First responders and guns (cont’d.)

Last updated on: July 13, 2016 at 7:59 pm By Fred Clark

In the previous post, we noted that in their role as “first responders” to emergencies unrelated to law enforcement, the guns that police officers carry are neither necessary nor helpful. The presence of those guns — the introduction of those guns — increases the danger present, rather than reducing or helping to resolve it safely.

When people with guns are summoned in an emergency, they sometimes respond as people with guns — whether or not guns are capable of addressing the emergency in question. This makes things worse.

This is particularly — and often tragically — the case when police are called on to be the “first responders” in an emergency involving someone suffering from mental illness, emotional distress, or psychosis. Too often, those stories end like this awful encounter a few months ago, “Parents called 911 to help suicidal daughter — and ‘police ended up putting a bullet in her.’”

Melissa Boarts is one of at least 262 people who have been fatally shot by police so far in 2016 [as of April 6], according to a Washington Post database. At least 41 of those killed by police were carrying a knife or other blade, and about a quarter of all police shooting victims were mentally ill or experiencing an emotional crisis.

People with untreated mental illness are 16 times as likely to be killed during a police encounter as other civilians approached or stopped by law enforcement, according to a study from the Treatment Advocacy Center.

… Since January 2015, the Post has tracked more than 1,100 fatal shootings by on-duty police officers, with one in four involving someone who was either in the midst of a mental health crisis or was explicitly suicidal. A Post analysis has found that in half of those cases, the officers involved were not properly trained to deal with the mentally ill — and in many cases, officers responded with tactics that quickly made a volatile situation even more dangerous.

When people are suicidal, we send “first responders” with guns. When a mental health crisis or emotional crisis becomes an emergency, our standard operating procedure is to add guns to the equation. This is a terrible idea with all too predictable results.

Stories like the one above are frighteningly common (warning: autoplay video at link), and law enforcement officials themselves are among the loudest of those calling for a change in this “first response” approach:

“If you talk to most police officers, the most volatile situations are the ones with mental illness,” said Tom Dart, sheriff of Cook County, Ill., who has worked to raise awareness about the large number of people with mental illness in jails and prisons and to improve their treatment. …

… Some police departments have formed crisis intervention teams, whose members have special training in dealing with people with mental illness. Training focuses on ways to calm people in the midst of a breakdown, rather than using force.

In Miami-Dade County, about 4,600 officers have been trained in crisis intervention, said Steven Leifman, an associate administrative judge in Florida’s Miami-Dade County Court. Before the program began, police were involved in the shooting of someone with mental illness about once a month. In the five years since the training began, there have been only four or five such shootings, he said.

Once a month. In a single county.

No one has ever called the police saying, “My relative is having a mental health crisis, I want you to come here and shoot them dead.” Anyone making such a call might themselves be arrested. Police would likely respond to such a request by — correctly — insisting that it’s not their job to come to your home to shoot and kill your relative who’s having a mental health crisis. And yet many people have made the opposite of that phone call, telling police “My relative is having a mental health crisis, but I don’t want you to come here and shoot them dead” — only to have that happen anyway, despite their pleas.

That can leave families of people with serious mental illness with nowhere to turn.

“I am terrified to call the police when it involves my son,” said Candie Dalton, of Englewood, Colo., whose 20-year-old son has schizophrenia.

Dalton said her son’s interactions with police have left him terrified of law enforcement. Once, he was the victim of a home invasion robbery. When he was unable to articulate what had happened, police accused him of selling his possessions for drug money. Officers then arrested him because of an unpaid speeding ticket.

On another occasion, Dalton called police because her son threatened her with a kitchen knife. Police responded with overwhelming force.

“There were multiple cops aiming their guns at my son until he got on the ground,” Dalton said. “One of the officers later told me that my son was close to having a hole in him so big they could drive a Mack truck through it.”

According to that article, the crisis intervention training in Miami-Dade is working, but such efforts and results are the exception, not the rule. Barring such training, when police are summoned to deal with a mental health crisis, they are summoned as first responders with guns. They are the people with guns who arrive as people with guns. And, unsurprisingly, those guns often get used.

“The traditional police response to people with mental illness has often been ineffective,” a Department of Justice guide says, “and sometimes tragic.”

Intensive training for police may help them to better serve as first responders in emergencies arising from mental health or emotional crises. If we’re going to continue to rely on police as the first responders in such situations, then we need to establish — and fund — far better and more comprehensive training for that response.

And part of that training, I’d argue, should be to leave the damn gun in the car.

The larger problem with police responses to crises of mental health or emotional distress is that it shouldn’t be their job. We’re asking police to do something that doesn’t have anything to do with their role as law enforcement professionals.

This is one of many, many ways in which we’re asking the police to be something other than, and far more than, police.

This is a major theme in that USAToday article linked above:

Many law enforcement groups are concerned about the demands placed upon them.

“Police are being forced to be mental health counselors without training,” said Jim Pasco, executive director of the national Fraternal Order of Police, the largest police organization in the country. “It underscores a real tragedy: the total collapse of the mental health system in the United States. People who should be wards of the hospital are wards of the street.”

When one system collapses, another system is forced to bear the weight — putting an undue burden and undue strain on that other system.

What we’re talking about here, then, is a failure of subsidiarity.

It’s not hypocrisy, it’s a contemptuous distrust

Last updated on: February 17, 2015 at 11:41 am By Fred Clark

I mentioned this yesterday as a one-liner, but it’s worth exploring a bit more.

“The choice to not have children is selfish,” Pope Francis said last week, without any apparent recognition of the irony. After all, Pope Francis himself is someone who has made “the choice not to have children,” and yet he does not seem to regard his own making this choice as selfish.

That might seem like hypocrisy — Francis is stating a rule that he refuses to apply to himself. But I don’t think he is being hypocritical — I think he’s doing something far worse than that. This isn’t hypocrisy from the childless pope — it’s a contemptuous distrust of others.

Francis’ own choice “to not have children” is a choice he sees as legitimate, sacred and virtuous. He does not believe that he is behaving selfishly by making that choice. Thus he clearly cannot believe his own categorical statement. He doesn’t really believe that “the choice to not have children” is always selfish. What he means, rather, is that such a choice may be selfish.

And that’s true! It is certainly possible to make “the choice to not have children” for selfish reasons. Such a choice may, in some cases, be a form of inhospitality. It may be, in some cases, motivated by a reluctance to share one’s time, life, home, money and other resources. It may be, in some cases, that people are making this choice for ignoble reasons.

But it is also certainly possible to make “the choice to not have children” for selfless reasons. That same choice can also be a form of hospitality. It can be motivated by a desire to share one’s time, life, home, money, etc., more widely. It may be a choice that people make for noble, praiseworthy reasons. That’s certainly what Pope Francis seems to think of his own choice not to have children — and of the same choice as made by every cardinal, bishop, priest, brother and sister in his church’s celibate clergy.

So here we have a choice that — according to the pope himself — can be made for either good or bad reasons. As a spiritual leader, then, the pope has a choice to make about this choice. One possibility would be for him to teach and encourage his followers to make good choices for good reasons. Another possibility would be for him to preclude the possibility of his followers making bad choices by arrogating to himself the right to make this choice on behalf of everyone else.

And he chose the second one.

That’s appalling and immoral of him. It shows a palpable disdain for the moral competence of his followers. Francis does not trust them. He does not believe they can be trusted. He does not believe they are capable of being trusted. He does not believe they are capable of the kind of responsible choices that he believes he is capable of making. And so he presumes that he is better equipped than they are to make this choice for themselves.

That is staggeringly arrogant. The choice to not have children, or the choice to have children, is an incredibly personal, intimate choice. No one else could possibly be as well equipped or as well informed about that choice as the individuals directly affected are. Those closest to this choice are most capable and most competent of choosing well. To usurp their responsibility and replace it with a bishop’s one-size-fits-all decree seems to make a mockery of the Catholic principle of subsidiarity. It is unjust.

“The choice not to have children,” the pope imagines, is an acceptable choice when he makes it, because he thinks he is capable of choosing correctly. But he does not believe that others are as capable as he is, so he will not permit others the freedom and the responsibility he permits himself.

Again, simple hypocrisy or duplicity would be preferable to this. But he’s not being hypocritical or duplicitous. He’s not saying this is a rule that applies to everyone and then turning around and breaking that rule himself. He is, rather, saying that there are two kinds of people — those like himself who are capable of making moral choices, and the larger group of little people who he says are not capable of making moral choices.

That’s not pastoral concern, that’s contempt. And it’s contemptible.

And just when I’d grown colder

Last updated on: September 30, 2014 at 4:24 pm By Fred Clark

• “… then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

• “It also raises the question of how daft an employee and/or manager must be to post that sign without realizing what it was advertising. Unless of course this was a deliberate bird-flip to Sainsbury’s management by a disgruntled worker. In which case, well done.”

• The late Paul Crouch was a pioneer in televangelism and a proponent of the perverse “prosperity gospel,” so I always suspected he was a grifter with several walk-in closets full of skeletons, contempt for his audience, and a team of fixers and attorneys who kept his secrets secret. But I still don’t know what to make of the allegations about Crouch in his recently unearthed FBI file. I know Crouch was a crook who couldn’t be trusted, but I also know that J. Edgar Hoover’s agency has a history of compiling dubious dossiers on public figures.

That Paul Crouch was laundering money seems very plausible. But gun-running seems out of character — too risky and labor-intensive for such a self-indulgent con man.

But if I’m not sure that I can believe all the allegations in Crouch’s FBI file, I am sure that I would love the screenplay and the movie based on everything in that FBI file being true. Harry Dean Stanton would’ve been perfect as Paul Crouch 30 years ago, but who would we cast today? Casting suggestions for both Paul and Jan Crouch, please, in comments below.

• Brian Pellot: “If Christians are uncomfortable with devout or flippant non-Christian faiths seeping into the public square, they’d be wise to remember that many people are uncomfortable when Jesus, God and the Bible appear in government-sponsored spaces. They’d also be wise to remember the Establishment Clause.”

Related: If Christian football players can Tebow, then so can Muslim football players. Especially after they pick off Tom Brady.

• “8 Thoughts on Receiving Charity in the Form of a Convertible” — wisdom, insight, honesty, self-scrutiny and gratitude from Jennifer Ellison.

• Congratulations to Rob Tisinai!

• Dana Bolger on the promise, and the limitations, of the “It’s On Us” campaign against domestic violence. Bolger is talking about the differentiated, overlapping, mutual responsibilities we all have in our individually and corporately varied contexts, roles and relationships. This is what subsidiarity looks like.

7 @ 9: Plagiarizing biblically

Last updated on: January 12, 2014 at 4:47 pm By Fred Clark

1. It takes a village, says Sarah Bessey: “There isn’t any need for guilt because we rely on our village as parents, because we are part of someone else’s village. This is the way we were created: to need one another, for family, for one another. It’s not something new, folks: this is called community.”

We often talk about subsidiarity in the context of government. It’s just as vital for all the other actors involved — including families. Absentee “small” government that turns its back on the village makes parenting a lot harder than it should be.

“White men’s anger is ‘real’ — that is, it is experienced deeply and sincerely. But it is not ‘true’ — that is, it doesn’t provide an accurate analysis of their situation.”

2. If you like the con artist you have instead of an insurance company, they won’t be allowed to keep you.

3. The CFPB is still kicking ass: “The Justice Dept. and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced the largest auto loan discrimination settlement in U.S. history with the news that Ally Bank has agreed to pay $98 million, including $80 million in refunds to settle allegations that it has been charging higher interest rates to minority borrowers of car loans.”

4. “Old Hoss Radbourn” evaluates all of ESPN’s Top 100 baseball players of all time.

5. The ridiculous and shamefully self-serving use of the adjective “biblical” continues as a hallmark of white evangelicalism: “Because of the biblical manner in which Pastor Driscoll has handled this situation, Tyndale strongly stands behind him and looks forward to publishing many additional books with him.”

6. “It simply never occurred to the Catholic Church to oppose health care plans that offer contraceptive coverage until opposing the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act became a priority for the Republican Party. In fact, until the contraceptive requirement became an issue in the 2012 campaign, numerous Catholic organizations and universities offered health plans that covered contraception.”

7. Carol Howard Merritt: “Sex, Pills and the Image of God”

Christians want to fight for a corporation’s right to practice its faith by refusing to provide insurance coverage for contraception. The voices of clergy tell us that birth control is tearing at the moral fabric of our society and many point to contraception as the reason for decline of Christianity.

When we fight against contraception, we tell a generation of women that Christians don’t care about their education, productivity, or empowerment. We highlight the brooding sense that Christians don’t want women to be intelligent, working beings, but we want a woman’s worth to be solely based on her sexuality.

Reformed seminaries ought to understand Reformed political theology

Last updated on: November 13, 2013 at 2:01 pm By Fred Clark

The good folks over at Internet Monk are reposting Michael Bird’s Aussie evangelical response to the reflexive antipathy white evangelicals in America show toward universal health care.

We discussed that here last week in a post called “American evangelicalism is defined by political tribalism.” Bird and British theologian N.T. Wright are both perplexed by how their fellow followers of Jesus arrive at — or, really, start from — a position opposed to universal health care. These guys would both meet any theological or doctrinal definition of “evangelical,” but they’re living, reading and writing from outside of the American cultural context. Since they don’t share the political tribalism that shapes and defines white evangelical Protestantism in the U.S., they’re startled and bewildered by its cruel callousness.

For a more polite rendition of that tribal, culturally conformed callousness, see Michael J. Kruger’s “Obamacare, N.T. Wright, and the Via Media.” Part of Kruger’s post is a critique of Wright’s instinctive seeking of the “middle ground” — always seeming to seek some place to stand betwixt the liberals and conservatives. Fair enough — that’s often true of Wright, but as Bird notes, Wright is Anglican, and “ever since the Elizabethan Act of Uniformity (1558), via media is how we Anglicans roll.” Criticizing an Anglican for a via media approach is like criticizing a Catholic for being hierarchical — it’s true, but, well, duh.

The really surprising thing about Kruger’s post is that Kruger is a Reformed theologian. He teaches, and serves as president, at the Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte. Yet Kruger seems wholly unfamiliar with, and wholly ignorant of, Reformed political theology.

That’s more shocking than the credulous falsehoods Kruger swallows and regurgitates as his talking points against universal health care:

Nationalized healthcare is fundamentally on the left side of the political landscape and constitutes a clear move towards a more socialist mode of governance. It is a monumental government power-grab of almost 20 percent of the U.S. economy.

Keep yer gubmint outta Michael Kruger’s Medicare!

The political tribalism shaping the white evangelicalism of folks like Kruger tends to leave them factually challenged, so it’s not surprising that Kruger doesn’t understand what he’s talking about. He imagines some sort of pristine free market in health insurance prior to Obamacare, apparently never having glimpsed the vast kludgeocratic mess of state and federal programs, subsidies, credits and regulations that this new, improved kludgeocratic mess is replacing. (That’s the more charitable interpretation. It seems kinder to Kruger to assume he didn’t know the U.S. was providing a $250 billion-a-year tax subsidy for employer health coverage, rather than to assume that Kruger only opposes subsidies for the working poor but not for corporations.)

Kruger’s ignorance of the existence of Europe’s Christian democratic parties and their long championing of universal health care — a fight often influenced by Reformed and Catholic political theology — is also shocking for the head of a Reformed seminary:

Wright tries to temper this reality by pointing out that “every other developed country” has nationalized healthcare, implying that American needs to get with the program. But, the fact that America stands alone does not invalidate its approach. Historically speaking, America has always been distinctive from the rest of the globe in precisely this area, namely its commitment towards economic freedom for its citizens, with limited government intervention. One might make the opposite of Wright’s point, namely that what makes America great is its willingness to not join the European socialist program.

“Historically speaking,” Kruger doesn’t know his hat from his hindquarters. If he thinks the many Reformed Christian parties of Europe are part of a “socialist program,” I’d hate to think what he’d make of Calvin’s Geneva.

Michael Kruger does not care for the European socialist schemes of European socialists like Margaret Thatcher, who was European. And therefore socialist.

Let’s be generous, though. Kruger is clearly way out of his depth. He’s a New Testament scholar, and I’m sure he know more about the New Testament than, say, Ezra Klein. Sure Kruger is embarrassingly wrong about the details, reality and history of health care in America and in Europe, and, yes, it would be prudent for him not to sound off on subjects he’s so proudly ignorant about, but if the folks at the Kaiser Foundation ever put out a report on the Synoptic Problem, I bet it would come off just as ignorant and amateurish as Kruger’s attempt to pontificate in their area of expertise.

Still, though, Reformed political theology is not a secret. It’s kind of a big deal. I studied it at a Baptist seminary under a Mennonite professor. It’s one of the few areas where I can find a genuine holy envy of my Calvinist brothers and sisters. I find Calvinist atonement talk monstrous, I think TULIP is an incoherent mess, and I think they’ve barely begun to grasp the way that E.P. Sanders and the new perspective on Paul swept away the ground on which Luther and Calvin built much of their theology, leaving the whole thing suspended, like Wile E. Coyote, over open air above a precipice. (I suspect that last point, by the way, is what motivates much of Kruger’s antipathy toward Wright.) But yet I find Reformed political theology — particularly the whole Kuyperian school ~~of European socialists~~ — to be elegant, constructive and immensely helpful.

I appreciate that political theology is the unwanted stepchild in seminaries. You can’t get a seminary degree without studying, say, Pauline christology, but you can easily graduate without ever having even heard of subsidiarity or sphere sovereignty. Fair enough. Seminaries are training pastors, not prophets. But those pastors are serving congregations made up of citizens and neighbors who have to live as citizens and neighbors. They need more than just sound exegesis, and the whole of theology and Christian political/ethical teaching provides something they need. Seminaries should be teaching political theology too.

Or, at the very least, seminaries ought to be run by people who acknowledge its existence — people who aren’t so woefully ignorant of political theology that they could write something like this:

But third, and most problematic, Wright defends nationalized healthcare on the grounds that “Christians taught that we should care for the poor and disadvantaged.” While I certainly agree this is a Christian value, how does that fact lead one to conclude that the government should be the body doing it? This simply does not follow. Historically, it was Christians caring for the poor and disadvantaged and not the government!

Sweet holy Dooyeweerd that’s some shameful nonsense.

I’ve come to expect this kind of immature ignorance from nondenominational white evangelicals who are wholly cut off from the rich traditions of Christian political thought, but to see the president of a Reformed seminary parroting this idea of social responsibility as a zero-sum competition is really disheartening.

In Christian political teaching social responsibility is always differentiated, mutual and complementary. It is never exclusive, binary or competitive. In Reformed theology, social responsibility is always differentiated, mutual and complementary. It is never exclusive, binary or competitive.

When you see a Reformed theologian suggesting otherwise, you know without checking that this person is an American and that what they’re saying is not the product of Reformed or Christian teaching, but merely the latest talking points of the political allegiance that defines their tribal identity.

Monday salmagundi

Last updated on: April 29, 2013 at 6:46 am By Fred Clark

• Wikipedia says that with 424 members, the New Hampshire General Court is “the largest state legislature in the United States and the fourth-largest English-speaking legislative body in the world.” I think it’s too big — and the evidence continues to pile up that it’s just way too large to maintain a quorum of the competent.

• A delirious fever-dream of a frightening alternate reality. Otherwise known as the past 16 months of National Rifle Association magazine covers.

The remarkable thing is the perpetual warning of imminent catastrophe: “If X happens, then all is lost,” the headlines warn. Then X happens, after which the next month’s issue says, “If Y happens, then all is lost.”

These stories can only appeal to people who are: A) very, very easily frightened; and B) unable to recall last month.

• Poor people must prove that they are innocent of the vices of the powerful:

Georgia state House Rep. Chuck Sims (R-Amrbose) was arrested last week and charged with Driving Under the Influence, his second such arrest in the last three years.

… Sims was arrested for DUI in 2010 by Atlanta police. He is among the state lawmakers who voted in favor of House Bill 861, which mandated drug testing for all Georgians seeking public assistance funding.

• Rush Limbaugh does not like the Christian principle of subsidiarity: “This is Marx, Mengele, communist manifesto, the nuclear family has always been under attack by communists, leftists.”

• Seriously, if the New Hampshire General Court were smaller, maybe it wouldn’t include quite so many embarrassing legislators.

• Christianity Today: “Margaret Thatcher Obits Overlook Her ‘Devout Christian Faith’”

Maybe that’s because her politics and her contemptuous disdain for the poor and the working class also overlooked her devout “Christian faith.”

Or were Isaiah, Jesus, James and John all just kidding?

• For 10 years I worked at a daily newspaper using the AP Stylebook, and for most of that time I had a long-running argument with my boss’s boss about the use of the term “illegal immigrant.”

Now, almost two years after I got laid off, the Associated Press has announced that it will no longer use the term. I’d call the newsroom to gloat, but my boss’s boss got laid off too and I don’t think either of the people left in that newsroom has the time to answer a phone.

• Opt out. Always opt out: “Last year consumers paid a whopping $32 billion in overdraft fees, a $400 million jump from 2011.”

Never give your bank permission to reach into your account and take your money. If you do, they will help themselves every chance they get. They took $32 billion from their depositors last year, and then had the chutzpah to call it a “service” and a form of “protection.”

Explain to me how a decent person can steal $32 billion a year and then maybe I’ll be persuaded that they might be decent people.

• I really, really, really hate the phrase “living in sin.”

It’s evangelical-speak for POSSLQ and few phrases reveal more about the stunted, unbiblical, sex-obsessed understanding of “sin” in American Christianity. Jamie Dimon is never described as “living in sin.” Wayne LaPierre is never described as “living in sin.” Unless and until that phrase comes to be employed to refer to people like that, it will always ring hollow — a meaningless phrase that signifies only the meaninglessness and hypocrisy of the subculture that produced it.

• Nothing says “pro-life” quite like sending death threats.

• Al Mohler laments “The Marginalization of Moral Argument in the Same-Sex Marriage Debate,” because Al Mohler does not listen.

If he listened, he would understand that a demand for equality is a moral demand. If he listened, he would understand that moral argument hasn’t been marginalized, it has been marshaled against him. There is a moral argument being made, forcefully and repeatedly, and it is an argument that demonstrates the immorality of Al Mohler and other defenders of inequality.

• “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

• They are coming for your birth control.

• I’m really quite serious about the New Hampshire General Court. It ought to be somewhere around half its current size. That would save the state money, and it might help to weed out some of the most delusional whackjobs.

The push-back against the push-back begins: ‘Mainstream’ evangelicals criticize critics of the religious right

Last updated on: January 2, 2013 at 2:41 pm By Fred Clark

Well, I told you this was coming.

Last month I wrote about a modest bit of push-back from “mainstream” evangelicals against the appalling things said by several religious right leaders following the massacre in Newtown, Conn.

Mike Huckabee, James Dobson, Bryan Fischer and Franklin Graham disgraced themselves by blaming the shootings on the separation of church and state, same-sex marriage and legal abortion, prompting widespread criticism from a wide variety of Christian leaders and just about anyone else who heard what they said.

But, as usual, mainstream evangelical leaders, magazines, bloggers and spokespeople were hesitant to condemn those remarks. Their constituency, after all, is the same white evangelical populace that watches Huckabee on Fox News, listens to Dobson and Fischer on the radio (on 7,000 and 200 stations, respectively), and that inexplicably regards Franklin Graham as the legitimate heir to his father’s legacy. They are thus, understandably, rather timid about criticizing those folks.

Yet a handful of “mainstream” evangelical types did clear their throats and respond to Huckabee and Dobson, including Out of Ur, which is the blog of Leadership Journal, the magazine for pastors put out by the folks at Christianity Today.

Out of Ur published a guest post by Michael Cheshire, an evangelical pastor from Colorado, who wrote, “They Think We’re a Hate Group, and They Might Be Right.” Cheshire compared the vocal and visible leaders of the evangelical religious right with a “crazy uncle”:

I feel like I’m with a crazy uncle who makes ignorant comments while you’re helping him shop. You have to stand behind him and mouth, “I’m so sorry. He’s old and bit crazy. He means well.” So to my gay friends, scientists, iPhone users, and others he blamed for the horrendous killing spree by that mentally ill young man, I stand here mouthing a few words of apology to you.

The rest of Cheshire’s piece was pretty forceful, so much so that I worried “… it might get him banished into the limbo of ‘controversial’ evangelical voices — Cizik-ed away to a seat beside folks like Tony Campolo and Jim Wallis, whose continued membership in the tribe is permitted mainly as a way of marking its boundary.”

And that didn’t take long. Less than two weeks later, Skye Jethani posted Out of Ur’s backpedaling semi-retraction of Cheshire’s comments: “No, We’re Not a Hate Group.”

Jethani explains that the religious right is not representative of the silent majority of American evangelicals. That’s a false impression, he says, created by sensationalistic journalists and, Jethani says — citing Timothy Dalrymple — created by wily progressive Christians. He links to Dalrymple’s unique explanation for the rise of the religious right. It’s due, he says, to:

… people like Fred Clark. I think Fred dramatically underestimates the extent to which he and his ilk shape the public and media perception of evangelicals when they shine a relentless light on every ridiculous and offensive thing an evangelical pastor or radio host does, and completely ignore the good and important work that the vast majority of evangelicals do on a regular basis.

Bryan Fischer speaks at the 2012 Values Voter summit in Washington. Organizers apparently asked Mitt Romney whom he would like to have speak just prior to his speech. Gov. Romney quickly consulted my blog, saw that I had written nearly a dozen posts criticizing Fischer, and requested Fischer precede him because, Romney said, “Fred and his ilk shape the public and media perception.”

Yes, it’s all true. I started this blog in 2002. At the time, James Dobson was an inconsequential figure broadcasting his radio message daily on a mere 7,000 stations (mostly AM). He’d only written a couple dozen books at that point, and only half of those had become national best-sellers. And only 500 or so of the thousands of newspapers and evangelical publications in America bothered to carry his weekly column.

But once I started shining my “relentless light on every ridiculous and offensive thing an evangelical pastor or radio host does,” that criticism — cleverly disguised as posts about the Iraq War, eschatology, Buffy, Niebuhr, subsidiarity and manufactured housing — catapulted James Dobson to national fame, leading Time magazine to dub him “the nation’s most influential evangelical leader.”

I’ve done the same thing for countless others — Franklin Graham, Rick Warren, Bryan Fischer, Tony Perkins and dozens of other such figures who I’ve managed to elevate without ever even mentioning them here.

My very first substantial post, on my original blogspot site, criticized Pat Robertson for selling “sentergistic” anti-aging milkshakes. The effect of that post was so powerful that it lifted Robertson to a second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses 14 years earlier.

My influence is vast, unstoppable and retroactive. Or, alternatively, Dalrymple and Jethani might be talking out of their backsides. It’s one of those.

In any case, Jethani’s endorsement of Dalrymple’s weirdly anachronistic history of the religious right is not the biggest problem with his attempted rebuttal of Cheshire’s piece. The biggest problem with Jethani’s post is that it’s pastoral malpractice. We’ll get to that in part 2.

Smart people saying smart things

Last updated on: October 6, 2012 at 12:53 am By Fred Clark

Chris Heard: “Interpreting Genesis 1 ‘literally'”

This is, rather, a plea that we follow Augustine and divest ourselves of the notion that interpreting a text literally means taking it as an historically accurate account of things that happened in time and space. If the text isn’t an historical narrative, then treating it as an historical narrative is not properly a literal interpretation. Now, I realize that discerning an author’s intention in this regard can be tricky — but not as tricky as you might think, if you attend to ancient genre conventions.

Amy Sullivan: “You Say Subsidiarity, I Say Bullshit—Why Paul Ryan and his Bishop Defenders are Wrong”

Ryan and his defenders rely heavily on the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, which Morlino defines as: “the problem at hand should be addressed at the lowest level possible — that is, the level closest to the people in need.” The federal government is so far removed from people on the ground, they argue, that it cannot possibly be responsible for addressing problems associated with poverty. That’s only true, however, if institutions at lower levels actually have the capacity to meet those needs. And that’s far from the case. As we discussed earlier this summer, each and every religious congregation in America would have to spend an additional $50,000 annually just to cover the proposed cuts in one federal nutrition program.

Lawrence Pintak: “Journalistic firebombs in the Middle East”

It’s likely the same reason most Western news organizations haven’t republished the topless Kate Middleton pix. Or why most US newspapers do not show dead soldiers. Or why, as I write this, I have told the head of my college’s NPR network that we will not publish the name of an underage rape victim, even though state law gives us the legal right. Such restraint does not damage our journalism.

Gary Longsine & Peter Boghossian: “Indignation Is Not Righteous”

Those who engage in these fallacies believe that becoming indignant, or refusing to question a particular belief, are virtues. In other words, one should become indignant, and not becoming indignant indicates a moral flaw in one’s character; one should refuse to question privileged beliefs, and persistence in questioning represents a character defect.

… Righteous indignation undermines civil discourse and often corrodes efforts aimed at reasonable compromise. When righteous indignation is invoked, conversation stops and violence may begin. For the indignant party, reason may be suspended. Righteous indignation muddles thinking, elevates emotional reactions to primacy in the discourse, and displaces its alternative: impassioned, reasoned, thoughtful analysis.