January Jubilee (for Your Inbox)

• I’m trying to start a tradition or custom — heck, I’ll settle for a rumor or a superstition — of a January Jubilee for email. On New Year’s Day or in the first week of the new year, in other words, you have permission to go into your email inbox, select all, and delete.

Because you deserve a new start for the new year. And because this is something we’ve all heard about as just something that people do at this time of year. What’s that? You say you haven’t heard about this before? Well, now you have. And now you know.

And given that this is a New Year’s tradition and something that people do at this time of year, it’s wrong and silly of anyone to be upset if their mid-December (or mid-November, or late-August) email to someone else has been deleted and tossed away like last year’s paper calendar. Just send it again if it’s still important. And Happy New Year.

I can’t quite manage to extend this January Jubilee to the list of links, tabs, and articles I’ve bookmarked for future reference. So instead of just deleting all of those aged or aging 2021 links, I’m going to try to rush through them all and share them here in the days ahead.

• The idea of “deconstruction” — breaking down one’s faith to enable its sustainable reconstruction — is widely discussed these days. Jessica Gapasin Dennis doesn’t use that word in her personal testimony. She uses a different word, one of my favorites: “Jubilee.”

What then, is the proper response to this gift of life that we have been given? By our ancestors, by this God who has pitched his tent among us?

The answer, I’ve come to find out, is to live.

And that is — and has always been — enough.

• I read Perry Miller in seminary back in the ’90s. I did not know that the great religious intellectual historian had started out as an OSS agent specializing in psychological warfare. OK, then.

• “The Christian Peacemaker Who Left a Trail of Trauma.” Weeks ago, I bookmarked this Daniel Silliman piece for Christianity Today because it was an excellent piece of reporting, albeit on a disheartening subject. I think I’d intended to write something more about it than just that, but find now that’s pretty much all I needed to say about it — that’s it’s an excellent piece of reporting, albeit on a disheartening subject.

• “The ‘satanic’ messages within Led Zeppelin song ‘Stairway to Heaven.’” I’ve written a lot here about the Satanic Panic of the 1980s in general, including specifically how everyone my age who grew up white evangelical probably spent time spinning records backwards. What struck me, reading Mick McStarkey’s look back on all that, is how those who deliberately spread this lie remain untainted — their moral standing as the arbiters of good, Christian morality undiminished — while the neighbors against whom they willfully bore false witness remain vaguely suspect because of that lie.

McStarkey notes that one of the primary originators and spreaders of the “Stairway” nonsense was “televangelist Paul Crouch.” It’s damning that white evangelicals ever took the slanderous gossip of back-masking seriously. But it’s doubly damning that anything produced by or touched by a charlatan like Crouch wasn’t immediately rejected.

• Alan Bean gave us all a doozy of a series, discussing “The Ten Plagues that drove American White Evangelicals to madness.” These posts are memory as history — the eyewitness testimony of a Southern Baptist in Texas who watched this happen over the past 20+ years and is writing with the clarity and urgency of someone who just wants to get this all down on paper so it won’t be forgotten.

• Alan Bean was also one of the many people who recommended the four-part interview with Kristin Kobes Du Mez about her book, Jesus and John Wayne, on the Holy Post podcast. Du Mez and host Skye Jethani focus mostly on the subject of the book’s subtitle: “How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.”

This is a pretty great discussion and introduction to the book. My favorite segment there is the third one, particularly the discussion of Promise Keepers and how even that group’s modest and limited efforts to promote “racial reconciliation” produced a massive whitelash.

P.P.S. (petty postscript): Happy to see Jethani recognizing the reality of the long history documented in Jesus and John Wayne, accepting that it’s not just imaginary hype created by C-list bloggers.

• Remember back during the weeks leading up to Virginia’s gubernatorial election, when Fox News and Facebook and white evangelical churches were in a full-blown moral panic about “critical race theory”? Remember how they all dropped the subject right after election day?

There’s a lesson there that we may never learn, so here’s a piece to bookmark for the weeks ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, when Fox News and Facebook and white evangelical churches and the rest of the GOP fire up the same bad-faith moral panic hoping for the same results: “Does Critical Race Theory Threaten the Gospel?” asks conservative white evangelical Warren Throckmorton. “A lot of evangelicals are saying it does but I don’t see how.”

• Back in November, historian Adam Laats wrote a terrific piece asking “Will the University of Austin Succeed?” Laats notes that “The track record of right-wing breakaway colleges is littered with instructive failures.”

If you’ve already forgotten what the “University of Austin” refers to, that’s why my answer to Laats’ question is “Yes, it already has succeeded.” The Substack glitterati who caused a big splash two months ago by announcing the creation of this “university” raised a nice chunk of change in support of the idea before they and everyone else forgot about it a few weeks later. So it was a success. It got them clicks and attention and donations — the only metrics these folks have for success and failure. Pretending to start a new university proved to be almost as “successful” as pretending to start a new social media platform.

January Jubilee (for your inbox)