Actually he posts an article every 3-4 days on average. https://thedispatch.com/people/5849328-david-french Again, just curious, with the many articles he writes why did you post this one?
Actually, I'm a subscriber of the Dispatch and regularly receive all of their content. As to French's poignant piece, I absolutely am in tune with his sentiments here. Moreover, remembering/mourning the travesties of our past definitely provides greater insights - while also securing an anchor of right moral values and behaviors. Now, and in the future.
This is a shout out to @UncleCliffy'sDaddy, who brought this to my attention yesterday. I wasn't aware of the SBC issues, nor that they would be coming to Nashville. At any rate, it's concerning all the way around. I left the large religious organizations years ago. My wife and I worship at a local smaller non-denominational church and are very content/involved. It's a church where people actually know and care about each other. This isn't to say that this can't happen in large churches, but sometimes I think people go to those to basically get lost in the crowd while "punching the clock" going to church. To steal a phrase from JFK, "Ask not what your church can do for you, ask what you can do for your church." At any rate, this is an enlightening, eye-opening, and disturbing piece from from David French (as most of his are....) https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com...Q.Kq5YGgBwxrS64IPRL_znbJXU9k--htMb9Z2M7hOHupU Character Is Destiny for the Southern Baptist Convention When it comes to the crisis of character in the SBC, please Baptists, heed your own true words. This week an estimated 16,000 Southern Baptists will descend upon Nashville for one of the most important conventions of this decade. Note that I did not say “Baptist” conventions or even “religious” conventions. I just said “conventions.” Period. The decisions made by the “messengers'' to the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting will echo across the church and across the culture. Their divisions reflect the divisions in the broader Evangelical church. Their culture reflects the culture of the church. And the culture of the church continues to shape the culture of this nation. In fact, a list of the key issues at the convention represents a snapshot of the key issues that are roiling the American right and broader American society. How should large and powerful institutions respond to allegations of sex abuse? To what extent should Critical Race Theory and intersectionality influence Christian thought, if at all? To what extent should political loyalties shape our religious communities? On the last point, for example, a group called the “Conservative Baptist Network” is expected to make a show of force at the convention. The right-wing radio host Todd Starnes has praised its efforts to “to save the nation’s largest denomination from a radical group of Never Trumpers and woke critical race theorists.” But to frame the dispute as one between true “conservatives” versus “liberals” or the “woke” is to warp the debate. The battle isn’t left versus right, and there are precious few true critical race theorists in Baptist ranks. Instead, the battle is over much more elemental concerns, including truth, transparency, corruption, and—ultimately—character. Last week I wrote about how my friend Russell Moore’s extraordinary letters leaked into the public domain. Moore is the former head of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberties Commission (ERLC), and he described a campaign of “psychological terror” waged against him within the SBC, a campaign that included “vicious guerilla tactics.” And what was the reason for the campaign? It wasn’t his well-known opposition to Donald Trump. It was his attempts to reform the SBC’s approach to sexual abuse and his attempts to enhance the SBC’s efforts at racial reconciliation. In his letters, Moore described how key leaders spoke about sexual assault victims behind closed doors. He alleged one leader called a victim a “whore.” He said victims were described as “crazy” or compared to “Potiphar’s wife,” a biblical figure who tried to seduce the patriarch Joseph before falsely accusing him of sexual assault. Moore also described deeply troubling interactions on matters of race. He recounted a time when one senior SBC leader said the wrong side won the Civil War. Another leader, Moore alleged, once said that “only those with guns would prevent black people from burning down all of our cities.” He also said that his family had experienced vicious attacks from “neo-confederates” within the SBC itself, including “constant threats from white nationalists and white supremacists.” As expected, Moore’s letter launched a firestorm of controversy. Then the leaks got worse. On June 7, a website called Baptist Voices published an email by the former executive vice president and general counsel of the SBC’s Executive Committee, Augie Boto. In the email, Boto justifies opposing what he believes to be efforts to change the SBC’s “denominational structure” to establish a committee empowered to respond to sexual abuse in the SBC. Certainly denominational structure is a valid consideration in any proposal, but here’s how he describes the opposing point of view: This whole thing should be seen for what it is. It is a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism. It is not the gospel. It is not even a part of the gospel. It is a misdirection play. Yes, Christa Brown and Rachael Denhollander have succumbed to an availability heuristic because of their victimizations. They have gone to the SBC looking for sexual abuse, and of course, they found it. Their outcries have certainly caused an availability cascade (just like Lois Gibbs did in the Love Canal example). But they are not to blame. This is the devil being temporarily successful. The hits kept coming. Last Thursday, Texas pastor Phillip Bethancourt, a former vice president of the ERLC, released recordings of powerful Southern Baptist leaders Ronnie Floyd, president of the SBC’s Executive Committee, and Georgia pastor Mike Stone, a leading candidate for SBC president. Here’s how the Religion News Service’s Bob Smietana and Adelle Banks described the their content: Newly released audio clips from a Southern Baptist whistleblower appear to corroborate accusations Southern Baptist Convention leaders were reluctant to take action against churches accused of mishandling abuse. The audio contains a recording of Ronnie Floyd, president of the SBC’s Executive Committee, telling SBC leaders in an October 2019 meeting that he is concerned about preserving the base in the denomination—even if that leads to criticism from abuse survivors. “As you think through strategy—and I am not concerned about anything survivors can say,” Floyd says in the recording, taken during a meeting to debrief the Caring Well Conference, held to address the handling of sexual abuse allegations within the SBC. “OK. I am not worried about that. I’m thinking the base. I just want to preserve the base.” As the website SBC Voices chronicles, a “culture of dismissal,” retribution and hypocrisy has persisted for years at the highest levels of the SBC. To take another example, Frank Page, a former president of the SBC Executive Committee, conducted an “investigation” of Russell Moore at the exact same time that Page was involved in a “morally inappropriate relationship” that would trigger his resignation a year later. With revelation piling on revelation, on Friday, the SBC Executive Committee announced that it had engaged a respected, independent firm called Guidepost Solutions to “review recent allegations against the SBC Executive Committee of mishandling sexual abuse allegations and mistreating sexual abuse victims” and to review “allegations of a pattern of intimidation.” All this barely scratches the surface of the sex-abuse issue, which is troubling and complicated enough to fill out a convention's worth of debate on its own. But then there's also the roiling controversy over Critical Race Theory. In fact, just as decisive opposition to CRT is becoming a litmus test for Republicans, so it is becoming a litmus test for the most conservative wing of the SBC. The convention will feature an effort to effectively void 2019’s Resolution 9, a resolution on Critical Race Theory and intersectionality that said CRT could serve as a useful “analytical tool” so long as it was “subordinate to scripture.” Even though the resolution specifically repudiated “the misuse of insights gained from critical race theory [and] intersectionality” especially when “absolutized as a worldview,” critics still deem it too “woke.” The end result is that thousands of messengers will flock to Nashville, some under a pirate flag, vowing to “take the ship” and repudiate “wokeness” at exactly the time when two of the SBC’s most prominent members, Russell Moore and Beth Moore (no relation to each other), have been chased from the denomination under a hail of hatred from the far-right, including from outright racists in the SBC itself. Thus it is no surprise that there are now black Southern Baptists who vow to leave the denomination if the SBC completely disavows CRT. Especially since, as Baptist pastor Dwight McKissic notes, the “National African American Fellowship of the SBC [is] unanimously opposed to denouncing CRT in its entirety.” And to compound the challenges facing the SBC, it’s in the midst of a long-term membership decline. It’s lost 2.3 million members since 2006, including more than 435,000 last year alone. Watching the drama unfold, three words come to mind: Character is destiny. Longtime readers have heard me reference this document before, but at the 1998 annual meeting, in the face of the Clinton sex and perjury scandals, the SBC issued a resolution on the importance of moral character in public officials that contained a simple truth: “Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.” Those words are scriptural and true. Indeed, we live every day with the dreadful consequences of character failures in national politics, including hatred, division, and incompetence. Yet if those words are true for politicians, how much more are they for leaders of the church? There are good-faith arguments to be had about the best institutional methods of dealing with sex abuse. Calling victims “whores” or “crazy” is not among those methods. Rachael Denhollander is a formidable person, and her thoughts are worth serious consideration. They’re not, however, beyond debate or critique. Yet describing Denhollander as an instrument of a “Satanic scheme” is utterly vile. Unwinding and ameliorating the complex and enduring effects of America’s racist past—along with responding to present day hatred and bigotry—is difficult and complicated even when everyone in the conversation operates with a level of mutual affection and respect. When leaders lament, however, that the wrong side won the Civil War or state that only armed citizens will save cities from “black people,” they do not provide Americans with assurance that the nation’s largest and most powerful denomination has decisively rejected a shameful racial past. That’s the context that surrounds efforts to completely condemn CRT. Again, it is worth emphasizing that the allegations and emails and recordings above relate to the conduct of senior leaders, not the actions of isolated individuals in the pews. It’s just wrong to equate the conflicts outlined above as fights between “liberals” versus “conservatives” or as the “woke” versus the “anti-woke.” It should never be considered ideological to endeavor to respect and protect victims of sexual abuse. And to denigrate good-faith efforts to achieve biblical justice and racial reconciliation as “woke”—when all sides agree on the authority of scripture—is to substitute name-calling for argument. There is much room for healthy debate and disagreement within the SBC. There should be no room for corruption and cruelty. The true issue in the SBC isn’t ideological. It’s not theological. It’s sin, including sin at the highest levels. And when it comes to the power of sinful leaders to corrupt a culture, few institutions have spoken more eloquently than the SBC. Yet in spite of its own words, the SBC has “tolerated serious wrongs.” It has thus “seared the conscience” of too many of its own members. And now lawlessness persists. What is the remedy? Again, here is the SBC’s own resolution: “we implore our … leaders to live by the highest standards of morality both in their private actions and in their public duties, and thereby serve as models of moral excellence and character.” Repentance is necessary. Accountability is imperative. When it comes to the crisis of character in the SBC, please Baptists, heed your own true words. One last thing … I’m going to break with tradition and share a song that isn’t obviously Christian. I’m also going to really break with tradition and share a viral clip from a game show. Millions have seen it. Millions more should. It’s from America’s Got Talent, and it features an original song by a remarkable young woman. Jane Marczweski goes by the stage name “Nightbirde,” and she’s a young Christian woman facing a terrible cancer diagnosis. The clip below sent me down a rabbit hole of her work, and I came across this searing and honest post by a believer in pain. These words … wow: I see mercy in the dusty sunlight that outlines the trees, in my mother’s crooked hands, in the blanket my friend left for me, in the harmony of the wind chimes. It’s not the mercy that I asked for, but it is mercy nonetheless. And I learn a new prayer: thank you. It’s a prayer I don’t mean yet, but will repeat until I do. Call me cursed, call me lost, call me scorned. But that’s not all. Call me chosen, blessed, sought-after. Call me the one who God whispers his secrets to. I am the one whose belly is filled with loaves of mercy that were hidden for me. Even on days when I’m not so sick, sometimes I go lay on the mat in the afternoon light to listen for Him. I know it sounds crazy, and I can’t really explain it, but God is in there—even now. I have heard it said that some people can’t see God because they won’t look low enough, and it’s true. Look lower. God is on the bathroom floor. Here’s the clip: And here’s the full, beautiful song:
I rather doubt it, unless they all get out their guns and shoot each other or something. The importance of organized religion to most people is near zero. barfo
Check out the first church in Acts 2. Nothing really organized about it. Man's gotten in the way a little too much.
Very sad statement right there. I'm sorry to hear that. The standard is Jesus. We all fall way short as humans and many have turned to their own way.
When the Aliens Come, Will Their Arrival Destroy Our Faith? Or will it teach us that creation is more magnificent than we imagined Friday was the moment I knew you were all waiting for. Yes, I’m speaking about the release of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s preliminary assessment of “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP is the government’s term for a UFO). It’s a fascinating document, and I love the Associated Press’s summary: “A long-awaited U.S. government report on UFOs released Friday makes at least one thing clear: The truth is still out there.” Between 2004 and 2021, the government chronicled 144 UAP reports and were able to identify only one with “high confidence” (it was a deflating balloon). As for the rest? The mystery remains. What I find particularly interesting is that 80 reports “involved observation with multiple sensors.” In other words, we mostly weren’t dealing with unreliable human narrators but rather with some of the most sophisticated instruments the military possesses, and even they can’t make sense of what they’ve seen. The military posited five potential explanations for the UAP: airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, government or industrial development programs, foreign adversary systems, and (my clear favorite) “other.” Here’s how the report described “other”: Although most of the UAP described in our dataset probably remain unidentified due to limited data or challenges to collection processing or analysis, we may require additional scientific knowledge to successfully collect on, analyze and characterize some of them. We would group such objects in this category pending scientific advances that allowed us to better understand them. The UAPTF intends to focus additional analysis on the small number of cases where a UAP appeared to display unusual flight characteristics or signature management. (Emphasis added.) So, we may need better science to understand what’s happening? Fascinating. But wait, you might say, isn’t this the Sunday newsletter? Where’s the faith angle? Well, the faith angle is a question that I’ve pondered--and that countless believers have pondered for centuries--what would (and should) the discovery of an actual alien civilization do to our faith? It’s not a frivolous question. Well, it might be more frivolous than spending another week diving deep in our nation’s religious culture wars. But it’s worth considering nonetheless. After all, in many quarters it’s simply a matter of conventional wisdom that there simply has to be additional intelligent life out there somewhere. The incomprehensible scale of the universe suggests that it’s inevitable. The modern estimate is that there are a whopping 2 trillion galaxies in the universe. NASA says there are between 100 and 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone. At some point the multiplication just gets silly. If you think of evolution as a process beginning with abiogenesis (the idea that primitive life can generate “from nonliving matter”) then it’s a numbers game, and the numbers indicate that intelligent life has to exist elsewhere in all the vastness of space. Others say no, however. The odds of abiogenesis generating an evolutionary process that results in truly intelligent life may be so low that the best guess is that we’re a one-off. One of my favorite YouTube channels makes that case in the video below: But belief in a creator God implies something else. There are exactly as many or as few advanced civilizations as God wills. He directs the creation of new life. In fact, it may well be that the existence of God makes it more likely that there are alien civilizations. After all, Christians already know there is “something else out there.” We believe that there are other sentient beings in creation, namely angels and demons. Also, there’s no real argument that scripture forecloses the possibility of alien life. The Bible is silent on the matter. And indeed no less a Christian theologian than C.S. Lewis allowed his imagination to run free in his “space trilogy” with the possibility of alien civilizations that possess somewhat different experiences with the same God. The middle book, Perelandra, remains one of my all-time favorites, and it asks a fascinating question: What if a different Eve and a different Adam could prevent the fall? Moreover, a surprising number of theologians and Christian thinkers have openly considered the possibility of alien intelligence, including in books and essays. The good folks at Biologos have pondered the question. And surveying the literature, there is an interesting amount of consensus about both the key Christian questions and the Christian conclusions about alien life. So, for now, let’s have a bit of fun and assume that aliens exist. What would their arrival mean for believers on earth? First, many Christian thinkers aren’t just open to the possibility of aliens, they would welcome their discovery (at least until they blew up New York and Washington). While there are atheists who proclaim that the discovery of aliens would pose insurmountable challenges to faith in Jesus and confidence in scripture, many Christians proclaim exactly the opposite. Yes, there are undoubtedly various Christian denominations that would find First Contact theologically challenging, but because the Bible does not preclude the possibility of alien life while it does powerfully expresses the mystery and glories of creation, untold millions of Christians would respond--after the initial staggering shock--with a sense of wonder and awe. In fact, one of the best short essays I’ve read on the topic comes from Dr. Luke Murray at the Institute for Faith and Culture at the University of Kansas, and he properly begins with the “the role of wonder” in the discovery of new life. Second, the discovery of alien civilizations wouldn’t diminish human significance. It might even enhance our understanding of God’s grace. In his book, Alone in the Universe? David Wilkinson, a fellow in the Royal Astronomical Society in England, examined the case for aliens (he’s skeptical) and the implications of their existence (he found the possibility “exciting for Christians”). I found this quote particularly poignant: While sharing much with other life-forms—even perhaps intelligence and self-consciousness—human beings are embedded in the story of God’s particular acts. This is not an appeal to human superiority. It is about an exceptional relationship but not an exclusive relationship. Human beings can be special without denying God’s love and concern for other intelligent beings. In many ways, the discovery of alien races would render Christ’s interaction with (and sacrifice for) the human race all the more mind-boggling. The Son of God himself would enter creation and die for only one species of God’s children? Third, the discovery of aliens would raise questions about sin, redemption, and the role of the cross. Did mankind’s fall truly impact all of creation? Did Christ’s earthly sacrifice redeem even alien civilizations of their sins? Or, to put it in more prosaic terms, would the Earth need to evangelize aliens? Does my church need to start raising money now to send missionaries to the Klingons? (The Klingons are a tough assignment, by the way. But not nearly as tough as reaching the Predators. It might be safer to seek out E.T. instead.) In his own essay about the possibility of alien life, John Piper argues that Romans 8 means that sin entered all creation through the fall of man, and that redemption of all creation comes through Christ. Here are the relevant passages: For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. But those passages are broad and poetic. I prefer Dr. Murray’s formulation, which places a greater emphasis on mystery, both in the reach of sin itself and the manner in which redemption occurs. “Of course,” Murray writes, “the Father could certainly communicate via the Son and Holy Spirit in a way that we just simply can’t imagine.” Murray also reminds us that C.S. Lewis’s imaginations are just as worthy as our own speculations, and Lewis “portrays the incarnation of Jesus as a unique and eternally present reality,” a reality “that the other aliens [can] come to know of” and perhaps even prevent the horror of the fall. Fourth, there is one message that all believers would certainly need to hear: Fear not. At its best, Piper’s essay reminds Christians to approach even the most extraordinary and unexpected events fearlessly. I love his ending, “God reigns. You are his child. What could be more secure?” Yet the mixture of awe and fear would likely be overpowering. Combine it with the likelihood that there would be bitter divisions on earth in our response to discovery of alien life, and the world would enter a period of turmoil that we’d find difficult to imagine. In that circumstance, the challenge to our faith might come less from the extraterrestrials and more from a familiar source--the sin and venality of our fellow humans. But let’s not end this unusual French Press journey on that dark note. Let’s end it instead with the wonder of creation and the sovereignty of God. Writing for Biologos about the possibility of alien life, Deborah Haarsma points to Paul’s words in Colossians 1: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.” Haarsma says that “It feels like Paul is running out of words in his effort to describe the comprehensiveness of God’s creative authority.” Exactly so. If galaxies and angels and resurrection and heaven itself aren’t too much for a believer to imagine, certainly we can comprehend (and even welcome) the possibility that we are not alone in God’s glorious universe.
THE FRENCH PRESS Lost Friendships Break Hearts and Nations We were not created for power and prosperity, but for community and fellowship. David French I want to start by talking about a friend. His name is Leo, and it’s hard to imagine a person more different from me. I’m a white Evangelical conservative born and raised in the South. He’s a former Mormon, former Catholic, agnostic Mexican-American Democrat. (He says he belongs to the “church of the Hubble Telescope” because he only believes what he can see.) We served together in Iraq. I was the only reservist (and a lawyer at that!) in an active-duty unit, and Leo picked me as his roommate on our Forward Operating Base. He was my first friend in Iraq. I don’t think I’ve spent more time, under more stress, in a single year with any person alive, including my wife. We didn’t change each other. He didn’t become like me. I didn’t become like him. We served together during The Surge, and from November 2007 until I deployed back home in September 2008, I heard him talk about Barack Obama almost as much as he talked about his wife (just kidding, Sandra!) Hours and hours of debate wouldn’t budge him one inch from his wrongness. When he redeployed back home, I used some law school connections to get him prime seats at Obama’s inauguration. How did Leo reward me for this act of generosity? By sending me a video of George W. Bush’s helicopter leaving the White House while he sang the “Goodbye Song.” I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. Why bring up Leo? Because of a disturbing chart and a powerful essay. Here’s the chart. It contains data from the Survey Center on American Life. Close friendships are declining, especially for men. The decline is precipitous: Timothy Keller @timkellernyc Do you think we have a problem? Americans have much fewer friends than they used to. 15% of men and 10% of women have no close friends. July 9th 2021 98 Retweets483 Likes And here’s the essay. It’s by Damon Linker at The Week, and I’ve been thinking about it for days. It’s called “The politics of loneliness is totalitarian.” Damon looked at the rising rates of friendlessness and came to this conclusion: [Friendlessness] provides a potent (if probably only partial) sociological explanation for why our politics have become much more polarized in recent decades, with increasing numbers of people attracted to more radical forms of political dissent on both the right and the left. It also suggests that if the loneliness and isolation become worse, so could our political pathologies. In recent years, we’ve been confronted with a key question. If the United States of America is the most powerful and most prosperous nation in the history of the world (and it is), then why are so many of its people so miserable and angry? Until the pandemic shock and the turmoil of 2020, for example, we were experiencing rising incomes, low crime rates, increased employment, relative global peace, and furious partisan hatred and rage. Yet as much as we don’t want our nation or our communities to be weak and poor, ultimately we were not created for power and prosperity. We were created for community and fellowship. Even if we’re wealthy and strong, we still need friendships like we need water and air. As Damon notes, when Americans lose the rich friendships one gains in the real world through shared lives, including shared hardship and shared suffering, we seek to fill the void through affinity (or factional) friendships we often start online. Damon argues (and I think he’s exactly right) that the prevalence of online relationships rooted in affinity or faction help explain our toxic politics. “A nation of increasingly lonely, friendless citizens given outlets to find collective, communal fulfillment online,” Damon writes, “will be a nation spawning a range of radical political factions, groups, or movements defined by and drawing the bulk of their cohesion from their loathing of other factions, groups, or movements.” Faction friendships are especially dangerous, I’d add, because they not only provide community, they also provide a sense of purpose, as destructive or as false as it may be. But faction friendships are also fragile. They depend on an extraordinary degree of agreement and conformity. I’ve experienced this myself. Many of us have. Friendships built up through years of engagement in politics and activism vanished in the blink of a tweet. “You’re not with us? Then we’re not with you.” And unless you have robust family relationships and deep friendships that aren’t so fragile and aren’t so contingent—unless you have a Leo or four or five in your life—then the sense of loss can be emotionally and spiritually catastrophic. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it a thousand times more. This is a prime reason why you can’t fact-check, plead, or argue a person out of a conspiracy, because you’re trying to fact-check, plead, and argue them out of their community. Why does all this seem worse for men? I don’t think it’s all that tough to discern. The diminishing number of male spaces means that there are fewer opportunities for rich, lifelong male friendships to form organically. The Cold War-era military was both much larger (in absolute terms and as a percentage of the population) and much more male. The workplace was proportionally more physical and more male. Recreational spaces (including sports leagues) were more male. Some of the changes are positive. We don’t want to face threats so serious that they require maintaining massed infantry and armor formations in Western Europe. We should be grateful for increased opportunities for women. Some of the changes, of course, are distressing. Regardless of the gender composition of the workforce, we want decent economic opportunities for less-skilled and less-educated workers. We want people to feel community, and the very nature of modern work—which can so often be conducted just as easily alone in your bedroom as in the sprawling cubicle farms of the modern office—often leaves us isolated and alone. As organic male spaces have diminished, we’ve struggled to artificially generate the kinds of shared experiences that used to happen so naturally. Just ask any church leader tasked with creating and maintaining a men’s ministry. The challenge is incredible. They’re reaching a cohort of men with careers and often families, for whom time is precious. So there’s pressure to force bonding, and quite a few men (me included!) have an almost allergic reaction to any effort to force intimacy. But still men seek that bond. They seek that purpose. When you recognize what’s happening, you can’t miss it on social media. You’ll see mostly-male mobs divide into factions and fight like real-world gangs carving up territory in a troubled neighborhood. Why so much emphasis on deciding who’s “strong” and who’s “weak”? (Which is especially laughable when we’re talking about tweets about law and politics.) Because the online fight is tapping into a sad shadow of the aggression and competition one sees on the gridiron, on a basketball court, or—at the extremes—on the battlefield. Time and again, as we watch deaths of despair escalate and as our political pressure cooker seems set to explode, I’m reminded of the ancient biblical principle—“It is not good that man should be alone.” It is not good for anyone to be alone, not just men. But look at this data (I’ve shared it before) regarding deaths of despair and single men. It should take your breath away: @swinshi Social Capital Project opioids report coming this morning... October 31st 2017 23 Retweets29 Likes Facing such bleak data, many thinkers jump immediately to potential solutions in the realm of the national and political. We think of a host of issues, from globalization to automation to Big Tech. If Big Forces have created Big Changes, then the answer has to lie in opposing and destroying those Big Forces, right? But I’d suggest something else. Yes, politics matters, but if our prime answer to the loss of healthy friendship is political rather than personal, then the crisis will only deepen. Our fellow citizens will form more factional friendships in fruitless quests to unring the bell of technological advance and global connection—or, much worse, to try to unring the bell of equal opportunity and legal equality. They’ll long for days that were good for some but far from good for all. Instead, we should remember that while we can have only the tiniest impact on a large number of people, we can have a large impact on a small number of people. You can be a friend. You can extend yourself. You can move out of your comfort zone. One of Leo’s most powerful acts of friendship was going to chapel with me, every week, even though he didn’t believe. I didn’t ask him to go. He just went. He went because friends do stuff together—and the greater the personal challenge, the more the word “together” matters. Not long ago, I was at a gathering of Christian leaders that was discussing a national strategy for engaging the culture. We went through five-point plans. We discussed ten-point plans. The discussion was fascinating and valuable. My mind was racing with ideas. Then one pastor spoke up with an idea at once more simple and more difficult. “What if our strategy,” he said, “was the fruits of the spirit?” That’s it. That’s the focus. “Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.” That’s how we engage. And it made my mind jump tracks entirely, from the political to the personal. How do we repair our politics? The answer is almost impossibly complex, but here’s a powerful start. Friendship. Cultivate and sustain genuine friendship. Why? Because friendships don’t just enrich and restore our lives, they also enrich and restore our land. One more thing … Speaking of friendship, the entire idea for this piece comes from a text thread with new friends from church. One of them shared this Kurt Vonnegut quote. It’s amusing, and it speaks in generalities, but it communicates something interesting and true. OK, now let’s have some fun. Let’s talk about sex. Let’s talk about women. Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything. What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish people wouldn’t get so mad at them. Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to. A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The Navahos. The Kennedys. But most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the other person. The groom gets one more pal, but it’s a woman. The woman gets one more person to talk to about everything, but it’s a man. When a couple has an argument, they may think it’s about money or power or sex, or how to raise the kids, or whatever. What they’re really saying to each other, though, without realizing it, is this: “You are not enough people!” I met a man in Nigeria one time, an Ibo who has six hundred relatives he knew quite well. His wife had just had a baby, the best possible news in any extended family. They were going to take it to meet all its relatives, Ibos of all ages and sizes and shapes. It would even meet other babies, cousins not much older than it was. Everybody who was big enough and steady enough was going to get to hold it, cuddle it, gurgle to it, and say how pretty it was, or handsome. Wouldn’t you have loved to be that baby?
The crooked pastor has done this to many others, to pre-empt his competition. Please write a letter to the State Attorney General and ask him to investigate.
THE FRENCH PRESS A Most Urgent Task As abuse claims proliferate, it’s time for an entirely new ‘Modesto Manifesto.’ David French (Photo by Sarah Altendorf via Flickr Creative Commons.) Here we go again. Last week Kathryn Post of the Religion News Service reported that yet another Christian leader has failed to respond adequately to sexual abuse: Bishop Stewart Ruch III of the Anglican Church in North America’s Upper Midwest Diocese had known since 2019 that former lay minister Mark Rivera had been charged with felony child sexual abuse. But he did not tell people in his diocese about the abuse allegations until last month — which Ruch has called a “regrettable error.” The ACNA was founded in 2009 by former Episcopalians who disagreed with the Episcopal Church’s teachings on sexuality. The ACNA adopts the traditional, orthodox Christian view that sex is reserved for a marriage between a man and a woman. Yet sadly, the Rivera scandal is not the only recent sex abuse incident in the ACNA: Bishop James Hobby of Pittsburgh resigned in November 2020 for mishandling abuse allegations about a priest in his diocese. Bishop Ron Jackson of the Great Lakes diocese was defrocked in 2020 after pleading guilty to sexual immorality due to a longstanding use of pornography. In 2019, an investigation by GRACE, a nonprofit that deals with sexual abuse at Christian organizations, found that a high-profile priest at St. Peter’s Anglican Cathedral in Tallahassee had sexually harassed men at the church. It can be deeply dispiriting to read about these scandals. Believe me, it’s even more dispiriting to write about them. It can be devastating to report them. But it’s hard to think of a more urgent task than responding decisively and justly to the crisis of sexual abuse in the church. American Christians are deeply divided. Christian public intellectuals are divided over the best response to the political and cultural challenge of a secularizing nation. Christian denominations are divided between Evangelicals and fundamentalists. Christian families are divided over politics, pandemics, and conspiracies. Yet these arguments—as important as they often are—will ultimately be fruitless if the church can’t protect its members from predators. We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that sex abuse scandals can devastate a church. They don’t just wreck its witness (who cares what an abusive institution thinks about, well, anything?); more importantly, they inflict deep and sometimes deadly wounds on human beings created in the image of God. It’s time for the disparate elements of a disorganized church to rally to a common cause. It’s time for that same disorganized church to apply the common lessons of all too many similar scandals to create systems of accountability that leave abusers nowhere to hide. It’s time to recognize that human frailty leads to human failure, and to enact policies and processes that put a fence around our own weakness. Not long ago I was talking through best practices with a young leader who was just starting to build his ministry. He told me, “Everyone needs to be on the same page. We need an entirely new Modesto Manifesto.” The term is a blast from the recent Christian past. In 1948 a young evangelist named Billy Graham gathered in Modesto, California with key members of his team to craft a set of informal rules designed to safeguard the integrity of his expanding ministry. According to his autobiography, Graham was concerned about the temptations of money, sex, self-promotion, and excessive independence from the local church. To respond to these temptations, Graham and his team made a few simple pledges. Regarding money, they agreed to downplay emotional appeals for funds and to depend on funds raised by local committees. The most famous aspect of the manifesto was the famous (and controversial) “Billy Graham rule,” his pledge “not travel, meet or eat alone with a woman other than my wife.” Graham also pledged to cooperate with local churches and to resist any temptation to exaggerate the effectiveness of his ministry. At the heart of the Manifesto was both a recognition of the frailty of the human heart and, in Graham’s words, “the determination that integrity would be the hallmark of both our lives and our ministry.” The rules aren’t mandated by scripture, and no one claims they’re perfect. The Billy Graham rule itself is dated. It can be a source of unfairness when or if a male leader grants access and privileges to male employees that he denies women in equivalent positions. The Manifesto’s rules do, however, construct a “fence” around real misconduct. Fences or “guardrails” aren’t just a Christian concept. One of America’s most influential progressive atheists, Ta-Nehisi Coates, once wrote this in the pages of The Atlantic: I’ve been with my spouse for almost 15 years. In those years, I’ve never been with anyone but the mother of my son. But that’s not because I am an especially good and true person. In fact, I am wholly in possession of an unimaginably filthy and mongrel mind. But I am also a dude who believes in guard-rails, as a buddy of mine once put it. I don’t believe in getting “in the moment” and then exercising will-power. I believe in avoiding “the moment.” I believe in being absolutely clear with myself about why I am having a second drink, and why I am not; why I am going to a party, and why I am not. I believe that the battle is lost at Happy Hour, not at the hotel. I am not a “good man.” But I am prepared to be an honorable one. Like Coates and Graham, I have my own fences. They’re different from Graham’s. I treat my male and female colleagues equally, for example. But I recognize that human failings proceed from human frailty, and it is wise to recognize your own frailty when setting the rules and practices that guide your organization and your life. And this brings me back to the proliferation of sex abuse scandals in the American church. It’s past time for the church to not just recognize human frailty in setting policies to prevent sexual misconduct, but also in setting policies to respond to abuse. A new version of the Modesto Manifesto would put a fence around the human temptation to cover up abuse, enable abusers, and rationalize cowardice. It’s hard to think of a modern sex abuse scandal that wasn’t enabled by one or more leaders within the abuser’s institution. Ministry leaders rallied around Ravi Zacharias when he faced sexual abuse allegations in 2017. He was, after all, one of the world’s most effective apologists. Kanakuk Kamp leaders refused to act when a young superpredator named Pete Newman was caught naked with boys. He was, after all, one of the camp’s rising stars. Time and again, warning signs are ignored. Ministries try to keep allegations quiet. They handle investigations in house. They use nondisclosure agreements to limit public damage. And each step of the way lawyers, executives, and board members do what they can to preserve the leader, preserve the ministry, and preserve their own reputations. In a very real way, the predators have help. The temptations to conceal, rationalize, and otherwise enable abuse are rooted in the old vices of greed and ambition. They’re also rooted in the law itself. The temptation of greed is obvious. Ministries can be immensely wealthy institutions, and the greater the reach of the ministry, the greater its wealth. Thus it creates a dynamic that teaches key leaders that they can do well (high salaries, book deals) by doing good (sharing the Gospel, saving the lost). When scandal strikes, Christians then protect their ability to do well by telling themselves that they’re trying to preserve their ability to do good. The temptation of ambition is perhaps even more pernicious. Virtually every Christian celebrity is surrounded by individuals who don’t just take a paycheck from the ministry, they derive virtually all their cultural influence and prestige from their proximity to the ministry or the man. When the ministry or celebrity is disgraced, a person can lose something even more valuable than wealth—their good name. They go from basking in the glow of the celebrity’s reflected glory to fighting against a stigma. That can be more than merely painful. It can be deeply humiliating. And then there’s the temptation of law. Corporate law is an under-appreciated factor enabling abuse. Virtually every American church or ministry is a nonprofit corporation. Under the law, corporate officers and directors have a legal fiduciary duty to the organization they serve. Ideally that fiduciary duty should empower board members to place the interests of the organization over, say, the interests of its founder or one of its key leaders. The organization should be bigger than the man or woman who runs it. But there’s a dark side to this legally mandated organizational or institutional loyalty. It provides incentive to minimize organizational risk and organizational exposure. Nondisclosure agreements, aggressive litigation tactics, in-house investigations—all these things can create a conflict between a director’s perceived legal obligation to the corporation he or she governs and the biblical obligation to “act justly” and to vindicate the oppressed. Put them all together, and you create a situation where people who spent their entire lives thinking of themselves as good and decent people find themselves neck-deep in concealment and cover-up. Each step of the way, every molecule of their body is screaming at them, “Make this go away.” They just can’t handle the truth. So, recognizing this human frailty, build fences. A new Modest Manifesto would say, “No nondisclosure agreements and no confidential settlements.” Confidentiality would be the victim’s decision, not the ministry’s. A new Modesto Manifesto would also pledge immediate, independent, and transparent investigations in the face of abuse allegations. Ministry leaders would be required to release the full results of the investigation, and to hold members of the organization accountable based on the results. Independent investigations also preserve due process. They guarantee that the fact of an accusation is not proof of guilt. Moreover, a new Modesto Manifesto would promise to protect whistleblowers. Earlier this year I wrote a long, reported piece about the failure of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries to adequately investigate sexual misconduct claims against Zacharias. The story depended on whistleblowers who were willing to go on the record and substantiate claims of not just a remarkable dereliction of duty but also outright cruelty directed towards those who dared raise questions about the organization’s investigation and response. This is hardly a complete list of proper pledges in a new Modesto Manifesto, but the right policies can reverse perverse incentives. Presently, ministry leaders face grave conflicts of interest when they conduct in-house investigations. It’s in their interests to clear their colleagues. But good policies make investigations automatic and independent. Accompanied by the knowledge that results will be transparent and public, they create incentives for cooperation and accountability. Critically, the right policies also enact biblical principles. The book of Luke declares, “For nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light.” Policies that endeavor to turn that eternal truth into temporal reality can help make integrity “the hallmark of our lives and our ministry.” And, more importantly, they can help save hearts from trauma, souls from despair, and lives from the darkness of death.
As you may know, I belong to the Anglican church, more properly known as the Episcopal church outside the United Kingdom, and I have never seen nor heard of sexual abuse within any of the dioceses I have belonged to. Also, none of that happened in my Boy Scout troop that met in Christ Episcopal church in Oswego. Of course our troop leader was the prominent attorney in town, Peter Blythe.
I was dating a Seattle women back in 2011 and she introduced me to Mars Hill Church. While I really didn't hear so much about what is mentioned here, I still eventually became skeptical of Drisoll's approach, and quit going. Driscoll was (is?) yet another case of the insidious nature of power and control. It's universal and not a respecter of persons. Why a Masculine Ministry Rose and Fell Learning the lessons of Mark Driscoll's decline. Mark Driscoll in 2007. (Photo by James Gordon via Flickr.) Let me start with a brief story about a nearly lost man and the simple thing that saved him. Three years ago I was on the road for work, and I was picked up at the airport by a young guy who looked like a vet. We had a ninety-minute trip to the speaking venue, and so we struck up a conversation. I asked him if he served. He said yes. I asked him if he deployed. He said yes, to Afghanistan. I asked how he was fitting in after he came back home. He got quiet for a moment. He said, “Have you heard of Jordan Peterson?” I said yes, absolutely. In fact, I’d just reviewed his book for National Review. “Well, Jordan Peterson saved my life.” How? The story begins the way a lot of veterans’ stories begin. After he came back from war, he felt lost. He had no purpose. In a flash he’d gone from an existence where every day mattered and every day had a mission to a world that seemed empty and aimless by comparison. To put it in the words of a cavalry officer I served with in Iraq, “I wonder if I’ve done the most significant thing I’ll ever do by the time I’m 25 years old.” The young man I was talking to had no mission. He also had no mentor. He picked up the bottle so much that he couldn’t put it down. Eventually he had suicidal thoughts. How did Jordan Peterson bring him back? He told him to clean up his room. Yep, clean up his room. He told him to get organized. He told him to stop saying things that aren’t true. It all sounds so simple, so basic. Don’t we need transcendent truths to turn our lives around? Well, yes. But sometimes the process starts with direction and with discipline. Especially for young men. The small disciplines led to larger disciplines. Small purpose led to bigger purpose. And there was my new friend—working hard, in a relationship, and saving for a down payment on a house. No wonder he was choked up with gratitude. Why bring up that story? Because of one of the most remarkable podcasts I’ve ever heard. It’s by Mike Cosper at Christianity Today, and it chronicles the rise and fall of Mars Hill church in Seattle and the corresponding rise and fall of its celebrity pastor, Mark Driscoll. The thing that’s remarkable about the podcast is that it spends as much time describing what worked about Mars Hill—why Driscoll and his church became a sensation—as it does describing why it failed. And we can’t start talking about either what worked or what failed without talking about young men like the driver in the story above. Driscoll, you see, was a Jordan Peterson figure before Jordan Peterson. He was a Christian celebrity pastor who understood that many millions of young men were lost. He aimed his ministry straight at them, provided them with a unique version of a boot camp Christian experience (he’d sometimes browbeat the men in his congregation for hours at a time), but then ultimately burned up his credibility in the bonfire of his own arrogance. Driscoll resigned from Mars Hill in 2014, under fire for his harsh, “domineering” leadership and almost a year after Driscoll apologized for “mistakes” following plagiarism allegations. Mars Hill Church dissolved shortly thereafter. It’s a story worth remembering, because young men are still struggling with modern masculinity, the church is still struggling to reach them, and Driscoll’s story is one part guide and one part cautionary tale. I use the word “guide” advisedly, with full knowledge of Driscoll’s deep flaws. But he did see something. He did understand that young men were flailing. They’re still flailing. Here’s how I phrased their predicament in my review of Peterson’s book: They’re deeply suspicious of organized religion, yet they can’t escape the nagging need for transcendence in their lives. They want answers to great questions, but they’re suspicious of authority. They want purpose, but they don’t know what purpose means apart from careerism. Oh, and all but the most politically correct are keenly aware that mankind is fallen, that men and women are different, and that, while the post-Christian West has allegedly killed God, it can’t seem to replace him with anything better. This is the landscape of spiraling rates of anxiety and depression, of extended adolescence, and of a generation of young men who’ve been told that masculinity is “toxic” but not taught how to live in a way that recognizes or even cares to comprehend their true nature. Driscoll stepped into this void with key insights—that men need male mentors (that’s one of the reasons why boys often respond worse than girls to absent fathers), that men often react quite well to direct and confrontational challenges to their manhood, and that men shouldn’t be ashamed that they are strong and often full of competitive fire. So when Driscoll walked into Seattle life and directly challenged men to get a job, to stop watching porn, to stop sleeping around, and to start supporting a family, It worked for much the same reason the Peterson message resonated a decade later. He gave men a sense of virtuous masculine purpose. Shape up. Protect and provide. In fact, I joined legions of other Christians in appreciating Driscoll’s message to men. I excused and rationalized some of his excesses, believing he was doing good work challenging men to lead better, more responsible lives. (I fully recognize, by the way, men are not all the same. They don’t all respond to the same kinds of appeals. The Driscoll blunt approach can repel as well as attract. But it attracted hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of young Christian men as Driscoll’s star kept rising.) But Driscoll ultimately failed. My appreciation was ultimately mistaken, and I’ve tried to learn from my own failure of judgment. Even worse, Driscoll didn’t just fail as an individual, the way so many celebrity pastors fail; his philosophy and approach failed the men and the women in his church. It caused great harm. And it’s worth exploring briefly why—because the “why” also applies to multiple modern Christian efforts to reach young men. One of the core reasons for the Driscoll failure (and for other failures before or since) is that he met a cultural overreaction with an overreaction all his own. He opposed a specific secular extremism with a Christian extremism that ultimately proved his critics correct. I’ve written a considerable amount about the secular war against so-called “toxic masculinity,” and while I recognize that toxic masculinity does exist, its definition often sweeps way too broadly. As I wrote in one of my first Sunday French Press essays, the American Psychological Association’s 2019 declaration that “traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful” represented a formal manifestation of a misguided cultural trend. Look at the list of characteristics above. Aside from “dominance,” the characteristics above can be vices or virtues depending on the context. Stoicism can be harmful, yes, but (as I’ve argued before) it can be indispensable to helping a man “navigate the storms of life with a calm, steady hand.” Aggression seems like a vice, right up until the moment when you need a good man to stop an evil man in his tracks. A competitive spirit can be harmful, but it can also build companies, institutions, and even nations. It can inspire extraordinary innovation. No, you don’t want to jam any person into the masculine stereotype and demand that they exhibit the characteristics above, but when those characteristics are present—and they are in many, many men—the challenge is to channel them into virtue, temper them away from excess, and ultimately subordinate them to the way of the cross. So what’s the Driscoll sin? What’s the common mistake of so many efforts to celebrate Christian masculinity? It’s to functionally take the exact opposite approach of the APA—instead of treating these characteristics as inherent vices, the Driscolls of the world turn them into inherent virtues. They glory in aggression, competitiveness, and achievement. The end result was a theology that conformed Christianity to traditional masculinity rather than conformed masculinity to Christianity. A theology and community that focused on sex differences created a world in which masculinity and male power was central to the identity of the church and the movement. The most heartbreaking of the podcasts so far was Episode Five, entitled “The Things We Do to Women.” It discusses how the church’s extreme focus on empowering men and fostering a “biblical” masculinity resulted in a culture that subordinated women to such a degree that wives were often treated as playthings for their husbands—encouraged to strip for them and perform sex acts that they found deeply uncomfortable and degrading. But the “smoking hot wife” was the reward for the godly man, and satisfaction of his insatiable sex drive was his entitlement. And thus you see the depravity of a thinly Christianized version of true toxic masculinity. What was first a church that challenged men to restrain their vices (Stop sleeping around! Stop watching porn!) ending up indulging men in modified versions of those same vices (You can still have all the sex you want! Your wife is your porn!) At the end of the day, the Driscoll example for young men was dangerous—he sent a message that with daring and discipline, you could become not just a responsible man, but a dominant man. Thus, perversely enough, Driscoll sanctified a secular version of masculine toughness and virility. The (sometimes necessary) act of grabbing men by their metaphorical lapels and shaking them out of their stupor ultimately pointed them away from the cross and towards the same will to power that has bedeviled mankind since the Fall. Let’s return to the young vet at the start of the essay. Like Driscoll did to young men a decade before, Peterson woke him up. He gave him a sense of immediate purpose. He spoke to a man in the way that so many men understand—directly, challenging them to do better, to be better. These kinds of direct challenges, whether they come from dads, pastors, authors, coaches, or drill sergeants, can be immensely valuable. Sometimes they’re the only thing that can reach a man’s heart. When you can understand this reality, you can start to see Driscoll’s appeal. His ministry did change lives. Others like him—before and since—have changed lives. And when you change a man’s life, you can inspire fierce devotion. But pastors and leaders must handle that devotion with great care. When countering a culture that often attacks traditional masculine inclinations as inherent vice, the answer isn’t to indulge traditional masculine inclinations as inherent virtue. In fact, in our efforts to define what it means to be a Christian man, we shouldn’t center our efforts on “masculinity” at all, but rather on understanding a person—a person who, “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” Driscoll, in all his toughness and swagger, tried to make men out of Christians. The church, however, should make Christians out of men.
My Niece's boyfriend has put my 14-year-old trans wannabe great nephew to work on their home construction worksite, calls him/her "Pedro" (they have a number of Hispanic workers there) and says make your bed every morning before going to work or we're gonna turn it into a guess room. Tough love. LOL
