Standing by the wall (by the wall)

• From Asia London Palomba in the Smithsonian, “How a Sudden Winter Storm in 1617 Sparked the Deadliest Witchcraft Trials in Norwegian History.”

I almost missed this fascinating story in my feed because it was hidden amidst the flood of reporting from Minnesota. That context changed how I read this tale of a society gripped by lethal madness.

As we discussed here in January — “And we’ll go sweeping through the city” — I am convinced that the organic, neighborly response of tens of thousands of principled Minnesotans presents us with a model for how communities can and should resist tyranny, ethno-nationalist violence, and fascism. The way ordinary Twin Cities residents from all walks of life have rallied to protect and support their threatened and vulnerable neighbors is inspirational and instructional. We should be taking notes and studying what they’re doing so that it can be replicated, adopted, and adapted elsewhere.

I’m also starting to think this remarkable response can perhaps be a blueprint for resisting and combating the kind of mass hysteria of moral panics like the witch trials that swept through Finnmark, Norway, in the 17th century.

• Speaking of moral panics, I’m so old that I can remember when Shirley MacLaine was one of the Top 5 bogeymen for white evangelical Christians in America. Whole aisles of Christian bookstores in the ’90s were filled with jeremiads warning real, true Christians against the dangers of the “New Age Movement.” Demonic “New Agers” were the villains in Frank Peretti’s best-selling “spiritual warfare” novels. Before there was “woke,” there was woo — and anything with even a hint of “New Age” vibes was anathema for white evangelicals.

That’s no longer true. With anti-vaxxers running the show in the Republican Party, white evangelicals are all-in on MAHA and all of its “New Age” ingredients.

• And the shame was on the other side
Oh, we can beat them forever and ever
Then we can be heroes, just for one day

• If you’re a white former judge running for the state senate and someone posts an audio recording of you using the N-word and joking about shooting a Black man, then you can either: A) deny the recording is real and sue for defamation, or B) accuse the person who made the recording of stalking and illegal wiretapping. But logically you can’t argue both of those things at the same time.

Former North Carolina Superior Court Judge Jerry Tillett is doing both of those at the same time.

Update: Tillet won his primary.

• In other news from North Carolina state legislature primaries: “Cunningham Loses in State House Primary Focused on Immigration Policy.” Carla Cunningham was a Democratic legislator who cast votes in support of Republican efforts to cooperate with ICE and Republican anti-trans legislation. That prompted a primary challenge from “a biblical scholar who had never before run for office.”

The Rodney Sadler is also the Rev. Dr. Sadler — he’s a professor at Union Presbyterian Seminary (M.Div. from Howard, Ph.D. from Duke) and he’s an associate pastor at Mount Carmel Baptist Church in Charlotte. He’s worked with William Barber’s Moral Mondays and Poor People’s Campaigns. And he can puh-reach:

Sadler responded in his booming preacher’s voice. “My parents told me very clearly when I was a child: Love God, love your neighbor, and love the stranger,” he said. “We have come far too far as a country to start scapegoating some among us … I want to say this very clearly: If you don’t love everybody, then you shouldn’t represent anybody.”

• It’s been a long time since I wrote headlines for a living, but kudos to whoever at The 51st came up with this one: “After the massive sewage spill into the Potomac, a shitload of questions remain.”

• Paul Putz is at it again. Putz is a historian with a very particular niche — sports and religion. His next book, due out next year (probably, no pressure) is tentatively titled “Jesus and James Naismith: A History of Basketball and Christianity from Origins to the NBA.”

Naismith worked for the YMCA back when it was still very much the Young Men’s Christian Association and was a proponent of “muscular Christianity.” Putz has written a great deal explaining that strange, influential religious ideology, and I look forward to learning more from him about how it shaped both this game and American Christianity more generally.

But the main thing to remember about James Naismith is “by their fruits ye shall know them.” Whatever the merits and demerits of “Muscular Christianity,” the bottom line is that Naismith came up with a terrific game that has given the world countless hours of joy — of fun. His legacy is a net positive — a nothing-but-net-positive. And how many 19th-century missionaries can we say that about?

• I also appreciated Paul Putz’s reflections on “Jesse Jackson and the Christian Athlete Movement,” which leads him to think about why Black Christian athletes like Jackson (a college quarterback) and Jackie Robinson were not embraced by this [white] “Christian Athlete Movement”:

The differences extended beyond political affiliation, reaching into the heart of the narratives that white and Black Christians told about their place in American society. While the Christian Right framed the 1960s as an attack on America’s foundations, many Black Americans saw the decade as a time when freedom and righteousness advanced. While the Christian Right saw Ronald Reagan’s presidency as a blessing from God, an opportunity to recover America’s traditional values, for many Black communities the Reagan years brought little benefit, with Black poverty rates remaining over thirty percent, nearly three times higher than the rate among white Americans, and a white backlash against government support for the poor that trafficked in stereotypes depicting Black people as lazy and dependent.

The Tebow/Kaepernick dichotomy started long before either one of those Bible-quoting, playoff-winning, famous-for-kneeling quarterbacks was even born.

• I agree with Holly Berkley Fletcher about Kids These Days and their ginormous socks. (Insert Principal Skinner “Am I Out of Touch?” meme here.)

The thing about this for me is that I am now old enough to have lived through this cycle twice. I stopped wearing baseball-appropriate-but-shorts-inappropriate mid-calf socks with shorts because my Millennial daughters begged me not to embarrass them around their friends by doing so. I began wearing ankle socks with shorts as instructed to do by every young person I then knew. And now I’m too tired to keep up or to switch again to whatever it is the people who will outlive me are doing. “I grow old … I grow old … / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”

Actually, I’m so old now that I don’t fully agree with Holly about those kids socks. I am I-don’t-care-what-you-wear-or-what-you-think-about-what-I-wear years old. “I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach …” Or not.