{"id":59692,"date":"2022-07-17T14:48:05","date_gmt":"2022-07-17T18:48:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=59692"},"modified":"2022-07-17T13:11:26","modified_gmt":"2022-07-17T17:11:26","slug":"were-beginning-to-suspect-that-not-everyone-sees-us-as-their-moral-betters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2022\/07\/17\/were-beginning-to-suspect-that-not-everyone-sees-us-as-their-moral-betters\/","title":{"rendered":"We’re Beginning to Suspect That Not Everyone Sees Us as Their Moral Betters"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u201cAre Southern Baptists ready for a world that despises Christians?<\/a>\u201d That\u2019s Ron Hale\u2019s Christian Post<\/em> reaction to a First Things<\/em> thumbsucker by Aaron Renn proposing Grand New Categories for white evangelicals\u2019 ongoing struggle to begin to comprehend that the way Everyone Else sees them is not at all the same as the way they see themselves.<\/p>\n

Renn\u2019s scheme proposes a grand sweep of history in which white evangelicalism (conflated throughout with All of Christianity from Antioch to Mara Lago) was first viewed positively (CE 321 to 1994), then briefly neutrally (1994 to 2014), and now negatively (Obergefell<\/em> and Black Man in White House through the present). It reads a bit like an undergrad paper on Berger\u2019s Sacred Canopy<\/em> written by an earnest student who, alas, did not finish reading the book or consider the possibility that the conversation may have continued and expanded since that book\u2019s publication in 1967.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the kind of Grand Scheme that makes sense as long as the undifferentiated plurals remain abstract and unexamined and as long as a fuzzy passive voice construct keeps essential nouns and subjects and agents obscured. The kind of Grand Scheme, in other words, that either breaks down entirely or hastily turns into something very different as soon as one asks something like \u201cviewed positively by who?\u201d<\/em> or \u201cwhatcha mean \u2018We,<\/em>\u2018 kemosabe?\u201d or \u201cWhat, to the Slave, Is Your Fourth of July?\u201d<\/p>\n

Renn\u2019s piece is getting a lot of buzz among institutional white evangelicalism and it\u2019s worth noting as a good example of a growing trend of such pieces circulating there on this theme of \u201cI\u2019m Beginning to Suspect That Not Everyone Perceives Us as Their Moral Betters.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The idiosyncratic details that make Renn\u2019s variation stand out are those weirdly specific dates of 1994 and 2014. He isn\u2019t suggesting that the lynchpin moments in all of church history were the Major League Baseball strike that spoiled the Expos\u2019 best season and the subsequent release, 20 years later, of Taylor Swift\u2019s 1989<\/em>. But he may as well have been. He may as well be attributing these purported changes in how \u201csociety\u201d perceives all of \u201cChristianity\u201d to the nefarious rise of Elvis. Aron. Presley<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The only things you need to note about Renn\u2019s strange choice of those dates is how very, very recent they are* and how intensely parochial they require this framework to be. I mean, if you managed to exhaust my objections about History & Culture Not Working Like That and about \u201cWhat part of \u2018Give us Barabbas\u2019 don\u2019t you understand?\u201d to the point where I became willing to start attempting to offer specific dates after which \u201csociety\u201d came to view Christianity \u201cnegatively,\u201d I suppose I\u2019d toss out suggestions like, say, 1789 or 1619 or maybe, again, 321. And if you narrowed down the question to the particular, parochial consideration of white evangelicalism in America as perceived by American popular culture I suppose I\u2019d start answering with a guess like, I dunno, May 2, 1963<\/a> or maybe three weeks later<\/a>, or, at the latest, March 7, 1965<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But what Renn and Hale and their fellow institutional white evangelicals are really getting at here is fuzzier and more subjectively personal than that. They\u2019re talking about a vibe<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This argument really boils down to, \u201cHey, remember back, years ago when you\u2019d tell the person next to you on a plane that you\u2019re an evangelical minister and they\u2019d react positively? That seems to have changed, somehow, and I\u2019m uncomfortable with that.\u201d It\u2019s the Principal Skinner meme above in essay form (with a handful of half-understood Alasdair MacIntyre references thrown in).<\/p>\n

And as always, this doesn\u2019t really tell us much of anything about \u201csociety\u201d or even about its overall abstract perceptions of white evangelicalism pre- or post-1994 or 2014. It just tells us that folks like Renn don\u2019t get out much. It tells us about their perceptions of other people\u2019s perceptions of them. And what it suggests is that they\u2019re very, very<\/em> slow on the uptake and not terribly interested in listening.<\/p>\n

Hale amplifies the confusion by cranking things up from a vague prevailing negative perception in \u201csociety,\u201d to \u201ca world that despises<\/em> Christians.\u201d That just stirs up more mud, further clouding the distinctions between popularity, admiration, power, esteem, control, affection, revulsion, conscience, love, fear, and hate that muddle this and every other variation of this post-Christendom lamentation genre. This is why we keep winding up with nonsensical claims like the one in that NPR headline we looked at last week<\/a>, \u201cThe Christian right is winning cultural battles while public opinion disagrees.\u201d<\/p>\n

The anxiety driving these pieces comes from the slowly dawning realization that even as the white Christian right reasserts its hegemony and tightens its grip on control, it\u2019s becoming ever less respected. It is, again, \u201cwinning,\u201d but not winning over<\/em>. It\u2019s succeeding in forcing others to abide by its stunted ideas of morality, but is failing utterly at convincing anyone that this \u201cmorality\u201d is, in any way, moral.<\/p>\n

\n

* This is similar to the present-ism of Rapture Christianity, which reassures its adherents that in all of church history and all of human history, the Very Most Important Time is the one you, personally, are living in. More than that, these \u201cBible-prophecy scholars\u201d say, most of the Bible and the most important bits of the Bible only apply here and now, for us, making us the extra special fortunate chosen ones. Renn\u2019s pivotal moments in history have to be set in his lifetime and in the lifetime of his readers because what\u2019s the point of proposing a Grand Scheme of History if it doesn\u2019t make us all epochally important Grand People as well?<\/p>\n

Part of that, too, is the nostalgia of childhood projected onto the world entire<\/a>. As John Oliver said, the world we remember from years ago, when we were still children, seems happier and less complicated to us now because \u201cwe were 6 years old<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

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

These lamentations about the end of Christendom all read like the Principal Skinner meme.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nWe're Beginning to Suspect That Not Everyone Sees Us as Their Moral Betters<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"These lamentations about the end of Christendom all read like the Principal Skinner meme.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2022\/07\/17\/were-beginning-to-suspect-that-not-everyone-sees-us-as-their-moral-betters\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"We're Beginning to Suspect That Not Everyone Sees Us as Their Moral Betters\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"These lamentations about the end of Christendom all read like the Principal Skinner meme.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2022\/07\/17\/were-beginning-to-suspect-that-not-everyone-sees-us-as-their-moral-betters\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"slacktivist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2022-07-17T18:48:05+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2022-07-17T17:11:26+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/52\/2022\/07\/Skinner.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Fred Clark\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Fred Clark\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2022\/07\/17\/were-beginning-to-suspect-that-not-everyone-sees-us-as-their-moral-betters\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2022\/07\/17\/were-beginning-to-suspect-that-not-everyone-sees-us-as-their-moral-betters\/\",\"name\":\"We're Beginning to Suspect That Not Everyone Sees Us as Their Moral Betters\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2022-07-17T18:48:05+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2022-07-17T17:11:26+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#\/schema\/person\/32666545e535b697afb93d9848dcfc47\"},\"description\":\"These lamentations about the end of Christendom all read like the Principal Skinner meme.\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2022\/07\/17\/were-beginning-to-suspect-that-not-everyone-sees-us-as-their-moral-betters\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2022\/07\/17\/were-beginning-to-suspect-that-not-everyone-sees-us-as-their-moral-betters\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2022\/07\/17\/were-beginning-to-suspect-that-not-everyone-sees-us-as-their-moral-betters\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"We’re Beginning to Suspect That Not Everyone Sees Us as Their Moral Betters\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/\",\"name\":\"slacktivist\",\"description\":\""Test everything; 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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. 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