Season Of The Witch

The Christian Right

And They Will Know Us By Our Intolerance

I am beginning to see conservative Christians as fascists possessed of a distorted Reichian funhouse-mirror Christian doctrine which in no way echoes the personal example of Christ (Reichian in the sense of fascism as a symptom of sexual repression). The core value of the Judeo-Christian esthete is choice: Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him… [Rev 3:20] That’s choice. God gives us choice; rich conservative mostly-white pastors take choice away, insisting on imposing God’s Law by burning Holy Qurans, bombing abortion clinics, inciting sedition by routinely preaching hatred of the sitting U.S. president and, most psychotically, calling for the elimination of the Supreme Court of the United States. All of which misses the point we are no longer under the Law but under Grace, the empirical nature of which is, yes, choice: a choice to dwell with God or a choice to exist Where God Is Not. Despite what your pastor may have told you, it is not our duty to club people over the head and force them to make godly choices.

Being the salt of the earth does not mean we exhaust ourselves trying to force Christian principles on people by political means; it means being living witnesses and teaching the world, through our example [John 13:30-38], of a better way. Only an un-Christlike hubris makes us believe we are actually pleasing God by demonizing people or exhausting ourselves trying to oppress them.

And yet there remains a hesitancy, if not a complete lack of thought, about calling these people what they are. These conservative pastors who routinely preach hate, who are either blinded to or in denial of their own patently obvious racism, and who routinely and intentionally distort or even invent scripture to justify their agenda, are the very definition of false prophets. They are followed and adored by millions, they are stinking rich, and they are the very face of intolerance which casts aspersions on our belief system. I spend, easily, half my ministerial time trying to make people understand I Am Not Those Guys. Those Guys Are Not Christians. They may well once have been a follower of Christ, but now they’re on some “morality” kick of their own, serving the master Morality and not the Master Jesus Christ, Who was not at all concerned with or distracted by efforts to force a specific moral definition upon the world. Jesus was not all that concerned about this world; He spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Because conservative Christian leadership has become so corrupted by social values, the purity of Christ’s mission, and therefore our own, is routinely lost. In the Black Church, far too many of us exhaust ourselves either building churches or struggling to keep the church doors open. Neither struggle is biblical. Jesus had no doors to keep open. He met with people were He found them. He held gatherings in public places; in peoples’ homes. There is no biblical model whatsoever for constantly oppressing the faithful for money, for all that begging, to keep the lights on at your facility.

This corruption of our values has us conflating the facility with the church itself. Beloved: the church is the people. Jesus said, “Feed my lambs,” [John 21:15] not, “Shake them down for money every time they walk through the door.” This is our main preoccupation in the black church: the pastor’s salary and that money pit of a building. Our pride prohibits us from sharing facilities to lower cost; no pastor wants to give up power or submit to anybody. Moreover, no pastor wants or tolerates his own paycheck getting cut; after all, he has a contract—which is also not biblical. We do all of these idiotic things that have absolutely no basis in scripture, and nobody knows the word or, apparently, knows God well enough to point this out.

Meanwhile, our white counterparts are obsessed with abortion and homosexuality, as if there’s nothing else going on in the world; nothing in the whole planet. Their simplistic myopia is superseded only by their wildly contradictory policy positions and specious rationalizing: they oppose abortion but also oppose contraception or sex education in schools but support the death penalty but oppose gun control of any kind.

No Missionaries For Chicago: 10 shot dead, 55 injured over the Fourth of July weekend.
White conservative "Christians" are obviously unaware of this, so they send millions overseas, fixing potholes in Uganda. While we're at it: Crefloe Dollar could sell one of his Rolls' to finance a mission here, too.

Face The Nation

The public face of conservative Christianity is one of intolerance. Most everyone can see that except the conservatives themselves who see only what they choose to see. These folks come across as racists because they wear a racist face. The organizations they lead are, for the most part, clearly and patently racist. Charleston, SC massacre suspect Dylann Roof credits The Council of Conservative Citizens with radicalizing him into a white supremacy belief system. “Christian” leader Perkins has ties to both the CofCC and the KKK. The few black people who attend these places are disproportionately highlighted in their promotional materials in an effort to distract from the fact the leadership, in its top echelons, is all white and likely exclusively male.

Wikipedia
The conclusions of a review of 112 studies on Christian faith and ethnic prejudice were summarized by a study in 1980 as being that "white Protestants associated with groups possessing fundamentalist belief sys­tems are generally more prejudiced than members of non-fun­da­men­tal­ist groups, with unchurched whites exhibiting least prejudice." The original review found that its conclusions held "regardless of when the studies were conducted, from whom the data came, the region where the data were collected, or the type of prejudice studied." More recently in 2003, eight studies have found a positive correlation between fun­da­men­tal­ism and prejudice, using different measures of fundamentalism.

A number of prominent members of the Christian right, including Jerry Falwell and Rousas John Rushdoony, have in the past supported segregation, with Falwell arguing in a 1958 sermon that integration will lead to the destruction of the white race

These ministries have little to no interest in the over 300 annual murders in Chicago; they’re dispatching absolutely no missionaries to the wastelands of Detroit or gangland areas of Los Angeles. The holocaust of black males being murdered at will, by police and by other black males, escapes their notice. Not one mention. The highest visibility blacks achieve at many of these places are typically glossy propaganda handouts featuring some sad-faced dusty black kid on the cover. Write the check; feed the sad-faced dusty black kid, their handouts say, and the faithful pony up a few bucks and go home feeling good about themselves as the bodies continue to drop in Cleveland, in Ferguson, in Charleston. From my chair, the vast majority of these large conservative white ministries are hateful cesspools of deceived people—easily as deceived as the Black Church Folk I routinely chastise. Educated, thoughtful, successful people who nonetheless fail to hold their leadership accountable to the bible, and who are completely tone deaf to the racism that is patently obvious to anyone who hasn’t gulped the Kool Aide.

Jesus engaged people one on one, where they were and in whatever state they were in. We blog. We sign petitions. We write checks. Why? Because all of that is easier than talking directly to even one single person. Even tougher: listening to that person and not expecting instant results. It may take weeks or even decades for your witness to make an impact on a non-believer; a task made harder every day by both the flood of mass media—nearly 100% of which directly or obliquely denies Christ—and, sadly, by the Christian Right in specific, which touts Christ while being patently racist, homophobic, misogynistic, reactionary and anachronistic. The Christian Right is ideologically dyslexic in its claim to Christ while unapologetically practicing hatred in His name. Their image is that of mealy-mouthed lunatic hate mongers offering Christ at gunpoint (yes, these people love their guns).

As Christians, certainly as people of conscience, it is certainly acceptable and reasonable for each of us to practice our civic responsibility. When put into that context, I have no quarrel with the double-chins and their reactionary agenda: if you see trash on your neighbor’s lawn, be a guy—pick it up. Be responsible. Vote your convictions and your conscience.

It is only when these guys lie—and make no mistake about it, that is exactly what they are doing—and tell us Jesus commanded we reject two legitimate national elections and actively *hate* the sitting president of the United States, or that we should pro forma overthrow the U.S. government because the Supreme Court didn’t legalize discrimination against a subject class, that this becomes rebellion against God, which the bible defines as witchcraft [I Sam 15:23]. This is precisely what these ministries—thousands of them around the country—are doing: they are practicing witchcraft. Functionally, they are witches’ covens, led by pastors lost in apostasy and inventing their own doctrine to justify whatever is eating them inside. Subjective love is not love at all. Hateful rhetoric masked as political analysis is still hate.

Which Is Witch

A pastor who preaches hate does not know Christ. He is, by definition, an antichrist preacher leading people astray with his nonsense, and his church is not part of The Church—The Body of Christ—at all, but is the temple of a false prophet if not a witch’s coven.

If your pastor has no humility, he does not know Christ. If your pastor has no patience, he does not know Christ. If your pastor actively promotes disrespect for the sitting president of the United states—regardless of who that person is—he does not know Christ. If he does not know Christ, he is a liar and a heretic. He is practicing witchcraft, and so are you if you just sit there because you like the band.

Nothing makes me crazier than Christians who refuse to follow Christ. You see, with your own eyes, and hear, with your own ears, your pastor being a nut, yet there you sit. Honestly don’t get that.

God doesn’t need our help to clean up the world; He’ll take care of that Himself when the time comes. Our zeal to “help God out” by picketing abortion clinics or sponsoring ballot amendments to fight evil in this world suggests God is too weak to assert His will on His creation, which denies the power of the Holy Spirit, which is called blasphemy. Much of our best intentions are actually blasphemous in that we deny God’s sovereignty by assuming we know better than God or that our judgment is keener than God’s.

Ours is to keep faith in His promise and act in obedience to His word, acknowledging the mystery of why God allows abortion or disease or, if you must, gay marriage or whatever else these folks are mad about. These conservative zealots, crediting God with destroying New Orleans because homosexuals live there, are the same people who will later turn around and blame God for plane crashes or cancers that take the lives of their loved ones. These issues and occurrences are all part of the same mystery, of why God doesn’t put His foot down and force the Kingdom of the World to reflect the Kingdom of Heaven. God addressed this mystery by simply assuring Paul that His Grace is sufficient (enough of an answer—my interpretation) [I Cor 12:9].

Instead of exhausting ourselves and our resources trying to “help God out” by enforcing Christian standards on the world, and instead of blaming God for everything bad that happens, we should trust in His rationale, His reasoning and His timing; we should rest in His Grace, and simply do what He actually asked us to do without extrapolating into all of these useless, purposeless and ultimately meaningless activities.

Mission Possible

The mission of the church is confoundingly simple: to be the measure of Christ’s love on earth. The pastor is the undershepherd guarding the flock. It’s not his place to run off and fight City Hall or organize campaigns and protests. Because, while he’s doing all that useless nonsense, the sheep wander astray. Or, worse, they begin to emulate him in his dysfunction because the sheep are not following Christ but are following their idiot pastor who is himself lost.

And that’s today’s Christian political right: not Christians, not right.

Christopher J. Priest
5 July 2015
editor@praisenet.org
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Next: Church Administration In The Black Perspective

Pulpit Freedom Sunday

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Taxpayer-Funded Racism
I believe God despises veneers. I believe He would appreciate truth—even a hateful truth of an admission of bigotry—than the hypocrisy of using politics as a shield beneath which to vent racist screeds. Pulpit Freedom Sunday, despite what its proponents say it is, is, in practice, an opportunity for bigoted white pastors to yell and scream hateful, racist epitaphs under cover of free political speech. Pulpit Sunday is simply a day of advocacy of racism and intolerance. It has absolutely no biblical model or foundation.

“The unholy alliance of the Political Right and the Religious Right threatens to destroy the America we love. It also threat­ens to generate a revulsion against God and religion by identifying them with militarism, ecological irresponsibility, fun­da­men­tal­ist an­tag­on­ism to science and rational thought, and insensitivity to the needs of the poor and the powerless.”

MICHAEL LERNER Theologian

The Christian Right

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Separation of Church and State
The Christian right believes that separation of church and state is not explicit in the American Constitution, believing instead that such separation is a creation of what it claims are activist judges in the judicial system.[67][68][69] In the United States, the Christian right often supports their claims by asserting that the country was "founded by Christians as a Christian Nation."[70][71] Members of the Christian right take the position that the Establishment Clause bars the federal government from establishing or sponsoring a state church (e.g., the Church of England), but does not prevent the government from acknowledging religion. The Christian right points out that the term "separation of church and state" is derived from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson, not from the Constitution itself.[72][73][74] Furthermore, the Alliance Defense Fund takes the view that the concept of "separation of church and state" has been utilized by the American Civil Liberties Union and its allies to inhibit public acknowledgment of Christianity and restrict the religious freedoms of Christians.

Thus, Christian right leaders have argued that the Establishment Clause does not prohibit the display of religion in the public sphere. Leaders therefore believe that public institutions should be allowed to display the Ten Commandments. This interpretation has been repeatedly rejected by the courts, which have found that such displays violate the Establishment Clause. Public officials though are prohibited from using their authority in which the primary effect is "advancing or prohibiting religion", according to the Lemon Supreme Court test, and there cannot be an "excessive entanglement with religion" and the government.[76] Some, such as Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, argue that the First Amendment, which specifically restricts Congress, applies only to the Congress and not the states. This position rejects the incorporation of the Bill of Rights.

Generally, the Christian right supports the presence of religious institutions within government and the public sphere, and advocates for fewer restrictions on government funding for religious charities and schools.


Abortion
The Christian right opposes abortion, believing that life begins at conception and that abortion is murder. Therefore, those in the movement have worked toward the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and have also supported incremental steps to make abortion less available. Such efforts include bans on late-term abortion (including intact dilation and extraction),[83] prohibitions against Medicaid funding and other public funding for elective abortions, removal of taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood and other organizations that provide abortion services, legislation requiring parental consent or notification for abortions performed on minors,[84] legal protections for unborn victims of violence, legal protections for infants born alive following failed abortions, and bans on abortifacient medications.

The Christian right contends that morning-after pills such as Plan B and Ella are possible abortifacients, able to interfere with a fertilized egg's implantation in the uterine wall.[85] The labeling mandated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for Plan B and Ella state that they may interfere with implantation, but according to a June 2012, New York Times article, many scientists believe that they work only by interfering with ovulation and are arguing to have the implantation language removed from product labels. The Christian right maintains that the chemical properties of morning-after pills make them abortifacients and that the politics of abortion is influencing scientific judgments. Jonathan Imbody of the Christian Medical Association says he questions “whether ideological considerations are driving these decisions."

As  people of conscience, it is certainly reasonable for each of us to practice our civic responsibility. When put into that context, I have no quarrel with the right and their re­ac­tion­ary agenda: if you see trash on your neigh­bor’s lawn, be a guy—pick it up.

Sexuality
The modern roots of the Christian right's views on sexual matters were evident in the 1950s, a period in which many Christian conservatives in the United States viewed sexual promiscuity as not only excessive, but in fact as a threat to their ideal vision of the country.[10]:30 Beginning in the 1970s, conservative Christian protests against promiscuity began to surface, largely as a reaction to the "permissive sixties" and an emerging prominence of sexual rights arising from Roe v Wade and the gay rights movement. The Christian right proceeded to make sexuality issues a priority political cause.[10]:28

The Christian right champions itself as the "self-appointed conscience of American society". During the 1980s, the movement was largely dismissed by political pundits and mainstream religious leaders as "a collection of buffoonish has-beens". Later, it re-emerged, better organized and more focused, taking firm positions against abortion, pornography, sexual deviency, and extreme feminism.[12][87]:4

Influential Christian right organizations at the forefront of the anti-gay rights movement in the United States include Focus on the Family, Family Research Council and the Family Research Institute.[10]:15–16 An important stratagem in Christian right anti-gay politics is in its rejection of "the edicts of a Big Brother" state, allowing it to profit from "a general feeling of discontent and demoralization with government". As a result, the Christian right has endorsed smaller government, restricting its ability to arbitrate in disputes regarding values and traditions. In this context, gay rights laws have come to symbolize the government's allegedly unconstitutional "[interference] with individual freedom".[10]:170–171

The central tenets of Focus on the Family and similar organizations, such as the Family Research Council, emphasise issues such as abortion and the necessity of gender roles. A number of organizations, including the New Christian Right, "have in various ways rejected liberal America in favor of the regulation of pornography, anti-abortion legislation, the criminalization of homosexuality, and the virtues of faithfulness and loyalty in sexual partnerships", according to sociologist Bryan Turner.[11]

A large number of the Christian right view same-sex marriage as a central issue in the culture wars, more so than other gay rights issues and even more significantly than abortion.[87]:57[dubious – discuss] The legalization of same-sex marriage in 2004 changed the Christian right, causing it to put its opposition to these marriages above most other issues. It also created previously unknown interracial and ecumenical coalitions, and stimulated new electoral activity in pastors and congregations.

The highest visibility blacks achieve at many of these places are typically glossy propaganda hand­outs featuring some sad-faced dusty black kid on the cover. Write the check; feed the sad-faced dusty black kid.

In Focus

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What's Wrong With The Right
Christian conservatives across the country are worried about the fate of their movement. At the very least, a great deal of soul-searching is certainly in order as the old ways of finger-pointing no longer satisfy a suffering American public. James Dobson's withering 1950's demagoguery is overshadowed by Rick Warren’s hopeful charisma, despite Dobson’s attempts to position himself as Jerry Falwell’s successor. Ironically, the future of Christian conservatism may hang on the presidency of Barack Obama, who, ironically, anointed Warren as America's pastor. Even a modest Obama success might cripple the Christian right movement beyond repair.

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