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
‘Life in the Negative World’

‘Life in the Negative World’

Last updated on: May 13, 2024 at 3:18 am by Fred Clark

0 Comments

‘Life in the Negative World’ 2024-05-13T03:18:08-04:00 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.

• John Fea has more details on that story about the right-wing campaign that got a professor fired from Grace College in Indiana. The key detail here being that the guy who orchestrated this hatchet-job is a full-on white supremacist.

Kathryn Post’s RNS article described Evan Kilgore as “a Grace alum and onetime employee” and as “a former Turning Point USA ambassador and now faith-based political commentator.” Fea reminds us of why Kilgore lost that onetime job as Grace’s “special projects director.” It was because back in 2017 he posed for and posted this fake “rap album” cover on social media:

That’s him there on the left, with the fake tattoos. What’s he been up to since then? Fea says:

Kilgore appears to have parlayed his firing at Grace into a career as a right-wing commentator. He was a former ambassador for Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA organization. (His TPUSA bio says he was “‘canceled’ from his marketing job by the woke outrage mob” and has been “retweeted by President Trump multiple times.”) Now he appears to be an independent political commentator with 79,200 X (Twitter) followers.

A look at his Xitter feed finds that Kilgore is a “groyper” — a big fan of Neo-Nazi white supremacist Nick Fuentes. “Nick Fuentes and his America First movement is the future of Right-Wing politics. Get on board or get left behind,” one Tweet reads. There are plenty more like that — the awesomeness of Fuentes and his racism/antisemitism is a big theme of Kilgore’s posts. And he’ll be a “VIP speaker” at Fuentes’ AFPAC rally in June.

So this is who Grace College President Drew Flamm and the school’s board of trustees are turning to for spiritual discernment and wisdom: actual Nazis.

Underscoring the more important main point of that earlier post: This is who will be empowered and put in charge of American life in a second Trump administration. Groypers. Neo-Nazi dirtballs. Brownshirts. “America First” fan-boys who understand the full racist, fascist history of that term and are thrilled to revive it because of that.

• “Emergency rooms refused to treat pregnant women, leaving one to miscarry in a lobby restroom”

One woman miscarried in the lobby restroom of a Texas emergency room as front desk staff refused to check her in. Another woman learned that her fetus had no heartbeat at a Florida hospital, the day after a security guard turned her away from the facility. And in North Carolina, a woman gave birth in a car after an emergency room couldn’t offer an ultrasound. The baby later died.

The self-proclaimed Virtuous People are making this happen in an effort to prove to themselves that they are Virtuous People. It’s not about obedience, or faithfulness, or protecting the vulnerable. If it were any of those things, they would recoil from the consequences of their own actions. If it were any of those things, they would be interested in understanding what the consequences of their actions were. But they are not interested in that at all, jamming their fingers in their ears and shouting “Lalala I can’t hear you!” at the hundreds of stories like those above.

For the self-proclaimed Virtuous People, those stories are too upsetting to look at. Not because of the human suffering, but because it ruins the whole fantasy about their oh-so virtuous obedience and heroism.

• Aaron Renn’s ridiculous Principal-Skinner-Meme essay has apparently been padded and stretched out into a ridiculous Principal-Skinner-Meme book.

I wrote about the essay here — “We’re Beginning To Suspect That Not Everyone Sees Us As Their Moral Betters” — and then again here, “The World Was So Big, And I Was So Small.” From the first of those:

Renn’s 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 and Black Man in White House through the present). It reads a bit like an undergrad paper on Berger’s Sacred Canopy 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’s publication in 1967.

It’s 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 “viewed positively by who?” or “whatcha mean ‘We,‘ kemosabe?” or “What, to the Slave, Is Your Fourth of July?”

Renn’s grand theory depends on two hinge-points in all of Christian history that just happen to coincide with two turning points in his own career and his personal awareness of the world around him. That gives his whole argument an absurdity that reminds me of that dark joke about what an amazing coincidence it was that right after most people began carrying portable digital cameras the police all of a sudden began beating up unarmed, nonviolent people all over the place. The bitter humor of that joke comes from the idea that anyone could be so dim as to believe that something had never previously been the case simply because they personally hadn’t seen it on video.

Renn, and his readers, are just like that joke. Until very recently, they say, white evangelicals were viewed positively as moral exemplars and moral authorities. But now, for inscrutable, mysterious reasons, the world has turned against them and no longer looks up to them the way they did before. And they date this reversal of public esteem for them at just around the time that social media began to be pervasive.

In other words, once they started reading Facebook and Twitter and blogs back in 2014, and started seeing for the first time how they actually have always been perceived by the rest of the world, they mistakenly assumed that this was all a brand new thing — a tectonic, epochal shift and reversal in public opinion. It was new to them, so they assumed it was a brand new thing and not a very old thing that was, for the first time, just starting to pierce their subcultural bubble of perception.

And because they don’t comprehend when the rest of the world began to regard them negatively, they also fail to comprehend why they are seen this way. Or, to put things more clearly than Renn’s “positive”/”negative” framework allows, they don’t understand why others perceive them as exemplars of immorality — as the opposite of what they imagined themselves to be and to be seen as.

Consider, for example, the first two items in this post. The worldly world of worldly secular worldsters tends to take a “negative” view of people who grovel to the demands of Neo-Nazis who bully them into firing professors for once having tweeted something supportive of Black Lives Matter.

And when normal people read a story about some poor woman being forced to carry a dead fetus to term before almost dying while miscarrying in a parking lot, those normal people will usually have a very negative view of the self-proclaimed moralists whose venomous sanctimony made that happen. And is making that happen, again and again.

Christianity Today’s review of Renn’s book says he offers a “framework for describing Christianity’s fall into cultural disfavor since the 1960s.” Here again that elastic cipher — “the 1960s” — prevents white evangelicals from understanding how and why others perceive them negatively. CT and Aaron Renn and all of the white evangelicals wringing their hands about “negative world” tell themselves it’s because of “the 1960s” — meaning hippies, free love, Woodstock, sex, drugs, and rock & roll. If “the world” views them negatively, they think, it’s because “the world” is a dirty hippie.

But that ain’t “the 1960s” that matters here. This is about “the 1960s” meaning the Civil Rights Movement — the “1960s” that forced white Americans to take sides. White evangelicals did exactly that. And they picked the wrong side — the blasphemously immoral side.

And they’ve been doubling down on that ever since.

That strikes most of the world as ugly, immoral, and shameful — as disgraceful in the fullest theological sense.

evangelicals

Previous Post

May 10, 2024

LBCF: Go to Hell

Next Post

May 17, 2024 LBCF: Pagan babies

Recent Comments

0 | Leave a Comment

"https://c.tenor.com/XyHFB5gb_EgAAAAd/tenor.gif"

Brandi

Cycling down the widening gyre

"The “Born in the USA” syndrome strikes again. Neil Young is suing Trump over his ..."

Carstonio

Cycling down the widening gyre

"More analysis went into this determination than just this picture, but it's not that surprising, ..."

Jim Roberts

Cycling down the widening gyre

"Assuming he actually did that...."

P J Evans

Cycling down the widening gyre

Browse Our Archives

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

Select a Month 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

What is the Pope's title as the head of the Catholic Church?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Father of the Church High Priest Bishop of Rome Supreme Pastor