Above All, Love
Devoted readers may have noticed that it’s been a while since we’ve posted here.
Rest assured, this blog is not abandonded, and we’re still accepting submissions.
We are, however, taking a bit of a summer break. The sun is out, the sky is blue, the grass is green and, frankly, your intrepid editor would rather be enjoying all of that instead of sitting behind a computer screen.
Peace and love to you all and we’ll see you in the fall!
[Edited 1 Aug 2018 to more accurately reflect the time frames of Joe Gregory’s and Michael McKinney’s involvement with BN Media.]
Last Tuesday, Warren Throckmorton announced that his blog had been abruptly removed from Patheos.
Dr. Throckmorton is a longtime Patheos blogger, and it was there that he wrote important posts about the scandals involving Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill Church, K.P. Yohannan, and Gospel for Asia. Driscoll and Yohannan both have blogs that continue to be hosted by Patheos.
In place of Dr. Throckmorton’s blog, Patheos now serves up a 410 error code, which means that “the resource requested is no longer available and will not be available again. This should be used when a resource has been intentionally removed and the resource should be purged.”
The only reason Dr. Throckmorton was given for this action was that his blog no longer meets the “strategic objectives” of Patheos. In an email subsequently sent out to some Patheos bloggers, Director of Content Phil Fox Rose says that “We’re sorry the lack of details allows for speculation,” but fails to offer any details that might end such speculation, other than that Dr. Throckmorton did not meet their “expectations.”
Patheos is a private company and is free to choose who they want to host on their site. But it’s not difficult to discover why Dr. Throckmorton’s relentless reporting on the scandals of evangelicalism didn’t fit the ideology (or the “strategic objectives”) of the owners of… [Read more…] about Patheos Removes Blog of Christian Whistleblower
Fundamentalists claim that unless we submit to the Bible as the Word of God, we cannot have objective morality. Our sense of right and wrong would be subject to personal taste or popular opinion.
I think this essentially becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those who grow up in fundamentalism rely on the external authority of other people’s interpretation of the Bible and morality. We are taught to DISREGARD our personal ideas, and we lose the ability to discern which opinions are worth our attention.
It is an insidious vicious cycle to keep people from functioning out of their own moral agency and stay under the control of religious gatekeepers. This is the reason for the arrested development of many fundamentalist adults, that they continue to rely on external authorities to dictate their everyday choices.
Breaking free from it takes time and incremental steps for a lot of us. It took me years to reclaim a strong sense of agency over my own spirit, mind, and body–to trust, once again, that I can discern for myself which ideas are compelling, what activities are worth engaging in, and who gets to be an influence in my life.
Contrary to popular fundamentalist opinion, gaining self-agency doesn’t mean we become free-for-all selfish beings who float around in hedonistic airs without purpose or moral grounding. It means putting back together a robust integrity of personhood that was broken by abusive religious teachings. And it means we can participate in the… [Read more…] about Fundamentalism Tells You Food Is Good While Taking Away Your Ability to Taste
Netflix’s show, Queer Eye, the reboot of the popular makeover show from the last decade, has been widely lauded for moving beyond mere fashion and grooming advice and instead engaging with timely social issues.
In the fifth episode of the season, the Fab Five—a team of five openly gay “experts”—set out to make over Bobby Camp, who is a married father of six and a devout Christian.
Midway through the episode, while working together in the garden, Bobby Berk, the design expert, brings up the subject of homosexuality with Bobby Camp. Interspersed with their discussion, Berk poignantly shares his personal experience growing up in a Christian family:
Berk: What’s your view on homosexuality?
Camp: Growing up—gays are crazy, gays are wrong.
Berk: That’s what I was taught, too.
[cut to interview with Berk]
Berk: My mother and father were religious, we went to an Assemblies of God church, brimstone, fire. I carried my Bible to school every day. I was the lead singer of a Christian rock band, I was a deacon in my children’s church. Christianity was my life.
[return to gardening scene]
Camp: I know when I grew up I saw so many examples of God doing the right things with people, and lives were being changed, but then I would see such a contrast in some other people who were considered upright and devout and role models, that I just saw the… [Read more…] about Queer Eye and Christian Hypocrisy
I recently received this email from a reader:
I’m a college student who has become an unfundamentalist just this last week. You guys were everything I was looking for, and I’m so glad I found you. I had a question, though, that I was hoping you could answer. Now that I’m aware that many of the Christian organizations I supported push through values that I cannot condone, I’m looking for some unfundamentalist approved charities I can send my 10% to. I was hoping that maybe you could post an article with a list of approved charities or simply send me a list of your favorites. Thanks in advance! 🙂
Since it’s the time of year that many of us make charitable contributions, I thought it might be helpful to respond publicly with my thoughts, as well as solicit charity recommendations from our readers.
First, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the requirement to give 10% of our money to charity is decidedly fundamentalist. It’s a notion borne out of legalism and control, and there’s certainly no Christian mandate to do so. Rather, we should seek to be generous and loving with our money (and other resources), giving freely and not trying to meet a specific number. For some people, 10% is likely too much to be reasonably affordable; for others, it’s probably far too little.
Second, it’s a good idea to vet any charity you’re not familiar with using one (or all) of these sites: Charity Navigator, CharityWatch, GreatNonprofits, and GuideStar. Keep in mind that… [Read more…] about Unfundamentalist Charities?
The Execution of God is a disturbing book—and rightly so: any meaningful discussion of the death penalty should be profoundly unsettling. It should cause us to reassess our values and our ethics. It should press us to reevaluate our actions—or inactions—regarding what continues to be one of the most divisive and troubling issues in modern America. The Execution of God succeeds on all these counts, and its potent message lingers, disturbingly, long after the final page.
In The Execution of God, Baptist pastor, theologian, and activist Jeff Hood provides a deeply personal reflection on the death penalty. He recounts the pervasive acceptance (and even glorification) of capital punishment during his fundamentalist Christian upbringing:
Throughout my upbringing, I heard about the death penalty. My family lived in a state that had the death penalty. We went to a church that was for the death penalty. We didn’t really know anybody opposed to the death penalty. Though it might sound strange, I thought that following Jesus included being for the death penalty. Every so often, an upcoming execution would get attention and everybody would start talking about the case until the person was executed. Occasionally slipping in and out conversation, the death penalty was a way of life.
—The Execution of God, p28
Hood goes on to describe his questioning of that de facto dogma, and his eventual transition to undertaking… [Read more…] about The Execution of God
Over the years that this blog has been running, we’ve devoted a great deal of space to countering the dominant theological propositions of fundamentalist Christianity. But this inevitably leads to questions about alternatives: If a literal, “plain-text” reading of the Bible, especially as informed by modern evangelical theology, isn’t the “right” way to read the text, then what is?
How are we — Christians who reject limited, self-serving conceptions of God, who reject the absolute authority of an inerrant Bible, who reject the misogyny and homophobia of the modern Church, who, indeed, reject much of the “modern” part of church in general — how are we to think about our faith? How can we thoughtfully — and faithfully — wrestle with the theological issues at the heart of Christianity?
In response to such questions, I can now enthusiastically recommend Yale theologian Dale Martin’s new book, Biblical Truths: The Meaning of Scripture in the Twenty-first Century.
This 408 page volume (including a bibliography and subject, author, and scriptural indices), offers nothing less than a “nonfoundationalist, postmodern, Marxist, orthodox, ecumenical, and provisional theological interpretation of the New Testament” (32), in which Martin explains “why and how I continue to find traditional Christian doctrines and confessions ‘true,’ why I’m willing to confess the creeds, even though I am a critical scholar who knows much of the Bible is not ‘true’ when taken… [Read more…] about Discovering “Biblical Truths”
If you have even a passing interest in jewelry making or holiday decor, then you’re probably familiar with Hobby Lobby. And if you have even a passing interest in biblical manuscripts or the modern antiquities market, then you’re probably familiar with the Green family, who just so happen to own Hobby Lobby.
The Greens possess both strong business acumen and steadfast evangelical Christian faith, and it is the meeting of those two seemingly disparate fields that is explored in the new book Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby by Candida Moss and Joel Baden. Their timely and eye-opening book is “an exploration of the unusual intersection of faith and business, biblical worldview and academic scholarship, religion and the public sphere–all of which are brought together in the Bible-focused initiatives of the Green family, Hobby Lobby, and MOTB [Museum of the Bible]” (12).
Moss and Baden examine the establishment of the vast antiquities collection of the Green family, the scholarly study (or lack thereof) of that collection, the Bible curriculum that the Greens are promoting for use in public schools, and the Museum of the Bible, a Green initiative dedicated to the book they seem intent to promote at virtually any cost.
In describing and explaining how the Greens are seeking to bring their “biblical” worldview to America, Moss and Baden raise difficult questions and cast light on countless questionable decisions surrounding the various… [Read more…] about Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby
The answer to the question posed by the title of Randal Rauser’s new book, What’s So Confusing About Grace? is “just about everything,” especially if you grew up, as Rauser did, in the North American evangelical subculture of the 80s and 90s.
Rauser’s spiritual memoir recounts his lifelong struggle to understand both the foundational and the superficial issues of Christian faith (the two are easily confused, as is made amply evident throughout the book).
Beginning with his conversion to Christianity at the age of five, Rauser takes us through seasons of certainty and doubt as he examines issues like salvation, hell, grace, good works, the Bible, the Church, and Christian doctrine. He “tells that story of moving from the naive innocence of a child’s faith, on through layers of doctrinal and ethical complexity, wrestling with the fear of ultimate failure, and finally arriving at an abiding trust in the God who is infinitely greater, wiser, more merciful, and more loving than I could ever be” (xii).
Equal parts humorous, sobering, and thought-provoking, Rauser explores the big issues of Christianity by honestly recounting the often self-deprecating anecdotes of his youth. He discusses hell through the story of an ill-fated gingerbread cookie, and exposes the hypocrisy of the notion that loving Jesus requires eschewing anything “secular,” which led him to smash his Peter Gabriel cassette tapes on the pavement. But he also offers more serious fare by tackling… [Read more…] about What’s So Confusing About Grace?
Over on the Friendly Atheist blog, Hemant Mehta, in a post titled “Every Religious Person Should Be Able to Answer These Questions,” draws attention to a “street epistemology” video in which an interviewer named Reid asks a Christian named Tia about her beliefs.
Tia has a difficult time articulating why she believes her Christian faith is true and ends up saying that her faith is an “internal feeling.” But the interview really begins to run off the rails when she’s asked:
“If someone from another religion came up to the table and said that believing in their god gave them joy and that they had really good internal feelings about that god, is that a justifiable way to come to that belief? By going off feelings for that?”
Tia’s response isn’t too bad:
“No. I would say that’s awesome. I would say that’s cool, but check out what I have to say.”
But she becomes flummoxed when asked to apply that logic to her own beliefs. Faced with the question “If it’s [faith] not reliable for them, why is it reliable for yourself?” she says “You’re asking tough questions!”
Tia simply can’t resolve the dissonance caused by the idea that her feeling of faith might be equally reliable (or unreliable) as that of a person from a different religious background.
It’s easy to poke fun at the faith of someone like Tia, but I’m sure if most people were put on the spot about their beliefs, they would also struggle to articulate them. Anyone who’s taken a course in epistemology or read a good book… [Read more…] about Every Non-Religious Person Should Be Able to Answer These Questions
