• Warren Cole Smith is a very conservative guy, and I’m sure he and I disagree about a very long list of things. But I agree with most of what Smith has to say in this column on Franklin Graham’s decision to pull Samaritan’s Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association out of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability.
When somebody literally runs away from accountability, you’ve got to ask why. If some televangelist back in the ’90s had suddenly announced that his ministry was leaving ECFA, you’d begin to suspect that he was trying to hide some kind of financial shenanigans. Franklin had no problems letting ECFA check out his books back then, so it doesn’t seem like getting caught for strictly financial misdeeds is what he’s worried about.
What has him upset, instead, are the new rules ECFA put in place to protect ministries and donors from the financial repercussions that followed scandalous behavior by leaders enabled by boards of directors that exercised little or no oversight. This was a reaction, as Smith says, to things like the Jerry Falwell Jr. scandals at Liberty University and the implosion of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries. ECFA’s new rules are intended to ensure that boards of directors don’t allow unaccountable leaders to misbehave for as long as Falwell and Zacharias did. These are the rules that Franklin Graham has publicly stated he finds intolerable.
And again, you’ve got to ask why.
Or maybe you’ve got to ask if there could be any possible explanation for this other than the simplest, most obvious one.
• Here’s an article lamenting “A Modern Leo Taxil.” The comparison is apt, but the reference is probably too obscure to be understood by most readers, even though Taxil’s continuing influence in our culture is massive and anything but obscure. We discussed Leo Taxil (aka Marie Joseph Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pagès, aka Diana Vaughan) here a few years back, see: “An old hoax that people still choose to want to believe.”
• Speaking of obscure references … Joey Cochran posts at The Anxious Bench about the current controversy over John Mark Comer and Penal Substitution versus other theories of atonement.
The details here are thick and baroque, but if you want to understand this dispute, you don’t actually need to know much of anything about theories of atonement or about how many angels can dance on the head of a peen. The real divide in this dispute, as with all current disputes among 21st-century American white evangelicals, is between those who wish to completely roll back legal enforcement of the Reconstruction Amendments and those who do not. Even the most arcane-seeming arguments over the most ethereal and speculative aspects of systematic theological constructs are simply proxies for that dispute.
• We set Christmas at the Big Box the first week of October. Yes, you can buy artificial trees and Christmas decorations at our store during one fourth of the year. Customers will pick at those displays a little bit over the next six weeks, but won’t start buying their decorations in earnest until just before Thanksgiving. Fortunately, though, Diwali arrives a little earlier this year — on October 20, so we’ll at least be able to sell some lights before then.
Diwali is now recognized as a state holiday here in Pennsylvania — one of only three states that allows for excused absences for the Hindu festival of lights. I’m not a Hindu, of course, but the holiday reminds me of what someone once said about how “On every world, wherever people are, in the deepest part of the winter, at the exact midpoint, everybody stops, and turns, and hugs, as if to say ‘Well done. Well done, everyone! We’re halfway out of the dark.'” It’s one of those festivals that I can respect with a kind of Stendahl-ian “holy envy.” Lights are pretty. They are delightful. That matters.
And also, on a more pragmatic and selfishly personal level, the holiday is a chance to clear some of those lights out of my overloaded overheads at the store.
I haven’t yet managed to secure official, professionally printed, Big Box-branded signage to mark this holiday for those of our customers who celebrate. So it looks like we’ll be going with hand-made “Happy Diwali” signs again this year. (We will be double-checking the spelling so we don’t have a repeat of that mortifying “Happy Hanakuh” incident from a few years back).
• Here’s a beautiful thing from Jana Riess. Latter-day Saints have been raising funds to support the victims of the deadly attack on a Michigan church. Four people were killed in that attack and eight others were wounded, including a 6-year-old, so they’ve set up a website where you can donate “to support the families of those who died and also the families of those who are recovering — people who will need surgeries and therapy and time off work.”
That’s mutual aid, and it’s a beautiful thing. But there’s also this:
An LDS member of the church has set up a GiveSendGo page to help the wife and children of Thomas Sanford, the man who shot the victims and burned the church. As of this afternoon, it had raised more than $361,000 to provide support for the Sanford family.
The man who started it, David Butler, is a Latter-day Saint science fiction writer with no connection to the Sanfords. He set up the fundraiser because in the New Testament Book of James, we learn that “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction.”
Yesterday, the fund creator said he had been “standing in a hurricane of love and generosity for three days now. Thank you.” He has been in touch with the Sanford family, who expressed gratitude “for the massive outpouring of support and compassion.”
• The title for this post comes from the Vigilantes of Love song “Eleanor,” which I was reminded of recently when Fatherland Securitat Secretary Kristi Noem made the absurd and impossible claim that her agency had recently arrested “the girlfriend of one of the co-founders of antifa.”
Nothing DHS or ICE says is trustworthy. Both agencies and their officers lie all the time, usually to cover up for cruelty and injustice, or to blame the victims of agency violence for the agency’s own pointless and lawless behavior. Since we cannot ask or expect Noem and DHS to speak the truth, I suppose the best we can hope for is that their lies be as outrageous and hilarious as the “girlfriend of one of the co-founders of antifa” business.
In any case, here is a song about the girlfriend(s) of one of the co-founders of anti-fascism.
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