• John Fea has more details on that story about the right-wing campaign that got a professor fired from Grace College in Indiana. The key detail here being that the guy who orchestrated this hatchet-job is a full-on white supremacist.
Kathryn Post’s RNS article described Evan Kilgore as “a Grace alum and onetime employee” and as “a former Turning Point USA ambassador and now faith-based political commentator.” Fea reminds us of why Kilgore lost that onetime job as Grace’s “special projects director.” It was because back in 2017 he posed for and posted this fake “rap album” cover on social media:
That’s him there on the left, with the fake tattoos. What’s he been up to since then? Fea says:
Kilgore appears to have parlayed his firing at Grace into a career as a right-wing commentator. He was a former ambassador for Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA organization. (His TPUSA bio says he was “‘canceled’ from his marketing job by the woke outrage mob” and has been “retweeted by President Trump multiple times.”) Now he appears to be an independent political commentator with 79,200 X (Twitter) followers.
A look at his Xitter feed finds that Kilgore is a “groyper” — a big fan of Neo-Nazi white supremacist Nick Fuentes. “Nick Fuentes and his America First movement is the future of Right-Wing politics. Get on board or get left behind,” one Tweet reads. There are plenty more like that — the awesomeness of Fuentes and his racism/antisemitism is a big theme of Kilgore’s posts. And he’ll be a “VIP speaker” at Fuentes’ AFPAC rally in June.
So this is who Grace College President Drew Flamm and the school’s board of trustees are turning to for spiritual discernment and wisdom: actual Nazis.
Underscoring the more important main point of that earlier post: This is who will be empowered and put in charge of American life in a second Trump administration. Groypers. Neo-Nazi dirtballs. Brownshirts. “America First” fan-boys who understand the full racist, fascist history of that term and are thrilled to revive it because of that.
• “Emergency rooms refused to treat pregnant women, leaving one to miscarry in a lobby restroom”
One woman miscarried in the lobby restroom of a Texas emergency room as front desk staff refused to check her in. Another woman learned that her fetus had no heartbeat at a Florida hospital, the day after a security guard turned her away from the facility. And in North Carolina, a woman gave birth in a car after an emergency room couldn’t offer an ultrasound. The baby later died.
The self-proclaimed Virtuous People are making this happen in an effort to prove to themselves that they are Virtuous People. It’s not about obedience, or faithfulness, or protecting the vulnerable. If it were any of those things, they would recoil from the consequences of their own actions. If it were any of those things, they would be interested in understanding what the consequences of their actions were. But they are not interested in that at all, jamming their fingers in their ears and shouting “Lalala I can’t hear you!” at the hundreds of stories like those above.
For the self-proclaimed Virtuous People, those stories are too upsetting to look at. Not because of the human suffering, but because it ruins the whole fantasy about their oh-so virtuous obedience and heroism.
• Aaron Renn’s ridiculous Principal-Skinner-Meme essay has apparently been padded and stretched out into a ridiculous Principal-Skinner-Meme book.
I wrote about the essay here — “We’re Beginning To Suspect That Not Everyone Sees Us As Their Moral Betters” — and then again here, “The World Was So Big, And I Was So Small.” From the first of those:
Renn’s scheme proposes a grand sweep of history in which white evangelicalism (conflated throughout with All of Christianity from Antioch to Mara Lago) was first viewed positively (CE 321 to 1994), then briefly neutrally (1994 to 2014), and now negatively (Obergefell and Black Man in White House through the present). It reads a bit like an undergrad paper on Berger’s Sacred Canopy written by an earnest student who, alas, did not finish reading the book or consider the possibility that the conversation may have continued and expanded since that book’s publication in 1967.
It’s the kind of Grand Scheme that makes sense as long as the undifferentiated plurals remain abstract and unexamined and as long as a fuzzy passive voice construct keeps essential nouns and subjects and agents obscured. The kind of Grand Scheme, in other words, that either breaks down entirely or hastily turns into something very different as soon as one asks something like “viewed positively by who?” or “whatcha mean ‘We,‘ kemosabe?” or “What, to the Slave, Is Your Fourth of July?”
Renn’s grand theory depends on two hinge-points in all of Christian history that just happen to coincide with two turning points in his own career and his personal awareness of the world around him. That gives his whole argument an absurdity that reminds me of that dark joke about what an amazing coincidence it was that right after most people began carrying portable digital cameras the police all of a sudden began beating up unarmed, nonviolent people all over the place. The bitter humor of that joke comes from the idea that anyone could be so dim as to believe that something had never previously been the case simply because they personally hadn’t seen it on video.
Renn, and his readers, are just like that joke. Until very recently, they say, white evangelicals were viewed positively as moral exemplars and moral authorities. But now, for inscrutable, mysterious reasons, the world has turned against them and no longer looks up to them the way they did before. And they date this reversal of public esteem for them at just around the time that social media began to be pervasive.
In other words, once they started reading Facebook and Twitter and blogs back in 2014, and started seeing for the first time how they actually have always been perceived by the rest of the world, they mistakenly assumed that this was all a brand new thing — a tectonic, epochal shift and reversal in public opinion. It was new to them, so they assumed it was a brand new thing and not a very old thing that was, for the first time, just starting to pierce their subcultural bubble of perception.
And because they don’t comprehend when the rest of the world began to regard them negatively, they also fail to comprehend why they are seen this way. Or, to put things more clearly than Renn’s “positive”/”negative” framework allows, they don’t understand why others perceive them as exemplars of immorality — as the opposite of what they imagined themselves to be and to be seen as.
Consider, for example, the first two items in this post. The worldly world of worldly secular worldsters tends to take a “negative” view of people who grovel to the demands of Neo-Nazis who bully them into firing professors for once having tweeted something supportive of Black Lives Matter.
And when normal people read a story about some poor woman being forced to carry a dead fetus to term before almost dying while miscarrying in a parking lot, those normal people will usually have a very negative view of the self-proclaimed moralists whose venomous sanctimony made that happen. And is making that happen, again and again.
Christianity Today’s review of Renn’s book says he offers a “framework for describing Christianity’s fall into cultural disfavor since the 1960s.” Here again that elastic cipher — “the 1960s” — prevents white evangelicals from understanding how and why others perceive them negatively. CT and Aaron Renn and all of the white evangelicals wringing their hands about “negative world” tell themselves it’s because of “the 1960s” — meaning hippies, free love, Woodstock, sex, drugs, and rock & roll. If “the world” views them negatively, they think, it’s because “the world” is a dirty hippie.
But that ain’t “the 1960s” that matters here. This is about “the 1960s” meaning the Civil Rights Movement — the “1960s” that forced white Americans to take sides. White evangelicals did exactly that. And they picked the wrong side — the blasphemously immoral side.
And they’ve been doubling down on that ever since.
That strikes most of the world as ugly, immoral, and shameful — as disgraceful in the fullest theological sense.
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