3 out of 5 white evangelical Christians are poisonously stupid

Jan 6, 2021; Washington, DC, USA; Protesters at the United States Capitol as the U.S. Congress meets to formally ratify Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 Presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021.. Mandatory Credit: Jack Gruber-USA TODAY

But there are some good ones, principled ethical Christians who are appalled at the direction their congregants have taken, like Jared Stacy.

Jared Stacy is still processing his decision to leave Spotswood Baptist Church in Fredericksburg, Va., last year. Until November, he was ministering to young parishioners in their 20s and 30s.

But in the four years since he had joined the church as a pastor, Stacy had found himself increasingly up against an invisible, powerful force taking hold of members of his congregation: conspiracy theories, disinformation and lies.

Unfortunately, they’re outnumbered by the bad ones.

The lie is so powerful that a recent survey by the conservative American Enterprise Institute shows that 3 in 5 white evangelicals say Biden was not legitimately elected.

Among them is Pastor Ken Peters, who founded the Patriot Church in Knoxville, Tenn., last year.

“I believe that right now we have an illegitimate president in the White House and he was not elected by the people,” Peters told NPR. “I believe the truly ‘We the People’-elected, should-be president is residing in Florida right now.”

On its website, the Patriot Church is described as a movement: “a church interceding on behalf of her nation.” That movement has a name: Christian nationalism. Some conservative evangelical circles have incubated and spread these kinds of conspiracy theories — some of which have led to violence – for years.

These people have totally ruined some perfectly reasonable words, like “family” and “patriot”, that have now become red flags to let you know that what follows is only hatred and paranoia and selfishness.

(By the way, I don’t trust the American Enterprise Institute, so it is entirely possible that white evangelicals aren’t as generally wretched as their poll suggests.)

I hope more Xians catch on to the big lies they’ve been sold

Isaac Bailey is not an atheist, but he makes the atheist case strongly.

I’m struggling to hold fast to my Christianity— because of Donald Trump. Not exactly Trump himself, though, but the undying support of the self-professed Christian pro-life movement that he enjoyed. My faith is in tatters because of that alliance. And I am constantly wondering if I am indirectly complicit because I dedicated my life to the same Jesus the insurrectionists prayed to in the Capitol building after ransacking it and promising to kill those who didn’t do their bidding.

If Christianity can convince so many to follow a man like Trump almost worshipfully—or couldn’t at least help millions discern the unique threat Trump represented—what good is it really?

Yeah? What took you so long, Mr Bailey? This isn’t a problem that suddenly appeared years ago — it’s been a property of the American political establishment since day one. It’s gotten worse in relatively recent years, since at least the 1950s, when the evangelical Christian movement was sinking their claws into our government, making lip service to Christianity a prerequisite for running for office. Where were you in the Reagan years, when cloaking oneself in piety and patriotism while practicing the politics of greed became de rigeur? This behavior flares up regularly in American history, where Christianity surges up and wrecks the country. How can you miss the corrupting influence of religion, and the hypocrisy of its most vocal advocates?

He seems to have been caught up in the most successful propaganda campaign American Christianity has waged: the “pro-life” movement, in which we get people worked up over a medical procedure and tell them it’s baby murder. It’s not, of course, but it has become such a deeply ingrained dogma that embryos are people from the instant of conception that you’ll never talk them out of it, and that lie is the wedge they hammer in to tell you that you have to vote Republican or you’re a baby-killer. But Mr Bailey is finally starting to see through it.

Trump oversaw a 200% increase in civilian deaths in Iraq and Syria during his first year in office. He presided over more than 460,000 COVID-19 deaths, far outpacing any other industrialized country. He repeatedly demonized a group of men, women and children seeking refuge in this country from the violence and uncertainty they faced in their own. A man picked up an AR-15-style assault rifle and committed a massacre in the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh after becoming convinced Jews were responsible for the despised caravan of vulnerable brown people. He murdered 11 people; how could Christians have supported the man whose conspiracy theory he quoted?

The body count didn’t end there, though. Trump incited an insurrection that resulted in at least five deaths, dozens of injuries and a stain on America’s reputation so severe it will be harder to get other countries to take us seriously when we demand that they honor life and not commit human rights abuses. Aided by “pro-life” Supreme Court justices, Trump was able to fast-track 13 federal executions during the final months of his presidency, the most by any president in more than a century. Even the abortion rate slightly increased in the middle of Trump’s term, a reversal from major declines during Barack Obama’s two terms in office.

If you can’t quite see yourself leaving Christianity fully (I did, it felt good and honest), at least let’s recognize that politicians claiming holy moral authority are all lying and that they are the last people you ought to elect to office.

The Christian Right poisons everything

I know Christopher Hitchens’ motto was that religion poisons everything, but maybe we should be smarter about parceling out the blame. Here’s a fascinating thread by Jane Carnall about the history of splitting out the “T” in “LGBT”. In Scotland, the alliance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people was basically taken for granted; in the US, the hate campaign against gay marriage was stopped cold by a Supreme Court decision. The Religious Right needed a new way to spew venom over non-cis non-heterosexual people, and they consciously decided that one way way would be to splinter the alliance.

So in 2017, at the Values Voter Summit held by the FRC (Patriarchy Research Council), they said it explicitly.

As Right Wing Watch also mentioned in their coverage of the same panel, a trend emerged during the session, as various speakers wrapped their opposition to nondiscrimination measures in rhetoric passing as progressive: transgender rights were depicted as anti-feminist, hostile to minorities and even disrespectful to LGB individuals. This seems to be part of a larger strategy, meant to weaken transgender rights advocates by attempting to separate them from their allies, feminists and LGBT rights advocates.

In her presentation, Kilgannon [a conservative activist] mapped out three non-negotiables in the fight against the so-called gender identity agenda, a conspiracy theory touted by anti-LGBT groups that disavows sexual orientation and gender identity. The first is to “divide and conquer. For all its recent success, the LGBT alliance is actually fragile and the trans activists need the gay rights movement to help legitimize them.” In other words, separate trans activists from the gay rights movement, and their agenda becomes much easier to oppose. As Kilgannon explained, “Trans and gender identity are a tough sell, so focus on gender identity to divide and conquer.” For many, “gender identity on its own is just a bridge too far. If we separate the T from the alphabet soup we’ll have more success.”

I’m rather impressed at how readily the Religious Right adopted feminist rhetoric to use against the open, tolerant views of LGBT feminists. Strategically it’s brilliant, even if it is hypocritical and morally repugnant, since they hate LGBs as much as they do Ts. They are consciously allying with a group they plan to stab in the back, once LGBT unity is weakened.

Kilgannon identified a wide coalition of potential allies outside the Christian Right who could confront trans friendly measures. Here’s her advice on how to draw them in:

Explain that gender identity rights only come at the expense of others: women, sexual assault survivors, female athletes forced to compete against men and boys, ethnic minorities who culturally value modesty, economically challenged children who face many barriers to educational success and don’t need another level of chaos in their lives, children with anxiety disorders and the list goes on and on and on.

The list could almost read like a manifesto for intersectionality, if it weren’t for its exclusion of some key groups, most notably transgender people themselves.

For Kilgannon, an example of effective coalition building includes the Hands Across the Aisle Coalition (HATAC), a group that unites religious and non-religious women to oppose transgender rights.

Yeah, good work, secular Americans. You were duped.

Let’s not forget that the Religious Right had reciprocal assistance from TERFs.

In many ways, there are possible allies to this pivot toward anti-trans secular movements: trans-exclusionary radical feminists, dubbed TERFs by some activists, have made waves in recent years. Some TERFs have reclaimed the term and redubbed themselves PERFs, penis-exclusionary radical feminists. Their rationale is that people who are assigned male at birth can never experience the same conditions as women do, and still hold on to their male privilege. (The latter becomes harder to prove in the face of the discrimination experienced by trans and gender non-conforming people.) As reported by Political Research Associates, trans-exclusionary feminists “may actually be guilty of drafting [the Christian Right’s] talking points, adding fuel to the fire of this dangerous anti-trans frenzy.”

I feel clarity coming on, like a nice cool draft of water. The barbarians who want to destroy our civilization and remake it in the stifling raiment of theocracy hate me for my atheism and science, despite the fact that I’m conventionally cis and hetero. They hate my friends who might be gay, or trans, or anti-authoritarian, or black, or liberal Christians, or Muslim, or any other that doesn’t conform to their views, and they are having remarkable success at picking off one narrow demographic at a time and weakening the bonds of our unity. We should know better here in the US, where the Religious Right has used single-issue rhetoric like an icepick against the body politic, splintering us into deeply divided blocs that they can manipulate. They’ve been using abortion, for instance, as a tool to get people to vote against their own interests, and now they’re gearing up to use anti-trans ranting to break us up further.

Stand strong, everyone. Don’t let disunity allow the Robertsons and Falwells and Copelands and all the other parasites to win.

It has become harder to laugh at the Q idiots

Just yesterday, I was saying it brought me great joy to watch Q implode. Today, the joy is gone. I have discovered r/QAnonCasualties. I guess I overlooked the fact that the gibbering twits have friends and family that loved them, and are heartbroken by this devastating disease that has poisoned their loved one.

There’s the woman whose COVID-denying, conspiracy theorist father came near to dying.

I have to admit though. I am upset. I am frustrated in this funked up trap my dad is in. My dad is a Christian, and in many ways it has brought him peace, joy, and love. But he is also a white Christian man in America. And he is brainwashed. There is another pandemic going on and it is that whole clump of right wing, Christian, crap. Even before this all happened I have missed my father, I have felt like in many ways he is gone :( . He raised me to be empathetic and loving. To care for the earth and be responsible. Now, He doesn’t even trust science. He screamed at me in the car about how climate change isn’t real as I sobbed and kept telling him to stop yelling at me. I took many classes in the college he helped me pay for and he still mocks me. Thinks my professors were all alarmist opportunists. And more upsetting he is apathetic about civil rights and believes BLM Is a leftist conspiracy. Im pretty sure in 2016 he voted for trump. I couldn’t even ask him this past year. It’s incredibly sickening and upsetting. Yet I think of everything he has taught me and I think, this can’t be? And this is a minor thing but weird to me, he won’t stop ranting about how wrong evolution is (I keep trying to tell him there’s a way god and evolution to exist as god “works in mysterious ways” but he doesn’t hear me out). Everything circles back to this somehow. He are having a nice day outside? “Look at all this, so much beauty and perfection, how could this EVER have been an accident or a series of mistakes?!!” ..I just want to talk with him about NORMAL THINGS. With sentient clarity!!! Everything circles back to something religious or a conspiracy theory. It’s not living.

Or the woman whose husband was so absorbed in the cult that they divorced.

I divorced my husband a year ago because he became a devout Qanon follower; over the last 3-4 years of our marriage his entire personality changed so much (slowly, of course…it doesn’t happen overnight).

Or the guy whose boss is preaching at him at work.

I can’t do this, y’all. I can’t keep getting cornered for 40 hours of my work week, having my boss aggressively talk over me to share tales of celebrities gene splicing child sex slaves into half-man-half-beasts. I can’t keep hearing about how Michelle Obama is a “tr*nny”, sucking child blood and helping Mark Zuckerberg’s wife run a cannibal restaurant in LA, of which Katy Perry is the top customer. I can’t keep hearing about innocent celebrities diddling kids for eight hours a day, about how Paris Hilton is under mind control by the democrats, about how Johnny Depp is a warlock feasting on fetuses from Planned Parenthood, and about how Michael Jackson “did what he could to save the children from Nancy Pelosi before they killed him”. I am tired of hearing about how ProudBoy figureheads were actually ANTIFA. I am tired of my boss complaining about “the fog war”, and about how “disinformation is spreading like wildfire and poisoning the minds of Americans”, when my boss is an unknowing proponent of that. I am tired of being yelled at in the break room for drinking Dasani or tap water, because it is “birth control and vaccine water”. I. Cannot. Do. This. I don’t even make enough money to do this. I need a new job but I am terrified of not being able to find one, so I’ve stayed for the last year. I am so sick and tired. Someone tell me this is gonna be over soon.

My schadenfreude has been reduced to just schaden. So many lives wrecked by this stupid belief. The site does include a list of resources for people dealing with QAnon fallout, which looks pretty good.

On the brighter side, we can still laugh at the Trump family catastrophe.

Donald Trump returns to his company this week as it faces a deepening crisis, with key properties bleeding revenue and its bankers, lawyers and customers fleeing the company.

Financial disclosure forms, filed by the former president as he left office, revealed that his hotels, resorts and other properties had lost more than $120 million in revenue last year, as the pandemic forced long-term closures and kept customers home.

Those losses were worst in the places where Trump could least afford it: His Washington hotel, which has a $170 million loan outstanding, saw revenue drop more than 60 percent. His Doral resort in Miami — also carrying a huge debt load — saw a 44 percent drop.

On Thursday, the company’s troubles grew: One of its banks and one of its law firms said they would cut their ties with the Trump Organization. They are the latest in a string of vendors and customers who severed their relationships with the company after Jan. 6, when a mob of Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol directly after he addressed them at a rally.

Ely said the Trump Organization is a relatively small operation, which relies heavily on the work of others — lawyers and real estate brokers, and investors who paid to have Trump’s name on their buildings. Now, some of those outsiders are pulling away. “He’s done enormous reputational damage to himself,” Ely said.

Oh yeah, I can watch every member of that ghastly family weep and moan and suffer and, I hope, languish in prison without a moment’s sympathy for them. Bleed, you monsters, so I can laugh harder, and I hope you all end up impoverished and ruined.

I’ll make a provisional exception for Barron, unless he turns out to be a privileged, grasping little shit like his father.

The Pelagian Heresy? Really?

I can tell we’re going to be hearing much about young Mr Josh Hawley in the future. He’s a fanatical Christian dominionist of the worst kind, and as Katherine Stewart explains, he has a guiding philosophy. He blames every thing wrong in society on Pelagius.

In multiple speeches, an interview and a widely shared article for Christianity Today, Mr. Hawley has explained that the blame for society’s ills traces all the way back to Pelagius — a British-born monk who lived 17 centuries ago. In a 2019 commencement address at the King’s College, a small conservative Christian college devoted to “a biblical worldview,” Mr. Hawley denounced Pelagius for teaching that human beings have the freedom to choose how they live their lives and that grace comes to those who do good things, as opposed to those who believe the right doctrines.

The most eloquent summary of the Pelagian vision, Mr. Hawley went on to say, can be found in the Supreme Court’s 1992 opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Mr. Hawley cited Justice Anthony Kennedy’s words reprovingly. “At the heart of liberty,” Justice Kennedy wrote, “is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The fifth-century church fathers were right to condemn this terrifying variety of heresy, Mr. Hawley argued: “Replacing it and repairing the harm it has caused is one of the challenges of our day.”

When I first read about Pelagius lo these many years past, I thought it was a shame that his ideas hadn’t taken root in the early church, but I didn’t suddenly become a faithful adherent of Pelagianism. It’s pure projection on Hawley’s part to think that people come to their beliefs about life by picking an ancient Holy Man and following him. I rejected religion because of the batshit crazy ideas it promotes, rather than because I found a 4th century monk who said things I liked.

The craziest idea that repelled me was this whole notion of “faith, not works”. It didn’t matter what you did in life — go ahead, murder and steal and violate the ten commandments all you want, as long as you accept Jesus in your heart on your deathbed, you will be welcomed in heaven. We are all sinners, bad and wicked, and pretending to be a good person won’t save you, only your belief in gods matters. Or rather, professing your belief to the benefit of the church and priesthood is what matters.

And that’s the rotten heart of most flavors of Christianity. Thanks, Augustine!

In case you’re looking for a more thorough definition of the Pelagian Heresy, read on.

Pelagianism rejects several basic Christian doctrines. First and foremost, Pelagianism denies the doctrine of original sin. It rejects the notion that because of Adam’s fall, the entire human race was contaminated by sin, effectively passing sin down to all future generations of humanity.

The doctrine of original sin insists that the root of human sinfulness comes from Adam. Through the fall of Adam and Eve, all people inherited an inclination toward sin (the sinful nature). Pelagius and his immediate followers upheld the belief that Adam’s sin belonged to him alone and did not infect the rest of humanity. Pelagius theorized that if a person’s sin could be attributed to Adam, then he or she would not feel responsible for it and would tend to sin even more. Adam’s transgression, Pelagius supposed, served only as a poor example to his descendants.

Pelagius’ convictions led to the unbiblical teaching that humans are born morally neutral with an equal capacity for either good or evil. According to Pelagianism, there is no such thing as a sinful disposition. Sin and wrongdoing result from separate acts of the human will.

Pelagius taught that Adam, while not holy, was created inherently good, or at least neutral, with an evenly balanced will to choose between good and evil. Thus, Pelagianism denies the doctrine of grace and the sovereignty of God as they relate to redemption. If the human will has the power and the freedom to choose goodness and holiness on its own, then the grace of God is rendered meaningless. Pelagianism reduces salvation and sanctification to works of human will rather than gifts of God’s grace.

Well gosh, when you put it that way, I guess I am sort of a Pelagian! I’m not interested in joining a Pelagian church, but more that I find the standard Christian theology of humans being intrinsically evil who can only be saved by worshipping a deity to be morally repugnant. I guess that Hawley is correct to consider me and my kind to be the enemy.

He’s still wretchedly wrong about everything, though, so let us join battle with the adversary.

Someone is really pissed off at the election results

It’s God. I mean, Ken Ham, who thinks he is god.

Oh look. Biden has appointed a transgender woman to a position where she can advise godly men. This is catastrophic to the Christian world view.

Once again, he demonstrates that his peculiar interpretation of the Bible is the one true Christianity.

OH NOES. Biden is planning to sacrifice children on the altar of secular humanism! Darn these Moloch worshippers worming their way into high office.

Wait, I thought he was a Catholic…

How about if we cast a critical eye on every church?

Last summer, I did some spider-hunting around Murdock, Minnesota. It’s the typical slow, sleepy, small rural town (with spiders! But that’s every town). It’s unfortunate claim to fame now is that Asatru moved in and bought a church dedicated to the premise that white people, especially northern European white people, are better than others. They probably assumed that this would be a fine, comfortable fit with the predominantly German and Scandinavian folk of Minnesota.

Except the townfolk are less than thrilled with the city council choosing to approve the founding of a church.

The decision alarmed many residents, particularly residents of color who until recently lived comfortably in the majority-white town. Ms. Barron said she and other mothers had discussed taking turns to watch their children when they play outside. When the elementary school asked Latino families to participate in a video production, Ms. Barron said, many declined.

“I don’t feel threatened right now. But I feel worried,” she said. “What worries me is losing our sense of peace.”

Many residents fear that similar groups will try “to get some sort of toehold here because they feel this is some refuge where they can come and foment this hate,” said Pete Kennedy, 59, an engineer who has lived in the town for about 50 years.

Town leaders have insisted they had no choice but to grant a conditional-use permit, or CUP, because of legal protections that forbid governments from using land-use regulations to impose a substantial burden on people trying to practice their religion.

Interesting. I wonder if they’d feel the same principled concern when a new Baptist church, or Plymouth Brethren church, or Lutheran church, or Catholic church petitions for approval to take over some real estate in town. This is not to imply that the Asatru church should be allowed to do their thing (they are truly repulsive), but that what I’ve seen around towns in this region is that every vacant building is quickly occupied by yet another cult. When our movie theater in Morris went out of business, a group of fundamentalists threatened to buy it and turn into yet another church! Fortunately, they were foiled by a local co-op.

Maybe city councils around here should question every application by every religion to take over productive real estate and replace it with untaxable dead voids in our city planning.

By the way, here’s what it costs to start a church in rural Minnesota.

In June, it was sold to the Assembly for $45,000, according to county records.

Sheesh. You mean instead of paying off a lawyer I could have bought a whole church?

Three religions at once

What a strange clip from Fox News. The garbage is flowing thick and fast here, and I count at least 3 dogmas on display.

The first is American exceptionalism. The presenter starts by claiming that Americans are individualistic…on Fox News, which builds its revenue on the sheep-like ability of Americans to follow their brand of bullshit obsessively.

Then this “doctor” is brought on to talk about the pandemic, and what is he concerned with? Football! Seriously, dude? Football is so important that he’s outraged that a game might be called off?

Fox News doctor Marc Siegel on Sunday encouraged people to have gatherings for Christmas and Hanukkah because COVID-19 is “almost like a biblical plague.”

Siegel made the remarks during a Fox News segment on National Football League (NFL) players who he claimed are being “punished” by COVID-19 restrictions.

“Do we want no Christmas? Do we want no Hanukkah?” Siegel complained. “We’re praying for miracles right now to get us out of this COVID-19 pandemic. It’s almost a biblical plague it seems like.”

We can’t cancel Christmas because we need to pray for the end of the pandemic! These guys have never heard of the idea of praying quietly at home, I guess. No profit in it.

I’ve always just mocked the idea that there is a war on Christmas, since most people are fine with everyone else celebrating midwinter however they want — I’m not going to march into your house and knock over your Christmas tree. But maybe we need to get more militant about some aspects of the holiday if we’ve got idiots insisting we have to defy basic disease prevention protocols to maintain his superstition.

Why you gotta do me like this, Anthony?

I go many long months without ever thinking of Michael Voris and his fanatical contingent of radical Catholics, but then a long-time reader has to fill me in on what he’s been up to, and I watch another of his videos. Voris is getting crazier and more extremist all the time. He’s a one-issue religious loon, and that issue is abortion. He claims that racism, nuclear war, the death penalty…none of these add up to a body count like abortion, not even close and that abortion is the great evil all the way back to the apostles — really? The Bible doesn’t make much of a big deal about it — and that Catholics who oppose the death penalty, for instance, are wasting their time because the Bible is fine with executing criminals (like, you know, the big guy who gets murdered on a cross at the start of the New Testament?). He’s a Catholic who despises the Catholicism of the church and the Pope and all that.

He also despises the Democrats, the Party of Death, who are all Marxists, and is horrified that a whole quarter of US bishops are registered Democrats. Joe Biden? Marxist? That alone should make you realize we’re not listening to a guy playing with a whole deck. No, according to Voris, he’s not happy with a Catholic being elected to the presidency, because Biden is actually a heretical gay-marrying child-killer. You see,

Biden and his party are evil, full stop. No Catholic, especially a member of the clergy, should be vague about this evil in the slightest. But if Biden captures the Catholic vote and goes on to win the White House, no doubt the champagne corks will be popping all over bishopland, but their partying will be short-lived. Marxists always kill those who got them to power. Regardless of how loyal they might have been on the path to power, thinking they would somehow be rewarded, their reward will be the wrong end of a gun barrel.

So get ready, everyone, Joe Biden is going to dispatch commie death squads to slaughter the Catholic church hierarchy.

I guess we do need to keep an eye on the fringe Catholics, who are taking paranoia to whole new levels.

If I may make a safe prediction: the churches, all of them, including the Catholic church, will do just fine under a Democratic government. They always do. Biden won’t lift a finger to support the separation of church and state.