The end of last week brought two depressing online phenomena. The first was the "mosk" business on Facebook and the second was my Google news alert for "evangelical," which turned up a few dozen variations of the same story/column/post about Glenn Beck.
If you missed the "mosk" thing, it turns out that there's a high correlation between atrocious spelling and atrocious religious bigotry. Searching for "mosk" in Youropenbook.org turns up an almost endless stream of vile chauvinist posturing against Muslims in general and the Park 51 Center (or "mosk") in particular. It's a vast river of hateful ignorance and ignorant hate, proudly displayed as though it were evidence of something virtuous or smart — something to be proud of.
Mr. Destructo provides a sampling of these hate-posts from last week. Take a look. This is what the hospitality of Sodom looks like.
That flood of bad spelling, imbecility and evil is an indictment of America's elementary schools, news media and churches. As someone deeply invested in two out of three of those, I feel the need to confess our failure and apologize. And then to throw up.
Let's just consider one of those failing institutions here: the church. That whole string of Facebook postings is an aggressively hostile assertion of religious hegemony — specifically of the kind of godandcountry religious hegemony advocated by American evangelical Protestants. I don't know how many of these posters think of themselves as "Christians," but let's be clear: If any of these people attend a Christian church, then that church has failed them. Utterly. That church has failed to teach them the one thing that matters more than anything else.
Yes, I know, I'm a lefty liberal hippie and so my views are viewed as beyond the bounds of acceptable thought in our evangelical community. But this isn't my opinion. The Bible is abundantly, explicitly clear on this point:
Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in the darkness. Whoever loves his brother lives in the light, and there is nothing in him to make him stumble. But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness; he does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded him. …
Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. … No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. …
If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.
That's it. That's the whole ball game.
That's what matters. Every other question of doctrine, orthodoxy or orthopraxy is comparatively inconsequential. Those other matters matter, but if you get them all completely wrong and still get this right, you're still called blessed. And if you get all those other things right and get this wrong, then you're still accursed. "Depart from me, I never knew you," etc.
Which brings us to all those stories about Glenn Beck. Beck has been reaching out to evangelicals to support his call for a moralistic brand of nationalism, and many evangelicals view him as a natural ally who shares their "conservative" values.
But Beck is also viewed as "controversial" because he is a Mormon. This controversy, and only this, was the subject of dozens of articles, columns and blog posts clogging my news feed. They all asked one and only one question: Should evangelicals avoid supporting Glenn Beck because he is a Mormon?
The answer is No. They should not be shunning Beck because he is a Mormon. They should be shunning Glenn Beck because he hates his brother, because he preaches hate, nurtures it, multiplies it and feeds on it.
He's also a liar and a con-artist running a shameless pump-and-dump scam on overpriced gold coins. Both of those far outrank whatever discomfort some evangelicals might have due to Beck's alleged Mormonism, but they fade in importance relative to the imperative to love.
How is it possible that so many evangelical Christian writers and reporters have taken the time to express their qualms about Beck's Mormonism but have scarcely any reservations about his relentless message of hate? "Straining out a gnat while swallowing a camel" was Jesus' term for this sort of thing.
Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. … If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar.
That's what matters. It's really not all that complicated.
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