I just learned that one of the featured talks in the US Pavilion at Davos (I detest Davos anyway) is titled Did God Take The World’s First Selfie in 33 A.D. It’s about the Shroud of Turin, which some gullible adherents think is a genuine artifact from Jesus’ time, rather than a medieval fake used to gouge money out of Christian pilgrims.

I can’t even.

This is what the United States of America looks like to the rest of the world: a nation of rubes and yokels.

I had no idea what Cities Church was like. This is the church in St Paul were protesters disrupted a service, horrified at the fact that one of the pastors was also an ICE field agent. Several people have been arrested, and Bondi’s Department of Justice promises a full investigation of the affair.

I think it is rightful to protest a church that takes advantage of the separation of church and state to get tax exemptions, but then hosts a clergy that preaches against secular government. Don’t burn them down, but at the very least the people should have the right to alert the community that one of the pastors is a hypocrite, on the one hand preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ and on the other hand arresting and deporting and bullying the poor and needy. Let everyone know what a lying fraud he is.

But now I learn about Cities Church’s long-running reputation. One protest is not enough.

“[T]hey are insecure little sexist and racist power-mongers who desire to be God,” wrote Rick Pidcock, a former fundamentalist and worship music expert, in a lengthy exposé for Baptist News Global. According to Pidcock, Cities Church is rooted in a network of far-right churches that teach “male headship and female submission” so extreme that their thought leader, John Piper, has argued that women shouldn’t even occupy management positions where men might have to answer to them.

Parnell himself has written extensively about how men “are given a charge to lead.” Under his leadership, female parishioners teach courses on learning to submit to your husband even when it’s “overwhelming, frustrating, or maybe even impossible,” as it seemed to be for a former church member who told Pidcock that the pastors pressured her to stay in a marriage with an emotionally abusive man who bankrupted his family by spending money on online sex workers.

Among Cities Church’s pastors is Joe Rigney, who has recently become a MAGA media darling because he, along with podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey, has been pushing the idea that empathy is a sin. Rigney has partnered with Doug Wilson, a pastor who has praised race relations under slavery and denounced women’s suffrage, to argue that people are “being manipulated by empathy.” Rigney’s misogyny is never far from the surface, including when he denounced empathy as evidence that “feminism is a cancer” because it allows women to move beyond just being “life-givers and nurturers” and into public spaces, where their allegedly toxic compassion is a “curse.”

“Cities Church is part of the Southern Baptist Convention, which was founded in 1845 over the right to own slaves,” Tim Whitaker, a former Christian nationalist who now works to expose the movement on his YouTube channel, told Salon. “This church should be disrupted. As far as I’m concerned, Jesus would’ve been right with those protesters.”

Whitaker’s view illuminates what the MAGA freakout over this protest is ignoring: that freedom of religion is not a shield against criticism of a church’s teachings, especially when those teachings are impacting the lives of other people. Cities Church, he said, “is home to a pastor that works for a federal agency kidnapping brown-skinned immigrants and killing unarmed citizens.” The anti-empathy and bigoted views taught inside the church are directly affecting people outside of it.

This is the Church of Doug Wilson, not the Church of Jesus, and it’s nothing but a sheltered little pocket of poison infesting the body politic. We have a system in which you are not even allowed to criticize the most evil, odious views if they are said by a man wearing a clerical collar, and it has to stop.

I don’t agree that empathy is a sin, but that’s OK because I feel no empathy for a nest of vipers in my state.

The University of Oklahoma has made an announcement about the Samantha Fulnecky affair. It’s the wrong one.

A student’s claim of religious discrimination on an individual assignment in an online Psychology Course taught by a graduate teaching assistant has come to resolution. As stated previously, the student followed two available processes at the University: the grade appeals process in the college and she made a formal claim of illegal religious discrimination. As already announced, the grade appeal was decided in favor of the student, removing the assignment completely from the student’s total point value of the class, resulting in no academic harm to the student.
The claim for discrimination has been investigated and concluded. The University does not release findings from such investigations.
At the same time of the investigation, the Provost—the University’s highest ranking academic officer— and the academic Dean reviewed the full facts of the matter. Based on an examination of the graduate teaching assistant’s prior grading standards and patterns, as well as the graduate teaching assistant’s own statements related to this matter, it was determined that the graduate teaching assistant was arbitrary in the grading of this specific paper. The graduate teaching assistant will no longer have instructional duties at the University.
Because this matter involves both student and faculty rights, the University has engaged in repeated and detailed conversations with the Faculty Senate Executive Committee to ensure there is an understanding of the facts, the process, and the actions being taken.
The University of Oklahoma believes strongly in both its faculty’s rights to teach with academic freedom and integrity and its students’ right to receive an education that is free from a lecturer’s impermissible evaluative standards. We are committed to teaching students how to think, not what to think. The University will continue to review best practices to ensure that its instructors have the comprehensive training necessary to objectively assess their students’ work without limiting their ability to teach, inspire, and elevate our next generation.

So the university “investigated” and concluded that the respectful, entirely correct evaluation of the essay by the TA, Mel Curth, was out of line, and has fired her from all of her teaching obligations. I think that means they have lost all of their income, unless they also have a research fellowship. And for what? Because they applied solid academic standards to a student paper and deservedly failed her work.

They haven’t thought through the consequences of this action. Every OU student now has a cheat code: mention Jesus in your crappy essay, and you’ve got an excuse to protest if you don’t get a passing grade. That immediately devalues a diploma from OU. I know I’m going to be sneering at modern OU degrees from now on.

Another consequence is that it’s only going to get worse — Christian fundamentalists will flood into OU, while secular students will look for just about any other university to attend.

We all know of and despise Ryan Walters, the Superintendent of Public Instruction in Oklahoma. He’s a Christo-Fascist of the worst kind who has been striving to destroy public education in his state.

He has tried to purchase Trump Bibles for public schools, eventually settling for sending a few hundred to AP Government teachers who don’t need them.

He rewrote the social studies standards to indoctrinate children with revisionist pro-Christian mythology, got the state’s Board of Education to approve those standards without telling them he made additional changes, got sued over it, and got blocked from implementing those standards by the Oklahoma Supreme Court.

He used public money to fund a religious charter school, a decision the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled was unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court later voted not to overturn that decision.

Despite a statewide teacher shortage, he said that teachers transferring from blue states like California had to take a special “America First” test to gauge their level of patriotism. The whole charade was just a publicity stunt for the right-wing group PragerU.

He sued an atheist group for warning public schools that they needed to follow the law and not allow staffers to push religion on kids. A judge dismissed that frivolous lawsuit with a blistering takedown of his pathetic arguments.

He also tried forcing teachers to make the Bible part of their curriculum, tried to put Christian chaplains in public schools, tried to mandate displays of the Ten Commandments in those schools, claimed the Tulsa Race Massacre had nothing to do with race, falsely insisted that President Joe Biden wanted “to destroy our Christian faith,” formed a faith committee to examine prayer in public schools, appointed the troll who runs Libs of TikTok to a statewide library advisory board, and sent out a “sample prayer” for teachers to use for the people of Israel (and definitely not the innocent people living in Gaza).

He pissed off Republicans in his own party, too. They said he was withholding $150 million for security enhancements that had already been allocated to public schools, hiding information about how he spent taxpayer dollars for his office’s travel budget, failing to fulfill open records requests in a timely manner, and refusing to spend money that he was legally obligated to spend on asthma inhalers for students. (Alas, there were not enough votes to impeach him.)
…
Just this week, he announced that every high school in the state would have a chapter of Turning Point USA in honor of Charlie Kirk, even though Walters has no actual ability to force schools to launch extracurricular groups and even though high school students already have the ability to start their own chapters if they want to.

But wait, I said this was good news. It is! Ryan Walters is resigning!

Walters, 40, said Wednesday night on Fox News that he is stepping down as state superintendent of public instruction to become the CEO of the Teacher Freedom Alliance, a nonprofit that says it assists educators “in their mission to develop free, moral, and upright American citizens.”

“We’re going to destroy the teachers unions,” Walters said on Fox. “We have seen the teachers unions use money and power to corrupt our schools, to undermine our schools.”

It is fitting that he is stepping down to join a fanatical, conservative, anti-teacher organization. May he wither away in his new bubble of contempt and hatred for education — it’s where he belongs.

Now the big question: will he be replaced by someone sane? It’s Oklahoma, so probably not.

We were always in favor of separation of church and state — I still am — and I never cared for these phony Christian charities that were providing evangelical nonsense and calling it genuine aid. But I am compelled to admit that some Christian charities were mostly sincere and were really supplying relief to communities in trouble, especially after disasters struck (some saw it as an opportunity to do nothing but PR, but let’s not tar every charity with the same ugly brush). Keep religion out of government, but if a church is actually providing helpful social services, they deserve compensation from the state…for that, but not for preaching or prayer.

Unfortunately, there are some who want to use secularism selectively applied to punish Christian charity and liberalism. Mike Flynn clearly did a search, not for corruption or abuse of funds, but for a Christian denomination he doesn’t like, to declare that they shouldn’t get government support. Lutheran Family Services must be very bad, because they assist refugees and immigrants. Of course Elon Musk agrees.

(Disclaimer: I was brought up Lutheran, but got out of there as fast as I could, and do not have a special place in my heart for Lutheran anything.)

I might be willing to go along with calling supporting Christian charities illegal payments, but only if the term was applied to all religious sects, all missionary efforts, and all religious outreach, as a way to close the loopholes that allow some churches to buy private jets so they can deliver Bibles to starving people. But I don’t know, “Lutheran immigration and refugee service” and “Lutheran social services” sound pretty benign. I’d want more evidence that they were abusing the system than that a notorious kook and fanatic searched for the religion in a table of funding payments. This is just naked sectarianism, a little sabre-rattling to start a holy war.

And DOGE is an even worse criminal enterprise, trying to benefit billionaires by ripping apart the social safety net.

I got the usual email from American Atheists, and Melina Cohen brought up an interesting contrast.

First, on Monday, there was Reverend Lorenzo Sewell, whose benediction has been variously described as “spirited” and “cringeworthy.” Sewell, a born-again adherent of charismatic Christianity and a favorite of the religious far-right, appropriated the tone and cadence of revivalists and plagiarized entire sections of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Afterward, he received a hug from Trump and announced the launch of his cryptocurrency memecoin, $LORENZO: “I need you to do me a favor to go and get that coin for us to accomplish the vision that God has called us to do on earth.”

The next morning, there was Bishop Mariann E. Budde, the leader of the Episocopal Diocese of Washington who asked the president to “have mercy” for immigrants and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Later, Trump rebuked Budde, calling her a “so-called Bishop,” a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater,” and demanding she apologize. Representative Mike Collins of Georgia went further, saying Budde “should be added to the deportation list.” Even Sewell stepped away from his budding crypto venture to accuse Budde of “theological malpractice.”

I missed that little detail of the inauguration because I didn’t give a fuck about the inauguration, but that surprised me: the guy they brought in to do the prayer used the time to announce his memecoin grift? And a Republican is threatening to deport a bishop who preached mundane Christian platitudes?

The closer you look at this administration, the more fractally corrupt they are.