• Steve Buchheit links to a headline that I do not care for at all: “Big, Invasive Parachuting Spiders Will Begin To Cover Entire East Coast, Experts Say.”
The 3-inch long Japanese Goro spiders are reportedly shy-ish and not biters. And they don’t look that different from the garden spiders that like to build webs by our front porch light in the fall. But still.
• Since we mentioned the cheerfully racist “church growth” ideology of the “homogenous unit principle” the other day, here’s a bit more background on that from historian Jesse Curtis:
It provided a missiological justification for focusing on the growth of white congregations. It was quite seductive. Here you had this scientific-sounding jargon coupled with a supposedly gospel-centered desire to see churches grow. And it turned out homogeneous churches grew fastest of all! Leading experts of church growth ripped whiteness completely out of its context of ongoing harm, describing it as a healthy expression of pluralism. Middle class white evangelicals were just as entitled to homogeneous worship as a foreign-language immigrant congregation. It was all part of America’s dynamic mosaic of peoples. People like to worship with people like themselves. Give them what they like. For experts like Donald McGavran and C. Peter Wagner, this was explicitly race-conscious. On the ground, it justified and enabled white spaces where race could be ignored and colorblind theology could flourish.
When black evangelicals and other critics raised the alarm about the ethics of this investment in whiteness, church growth experts had their trump card in hand: what could be more important than people becoming Christians? Don’t we have to use the most effective methods possible? This was all taking place in a context of the crisis of the American city and white suburbanization. Ordinary white evangelicals and their congregations effectively exacerbated the crisis of American racial inequality, as Mark Mulder showed so well in Shades of White Flight. But their self-conception was that they were simply biblical Christians trying to spread the gospel. It’s these kinds of stories that I have in mind when I talk about white evangelicals investing in whiteness as evangelicals. They deliberately used race for their purposes, while at the same time constantly criticizing black evangelicals when they brought up race. It’s as if they said, my use of race reflects my commitment to the gospel; your use of race is a distraction from the gospel. These pernicious narratives remain dominant in white evangelicalism right up to the present day.
Running across those two items one after the other derailed part of an afternoon, which I spent watching old 1980s videos from those artists. This led to two conclusions: 1) An hour or two watching Dolly and Annie sing is time well-spent; and 2) I have a very, very hard time believing or taking seriously any of the folks now going through the motions of a moral panic over Kids Today and their crazy notions about gender and pretending this is all something new and unprecedented in human experience. I mean just look at photos of Dolly and Annie from the 1980s — from 40 years ago. Just look at them. OK, then.
• I like cake. I like Campbell’s tomato soup. And I liked reading about the history of cake made with Campbell’s tomato soup.
Now I’m trying to figure out if I like all of those things enough to actually try making this.
• In the late 20th century, Michael Novak was regarded as a respectable “economic conservative” Catholic intellectual. The fact that he was a fierce opponent of the Civil Rights Movement and a leading proponent of the resentful whitelash against it did nothing to diminish his respectability within the church, or among political pundits, or among the desperate-to-be-perceived-as-smart First Things Club.
Related: Gold-bug conspiracy theorist, white-/Christian-nationalist and all-around right-wing crackpot Gary North has died. North was never as widely regarded as respectable as Novak, but he was still way too widely respected by way too many white evangelicals. I’m not grave-dancing over his death, just offering the very same condolences to his family that I offered throughout his life.
• Speaking of right-wing white-/Christian- nationalists … disgraced former Gen. Michael Flynn is still touring white churches and white Christian political rallies, earning applause with nonsense like this: “The word ‘Creator’ is in the Constitution four times.”
Flynn, of course, is off by four. That word never appears in the Constitution — a choice that was adamant, emphatic, and deliberate.
Flynn’s intellectual (to use that word generously) ancestor is the anti-constitutional pamphleteer who warned, in 1788, that the godless Constitution treating non-Christians as equal citizens would lead to results he viewed as self-evidently disastrous:
1st Quakers, who will make the blacks saucy, and at the same time deprive us of the means of defence — 2dly. Mahometans, who ridicule the doctrine of the Trinity — 3dly. Deists, abominable wretches — 4thly. Negroes, the seed of Cain — 5thly. Beggars, who when set on horseback will ride to the devil — 6thly Jews etc. etc.
Some 244 years later, Flynn imagines that he can continue the same fight as that writer by simply pretending that the Constitution is the white-supremacist document of Bartonian theocracy he wishes it were. And, like The Liar David Barton and all the other charlatans promoting this fantasy, Flynn does so because he shares the exact same fears as that writer: “saucy” Black people, Mahometans, beggars, “Jews etc. etc.”
• The title of this post comes from the first song I ever tried to play on the guitar (it did not go well).
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