She couldn’t sail but she sure could sing

• Cheryl Rofer has more on that dinner for/with billionaires attended by Jeffrey Epstein and David Brooks: “All Jeffrey Epstein’s Friends.”

“There is a certain sort of affectation that many intellectuals are prone to.” Rofer writes. “If I am an intellectual, they reason (and reasoning is one of the things intellectuals do), then I must have Great Thoughts. And if I have Great Thoughts, I must share them with others so that I am a Public Intellectual, to be held up to the masses as someone to emulate.”

This noxious self-flattery is exemplified by “The Edge” a group that describes itself as nobly pursuing Big Ideas: “To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.”

And what does it mean to “seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds” and “put them in a room together”? It means inviting dozens of billionaires to a fancy dinner with the kinds of columnists and academics who can be relied upon to be flattered by the invitation and to, in turn, flatter those billionaires and being worthy of their esteemed attention and deference.

The Edge has Billionaires’ Dinners, where billionaires, who must be Big Thinkers, ask each other Big Questions.

The Edge is in the news today because David Brooks is in some of the photos the House Democrats released today of Jeffrey Epstein, which seem to be from one of the Billionaires’ Dinners. Last month, Brooks wrote a column saying that we’re making too much of Jeffrey Epstein.

The dinner was after Epstein had been released from prison for child sexual abuse. That evidently was not enough to disqualify him from The Edge’s coterie.

I used to know a Black pastor who had been involved in Boston’s TenPoint Coalition and somehow got invited to one of these “Big Thinkers, Big Questions” wankfests held in Aspen back in the 1990s,. He came back terrified. Those people, he said, believed they had the whole future mapped out and planned — and there were no Black people in that future. “We just didn’t exist” he said, in the ideal world these Big Thinkers dreamed of creating because they believed they deserved to create the world in the image of their Big Brains.

That’s the kind of gathering Brooks was photographed at. And that’s what “the Epstein Class” that Brooks denies exists is all about.

• Here is the SHOCKING headline publicizing a poll conducted each year to produce, and then fundraise off of, exactly this kind of SHOCKING headline: “More than half of US adults, 30% of evangelicals believe Jesus isn’t God.”

Even though the Bible and traditional teachings of the Christian Church hold that Jesus truly existed as both man and God, among the key findings of the biennial State of Theology survey from Ligonier Ministries conducted with LifeWay Research, is that 52% of American adults believe that Jesus was a great teacher and nothing more.

And nearly a third of evangelicals also support that view, a preliminary release on the findings of the study said Thursday. The complete report on the survey, conducted March 10 to 18 among 3,002 U.S. adults including 630 professing evangelicals, is expected to be released on Sept. 8.

“Statistics like these from the State of Theology survey can give us quite a shock, but they also shed light on the concerns that many American Christians and churches have expressed for decades. As the culture around us increasingly abandons its moral compass, professing evangelicals are sadly drifting away from God’s absolute standard in Scripture,” Stephen Nichols, chief academic officer of Ligonier Ministries and president of Reformation Bible College, said in a statement.

Stephen Nichols of Ligonier Ministries points out that results like this — “nearly a third of evangelicals deny the deity of Christ!1!! — confirm exactly what people like Stephen Nichols of Ligonier Ministries have been concerned about “for decades,” and that precisely those “concerns” led such people to address them by founding institutions like Ligonier Ministries and Reformation Bible College.

That ministry and college have worked to address these concerns “for decades” by commissioning an annual poll, highlighting how the results “can give us quite a SHOCK,” and then appealing for donors to support their ongoing work to ensure that they will be able to design next year’s poll in a way that will ensure it produces more SHOCKING results and more confirmation of this business model.

The fact that 200 or so of the self-professed “evangelicals” surveyed didn’t pass Ligonier’s catechism doesn’t actually tell us much about evangelicals or evangelicalism as a whole — particularly not with this annual survey’s track record of seeking/generating such “gee whiz” SHOCKING results. But it does reinforce that we should be cautious about the utility of attempts to define evangelicalism as a strictly theological category. And it should remind us that stereotypical expectations of evangelical=theological conservative and Mainline=theological liberal don’t correspond to reality.

I consider a fundraising poll like this mostly useless, but if there’s any value in it — for anyone other than the marketing departments at Ligonier and RBC — it might be to remind us not to trust lazy generalizations that tell us “evangelical Christians” are those who believe in orthodox theology while “Mainline liberals” are the ones who merely believe that Jesus was a “great teacher and nothing more.”

• In the interest of accountability, here is a failed prediction I posted on this blog in March of 2014, more than 11 years ago:

Ten years overall, five years for the print edition. That’s how much time Christianity Today has left before its graying readership shrivels below the point of sustainability. …

The magazine has outlived my expectations — it is still surviving and still in print. For now.

• The USA has the 10th longest total coastline of any country in the world, but is nowhere near the Top 10 in offshore wind capacity — China is No. 1 in that category, by a lot. Offshore wind is clean, abundant, and ultimately cheaper than the fossil fuels that are changing our climate, but abundant clean, affordable energy that would radically improve America’s energy independence is something that Donald Trump insists must never be allowed to happen.

That’s partly because he’s not getting any vigorish from offshore wind energy, but also partly because he thinks offshore wind turbines ruined the view from one of his luxury golf resorts in Scotland (ruined the view if it’s a very clear day and you’re looking through binoculars).

• The title of this post comes from Bruce Springsteen’s “Growin’ Up.” Via Evan Hurst, I learn that Tori Amos record a version of this song for her 2001 album Strange Little Girls, a collection of covers of songs by men. That record means a lot to me because Amos appeared on The Late Show With David Letterman to perform a track from it on September 17, 2001 — Letterman’s first show, live from New York, just a week after the Sept. 11 attacks hit the city. Tori Amos performed Tom Waits’ “Time” on that show, and it was unforgettable.

And but so anyway, here’s her Springsteen cover from the Strange Little Girls sessions, which didn’t make the album back then but will be part of a vinyl remaster coming out soon.