Unfundamentalist

Above All, Love

Don M. Burrows

On Conservative Christians’ Sudden Devotion to Imperial Cult

by Don M. Burrows in Christian History

The amount of “good Christians” who have rattled their sabers in response to the NFL’s kneeling players during the National Anthem should not be surprising to anyone. Many of these same conservative (and of course largely white) Christians also voted for a man last November who epitomizes everything their Gospels speak against.

Indeed, in the wake of the Las Vegas shooting, Pat Robertson didn’t even try to veil his and his flock’s fetish for authoritarianism:
“Violence in the streets, ladies and gentlemen. Why is it happening? The fact that we have disrespect for authority; there is profound disrespect for our president, all across this nation they say terrible things about him. It’s in the news, it’s in other places. There is disrespect now for our national anthem, disrespect for our veterans, disrespect for the institutions of our government, disrespect for the court system. All the way up and down the line, disrespect.”
Robertson’s comments are ironic enough in light of how he spent much of the Obama administration. But seen through a longer lens of history, his and his ilk’s anger over citizens failing to display blind obeisance to a national leader, symbol, or ritual, and their demands for punishment, are ever more so.

Remember that these same white Christians have an immense persecution complex. They see any and every slight upon their faith as evidence of systematic oppression or proof positive that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are galloping our way for… [Read more…] about On Conservative Christians’ Sudden Devotion to Imperial Cult

Bullying Bishops and Castrated Christians: The Nashville Statement’s Eunuch Omission

by Don M. Burrows in Christian History

Mountains of ink have already been spilled rightfully condemning the anti-gay, transphobic Nashville Statement last month, but I was particularly drawn to one of its infamous affirmations/denials that made use of a New Testament passage routinely abused by gender-conformity enforcers: Matthew 19.

This is the passage where Jesus is asked about divorce, answers that it is not really acceptable, and caps his discussion by talking about castration. Yes, really. Not the way you remember it? That’s probably by design.

The standard translation for Matthew 19:12 is (as usual) most accurately conveyed by the New Revised Standard Version:
For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.
Yet a perusal of other translations shows just how much many Christian translators want to avoid any notion of men “making themselves eunuchs.” Any number of alternative translations have been offered, like “those who choose to live like eunuchs” (NIV), or “some choose not to marry” (NLT), or those who “became eunuchs” (NET), or who “decided to be celibate” (God’s Word), or my favorite, “disabled themselves” (Weymouth).

None of these come as close as the NRSV does at capturing what the Greek actually says in the text, and yet the NRSV and its traditional wording (the same found in the King James Bible) are… [Read more…] about Bullying Bishops and Castrated Christians: The Nashville Statement’s Eunuch Omission

Gagnon out at PC(USA) Seminary

by Don M. Burrows in LGBT

Photo by Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.Finally, Robert Gagnon – the anti-gay theologian whose abuse of scholarship was rivaled only by his abuse of people – is out at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. A link that once led to his faculty webpage there has been 404’d, and Gagnon himself has issued a breathless statement on Facebook about his departure.

This one was not really hard to see coming. Pittsburgh Theological Seminary is affiliated with the LGBT-affirming Presbyterian Church (USA) denomination, and his virulent, often erratic behavior toward anyone who disagrees with him is not the sort of thing institutions typically wish from their scholars. Indeed, Gagnon has a penchant for cherry-picking or outright rejecting mainstream scholarship (and even entire fields of study), and anyone who engages in such practices does not belong in an academic institution.

Gagnon himself appears to realize this, as, in the announcement of his resignation, he pines for employment at an evangelical institution, noting (correctly) that “it seems unlikely, given my stances on sexual ethics and Scripture, that any university religion department or mainline denominational seminary would take me.” It’s amusing how Gagnon truncates his tendency lump gays and lesbians in with pedophiles and his obsession with the “perversion” of LGBT people as merely “sexual ethics and Scripture,” but I digress.

More likely, institutions will be loath to hire him because of… [Read more…] about Gagnon out at PC(USA) Seminary

We Agree: We Can't Agree to Disagree on Anti-Gay Bigotry

by Don M. Burrows in Christian Issues

Over on the Patheos Evangelical Channel, some authors are still fighting the losing battle against the social acceptance of gay and lesbian people. I know, so 2004, right?

Well, every once in a while it’s probably good for us to engage their tired thinking and to once again point out why anti-gay theology is so fraught with problems. So when the Patheos Facebook Page recently shared a problematic piece by Grayson Gilbert titled “We Can’t Agree to Disagree on Homosexuality,” I went ahead and read it against my better judgment.

Before I take a closer look at Gilbert’s exegesis, let me concur with his title: it’s true, we can’t agree to disagree on what amounts to bigotry. I wouldn’t “agree to disagree” with a racist, and I’m not going to agree to disagree with someone who, like racists, clings to a traditional set of prejudiced notions despite the mountains of evidence against them, using instead a host of illogical and “biblical” rationalizations — just like the racists of yore did.

But when bigotry uses the tools of my trade — in this case Greek philology — I feel duty-bound to, yet again, set the record straight.

Gilbert, a self-described aspiring master’s student at the fundamentalist Moody Bible Institute, lectures us all about the meaning of the Greek in the famous clobber passage of 1 Cor. 6:9. In so doing, he parrots Al Mohler and a host of other conservative pseudo-intellectuals whose knowledge of Greek is clearly limited to the New Testament, making the routine… [Read more…] about We Agree: We Can't Agree to Disagree on Anti-Gay Bigotry

Why the Bible Doesn’t ‘Clearly Say’ Anything

by Don M. Burrows in Christian Issues

If it’s a day ending in Y at Unfundamentalist, it’s probably a day on which we’ve gotten some version of the following from one of our detractors: “Your argument seems to be with the Bible.”

These are the people who believe the Bible to be the Definitive Word of God, and who believe, even when offered any number of nuanced arguments about why that’s problematic, that “the Bible clearly says X,” about any given issue.

If you are saying those words in English, living in present-day America, then you are uttering either an obfuscation or an outright lie. Because the Bible doesn’t “clearly say” much of anything.

Sure, it isn’t as though most of the New Testament contains completely opaque Greek. Much of it is quite straightforward. But the Biblical texts get especially sticky on matters of theology and social politics, when verses are used to declare people sinners or unfit for heaven. In such a context, a verse like “No one gets to the Father except by me” calls for a much greater discussion than a verse like “they went down into Nazareth” (though issues of narrative flow are even raised for the latter).

This is because the Bible is written in ancient languages, and ancient languages are particularly difficult for us to nail down, since no one is currently alive speaking them as living models of communication. So scholars work hard to tease out the meaning of problematic passages using the tried-and-true tools of philology—the study of ancient… [Read more…] about Why the Bible Doesn’t ‘Clearly Say’ Anything

There Is No "Judeo-Christian Tradition"

by Don M. Burrows in Christian History

View image | gettyimages.com
 

Ohio Governor John Kasich, whose bid for the presidency appears to be running on fumes, announced earlier this week that the U.S. should develop a federal agency to export “Judeo-Christian values.”

No surprise there. Most Republican candidates have worked to appeal to religious conservatives, and using the buzz phrase “Judeo-Christian” is a tried and true way to do it. But in point of fact, there really is no “Judeo-Christian tradition.” Said tradition is nothing but a Cold War invention that elides thousands of years of history in the service of identity politics.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting there are no shared values between Christians and Jews. There are. But there are shared values between Christians and people of all religions, between Jews and people of all religions, and between both Christians and Jews and those of no religion. The “Judeo-Christian” religion has only ever existed as a way for some religious people to define themselves against all others.

Lots of people throw around the phrase “Judeo-Christian,” and many do so with good intentions: as a way to acknowledge the shared texts and origins of the two faiths. But nobody spoke of a “Judeo-Christian tradition” until quite recently. Indeed, the word does not even show up in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1899.

If you know any amount of Christian history, or have merely read the New Testament, you know that anti-Jewish animosity has been an unfortunate part… [Read more…] about There Is No "Judeo-Christian Tradition"

Kicking the Samaritan: Christianity and the Anti-Muslim Backlash

by Don M. Burrows in Christian Issues, Current Events, Islam

View image | gettyimages.com

 

By now, the anti-Muslim backlash we witness after every fresh terror attack is not all that surprising. Bigots will be bigots, and they are not known for complexity or nuance in the face of … well, anything.

What makes it more unsettling this time is that while in decades past the top Republican in the country has denounced Islamophobia, this time around Republican candidates for the presidency have fallen over themselves to be ever more hateful toward Muslims.

A full 23 governors (most of them Republicans) announced on Monday that they would not welcome Syrian refugees into their borders, while Jeb Bush noticeably departed from his brother’s more measured words and declared that we should screen people by religion – accepting only Christian refugees and not Muslim ones into America.

As if that weren’t bad enough, the Republican front-runner, Donald Trump, then mused on national television that we should look at shutting down mosques.

All of this from the party of “religious freedom.”

We could wax on about how hypocritical they are for thinking religious freedom means actively discriminating against gays or denying your employees birth control, as opposed to, you know, shutting down houses of worship. But their mentality seems far darker than mere hypocrisy.

Need it even be said in this day and age? To turn one’s back on refugees is the epitome of anti-Christian action.

When Jesus was asked what one must do to attain eternal life… [Read more…] about Kicking the Samaritan: Christianity and the Anti-Muslim Backlash

God Still Wishes He Were Dead: A Scene-By-Scene Analysis of the God's Not Dead 2 Trailer

by Don M. Burrows in Movie Reviews

I’ve been avidly consuming any and all speculation and analysis of the trailers for the upcoming “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” and it struck me that we should do our own scene-by-scene analysis of the latest trailer to drop for another blockbuster sequel. I’m referring, of course, to the no-doubt highly anticipated sequel to 2014’s “God’s Not Dead.”

As I wrote in my review of that horrid film, “God’s Not Dead” was a narrative fantasy of conservative evangelical projection. Non-Christians were bad. Academics and universities were bad. But atheists were especially bad. And good Christians have to rise up to defend their faith when they are confronted with a philosophy professor who seems more interested in science than philosophy (I have to agree there – that would definitely go on my student evaluation).

It’s hard to imagine a story even more divorced from reality than “God’s Not Dead” — hard, that is, until one sees the new trailer for “God’s Not Dead 2”:

https://youtu.be/Fq6lG4GeEMI

First off, what’s with the lame title? Most sequels nowadays don’t just go with numbers. Why not the obvious “God’s Still Not Dead” with maybe an editing caret adding “still”? Or better yet – “God’s Not Deader” or maybe “God’s Not Dead – Not Dead Harder”?

Whatever the title, the sequel appears to be connected to the first film only by way of sharing a (purely) fictional universe. But this time, the hero is a school teacher in a plot so impossible it should really be classed as speculative… [Read more…] about God Still Wishes He Were Dead: A Scene-By-Scene Analysis of the God's Not Dead 2 Trailer

Jesus-Deniers Still Don’t Get It

by Don M. Burrows in Christian Issues

Despite what New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman calls a “cottage industry” promoting the claim that Jesus of Nazareth never existed, the existence of a guy by that name in first century Palestine who was crucified by the Romans remains a matter of historical consensus among ancient historians and philologists.

That is a fact. The consensus remains, because no evidence has surfaced to make the academy question the existence of Jesus any more than the many other minor figures of ancient history, despite the fact that like many of those other figures of history, Jesus’ biographers ascribed to him quasi-divine status and asserted that he performed a host of miracles.

Why does the mention of miracles and divine intervention fail to give us pause with respect to Jesus? Because the existence of the supernatural is taken for granted in antiquity, so source material lacking any mention of it at all is in fact quite scarce.

True, there are a few famous skeptics among the ancients, like the Greek elegist Xenophanes (sixth century BCE), the Latin poet Lucretius (first century BCE), and the Greek satirist Lucian (second century CE), but they are far from the majority, even among the educated elite who give us the written material from that epoch. Even outside of written sources, the art, architecture, and archaeology of the ancients (especially the sheer number of defixiones, or magical curse tablets) point to a world in which the supernatural was an everyday part of… [Read more…] about Jesus-Deniers Still Don’t Get It

The Duggars: Privilege and Personal Irresponsibility

by Don M. Burrows in Christian Issues, Current Events, Fundamentalism

View image | gettyimages.com

Nothing has laid bare how obviously conservatives’ own privilege trumps the “personal responsibility” they demand of everyone else than the ongoing saga regarding Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar’s oldest progeny and his apparent teenage preoccupation with molesting young girls.

On the one hand, the Duggars are so committed to sexual responsibility that they adhere to a rigid gender and procreative ideology that eschews all sexuality outside of heterosexual marriage, birth control (even within said marriage), and of course abortion, to the point that they will blithely imply that anyone who falls outside their sexual orthodoxy is prone to molest and prey on children.

On the other hand is their son Josh Duggar, who we now know made it a recurring habit as a youngster to not only molest females while they slept, but to do so to his own sisters, who were as young as 5 years old, annihilating pretty much every sexual taboo across cultures worldwide.

Yet of course, the Duggars are the true victims, as they told Fox News Wednesday night, because:

Liberals have it in for them, because they’re “Christian.” Actually, if liberals have it in for the Duggars, it’s because of the very public campaigns they’ve waged against equal rights for gays and lesbians throughout the years. Liberals don’t have a problem with “Christians” overall. Many liberals are Christians.
The wicked Springdale Police Department released a report via the… [Read more…] about The Duggars: Privilege and Personal Irresponsibility