Friday, February 28
PCA Woketopians Exclude Whites From Aftrosupremacist Convocation
PCA Woketopians Exclude Whites From Aftrosupremacist Convocationhttps://t.co/03hs3EhVXA
— epistolizer (@epistolizer) February 27, 2025
Keep Your Life Private
Yet if you don’t spill your guts to ecclesiastical operatives, these same ultrareligionists will damn you for being an aloof individual.
And if private life is private, the Washerites should not be so public in their condemnation of singleness and dating.
Small Churches Are The Answer
Perhaps doctrinally.
However, it has to be admitted that these are just as lonely as large ones when an individual does not really fit in with those already part of a niche tight-knit congregation.
In such, there really aren’t many chances for positional growth given so few Sunday school opportunities or for socialization if you are a single and really nobody to pick from.
Doctrine is indeed the most important matter.
However, it cannot be the only thing when it comes to selecting a church.
Friday, February 21
Did Russell Moore Receive Government Money To Prostitute Himself To The Plague Cult?
Did Russell Moore Receive Government Money To Prostitute Himself To The Plague Cult?https://t.co/M3cY9FAXm6
— epistolizer (@epistolizer) February 21, 2025
Tuesday, February 18
An Analysis Of “Blinded By Might: Can The Religious Right Save America”, Part 1
One of the inevitable lessons of history is that political plans and agendas are seldom implemented as initially conceived irrespective of the nobility of intention or even piety motivating such aspirations. Evangelical conservatism, also commonly referred to as “The Religious Right”, would prove to be no different. In Blinded By Might: Can The Religious Right Save America, columnist Cal Thomas and pastor Ed Dobson examine what they believe to be the reasons resulting in the disparities between theory and practice in regards to this particular socio-political movement.
One would be hard-pressed to find thinkers more qualified to write a critique of political Evangelical conservatism than either Cal Thomas or Ed Dobson. Thomas came to be part of the Religious Right circuitously through his lifelong career in journalism. Thomas briefly conveys in Blinded By Might how after being fired from NBC news that he made a more explicit profession of faith in Christ and commitment to Bible study (12). In that phase of his life, Thomas considered himself a supporter of Jimmy Carter, having voted for the governor of Georgia as president on the basis of Carter's record as a sincere churchgoer and endearingly refreshing sense of integrity.
Yet as the Carter administration progressed, a trained observer of public events such as Thomas could not help but notice the dichotomy between the policies actually implemented and the convictions Thomas believed were expressed in Scripture particularly in regards to the issue of abortion. It was around this time that Thomas made the acquaintance of the Rev. Jerry Falwell at an event Thomas was covering in his capacity as a journalist at which Falwell spoke. Given the congruence of their thinking, Falwell contacted Thomas thereafter to offer Thomas a position as the vice president for communications for an organization that would come to be known as the Moral Majority.
If Cal Thomas granted the Moral Majority a degree of journalistic respectability and media professionalism, Ed Dobson brings to this analysis the perspective of a minister that served as part of Falwell's inner circle as the pastor's personal assistant. It was, in fact, Dobson along with Liberty Baptist College professor Ed Hindson that essentially ghostwrote Falwell's book that set down as a manifesto what would become the agenda of Moral Majority. In his role as Falwell's assistant, Dobson points out that he was not so much involved with the day to day operations of Moral Majority but rather sat on the organization's governing board and often represented Falwell in numerous media interviews when the pastor himself was not available.
Dobson admits that at the time he not only found the confrontation in forums such as “The Phil Donahue Show” invigorating but also the sincere work of the Lord. However, it was while waiting for a flight at the airport in Charlotte, North Carolina that Dobson began to question whether he had comprised the best to settle for the good ironically enough when he crossed paths there with fellow Falwell confidant Harold Wilmington. After the two exchanged pleasantries with Dobson going into enthusiastic detail about the Donahue debate regarding the expulsion of an atheist member from the Boy Scouts, Wilmington observed that his colleague might be casting his pearls before swine. By that, the theologian suggested that a pastor might actually be squandering his time and efforts in attempting to advocate for truth in a hostile arena never intending to embrace such rather than in a traditional teaching context where a careful exposition might find a more receptive audience (18-19). After nearly a year of reflection and prayer, Dobson accepted a call to the pastorate of Calvary Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It seemed Dobson got out when the getting was good as Dobson recalls that the day that his new church voted to install him was the day Falwell took over as the head of PTL following Jim Bakker's adultery scandal.
It was in reflecting on this considerable expenditure of resources in terms of both time and finances with little actual cultural change that both Thomas and Dobson were forced to ask what was the point. In the chapter titled, “What Did We Really Win?”, Thomas writes, “...very little we set out to do has gotten done. In fact, the moral landscape of America has gotten worse (23).” As evidence for his claims, Thomas references statistics regarding the sorts of issues Moral Majority must be commended for taking a principled stand pertaining to such as abortion and media decency.
For example, in 1973, 63% of those polled agreed that it is against the will of God to destroy human life including that of the unborn. Yet 68% of those polled also agreed with the statement that, so long as a doctor was consulted, the decision should remain that of the woman in question. As of the publication of Blinded By Might in 1999, opinions remained relatively unchanged during that two decade span in which the Religious Right in the form of the Moral Majority and its successor the Christian Coalition was at the peak of its influence.
In regards to the homosexual agenda, Thomas admits that in 1997 Congress did enact the Defense of Marriage Act which defined state-recognized matrimony as between a man and a woman; but the columnist points out that states such as New Jersey were beginning to allow homosexual adoption. And flash forward to the writing of this analysis in 2021, gay marriage stands triumphant, recognized in all fifty states. Prominent political dynasties of both parties such as the Obama's, the Bush's and the Cheney's once extolling the Defense Of Marriage Act as a reasonable bulwark upholding the wisdom of several thousand years of human tradition now insist that they never really supported the legislation and those continuing to hold that once professed by the stalwarts of the establishment the deviants an affront to all human decency.
To understand how a movement so-well intended in terms of wanting to see righteousness upheld throughout the land stalled at best or lost its way at worst, it might be prudent to examine the background of the Moral Majority and what it was exactly that the organization stood for. Ed Dobson attempts to undertake such a task in the chapter titled “The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy”, a reference to a remark made by Hillary Clinton (at the time First Lady) describing the network of conservative operatives among whom Jerry Falwell ranked prominently that organized to oppose the profound shortcomings of her husband's presidential administration such as the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Though the Religious Right as embodied by Moral Majority would come to represent a spectrum of conservative theological traditions such as Pentecostals, Charismatics, and even a smattering of Roman Catholics as well, its most direct lineage was probably most accurately traced through the Fundamentalist movement of the early twentieth century.
To Be Continued...
By Frederick Meekins
Thursday, February 13
Apostate Pastrix Denies The Resurrection
"Did Jesus really raise form the dead? I don't know."
— Protestia (@Protestia) February 13, 2025
United Church of Christ Minister Pat Langlois says she doesn't know if Jesus rose from the dead, and also that it doesn't matter if he didn't. pic.twitter.com/FsRYNpmTow
Monday, February 10
Thomas Aquinas Speculative Visage
Face of a Saint: Thomas Aquinas’ Appearance Revealed After 750 Years
— National Catholic Register (@NCRegister) February 7, 2025
"On the heels of the skull of St. Thomas Aquinas touring the nation, a new study released this week gives Catholics a glimpse at what the “Angelic Doctor” may have looked like."
✍️@alyssamurphy… pic.twitter.com/dMYAopVBKk
Saturday, February 8
Christainity Today Abets Evangelical Capitulation
Mind you, just seconds before, the presidential candidate had endured what would have been if he had not turned his head a skull-shattering shot rather than a traumatic ear wound of debateable severity.
The rallying cry of “Fight, fight, fight” mght provide valuable insight into the psychology of Donald Trump.
However, the response to it on the part of the editorial staff of Christainity Today perhaps reveals even more about the sorry mental state of the propagandists going out of their way to publish nitpicky criticiisms of something articulated under considerable emotional distress.
For all Trump knew he was about to die.
Would these pecksniffs preferred him to blubber for his life or to impart a rallying cry for his supporters to carry on the cause in light of his looming demise?
Was Trump supposed to have urged his supporters to role over to allow what remains of our withering liberties to be trampled asunder?
Apparently the virtue signallers at Christianity Today are outraged that Trump's instincts when attacked were to retaliate rather than not only to enunciate a recantation of the deeds for which a disturbing number find the assailant's intended outcome fitting recompense but for failing to regret that this plot against him was not carried out to the desired fruition.
Yet throughout the summer of 2020 and henceforward, those on the Christianity Today/Russell Moore/Gospel Coaltion end of the Evangelical spectrum barely said a word of condemnation of the outright acts of vandalism, terrorism, and theft perpetrated by the likes of Black Lives Matter and that movement's Antifa street brawlers.
If anything, theologues of the Christianity Today/Gospel Coaltion ilk preened how those like them were rather at fault simply for being White.
These woketopian scolds condemned as the most pernicious and inscidious racists of all not those that rallied for Nazi and Klan marches but rather run of the mill conservative Caucasians that had never done anything malaicious to a Black person a day in their lives.
Even more akin to crocodile tears is the line in the Christianity Today article wishing that Trump had articulated some patrriotic grandiosity.
Had Trump utterered something along the lines of Nathan Hale's sentiment that he regrets that he has only the one life to give for his country, the Christianity Today article would have flown into a tizzy that such a statement was proof as to Trump's political idolatry and Christian nationalism.
For years, the Gospel Coalition/Christianity Today axis serrved as a nexus insisting that any displays of American pride such as U.S. flags in a church had to be removed out of concern that such might set off foreigners and minorities still permitted to retain the symbols of their own ethnicity despite the likes of Russell Moore and Jonathan Leeman repeatedly berating White Southerners for brandishing anything other than the detailess ensign signalling unconditional capitulation to the nation's enemies.
One can't very well wipe one's dirty rhetotical feet across Old Glory and then attempt to wrap its comforting embrace around you snuggly as you look down at those you hold in utter contempt.
By Frederick Meekins
