For example. A guy standing in front of me with a brick is potentially quite dangerous but I can see him coming. This guy….
That is attempted murder and it happened because the guy never saw it coming.
For many years, White evangelical Protestants and Catholic laity were some of the most reliable conservative voters in America. This has only increased recently. In 2016, Donald Trump, a man with what can charitably be described as a sordid past, pulled in a huge percentage of the born-again vote:
Only blacks, who voted 89% for Hillary Clinton, were as monolithic as White evangelicals. I would bet the numbers were actually higher than 80% as I suspect many evangelicals were loathe to admit they voted for Trump to a stranger.
So needless to say, when the Left made a list of institutions that needed to be infiltrated and destroyed, religious organizations were at the top of the list. As usual, they skipped the frontal assault and began infiltrating the seminaries, completely unbeknownst to the rank and file clergy and laity. Soon, “parachurch” groups started to succumb to the Bolsheviks in their midst.
One part of the problem, a major part of the problem if you ask me, is that far too many Christian clergy of various sorts are dependent on the donations from the plate and that makes them skittish. The second part of the problem is that the clergy in this day and age tends to attract soft men (and increasingly women). Many younger clergy are bookish and weak, both physically and emotionally. The John MacArthur’s are dying out, replaced by men who look like they are incapable of changing a flat tire. The third part of the problem is the sense of inferiority so many clergy, theologians and seminary instructors have compared to their more “serious” counterparts in secular academia.
Put it all together and you have a recipe for moral rot.
Very few Christian laity know what is going on at the institutions supported by their money. They just assume that they are working to spread the Gospel. In general that is not the case.
Exhibit A:
Matthew J. Hall, provost and senior vice president for academic administration at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. SBTS is the seminary run by purported conservative Albert Mohler and is supposed to be a bulwark against liberalism. That reputation is pretty tarnished these days and for good reason. Mr. Hall in 2017 had some stunning and brave things to say to a room full of what I assume are young Christian ministers in training.
In case you missed it, here is what he said:
Notice the word: Everything.
Again, this man is paid by the labors of the people in the Southern Baptist convention but Mr. Hall spits on the very denomination that employs him, the traditions of the school where he has a cushy job, and the very families who put money in the plate.
Why doesn’t Matthew Hall go be the provost at some Bible school in the Congo or Bangladesh? Oh, because he likes the soft, comfortable job he has where he can give some talks and write some papers and make a nice living. Deep down, Matthew Hall loves “White supremacy” because it makes his life easier and even he knows that it makes the lives of blacks in America much easier compared to life without “White supremacy”.
Look at someone like Voddie Baucham. Voddie is a black conservative Christian. He had a great gig in the U.S., writing books and speaking at conferences. But he felt called to something else so a few years ago he took a position as Dean of Theology at African Christian University in Lusaka, Zambia. Zambia is a poor country in Africa with a per capita GDP of around $4,000 compared to the U.S. at $67,000 per capita. Clearly Voddie cares more about his ministry than his own personal comfort.
Then Mr. Hall suggests not so subtly that all White Southern Baptists over 45 are basically unrepentant racists that he has to “love” especially to get through their thick, racist skulls that they are awful racists. I wonder if the average 45 year old White Southern Baptist knows that the provost of Southern Seminary thinks they are intractable, ignorant racists? Maybe they would reconsider their donations to the denomination.
Mr. Hall appears to be more of an evangelist for the religion of woke White guilt rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ. His passion seems focused on teaching young White ministers in training that the traditions represented by Southern are evil and racist and cover the “rotting corpse of White supremacy”. Why would a faithful Southern Baptist church hire men who are being taught the Southern Baptist Convention is a rotting corpse of racism and that everything about the denomination, traditions and even the families that make up the SBC are evil?
Fun fact. The faculty page for Southern Seminary lists 68 faculty members. A grand total of one, Kevin L.Smith, is black. There are a couple of mestizos and a Middle Eastern guy plus a couple of White women, but the rest of the photos are a sea of White male faces. If I am going the math right, that means that blacks make up less than 1.5% of the faculty at Southern. I guess Matthew Hall likes virtue signaling about blacks to his young White students but doesn’t actually like having black people around. Pretty much like every White liberal, blacks for Southern Seminary are an object of veneration but only in theory and from a safe distance.
Exhibit B:
The “Gospel” Coalition
I have been on the shit-list for The Gospel Coalition for years. At one time I was blocked from commenting on their website, blocked on Facebook and blocked on Twitter. I haven’t been paying attention to them for a number of reasons but when I do, they never fail to live down to ever lower standards.
Case in point, a recent article by K. Edward Copeland. Mr. Copeland is a black guy who has spent most of his life safely ensconced in academic settings created by White people and apparently that makes him upset. Mr. Copeland wrote: Why I Hate August
The top of the article features a picture of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17 year old kid who shot three criminals in self-defense, alongside a grinning photo of Jacob Blake, the rapist who was shot by police while resisting arrest and reaching for a deadly weapon. It wasn’t one of these pictures of Jacob Blake:
I wonder why?
Anyway, he provides the obligatory mention of Emmett Till, a 14 year old black who was lynched in 1955, allegedly for either flirting with or pawing at a White woman. Remember this is 1955, or 65 years ago but it needs to be constantly mentioned as part of the liturgy of grievance as if it happened today. Then he describes the shooting of Jacob Blake like this:
“I watch a video of a police officer pumping seven bullets into an unarmed black body”
Well that isn’t exactly how it happend and can we dispense with the “black body” nonsense? No mention of the knife he was reaching for or his violent criminal past or the attempt to subdue him with tasers or the assault on police officers. Nope, he was just shot in the “unarmed black body”. OK, that is pretty tame but then he writes this:
When armed mass shooters (Kyle Rittenhouse, Dylan Roof, etc.) are apprehended without incident, and unarmed black people are killed out of fear that they might be armed, we have a more insidious problem than “a few bad apples.” This thing is cultural, pervasive, and abominable.
Uh. Yeah.
Three big problems here.
First, lots of blacks are apprehended without being shot, that is why we have prisons full of them. The percentage of black men with prison records, often multiple stints, is enormous. Obviously they weren’t shot. Now, are lots of blacks shot by cops? Yes, you can see the videos of them but often they are being shot while attacking cops, shooting at them or other actions that justify the shooting.
Second, and this is more important, the outrageous conflating of Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17 year old White kid who was seen on camera in a violent altercation with adult men, who were armed, shooting people in self-defense is nothing at all like Dylan Roof, a 21 year old White man who targeted a black church specifically because it was full of black people and went on a racially based shooting rampage that killed 9 blacks. The two stories have nothing at all in common.
Were the actions of Dylan Roof the same as Kyle Rittenhouse?
No one with an ounce of discernment, something supposedly mandatory for a Christian minister, would think so unless the prevailing worldview one views the world through is not a Christian lens but a racialist lens where White people are the enemy.
Third, every reasonable and accepted definition of a mass shooting involves four or more people being shot. Rittenhouse shot three. That wasn’t a mass shooting and therefore Rittenhouse isn’t a “mass shooter”. Dylan Roof certainly was. Mass shooting is a loaded term and using it to describe a shooting that wasn’t a mass shooting in order to create a linkage in the minds of readers with Dylan Roof is dishonest in the extreme.
If I didn’t know better, I might think that Mr. Copeland just sees all young White men as indistinguishable. I wonder if we all look alike to him?
Exhibit C:
Russell Moore.
I won’t waste time on Russ, you can read about him a little bit here: The Curious Case Of Russell Moore
The Christian church in America is really two different institutions. There is the rank and file, the laity and the less famous preachers who are laboring in the ministry field day in and day out. Most are decent, hard working and humble people who are also politically conservative and reject the racialist politics of black Lives Matter.
Then there are the academics who seem to think that the laity are all a bunch of dangerous rubes and racists but are happy to be employed by those same racists.
I don’t have the numbers but I suspect, supported by anecdotal evidence, that the Southern Baptist Convention is bleeding members and churches. This is the same denomination where delegates to the national convention cheered when it was announced that the sons of Saddam Hussein had been killed by American troops. Today it is quickly becoming unrecognizable, rotting from within.
Meanwhile, Barna reports that as many as 1 in 5 U.S. churches faces permanent closure.
The evangelical church, once the most stalwart opponent of liberalism in America, is on it’s last legs. Why would any self-respecting White guy be associated with a church that employs teachers who accuse them, without evidence, of racism and describe their own denomination as covering the rotting corpse of “White supremacy”?
The Christian church was already on a precipitous decline in America as more and more Americans turn their back on organized religion. Add in the coronavirus and the wokevangelicals in “leadership”, and we might see the functional end of Christianity as a cultural force in the U.S.
Whatever your religious leanings, seeing Christianity stamped out in America is not healthy for anyone.
I grew up in a Southern Baptist church, graduated from Liberty University and shook Jerry senior's hand, preached for awhile, considered going to SBTS, followed the TGC crowd for several years online and admired much of their initial work. But then the veil was "rent in twain" and what I saw was not the "holy of holies" but more like the chicanery of charlatans. If I ever participate in church again I assure you it will look nothing like the cultural following crowd and "superstar" preacher clubs that has become much of current "Christianity." The sooner the actual Church strips away all the bullshit and focuses on the true mission of Christ the better our nation will be. How many lives will be sacrificed in Gehenna in the meantime is anyone's guess.
It's uncanny how much you and I have in common.
"The Christian church was already on a precipitous decline in America as more and more Americans turn their back on organized religion. Add in the coronavirus and the wokevangelicals in "leadership", and we might see the functional end of Christianity as a cultural force in the U.S.
Whatever your religious leanings, seeing Christianity stamped out in America is not healthy for anyone."
Great post, as usual. You've really been on fire lately! (In a good way, that is.)
I have to quibble with you about the ending, though, just a bit. I don't think we're witnessing the decline of Christianity in America. I think what we're seeing is how small the Church — the real church, the body of real believers — has always been. What's going away, sloughing off like the decaying flesh of that rotting corpse the commie-seminarian mentioned, is what's been called Churchianity. That's the various buildings with pointy roofs and bake sales and the tax-exempt organizations they house. These organizations are friends with the World in general and government in particular (see the aforementioned tax exemptions), and I have no doubt that they have been, in the past, generally an influence for decency, and possibly even good. And I agree that their waning is not healthy for America.
But ultimately, my first concern isn't for my physical life, my community, America, or the whole planet. These things are worthy of concern, and I will work (and have worked) for all of them. If a respectable militia forms in my area, I'll serve in it. But my ultimate concern is the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, and as He said, in John 18:36, that Kingdom is not of this world.
The actual Christian church? It is tiny and weak, as strength is reckoned by the world. But think how tiny and weak it was immediately following the Crucifixion: Jesus dead, His betrayer dead by suicide, and eleven nobodies plus a handful of women, hiding. That was the church. But, as Jesus promised, the gates of Hell did not prevail against it, nor will they prevail now. His power is perfected in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). No, the church's deadliest enemies have always been comfort, prosperity, respectability, and worldly power, and these have encrusted it, over and over, throughout the last two millennia. But God periodically prunes the deadwood. I think He's doing so now.
I took M.Div. classes online from Liberty, was a minister in s small SBC church for a while and grew disenchanted first with institutional religion and then organized religion in general. There are years of posts on my old blog saying much of the same things you wrote.
You are correct Jim, I should have distinguished between the actual church and cultural Christianity. I wrote often that the death of the powerful and wealthy institutional church is the best thing that could happen to the *actual* church.
The SJW rot is pretty deep in some schools granting degrees in theology. One person I know indicated that, although he was a member of the Student Senate, he was told that he couldn't have opinions because he wasn't a POC. He's still stuck in blue pill.
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