Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
Don’t give up hope ye heavy laden

Don’t give up hope ye heavy laden

Last updated on: April 20, 2023 at 6:09 pm by Fred Clark

0 Comments

Don’t give up hope ye heavy laden 2023-04-20T18:09:26-04:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

• “Amy Grant, Sheryl Crow and other top artists push lawmakers for gun reform measures”

A group of Nashville music industry heavy hitters are calling for the Tennessee General Assembly to pass “common sense gun safety legislation” before lawmakers end their session, a timeline that is rapidly dwindling as legislators push to finish within days after weeks of political controversy.

Sheryl Crow, Amy Grant, Kacey Musgraves and Jason Isbell are among the dozens of signees calling for extreme risk protection laws and legislation strengthening requirements around secure storage of firearms. The letter was drafted in the wake of the deadly Covenant School shooting.

“Gun violence in Tennessee is not inevitable,” the group said. “We are not hopeless, and we will not accept inaction. This does not have to be our normal and we ask that you stand with us! We know that gun safety laws work. Policies like extreme risk protection laws and secure storage of firearms can save lives. And we ask that you keep your session open until these policies are put into place.”

The list of artists signing this letter includes lots of folks who will or already have been dismissed by the white Christian Republican Powers That Be in Tennessee. The white guys running the show in Nashville — the (mostly) men who make up what David Dark calls Nashville’s “Prayer Trade” — have already trained themselves to pretend that artists like Isbell, Crow, and Musgraves are outside agitators and coastal elites and don’t represent real, true Nashville or real, true Christianamerica.

The Prayer Trade — like the white Republican legislature, the white Republican church, and the white Republican barons of Country radio — is shaped by Us vs. Them. If you ain’t one of us, then you’re one of them and we don’t have to listen to them. They have no rights that we are bound to respect. That’s why Republican legislators didn’t hesitate to seize the flimsiest of excuses for expelling two duly elected young Black state representatives for minor violations of rules of “decorum.” (Both have since been reinstated by the constituents who elected them.) And it’s also why the white Republican “Us” will automatically discount any criticism that comes from the likes of Isbell or Musgraves, or Margo Price or Maren Morris or Lucinda Williams or Emmylou Harris.

These Christian White Guys In Charge are, after all, people who long ago taught themselves to pretend that Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and Dolly Parton were cosmopolitan liberal interlopers lacking in red-blooded Country authenticity. And once you’ve convinced yourself that folks like that are irrelevant, it’s not hard to ignore people like Mickey Guyton and Michelle Branch too.

But then there are other names here too, artists who haven’t previously been discounted as suspiciously liberal: People like Amy Grant and Martina McBride. These are people generally thought of as wholesome, apolitical, and mainstream. Yes, I’ve often joke about how Amy Grant has been cancelled by white evangelical gatekeepers ever since her duet with Peter Cetera, but Amy Grant is still Amy freaking Grant, and if you’ve lost the Amy Grant constituency in white evangelical Nashville, well, you might have to start paying attention.

• Jonathan Edwards’ slavekeeping and advocacy for slavekeeping should be viewed with extreme charity and deference because he was a Man of His Time.™ George Whitefield was also a Man of His Time.™ So were George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, etc.

But David Barrows, apparently, was not a Man of His Time™:

Barrow was a Revolutionary War veteran and church pastor who had been persecuted for his Baptist faith in Virginia before freeing his slaves in 1784 and publishing a booklet arguing against the institution of slavery, Harper said. “If you want to defend slavery as an institution, read that booklet and see if you can still do it. And to his credit — to his eternal credit — David Barrow paid for the publication of that book out of his own funds. He paid for it, he gave it away for free and it fell on deaf ears.”

Barrow became a pariah in the [Kentucky Baptist] Elkhorn Association in the process, he added. “They took the unprecedented step of actually going to David Barrows’ church on the day they were having services and tried to get him voted out of his own congregation — against Baptist polity, against anything that Baptists say they believe. But that’s the lengths to which they were willing to go.”

Yes, humility and charity require that we extend a bit of grace to those who participated in the prevailing evils of their time. Most of us will require that grace ourselves. But it won’t do to argue that their participation carries the innocence of ignorance. We can say, “Alas, this did not make them exceptional,” but we cannot say “Most people at that time didn’t know any better.” The white Kentucky Baptists who actively worked to shun and silence David Barrow cannot be said to have never heard of David Barrow.

• Ever since Deane Galbraith closed shop years ago there has been a depressing lack of Nephilim and Nephilim-related blogging. Good to see B.J. Oropeza helping to make up for that with a series of recent posts.

Here’s one on “The Book of Giants from the Dead Sea Scrolls.” Alas, we only have fragments of that ancient text offering what Oropeza describes as “imaginative elaborations on the stories of Genesis.” Or, in a sense, Genesis and Book of Enoch fan-fic. Gilgamesh even makes a cameo, which is pretty wild, like one of those Batman meets Spider-Man stories.

Oropeza also discusses one of my favorite aspects of this weird biblical tangent: “Who Are the Nephilim and Did They Escape the Flood? Giant Problems in Genesis 6 and Numbers 13.”

This is, oddly, one of the questions I got in trouble for asking as a young fundie. How are the Canaanites and (later) Goliath descended from people whose descendants all perished in the (literal, universal, dinosaur-killing) flood? Getting in trouble for asking such questions was troubling, which is part of why young fundies often don’t become old fundies.

Anyway, this apparent contradiction is only a problem within fundie/inerrantist contexts among those determined to inflict a “literal” and anti-literary interpretation onto two ancient passages that defy such readings. But it’s still a fun puzzle for the rest of us and Oropeza has fun with it, even providing a suggested solution that our fundie friends might find almost satisfactory. He suggests that the post-flood reference to the Nephilim comes from unreliable narrators — the faithless spies — who may have been lying. That resolves the contradiction, but only by acknowledging the presence of unreliable narrators within the Bible — a concession that our fundie friends generally realize is fatal to their hermeneutics.

• The title for this post comes from this weirdly adorable little track from Amy Grant’s debut album. Don’t press play on that unless you’re prepared to have this stuck in your head for a while.

Uncategorized

Previous Post

April 18, 2023

Postcards from the class & culture wars (4.17.23)

Next Post

April 25, 2023 King Philip's head is still on that pike just down the road

Recent Comments

0 | Leave a Comment

"Yes. Lemme 'splain.For a lot of kids (12+, chiefly), D&D is one of the first ..."

Jim Roberts

The possibility of possibility

"My favorite, being a New York City resident, is the way the wingnuts screeched "Liberals ..."

WeWantPie

The possibility of possibility

"Question for the DnDers hereOver on PITT Parents they had a lengthy paranoid rambling about ..."

Skybison

The possibility of possibility

"Possibility of possibilities... Can we have some of that over here in the UK, please?"

MG Remoaner

The possibility of possibility

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category class warfare evangelicals Iraq Left Behind Mammon music Uncategorized

Select a Month November 2026 October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who was Samson's mother?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Delilah Ruth Manoah's wife Hannah