The Top 10 posts of 2018 (are in here, somewhere)

The Top 10 posts of 2018 (are in here, somewhere) January 4, 2019

In lieu of one of those New Year’s “Top 10 Posts of Last Year” posts* I decided to just review all of them and let you pick which 10 you liked best.

We told a lot of stories on this blog in 2018. Some of these might seem like they were written in an attempt to encourage or inspire those reading them, but most were actually written in an attempt to encourage or inspire myself:

We continued collecting Satanic baby-killers in 2018. It was, alas, a banner year for that, so that Fox Mulder UFO poster template got a lot of use here in 2018:

Hermeneutics — which is to say, learning how to read and learning how we read — was again a frequently discussed topic here:

The whole question of who is and who is not an “evangelical,” what that means, and who gets to say, was a recurring theme yet again in 2018. Here’s a small sampling of that:

What else? Well …

We started off 2018 talking about misunderstandings of the First Amendment, which still seems relevant. We sipped our tea watching Moody Bible Institute swallow its own tail (see “Moody People” and “Moody’s critics lament liberal shift away from biblical white supremacy“) which led to a discussion of “White evangelicalism vs. missionaries” and tied in to the thing that white evangelicals find most attractive about Donald Trump: his proud racism.

Then we saw how the mechanism for clinging to that racism while still clinging to the illusion that one is a decent person is similar to the mechanism for clinging to young-Earth creationism. That led, in turn, to a reminder that “‘Bearing false witness’ is not a synonym for ‘lying.’

We looked at the largely avoided passage wherein the Bible commands abortion, and considered a slightly less disturbing interpretation of it.

We tackled the subject of “progressive evangelicals” — a not-quite-right name for a not-quite-left thing in a three part series. (“A progressive evangelical is what you get when a white evangelical starts treating the “biblical data” on money the same way they treat the “biblical data” on sex.”)

Billy Graham died, and we discussed his legacy or lack thereof within the white evangelicalism he helped to create. See also: “The Cold War before the culture war,” “Billy and the Bolsheviks,” and “Revive us again.”

Michael Gerson made a big splash with a long essay on white evangelicals and Trumpism, the main benefit of which was that it drew attention to a far better essay by Chris Ladd. Both essays led me to ponder the pitfalls of Christian millennialism. (See also: “Theory: White Nationalist Theology Might Explain Support for White Nationalist Politics.”)

Some 2,000 frozen embryos were destroyed by a power outage at an Ohio fertility clinic and I explored why this was not seen as a big deal by the white evangelicals otherwise devoted to pretending that they believe this was completely indistinct from 2,000 elementary school students dying in a natural disaster.

We considered the eerie absence of the church in the ongoing opiate crisis, took a road trip to Zzyzx, called for more harrowing, and repeated, for the umpteenth time, that “Young-earth creationism is a cruelly efficient machine for manufacturing spiritual crisis.” We looked at the American inversion of Christian teaching on the moral failure of wealth, pondered the death of Art Bell and the loss of good faith crackpots, and noted that Steve Strang is neither a person of good faith nor the crackpot he pretends to be.

We suggested how to keep young people from leaving your church “in droves” (take away their droving license!) and — months before the arrest of Maria Butina — we called for the complete abolition of prayer breakfasts. We remembered that the Ten Commandments exist in several forms, and that each one is pervasively sectarian.

We watched as karma slowly began catching up with Paige Patterson, popularizer of the oxymoronic ideology of Baptist authoritarianism. Patterson’s cushioned comeuppance also had us revisiting the “biblical teaching on divorce.”

The U.S. decided to move its embassy in Israel to somewhere not yet wholly in Israel. A lovely royal wedding featured an even lovelier sermon. And I learned that Latin headlines keep people from getting upset about the kind of blog posts you’d expect them to get upset at.

We noted that dystopian alternative futures aren’t ever quite as bad as the actual, literal past for most people, and we considered the actual dystopian future in store for the Jersey Shore.

We gaped as Jeff Sessions and Sarah Sanders tried to revive a beastly misinterpretation of Romans 13 and noted that Sessions wasn’t just misreading Romans, he was also misreading the Gettysburg Address.

Did we compare Donald Trump and Mike Warnke? Yes. Yes we did. We also suggested that white evangelical theology needed a reconstruction something like Galveston after the 1900 hurricane. And that “The con-game of anti-abortion partisanship that replaced Christianity has been so successful that we forget how recently it was invented.”

We were unsurprised when white evangelical voters rallied behind a thrice-divorced pimp. We were disappointed when a white conservative magazine suggested that  Bull Durham was set in the 1960s.

We said “Missiology is a minefield.” We observed that Paula White is confused. We suggested that “Abolish ICE” is the squishy moderate position. And we reported that a now-confessed Russian spy may be linked to … (checks notes) … the new owner of Patheos (gulp).

We thought that a Big Article about Trump-loving white evangelicals came in six commandments too late, but it was still a heck of an article.

How did “Great Commission” evangelicals turn into anti-immigrant MAGA Commission Trumpites? Figuring that out called for yet another three part series.

We explained why George Whitfield was the worst, and why Baphomet is not an idol but Nehushtan is.

We invited you to ask your local supermarket to stop carrying the National Enquirer, and we hoped to see Colin Kaepernick pitching for the Rumble Ponies.

We stretched and strained a metaphor to try to explain an inexplicable poll result on Donald Trump’s honesty. And we reiterated our belief that the Pledge of Allegiance is creepy (and a threat to the Republic).

We read the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report. And we refused to forget that Merrick Garland exists, or that Fred Rogers was full of fierce rage. We traced the eerie parallels between two crimes and outlined the shape of Brett Kavanaugh’s many, many lies. And we played the grimmest, most enraging version ever of Six Degrees of Separation.

We took a look at “God’s Point of View,” took another look at the either/or of God and Mammon, and looked askance at what “religious liberty” seems to mean these days.

We predicted that Very Nice White Christians would re-elect Steve King despite/because he’s a Nazi. (They did.) We noted what Isaiah had to say about that.

We pondered the nature of forgiveness and we pondered empathy and disgust, and we expressed mostly that last one with regard to “Court evangelicals courting Mister Bone Saw.”

We considered whether self-proclaimed nationalist Donald Trump fit Orwell’s description of a nationalist.

We observed — here and here — that Galatians commands and requires the church to embrace LGBT+ Christians without qualification. And anybody who says otherwise should just go cut their own dicks off. (That’s Paul talking, not me.)

We thanked a Christian for bearing true witness on behalf of his neighbors, and we witnessed the living testimony of Charles Langston.

That brings us up to December which, being last month, hardly seems to need revisiting.

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* I used to join in the annual blog ritual of compiling the “top” or “most popular” posts of the previous year. That was back before the world of blogs became a withering sub-section of the feudal world of “social media,” making most attempts to measure or rank such a thing meaningless.

We used to be able to say, with some confidence, “Here are the 10 most-read posts from last year.” That changed to “Here are 10 posts from last year that got linked to by high-traffic sites on Facebook or Reddit.” And now, with Google blog search gone, RSS use fading, and social media platforms intent on killing everywhere not already a part of their guided tours, I don’t even bother trying to gauge such a thing.


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