Sapphira is a model of ‘complementarian biblical womanhood’

April 15, 2021 By Fred Clark

Back when we were doing the “Chick-fil-A Biblical Family of the Day” thing here, I kept bumping into Ananias and Sapphira.

This story comes from the fifth chapter of Acts, right after we’re told about all the radical economic sharing practiced by the first Christians. It’s an unsettling story. The first 12 chapters of Acts — before it turns into the Paul Show — are mostly lovey-dovey utopian stories about this radically inclusive early community. We see them embracing strangers, feeding widows, overcoming ethnic boundaries — it’s all very Kumbaya. But then right in the middle of all of that we get this disturbing glimpse of lethal divine wrath.

This artwork is intended for use in children’s Bible school lessons on Ananias and Sapphira. Or maybe for children’s Bible school classes on the Levite and his concubine from Judges 19.

Pentecost had just created this new community and people were selling their possessions to share their wealth with one another: “Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. … There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.”

That’s the end of chapter 4, where this is all going well. But then we turn to chapter 5 and we get this:

But a man named Ananias, with the consent of his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property; with his wife’s knowledge, he kept back some of the proceeds, and brought only a part and laid it at the apostles’ feet.

“Ananias,” Peter asked, “why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back part of the proceeds of the land? While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, were not the proceeds at your disposal? How is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? You did not lie to us but to God!”

Now when Ananias heard these words, he fell down and died. And great fear seized all who heard of it. The young men came and wrapped up his body, then carried him out and buried him.

After an interval of about three hours his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. Peter said to her, “Tell me whether you and your husband sold the land for such and such a price.”

And she said, “Yes, that was the price.”

Then Peter said to her, “How is it that you have agreed together to put the Spirit of the Lord to the test? Look, the feet of those who have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out.”

Immediately she fell down at his feet and died. When the young men came in they found her dead, so they carried her out and buried her beside her husband. And great fear seized the whole church and all who heard of these things.

Yikes. That story is a lot.

I’ve scarcely begun contending with that story, usually only thinking of it as a vivid example of how maybe we’ve got things mixed up by pretending the Bible treats the Sex Stuff as vastly more important than the Money Stuff.

But despite my reluctance to contend with it, I kept coming back to Acts 5:1-11 while collecting all those examples of Chick-fil-A-style “biblical families” because Ananias and Sapphira are one of the few examples in the Bible of the kind of family that fit the model of “biblical families” promoted by culture-war white Christians. If you turn to the Bible looking for examples of “biblical marriage as one man and one woman in a monogamous lifelong commitment” you’re going to wind up with a very short list: Adam and Eve, Noah and Mrs. Noah, Job and Mrs. Job, Priscilla and Aquila, Ahab and Jezebel, Ananias and Sapphira. You may find a few more, but not many.

And of the half-dozen examples listed there, only one of these couples exemplifies the “complementarian” model of a submissive wife who uncritically accepts the spiritual leadership of her husband.

This is why I found myself, again, thinking of Ananias and Sapphira while reading NPR’s story on Beth Allison Barr and her new book, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth. Barr — a Southern Baptist and a pastor’s wife — starts with this story:

I came home from church one day. The pastor had been teaching on women’s roles in the church, and during that sermon, one of the women and [one of the] men were called up to give a testimony at the end. And the testimony that they gave was that no matter if the woman agreed with her husband or not, she should always tell him, sure, and just do whatever he said, because that was what women were called to do. And I’d recently been teaching on women in the early church — and I had this moment where I realized that what we found in the Bible about what women were supposed to do did not match with what my church was saying women were supposed to do.

If you’re searching for a biblical example of what Barr describes there — “no matter if the woman agreed with her husband or not, she should always tell him, sure, and just do whatever he said, because that was what women were called to do” — you won’t find any clearer example than that of Sapphira.

And whatever else it is that we’re supposed to learn from Sapphira’s story, perhaps the clearest message is that she was punished — severely — for doing just that. The story goes out of its way to show us this. Peter gives her a chance to come clean — to do the right thing by not going along with her husband’s plan, by refusing to uncritically obey his spiritual guidance — but instead she opts to be a good “complementarian,” demonstrating her unwavering commitment to submissive “biblical womanhood,” and the same young men who buried her husband carry her to her grave as well.

None of that suggests that Acts 5:1-11 should be a clobber text against “complementarianism,” because clobber-texting is still a foolish, illiterate business that ignores how reading and texts and meaning works, turning holy texts into a game of “War” (which is probably the most boring and pointless card game ever invented). But, still, this story ought to give the adherents of the 20th-century invention of “complementarian womanhood” some cause for concern.

I suppose, though, that once you’ve made peace with this story as a capitalist Christian, you probably won’t find it troubling as a “complementarian” either.

Smart people saying smart things (12.30.20)

December 30, 2020 By Fred Clark

David Dark, “Why are Republicans sticking with Trump? Peer pressure—and we’re all susceptible to it”

We need to make sure we are not letting deferential fear do our thinking for us. This is the challenge even when we are not confronting an attempted coup involving elected officials and political appointees refusing to concede after a presidential election. It appears before us in myriad settings throughout our lives: the pressure to keep the peace that is no peace, the pressure to play along. The problem here is civil obedience. Our presumed consent functions as a free pass for abuse.

Charlie Dates, “We out: Why our church is leaving the SBC”

When did the theological architects of American slavery develop the moral character to tell the church how it should discuss and discern racism? When did those who have yet to hire multiple Black or brown faculty at their seminaries assume ethical authority on the subject of systemic injustice?

How did they, who in 2020 still don’t have a single Black denominational entity head, reject once and for all a theory that helps to frame the real race problems we face?

I had to tell my church I was wrong. There is no such thing as “the Old Southern Baptists.”

Conservatism is, and has always been, the god of the SBC.

Elizabeth Jemison, “The Long Road to White Christians’ Trumpism”

A look at history, though, reveals that the forces of Trumpism — with its racism and sexism — run deep through white American Christianity. From the antebellum defense of slavery to postemancipation attacks on Black rights, many white American Christians have long defended racial hierarchy. In researching my book, Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South, I realized that white Christians after the Civil War invented many of the arguments that are now used by Christian Trump supporters. White Southerners argued that the Bible demanded that they oppose Black civil and political rights in favor of white men’s power because equal rights were a new political idea that conflicted with biblical teachings. They created their own echo chamber of white supremacist Christianity where they claimed that no Black Christians nor any white Christians who endorsed racial equality deserved their attention.

Rebecca Solnit, “On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway”

In fact the whole Republican Party, since long before Trump, has committed itself to the antidemocratic project of trying to create a narrower electorate rather than win a wider vote. They have invested in voter suppression as a key tactic to win, and the votes they try to suppress are those of Black voters and other voters of color. That is a brutally corrupt refusal to allow those citizens the rights guaranteed to them by law. Having failed to prevent enough Black people from voting in the recent election, they are striving mightily to discard their votes after the fact. What do you do with people who think they matter more than other people? Catering to them reinforces that belief, that they are central to the nation’s life, they are more important, and their views must prevail. Deference to intolerance feeds intolerance.

Fintan O’Toole, “Trump has unfinished business. A republic he wants to destroy still stands”

Democracy is not just about voting – it is a system for the rational articulation of ideas about the public good. Trump set out to lay waste to that whole system, from the bottom up, poisoning the groundwaters of respect for evidence, argument and rationality that keeps it alive.

The power of his instinct was that he knew how to tap into a hatred of government that has been barely below the surface of American culture since before the foundation of the US.

That instinct proved sufficiently well attuned that he got nearly 75 million votes in November, even while his malign incompetence was killing his own people. He got those votes, moreover, having made it abundantly clear that he would never accept the result of the election unless he won. They were votes for open autocracy.

This is his legacy: he has successfully led a vast number of voters along the path from hatred of government to contempt for rational deliberation to the inevitable endpoint: disdain for the electoral process itself.

Melissa Gira Grant, “Nick Kristof and the Holy War on Pornhub”

Women’s rights groups teamed up with religious right groups to shut down Craigslist’s and Backpage’s ads for sex work. All this was accomplished by religious right groups marketing themselves as anti-trafficking groups who were invested in protecting women and children from abuse. Meanwhile, their approach led to police abuse of sex workers under the guise of anti-trafficking raids and “rescues,” while also dismantling sex workers’ efforts to work independently and protect themselves. This isn’t fighting human trafficking: In some senses, it has increased the likelihood of exploitation and violence.

I am a Christian. Here is what I believe about abortion.

September 2, 2020 By Fred Clark

I want to talk about abortion with my fellow white evangelical Christians.

More specifically, I am addressing those evangelicals who have not sworn their full allegiance to Donald Trump. We might refer to this group as the “19 percent” — meaning the minority of white evangelicals who did not vote to elect Trump in 2016, but I am hopeful that the share of those willing to read or to listen here will be somewhat larger than that.

We might describe my intended audience here as a spectrum ranging from Michael Wear to Russell Moore, which is to say those of my fellow American evangelical Christians who are Trump-resistant or at least somewhat Trump-reluctant. Some of you are emphatically opposed to Trump while others may be ruefully supportive of him due primarily to his support for judges and policies more likely to end legal abortion.

Wherever you fall on that spectrum, you and I disagree on the meaning and the morality of abortion. This post is not an exercise in persuasion or in condemnation. Nor does it involve the suggestion of any sort of compromise or “middle ground” or “third way.” All I want to do here is to explain, as simply and clearly as I can, what it is that I believe about abortion and what the political implications of that are for me.

Quotes below are from the 1975 edition of this book (left).

The difference between what I believe and what you believe is, in some ways, a lot smaller than you might imagine. The implications of that difference expand outward, producing very different responsibilities and obligations for the law, for citizens, and for all of civil society — including the church.

Here is that difference: You believe that full human personhood begins at the moment of conception, which is to say that a fetus, an embryo, a blastocyst, a zygote possesses an equal moral standing to that of any child or adult. To end a pregnancy, therefore, is to take a human life — an act indistinct from taking the life of any other child or adult.

I do not believe that. I make a distinction between the potential human personhood of a fetus/embryo/blastocyst/zygote and the actual human personhood of actual infants, children, and adults. I believe that potential human personhood has great value and great moral significance, but not as great as that of any and every actual human person. Abortion is a serious and significant matter, but it is not at all like “murder.”

The prolific evangelical apologetics writer Norman Geisler put it this way:

The one clear thing which the Scriptures indicate about abortion is that it is not the same as murder. … Murder is a man-initiated activity of taking an actual human life. Artificial abortion is a humanly initiated process which results in the taking of a potential human life. Such abortion is not murder, because the embryo is not fully human — it is an undeveloped person.

That distinction, which Geisler argued was derived from biblical teaching and biblical prooftexts, led him to conclude that abortion was justified and even obligated in some cases:

When it is a clear-cut case of either taking the life of the unborn baby or letting the mother die, then abortion is called for. An actual life (the mother) is of more intrinsic value than a potential life (the unborn). The mother is a fully developed human; the baby is an undeveloped human. And an actually developed human is better than one which has the potential for full humanity but has not yet developed. Being fully human is a higher value than the mere possibility of becoming fully human. For what is has more value than what may be. …

Birth is not morally necessitated without consent. No woman should be forced to carry a child if she did not consent to intercourse. A violent intrusion into a woman’s womb does not bring with it a moral birthright for the embryo. The mother has a right to refuse that her body be used as an object of sexual intrusion. The violation of her honor and personhood was enough evil without compounding her plight by forcing an unwanted child on her besides. … the right of the potential life (the embryo) is overshadowed by the right of the actual life of the mother. The rights to life, health, and self-determination — i.e., the rights to personhood — of the fully human mother take precedence over that of the potentially human embryo.

The crucial point here is that final sentence, so let me repeat it: “The rights to life, health, and self-determination — i.e., the rights to personhood — of the fully human mother take precedence over that of the potentially human embryo.”

Please note what this does not say or mean or imply or entail: It does not mean that the potentially human embryo has no rights, or no value, or no meaning, or no significance, or no dignity. To regard “the potentially human embryo” as meaningless or worthless would be wrong — wrong both in the sense of immoral and in the sense of inaccurate.

How, then, ought we to account for and to honor the moral claims and moral value of the potential personhood of the unborn? How do we, as you all often say, “protect the unborn”?

The problem with that question is the word “we.” Who is we?

That is always an essential question in Christian ethical teaching and Christian political thought: “Who is ‘we’?” And the way that Christians, for centuries, have tried to answer that question — to clarify and differentiate all of the potential meanings of “we” — fall under the heading of subsidiarity.

Subsidiarity is both a prudential principle and an ethical one. To violate or to reject subsidiarity, then, is both immoral and ineffective. Subsidiarity clarifies the varied and various roles that different people, different actors, different institutions and agencies have — the varied and various responsibilities and obligations we all share in different and differing capacities. It describes what the epistle calls the “inescapable network of mutuality” that binds us all together directly and indirectly. Our various places and roles in that network shape our various responsibilities and duties to one another. To abdicate the responsibilities that are rightly ours, or to usurp the responsibilities that are not rightly ours, is both imprudent and immoral.

Subsidiarity teaches that those closest to a given situation have the greatest responsibility for that situation. Every other actor and agency in the network of mutuality also bears responsibility, but their indirect responsibility takes the shape of supporting those closest, who hold the primary and most direct responsibility.

I believe in subsidiarity. It seems clear to me that the primary responsibility for “protecting the unborn” is given to those whose bodies are literally transforming for that very purpose, which is to say with the actual human persons, the women* whose bodies are carrying and have carried every potential human person who has ever later been born. They are the most direct actors here, exponentially closer and more responsible than anyone else, and the responsibility and obligation of everyone else is to ensure they have all the moral and material support they require to fulfill that role.

I trust those women. I trust them more than any indirectly responsible actor who would trample on their subsidiary obligations by trying to usurp the responsibilities entrusted to those women by nature and nature’s God.

Will 100% of those women make 100% of the best choices 100% of the time? Of course not. They are, like all of us, human, and no human or group of humans is ever always capable of always making only the very best choices. But their humanity is all the more reason to affirm their agency and dignity to choose, not a license to strip them of that humanity by stripping them of their responsibility, dignity, agency, and freedom.

It is not my job — not my ethical duty nor my capacity — to usurp their primacy here. Not as their neighbor, not as their relative, not as their congressional representative or as their pastor or as their president or as their appellate-court judge. Every other actor, agency, institution, civil society organization, magistrate, and pastor does have an indirect role to play — the role of supporting these women to make the best choices and to have the best choices available to them.

What does that mean in practical terms? It means, for most of us, working to create a context for their choices in which they are never constrained by desperation or duress, by the market-worshipping coercion of penury, by fear or want or threat. It means working to establish a context in which financial support, vocational opportunity, human potential, human thriving and human dignity are not contingent or conditional or inconstant. It means creating a context which is hospitable to welcoming new life, and therefore a context in which the choice of hospitality is possible and promising. (If I were to choose a text for a sermon on the politics of abortion, it would be the story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath.)

Sometimes, when I describe this role and this obligation, those who wish only to deny subsidiarity by a top-down decree criminalizing all abortion will accuse me of just trying to change the subject. But this is the subject. Subsidiarity teaches me that what is best for “the unborn” will be what is best for their mothers. The only way to “protect the unborn” is by protecting those carrying them — protecting their health, dignity, wellbeing, financial security, agency, and freedom.

My uncle was an obstetrician in the 1960s. He was hired to reform a regional hospital in central Pennsylvania that was struggling with one of the worst infant mortality rates in the state. He took the job only on the condition that he could, instead, address the crisis that hospital hadn’t recognized — that it also had one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the nation. Some thought that he, too, was trying to change the subject, but he insisted that if they took better care of those mothers, the infant mortality problem would also be resolved. And it was.

If “we” want to “protect the unborn” then “we” must trust those entrusted with that duty. Erasing or outlawing their central role, their humanity, and their agency is both imprudent and immoral. “We” — for any given value of “we” — need to center them, support them, and provide for them a larger context in which they are best able and equipped to do what is best for themselves and for those potential and actual human persons in their care.

This is what I believe. This is my “abortion politics.” The sectarian nuance and the detailed working out of this may vary somewhat, but this is, in broad terms, what tens of millions of other American Christians who are also Democratic voters also believe.

Again, I am not telling you this in an effort to persuade or to convince. I have done that elsewhere and will do it again, but that’s not what this post is about. I am not here attempting to create any compromise or debate and would not welcome either one. (Although I’m sure the DEBATEME!-boi reply guys will still show up in comments, because fish gotta swim.)

I am telling you this only because I think it is something you should know. What you decide to do with that knowledge, what you feel you’re allowed to do with that knowledge, I leave up to you.

* Mostly women, but not only women. That needs to be said here, for accuracy’s sake and not for the sake of what many of my fellow evangelicals might dismiss as “political correctness.”

I’m sorry, but this is a post about the sexual appetites of Jerry Falwell, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort. (And it’s every bit as unpleasant as that sounds.)

August 26, 2020 By Fred Clark

“My gorgeous wife,” the white pastor says, going on a bit too much about how beautiful she is or even, if he’s more of a Driscoll-ish pastor, about how “sexy” she is. After Talladega Nights filtered into the white evangelical subculture, some pastors even weirdly latched onto the “my red-hot smokin’ wife” joke used in that 2006 Will Ferrell comedy.*

Thankfully, most pastors don’t do this, but quite a few did and still do — as do lots of male CEOs and politicians. And it’s almost always painfully awkward for almost everyone involved. That awkwardness is intensified because it causes you to instinctively glance over at the pastor’s poor wife who is usually wincing through the ordeal. Sometimes the pastor will acknowledge this, making it out to be a running gag between them by saying, “She hates it when I do this.” And he’ll grin mischievously because he’s sure that, deep down, she secretly likes it when he does this, no matter how many times she tells him to stop.

It’s possible, of course, that he’s right — that she doesn’t really hate it when he does that. Maybe she’s as enthusiastically into this whole bit as he is, and maybe this is a little ritual that they share equally in the pleasure of. That’s possible, and where that’s true, I suppose, no harm, no foul. If she’s OK with that, then there’s no reason I shouldn’t also be OK with that.

But it often seems like she’s not OK with that — that she really does hate it when he does this, and wishes he would stop, and is only hanging in with the whole bit because he’s kind of bullied her into it, every time. And that’s just skeevy.

That skeeviness is what I was trying to get at in a recent tweet — posted before full reports of Jerry Falwell’s throuple affair — talking about the “vibe” he often seemed to project:

Ever been at a bar on vacation and then had a slightly off couple sit down next to you and start chatting? They buy you a round of drinks then, at some point, abruptly, the guy segues to "So … do you guys swing?"

Jerry Jr. gives off exactly the same vibe as that guy. https://t.co/1wUxN79LHb

— SlacktivistFred's therapeutic language (@SlacktivistFred) August 20, 2020

If you can’t read that embedded Tweet, it says: “Ever been at a bar on vacation and then had a slightly off couple sit down next to you and start chatting? They buy you a round of drinks then, at some point, abruptly, the guy segues to ‘So … do you guys swing?’ Jerry Jr. gives off exactly the same vibe as that guy.”

This isn’t kink-shaming because the problem with That Guy isn’t that he’s kinky. The skeeviness doesn’t come from That Guy being a swinger, it comes from realizing that he’s utterly unable to recognize whether or not somebody else is. Including, perhaps, his own wife.

It’s skeevy, in other words, for the same reason the pastor’s unironic Ricky Bobby impression is skeevy — because we don’t know if he would know if his wife was really into this too. We cannot trust him to know, or to listen, or to realize if she wasn’t. And if she’s not — if she really does hate it when he does this — then something actually bad and not merely benignly kinky is going on.

“Kink-shaming” is bad because kinkiness is not shameful. What is shameful is forcing, coercing, bullying, or manipulating someone else into participating in your idea of a good time when it’s actually their idea of a Very Bad time. Depending on what all that entails, such coercion and bullying might make you a jerk, or it might make you a rapist.

Be kind and be careful, because this sort of thing can be complicated.

To clarify what I’m getting at here, let’s consider the examples of two of Jerry Falwell Jr’s colleagues from Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign: the recently pardoned criminal Roger Stone and the likely soon-to-be-pardoned criminal Paul Manafort.

Roger Stone is a pretty kinky guy and he doesn’t care who knows it. I’m pretty sure he’d be insulted if anyone suggested that his sex life or sexual appetites were in any way average or plain vanilla. Back in the ’90s, he and his then-wife placed graphic ads in Swing Fever magazine seeking “similar couples or exceptional muscular, well hung, single men” for threesomes or group sex. This was something they both wanted to do and they were looking for other interested parties who wanted to do it too. Kinky, yes, but also enthusiastically consensual.

There are thousands of reasons to condemn Roger Stone as an awful human being and a pernicious, toxic presence in society, but his kinkiness isn’t one of them.

Paul Manafort — Stone’s longtime business partner in the dictator-defending lobbying firm of Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly — is also a really kinky guy, but he doesn’t seem to care about consent. Thanks to his role running Trump’s 2016 campaign, much of Manafort’s private life has come to the public eye, including his “public affair as a sugar daddy to a much younger woman” and his “his membership in BDSM sex clubs.”

That sex-club membership, like the affairs, was extra-marital — a betrayal of his wife. Far worse was the cruel stuff that Manafort forced his wife to be involved in. Maya Gurantz discussed this, as delicately as possible, in an LA Review of Books essay last year, “Kompromat: Or, Revelations from the Unpublished Portions of Andrea Manafort’s Hacked Texts.” But it’s not really possible to discuss this behavior delicately. It involves, as Gurantz summarizes it, “Over a decade of coercive and manipulative sexual behavior, in which Manafort allegedly forced his wife, vulnerable from having sustained brain damage after a near-death horseback riding accident years before, to engage in ‘gang bangs’ with black men while he watched.”

This was something he wanted but she did not, something he bullied and manipulated and coerced her into doing against her will. That’s not kinky. That’s just cruel.

I hope that the distinction here is obvious even to my conservative evangelical cousins who distrust (and often distort) the ethical significance of consent. I appreciate that those folks tend to misapprehend any reference to consent as calls for an “anything goes” ethical free for all. But surely even they can recognize that there’s a huge and important and meaningful moral difference between Mr. & Mrs. Stone sharing in the choice to enjoy what most evangelicals regard as sinful sex and Mr. Manafort coercing his wife to do participate in something she emphatically did not enjoy.

Which brings us back to the Falwells and the “pool boy” and all that we do not know and cannot be sure of about their alleged long-term three-way affair, which began with the couple showering gifts and attention on a then-20-year-old Giancarlo Granda:

Granda said that while he entered into the sexual relationship with the Falwells willingly, today he feels the couple preyed upon him. “Whether it was immaturity, naïveté, instability, or a combination thereof, it was this ‘mindset’ that the Falwells likely detected in deciding that I was the ideal target for their sexual escapades,” Granda said.

Consent is hugely important. It can also be hugely complicated — particularly when more than two people are involved and when the power dynamics are far from equal. This situation made respectful respect for consent exponentially more complex. It’s not necessarily true, as one character on the dark satire The Politician joked, that “The problem with a threesome [is] someone always ends up in tears,” but it’s a likelier outcome if everyone involved isn’t aware of that increased complexity.

Granda believes he willingly agreed to participate in this affair, but that he was also, to some extent, “preyed upon” and manipulated. Perhaps the same could be said of Becki Falwell. Perhaps it was true of Jerry Falwell. It’s even possible — in a kind of sick twist on “The Gift of the Magi” — that it was true of both of the Falwells, that they both felt pressured into going along with something they mistakenly thought was necessary to maintain the other’s affection. Maybe they were both fully into it and just presumed Granda always would be as well. Or maybe they recognized his “immaturity, naïveté, instability” and therefore consciously singled him out as someone they could manipulate.

From where we sit, outside of this arrangement, we can’t know. Maybe this whole affair, this whole time, was free of coercion or bullying or the kind of dismissively “joking” attitude of that pastor saying “she hates it when I do this.”

But maybe not. So while I do not wish to engage in any kink-shaming about this affair, I’ll also withhold any judgement about whether it was just innocently kinky because, from our vantage point on the outside, we do not know if that was the case.

* That movie remains quite popular in white evangelical circles despite its PG-13 rating and despite the fact that it’s often as much of a satire of white evangelicalism as it is of NASCAR. The whole “smokin’ hot wife” bit itself comes from a scene that spoofs white evangelicals’ ideas about who Jesus was.

That same scene from that same movie is also probably the source for the single-word sexual slang “hotwife,” which seems to be specifically pertinent here.

We’re all responsible for the responsibilities we refuse to accept

April 21, 2020 By Fred Clark

Noam Chomsky is 91 years old, but the legendary leftist academic still managed to make waves on social media last week simply by repeating the same thing he has said about every presidential election since (at least) JFK vs. Nixon. Once a presidential election clarifies down to a binary choice between two viable alternatives, he said yet again, we are obliged to vote for the better of those two alternatives.

Chomsky says this every four years with the same principled consistency he’s said everything else he’s had to say for the last 70 or so years. And every four years it causes a weird brief moment in which he gets praised and commended as a wise old man by the very same corporate centrist types who spend most of the other three years and 51 weeks of every quadrennial cycle dismissing him as a leftist crank, while at the same time he briefly gets anathematized as a sell-out and stooge by the very same leftier-than-thou types who spend most of the other three years and 51 weeks of said cycle hailing him as a hero and posting memes with quotes from Manufacturing Consent.

That latter group wails that Chomsky is “compromising his principles” when he offers his begrudging endorsements of Biden, Clinton, Obama, Kerry, Gore, Clinton, Dukakis, Mondale, Carter, McGovern, Humphrey, LBJ, etc., but that ain’t what’s happening. He’s not compromising his principles, he’s applying them. For Chomsky, as for everyone else in a democracy, having principles and sticking to them requires compromise not with those principles, but with other people.

Noam Chomsky is a guy who absolutely believes that American-style democracy has been corrupted by corporate interests wielding power that rightfully ought to belong to the people. Our elections, and especially our presidential elections, he has said — repeatedly — are “a corrupt system designed to limit choices to those acceptable to corporate elites.” And he has said, at great length, that there are many many ways we can and ought to be working diligently to change that. But none of those ways involves elevating one’s own personal sense of purity or of special identity by throwing away the compromised-but-still-significant act of voting to instead register one’s own indignation at the limited choices we are presented with every four years.

“Voting should not be viewed as a form of personal self-expression or moral judgement directed in retaliation towards major party candidates who fail to reflect our values,” Chomsky wrote four years ago. “Voting should not be viewed as a form of … retaliation towards … a corrupt system designed to limit choices to those acceptable to corporate elites.” Because the abdication of personal responsibility that such self-righteous protest votes entails is, itself, also one of the limited choices deemed acceptable to corporate elites.

I confess to understanding the allure of misperceiving voting as an opportunity to express my own personal moral superiority to both of the available candidates. I did this in 1996 by proudly refusing to vote for Bill Clinton after what I (correctly) perceived as the perverse immorality of his “welfare reform” scheme. I allowed myself to get worked up into thinking that my vote had something to do with my personal complicity in the cruel consequences of that policy rather than that vote being what it actually was — an opportunity to choose between Bill Clinton and his agenda and Bob Dole and his agenda, and nothing more. So I wrote in Wendell Berry as a “protest” vote.

The effect of that vote was not, as it turns out, a small ripple of a contribution to pressure the Democratic Party into offering us better future alternatives. Nor did it contribute, in any way, to a larger repudiation of Clinton’s welfare reform. In the grand scheme of things, the only effect of that vote, rather, was a slight diminishment of Bob Dole’s defeat in Pennsylvania.

But for me personally, the effect was much worse. I had approached voting as primarily a means of refusing to accept any share of personal responsibility for the outcome and thereby tricked myself into regarding my own irresponsibility as a sign of special virtue. And that is a very dangerous place to be — a bystander defiantly proud of standing by, convinced of my own goodness because my hands were as clean as Pilate’s.

I should have known better. I very specifically and emphatically should have known better because I was then, in the late 1990s, working for a nonprofit specifically dedicated to encouraging white evangelical Christians to get over themselves and to get over this very same form of self-righteously proud bystander-ism. I had written essays chastising my fellow white evangelicals for elevating some personal sense of personal purity above the concerns of their neighbors, thereby becoming like the priest and the Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan. I’d preached sermons on James 1:27 — “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world” — condemning our self-righteous tendency to twist that into imagining that the best way “to keep oneself from being polluted by the world” was to avoid the distress of orphans and widows.

But I still slid into the very same trap, treating my vote as “a form of personal expression,” as though it were mainly a way of demonstrating and affirming my own personal virtue. Follow that to its logical conclusion and it quickly becomes clear that the Most Virtuous path is never to vote at all. And the Most Virtuous thing to do is nothing. Ever.

That sounds absurd when stated so plainly, the reward of greatest-possible virtue for the expense of the least possible effort. But in practice, in the moment, it’s subtly enticing, enchanting, and intoxicating. It takes so the anxiety that comes from seeing others more deeply engaged and more fully committed, tempting us to see them, instead, as merely more deeply compromised and more fully polluted. It mistranslates their worthy example into the smug reassurance that we’re better than they are because we’re not doing anything about anything.

And like any addictive drug, it requires us to continuously up the dosage, because we’ll need more and more of it to deal with the ever-more-acute anxiety caused by the ever-increasing gap between what we see others doing and what we know ourselves not to be doing — an anxiety that we’ll do our best to avoid identifying, accurately, as our conscience.

The point here is not just to argue that you shouldn’t flee from responsibility by throwing your vote away on a meaningless protest vote because you wish to preserve your own righteous purity in a world that refuses to provide you with purely virtuous and perfect choices. The point here is that presidential elections are far from the only occasion on which you will be tempted to put your own sense of personal purity and righteous virtue ahead of the actual righteous virtue that comes from taking the responsibility of choosing between whatever tainted, imperfect, fallible options are actually present, and there’s no surer way to defile yourself with the pollution of this world than by abandoning the responsibility to make such imperfect choices. That’s not the way to make yourself purer than anybody else, it’s just the way to make yourself insufferably self-righteous even as you leave widows and orphans to fend for themselves in their distress.

The wrong rec room

March 28, 2020 By Fred Clark

Here is your open thread for March 28, 2020.

Lady Gaga turns 34 today. And Cheryl James — Salt from Salt-n-Pepa — turns 54. They’re both terrific, but for the video here I’m going to have to go with another fabulous musical star. Reba McEntire turns 65 today. She’s recorded some great music, but this is my all-time favorite thing she’s ever done:

That’s from Tremors — a cult-classic B-movie. Reba and Michael Gross are hilarious in this scene, while also showing us why Burt and Heather Gummer are so happily married. But the scene also addresses a formal requirement of the creature feature, wherein it must be established that Bullets Won’t Stop ‘Em. That point gets hammered home here by demonstrating that, OK, yes, technically, Bullets Will Stop ‘Em, but you’re going to need an awful lot of bullets.

On March 28, 1854, Britain declared war on Russia. France had declared war on Russia the previous day. This was part of the Crimean War. Raise your hand if you understand the Crimean War. (Notice me not raising my hand.) Pretty much the only thing I ever learned about the Crimean War, and the only reason it was ever mentioned in any of my schooling, was because of “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

Like the soldiers in that poem, ours was not to reason why a dozen or so countries (and empires) had gotten themselves embroiled in a war that lasted two and a half years, leaving something like 700,000 combatants dead. The reasons why, it turns out, are blasphemously depressing:

A major point in dispute was whether the Greek Orthodox should continue in exclusive possession of the keys to the main door of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, on the spot where the baby Jesus was born and cradled in the manger. The Latins had their own keys, but they were to a side door and not to the main door. There was also a row about a silver star with Latin inscriptions in the sanctuary, which had mysteriously disappeared in 1847, as well as disputes over the Latin claim to the right to repair the principal cupola of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and over the right to officiate at the Tomb of the Virgin Mary at Gethsemane. Feelings ran so high that Greek and Latin monks came to blows with crosses and candlesticks in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

This is yet another one of those cases, I think, where it’s impossible to distinguish between the ways religion served as a pretext for political power and the ways political power served as a pretext for religious conflict. In any case, the Ottomans got in a fight with the Orthodox and then the Catholics and the Anglicans jumped in on the side of the Ottomans. Empires gonna empire.

On March 28, 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Stump v. Sparkman that a woman who had been sterilized by a judge’s order — without her consent or knowledge — was not permitted to sue the judge. Basically, this was judges protecting judges by judging that it should be extremely difficult and rare for people harmed by judges to sue them. But there are other elements of the case that make it disturbingly timely.

Raphael was born 537 years ago today. It’s also the birthday (but not the feast day) of St. Teresa of Avila, who was born 505 years ago. I find the work of both of them beautiful in deeply strange ways.

Raise a glass (or a can) to Frederick Pabst, who was born 184 years ago today.

Worldwatch Institute founder Lester R. Brown turns 86 today. He has, alas, been mostly right for most of those 86 years.

Southern Gospel legend Bill Gaither turns 84.

“Southern Gospel” music is not to be confused with Gospel Gospel music — and certainly no one who hears it would confuse to the two. I’m not generally a fan of this whitest-of-all musical genres, but I’m fond of Gaither and his collaborators, who’ve recorded hundreds of songs over the years, some of which are real toe-tappers. (This is partly due to nostalgia, as Gaither’s music was inescapable during my fundamentalist childhood.)

Academy Award-winner Dianne Wiest turns 75. She won that Oscar for Bullets Over Broadway, which is less problematic if you think of it as a Dianne Wiest movie (or a John Cusack/Chazz Palminteri movie). Or you can think of it as the movie in which screenwriter Douglas McGrath conclusively wins an argument with his co-writer about the moral responsibility of the artist.

Vince Vaughn turns 50 today. He was really good in Return to Paradise. Novelist Jennifer Weiner also turns 50. (She’s from Philly and she’s always been supportive of, and delightful to, area bookstores.) Julia Stiles turns 39.

March 28 is the feast day of St. Guntram (or Gontrand, or Gontran, Gontram, Gunthram, Gunthchramn, or Guntramnus). St. Guntrum was a Frankish king in the sixth century who got into a civil war with his own brother and crushed a rebellion led by his niece. He apparently also, at some point, must have done something or other that was saintly, but whatever that might have been has long since been forgotten. Saint Guntrum, pray for us.

Talk amongst yourselves.

If it’s violins she loves, let them play

February 16, 2020 By Fred Clark

Here is your open thread for February 16, 2020.

Today is the birthday of the late great James Ingram, who could sing anything with anybody. He won the first of his two Grammys for this one. It’s an odd love song in that it’s sung as advice (mostly good advice, I think) to other men:

“One Hundred Ways” verges on a sappy earnestness, but Ingram sells it — in part by injecting a note of remorse, a hint that this was advice he himself regrets having once dismissed as sappy. Ingram had a knack for that — for making earnest cool. (Admit it: If you’re alone in the car and you come across “Somewhere Out There” on the radio, you’re going to let it play, you might even turn it up, and you might even sing along.)

The first computer bulletin board went live on February 16, 1978. It was quickly followed, no doubt, by the first flame war, the first troll, and the first flounce.

Today is the Day of the Shining Star, a mandatory holiday enthusiastically celebrated (or else) in North Korea to mark the birth of Kim Jong-Il. It’s basically like the Freedom Sunday celebrations at Robert Jeffress’ First “Baptist” Church in Dallas, except in Korean.

It’s the birthday of two-time Academy Award-winner Mahershala Ali.

LeVar Burton turns 63 today. He’d be a beloved figure if he’d only done Roots, or only done TNG, or only done Reading Rainbow. Having done all three is pretty impressive.

William Katt, who played the title roles in Pippin and The Greatest American Hero, turns 69. Years ago, I wrote about my frustration with the shallowness of Pippin, which I described as “a period piece, locked in the ’70s at that moment in time when the ’60s were beginning to morph into the ’80s.” It sets out as the story of a young man’s search for meaning, then winds up being about his decision not to do that. Think of it as “OK, Boomer,” the musical.

The Greatest American Hero, on the other hand, was cheesy fun. Pilot episodes for two reboots of that show have been filmed but neither one ever aired or got picked up as a series. I’d be happy to see a third attempt, although I’d also argue that there already has been at least one successful remake of the series. It was called Chuck.

Ventriloquist Edgar Bergen was born on February 16, 1903. Bergen started on vaudeville, but for much of his career he was a radio ventriloquist, which seems like cheating.

Tracy Lauren Morrow, better known as Ice-T, turns 62 years old today. As I forget which comic noted, his career began with boycotts over “Cop Killer” and evolved into his decades-long run as a cop on that show your mom watches. (John Mulaney’s bit on Ice-T on SVU is fun.) Abel Makkonen Tesfaye, better known as The Weeknd, turns 30 today. This means he was born in 1990. Part of my brain still freaks out a little bit at the realization that someone who was born in 1990 is now 30.

Christopher Eccleston turns 56 today. He played the Ninth Doctor, which seems like it ought to make him a member of the House of Lords or something.

Otis Blackwell was born February 16, 1931. He wrote “Fever” and “Great Balls of Fire” and “All Shook Up” and “Don’t Be Cruel.”

Prominent 19th-century quack Phineas Quimby was born on February 16, 1802. It says something about the audience for mesmerism and “mind cure” quackery that it could be successfully peddled by a guy named “Phineas Quimby” without that giving anyone pause.

In Western calendars, today is the feast day of St. Onesimus. This would be a good day, then, to revisit our discussion of why “The book of Philemon does not defend slavery.”

Another saint celebrated in the liturgical calendar today is St. Juliana of Nicomedia. She was an early Christian martyr whose story is interesting in that it could have — in some Sliding Doors alternate history of Christianity — become an important example of the fundamental moral importance of consent. Instead, of course, her story was twisted into purity-culture propaganda and used to teach the idea that it’s better to be tortured than to be unchaste.

Talk amongst yourselves.

North Dakota conservatives seek to deny refuge to those in need

December 11, 2019 By Fred Clark

The word “conservative” is doing a lot of unspoken work in this story. It serves, among other things, as both an accusation and a defiant confession.

“North Dakota county may become US’s 1st to bar new refugees”

If they vote to bar refugees, as expected, Burleigh County — home to about 95,000 people and the capital city of Bismarck — could become the first local government to do so since President Donald Trump issued an executive order making it possible.

… Trump’s executive order this fall came as he had already proposed cutting the number of refugees next year to the lowest level since Congress passed the Refugee Act of 1980. He declared that refugees should be resettled only in places where the state and local governments — counties — gave consent. Since then, many governors and counties around the country have declared that they would continue taking refugees.

Republican Gov. Doug Burgum said last month that North Dakota would continue accepting refugees where local jurisdictions agreed, and his spokesman said the governor saw it as a local decision. Soon after, Cass and Grand Forks counties, which are home to the state’s largest city, Fargo, and third-largest city, Grand Forks, respectively, declared they would continue taking refugees. Fargo Mayor Tim Mahoney said refugees were needed to boost the city’s economy, and that 90% were fully employed within three months of resettling in his city.

But the idea was quickly opposed in more conservative Burleigh County. Among the opponents was Republican state Rep. Rick Becker, of Bismarck, an ultraconservative who took to social media to criticize the program as unrestrained and a possible drain on social service programs, schools and law enforcement.

Burleigh County is likely to bar refugees because Burleigh County is “conservative.” The most outspoken opponent to permitting refuge for those fleeing violence and persecution is a local Republican state representative who is “ultraconservative.”

We are presented with an identity: “conservative” equals “inhospitable to outsiders and those in need.” Rick Becker is opposed to accepting refugees because he is a “conservative.” Rick Becker is “conservative” because he opposes accepting refugees.

AP reporter James MacPherson attempts to employ the word “conservative” as a dispassionate, disinterested descriptor — a label that strives for accuracy, not for evaluation. This is in part because the article is discussing Republicans, and the generally agreed-upon consensus view is that Republicans are the “conservative” party in America. This is, in fact, how the Burleigh County Republicans describe themselves, so MacPherson’s use of “conservative” is also deferential — allowing those he discusses to describe themselves as they see fit.

But despite all of that — despite the fact that this use of “conservative” here is customary, chosen, and embraced by the subjects of the article it describes here — the use of the term here is still likely to be regarded by some as judgmental, pejorative, or “biased.” That’s due to the unavoidable substance of the article, which reports the facts of the matter, namely that in Burleigh County, North Dakota, conservatives seek to deny refuge to those in need.

That’s simply a blandly accurate description of what is happening. That this will strike many readers — including many self-identified “conservatives” — as pejorative or judgmental has nothing to do with MacPherson’s or my predisposition toward these self-declared conservatives. Nor does it have anything to do with MacPherson’s or my evaluation of their behavior.

I will happily add my opinion and evaluation to that simple description: Conservatives in Burleigh County seek to deny refuge to those in need … and in my opinion that is a shitty, sinful, blasphemously evil thing to do.

But it doesn’t matter whether or not I add that, or even whether or not I think that. What matters is that everyone thinks that — including the ultra-conservative Rep. Rick Becker, his fellow anti-refugee Republicans in Burleigh County, and all of their fellow anti-refugee Republicans across America. I don’t have to tell you or them that I think this because it is what everyone recognizes to be the case. Banning refugees is just shitty behavior — an ignorant, selfish, dishonest, indecent violation of the Golden Rule.

This creates an uncomfortable situation for poor Rick Becker. He is defiantly proud of his self-chosen identity as a “conservative.” And he is adamant that being a “conservative” entails denying refuge to people in need. If you were to accuse him of going “soft” on his proposed refugee ban, he would vehemently deny that was the case, insisting that no one takes a harder line against providing refuge to refugees than he does. He will not abide the suggestion that anyone could possibly be to the right of him on this point, or that anyone else might be more conservative than he is when it comes to the conservative belief that refugees should be turned away.

And yet, at the same time, he is inescapably aware that his position is utterly gross and shameful. This is what leads him to defend that position as unwaveringly “conservative” rather than attempting the impossible task of defending it as good or as wise or truthful or beautiful.

Perhaps I’m overstating the matter when I say that even Rick Becker and the rest of the anti-refugee Republicans of Burleigh County agree that banning refugees is shameful, sinful, ugly and evil. Maybe they don’t agree with that at all. Maybe they think it’s good and right and just to ban refugees.

But I don’t buy that, because look what happens even if we follow MacPherson’s example and attempt to be as neutral as possible, stating only the stark facts of the matter and refraining from any evaluation or judgment of those facts. We could say:

1. People who describe and identify themselves as “conservatives” seek to ban refugees in Burleigh County, North Dakota; and

2. These same self-described conservatives insist that banning refugees from Burleigh County is the conservative thing to do.

And that alone will provoke a defensive response. It will be perceived as an attack on conservatives and as a criticism of conservatism. Because whether or not it’s ever stated, it is impossible for conservatives or liberals or anyone else to read those two points without also acknowledging a third point:

3. Banning refugees is a shitty thing to do.

Folks like Rick Becker will try to distance and insulate themselves from that recognition by attributing that third fact to the mere opinion of specific others. Points 1 and 2 are an attack on conservatives, they will say, because most liberals think that banning refugees is a shitty thing to do.

And that’s not wrong. Most liberals do think that. Because most liberals are humans and most humans think that. Most conservatives are also humans, and so most conservatives think that too.

We humans — all of us, liberal, conservative, whatever — tell stories about this very thing. In some of these human stories people offer refuge to others who are fleeing violence, disaster, or destruction. In other of these human stories, people refuse to offer such refuge. We humans can tell either version of that story. But what we cannot and do not ever do is tell a story in which those who refuse to offer refuge are the Good Guys.

It is impossible to tell such a story, or to hear it, or to imagine it. By definition — because that is what “the Good Guys” means.

Rick Becker knows this. That’s why he’s so defensive about proudly defending the indefensible.

Becker is quite aware that the policy he’s proposing looks really bad:

“This isn’t about skin color,” said Becker, a plastic surgeon and former gubernatorial candidate. “In the past, nobody had any say whatsoever. Now we have something that should have been in place decades ago.

“Now, if they want to accept them, they can, and if they don’t want to they shouldn’t.”

So this isn’t about skin color, Becker says, as everyone seems to say when they’re doing something explicitly about skin color. Becker says, rather, this is about states’ rights. The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even etc.

Republican state Rep. Rick Becker, of Bismarck, North Dakota, apparently.

I’m still unclear as to what it would even mean for Burleigh County to withhold its official “consent” for the resettlement of refugees there. Trump’s executive order — dreamed up by his white supremacist senior legislative aide, Stephen Miller — seems illegal or unenforceable or, at best, simply beside the point. When the “conservative” fundamentalist Baptist church I grew up in signed up to resettle a refugee family of “Boat People” back in the early 1980s, we didn’t seek or require the “consent” of Union County, N.J. We were just a group of citizens acting as such. The county government had no role, no jurisdiction, no say, and no involvement in any of that.

In providing refuge for that family, we were also a local church acting as such. Had our local county government imagined they had any legal right to muck about with our doing that, we’d have taken them to court and every lawyer they tried to hire against us would’ve advised them to back off, drop the matter, and apologize to avoid losing a slam-dunk First Amendment case.

I note that Burleigh County, North Dakota, is home to many local churches that belong to traditions with a long history of welcoming refugees as an intrinsic expression and requirement of their faith. There are dozens of Lutheran congregations there that have long supported the work of Church World Service. There are local Catholic parishes that have long contributed to support refugee resettlement through the UCCB and Catholic Charities. There are scads of nondenominational white evangelical congregations that have, up until recently at least, wholeheartedly supported the refugee resettlement work of World Relief. And that’s just the Christians — there are also at least three synagogues in Bismarck, and America’s Jewish congregations have always way outperformed us American Christians when it comes to offering refuge to those in need.

I don’t know, specifically, if any of these many many religious congregations in Burleigh County are directly involved in helping to resettle refugees in their community, but the odds are that at least some of them are or plan to be. Does the Burleigh County government imagine it has the authority to stop them by denying them its “consent”? Does the Republican-controlled Burleigh County government imagine that it has any hope of defending itself against the lawsuit that these congregations are likely to bring?

Yes, I realize Trump has had three years to cram hundreds of Federalist Society ideologues onto the courts, and that those bozos do not recognize religious liberty as a constitutional right, only as a political slogan having to do with letting bakeries refuse to sell baked goods or allowing pharmacists to refuse to sell Monistat because they pretend to believe it’s abortion cream. But even so, there’s no legal basis for a county government barring local congregations from practicing their faith in the way that American congregations have done for more than a century.

The idea of a local government withholding its “consent” for refugee resettlement just seems confused. This is not an activity that has ever required that government’s consent.

But now, according to Trump’s strange executive order, we’re told that government “consent” will be required even for activities in which that government has no role or involvement. Religious groups who seek to continue doing that which religious groups have been doing will first need to seek and secure the government’s permission.

There are many words that might be used to describe that state of affairs, but “conservative” really shouldn’t be one of them.