I talk with New York Times columnist David French about how he got canceled by his own church—see his Times column about that. We also talk about the growing problem of partisanship and intolerance in conservative institutions, the crisis of American Christianity, and the reasonable “center” that we need to hold together.
You can view the video of this conversation here.
The Mote and the Beam
We spend part of this conversation talking about various sex scandals within the church, and referring to it as a crisis. Here’s what I mean by that.
If were a more bitter and militant atheist, I could run a whole blog cataloguing one horrific example after another. David mentions Ravi Zacharias, but I was thinking about Paul Pressler, the architect of a conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention who it turns out was abusing his power to make homosexual advances on young men.
I also recently saw the news about one of the Trump’s so-called “spiritual advisors,” a megachurch pastor who confessed to having an affair and being forgiven for it by the church—but now it has been revealed that his victim was 12 years old.
Remember that the right has been spinning QAnon fantasies about left-wing politics being a cover for the sexual abuse of children—yet a steady drumbeat of these stories keeps coming out about conservative Christians. Another Southern Baptist Convention conservative was just arrested “after an investigation revealed that he allegedly used cryptocurrency to purchase child sex abuse material.”
As they’ve been saying online: Somehow, it’s never a drag queen.
Then there’s the Republican State Representative in Michigan arrested “after alleged altercation with a stripper involving a firearm.”
Meanwhile conservative Christian are very eager to protect themselves from this:
With glowing performance reviews and above-average student evaluations, by most measures Matthew Warner’s first year as a communications professor at Grace College was a triumph.
But he spent most of that first year knowing it could be his last. After four months on the job, Warner was informed by the school’s president, Drew Flamm, that the board had “come to the conclusion that we don’t think it works out to move forward,” according to a recording obtained by Religion News Service.
Warner’s termination is the latest in a string of professor terminations at Christian colleges seemingly tied to clashes over narrowing and often unspoken political and theological criteria. While Flamm didn’t specify the reasons for Warner’s dismissal, it was preceded by an online termination campaign clear about its goals. Launched by conservative influencers and Grace College stakeholders, the campaign demanded Warner’s removal due to his social media posts about LGBTQ rights, Black Lives Matter, and critiques of the GOP.
This is exactly what I mean by “conservative cancel culture.” It’s the exact process conservatives have complained about when it comes from the left, but used in their own institutions to impose their own orthodoxy.
In our conversation above, we spend a little time trading Bible verses. I think perhaps conservative Christians ought to give more thought to Matthew 7:3: “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”
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