slacktivist

Fundamentalism thrives on isolation from and opposition to the world — isolation from and opposition to the rest of society, to other people, to The Other, to everyone else.

The despicable Charles Worley and his Providence Road Baptist Church in North Carolina illustrates this opposition. But the fact that we know about Worley, that we’ve heard his vile words through a viral video that has been viewed by more than half a million people, shows that isolation is becoming increasingly difficult even for the most rabid fundies.

And just to be clear, that’s what we’re dealing with here. Warren Throckmorton traced the affiliations of Worley’s congregation — it’s an independent, KJV-only church connected with something called “The Only Hope” network. Not Southern Baptist, then, but nondenominational fundamentalist (think Bob Jones University, Bill Gothard, etc.). I’ve never heard of this “Only Hope” group — they seem to be hard-core fundie and desperately in need of a Web designer.

These small, nondenominational, KJV-only fundamentalist churches endure, in part, by keeping their members in the dark. Like all abusers, they need to keep their families dependent on them — ensuring that they’re the sole source of authority by ensuring that they’re the sole source of information. That’s getting harder to do in a world shaped by the subversive possibility of Google. Such churches have a long history of keeping their members out of the library, but now they have to keep them off of the Web as well.

And just as the Web undermines these churches’ ability to control the information their members can access, it also undermines these churches’ ability to keep their own shameful secrets. Worley’s “sermon” was an effective bit of propaganda within the closed-off world of his own sanctuary, but outside of that controlled environment it is quickly exposed as shameful, hateful ignorance of the very worst kind. When the rest of the world — the rest of America, the rest of the church — hears such things, the rest of the world responds and people like Worley can’t wholly prevent their followers from hearing that response.

He can inoculate them against it — misquoting Matthew 5:11-12 and 1 Corinthians 1:27 and John 15:18 to reassure them that any and all criticism amounts to “persecution” and therefore confirms the rightness and righteousness of his lies. You’ll see that argument parroted by drive-by trolls in the comments of sites like Stuff Fundies Like, often in ALL CAPS. But I often get the sense that these folks are shouting so loudly just to try to drown out the questions they’re desperate not to answer.

Providence Road Baptist Church requires isolation to function — isolation to keep its members ignorant and to keep its shameful secrets from being exposed to a wider world in which they cannot be defended. The good news this week is that it has lost that isolation.

Below the jump, a sampling of others’ insights, rants, lamentations and jeremiads w/r/t Worley and his awful church.

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OK, it’s getting late in the day and my plan of cooling down to a calm, rational tone to discuss this still isn’t working.

So let’s discuss the Rev. Charles L. Worley of Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, N.C.

Actually, let’s just make that Charles L. Worley — there’s nothing “reverend” about this bastard, regardless of what the clueless, hateful club-members of this local congregation try to say. He’s not “pastor” Worley. Pastor means shepherd, and Worley’s not shepherding a flock, just fleecing a bunch of rubes — the kind of easy marks who beg for a second shot at the offering plate after hearing their bigoted leader endorse concentration camps.

Yes, concentration camps. Which is why this subject comes pre-Godwined.

No matter how they play dress up, Worley ain’t a pastor and Providence Road ain’t a church. As Ramona writes: “If you could turn off the sound and watch this man Worley as he clutches his bible and moves around his pulpit, you might be lulled into thinking you were watching a man of God preaching in God’s house. No such thing exists in that building posing as a church.”

Here’s what Worley had to say this month in the “sermon” at his “church”:

If you can’t watch that video, here’s a transcript of the lowlights:

I figured a way to get rid of all the lesbians and queers, but I couldn’t get it past the Congress. Build a great, big, large fence — 150 or 100 mile long — put all the lesbians in there, fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals and have that fence electrified ’til they can’t get out. … And you know what? In a few years, they’ll die out.

Let’s be clear: This is eliminationist talk. Worley is advocating rounding people up and putting them in camps until they die off. This is something that has been done in the past and Worley is suggesting doing it again.

I’m sure Worley will try to say he was only “joking” — that he wasn’t seriously suggesting rounding up millions of Americans and locking them away until they die. But he isn’t joking in that video. The only playfulness in his comments is the smirking “I couldn’t get it past the Congress,” and that, for Worley, is the joke here — that concentration camps are what we ought to do, if only, alas, we could.

CNN reports today that Worley’s rant is getting “mixed reactions” around Maiden, N.C. — meaning others are appalled, but the members of his congregation support their “pastor.” These people are ignorant Bible-carriers who don’t show the slightest hint of ever having cracked the spines of those books:

“He said he would feed them!” some church members told CNN, referring to Worley’s idea for rounding up gays.

Worley “takes a real firm stand on the Bible and what it says about different things,” said church member Joe Heffner. “Whether I like it or not or whether anybody else likes it.”

Another church member, who declined to give his name, said that “Being gay and lesbian or homosexual is wrong according to the Bible… it’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”

(Rule No. 17: Anyone who says “… not Adam and Steve” imagining that they are either being clever or invoking the meaning of the Bible is thereby proved to be someone who is utterly incapable of either being clever or invoking the meaning of the Bible.)

The local NBC affiliate reports that “Members stand behind pastor’s anti-gay sermon“:

Geneva Sims said she’s been listening to Worley preach the Gospel since the 1970s.  She wasn’t surprised by the 71-year-old pastor’s now infamous sermon.  In fact, she supports him and his message.

“He had every right to say what he said about putting them in a pen and giving them food,” said Sims.  “The Bible says they are worthy of death. He is preaching God’s word.”

So Sims was probably present back in 1978 when Worley preached a “sermon” in which he spoke longingly of the good old days in which “homosexuals … lesbians and all the rest of it” would have “hung and blessed God from a White Oak Tree.”

Geneva Sims has spent four decades of spiritual and moral formation sitting at the feet of Charles Worley. This is why Geneva Sims is a horrible person.

Attending a so-called church filled with horrible people and led by a horrible so-called pastor will do that to you.

I’ll come back to this to round up some of the wiser, more temperate responses to Worley from around the Intertubes, but let me close here by highlighting one excellent response (via The New Civil Rights Movement), from the North Carolina group Catawba Valley Citizens Against Hate. They’re organizing a peaceful protest this Sunday, May 27, beginning at 10 a.m.

We are organizing a PEACEFUL protest against Pastor Worley’s bigoted and hate filled rhetoric. Regardless if you are gay or straight, Christian or not… this rhetoric is dangerous and harmful. Taking a peaceful stand for our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is paramount.

This event is a peaceful protest organized in the ideals of Dr. Martin Luther King and Gandhi. All participants of this direct action must vow to remain peaceful and non-violent. We will not scream, shout or taunt Pastor Worley or his church’s members. We will not vandalize, threaten or injury property or persons. We will allow law enforcement to handle harassment and disputes that may arise. Protest Peace Keepers will be in charge and will provide instructions.

 

Historian John Fea asks: “Is it time to gather Christian historians together to sign some kind of formal statement condemning Barton’s brand of propaganda and hagiography?”

Easy question. The answer is “yes.”

David Barton is a liar and a con-man who poses as a Christian historian.* That’s bad for the reputation of all Christians and of all historians, and especially for the reputation of Christian historians.

Even worse, since Barton’s shtick is premised on the idea that he is a lone, brave truth-teller standing against a conspiracy of lies, one of the underlying lies for everything he writes and teaches is that all legitimate historians — those teaching the facts that contradict his fantasies — are dishonest and anti-Christian.

So Barton isn’t just routinely lying about George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and the rest of the founders. He’s also routinely lying about every Christian historian.

Given that, it is long past time “to gather Christian historians together to sign some kind of formal statement condemning Barton’s brand of propaganda and hagiography.”

* * * * * * * * *

Speaking of lying con artists, let’s check in with our friend the “evangelist” Bob Larson: Rogue demon-hunter.

I am happy to report that blogger Rob Tisinai is officially not possessed by a demon.

Tisinai coughed up the $9.95 that Bob Larson charges for his online Demon Test®. Larson says “This Test is the result of more than 30 years of research and thousands of hours in a personal ministry with troubled souls. Through this vast experience we have been able to design this test so that we may quickly determine an individual’s spiritual condition.”

Tisinai was disappointed to find how “sadly mundane” Larson’s Demon Test® proved to be. It doesn’t employ any of the cool tricks I’d come to expect from years of watching the Winchester boys on Supernatural. Instead it’s just a bunch of questions likely borrowed from “a standard psychological exam” with a few that come closer to the pop-culture mythology (“Have you asked Satan to take your life in exchange for something?”).

But apparently nothing involving holy water, cold iron or flinching at the name of God. And no questions about levitation, or about suddenly lapsing into ancient Sumerian.

But Larson was at least true to his word in promising to provide a prompt, definitive reply:

So here’s the result: I don’t have a demon. Seriously. Rob Tisinai, confirmed homosexual, gay blogger, not a Believer an any conventional sort of deity. … And I don’t have a demon.

Not even me.

The test, obviously, is a fraud.

Read the whole thing, it’s hilarious.

Tisinai’s conclusion: “It’s better to know your demons and wrestle them than to pay $10 for assurance they aren’t there.”

* * * * * * * * *

Jeremy Hooper on Bryan Fischer: “They really don’t think they verbally abuse us; that’s a big problem.”

Fischer is the feverishly anti-gay spokesman for the feverishly anti-gay American Family Association. He daily repeats the most dishonest, horrible and hateful slurs he can dream up about LGBT people, liberals, environmentalists, moderates and anyone else who isn’t Bryan Fischer.

Yet this same Bryan Fischer recently tweeted this: “Why conservatives do not verbally abuse those who verbally abuse us: ‘When he was reviled, he did not revile in return.’”

That’s one of the most astonishing displays of a lack of self-awareness I’ve ever seen.

Bryan Fischer is a reviler. He reviles. He reviles every day. He reviles constantly. He reviles for a living. Reviling is what he does. Reviling is all he does.

Bryan Fischer is on the short list of candidates for the vilest reviler ever to revile.

Yet here he is congratulating himself for never verbally abusing others.

Bryan Fischer seems to have very successfully achieved a sense of contrived innocence.

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* Update: That phrase “Christian historian” is a bit murky. Fea, and I, are both using the phrase here to mean historians who are also Christians (and not historians who study Christianity). The point is not that historians who are Christians have a particular sectarian approach to the discipline, but rather that Christians make up David Barton’s target audience and constituency.

Barton’s audience has been carefully trained over many years to distrust “outsiders,” so a broader statement from all historians would likely be received as just another form of “persecution” from those Christian-hating intellectuals they’ve been warned about for so long — and thus, perversely, as a kind of affirmation and confirmation of Barton’s nonsense. A statement coming from “Christian historians” — from historians who are Christians, and who can speak the evangelical dialect with a native accent — may be more likely to be heard and heeded. Maybe.

I’m hopeful that John Fea — who teaches at the evangelical Messiah College — will seriously consider doing this. Perhaps with help from Michael Coulter of Grove City College, another conservative evangelical school. Coulter is co-author with Warren Throckmorton of Getting Jefferson Right, a book refuting Barton’s claims about the third president. (For a taste of that, see Throckmorton’s recent Salon piece, “Faux history for the GOP,” or his long history of responding to Barton on his blog.)

Here’s the thing: Mesa Prep’s high school baseball team went undefeated.

That’s the high school team in the Arizona Charter Athletic Association for which Paige Sultzbach plays second base.

Mesa Prep won the charter league state championship by forfeit after Our Lady of Sorrows — a fundamentalist Catholic school — refused to play in the championship game because Mesa had a girl playing second base.

The teams played each other twice earlier in the season, with Sultzbach sitting out both games because they were at Our Lady of Sorrows, where Mesa deferred to the patriarchal school’s “no girls allowed” policy. And even without their starting player at second base, Mesa swept both games.

All of which is to say that I don’t buy the claim by Our Lady of Sorrows that its forfeit of the championship game is some kind of principled stand for its anti-female religious beliefs. They just knew they were going to get their butts kicked. Again. So they wimped out.

Discrimination, after all, is usually about fear. So when Our Lady of Sorrows tells us that they’re opposed to girls, what they’re probably telling us is that they’re afraid of them. The school’s actions bear that out.

Speaking of baseball, bigotry and fearful idiots refusing to take the field, here is the story of three Baptist churches from Missouri fleeing a church softball league because one of the other churches in the league has a pastor who is bisexual.

The pastor doesn’t actually play on the softball team, not that it really matters.

I say this often, but God have mercy it must be exhausting to live so obsessed with the tribal culture wars that you can’t even enjoy a softball game without worrying about whether or not everyone on the opposing team is at least six degrees removed from all the many things you consider offensive.

And speaking of high school girls’ athletics, two big pieces of news from my family’s weekend trip to Pittsburgh:

1. The Downingtown RFC Dingoes — both the girls and the boys teams — are officially Pennsylvania state champions.

2. Next up for the Dingoes is the regional tournament next weekend. Unfortunately, only one of our daughters will be playing. Our older daughter injured her foot in Sunday’s game — breaking the navicular bone. She’s looking at six weeks in a cast, but no ligament damage and, we hope, no long-term effects.

If I were a better blogger, I’d have something insightful, profound or witty to say about all of these links.

“The surprising thing to me as I look back at my career is the determination I had, because I never thought of myself as a determined person. … I guess I just had to find out if I was any good or not.”

“It’s very much thinking about it all the time,” celebrity chef Mario Batali says of taking the food stamp challenge.

“In The Real World, you don’t unlock any rewards or receive any benefit for playing on higher difficulty settings. The game is just harder, and potentially a lot less fun.”

“So, to enlighten him, let’s list all the ways Eduardo Saverin has benefitted from America.”

“If the median household income had kept pace with the economy since 1970, it would now be nearly $92,000, not $50,000.”

“In your country, for example, there seem to be Christian political voices saying that you shouldn’t have a national healthcare system. To us, in Britain, this is virtually unthinkable.” (via AZspot)

“While the U.S. doesn’t have an official VAT, it has an unofficial one that we all end up paying for indirectly: the 8% difference between what we pay for our bloated, fraud-ridden healthcare system and what our global competitors pay for their universal-care healthcare systems.”

“That’s a disadvantage of doing comedy: You’re by yourself all the time and you have no insurance. Which is actually all of America: We’re all by ourselves too much and have no insurance.”

“Republicans and their allies are dusting off an old $500 billion deception about Medicare, trying once more to scare seniors into voting their way.”

“The idea that an abortion shouldn’t be paid for by the government comes from the broader stigma of abortion – that it’s a luxurious service we seek after we (women) do something bad.”

“They’re not all dealing with their own private conflictedness about homosexuality, but they’re all nursing a private moral failure they need a scapegoat to dump it on.”

“When an innocent man is convicted of murder and wrongfully incarcerated, that means that the real murderer is allowed to go free and commit other crimes.”

“The case, too, reflects the aggressive conservative judicial activism of the Roberts Court.”

“Separation of state and church is woven throughout the Constitution, part of the warp and woof.”

“The fact that The Lord’s Prayer has been the only prayer recited at the beginning of Council meetings for over six years is likely to be found to demonstrate that the Council gives Christianity an unconstitutionally preferred status.”

“Almost every policy battle has been transformed into a proxy in a Republican war to define ‘American’ as white, straight, male and wealthy — an us-versus-them war being waged ever more intensely in 2012 because changing demographics threaten to define the term on far different terms.”

“9 Examples Why You May Want to Avoid Homeowners Associations Like the Plague”

“10 Questions Every Candidate Should Be Ready to Answer”

Hemant Mehta supplies the appropriate headline for news of the 7-story cross being planned for Branson, Missouri.

Not cool.

Also not cool.

The 400-seat New Hampshire House of Representatives is still too large.

No, really, the 400-seat New Hampshire House of Representatives is still too large.

Don’t get sneetered into drinking the wapatuli, you bufflehead.