Although I am an ex-Christian and a card-carrying Unbeliever I nevertheless remain fascinated with how the church is navigating these uncertain times where its societal/cultural influence and consequent privileges are in decline. Will the USA, constituted as a secular republic, actually achieve levels of secularity on a European level? Can Christianity survive if it has to compete in the “marketplace” of ideas and is not privileged in some way? Christianity thrives under persecution, but what about…indifference? These are open questions.
The specific incident that motivated this post is the ongoing Alistair Begg Controversy. Since it’s probable that outside the Evangelical Fundamentalist blogosphere this episode is getting absolutely no bandwidth whatsoever, let me provide some background.
Alistair Begg is the senior pastor of Parkside Church, located in Cleveland, Ohio, a position he has held since 1983. Begg had an active radio ministry, Truth For Life, which broadcasted his sermons daily to 1,800 stations across North America. (Close readers will note the use of the past tense here.) Theologically he is Calvinist, believing in the inspiration and inerrancy of scripture. So…firmly in the Evangelical Fundamentalist camp. Or so it seemed.
Begg recently related in a broadcast interview how he counseled a grandmother who who contacted him for pastoral advice because her grandson was marrying a transgendered individual. What should she do? Should she attend the wedding?
Question: Does your grandson know about your religious convictions? Answer: Yes.
Question: Have you expressed to your grandson your objection to his actions? Answer: yes.
Begg advised the grandmother to attend the wedding as a witness of Christian love and to maintain contact with her grandson which would probably be cut off if she refused to attend because of her religious convictions.
Cue the firestorm.
In the Evangelical Fundamentalist Community Begg is being treated like a heretic. The American Family Association removed Begg’s Truth for Life broadcasts from its American Family Radio network. Old friends in the community are quietly sneaking out the back door. No word on his status as a pastor.
Now I can only speak personally but even as an unbeliever this seemed to me to be perfectly practical advice. The grandmother did not compromise her Christian principles and she maintained at least a bridge of communication with her loved one.
But NOOOOOOOOOO…TRANS FOLKS ARE OF THE DEVIL!!! They must be condemned in no uncertain terms. God said it’s ok to be a bigot.
Don’t these Evangelical folks realize they’re the ones with the problem here? Don’t they see that the harsher they double down the faster and more absolutely they isolate and marginalize themselves, hastening their demise and loss of influence? What am I saying? Of course not!
I think what we’re seeing today is fairly predictable. The larger Christin community will, as it’s always done, find some way to accommodate the larger culture. The hardcore will, as I said, double down, and alas, not go quietly. I don’t want to gloat and celebrate their decline. They can do a lot of destruction on their way down. Hurt a lot of people. How can we, those who count ourselves in some degree enlightened, help them to understand that the world is not coming to and end simply because we enlarge our sense of community as humans to include those of differing lifestyles and viewpoints?
My advice to Christians is simple. Fulfill your mandate. Comfort and heal the sick. Feed the hungry. Visit those in prison. Against such there is no law! If you did that no one would avoid you, be repulsed by you. They would be attracted to you. If that was what you were known for. Instead of the puritanical backbiting.
I am not interested in debating but I would definitely welcome other opinions. What do you think? Especially those who are Christian.
A close friend whose husband is in the ministry (both strong evangelicals) is estranged from her daughter who is in the process of transgendering. They do not approve. It’s mind-boggling to me. This is one of the loveliest people ever and one who was the most
devoted mother to both of her daughters. Not to be supportive for a daughter going through all it takes to become a man is beyond
me. (Wasn’t Cher amazing with her daughter Chastity becoming Chaz?)
A close friend whose husband is in the ministry (both strong evangelicals) is estranged from her daughter who is in the process of transgendering. They do not approve. It’s mind-boggling to me. This is one of the loveliest people ever and one who was the most
devoted mother to both of her daughters. Not to be supportive for a daughter going through all it takes to become a man is beyond
me. (Wasn’t Cher amazing with her daughter Chastity becoming Chaz?)
Judith a friend of my father spent his life tormented by his son’s “gayness” since he was convinced that he had done something wrong as a parent that must have caused this condition.
The hangups of Christianity over sexual matters is almost a cliche at this point. There is some kind of deepseated terror of “boundary violations” that disrupt God’s mandated order. This is an example of how the default point of moral perception and social awareness shifts over time. Once slavery was universal. Now it does still exist but is condemned in most cases. It is the same with sexual morality. The default point has shifted past the point declared in the New Testament. This is the problem with sacred scripture. It sustains ideas that should have long since been abandoned.
Stephen: “This is the problem with sacred scripture. It sustains ideas that should have long since been abandoned.”
That would indicate the human capability of becoming more tolerant, understanding and accepting of differences among us! How is it
that some get there before others? For me, it’s books. Having just read Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, I have a huge
empathy for anyone hooked on drugs.
That would indicate the human capability of becoming more tolerant, understanding and accepting of differences among us! How is it
that some get there before others?
A mystery. Some people are open and receptive to others. Some are closed off. But before I congratulate myself on my perceptions I have to wonder if we’re not just “born that way”. My cousin Larry, back in Georgia, same age as me, raised in an identical environment, yet he’s a MAGA Fundamentalist who thinks there’s some kind of anti-God conspiracy seeping through the body politic. “Liberals” aren’t just fellow Americans with different political opinions, they’re Satanic. Literally. Possessed. I don’t think Larry would push a gay man off the roof of a building himself but if he lived in a society where such acts were justified by those in authority in the name of social morality I do believe he would sit quietly staring down at his feet while it went on.
There will always be fundamental disagreements between people. But what’s bothersome now is how fragmented we are. We have eliminated shared public spaces where people of different viewpoints can at least come into contact. Now we can surround ourselves with only that sensory input that confirms our perceptions about how the world works. We create virtual communities, not to expand our ideas, but to shut them out.
Sorry to wax political but I saw a news report recently that pointed out through interviews with Trump supporters that it is not that they’re aware of all Trump’s crimes and just don’t care, it’s that they are mostly unaware of any of the details! They live in a media environment where all the details are extruded. It’s a self-authenticating conspiracy. The worse the news, the more proof that the ‘Powers That Be’ are out to get him.
It’s not that these folks have thoughtfully considered the evidence for human caused climate change and rejected it. Don’t know. Don’t want to know.
And you can’t educate people at gunpoint. You can’t really educate another person at all. All you can do is try to help them educate themselves. First there has to be an impulse to find out. The tragedy is when those who lack that impulse manage to suppress it in those who do.
Although the Death of New Atheism has been celebrated of late within the Christian Apologist Blogosphere, it seems clear that the “movement”, such as it was, has simply mainstreamed and these sorts of discussions continue unabated, especially on the YouTube. I’m posting a conversation between Alex O’Connor and Rhett McLaughlin, an apparently quite well-known social media personality with whom I am otherwise unfamiliar. (I don’t get out much social media-wise.) A lot of what McLaughlin (for brevity hereafter, RM) says about his own journey resonates with me. I am part of an earlier generation but he comes from rural Georgia as well and that Old Time Religion obviously retains its sway. After the video I’ll make some comments.
What resonates with me most about RM’s comments is his path out of belief. For me as well it wasn’t abstruse philosophical argumentation or arid parsing of metaphysical justifications. It was much more existential. For me it started with the gap between the world as I had been taught it must be and the way I perceived it through my own education and experience. Coming to terms with the reality of Evolution was a big part of that. It is not simply the exchange of one set of supposed “facts” for another. Evolutionary Theory and the loving Abba of the gospels occupy different universes. This is why I sympathize with the Young Earth Creationists in a way I do not with the so-called “Theistic Evolutionists” whose project, it seems to me, is like trying to graft the head of a rhinoceros onto the body of a chicken. YECism at least understands that with evolution, everything changes. Of course they make the wrong choice but they do realize what’s at stake. The God of Evolution, a god who would use evolution as his method of creation, is not the loving Abba of the gospels but an Unspeakable Monster.
When I was in High School, where it should have been explained to me, it was impossible to discuss the the theory of evolution. A biology teacher who had done so would have been tarred and feathered and then ridden out of town on a rail. (Thankfully we had gotten past the auto-da-fé.) Even well after the Supreme Court decision it was SOP for teachers to read scripture at the beginning of classes. Biology was taught as a disparate series of factoids. The result was that I didn’t have evolution explained to me until I went away to college. I remember when it sank in. Huxley describes his face-palm moment when he first read Origin of Species. “Why didn’t I think of that!” For me it was “Of course! Of course!!. It made perfect sense. The whole world opened up to me. But as I thought more about it I began to see the appalling implications. The gap I described earlier got so wide that I could no longer straddle it. (I tried. For years I tried.) I had to make a choice. I couldn’t go back. That would have been to reduce myself.
And like RM, my views were shaped by historical/critical study of the Bible. I began to see the texts as not delivered from above, as it were, but rising from the flow of human culture. The Bible is human. That’s precisely what makes it valuable. I’ve commented before how it was only when I stopped looking at it through the lens of faith that it opened up to me and I began to truly see it.
Maturity begins with reconciling ourselves to the preconditions of our own existence. Not resignation but acceptance. This applies not just to us as individuals but as a species. I suppose the goal should be to grow up but without forgetting what it was like to be a child.
One last thing. RM describes his people as Calvinists. Mine were Baptists but Arminian. (Not that any of us had ever heard of Arminius.) Colloquially we were known as “Free Will” Baptists because we rejected the doctrine of Predestination. However we held firmly onto the doctrine of the Perseverance of the Saints, Eternal Security of the believer. We called it “once saved, always saved”. The relevance to this discussion is because such folk deny that if one is truly saved then you can’t ever lose it. Sooo…people like RM and me must not have ever been truly saved in the first place. It’s weird to be told you weren’t ever really a true Christian as I have, by members of my own family who sat in the pew next to me when I was growing up. They certainly thought I was saved then!
ps: Nice hair for a guy pushing 50!
Anybody want to talk about Pope Leo XIV?
As an outsider I admit to being completely fascinated. It’s fascinating how all the “interested parties” project both their hopes and fears onto him. just some observations.
I was surprised at how fawning the western media was. Of course there are around 50 million catholics in the US so the media knows its audience. But still no mention of any of the pressing issues facing the church. Almost a gushing celebration. Something tells me when the Southern Baptist Convention elects a new president the first week of June in Dallas the response will not be remotely similar. The largest protestant denomination in the US with about 13 million members.
The cynic’s take is that Francis was hired to put a happy face on the church and change the conversation. This task he performed admirably. Now Leo will project a sense of moderation to reassure the trad catholics that the church is not going off the deep end.
Still, behind the theater, pressing problems remain. The demographics are ominous. Not a year goes by without another clerical abuse scandal being reported. The church also has serious financial problems.
In Washington State, the church is opposing a new law requiring clergy to report child abuse to secular authorities, even if they learn about it in confession. This will turn into a church/state separation controversy and obscure a recurring issue. The church’s unwillingness to report abusers and turn them over to secular authorities for investigation. I’m a big church/state separation guy and I see the problem with secular authorities violating the confessional but the question that needs to be asked is, how we got there in the first place? My perception is that the folks in the pews have pretty much decided to look at the issue as either “it’s just a few bad apples” or as a problem that occurred 30 or 40 years ago and the church has since taken steps to correct the abuse. Both responses are simply denial. The truth is, the only effective pressure for change must come from the pews, the people who support the church financially.
Reportedly the church ran a $94 million dollar deficit for fiscal year 2024. It’s hard to imagine the Pope not focusing on this problem even if it’s kept as quiet as possible. (Probably not coincidently the church is allying with the Trump administration on court challenges to the church not being able to accept direct public money for charter schools.)
It’ll be like pulling teeth without anesthesia, and these are not new ideas, but to restore any kind of real positive public image they need to turn abusers over to the secular authorities for investigation and prosecution, and bring in independent auditors to go over their finances. I won’t hold my breath.
As I wrote the SBC convention is in June. My old team. A different kind of theater. I’ll be interested in that as well.
I think understanding the Catholic right’s reaction to Leo requires understanding just how bad Francis was. He was a petty, vindictive, authoritarian. He was incoherent.
Leo appears palpably Catholic–I mean the sort of person who clearly believes the stuff the Church teaches. He may not be in theological lock-step with the right, but he actually has something that resembles a theology rooted fundamental Catholic dogma. And he is thoughtful and articulate, rather than just vomiting out whatever incoherent–often offensive–nonsense passes through his mind in the moment.
Leo comes off as genuinely humble, sincere, pastoral–not the feigned humility we are used to, nor the lip-service to accompanying those on the peripheries.
I think, after Francis, the Catholic right is ready to embrace a big-tent Catholicism.
Responding to the portions of the thread referencing homosexuality: I think the language society uses has impeded progress on many issues, particularly this one.
It is uncomfortable to be confronted with the sexuality of a stranger before you know anything else about them. This is private. I don’t really want to picture anyone in a sexual context no matter what orientation. Honestly, I shouldn’t know anyone’s sexual preference unless they are part of my community/friends in which we would know about one another’s relationships. Identity politics has really championed this idea that to be equal, LGBTQ+ should be “proud” about it. Certainly don’t be either ashamed or proud. Just be. Secondly, “homosexual” is an unfortunate label. Again, it draws attention to sex. But that’s not even an accurate representation of the issue. Sex is subsequent in all committed loving relationships. I think even the prudish would have an easier time understanding the relationship through the filter of two loving adults who want to be lifelong companions. This issue should focus on love, not sex.
It is uncomfortable to be confronted with the sexuality of a stranger before you know anything else about them. This is private. I don’t really want to picture anyone in a sexual context no matter what orientation. Honestly, I shouldn’t know anyone’s sexual preference unless they are part of my community/friends in which we would know about one another’s relationships.
My first impulse is to agree emphatically. And yet even in traditional heteronormative society, your relationship status is very much a public thing. If you are married, it is, for example, one of the first things people learn about you. Being married (even being engaged) changes your social standing. It would be extremely rude, for example, to invite one spouse to a social gathering without the other (unless the gathering was single sex).
Indeed, traditional societal norms were based on the assumption that you would know people’s sexual preference just by knowing their sex. I mean, we segregate men’s and women’s dressing rooms because we assume men and women are heterosexual, so if a woman was in a dressing room with other women she wouldn’t need to worry about being ogled as a sexual object.
I think it is naive to think we have figured this new reality all out.
@ Porphyry @ Robert
I agree with you both. I lament the marginalization of any group for any reason. But if I’m being honest, there is a segment within the LGBT community that is hard for me to process. I am a woman in every sense of the word, yet some who identify as women present themselves in a way that pushes femininity to the point of satire. It’s so exaggerated, it seems really inauthentic. I hope I don’t sound judgey. I’m just really confused about it I guess.
I wouldn’t want to suggest all trans-women. Some do present themselves in a manner I consider consistent with “ traditional” women. But there are some who are so exaggerated in their dress and body language and the way they speak that it’s like they aren’t really acting like a woman—-it’s more theatrical. As a woman myself, I, nor any “traditional” woman I’ve ever known, has dressed or acted as flamboyant as I’ve seen some gay men or trans women present. I just find it so inconsistent to claim they feel like a woman, yet behave like no woman I’ve ever known.
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