangelical ecosphere.  Now consider what is happening to that church in the age of COVID-19.  I leave you with the following citations:

• Survey: 65% of Churches See Giving Decline During Pandemic
• Why Are Your Online Attendance Numbers Suddenly Dropping? 5 Reasons
• When Your Church Reopens, What Will Be Left and Who Will Still Come?  Some Thoughts
• Sunday Slump - The Virus Is Accelerating Dechurching in America

I therefore hypothesize the emergence of a much smaller evangelical presence in America over the next several months, and the diminishment of American evangelicalism as a potent and controllable force in American politics.  (Disclaimer: I am not a prophet, and have not been officially certified by any state or government board as having any sort of gift of prophecy.  Take what I say with a grain of empiricism - YMMV.)  I also hypothesize the emergence of a cohort of jobless pastors!  This decline of evangelical power is, I think, one of the biggest reasons why Trump is so hot to remove social distancing restrictions on large indoor gatherings.  It is also why the Trump administration has extended COVID-19 financial aid to evangelical churches (in violation, some would say, of the Constitutional separation of church and state).  

Trump's use of government resources to prop up cronies leads me to the consideration of other propagations of the outworkings of damnation.  These considerations overwhelmingly involve the effect on American secular power.  But you'll have to wait until my next post to read them.  It's way past time for me to do other stuff...