News from the Doorkeeper

Christ, That Hurt

John Bloom — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:19:08 -0500

Okay, obviously nobody can resist a video of uber-atheist Christopher Hitchens being waterboarded. Vanity Fair has apparently resorted to making bad YouTube videos in order to promote itself–in this case, the Hitchens article “Believe Me, It’s Torture.” But I have questions for Christopher, starting with: Do you always get waterboarded by guys dressed up like cat burglars? And couldn’t you just climb onto the board? Why do you have to be bound like a paralysis victim and then lifted on and off it? Did you get waterboarded while drunk or something? Come to think of it, maybe you could have lasted more than 10 seconds if they’d used vodka instead of water when they were sprinkling you out of that Clorox bottle. And that’s another thing: it looked like they sprinkled about, oh, two fingers of a shot glass worth of Evian water through a towel. Is that really all it takes? Maybe I’m in favor of waterboarding after all. You think you’re drowning but there’s no way in hell you could even get wet. Those who’ve watched the video know that Hitchens was given a safety word if he wanted to abort the demonstration, but contrary to rumors on the blogosphere, that word was not “Jesusislord.”

Anglican Steel Cage Death Match Might Be Postponed

They won’t be singing Kumbayah this week at the Lambeth Conference, the every-ten-year meeting of the entire Anglican communion, especially since 200 bishops will be boycotting the event, including my recent dinner companion, Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, who used the word “apostates” to describe some of his fellow clerics at the recent Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) in Jerusalem. The conservatives all but admitted they held GAFCON to intentionally upstage Lambeth, declaring themselves a “church within the church” that was tired of complaining about liberal doctrine that the church leaders are obviously loathe to change. But N.T. Wright, the respected Bishop of Durham who’s on the short list to be the future Archibishop of Canterbury and who once made the mistake of giving an interview to the Door’s own Becky Garrison, called the GAFCON movement “strange in form and uncertain in destination,” and encouraged the renegade bishops to reconsider and bring their “rich experience and gospel-driven exuberance to the larger party where the rest of us are working day and night for the same gospel, the same biblical wisdom, the same Lord.” Some of the conservatives will indeed show up at Lambeth, but they don’t wanna sit next to the gay guy. And the Archbishop of Canterbury appears to be floating a last-ditch effort to make the theocons happy: he’s creating a cadre of “superbishops” to supervise churches that object to being led by a female–because, oh yeah, there’s that problem, too, the fact that 14 years ago the Anglicans started ordaining women and now they’re about to have the first female bishops. No wonder several of the Anglican dissidents were recently seen darting in and out of offices at the Vatican. In 1994, 500 Anglican priests became, overnight, Catholic priests. Benedict is hoping for a new harvest. And, by the way, the first superbishop was created in the 1970s, by Monty Python.

Barack Loves Jesus Again

Uh oh, Barack Obama was using the phrase “personal commitment to Christ” last week, and we know what happens when the Obamameister starts getting all evangelical on us–he ends up interpreting scripture. Fortunately, he hasn’t given us any more exegesis lately, but he did come out for expansion of the Bush administration’s faith-based programs. Would that be the same programs that, uh, were roundly condemned as failures after special assistant to the President Doug Wead was drummed out of the White House for making secret tapes of the Prez? Yes, they would be, but that had nothing to do with the original vision of the programs, as Jim Wallis of Sojourners explained in a virtual endorsement of Obama during the same week that Obama’s handlers explicitly stated that they were seeking the support of the “religious left.” They were seeking it, by the way, in Zanesville, Ohio, hometown of Zane Grey, holder of the all-time record for novels made into movies (over 200), and not a member of the religious left. If this goes on much longer, Obama will be in danger of saying something akin to Howard Dean’s comment in 2004, when asked what his favorite New Testament book was. If you’ll recall, the answer was Job. There wasn’t much spin for his handlers to put on that one.

Last Time the Romans Showed Up, the Trojans Lost

The Popemobile is in Australia this week for World Youth Day, and our sources in the Anglican church tell us that there’s an organized effort to drop condoms on the Pope’s head. So far there have been no papal condom showers, but if they do go through with it, I hope they’re not ribbed condoms. After all, he’s an elderly man.

No Shocking Glimpses of Stocking in This Couture Line

John Bloom — Wed, 9 Jul 2008 20:52:39 -0500

The world’s most famous polygamists have started a new cottage industry–selling “modest” handmade children’s clothing, popularized during the epic battle between the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and baby-snatching agents of the state of Texas. Shortly after the seizure of the 440 children at the church’s ranch in El Dorado, Texas, their mothers spent night and day at their sewing machines, trying to provide clothing that Texas Child Protective Services needed for day-to-day use of the imprisoned children. This caused a lot of inquiries from parents across the country seeking dresses, overalls, shirts, pants, sleepwear and “ankle-to-wrist underwear” for their loved ones. The polygamist wives, many of whom are afraid to return to the ranch until the state investigation is complete, told all callers that they would be happy to sell their handiwork. There’s a bigger market for this stuff than you might think. It’s always been a major problem for Orthodox Jewish girls trying to socialize at swimming pools, but, believe it or not, neck-to-knee one-piece swimsuits can actually be cute and stylish. And we now have this late-breaking development: Marc Jacobs has announced that his spring 2009 collection, to be unveiled at September Fashion Week in New York, will be Prairie Style Unisex. (Incidentally, I was making the Marc Jacobs joke even before Tim Gunn debuted his YouTube interview on polygamist style, during which he gives the wives some advice on how to “redefine the Prairie Dress”–he would put “a big wide patent leather belt” on most of them, and switch their footwear to “a cute little ballet flat”–but he was actually impressed by some of the “innovations” the wives have already come up with, including intricate “piping detail” on their collars.)

Okay, Let’s Sing the Solstice Song

The Oprah View of Salvation–“There are many ways to God, and my way may not be your way, but kumbayah”–has now been verified by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (is it my imagination or is the Pew Forum becoming the pollster of choice for every media outlet in America?), which reports that 70 percent of religious Americans agree with the statement, “Many religions can lead to eternal life.” For evangelicals, the figure falls to 57 percent. Since everyone seems determined to talk about this–it’s one of those Won’t Go Away discussions–here’s the important theological distinction. For you, the believer, the injunction is One Way, and the way is narrow. The way is Christ. You don’t get to go to the salad bar. However, there’s a paradox: For you, the believing citizen of the greater world, the injunction is, Say not even in your heart who shall ascend into heaven. Two different things. You. Them. You = The Cross. Them = Love Them and Never Judge Them. The narrow way is for You, no one else. Don’t make me have to explain this again.

Shadrach Was Spared, But the Money Got Burned Up

The Three Hebrew Boys swept through small black churches and military bases in the Carolinas, signing up investors in “secret foreign currency exchanges” that earned anywhere from 200 to 500 percent daily interest. Since an investment like that could quickly become worth millions of dollars, it was a good way to erase your credit card debt, mortgage or car loan–or so the spiel went. You think you know where this is going, right? You only know part of it. Tony Pough, Timothy McQueen and Joseph Brunson, who called themselves the Three Hebrew Boys in homage to Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, were cast into the fiery furnace of the federal grand jury system, which indicted them on 35 counts of mail fraud last week, alleging that they collected $80 million and invested only $40,000 of it, using the rest for the usual assortment of personal luxury items. But here’s the twist: more than a hundred of their investors, including ministers and retired generals, rallied outside the South Carolina Statehouse, calling on investigators to leave them alone, proclaiming their innocence. The feds have seized $17 million and frozen it until trial, which should be good news for the defense bar of South Carolina, not to mention any Old Testament scholars who might be called for expert testimony as to exactly how much Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were supposed to get paid.

Vile Filmmaker, You Are Free to Go

How upside down has the world become when it’s considered enlightened and tolerant for a government to decide not to prosecute someone for making a movie? That was the position of Geert Wilders last week when Dutch prosecutors said his short film I, which maintains that the Koran is full of incitements to violence, is merely “hurtful and painful,” but not egregious enough to be prosecuted as hate speech. The Muslims in the Netherlands were not mollified, by the way, and intend to ask a judge to prosecute Wilders anyway, and possibly extradite him to Jordan, where he’s wanted on hate-speech charges. Seize that man’s digital camcorder before it’s too late.

The Vatican Chooses the Messy Communion

John Bloom — Tue, 8 Jul 2008 22:39:18 -0500

Should the communion wafer be placed directly in your mouth by the priest, or should the priest just hand it to you and let you chomp it? After decades of debate and millions of pages of theological discourse, the Pope has decided to risk cooties by sticking it directly in your mouth. Don’t make us adjudicate this a second time.

Frothing at the Mouth Protected by the First Amendment

The Texas Supreme Court has ruled that exorcisms, no matter how gnarly they get, constitute protected First Amendment speech and you can’t circle back later and say you were battered or abused by the demon-casting process, even if your head spun around several times and caused spinal damage. The test case involved a 17-year-old girl named Laura Schubert who was freed of demonic influence during a marathon session in 1996 at Pleasant Glade Assembly of God in Colleyville, Texas, but later claimed false imprisonment and mental distress leading to the need for professional psychiatric help. The Supreme Court held in a 6-3 decision that, if a church could be sued every time someone gets driven insane by doctrine or practice, then it would have a chilling effect on the willingness of ministers to beat people up for Biblical reasons.

Shifty Shiflett

The Reverend Charles Shiflett, destined to be known as Shifty Shiflett, was pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Culpeper, Virginia, from 1988 to 2005, but that started to unravel when he got charged with cruelty to children, including six (!) assault and battery convictions, at his church-operated school. Last week he was back in court, pleading guilty to 20 fresh felony counts involving his checkbook, including obtaining money by false pretenses from the church, filing a fake workers compensation claim (says he hurt his back “unloading a pony”), insurance fraud and tax fraud, all of which could add up to 310 years in prison and $50,000 in fines, if the district judge is not inclined to mercy. He has until October 8th to round up some character witnesses willing to say his sticky fingers didn’t interfere with his ministry. One of the charges involved his failing to report proceeds from the sale of livestock as income, but the livestock apparently consisted of camels that were maimed by attempts to thrust them through sewing utensils.

Let the Preacherman Preach

The Alliance Defense Fund, the original religious right legal outfit founded by James Dobson and the religious broadcasters in 1993, is searching for a church that’s willing to endorse political candidates from the pulpit so they can get arrested and fined, then challenge the constitutionality of the Internal Revenue code that prohibits churches from getting involved in politics. I support this effort, and predict victory, mainly because free speech should be universal and unrestricted, and you shouldn’t be denied the chance to speak just because you’re a pastor speaking on Sunday morning. Americans United for Separation of Church and State disagrees, saying that charitable contributions should not be used for politics, but that’s more the French model–no religion in the public square–as opposed to the American model of equal access for religion and non-religion in the public square. I know that when my father ran for the school board, he visited virtually every black Baptist church in Pulaski County, Arkansas, most of them during a religious service, to speak specifically about politics, and nobody much cared. They considered voting part of doing the right thing, and doing the right thing part of their religion, and that’s their right. If AUSCS truly believes in mere separation, and not anti-clericalism, then they’ll enforce the rights of the church side just as ardently as they do the rights of the state side.

Don We Now Our Homosexual Apparel

John Bloom — Mon, 7 Jul 2008 21:08:28 -0500

OneNewsNow is the daily news feed of Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association in Tupelo, Mississippi, but since they’re so afraid of the pagan elitist liberal media infecting their news site with anti-Christian thought, they put word filters on the incoming Associated Press stories, so that offensive ones are automatically changed or removed. One of those words is “gay,” which the AFA objects to as promoting homosexuality. But that can result in some strange news reports when the fastest human in the world runs the 100 meters:

That would be the man known to his friends as Tyson Gay.

Jesus Is a No-Show in Florida

Todd Bentley, our favorite biker-dude preacher, currently holding the Revival That Refuses to End in a Lakeland, Florida, RV park, told his audience that Jesus would come down in his chariot in clouds of glory and walk on Todd’s stage on June 8th. But apparently Jesus promised and then didn’t show up, which seems very un-Jesus-like to us. I would imagine that on June 9th Todd was upset, which would explain why he had to kick a man in the stomach to get rid of his stage IV colon cancer.

Mama, Stop Writin’ ‘Bout Us

Apparently that parenting book by Britney Spears’ mom is back on again. Michael Hyatt, the CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, couldn’t wait to get back to the office last week, so he sent out an instant message on his Blackberry: “The Lynne Spears manuscript is totally compelling. I can’t put it down–and I’m not even the market!” What? The head of Thomas Nelson is not the market for white-trash confessionals? I’m stunned.

500 Christians in Jersey Can’t Be Wrong

Of all the things I’ve blogged about these past eight months, my (admittedly snarky) item on the “Envision ‘08" conference at Princeton last month engendered some of the most outraged responses, many of them suggesting I’m an arrogant judgmental Neanderthal. Now the 500 Christian leaders at Princeton have emerged from this convocation with a “Declaration on the Common Good,” in which they talk about this “critical moment in the history of the United States” (without being too specific about why it’s critical), then calling for “the way of Jesus” and defining that way as “struggling for peace, social, economic, and racial justice, and a flourishing creation.” (I thought the way of Jesus meant picking up the Cross, but let’s not quibble.) For this Princeton group, the “new vision of the common good” involves ethnic diversity, elimination of poverty, and saving-the-planet eco stuff, but acknowledges that “we do not have all the answers.” In other words, another position paper that nobody will read, that manages to be even more boring than a United Nations position paper, and has the added disadvantage of being disingenuous. This entire conference was set up as a rebuke of the religious right. Rather than saying that out loud, they pussy-footed around the topic, denied that they represent the religious left, and cut off fellowship with those who also follow “the way of Jesus” but do it as conservatives. Leave it to a summer intern at the Institute on Religion and Democracy to write the most dead-on analysis of the whole event. Nobody who simply transfers the culture wars from the political arena to the religious is helping us find the one way, which, should we need to be reminded, is narrow.

My Breakfast with the Archbishop (and Lunch, and Dinner)

John Bloom — Tue, 1 Jul 2008 22:13:04 -0500

The Archbishop of Canterbury was not pleased when several Anglican bishops convened in Jerusalem without him, then announced that they would create a “church within a church” that will do their own training of ministers, because they don’t think that the wimpy leaders in Europe and America are theologically rigorous enough. This is just an extension of the simmering feud between the Gay Priest Faction–which hates it when you call them the Gay Priest Faction–and those who don’t trust any Church of England theologian born after the year 1832. One of the first people to condemn the conservative bishops was Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the United States, who called the statements out of Jerusalem an “emission” from an elite who consider themselves “the only true believers.” I really don’t think that can be the case, though, having recently met one of the ringleaders, Peter J. Akinola, who was seated next to me for three–count ‘em, three!–heavy Austrian meals during a conference in Vienna. And it takes a long time to eat an Austrian meal. Akinola is Archbishop of Nigeria and chairman of the Global South Anglican Communion, and he’s obviously a working-class guy, earthy and direct, really the opposite of elitist. (The formalistic pronouncements of Jefferts Schori, come to think of it, sound elitist in a prep school sort of way.) But anyway, I had several conversations with the archbishop during the Vienna Forum, which was held in a cool white tent on the manicured grounds of Castle Neuwaldegg. And this is gonna be hard to explain, but the conference was held under the protection of what are called “Chatham House rules,” meaning that no one is allowed to be quoted, in the hope that this will engender vigorous uncensored debate. So there was vigorous debate, and it was uncensored, and so I can’t quote anything Archbishop Akinola said to me. However, I do think I can quote what he repeated every time he would get excited. He would tell the story of something he didn’t like, and at the end of each story, his voice would rise and he would say, with exasperation, “Where was the church?” Sometimes he would say it twice: “Where was the church? WHERE WAS THE CHURCH?” These conservative bishops don’t think they’re taking over a denomination. They think the captains abandoned the ships long ago.

Adam to God: She Just Won’t Listen!

Okay, I’m gonna drop some bloody red meat into shark-infested waters here. I’ll just give you people the headline and you can take it from there: “Southern Baptist Scholar Links Spouse Abuse to Wives’ Refusal to Submit to Their Husbands.” The original comments are from Bruce Ware, Professor of Christian Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, who gave this sermon at the notoriously fundamentalist Denton Bible Church in Denton, Texas, where pastor Tom Nelson has been relentlessly assembling a literalist rulebook for years. The above headline is on an article by Bob Allen, Managing Editor at EthicsDaily.com. But here’s the best part: Bruce, Bob and Tom are all basically in agreement that if the broads would just shut up and do as they’re told, they wouldn’t get beaten up so often. (Biblical citations are plentiful.) And, after all, who can argue with that?

What a Country!

This Friday night, direct from the pentecostal heartland (Springfield, Missouri), comes the “I Love America Celebration,” which has been claiming upwards of 100,000 attendees in recent years after starting out as a small gathering of James River Assembly of God Church in Ozark, Missouri, in 1997. Something called GOD TV (we’re not making that up) will be broadcasting over the Internet this super-patriotic blending of America and Christ that will feature an orchestra outfitted with 76 trombones (uh, wasn’t that a lie told by Robert Preston in The Music Man?), then an air show, a salute to the military, and the Pledge of Allegiance led by Missouri Governor Matt Blunt, who’s always sniffing after that pentecostal voting bloc. We were planning to stop by, but how can you be that close to Branson, Missouri, and not stop in to see the newest sold-out act, The Twelve Irish Tenors, eclipsing the records set last year by Noah the Musical?--although those statistics are a little bit like apples and oranges, since our all-time favorite Branson performer, Yakov Smirnoff, is taking the week off.

Sanjay Gupta Is Too Damn Cheerful

Dr. Sanjay Gupta–and, by the way, is he on every television news show on every network, at least seven times a day?–Dr. Sanjay Gupta says that religious faith can cut down on heart disease and infections, but the verdict is still out on cancer. There’s a chicken-and-egg problem here, though. Are religious people healthier because they believe? Or are healthier people more likely to be religious? Dr. Gupta thinks that maybe religious people are healthier because they’re “more optimistic,” and optimistic people take better care of themselves. What about us Negative Christians, though? What if you’re religious, but really really grumpy, like everyone at the Door? What if you’re so grumpy that you get mad when people say you’re religious? What if you occasionally use the f-word in the middle of Bible study? Do you have more heart attacks? And what about the Christian Scientists? Shouldn’t they be living to at least 300 years old by now? Just wondering.