{"id":22451,"date":"2014-05-20T15:46:07","date_gmt":"2014-05-20T19:46:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=22451"},"modified":"2014-05-20T15:46:07","modified_gmt":"2014-05-20T19:46:07","slug":"you-want-much-more-than-im-giving","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2014\/05\/20\/you-want-much-more-than-im-giving\/","title":{"rendered":"You want much more than I’m giving"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u2022 Winston Churchill\u2019s mother had a tattoo. A snake<\/em> tattoo<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Randall Munroe is right to complain<\/a> that this trick probably gets overused:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

But that\u2019s because copy editors know that superlatives are the easiest<\/del> one of the easiest<\/del> an easy way to wind up inserting unverified and incorrect facts into a story. See, for example, this superlative mistake in an otherwise fine post from Richard Bartholomew<\/a>:<\/p>\n

That would be Mike Warnke, author of the most shameless and grotesque bogus \u201cmemoir\u201d in evangelical history.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A good copy editor would\u2019ve caught that. Warnke\u2019s fraudulent memoir was certainly shameless and grotesque, but can we be certain it was \u201cthe most<\/em> shameless and grotesque \u2026 in evangelical history\u201d? There are quite a few other strong contenders for that title, and no easily comparable quantifiable metric for shamelessness and grotesquery. How do we rank Warnke\u2019s fraudulence against that of, say, Michelle Remembers,<\/em> or against Benny Hinn\u2019s autobiography? And while Warnke\u2019s book was, indeed, a string of outrageous lies, he did write it himself<\/em> \u2014 making it a\u00a0unique<\/del> rare achievement in the field of evangelical celebrity autobiography.<\/p>\n

The simplest<\/del> A simple fix for the sentence above, of course, is Munroe\u2019s pet peeve:<\/p>\n

\u00a0That would be Mike Warnke, author of [one of] the most shameless and grotesque bogus \u201cmemoir\u201d in evangelical history.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Problem solved.<\/p>\n

\u2022 \u201cProblem solved\u201d is also what I thought was the case with Mike Warnke. He used to be a superstar in white evangelicalism, but I thought Mike Hertenstein and Jon Trott had ended that with their devastating and thorough expos\u00e9 Selling Satan: The Evangelical Media and the Mike Warnke Scandal<\/em><\/a>. But it turns out that being a proven liar isn\u2019t a career-ender in white evangelicalism \u2014 not when those lies were told in the service of demonizing Satanic baby-killers. Here\u2019s the substance of that post from Richard Bartholomew<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Many people were under the impression that Warnke had disappeared from public platforms after his exposure, but although he\u2019s no longer an evangelical \u201cA-lister\u201d he\u2019s maintained a presence on \u00a0the church speaker circuit, through his\u00a0\u201cCelebrations of Hope\u201d ministry.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Turns out Rick Joyner, the guy promoting Warnke\u2019s rehabilitation, is also a big promoter of fraudulent evangelical memoirist Kamal Saleem. Same shtick, except Saleem pretends to be an ex-Jihadist terrorist instead of an ex-Satanic high priest.<\/p>\n

\u2022 I missed reading about this last month<\/a>: \u201cStudents from around the United States will be visiting their congressional representatives today \u2013 Abstinence Day on the Hill [April 3] \u2013 urging them to ignore President Barack Obama\u2019s call to defund abstinence education.\u201d I suppose I\u2019ll just wait ten years or so and then read all about it in the post-evangelical memoirs, blogs and National Abstinence Education Association survivor\u2019s networks that will have sprung up by then. Poor kids.<\/p>\n

\u2022 \u201cYou can be fined for being a Christian in the United States of America. For living, behaving as a Christian, it has now become a crime in the United States of America.\u201d That\u2019s infamous liar, racist and AIDS-denier Bryan Fischer spouting his usual nonsense<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Fischer was, as usual, just getting lathered up in a hyperbolic self-righteous fantasy, and when that happens he starts to describe the role-playing fantasy world he wishes he lived in rather than the reality he hates. In this world, he\u2019s a hate-filled bozo with a fringe radio platform, but in the world of his fantasy, he\u2019s a heroic lone voice defending righteousness against the armies of wickedness.<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0But then there\u2019s also this: You can<\/em> be \u201cfined for being a Christian\u201d in Daytona Beach. \u201cLiving, behaving as a Christian \u2026 has now become a crime<\/a>\u201d in that Florida resort town. But that\u2019s mainly because it seems that Daytona Beach\u2019s police chief, Mike Chitwood, is a right-wing idiot who thinks that many homeless people \u201care homeless by choice\u201d because they are \u201cbank robbers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Daytona Beach isn\u2019t saying, \u201cHey, great, you\u2019re feeding hungry people. But let\u2019s make sure you\u2019re doing this in a way that doesn\u2019t create chaos or prevent others from enjoying public spaces.\u201d Daytona Beach is saying, \u201cYou\u2019re feeding hungry people. That\u2019s creating \u2018dependency\u2019 and it must stop.\u201d That\u2019s hogwash.<\/p>\n

You\u2019d think Debbie and Chico Jimenez would have become a cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre for the religious right fundraisers who claim to be so concerned about \u201creligious liberty.\u201d But it seems that \u201creligious liberty\u201d is only for billionaire CEOs who want to deny health insurance for women, not for those who would celebrate a love feast by going out into the streets and lanes of the town and bringing in the poor. The difference, of course, is that the former is prohibited by scripture, while the latter is commanded by it.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"You want much more than I'm giving","description":"Superlatives are the worst. Mike Warnke is making a comeback. It's cruel to take teenagers to D.C. to make them lobby on behalf of \"abstinence only\" sex education. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22451"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22451\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}