Evangelical Underground

Is it bad to ask someone to nominate my blog?

the evangelical outpost: “But what do the millions of books and products represent? Does it reveal an interest in eschatology among non-believers or just a hunger for Tom Clancy-style thrillers with churchgoers? Is the dispensational theology inherent in the novels representative of evangelicalism or does it lead to misperceptions about our beliefs? Are the novels great popular art, good entertainment, or shoddy pulp being pawned off on a gullible public?”

Another great thread at a great blog, Evangelical Outpost. However, when I read it I said, “Great.” in a different tone of voice. You can see what is coming already.

Dispensationalists will often get treated as dim or as the cause of all the problems in the evangelical church. Too much excitement? Blame the dispensationalists. Not enough excitement? If only the evangelicals had not embraced dispensationalism!

Is it possible for dispensationalists to get respect? I work at a dispensationalist University. The reader can be assured that theology at Talbot Seminary is sophisticated, attempts to be Biblically based, and is subtle. Robert Saucy is a careful thinker and scholar. Fred Sanders, my co-worker in theology, screams along at pentium speed in theology while I toddle along as a Commodore 64. However, most posts (I am not commenting on Joe Carter) give dispensationalism no respect.

All forms of dispensationalism assert one core doctrine. What is it? They claim there is a future work for the Jewish people in God’s economy. The Church is not Israel. One may not agree, but since even the Roman church has moved in this direction, it cannot be considered a foolish position. Discuss it, but let’s stop the sneering. I have never been fond of attacks on Calvinism that start with assaults on the “monster god created by Calvin.” That is stereotype. However, in most discussions of the dispensational position all we get is caricature.

The biggest problem with the “Left Behind” series is if folk confuse pop dispensationalism with the scholarly version. However, perhaps Biola could promise not to assume that Father Greeley’s novels represent Ratzinger (if anyone is so inclined) if the rest of the Church does not assume La Haye is Saucy.

I confess to reading Star Trek novels. In a certain mood, I like them. They are comfort food for the mind. Kirk acts like Kirk and Spock like Spock. Plots are very safely predictable. Who would want anything else?

I have read every Left Behind book (childrens and adult). They were not great or even very good. Jenkins has written better books. However, they are not nearly as bad as many a summer book I have read. The theology is simple, but so is the book. Taken too seriously, they could lead people astray. My view is that Left Behind is o.k. summer popcorn reading and that Christians should mellow out.

Get a group of pastors into a room and a strange thing happens. They begin to tell a story and the size of the congregation begins to grow. As people nod more and more, the story gets better as the sermon grows ever more anointed and the response larger. Soon instead of fifty people coming to faith throngs came streaming down the aisle to pray. Without care, throngs becomes a number and five hundred are praying with the pastor. The little Baptist church in which he was speaking, one aisle wide, has grown to dwarf Saddleback in size. He has lied without ever knowing it by allowing a story to get away from him and telling folk he liked what they wanted to hear.

Academics are just as bad. Put them in a room together and the stories start to flow. The telling remark made to the opposition becomes so insightful that C.S. Lewis would have been proud to say it. Every academic becomes Samuel Johnson in his own story. His foes become brilliant, but wrong headed fools.

I am sure the same thing happens with journalists. Get a group of journalists in a room and things start changing. They begin to tell the group what they want to hear. What does a room full of journalists want to hear? What kind of speaking evangelistically goes on with them?

Hugh Hewitt points us to the strange case of Eason Jordan. Hewitt reports:

Here is the key quote from a first-person account of Jordan’s remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos:

“During one of the discussions about the number of journalists killed in the Iraq War, Eason Jordan asserted that he knew of 12 journalists who had not only been killed by US troops in Iraq, but they had in fact been targeted. He repeated the assertion a few times, which seemed to win favor in parts of the audience (the anti-US crowd) and cause great strain on others.”

Everyone interested in ethics must work hard to avoid this in his or her life. Nobody is perfect, but it is interesting to note what they lie about. Pastors lie about helping more people. Academics lie about the life of the mind. Journalists lie about America.

Let’s assume that Jordan said it. Let’s also assume that our brave troops are not killing journalists. Why? We know our boys in harms way. Nothing could convince me that lads like Jon Dyke and Colin Anderson, classically educated patriots, would kill journalists. I know those men and through them the men with which they serve. Every unit, I assume, has men like them. Dyke and Anderson have read Aristotle and Christ. There is no way that such an army as Mr. Jordan describes could keep them. They would shout the evil from the housetops. Jordan assumes that the troops are the faceless fighters of some Lucas movie dying blindly from orders given. They are not. Every unit has a mix of many type of persons, including men with more education and culture than Mr. Jordan. We know US troops are not killing journalists in a large scale way in many places and at many times, because we know our friends in the army.

My guess is that an anti-war journalist speaking in public mostly ends up in a room of friendly folk. The temptation is to get more and more colorful until finally he tells falsehoods. He did not mean to lie, in fact he did not even feel the lie coming. It just slips out from being in a room with only nodding heads. He has made the story better, the congregation larger, and the witty remark wittier. In the case of Jordan, he ends up making his US troop behavior worse until finally he is saying monstrous things.

And everyone will cover for him, because they understand that they might someday do the same thing. He did not mean to lie, but said what people say in private in public in a fit of fervor. Polite folk look away when the demand for rigor comes up after someone speaks evangelistically. However, a cover up is impossible in the world of blogs.

What does it tell us about our media if a room of them encourage lies about the US military? It does not encourage jingoistic boasting, because the folk in the room would smell out such bombast. In the end, it allows for wicked lies such as those told by Mr. Jordan.

But Hewitt’s book is right, there is a new world out there. When I blog, I know critics will read it. I am not just writing to a small world of fellow believers. At the very least this discourages speaking evangelistically. It has its own pitfalls, including a limit on how much one can write and expect to be read and the difficulty of placing arguments in a blog. However, for “news” it is a better world with the blogosphere a bigger and more diverse group of people.

The legacy media has become sterile and in grown. It lacks new ideas and new voices on both the left and the right (not to mention the middle). Freedom, and blogging is just a growth of freedom, is a mixed blessing surely. But it is fundamentally a blessing and those who want to oppose it, however they try, will never win. They may pick on the downside of the blessing, but people like good things.

Tell the truth CNN. Release all the material and if your reporter was guilty of telling lies in an ingrown atmosphere consider shaking up that atmosphere. How different most newsrooms would be if one “out” evangelical sat at every table!

The Trivialization of James Dobson

Fit the stereotype, even once, and you are in trouble. Urban legend says that Evangelical Christians are joyless, book burners. These folk always live in a state to the South of you, even in the deep South where South is a state of mind not a place. Reports say they are always in the town next to your own: the one slightly more rural. It is hard to meet these folk, but you would know them if you saw them. With prune faces, empty wallets, emptier minds: the sort of folk who wore American flag pins before FOX News and 9/11. Everyone knows they exist, but nobody is quite sure where to find them. To be an evangelical in America, and thrive, means to prove every day that you are not one of “them.” Mess up once and you will never recover.

Bill Clinton’s great strength was that his sins insulated him from this worry. He could be as down home as he wanted, and quote the Bible more than the revival preacher, but no one would believe him one of them. His titanic indiscretions nearly sank him, but saved him from being a citizen of Jesus Land.

James Dobson was hard to stereotype. Secularly trained as a child psychologist, he has the right pedigree. He is soft spoken and cultured. He has no sex or money scandals and most of his advice was to the left of the Evangelical main stream just twenty years ago.

Now he has been linked in the public mind with Sponge Bob. Why? The pop culture belief, which no longer even needs to be true to be a hook, is that he wants to “censor a gay sponge.” It is a lie, but what does it matter? Dobson is religious and to the folk who own the mainstream media, this alone is enough to condemn him. Even some Christians, worried to cultivate their cool, rush to ridicule the man who would attack a cartoon. Book burner. Hateful. Opposed to tolerance. Jim Dobson.

It is all a lie, of course. It is a character blackening, sick, and twisted lie of the sort done by cynical people who will do anything to knee cap a foe. However, it fits the stereotype and so it sells. Like African Americans of an earlier generation no real evidence is needed. Whatever he said then, or says now, we know Dobson hates fun, just as we knew African-Americans were lazy, fearful, and dumb. The very denial of the victim leads to knowing nods. “Methinks he doth protest too much.” we say.

Here is what Dobson said and says (HT Hewitt).

What parent would not want to know if ideas must Americans thought wrong were being sold to their kids using innocent characters? Note that the point of concern is that characters like Winnie the Pooh and Sponge Bob are innocent. To hi-jack them for a message many of us think extreme and wrong with small children is wrong.

It is also wrong to wrap a message of hate up and call it tolerance. The groups that sponsor the video (itself a harmless bit of fluff) suggest using it with tools that convert the Pope’s views on homosexuality into mere bigotry. If your elementary school kids miss the subtle argument used to get there, it is because there is not any. One could be pro-gay rights and still find this sort of tax payer funded assault on the views of most the tax payers and users of the system very offensive.

Here is the pledge the We Are Family Foundation is using with the video. Some have suggested that this pledge is just about tolerance. Who can be against that? Stereotypes of Evangelicals and snickers begin at this point, but a bad thing may be wrapped in a lovely word. What this group, the WAFF, means by tolerance is a form of group think where anyone who disagrees with them is a bigot.

The pledge links race and sexual identity. By doing so, WAFF suggest that having majority American views regarding homosexuality is not just wrong, it is wicked. They are trying to get public air time, for free, in order to proclaim this view to very young children using suggestion and not argument.

It is not hard to look at their web site and discover the world view behind their bland exterior. If you want to know a site, check out who they recommend for resources. It is a list of usual leftist suspects. We are entitled to read their intentions with the school project in that light. After all, where are their conservative voices (far larger than the left in the USA) in this “neutral” project?

Their site contains projects such as this:

American Culture in the World is being co-organized by Americans for Informed Democracy (AID) and the We Are Family Foundation (WAFF). AID is an organization of young professionals and students from more than 70 universities who seek to promote global understanding through dialogue. WAFF is an organization dedicated to promoting diversity and multiculturalism and the vision of a global family through education. Other speakers involved in the series include World Press Review editor Alice Chasan , independent filmmaker and CNBC producer Danny Schechter , and A History of News author Mitchell Stephens .

Even if you agree with the point of view of the group to pretend it is “neutral” to the views of the vast majority of parents who voted for Bush (parents of kids were one of his strongest demographics) is nonsense. This group, WAFF, is not “world view” neutral. . . and should not be allowed to introduce materials into public school classrooms as if they were.

But perhaps Dobson is just a jerk. After all, isn’t he an evil white man? Wasn’t his dad a pastor, worse a Nazarene? American Christians, eighty percent of the population, should be warned. When the secular establishment and the legacy media turn on you, nothing will protect you.

For example, one of my heroes is Bernice King, daughter of MLK. See how she is treated by tolerance.org where her Evangelical views are described as “bigotry.”

If you agree with Ms. King, the sorts of folk who run the WAFF think you are a bigot. Period.

Shouldn’t Christians resent this? Wouldn’t it worry you if a group and its allies, that think Bernice King is a bigot, were writing stuff for your kids that looked “tame”? Wouldn’t you want to know if they might (!) have a not so hidden agenda?

Millions of Americans are not comfortable linking sexual preference and race in the manner of this pledge. In the context of the actual cultural debate, this pledge is loaded and everyone knows it. Race and sexual identity are side by side in the statement. The Civil Rights movement is being stolen to honor the gay rights agenda.

What about tolerance? Doesn’t the pledge say to respect all “beliefs” as well? Does this include the belief that the pledge is a bit of meaningless leftist good? Does it include the belief that the people who finished off Sadaam and the rape rooms did more for women than all the WAFF videos in the world?

That is not the worst of it. The site calls us to respect all beliefs. This is either fatuous, we really mean beliefs that all p.c. Americans include in the sanitized list we are talking about, or it is a wicked thing to teach kids.

How can I respect wicked beliefs? I can be nice to the people having them. . . but I have no respect for people thinking that persons of other races are inferior. Why should my child be taught that a Nazi should be given respect? Shouldn’t respect be earned? What does it mean to have “tolerance” and respect for such beliefs?

Isn’t it o.k. that I wish them stamped out?

I do not welcome differences over voting rights, as the pledge seemingly wishes me to do. People who think that terrorism is a good and that they should blow up people about to vote do not earn my respect. I hope their beliefs die out and that they, if they do not change, die with them. I would hope that schools, at a young age, cultivate a healthy bias toward freedom and voting and against torture chambers and despots.

My bottom line has always been (and I repeat): such “hot topics” do not belong in lower grades unable to resist, handled by people without training, using materials put out by groups with ideological points of view hostile to most parents in the government funded schools.

Iraq should note the difference. Conservatives removed despotic regimes and favor voting. Liberals would send smarmy videos and be unable to do anything but have respect for Sadaam while he is in power.

Isn’t this an old story? Shouldn’t I give it up? I don’t think so. I great man has been defamed and mocked by the creation of a false history. Some might say that Dobson should just suck it up and move on with his life. I am sure he will do so. Politics and the public square are tough and Dobson is a strong willed psychologist and he can handle it. The rest of us see what can be done by the legacy media when they decide on an issue. Most people will go on believing that Dobson said what he did not say and an evil little stereotype will be strengthened. You know the type: one not quite wicked enough to ever be exposed and rooted out, but enough to get some other Jim passed over for a job (”Too religious, not a team player.”) or a scholarship.

The legacy media should apologize to Dobson or the rest of us should start to realize that the bigotry of the old media will spare no one. If Dobson can be made to look the prude, what will happen to the rest of us? Instead, let’s break the stereotypes, because they are wrong, and keep our kids safe from socialists with cartoon characters.

Note: some of my comments appeared in somewhat different form in a conversation on the Biola public discussion boards. None of my comments here are directed to the fine people in that discussion.