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.

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.  

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.

Focus On The Family Continues to Send Spam Email To People Who Don't Want It

I have to wonder how or why Google blithely gave my email address to people with whom I want no contact.  Why, for instance, have they given my email address to Focus on the Family, a right-wing white supremacist arm of the American evangelical church?  From the screenshot below, one can plainly see that FOTF does not care about religion per se, nor about the worship and obedience to Christ, but only about helping the Rethuglican Party during this year's midterm elections.  

Let me "speak the truth in love" as Ephesians 4 says - but I must warn FOTF that my love is tough love.  You thugs supported the presidency of Donald Trump.  You are utterly corrupt religious parasites and you have no business trying to tell me how to vote.  Don't call me; I'll call you if I ever want to hear from you.  But here's a hint - you probably shouldn't waste time hanging around your phone.

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.

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?

The Confused Villains Of The Piece

As I write this, I am suffering from a bit of sleep deprivation.  I spent too much of last night and early this morning reading the news about the Congressional ratification of Biden's election victory and the riot by pro-Trump thugs in Washington D.C. yesterday.  Sleep deprivation tends to make me cranky.  To the Thug-In-Chief, I have a message: you're done.  Shut up and get out.

I do want to mention that in my morning Bible reading, I started the Book of Revelation a few weeks ago.  (I've also been reading the Book of Exodus in the evenings - but lately I slacked off.  I need to get back to it.  Tonight, however, I may just go to bed early.)  Reading Revelation took me on a bit of a trip down memory lane.  Way back when I was a new Christian, in the early days of the racking up of the miles of my pilgrimage, I was exposed to a number of white evangelical authors whose books offered to expound and explain Revelation to people like me.  The books all tended to have the same formula, with the following elements:

• The preaching of the doctrine of the pre-Tribulation rapture, in which believers will supernaturally be whisked away from the earth to Heaven just prior to the period of human history in which mankind must suffer through the final conflict of this present age.
• The teaching that the reason why the United States is not mentioned in the Biblical account of that final conflict is because most of the people of the United States will be caught up in the pre-Tribulation rapture, thus causing the U.S. to cease to exist as an earthly nation.
• The reason why most of the people of the United States will be raptured is because this is a Christian nation!  Hey, it's obvious - especially when we vote Republican, oppose gun control and socialism (note: whenever you say this word, be sure to pronounce the "s's" with a sinister hiss - something like this: "ssssssocialisssssmmmmm..."), support family values and the free market, and believe that the United States is Biblically mandated to kill anyone who thinks otherwise. 

These tenets are encapsulated in books like The Late Great Planet Earth, Peace, Prosperity, and the Coming Holocaust, and (of course) the Left Behind books.  But there's a funny thing about all of these books (and of the books of the related genre of the baptized version of the myth of redemptive violence, including all the books of Frank Peretti).  The thing is that even though the pre-Tribulationists are convinced that Christians will be whisked away from the earth just prior to the appearance of the Antichrist, they are obsessively fixated on the dangers posed by certain cultural trends which they consider to be the deceptions that will trigger the End Times and initiate a wave of persecution of Christians.  Note my description of their "definition" of a Christian in the third bullet point in my list of points above.  Such a definition is an apt description of many of the Americans who have aligned themselves with white supremacy, so that white supremacy has come to be regarded by many as synonymous with Christianity, and white America has just happened to become regarded as the hero of the drama of the end of this present age.

Don't get me wrong.  I accept the Book of Revelation as part of God's holy Word.  And I support family values - especially when the proponents of these values practice what they preach (which many of them haven't done).  Nor should anything I say in this post be construed as an indication that I think Trump is the Antichrist.  I don't.  It's not that Trump is not evil enough to be, but rather that he is too stupid.  But what if the people who congratulate themselves as the heroes of the End Times are confused about who the real heroes and villains are - like a dog who thinks he's a cat?  Consider the support which white evangelical leaders have given to Trump all throughout the sorry pile of used toilet paper that comprises his political career.  Consider their statements of their support, such statements as "If God could use a wicked king like Cyrus or Nebuchadnezzar to advance His Kingdom, then we must accept that God is using Trump.  We must not criticize Trump, but instead we must support him!"  Such statements are usually bundled with admonitions to Trump's critics to submit to their rulers as commanded in Romans 13.  Funny, but these same evangelical leaders seem to suffer from collective amnesia regarding Romans 13 when their political opponents win elections.  Maybe that's why some of their followers were toting pipe bombs and firearms yesterday.

Let me restate what has been obvious for a long time: white American evangelicals and their leaders do not really accept the Bible as a guide for their own lives.  Otherwise, they would obey the Sermon on the Mount, wouldn't they?  And they would speak truth to power like John the Baptist did - even when it was politically inconvenient and they had to tell the truth to their own President - wouldn't they?  No, rather, the god of white American evangelicals is raw, naked, secular political and economic power.  In their pursuit of this power, they have forgotten that the Bible says that no lie is of the truth.  By hitching their wagon to a serial liar like Trump, they have become not only nihilists, but syncretists.  Like a junkie and his needle, they have shown that they will support and ally themselves with anyone who gives them their power fix - even if the people they support live wicked lives that deny the Gospel, even if they are so corrupt that they try to give themselves Presidential pardons in order to avoid jail, even if they go so far as to sympathize with openly New Age or Satanic white supremacist groups like the Order of Nine Angels.  This means that should the Rapture actually occur after the Tribulation, there will be white American evangelicals during the Tribulation who will align themselves with the Antichrist and "take the mark of the Beast" as long as the Antichrist promises them a seat at the table of political power.

Which means that when the Rapture occurs, a lot of evangelicals will be left behind.