• Remember that thing we were just talking about regarding local churches and 990 forms and financial transparency? “Judge orders church led by CBN spokesman Brad Jurkovich to turn over financial records.”
It seems 161 members of the church have complained that their donations intended to support missionaries were instead diverted by Pastor Jurkovich to his side-hustle, the Conservative Baptist Network. Jurkovich, for his part, denies the charge and says, rather, that 161 members of his church are pawns of Satan. That seems like a strange defense for a pastor to make, but there it is.
• Thomas Lecaque on “Christian Nationalists and the Holy Gun Crusade“:
It’s not unique, and that’s the sad part. There’s a gun store that chose the name “Templar Rifle Company.” Hodgdon Powder Company’s mission statement begins, “Hodgdon Powder Company operates following Biblical principles to honor God.” Etsy has an entire page of bullet rosaries—yes, rosaries made out of bullets—described in Patheos as the “ultimate spiritual weapon rosary.”
And then there are the big moments, like the Trijicon ACOG scandal, where the company inscribed New Testament verses on all of their sights being sold to the US military for use in Iraq and Afghanistan. The company’s website still says, “We believe that America is great when its people are good. This goodness has been based on Biblical standards throughout our history and we will strive to follow those morals.” This idea is everywhere—guns and God, hand in hand.
• Robyn Pennacchia dunks on Marjorie Taylor Greene: “MTG Oddly Familiar With Satan’s Conversations With Prospective Abortion-Havers.” Greene has earned every bit of that, and more, but it’s also worth noting that her contempt for everyone else is indistinct from the contempt for everyone else that undergirds the anti-abortionism of Very Nice Religious People.
Step 1: Imagine a scenario in which a woman chooses to have an abortion for indefensibly shallow and selfish reasons.
Step 2: Imagine that all women choosing to have abortion are doing so for the reasons you’ve just imagined.
Step 3: Imagine that you’re a good person because, after all, you’re better than the millions of women around the world that you’ve just imagined are indefensibly shallow and selfish.
You cannot arrive at the place that mainstream, “moderate,” moral Very Nice “pro-life” people arrive at without following all three of those steps. You cannot get there without choosing to become way more like Marjorie Taylor Greene than you may be comfortable admitting.
• Absolutely related to that: “Because those motivations are all about psychological needs, arguing the facts around individual conspiracies will do little to shake people out of their beliefs.”
• Slogans developed to address those “psychological needs” — the need to believe that most other people are driven by the worst imaginable motives and the eagerness to imagine and to presume the absolute worst about one’s neighbors — cannot be made to function as more than slogans. This is true even when such slogans appear to convey some kind of ethical principle or content other than this presumption about others.
That’s why Charlie Dates’ commendable attempt here — “White Churches, It’s Time to Go Pro-Life on Guns” — will prove as impotent as every other attempt to leverage “pro-life” as something more than such a slogan.
• I forgot to provide my usual pre-Trinity Sunday warning this year: “It’s a trap!” Affirm your belief in the doctrine of the Trinity, then walk away. Anything beyond that will only get you entangled in one of those discussions that sounds like you’re reading from a Monster Manual of ancient heresies.
Such discussions, admittedly, can be an amusing distraction — as happened this Trinity Sunday when some self-proclaimed trad-Cath Defender of Orthodoxy on Twitter attempted to deny the imago dei of LGBT+ children of God by, um, denying the humanity of Jesus. Hilarity ensued as readers struggled to parse whether this Defender of Orthodoxy was promoting Docetism or Appolinarianism or some other obscure -ism.
As Anthony Oliveira put it, “Breaking with the Nicene Creed to own the libs” is quite the maneuver.
• Everybody tells me that “worship bands” have gotten a lot better these days, and I suppose that’s probably true. But the best of them still aren’t this good, and this is just a sound-check.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_uU0bnv4m0
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