• Last week we talked about how race and gender are intertwined in white America’s “culture wars.” Here’s Kristin Kobes Du Mez and Beth Allison Barr discussing the same thing, describing how it turned out to be impossible to write about gender in the church without winding up hip-deep in white American whiteness.
• If you were reading Hal Lindsey’s Rapture-mania best-sellers back in the ’70s and ’80s, then you’re not as young as you used to be. In fact, you’re now far older than those books insisted you’d ever be.
When the adults at my Lindsey-loving fundamentalist church and private Christian school insisted that we kids read and study Lindsey’s books back then, I don’t think any of them thought through how truly, deeply effed up it was for them to be telling the entire youth group that we shouldn’t expect to still be living here on the Late Great Planet Earth by age 30 — and that there was certainly no chance we’d ever live to see our 40s or 50s.
The same could be said of the millions of American Christians who devoured the World’s Worst Books in the 1990s. Anyone who believed those books was being taught that there was no future — no way they or the world would still be around in the distant future of 2022. This rarely comes up as a factor in all the discussion of “the rise of the Nones” and the fretting about Millennials leavingthechurchindroves. But how could it not be a factor in that?
And but so, if you are a one-time Hal Lindsey reader still living here on this late great planet, then Andrew Logan would like to talk to hear your story.
Now during those days, when the disciples were increasing in number, the Hellenists complained against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of food. And the twelve called together the whole community of the disciples and said, “Critical Race Theory is a bigger threat to the church than racism itself.” And the disciples expelled the woke Hellenists from their midst and the number of disciples decreased greatly in Jerusalem and everyone agreed to never mention Pentecost ever again. The End.
• Snark aside, the actual text of Acts 6:1-7 — in which the first deacons were appointed to correct the cultural injustice already infecting the young not-yet-a-church community — is pretty awesome.
Except, that is, for the bit where an unnamed spokesman for the disciples says this: “It is not right that we should neglect the word of God in order to wait on tables.” That had to be Peter, right? Because there’s kind of a motif woven through the first half of Acts involving Peter being embarrassingly slow to come around to understand what Pentecost means involving tables and who gets to sit at them and who should be waiting on them. Imagining that waiting on tables somehow entails “neglecting the word of God” is exactly the kind of thing that Peter would have said before getting chewed out by Paul and finally set straight by a rooftop vision directly from God.
I like to think that part of the reason that newly appointed deacon Philip hightailed it to Samaria was that he didn’t quite trust himself not to tell Peter et. al. what they could do with the suggestion that “waiting on tables” for hungry and outcast widows was somehow a distraction from “the word of God.”
• “Can’t Believe We Have To Say This But Yeah, Dr. King Got Arrested A Lot.” Stephen Robinson responds to Fox News legal analyst Jonathan Turley’s statement that “By this rationale, they could have cracked down on the Civil Rights Movement. They could have arrested Martin Luther King.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was known for his spotless arrest record, and we’ve all studied his powerful essay, “Letter From A Birmingham Day Spa.”
This is why these dummies need critical race theory: Turley is a professor at George Washington University Law School, but he doesn’t know that Dr. Martin Luther King was arrested 29 times in his adult life. (He was murdered at 39, so do some quick math.)
King was first arrested in 1956 after he’d just turned 27. This was part of a Montgomery, Alabama’s “get tough” policy intended to intimidate bus boycotters. Four days after his arrest, his home was bombed. He was arrested again in March along with Rosa Parks and more than 100 others on charges of organizing the Montgomery Bus Boycott. …
In September 1958, King tried to attend the arraignment of a man accused of assaulting his friend and civil rights leader, the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy. Two cops barred him from entering the courtroom and when he told them he’d wait outside, they twisted his arm behind his back and charged him with “loitering.” He was convicted of disobeying a police order and sentenced to 14 days in jail but was released after the police commissioner paid his fine.
He was arrested in 1960 during an Atlanta sit-in and sentenced to four months in jail, but then presidential candidate John Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy intervened. He was arrested in Albany, Georgia, in 1961 for obstructing the sidewalk and “parading without a permit.” He was arrested again in 1962 for holding a prayer vigil.
Dr. King wrote his historic “Letter From A Birmingham Jail” after he was arrested in 1963 for demonstrating without a permit. …
Republican governors are working hard to make it illegal to teach any of that history in red-state public schools.
• The title of this post comes from Barry McGuire’s Larry Norman-ish hit “Eve of Destruction,” which seems appropriate to both our discussion of Hal Lindsey above and to, well, the news this week. I prefer the Dickies’ amped-up rendition of the song, which captures the kind of smash-it-all punk response that resonates for those of us who grew up being taught that we’d never get to grow up.
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