Smart people saying smart things (3.25.19)

March 25, 2019 By Fred Clark

Ian Millhiser, “Obama warned us about the Supreme Court we have right now”

No, Scalia’s transition from Smith to Hobby Lobby cannot be explained by a change in the law. But it can be explained due to a factual distinction between the two cases. Smith was a case about Native Americans who belong to a faith that Scalia did not share. Hobby Lobby, by contrast, was brought by conservative Christians — and Scalia was also a conservative Christian.

Conservatives’ evolution on religious liberty, in other words, is best understood through their lack of judicial empathy. When the members of a Native American faith sought a religious exemption from the law, Scalia recoiled. When a Muslim inmate asked to have his imam present at his execution — or, for that matter, when Trump banned many Muslims from entering the United States altogether — the Court’s right flank does not see the virtue in these claims. Yet when a Christian conservative employer does not want provide their employees with birth control coverage — or when a Christian conservative baker refuses to serve a gay couple — the court’s Republicans are suddenly up in arms.

West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943)

Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.

It seems trite but necessary to say that the First Amendment to our Constitution was designed to avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings. There is no mysticism in the American concept of the State or of the nature or origin of its authority. We set up government by consent of the governed, and the Bill of Rights denies those in power any legal opportunity to coerce that consent. Authority here is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority.

The case is made difficult not because the principles of its decision are obscure, but because the flag involved is our own. Nevertheless, we apply the limitations of the Constitution with no fear that freedom to be intellectually and spiritually diverse or even contrary will disintegrate the social organization. To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous, instead of a compulsory routine, is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds.

Bernadette Devlin, “Our people are being oppressed with the active assistance of our people”

Sarah Posner, “The End of the City on a Hill”

Peter Sprigg, an official with the Family Research Council who spoke in Chișinău, similarly downplayed concerns about Orbán’s autocratic moves. “It seems like the Western media likes to focus on some of these sort of procedural things,” Sprigg told me, instead of how Orbán “talks about defending Western civilization rooted in Christianity. I mean that’s where we see that we have common cause with him.”

In recent years, this common cause has more and more explicitly involved the rejection of liberal democracy. “There are great experiments in postliberal political and economic life occurring right now in real places,” Carlson wrote in 2018, “in Poland’s Law and Justice Party; in the Hungary of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán; and — yes — in the land of the Great Russians led by Vladimir Putin.”

Nesrine Malik, “Until Christchurch I thought it was worth debating with Islamophobes. Not any more”

Politicians and the media know exactly what they are doing. They know that hating Muslims sells, whether it is for votes or for clicks or for profile raising. They know that there is a sweet spot where prejudice against Muslims and anti-immigration sentiment intersect, and that the former is a good way of legitimizing the latter. They know that there is a market for racism, but one that isn’t simply based on skin color – that’s too difficult to justify openly – and so “Muslim” became a good shorthand for the unwelcome other.

Postcards from the class & culture wars (2.5.19)

February 5, 2019 By Fred Clark

“The 26 richest people on earth in 2018 had the same net worth as the poorest half of the world’s population, some 3.8 billion people.”

“So, it’s not like it’s a gigantic number overall.”

“Companies like Wells Fargo have enjoyed huge profits from the tax cuts and spent billions on buybacks while laying off workers.”

“Mitch McConnell, Chuck Grassley, and John Thune look at the existing policy landscape – the enormous deficit Republicans have created, the priorities in desperate need of investment – and believe what’s really needed is another tax break that would exclusively benefit the rich.”

“By expanding their demands beyond their own compensation, teachers’ unions are transforming into some of the most significant advocacy groups striving for socioeconomic equality in America today.”

“The Trump administration says it would require extraordinary effort to reunite what may be thousands of migrant children who have been separated from their parents and, even if it could, the children would likely be emotionally harmed.”

“Yes, judge. She was also a 13-year-old who under our laws can’t consent to anything.”

“Hagedorn also said that the NAACP, the national civil rights group, was a ‘partisan hack’ and a ‘disgrace to America.'”

“The topic turned, as was necessary, to Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s refusal to resign after he tried the ‘sorry for the blackface/coonman nickname’ defense on Friday and then almost moonwalking to a Shaggy’s ‘It Wasn’t Me’ defense on Saturday.”

“Birnbaum doesn’t appreciate the irony, but there is little doubt he played a crucial role in the weaponizing of antisemitism.”

“On multiple occasions, including on or about December 1, 2017, STONE told Person 2 that Person 2 should do a ‘Frank Pentangeli‘ before HPSCI in order to avoid contradicting STONE’s testimony.”

“Trump heard something that wasn’t actual intelligence, and repeated it as truth.”

“The plot of the film is made up, as are the characters and developments that unfolded on screen.”

“These are full-blown, what-can-we-do-to-strangle-and-destroy-the-support-system Republicans.”

“In reality, all that remains in town today is a few clusters of homes, a scrapyard, a community center, a dairy, and the infamous PG&E station that connects to the vast natural gas pipeline system.”

“That’s just how it is off in Indian Country.”

“If a candidate can garner the support of me and my 1,156 Twitter followers, I would think that should be more than enough to take the win!”

Brief interludes with hideous men

October 4, 2018 By Fred Clark

• On Sunday night, Fathom Events will be staging a special screening at thousands of theaters to mark the 50th anniversary of the iconically cool Steve McQueen vehicle Bullitt. Next week, the promotional company will have a two-night special event screening the season premiere of Jodie Whittaker’s run as Doctor Who.

Both of those sound like great fun. They should provide a chance for Fathom Events to make back some of the money it seems to be losing this week by hosting the two-night special screening premiere of Liberty University’s conspiracy theory biopic The Trump Prophecy.

The Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood attended one of the 1,200 nationwide showings of the film last night and, despite being right there in Lynchburg, Virginia, found rows of empty seats as well as a smattering of true believers.

Sherwood reminds us that Mark Taylor’s “true story” and his “prophecy” of Donald Trump includes the claim that “Barack Obama will be charged with treason and Trump will authorize the arrest of ‘thousands of corrupt officials, many of whom are part of a massive satanic pedophile ring.'”

That hasn’t happened yet. But Sherwood also notes that Taylor/Liberty have prophesied that God has also ordained Donald Trump to “force the release of cures for cancer and Alzheimer’s that are currently being withheld by the pharmaceutical industry.” So, you know, we’ve got that going for us.

• “He said that because everyone was deaf at the school except those who worked there, no one could hear the screams and cries of the young boys when the abuse took place.”

That’s from this Daily Beast report on “The Sex Abuse of Deaf Orphans in Pope Francis’ Backyard.” This was from a school in Rome. It’s horrible. Just as horrible as the deluge of similar stories from all over the world, including the extensively documented accounts of generations of this kind of abuse here in Pennsylvania.

Everywhere this has happened we have seen religious authorities — “moral” authorities — mustering all of their power and privilege to shelter and safeguard the abusers in order to shelter and safeguard their own reputation as moral authorities. In doing so, they have made themselves magnets for abusers and incubators for programs of institutional abuse.

And everywhere this has happened, those same moral authorities have simultaneously supported equally “moral” political movements to control and subjugate women, to defend the status quo, and to protect money from accountability. The term for this behavior in American religion is “pro-life,” and anyone who refuses to accept this program as a matter of course is condemned as immoral. This Florida bishop explains that we are obliged to bow before our moral “superiors.”

• Speaking of self-proclaimed religious authorities who devote their lives to defending abuse: “Paige Patterson plans to co-teach a mid-October weeklong class on ‘Christian Ethics: The Bible and Moral Issues’ with Richard Land.”

A full week seems a bit too long for these two men to share everything they know about ethics.

Patterson lost his job as a seminary president due to his role in covering up a rape, blaming the crime on the victim, and just generally having a long, bottomless history of belittling and demeaning women. He has also been named in some of the pending sexual abuse cases against his long-time ally, Paul Pressler. Land, for his part, lost his job with the Southern Baptist Convention after he plagiarized a newspaper columnist, attempting to pass the columnist’s extremely vile racist words off as his own.

Any fee or tuition charged for an “ethics” class taught by these two horrible men constitutes theft.

Paige Patterson and Richard Land are simply two more ugly Confederate monuments defouling the landscape. They should have been torn down generations ago.

• Lili Loofbourow writes a clearer version of some of what I was trying to say in yesterday’s post, “Brett Kavanaugh and the Cruelty of Male Bonding.”

For what it’s worth, and absent evidence or allegations to the contrary, I believe Brett Kavanaugh’s claim that he was a virgin through his teens. I believe it in part because it squares with some of the oddities I’ve had a hard time understanding about his alleged behavior: namely, that both allegations are strikingly different from other high-profile stories the past year, most of which feature a man and a woman alone. And yet both the Kavanaugh accusations share certain features: There is no penetrative sex, there are always male onlookers, and, most importantly, there’s laughter. In each case the other men — not the woman — seem to be Kavanaugh’s true intended audience. In each story, the cruel and bizarre act the woman describes—restraining Christine Blasey Ford and attempting to remove her clothes in her allegation, and in Deborah Ramirez’s, putting his penis in front of her face — seems to have been done in the clumsy and even manic pursuit of male approval. Even Kavanaugh’s now-notorious yearbook page, with its references to the “100 kegs or bust” and the like, seems less like an honest reflection of a fun guy than a representation of a try-hard willing to say or do anything as long as his bros think he’s cool. In other words: The awful things Kavanaugh allegedly did only imperfectly correlate to the familiar frame of sexual desire run amok; they appear to more easily fit into a different category — a toxic homosociality — that involves males wooing other males over the comedy of being cruel to women.

Loofbourow goes on to explain how this band-of-bros camaraderie shields these dudes from remembering anything significant about any of the many, many women to whom they were cruel. The objects of their cruelty do not register. Those women were not ever the most important people in the room when these boys performed their cruelties for their intended audience of one another.

Whether or not Kavanaugh was a virgin throughout his teen years, his own boofing words in his yearbook, his calendars, and his hand-written letters shows him to have been a boy obsessed with pushing the bounds of so-called technical virginity. It did not matter to him who the girl involved might be, or whether she was sober, or whether she gave her consent. The important thing — the all-important thing — was that his bros were there to watch and to take part, and to laugh with him.

The lawyerly loophole of technical virginity is a product of Catholic and evangelical purity culture, which is itself an expression of rape culture. The ferocious anger of Kavanaugh’s self-defense and of many of his Catholic and evangelical defenders only makes sense in the context of this warped notion of “purity,” which sees sex itself — and any woman who willingly engages in it — as dirty. In this view, any couple enthusiastically engaging in non-marital sex is guilty of a grave sin, but Kavanaugh can’t be accused of having done anything wrong because there was no P in V. How dare we accuse him of wrongdoing?

Grateful at the end of a long week

February 16, 2018 By Fred Clark

My wife comes home this weekend. She’s been at Pennsylvania Hospital most of the week recovering from surgery which the good doctors and nurses say went just the way it was intended to go. They’re confident that they fixed what needed fixing.

Avoiding the details, her problem fell into the general categories of stuff that’s not supposed to be there and of stuff that’s not where it’s supposed to be. This wasn’t life-threatening, but it was the source of a lot of pain and discomfort. This problem isn’t particularly rare, but it’s usually only found either due to some underlying syndrome or problem, or else it’s a symptom of some new ailment or disease (including some of the really scary ones.) So the long run up to her surgery involved months of screenings and test and consultations with specialists, all confirming that she didn’t have any of those syndromes or diseases.

Depending on how you look at it, then, she’s either incredibly lucky/fortunate/blessed to not have any of those associated problems that doctors expected to find, or else she’s incredibly un-lucky to be the rare, otherwise-healthy person who somehow wound up needing this surgery today. We’re mostly choosing to look at it the first way — especially after learning about what all it was those screenings and consultations were ruling out, and what the poor souls who do have those associated problems must be dealing with.

That whole “depending on how you look at it” choice always seems to be part of the picture when you’re spending time in hospitals. You wouldn’t be there if not for something bad and painful and serious, but you’re also surrounded by others, many of whom are facing something worse and more painful and more serious, and whose road back to normal might be longer and harder than the one ahead of you. You can take that raw experience and spin it into either grievance or gratitude. I can’t say I haven’t felt a bit of the former, but today I’m mostly focused on a lot of the latter.

Ash Wednesday is a strange day to spend in a hospital waiting room. I’ve always appreciated the meaning of that day’s visible reminder of our mortality and fragility. That reminder is true, and good, but in a hospital waiting room it just seemed redundant. Everybody in that room was already thinking about that. We’d all just helped loved ones sign multiple consent forms reminding us of those very same things. I think in a hospital waiting room, every day is Ash Wednesday.

(The day set for her surgery also led to less ponderous thoughts — jokes about how unfair it was to have to fast on Fat Tuesday, or about how she seemed to be taking the whole “giving up something for Lent” business a bit too seriously. And whenever anybody asked me if I was doing anything special for Valentine’s Day I could just say that my wife and I had reservations in center city at a really nice place.)

The Slacktivixen is still pretty sore, but there’s a chance she’ll get to come home tomorrow or Sunday. It will be a while before she’s back to 100-percent, and they’ve forbidden her from going back to work for at least three weeks. She’s the sort of impatient patient who needs to be formally forbidden from trying to do too much too soon — the sort of patient who when told they can’t return to work will start secretly planning ambitious projects around the house. So I’m getting ready for a few weeks of saying things like, “Yes, it looks great and you did an amazing job blacktopping the driveway, but please, you’re supposed to be taking it easy.”

But the very, very good news is that within a few weeks she will be feeling better than she has in a long time. We’re enormously grateful to the doctors and nurses and the whole crew at Penn, who have been kind and capable and impressive at every step.

Anyway, I’ve spent most of the week in This Is The Only Thing That Matters Right Now mode. I hope to be emerging from that soon.

LBCF, No. 170: ‘Pruneface Stonagal’

January 26, 2018 By Fred Clark

Originally posted June 27, 2008.

Read this entire series, for free, via the convenient Left Behind Index. This post is also part of the ebook collection The Anti-Christ Handbook: Volume 1, available on Amazon for just $2.99. Thank you for your support. Volume 2 of The Anti-Christ Handbook, completing all the posts on the first Left Behind book, is also now available.

Left Behind, pp. 452-453

Nicolae Carpathia is working his way around the conference table, inducting his followers one by one into his Team of Evil with his hypnotic incantation and his look-into-my-eyes mind control mojo.

Carpathia went through the ceremony with Steve, who gushed with pride. Nicolae eventually covered everyone in the room except the security guard, Hattie, and Jonathan Stonagal. …

So of the 20 or so people assembled in the room, the authors only bother to show us the induction ceremony for the six characters we already knew by name — Buck, Steve, Hattie, Chaim, Stonagal and Todd-Cothran. This is frustrating. Assembled in this room are the Antichrist’s hand-picked lieutenants, the Grand Council of Evil, the Vice-Regents of Armageddon, the Ten Henchmen of the Apocalypse. Yet we aren’t introduced to a single one of them by name.

Villains

This scene wouldn’t fly in the funny pages. Even the worst hacks in the comics biz know how to properly introduce a Rogues’ Gallery. As a sometime comic writer himself — Jerry Jenkins scribed the syndicated newspaper serial Gil Thorp — he should know better. After dropping the ball on this scene, Jenkins’ dreams must’ve been haunted by the angry ghost of Chester Gould.

What sort of people are assembled around this table? That ought to matter. Is this a collection of explicit villains (“Ambassador of the Great States of East Asia Kim Jong Il,” “Ambassador of the Great States of Africa Reanimated Zombie Mobutu,” “Rupert Murdoch, emperor of Australia”)? Or would that be too obvious? Maybe this council of One World Government vice-regents would be composed of others, like Nicolae, who are wolves in sheep’s clothing — Nobel Peace Prize laureates, environmentalists and champions of the poor. Introducing these various ambassadors, even briefly, should have been a prime opportunity to reinforce one of Left Behind’s central themes, Tim LaHaye’s upside-down belief that those who speak of peace, justice and unity are actually the dupes of Satan.

As it is, readers are left with only the vaguest impression of a conference table ringed by interchangeable, faceless white men in expensive suits. That sounds much more like my idea of an evil syndicate than like LaHaye’s.

Carpathia turns to Hattie and gives her the whole “I welcome you to the team … rights and privileges … consistency and wisdom” spiel.

Buck tried to catch Hattie’s eye and shake his head, but she was zeroed in on her new boss. Was this Buck’s fault? He had introduced her to Carpathia in the first place. Was she still reachable? Would he have access? …

“Access“? If that’s not a Freudian slip then I don’t know what else to make of it.

Everyone stared with beatific smiles as Hattie breathed her heartfelt thanks and sat down again.

Here again it’s impossible to tell whether the creepy, unnatural behavior of everyone at the table is meant to be seen that way. The inappropriate and inhuman response of this mostly anonymous group might be intended in this scene to show that they are in the thrall of Carpathia’s mind control. But then it’s not all that different from the inappropriate and inhuman responses that have characterized everyone in the novel, even in scenes that Nicolae has nothing to do with, so who can say?

Carpathia dramatically turned to Jonathan Stonagal. The latter smiled a knowing smile and stood regally. “Where do I begin, Jonathan, my friend?” Carpathia said. Stonagal dropped his head gratefully and others murmured their agreement that this indeed was the man among men in the room. …

We haven’t much time left to consider the sad case of Jonathan Stonagal, so if we’re going to do so before it’s too late we’d best do it now.

Poor Stoney has just never quite fit in Left Behind. Try as he might, Jenkins was never really able to integrate him into the story. Stonagal’s subplots kept turning into tangents wholly unconnected — and unconnectable — to the book’s main plot and setting.

First there was Buck’s Unnecessary Adventure in London — an uncomfortably inserted interlude in which our hero travels to an England from another world, a place where The Event seems never to have occurred. That whole chapter, a pastiche of stock scenes from spy thrillers, fit in so poorly with the rest of the book that even Jenkins seems to have noticed, hastily undoing every consequence of its events as soon as Buck returned to New York. (The conspirators want Buck dead! Oh, nevermind, now they just want him to attend a meeting.)

All we learned of Stonagal from that episode was that he was somehow connected to a plan to consolidate the world’s money into only three currencies. The plan was public knowledge — it’s not like you could change the currencies of more than a hundred nations without their knowledge or consent — yet Stonagal acted as though it were a secretive, surreptitious scheme. The authors didn’t bother to explain, but presumably the international banker (he owned “several” banks, we’re told) was pursuing some kind of insider-trading angle to profit from the currency scheme.

All of that scheming would seem to have been rendered moot days later when Carpathia, newly installed as All Powerful Global Leader of the OWG, declared by fiat that there would be only one global currency.

But of course it’s still true that Nicolae Carpathia would not have become All Powerful Global Leader if not for the assistance and maneuvering of his shadow-government sponsor Jonathan Stonagal. The details of this maneuvering are, again, pretty sketchy, as is the explanation for why Nicolae — already receiving the full assistance of Satan himself — would even need Stonagal’s help.

And that’s Stoney’s real problem. He’s the Satan figure from a different story, a different mythology. Stumbling unwelcome and unneeded into this story — where the Satan figure is actually Satan — he just can’t compete.

Jonathan Stonagal doesn’t belong here. He is, as his name inelegantly suggests, the stand-in for the Rockefellers and Rothschilds of a very different fantasy world — the conspiratorial nightmare realm of LaRouchies and John Birchers. The Rockefellers — or, rather, a nefarious, fun-house mirror version of them — play a central role in the John Birch Society mythos that Tim LaHaye enthusiastically embraced* before he later moved on to become a premillennial dispensationalist “Bible prophecy” guru.

LaHaye’s years spent as a missionary for the goofy beliefs of the John Birchers helped to prepare him for his second career as a promoter of the even goofier beliefs of PMD prophecy mania. Those two worlds share some common traits. Both believe in global conspiracies with evil, if vague, agendas. Both insist that only true believers possess the secret, gnostic keys for decoding the true meaning of history and current events. But these different conspiracies aren’t really compatible — the John Birchers and the PMD heretics decrypt the signs of the times in very different ways.

Yet despite this incompatibility, LaHaye can’t quite seem to let go of many of his younger self’s JBS notions. The continuing influence of those ideas can be seen throughout LB in the authors’ obsession with the United Nations and in their stubbornly perverse misunderstanding of that institution. And this influence can be seen in Jonathan Stonagal, a character who inhabits the faultline or seam between these two systems that LaHaye is still trying, unsuccessfully, to stitch together. Stonagal — the evil Rockefeller** stock character from the John Bircher rogues gallery — seems purposeless and adrift in Left Behind. He stumbles around the edges of this story, unable to find any legitimate reason for his presence. He seems a sad, vestigial relic.

This vague purposelessness of Stonagal’s also underscores one of the defining traits of LB, and of PMD mythology in general, something we might call conspiratorial naivete. LaHaye believes, fervently, that history is shaped by murky, behind-the-scenes forces striving to create a One World Government. Yet he’s complacently incurious about the actual institutions he suspects are part of that conspiracy, and he can’t be bothered to learn anything about how they actually operate or what their motives might be. Stonagal, we assume, is trying to amass money and unchecked power, but how and why he intends to do this doesn’t seem to interest the authors at all. The vague villainy of these conspiracies is proved by a tidy bit of circular reasoning: We know their deeds are evil because they are the deeds of evil men; we know they are evil men because they commit such evil deeds. Beyond that, the authors don’t know, or care to know, any more about such villains.

The portrayal of Jonathan Stonagal in this, his final scene further illustrates L&J’s conspiratorial naivete. For all of their apparent interest in characters like Stoney, they have no idea what might actually make someone like him tick.

Stonagal is meant to be the grand vizier, the power behind the throne — think of Cardinal Richelieu, or James Baker, or Dick Cheney. Such men, as a rule, don’t care about fame, prestige or recognition. They don’t seek titles, since the unrestrained influence they seek to exert always goes beyond the restrictions of any given title. Titles, after all, imply formal offices — with all the checks and balances, responsibilities and restrictions that come with them. That’s not the prize such characters are after.

The powers behind the throne always avoid the spotlight, the headline and the podium, not because they are modest or humble, but because such attention would interfere with their ability to wield power without concern for public opinion or public good. Puppets appear on the stage. Puppet masters do not.

And here we learn that Jonathan Stonagal is too vain, too needy, to succeed as a puppet master. He wants to be thanked, to be praised, to be loved. A real puppet master, a Richelieu or Cheney, would view Stoney’s behavior here with contempt and disdain:

Carpathia took Stonagal’s hand and began formally, “Mr. Stonagal, you have meant more to me than anyone on earth.” Stonagal looked up and smiled, locking eyes with Carpathia.

“I welcome you to the team,” Carpathia said, “and confer upon you all the rights and privileges that go with your new station.”

Stonagal flinched, clearly not interested in being considered a part of the team, to be welcomed by the very man he had maneuvered into the presidency of Romania and now the secretary-generalship of the United Nations. His smile froze, then disappeared as Carpathia continued, “May you display to me and to those in your charge the consistency and wisdom that have brought you to this position.”

Rather than thanking Carpathia, Stonagal wrenched his hand away and glared at the younger man. Carpathia continued to gaze directly at him and spoke in quieter, warmer tones, “Mr. Stonagal, you may be seated.”

“I will not!” Stonagal said.

“Sir, I have been having a bit of sport at your expense because I knew you would understand.”

Stonagal reddened, clearly chagrined that he had overreacted. “I beg your pardon, Nicolae,” Stonagal said, forcing a smile but obviously insulted at having been pushed into this shocking display.

Real puppet masters don’t allow their feelings to be hurt when they don’t receive proper recognition for their accomplishments. They’d prefer their accomplishments to go unnoticed. And they don’t have feelings.

The only thing about this “shocking display” that’s actually surprising is the accidental revelation that Jonathan Stonagal seems to be immune to Nicolae’s mind-control. No amount of warm-toned, hypnotic flattery or eye-gazing seems to work. The Antichrist is unable to bend Stonagal to his will.

That’s interesting. We were told that Buck Williams alone was shielded from Nicolae’s powers due to his “commitment to Christ” and to the protective prayers of his friends in the Tribulation Force. I doubt that we’re meant to assume that Stoney has also become a born-again RTC, or that Bruce and the Steeles are desperately praying for him too. And even with all that divine counter-magic, Buck still wasn’t able to resist as firmly as Stonagal did — wrenching his hand away and saying “I will not!”

So what accounts for this apparent immunity to Nicolae’s preternatural charisma? I have a theory. Like many of my theories that attempt to explain the unexplainable in LB, this one is unsupported, and probably contradicted, by the book itself, but I think it’s interesting.

For about 30 pages in the previous couple of chapters, Jenkins tried to inject a bit of suspense by raising the possibility that Stonagal, rather than Carpathia, was the real Antichrist. What if that were actually true? Or, rather, what if they both were?

What if, years ago, a young Jonathan Stonagal agreed to a deal with the devil. He agreed to dedicate his life to the service of his infernal master, paving the way to One World Government and one counterfeit world religion. In exchange for this faithful service, he would one day rule the world as Satan’s anointed, warring against Heaven itself as the Antichrist.

Here, after decades of careful but ruthless toil, the final pieces of his grand scheme are at last moving into place. The figurehead he personally selected and groomed has been installed as the man through whom he, Jonathan Stonagal, will rule the world. His triumph, finally, is at hand.

And then, just as he is about to receive his reward, Old Scratch points out the fine print in their contract. These things always have fine print, even if all it says, way down at the bottom in microscopic, blood-red ink, is that you’d be a fool to trust the Devil to keep a bargain. Other deals and other promises have been made, Stonagal learns, too late, but only one will be kept. He did all the work, but the figurehead will reap the reward.

That scenario would have made Stonagal a more interesting, more tragic villain. It would also have added an interesting aspect to Nicolae Carpathia’s character — haunting him with the kernel of doubt that belongs to every triumphant adulterous lover.

But as I said, this theoretical scenario isn’t really supported by the book itself. The authors don’t really know or care to know why Stonagal has worked so hard for so many years to set the stage for Nicolae’s global dominion. His elimination in the pages that follow isn’t presented as the inevitable tragic fate of a diabolically ambitious villain. It is, rather, an awkward and belated attempt to correct a wrong turn in the story, to purge an unnecessary character who wandered in, accidentally, from a different conspiratorial fantasy and never really belonged in this story in the first place.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

* For much more on Tim LaHaye’s roots in the John Birch Society, see Michael Standaert’s insightful Skipping Toward Armageddon.

** LaHaye may also be clinging to some 50-year-old worries about the ecumenical movement. The Rockefellers were generous patrons of the once-influential National Council of Churches, helping to fund, among other things, the NCC’s offices at 475 Riverside (a.k.a. the “God Box”). The council was once feared by fundamentalists as a source of corrupting liberal theology. Fundamentalists also criticized its emphasis on interdenominational cooperation as a form of syncretism — a stepping stone to the One World Religion that LaHaye is certain looms in the future of our doomed planet. The Fosdickian bomfoggery (“brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God”) once enthusiastically promoted by John D. Rockefeller is now as dead as J.D. himself, but LaHaye seems to cling to this bugbear from his youth the way other men his age still cling to the hairstyles and fashions of the postwar years.

Churches List Themselves as Unsafe for Children

November 13, 2017 By Fred Clark

If you are a Christian parent in Alabama looking for a place to send your children to Sunday school, VBS, Awana, youth group, Pioneer Girls, or Christian Service Brigade, do not send them to any of the following churches. All of these have been designated unsafe for minors.

danger

NOTE: This is a voluntary designation from these churches themselves, not from any outside group or agency.

The pastors of these churches chose, on their own, to come forward and to announce publicly that their communities are unwilling and unable to protect children, and that their churches will, in fact, eagerly defend adults who prey on them.

Parents should be advised: If this is what these churches say is true about themselves, you should probably believe them.

Adams Street Church of Christ, Enterprise, Alabama
Christ Church, Odenville, Alabama
Christian Renewal and Development Ministries, Eufaula, Alabama
Church of the Living God, Moulton, Alabama
Covenant Christian, Gadsden, Alabama
Dominion Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama
Edgewood Church, Anniston, Alabama
Fairfax First Christian Church, Valley, Alabama
Faith Worship Center, Gadsden, Alabama
Fannin Road Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama
First Assembly of God, Greenville Alabama
Freedom Church, Gadsden, Alabama
~~Fresh Anointing House of Worship, Montgomery, Alabama~~
Grace Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama
Grace Way Fellowship, Evergreen Alabama
~~Heritage Baptist Church, Opelika, Alabama~~
Kimberly Church of God, Kimberly, Alabama
Lakeview Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama
Marvyn Parkway Baptist Church, Opelika, Alabama
Open Door Baptist Church, Enterprise, Alabama
~~Pine Air Baptist Church, Grand Bay Alabama~~
Pleasant Ridge Baptist Church, Anniston, Alabama
Summit Holiness Church, Alabama
Trinity Free Presbyterian, Trinity, Alabama
Victory Baptist Church, Millbrook, Alabama
Victory Christian Fellowship Church, Florence, Alabama
Webster’s Chapel, Gadsden, Alabama
Young’s Chapel, Piedmont, Alabama

NOTE: This post has been updated to recognize that some of these churches did not consent to endorse Roy Moore after allegations he molested underage children. See here for details.

LBCF, No. 155: ‘Super powers’

October 13, 2017 By Fred Clark

Originally posted March 7, 2008.

Read this entire series, for free, via the convenient Left Behind Index. This post is also part of the ebook collection The Anti-Christ Handbook: Volume 1, available on Amazon for just $2.99. Most of Puerto Rico lacks electricity and drinking water. Volume 2 of The Anti-Christ Handbook, completing all the posts on the first Left Behind book, is also now available.

Left Behind, pp. 415-417

Nicolae Carpathia has super powers.

Usually, I don’t have a problem with stories involving super-powered characters. I’ve been reading and enjoying such stories my whole life. Whether it’s Peter Pevensie or Peter Parker, Harry Potter or Buffy Summers, I’m game. Just provide some kind of explanation (radioactive spider, the Chosen one, cosmic rays, the effects of our yellow sun on the last son of Krypton) and set out some basic rules and limitations so that the power, and thus the story, isn’t completely arbitrary and I will gladly come along for the ride.

The other thing I’ll need to consent to such stories is a bit harder to describe. The storyteller needs to provide some indication, some clue, that this is that kind of story. This can be some basic genre shorthand or some other kind of signal, but it has to come fairly early on so that I don’t feel betrayed when suddenly one of the characters begins doing things that no ordinary human can do. There’s probably a name for this or some better way of describing it, and for that I’ll defer to those more immersed in the theory and the study of such stories, but what I’m getting at is that it’s no fair to have Miss Marples suddenly explain in Chapter XXXII that she was able to solve the mystery by using her X-ray vision. That sort of thing violates a reader’s trust. Pull a stunt like that and your super-powered character is in-credible rather than incredible.

Our question here is whether Nicolae Carpathia’s sudden manifestation of super powers presents this sort of betrayal. We’ve only just begun to see the full extent of his mind-control mojo at work. In the remaining pages of this volume, Bruce Barnes will babble a bit of pseudo-scriptural phlebotinum to provide a half-hearted explanation for Nicolae’s powers, and then those powers will be displayed unambiguously. Is that fair?

On the one hand, this seems like the worst sort of ninth-inning rule change. We’ve been told — on the back cover and in the story itself — that Left Behind is supposed to be a ripped-from-the-headlines style thriller set not just in a world like our own, but in the very world we live in. Not the world we live in plus X (where X is magic, vampires, superheroes, etc.), but simply a fictional version of the world we live in. Changing the name of Newsweek to Global Weekly doesn’t violate the terms of that agreement, but changing the laws of physics does.

Set aside for the moment the authors’ woeful inability to portray this or any other world accurately or believably. That’s not the issue here. The issue here is that they’ve told us all along that this story was set in a world in which we know there’s no such thing as super powers or mind-control mojo, and then suddenly — when they’ve plotted themselves into a corner and there’s no other way to escape — we meet a super-powered character who is able to work his mind-control mojo and thereby to prevent their nonsensical plot from grinding to a halt. That sure seems like cheating to me.

But on the other hand we’ve also been told all along that this will be an explicitly supernatural story. From that perspective, complaining about the sudden appearance of a character’s supernatural powers in Left Behind would be a bit like complaining about the existence of paranormal phenomenon on The X-Files. Yet Nicolae’s super powers still seem to be in a different category from the book’s other supernatural events. There’s a big difference between making God a character and allowing God to act with divine powers and the idea that the president of Romania can also do miraculous, godlike things. A monster of the week with telepathic abilities would be part of the bargain for viewers of The X-Files. If Mulder and Scully had suddenly begun using telepathy, that would have violated the bargain.¹

The authors would argue, I think, that giving Carpathia miraculous abilities is fair game because he is the Anti-Christ. Since Christ was able to perform miracles, his evil twin should have the same abilities. That would be easier to swallow if Carpathia’s Antichrist powers more closely paralleled the sorts of miraculous deeds attributed to Jesus Christ.

In the Gospels, Jesus is tempted by Satan in the wilderness to perform miracles in order to amass power. The Antichrist, one would expect, would have succumbed to those same temptations.² We should be seeing the Antichrist performing antimiracles — perversions and inversions of the miraculous signs and wonders told of in the Gospels.

Unlike John of Patmos or the author of John’s epistles (the only place the word “antichrist³” is used in the Bible), LaHaye and Jenkins don’t really seem to regard the sense in which the Antichrist is Christ’s opposite. That opposition is hard to miss in the book of Revelation — beast vs. lamb, power vs. love is one of the book’s central themes — but L&J seem to have missed it both there and in their representation of it here. Their Antichrist is an anti-christ, an anti-messiah, in the sense that he is a false liberator who brings slavery. But where Carpathia chooses to pursue power, those who oppose him do the same. L&J’s version of the evil beast will be defeated, ultimately, not by the lamb, but by the good beast. In Left Behind, good triumphs over evil not because it is intrinsically different, but because it is simply more powerful. God has a bigger gun than the devil.⁴

DJesus

But however the authors mean to account for it, the bottom line remains this: Nicolae Carpathia has super powers. Their story — meant to present what they believe are real events that will really happen sometime soon — has a character with super powers in it. Make of that what you will.

It’s not clear whether Nicolae has been using those super powers in the preceding scenes. It’s impossible to believe that the ambassadors of every nation on earth would have been willing, or thought themselves able, to abandon their respective nations’ sovereignty and capacity for self-defense just because they were asked politely to do so by a handsome young polyglot, so it sure seems like Carpathia’s mind-control powers must have been at work at the United Nations.

Then again it also seems impossible that people the world over would be “in a mood to party” upon hearing that their nations, languages, religions and currencies were about to be replaced with new, one-size-fits-all global versions. So is Nicolae somehow projecting his mojo over the airwaves, enchanting the globe via satellite TV? If so, why isn’t Buck affected? He hasn’t yet performed the counter-spell invoking the protection of the Holy Spirit, yet he alone doesn’t seem thrilled with Carpathia’s announcement of global dictatorship.

It’s been five pages since the last phone call, so the phone rings and Buck seems guarded and sullen as he discusses the announcement with his old buddy Steve Plank.

“Pretty exciting, isn’t it?”

“Mind-boggling.”

“Listen, Carpathia wants you here Monday morning.”

“What for?”

“He likes you, man. Don’t knock it.”

It may just be my imagination, but Steve seems to be sounding a bit more hip-cat since he went to work for the Antichrist. In the next page, he will use the word “hustle” as a verb.

Steve explains that Carpathia is planning a meeting with “his top people and the 10 delegates to the permanent Security Council.” It seems from the way they discuss this that those delegates will be selected by Nicolae, rather than appointed by their respective nations. Whether this is how L&J imagine the U.N. works now or if this is meant to be understood as one of Carpathia’s “reforms” isn’t clear, just as it isn’t clear why a Security Council is even necessary now that all the member nations have been disarmed and subsumed into the OWG.

They briefly discuss the role of Jonathan Stonagal and whatisname Todd-Cothran, though Jenkins seems to have lost all interest in trying to make any sense out of their conspiratorial conspiracy of conspirators. He seems relieved to have rendered them redundant and no longer seems to care whether or not they still seem menacing and mysterious. Steve half-heartedly tries to drum up a bit of the old menace by telling Buck that “nobody tells Stonagal” what to do.

“Not even Carpathia?” Buck asks.

That should be, for him, a rather pointed question. As Steve is well aware, Stonagal and Todd-Sidekick tried to kill Buck with a car bomb just a few chapters ago. The only reason he’s not still running for his life is because Carpathia apparently intervened on his behalf, convincing Stonagal to let Buck live in exchange for Buck’s promise never to report on their murky dark doings. So when Steve answers, “Especially not Carpathia. He knows who made him,” you’d think a reasonable response on Buck’s part would be to go back into hiding. Instead, he agrees to go to the meeting and to sit in a room with the two men who killed his friends Dirk and Alan and very nearly killed him as well.

For what it’s worth, Steve reassures Buck that Carpathia, although unable to control Stonagal, is:

“… honest and sincere, Buck. Nicolae will not do anything illegal or underhanded or even too political. He’s pure, man. Pure as the driven snow.”

Sadly, Buck will soon learn what readers figured out hundreds of pages ago — that Carpathia is neither honest nor sincere. That’s a shame. He’d be much more interesting if he were. Then at least we might be able to grasp some motive behind his grasping for power. There could be a compelling story in the tragedy of an honest and sincere man who sought unlimited power in the hopes of achieving unlimited good, of fixing the world through brute force. But that would have made Carpathia the good beast and, as we’ve already seen, the part of the good beast is already taken here in Left Behind. In the authors’ view, fixing the world through brute force is God’s job. (Makes one wonder what they think all that business with the cross was about.)

Steve tells Buck that he will be the only reporter present at this meeting of the new global cabal:

“What’s the catch?”

“No catch. He didn’t ask for a thing, not even favorable coverage. …”

Because, you know, for Steve and Buck, the idea of exchanging access for favorable coverage is no big deal.

“… not even favorable coverage. He knows you have to be objective and fair. The media will get the whole scoop at the press conference afterward.”

“Obviously I can’t pass this up,” Buck said, aware his voice sounded flat.

Buck isn’t the only one who seems aware that this all sounds flat and unenthusiastic. Jenkins will reprise this entire conversation in the next chapter, and he seems to put a bit more effort into it the second time around.

“What’s the matter, Buck? This is history! This is the world the way we’ve always wanted it and hoped it would be.”

“I hope you’re right.”

Steve means it. One, unlimited, unaccountable and all-powerful global government enforcing one world language and one world religion really is “the world the way [he’s] always wanted it to be” because Steve is an Imaginary Liberal. Imaginary Liberals are all closet fascists, don’t you know. If you want to know how they really want and hope the world to be just take the opposite of everything they say and conjure up the most illiberal nightmare conceivable — a world without civil liberties or democracy or freedom of conscience. The fact that liberals all speak and act against such a nightmare scenario is simply evidence of their duplicity.

Imaginary Liberals are thus irredeemable, which is why Buck here has to be shown as less than enthusiastic about the IL dream come true. Buck is destined to be redeemed, so he has to be shown to be a not-really liberal member of the liberal media just as he had to be shown to be a virgin bachelor playboy.

Steve says there’s one final favor Carpathia has to ask of Buck:

“He wants to see that stewardess friend of yours again.”

“Steve, no one calls them stews anymore. They’re flight attendants.”

“Whatever. Bring her with you if you can.”

“Why doesn’t he ask her himself? What am I now, a pimp?”

“Stews?“

Buck objects to being viewed as a pimp. He may also object to Hattie being viewed as a prostitute, although he never says so. His unprecedented siding with Hattie here reflects the authors’ notion of chivalry, not some kind of feminism. If the little ladies want to be called “flight attendants,” then we should humor them.

“C’mon, Buck. It’s not like that. Lonely guy in a position like this? He can’t be out hustling up dates. …”

“I’ll ask her,” he said. “No promises.”

“Don’t let me down, buddy.”

Normally, I’d agree that world leaders “can’t be out hustling up dates,” but there’s nothing normal about Carpathia’s position. It’s not like he has to worry about his reputation or about getting re-elected. He’s scandal-proof, untouchable. Plus everyone who would have had some moral objection to his sexual escapades disintegrated last week. If he wanted to Nicolae could Casanova his way through the Manhattan phone book (alphabetically, of course), sweet-talking women in nine languages (eight of which are soon to be forbidden). If the People magazine thing and his Redford-ish looks didn’t work for him, he could just use his super powers to compel them (because, remember, he’s evil).

But even though he could have any woman in the world, the only one he wants is Hattie. Just as the only reporter he wants present at his big meeting is Buck and, later in the series, the only pilot he wants to hire is, yep, Rayford Steele. There are still 4 billion people on earth, but Carpathia is working closely with the authors to ensure that only a handful of them are ever involved in this story.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

¹ This may actually have happened in Season 9, but by that point I’d gotten almost as confused and off-track as the writers.

² I suppose that Carpathia’s enlisting of Rosenzweig’s miracle formula franchise is vaguely like turning stones to bread, but he’s just piggybacking on somebody else’s miracle there and there’s little to indicate that this dubious parallel is intended by the authors.

³ Antichrists, actually, plural. Which is more than a bit troublesome for the PMD mythology.

⁴ Or put it this way, in LB, Frodo uses the ring to destroy Sauron. That doesn’t make for the same story with a different ending, that makes for an entirely different story.

White evangelicalism, 1975: Before the change (4)

September 21, 2017 By Fred Clark

We’re continuing in Norman Geisler’s 1975 discussion of “When Abortion Is Justified.” Geisler, a conservative white evangelical, first wrote this in 1971. The book was so well-received by other conservative white evangelicals that it had a third printing in 1975.

Nothing at all occurred between those two dates to cause Geisler or any of his fellow conservative evangelicals to regard any of this differently. If there were, for example, any notable Supreme Court decisions involving any of this, they were not seen as significant enough to be mentioned or to require this section to be revised.

The book was updated with a then-futuristic, oh-so 1975 cover, but not with any response to Roe v. Wade.

Geisled5

This is from pages 222-223 of the 1975 printing:

3. Abortion in Conception Without Consent — Should a mother be forced to give birth to a child conceived by rape? Is there a moral obligation to generate a child without consent? This raises the whole question of the moral duty of motherhood. Can one be forced to be a mother against her will? Is her womb a mere tool for the tyranny of outside forces of life? This is a delicate question but it seems to involve a negative answer. 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.

But what about the right of the child to be born despite the evil way in which it was conceived? In this case 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. A potentially human person is not granted a birthright by violation of a fully human person unless her consent is subsequently given.