An Obadiah Slope column
How to ruin a good Christian song: Obadiah has been re-reading Taylor Branch’s Martin Luther King Trilogy. Deep in the second book Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, President Lydon Johnson Johnson rejects advice to negotiate a withdrawal from Vietnam and decides to bomb the other side into accepting a settlement. “Final bomb clearance began promptly the next day under the code name ROLLING THUNDER taken from the theme hymn of the Billy Graham revival crusades.” Branch quotes historian Stanley Karnow – after eight years the US had dropped on North Vietnam “ triple the tonnage dropped in Europe, Asia and Africa during World War II.”
Obadiah fears that song, How Great Thou Art will never sound the same to him.
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All clear: Obadiah visited the doctor who happens to be a Christian. Glanced up and saw on the wall a notice to the effect patients will be seen without regard to their sexuality or gender identity. As it should be.
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Quote of the week: Michael Gerson, speechwriter to President George W. Bush asks “Trump should fill Christians with rage. How come he doesn’t?” in the Washington Post.
“Having known evangelicals who live lives of moral integrity and serve others across lines of race and class, I have no intention of pronouncing an indiscriminate indictment. But all conservative Christians must take seriously a sobering development in America’s common life. Many who identify with Jesus most loudly and publicly are doing the most to discredit his cause. The main danger to conservative churches does not come from bad laws — it comes from Christians who don’t understand the distinctives, the demands and the ultimate appeal of their own faith.
“This development deserves some woes of its own:
- Woe to evangelical hypocrisy. Given the evidence of sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention, the corruption and sexual scandal at Liberty University, the sex scandal in the Hillsong ministry, the sexual exploitation revealed in Ravi Zacharias’s ministry, and the years of sexual predation at the (Christian) Kanakuk summer camps, Americans increasingly identify the word “evangelical” with pretence, scandal and duplicity. In the case of the SBC, victims (mostly women) were ignored, intimidated, dismissed and demeaned. Many of the most powerful Southern Baptist leaders betrayed the powerless, added cruelty on top of suffering and justified their coverup as essential to Christian evangelism. How can hearts ostensibly transformed by Christ be so impervious to mercy?
- Woe to evangelical exclusion. In their overwhelming, uncritical support of Trump and other nationalist Republicans — leaders who could never win elections without evangelical votes — White religious conservatives have joined a political movement defined by an attitude of “us” vs. “them,” and dedicated to the rejection and humiliation of social outsiders and outcasts. From the start, the Trump-led GOP dehumanized migrants as diseased and violent. It attacked Muslims as suspect and dangerous. Even when evangelical Christians refuse to mouth the words of racism, they have allied themselves with the promoters of prejudice and white grievance. How can it be that believers called to radical inclusion are the most hostile to refugees of any group in the United States? How can anyone who serves God’s boundless kingdom of love and generosity ever rally to the political banner “America First”?
- And woe, therefore, to Christian nationalism. Evangelicals broadly confuse the Kingdom of God with a Christian America, preserved by thuggish politicians who promise to prefer their version of Christian rights and enforce Christian values. The political calculation of conservative Christians is simple and simply wrong.”
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The day of small things: At the recent Bible Conference, Bible Society CEO Grant Thomson described the inaugural conference as a beginning. “Who dares despise the day of small things,“ he quoted from Zechariah 4:10 which describes Zerubbabel laying the foundation of the (second) temple.
Applies to me, and theothercheek methinks. Enjoy this little blog.