Democrats May Be Seeing Pathways to Victory in Unconventional Ways

I'm not a professional political analyst by any means, though I do consider myself well informed and perhaps with a little bit of an edge after having spent so much time as a social studies teacher specific to American History and Civics.  I do a lot of reading, from a variety of sources outside the scope of the mainstream media, which is really where the American free press exists these days.  

I watched the Democratic Senate primary in Maine pretty closely, mainly because I find Graham Platner to be the kind of candidate exactly suited to help Democrats win what I see as an overwhelming victory in the coming Mid-term elections.  He's not a party-liner, nor is he a traditional or typical candidate by any stretch of the imagination.  He's going to win.  His opponent, Senator Susan Collins, is going to lose because she typifies the kind of Republican that most voters will be voting against in November, lacking anything of substance to offer and lacking any real commitment to convictions.  But he is going to win because he does have something to offer that is attracting a lot of voters who might not participate in a moribund election otherwise.  

The Republicans, and most notably Trump himself, have made the kind of slurs and attacks on Platner's character meaningless.  I mean seriously, why should Democrats bother with a few verbal comments, emails and a tatoo when Republicans have ignored far worse than that in almost all of their major candidates and cabinet posts?  They're the ones who have made these kinds of choices, which clearly are not representative of the candidate's character by the way, irrelevant and meaningless.  This is the politics of the current hour, people, and it is stupid, and yes I will use that word in the full context of its meaning, to try and bring down the strongest Democratic candidate running for the Senate in Maine over a few long since past mistakes that are not only meaningless, but about which the other side has clearly demonstrated they don't give a damn.  

I'm pleased to take note of the fact that whoever thought this might amount to something got kicked in the teeth by the primary vote supporting Platner.  Honestly, whoever was responsible for that made him an even more viable candidate.  He's a man of the people, and the way he is approaching this campaign is a gigantic threat to the billionaire establishment that runs the country now. People who are opposed to that saw this for what it was, and they turned out and gave him a win that went way beyond what pollsters were predicting.  

The Republicans introduced politics that sometimes kicks people in the teeth.  It's time the Democrats stepped up and started knocking out some teeth themselves, instead of mamby-pamby old school stupidity. 

I'm also watching Texas, and Senate candidate James Talarico with close interest.  While the pollsters who claim to be genuinely credible and accurate keep finding Talarico leading this race by anywhere from three to five points, and keep finding that his core constituents are planning on turning out in the same kind of record numbers they did during the primaries, the old heads, like the Cook Political Report, just don't want to change their position.  

What I think is fascinating about Talarico is that he has exposed conservative Evangelicalism for the pseudo-Christian cult that it is.  The biblical values that establish the Christian gospel, revealed by Jesus in the words recorded by the gospel writers are not the kind of Christian example people see in the hard line racism and exclusion exhibited by conservative Evangelicals in the blend of right wing extremism with their fundamentalist religious perspective.  There is no consistency between their claims to Biblical fidelity and the politics and politicians they support.  

And Talarico can't be attacked on traditional Democratic party platform support.  They've tried, but he has a perspective that is consistent with his Christian faith and practice, one that allows for complete individual freedom on the social issues Republicans want to use to control people's lives.  And that frustrates the conservative Evangelicals to no end, because it exposes their hypocrisy.  

These candidates are walking their own path, staking out their own campaign and carving out unique positions that don't always square up with the party line at the moribund DNC.  What I really like is that the old line politicos there have to support these guys whether they like them or not, because they need the seats and they want the win.  They should have paid a little more attention to David Hogg.  

I'm observing trends, looking at the numbers and reading things from "on the ground."  Texas still has a cluster of independent, weekly newspapers scattered throughout small towns that reflect local thinking and local life, and ignore evertything else as irrelevant.  There's a lot of support for Talarico among those editors, and among those who still express their opinion by writing letters to the editor.  A lot of those people loved Cornyn and hate Paxton.  There's no D or R on a Texas voter registration card, either, and that means a lot of independents can show their preference in the primaries.  The fact that Democrats doubled the Republican turnout this time around indicates to me that Talarico is on his way to a firm win.  

I think the Democratic primary turnout and vote tally in Maine confirmed Platner's ability to win this senate seat by a ten point margin, if trends continue.  I think his ability to get out of the party mode and be his own candidate, flaws and all, is exactly what is so appealing and attractive to voters in Maine, who aren't urban Democrats by any means.  

Ultimately, I think this is a lesson for the whole Democratic party.  We need more than just a cordial debate, which isn't an effective strategy at all against someone we claim is an existential threat to American democracy.  Our party's lack of bold risk taking cost us the chance to make sure he never got back into the White House, because there was too much interest in personal nest-feathering, and not enough collective boldness.  There are so many things we had the power to do, right there in our hands, including court reform leading to overturning citizens united and the ridiculous immunity ruling of the Supreme Court, and saving Roe.  But we let foot dragging and obfuscation get in the way and we didn't push because it would have looked "too political."  

Well, it's damned political, and there isn't anything we can do about it except stop this bastard.  That's the bottom line.  With candidates like Talarico and Platner, we have a fighting chance.

 

Lies, Lies and More Lies; Talarico's Church Pushes Back Against False Accusations

Baptist News Global: Talarico's Pastor Pushes Back Against Daily Wire's Claims 

Whatever there is to be known about the Daily Wire, and it's not really all that much, Ben Shapiro is good at something.  He's good at playing on people's prejudices and biases, and if he tries to confirm something, there's a 100% chance it is a misconception or an outright lie.  The fact that it depends on social media to spin its misinformation underlines the fact that it isn't credible news or information or commentary.  

So when they attacked St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas, the church where Texas Democratic nominee for the US Senate James Talarico is a member, the information they put out was clearly innuendo that counted on ignorance of the church, the denomination, and lacked proof or evidence of anything in the accusations.  The article, written by Lief LeMahieu, made a list of standard, tired, inaccurate accusations.  

And it got a response from the church's pastor, who compared it to the silly ignorance that spread around when false accusations were made about public schools doing sex change operations and putting litter boxes around for kids who identified as feline.  What amazed me about all of that idiocy, when it was being spread, was that people were actually stupid enough to believe it.  I am also amazed when people are stupid enough to believe anything in the Daily Wire, or that Lief LeMahieu or Ben Shapiro has to say.  

The Accusation that St. Andrews is a "Woke Church" is Accurate

The whole idea of Christian redemption, which relies on things like repentance, grace, loving God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and loving your neighbor as yourself is the very definition of "woke."  In spite of the right wing use of the term as one of derision, what is now defined as "being woke" is exactly the kind of spiritual awakening that is at the very core of being Christian.  It is, in fact, not possible to be Christian with any genuine sincerity of repentance that is exactly what being woke means.  And when the Daily Wire accuses St. Andrews of being a "woke church," it is stating the very obvious fact that St. Andrews is a genuinely and sincerely Christian church.  

So thanks for that. 

Anchoring Christianity on the Actual Teachings of Jesus

Jim Rigby, senior pastor at St. Andrews, gave an outstanding summary of exactly what has happened to American Christianity as a result of right wing political extremism when he said, "Now anyone may be called a heretic if they presume to anchor Christianity on the actual teachings of Jesus instead of the rantings of televangelists and political moralizers."  

The primary, foundational core belief of Christianity is rooted in Jesus' declaration that the first and greatest commandment, leading directly to redemption and eternal life, is "to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.  And the second is like it, to love your neighbor as yourself."  That's found in Mark 12 and in Luke 10.  Matthew, who records the primary, core teachings of Jesus in one segment, known as the Sermon on the Mount, starts off with a list of the core values of Christian faith, in the Beatitudes.  

It's the legalistic, literalist interpretation of specific select passages from the Bible, missing the required filter of interpretation through the teachings of Jesus Christ, that forms the foundation of the highly politicized version of Evangelical Fundamentalism that is the real heresy.  In his parable of the Good Samaritan, in which Jesus defined the term "neighbor" for the lawyer who asked the question, he deliberately chooses a man whose ethnicity was despised and hated by those to whom he was speaking, to exemplify the characteristics he was defining.  What that means is that "neighbor" is anyone with whom we come in contact.  It is all of humanity, without qualification.

So how does this parable apply today?  Would the Levite and the Priest represent the conservative Evangelical, who wouldn't help the person wounded from being robbed if they were gay or atheist, or Muslim?  Or black, or a woman?  Or would the wounded man represent the conservative Evangelical, and the Samaritan be of some social group or ethnicity he despised, such as someone who was gay or lesbian, or a Muslim, or a black man?  The analogy here would work in any of those cases.  

Let's Put This in a Clear Perspective

If right wing extremists want to make James Talarico's faith, and the church where he worships, a political issue, then so be it.  Look who he's running against.  His opponent fits the defintion of "an ungodly person who perverts the grace of our God into a license for immorality" as the Apostle Jude defines in his epistle, verse 4.  If that is the issue that is being pushed, and those are the standards that are being used, then no sincere, faithful Christian can cast a vote for Ken Paxton without completely violating the core principles of Christianity.  

And I think that's as clear as it gets. 

Attempts by Southern Baptists to Amend Their Constitution to Exclude Women Pastors Isn't Rooted in Historical, Traditional or Biblical Christianity

It's rooted in the unorthodox, distorted theology and doctrine that emerges from the combination of nineteenth century fundamentalism with the distorted interpretation of the sixty-six books of the Protestant Bible subjected to the doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy.  It is complicated further by the push of Evangelical conservatives into right wing politics as a result of the pressures that come from white Christian nationalism creeping into the churches. 

There's a power vacuum among Southern Baptists now, more than forty years after a movement tagged as the "Conservative Resurgence" was launched in 1979 with the dual purpose of bringing the denomination into full support of right wing Republican politics, using the theological and doctrinal claim that it was sliding down the "slippery slope" of liberalism, requiring restoration of the belief in the sixty-six books of the Protestant Bible as inerrant, and infallible, the sole authority for the faith and practice of the church.  

The two men who used their personal connections, power and influence to orchestrate the political activity in order to bring about this resurgence, Dr. Paige Patterson, then president of broken down Criswell College, a fundamentalist school operated by First Baptist Church of Dallas, where the power-broker pastor W. A. Criswell still occupied the pulpit, and Paul Pressler, a Texas Appeals Court Justice and Republican Party community organizer and operative, revered among Southern Baptists as the "architects" of this movement, are both out of the picture, disgraced by their own involvement in the sexual abuse scandal that the denomination's leadership can't seem to resolve.  

Patterson was involved in the negligent mishandling of abuse and rape accusations at both Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina and at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, under his presidency at both schools.  He was ultimately dismissed from Southwestern for this reason, and not for his gross mismanagement of the seminary, leading to an almost 70% decline in enrollment and financial resources.  Pressler passed away two years ago, after charges of sexually abusing young men in the churches where he served as a youth pastor and Sunday school teacher, and in association with his law firm.  You can click this link to Baptist News Global to read about all of that scandal. 

Will Persistence Pay Off? 

This is the third time an attempt to amend the constitution with this specific requirement has been attempted.  The first time it was introduced, by Virginia pastor Mike Law, is was approved, but it failed to get the two thirds vote it needed at the subsequent convention.  The following year, a Texas pastor, Juan Sanchez, introduced it again, but it failed to get the required two thirds vote to be brought back the following year.  So this year, Dr. Al Mohler, noted Southern Baptist pontificator, commenter, influencer and President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, made the recommendation to place the amendment in the constitution.  

Mohler's motion to amend the constitution passed 6,028 to 2,026, just under a three to one vote.  It should be noted that 11,692 messengers were registered for the convention which means that when this vote, billed as the most important thing the convention was doing  this year, was taken, 3,638 messengers did not cast a ballot.  However, under the SBC's parliamentary rules, non-voters do not count in the total.  Having almost a third of the messengers not vote on an issue isn't all that unusual at an SBC meeting, especially not in Orlando, where this denomination has now met four times since boycotting Disney.  

Complimentarianism, the name given by conservatives to the ideology which claims that the Apostle Paul laid down authoritative comments restricting women from preaching or serving as a pastor, the "episkopos", bishop or elder as the Greek term in I Timothy 3 would suggest, runs very strong among Southern Baptists.  That is due largely to the anti-educational bias that infected the formation of hundreds of Baptist churches along the western frontier, and in the south, due to a lack of educated, seminary trained pastors and leaders mostly as the result of the Second Great Awakening, a movement that produced as many cults as it did new Christians, by the way.  

There is also a whole lot of what I can generally call "Southern American culture" that is part of this errant theological perspective, stemming from the same kind of faulty, literalist, "word for word, verse by verse" interpretation of the Bible that convinced Southern Baptists to separate from the Triennial Convention in 1845, in full support of the belief that the black man was inferior to the white man, and that this belief was an unassailable truth, in the words of Andrew Stephens.  That same literalist, fundamentalist approach, treating every verse separately as its own command and nugget of truth is exactly what has produced complimentarianism.  

Baptist churches, unlike most of the other branches of Christianity that have developed over the 2000 year history of the church, are independent and autonomous.  Each one is a local body, with no formal or ecclesiastical connection to any hierarchy, so a church is the highest level of authority when it comes to interpreting and applying scripture, the church determines its own leadership, including who will serve as its pastor, and ordination of ministers is determined by the leadership and congregation of the local church alone.  When the churches in the Southern states formed their own denomination in 1845, they separated not only from cooperation with other Baptists, but also from the colleges, universities and seminaries where ministers were educated.  

I'll say it here, because it's true.  It's not possible to understand the Christian gospel revealed by God through Jesus, if all that's available is a King James Bible and a man with a 6th grade education who has been taught to read, and interprets it literally, verse by verse.  It's a disadvantage to start Bible study without even a basic understanding that verses and chapters are reference points and not the outline of the original text.  

The Bible is Not Equally "Inspired" 

The statements of faith adopted by the Southern Baptist Convention over the course of its history reflect influence and change when it comes to specific theological issues.  In the 1963 Baptist Faith and Message, under the section which defines the denomination's belief regarding the sixty-six books of the Protestant Bible, the last line very clearly states, "The criterion by which the Bible is to be interpreted is Jesus Christ."  

While much of that paragraph states beliefs that have been determined by common agreement, this last statement is the key to any hope of achieving an accurate interpretation of the Bible, if such is actually possible from a 2000 plus year old text that has been undeniably filtered by, influenced by and altered by culture.  Christians ultimately concluded that Jesus Christ was both fully human, and fully divine, the incarnate word in the flesh, a direct and thorough revelation of the nature of God himself.   This doctrine, called the Supremacy of Christ, establishes the words and the life work of Jesus as the Christian gospel.  So everything else must be interpreted through the filter of that belief, and all of the implications involved.  

So it's not possible to consider the works of the Apostles, or the Prophets, or any other Biblical authors as being equally inspired and equally authoritative with the words of Jesus, even if we're at the point of acknowledging that what we read in our modern English translations is a relatively accurate rendering of the original manuscripts in ancient Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic.  

Much of the basis of the Christian nationalism we see among Evangelical conservatives is based on Old Testament theocracy, and the old covenant which God made with Israel, through patriarchal heritage.  However, if Christians believe that Jesus is the criterion by which all scripture is to be interpreted, he makes a comprehensive statement in the Sermon on the Mount which puts the perspective of the Old Covenant in its place.  He declares an end to it, in Matthew 5:17.  

"Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have not come to abolish, but to fulfill."  

And how did Jesus fulfill both of these things?  

He did not establish a theocratic kingdom with himself as the political and spiritual head.  He separated the spiritual kingdom from the literal kingdom, giving the spiritual kingdom a much different identity and purpose.  Declaring the old covenant, and the prophets, fulfilled, Jesus taught a salvation that involves acceptance of his sacrifice on the cross as the penalty for violating the law, to which obedience once represented the same kind of salvation.  And he established a spiritual kingdom, the Christian Church, which transcends the political authority of a theocratic state, and repreents an accessible kingdom made up of those who are spiritually redeemed from sin.  

The Christian gospel is simple, not complicated.  It is founded on the principles and values taught by Jesus.  If you want a quick and easy to understand look at exactly what that involves, the gospel writer Matthew recorded what is known as the "Sermon on the Mount" in Chapters 5, 6 and 7, starting off with the Beatitudes.  I've actually been a member of two churches which understood this as the foundation of Christian faith and practiced, and which actually worked because there wasn't some kind of ulterior motive to control or to use faith as a means of wielding some kind of power.  

I'll Cut to the Chase

Constructing theological systems like complimentarianism, and then putting it up against egalitarianism, is an attempt to gain power for the purpose of control.  It's simply fallling for the third temptation of Jesus, when he was offered rule of the world in exchange for his loyalty.  Many of the older Southern Baptist congregations hold on to some of the last vestiges of antebellum Southern culture, remnant social order of the old Confederacy, and, seeing what they label as "militant feminism" as a threat to that culture, they've tried to package it as satanic evil influence, and use the churches they control to fight against it.  

Jesus, however, wasn't concerned with the social order.  He was concerned with revealing the nature and character of God to humankind.  That concern is characterized when he asked a young lawyer to look at the law, which he fulfilled, and tell him what it said.

"Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength," responded the lawyer, "and love your neighbor as you love yourself."  

"You have answered correctly, Jesus replied.  "Do this and you will live."  [Luke 10:27-28, NIV]

And without a debate on complimentarianism, or on the purpose of the law, that was it.  

Right Wing Politics Are a Heavy Influence in Southern Baptist Convention Vote to Include a Ban on Women Pastors in Their Constitution

Over the course of the past three years, the messengers from the churches to the Southern Baptist Convention have defeated attempts to place a restrictive ban on women serving as pastors in its affiliated churches, though the denomination's statement of faith, the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, has allowed its credentials committee to sever ties to several churches considered to be in volation of this provision.  The difference between this being a committee decision, as opposed to being included in the constitution and bylaws of the denomination is that doing the latter would automatically exclude any church which has, on its staff, a female in the role of a pastor who interprets scripture, teaches, or preaches to the church.  

In order to be included in the Constitution, the amendment must pass with a two-thirds majority of the messengers in favor of it at two subsequence convention annual meetings.  Mike Law, a Virginia pastor, introduced an amendment three years ago, which passed the first convention, but which failed to get the two thirds approval at the subsequent meeting to be included in the constitution.  Juan Sanchez, a Texas pastor, introduced a similar proposal at the following convention meeting, but it, too, failed to get the two thirds majority required to advance.  It should be noted that this proposal has been supported by the majority of messengers in attendance, but not enough support has carried it to the two-thirds threshold.  

This proposal, made by one of the denomination's self-appointed inner circle, Al Mohler, President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, got 75% of the messenger's votes at a convention being held in Orlando, attended by a relatively small number of messengers, just over 11,000.  It's been convention meetings with higher attendance where the two-thirds threshold has been more difficult to meet.  

Implications of This Vote Against the Backdrop of the Denomination's Failure to Effectively Deal With a Significant Sexual Abuse Crisis Among Its Clergy

Many messengers were shocked by revelations of significant sexual abuse allegations against church pastors and vocational ministers, including some of its missions personnel and high ranking committee members and trustees, which came out after an expose by the Houston Chronicle in 2019.  Many of those who heard the allegations demanded immediate action, and took the responsibility for doing something about it out of the hands of its moribund Executive Committee, placing it with independent investigators.  

What resulted, however, was a disgraceful display of antagonism toward the victims, and sympathy for the abusers.  Ultimately, in spite of messenger directives, the bureaucrats failed to do anything at all to resolve the crisis, and got away with the inaction as interest died down.  The fact that a so-called Christian denomination not only took no meaningful action to prevent further abuse, but also did not reach out to provide any kind of ministry to the victims, and treated them as if it was their fault, is a disgraceful testimony to the huge gap which exists between the presence of the Spirit of God and the Southern Baptist Convention.  

"Ichabod" is written over the door of the Southern Baptist Convention as a result of their handling of this crisis. 

The anti-woman stance of this denomination is clearly present in their way of handling this issue.  Many of those who attacked victims claimed that they were evil, intent on ruining the ministry of many "good" men.  This is an attitude and a culture that emerges from being completely misinformed theologically and doctrinally.  The inherent belief is that women are inferior to men, in spite of scripture which clearly teaches otherwise.  And this comes directly out of the fundamentalist theology that is now widely accepted among Southern Baptists, based on the belief that the whole of the 66 books of the Protestant Bible are equally inspired and equally authoritative because it is inerrant and infallible in its original autographs.  

So what is known as the doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy, a fundamentalist invention out of 19th century ignorance, codified by the Southern Baptist Convention in its doctrinal statement known as the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 is the underlying support for the second-class treatment women get in the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention, enforced by ecclesiastical authority of a denomination that goes against the foundational beliefs expressed in the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Equating the Old Testament covenant with the Gospel is a grave theological error that distorts Christianity, and leads to beliefs and practices that are completely out of line with what Jesus revealed.  

Christian Nationalism is the Vehicle Which Helps This Backward-Looking False Theology Work Its Way Into Right Wing Politics

White supremacy, the subservience of people of dark colored skin, goes hand in hand with the subjugation and inferior status of women.  It's this same fundamentalism, based on the literal interpretation of scripture that is not equally inspired, nor complete in its prophetic revelation, from which the idea that white Europeans have been destined by God to rule the world and were gifted with the resources of the untouched North American continent in order to do so.  

On the surface, the SBC has had to accept the presence of blacks in pastoral ministry, in leadership, as members of trustee boards and committees, though not nearly in the percentages of numbers that actually exist within the denomination.  But they've been able to hold down the rise of women in leadership, and claim literal interpretations of verses taken out of context in support.  There are actually just three specific references in the New Testament to which these people refer in order to claim that "the Bible" instructs churches against the practice of calling women to be pastors, the "episkopos" as described in I Timothy 3:1.  

One of the long time, defacto leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, the now deceased Paul Pressler, considered one of the two "architects of the Conservtative Resurgence," took on the responsibility of linking the denomination to Republican partisan politics.  If there was any doubt at all as to the real intention of this movement, disguised as "theological reform" when it started in 1979, Pressler's work, and the place where the denomination has ended up, has removed it.  While his partner, Paige Patterson, began working to make sure trustees of the six theological seminaries were hard line fundamentalists, who removed good, solid professors, replacing them with like minded Bible college flunkies, Pressler, a former Texas Appeals Court Justice and a Republican party inner-circle operative, used his executive committee influence to make the SBC a right wing political action committee.  

Pressler is a good example of how this denomination is willing to ignore the principles of the Christian gospel in order to gain the political power and leverage it wants.  This "architect of the Conservative resurgence" and long term unelected influence and leader in the SBC had a record of grooming teenaged boys under his influence, some from a church where he served as a youth pastor, others from contact with him through his law practice, and sexually abusing them.  This was known by his church, First Baptist Church of Houston, Texas, after a letter from their leadership surfaced, removing him from his positions in the church and warning that if word of his sexual abuse got out, it could potentially destroy the cause, which they obviously valued over doing the right thing.  

Isn't that a familiar sounding theme among conservative politics these days.  

 The Importance of Understanding How This Religious-Political Connection Works

I think it is vitally important for those who are working hard to oppose the fascist dictatorial tendencies of the sitting President to understand exactly how right wing conservative Evangelicalism works.  Undermining this pseudo-Christian cult is a solid strategy in providing the kind of opposition necessary to prevent further damage and to motivate voters to get to the polls and make sure anything and anyone associated with Trump is defeated.  

There are those who think it is futile to try and provide a reasonable argument for people to get out of this right wing religious-political mess, but I disagree.  In the decade since Trump first ran for the Presidency, the Southern Baptist Convention has lost just over four million members, 25% of what it had in 2016, and has seen a 30% decline in the weekly attendance at its affiliated churches.  Something is causing this massive exodus, and it is sure not the weak excuses being offered by its apologists.  I tend to think that the sincere Christians among their ranks, those with a deep understanding of scripture, and Christian history, and the ability to discern the cultural and historical contexts of Christian faith and practice are deciding to get as far away from an apoostacy 

There is, in fact, a growing group of podcasters and bloggers who are pointing out the grave theological errors of the SBC and their impact, and are showing people how it is possible to be a practicing Christian and an American Patriot and a Democrat at the same time, three representations of religious and political identity that are fully compatible with each other.  

 

 

On the Eve of the Southern Baptist Convention, the Waning Power of Evangelical Conservatives Shows Itself

For a group that has been vocal about its disapproval of Disney, and has passed resolutions encouraging its members to boycott Disney parks, the Southern Baptist Convention is meeting in Orlando, Florida, with the convention itself opening tomorrow in a convention hall owned by Disney.  This annual meeting, like others that have been held in Orlando, will draw approximately 20,000 delegates known as "messengers" from the denomination's 45,000 churches.  Southern Baptists first met in Orlando in 1994, then again in 2000 when they adopted the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, then again 10 years later in 2010, and planned to meet there in 2020, but no meeting was held because of COVID.  So this 2026 meeting will be the fourth one in the Disney paradise in about three decades. 

Southern Baptists Will Ignore the Sexual Abuse Problem Among Its Pastors and Church Leaders

The moribund bureaucracy of the Southern Baptist Convention has failed, over the past five or six years, to follow directives given from the floor of the convention by the messengers to find ways to deal with the sexual abuse problem that exists among its pastors, church staff and missions personnel.  The problem is larger than was originally exposed by the Abuse of Faith  series in the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express News in 2019.  

One good thing that happened, when an independent investigator was hired, was the resignation of a number of executive committee members who were upset about not being able to control and strong-arm the investigation.  Some baggage that needed to be shed was gone as a result of that.  But when it has come to really essential things that needed to be done as a result of the manner in which this scandal was handled by SBC bureaucrats, including actually giving the appearance of being Christian when it came to the known victims of abuse, nothing has happened.  Victims, in fact, have been further victimized by the harsh and unforgiving manner reflected by the convention's national leadership. 

The bureaucrats have, in fact, hidden behind what they claim is a core doctrinal principle of the Southern Baptist Convention and the way it is structured as a denomination, and that is the independence and autonomy of the local church.  Churches affiliated with the SBC are independent and autonomous, according to the polity that has developed among Baptists, therefore, the denomination cannot assume a measure of ecclesiastical authority to put measures in place which prevent sexual predator pastors and church staff from moving to another church.  And they can't seem to find a way to establish a database that will provide churches with a list of adjudicated offenders.  

So, in spite of demands from messengers that the convention bureaucrats do something about this problem, very little has been done, none of it effective in helping curb this problem.  "It's a local church issue," say the bureaucrats.  

But, Let a Woman Be Called to Serve a Church as Pastor, and the Independence and Autonomy of the Local Church Gets Thrown Out the Window

Messengers to this year's Southern Baptist Convention will be voting on a third proposal to change the denomination's constitution to disfellowship, a.k.a. "kick out," churches which have a female pastor, either as a senior pastor preaching from the pulpit, or on their staff in a role with the title "pastor" defining their duties.  This is a blatant violation of the independence and autonomy of the local church, which, according to the Biblical interpretation of church polity Baptists have held for centuries, is not consistent scripturally.  

So they won't interfere by helping churches avoid calling a sexual predator with a criminal record as their pastor, but they will tell their churches to hit the exit door if they decide to call a woman to serve as a pastor.  It can't be possible to demonstrate more hypocrisy than this.  

So far, they have tossed a few churches, including the largest and most evangelistic Baptist church in the denomination, Saddleback Valley Community Church in Mission Viejo, California, out the door for having women in a pastoral role where they were teaching and preaching to the congregation.  Other churches joined with those being kicked out by stopping their contributions to the denomination's Cooperative Program, and also hitting the exit door.  No church has been coerced into changing their polity and complying with the ruling which, if the amendment passes two consecutive conventions with a two-thirds majority, will result in the dismissal of any church deemed not to be in friendly cooperation because they have a female in a pastoral ministry role.  

But this denomination has yet to come out and act like they care about the thousands of sexual abuse victims who have suffered at the hands of one of their pastors or church leaders.  The general attitude has been that the women who are victims of the abuse are some kind of destroyer of a good pastor's ministry, tools of the devil aimed at bringing good, godly men down.  There are even those who claim that this is simply the result of the creeping influence of radical feminism into "western culture," aimed at disrupting the work of good, godly people.  

Well, don't act too surprised.  This is a denomination founded on the false, unbiblical and inherently evil belief that slavery was justified by white supremacy.  It took them 150 years to refute that grave error and apologize for their mistake.  So it might be a while before they admit their error on this one, too.  

Still No Admission or Acknowledgement of Fallen, Failed Leadership

The Southern Baptist Convention's messengers, gathered at a convention in 1979, made a decided turn to the right, out of conservative Evangelicalism and into a much more fundamentalist approach.  The movement, known as the "Conservative Resurgence," took a decade to stack the trustee boards and committees with fundamentalists before removing seminary professors, missionaries and denominational employees who did not adhere to the strict doctrinal guidelines that included required acceptance of the fundamentalist version of the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy.  

The two men who led this movement became ultimately powerful in the denomination,  Paige Patterson, who had been the President of run-down Criswell College in Dallas, got himself hired as the president of two of the six SBC seminaries, where his authoritarian style leadership put him in position to call all the shots.  He was the theologian-in-chief of the resurgence movement.  Paul Pressler, a Texas Appeals Court justice, was the leader with the designated role of bringing the denomination into secular politics on the side of the Republican party.  

Pressler saw to it that any denominational employees who didn't tow the political line got the boot.  He was especially effective in getting the Baptist Press made into a right wing political propaganda organization.  Patterson named individuals for trustee board appointments and then began the process of getting rid of professors who weren't hard line fundamentalists.  While neither individual was actually elected to their position, the power they were given by those who were was virtually unlimited and they ran the denomination for 20 years.  

But there were problems.  Patterson, in his role as seminary president, mishandled multiple reports of rape and sexual assault on both of the seminary campuses, moving to protect perpetrators by encouraging female victims not to report to law enforcement but let the seminary handle their claim.  Pressler, as it turned out, had a long history of grooming young men and then luring them into physical encounters.  It started when he was a youth minister in an independent church in Houston.  He had settled abuse charges out of court, but ultimately, lawsuits revealed what had been going on for a while. 

The Southern Baptist church in Houston where he was a member was aware of the litigation against him, and the accusations, and actually sent a letter to him notifying him that he was dismissed from all church offices he held, and that he needed to be careful to avoid any further activity, because if word got out, it could ruin the cause for which he was an advocate.  They preferred to let him continue to be one of the two conservative resurgence leaders, a totally hypocritical move given their stance on homosexual behavior, and keep the secret.  

So far, in spite of all that has been revealed, the convention's messengers haven't taken any steps to separate themselves from these two men, or to distance the convention from their actions.  They've been removed from positions of influence.  Patterson was fired from Southwestern, following revelations of what had been done there.  Pressler eventually rotated off the executive committee, and then off the last trustee board to which he had been appointed, and as the litigation against him by his victims increased, he faded out of sight.  Perhaps the rule about speaking ill of the dead now applies, but the silence of Southern Baptists, and their refusal to acknowledge the damage each has done speaks volumes to the lack of integrity in this denomination. 

An Evangelical Denomination Getting It's Priorities Straight

The Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting will take place in Orlando, Florida on June 8-9.  This denomination, considered the largest of American Evangelical and Protestant groups, with approximately 12.2 million members in 45,000 churches nationwide, has been dealing unsuccessfully with growing revelations of a clergy sexual abuse scandal that has been going on among its churches for quite some time.  The scandal, exposed by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express News in an expose called "Abuse of Faith" published in 2019, reached into the denomination's highest levels, including the discovery of multiple cover-ups of reports received by it's national Executive Committee.  

When it was exposed, the scandal created an outrage among the membership of the churches.  In response, the delegates elected by the churches to the annual meeting, known as "messengers," enraged by the revelations, began bypassing the cumbersome, deliberately slow denominational bureaucracy, to demand action directly from the floor of the convention.  In spite of those demands, which resulted in the resignation of a dozen executive committee members and several personnel shake-ups at high levels, including the resignation of the executive director at the time, Frank Page, because of his own admission of marital infidelity, this convention body has been 100% ineffective at providing anything useful as a result.  

To understand this ineffectiveness requires knowing that the SBC is a bureacracy deliberately designed to favor the wishes of a few elitists who control it, while ignoring any kind of input from the churches that might not agree with the set agenda.  It appears to be democratic, with power invested in the messengers who show up to the annual meeting.  In practice, as this whole scandal has revealed, even when the messengers directly instruct the bureacracy to do something, it doesn't get done and there aren't any consequences for that not happening.  

One of the internal problems experienced when trying to get something done about this sexual abuse scandal has been the manner in which churches relate to the denomination.  All of the churches are, theoretically, at least, independent and autonomous, and the denomination has no ecclesiastical authority over any church.  Each church calls its own pastors, hires its own staff and preaches according to its own doctrinal and theological understanding.   So technically, the denomination can't force any church to do anything about an abusive pastor in one of the pulpits.  

But...If They Want to Exercise Ecclesiastical Authority, They Will

Local church autonomy is the excuse that works well for the SBC bureaucrats when they don't want to follow the directives of the messengers.  But they are willing to throw it out the window when they want to force a narrow doctrinal perspective on the churches.  For a denomination that claims it is not ecclesiastical in structure at all, and that each local church is its own authortity on all things, it uses the threat of removing a church's membership in the denomination if they are not in line theologically and doctrinally.  

By directive of its bylaws defining what is meant by "voluntary cooperation," all churches that are part of the SBC must have theology and doctrinal positions that are "closely aligned" with the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, the doctrinal statement of the SBC.  That means, among other things, that they must affirm the SBC's interpretation of the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy, and all interpretations of the Bible controlled by that, including placing restrictions on women serving in the church position of pastor.  And while there are some that say this only applies to the "senior," or "lead" pastor, others insist that women are restricted biblically from any pastoral role. 

They can't seem to get anything done about the sexual abuse running rampant in their churches, especially by those who have the title "pastor," but they are willing to entertain yet another proposal to make a permanent change to their constitution and bylaws denying membership to any church that calls a woman as a pastor.  One of the denomination's insider elitists, the President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky, Dr. Al Mohler, who fancies himself as the SBC's "chief pontificator", will bring a motion to add this restriction at this year's meeting.  

Making this kind of permanent change involves getting a full two thirds of the messenger vote total at two subsequent annual meetings.  The last time this effort was made, it was approved in the first meeting, then failed to get the kind of majority required the second year.  A lot of the success or failure of motions like this depends on how many people on the SBC payroll actually get elected as messengers from their church and go to the convention.  When the bureaucrats and employees of the bureaucracies outnumber the regular people from the churches, these things tend to do well. 

Ignoring Elephants in the Room

Membership declined by 390,000 in 2025.  And aside from the typical excuse-making, and the celebration of tiny gains in weekly attendance and in baptisms, which don't come anywhere near making up the difference, it doesn't appear that this crisis, which has led to a decline of 4.1 million members in a decade, staggering losses that are larger than most denominations have in total membership, will get nearly the attention that the ongoing rage over women serving as pastors is going to generate.  By contrast, no mainline Protestant denomination has lost that many members in a decade, not even the fractured and split United Methodists. 

The denomination has already exercised, through its credentials comittee, the dismissal of churches with women in pastoral roles or leadership, including kicking out Saddleback Valley Community Church, the largest and most evangelistic church in the denomination, and in response to that, as many as a hundred other churches left in protest.  Saddleback Valley alone accounted for 40,000 of those members lost, and Elevation Church, with 26,000 members, left the same week.  That accounts for at least 66,000 of the 280,000 decline the SBC experienced in 2024.  

But the failure to bring the denomination up to its own messenger's expectations on the sexual abuse issue is also a huge elephant in the room.  Both of the men who are still revered by some as the "Architects" of the beloved "conservative resurgence" in the SBC were deeply involved in the scandal, and I still haven't heard any of the elitist leadership comment on it, or set the record straight.  One enabled abusers and rapists on two seminary campuses, the other was involved in abuse himself, with victims of the same gender.  

But then, giving this kind of deference to leaders who are deeply involved in licentious behavior seems to be an Evangelical characteristic these days.  The rapidly falling membership of the SBC could be the result of this infection of political and religious hypocrisy that has infected most of American Evangelicalism, because it is losing members across the board just as rapidly as the SBC. 

Will the Southern Baptist Convention Straighten It's Priorities, or Make Itself Irrelevant? 

It took the Southern Baptist Convention 150 years to apologize for its historic stance on slavery, a divisive and unbiblical position it took when it was founded in 1845.  That position, too, was based on belief in a literalist interpretation of the Bible, the same kind of fundamentalism that ignores and ridicules theological study and education and relies on a literal rendering of the King James translation.  It's the same kind of interpretation that leads to the faulty conclusion that women are forever and always restricted from being pastors, or that caused the SBC to remove what was known as the "Jesus criteria" from the Baptist Faith and Message.  

It appears that Dr. Al Mohler, who had a prior failed attempt at being elected President of the SBC, which he apparently considers his "due", will try to make himself relevant among the SBC elitists still left by codifying bad theology and denominational policy into its constitution and bylaws.  Perhaps there are enough Southern Baptists interested in keeping their denomination out of the abyss into which it is falling, who have abandoned the literalist fundamentalism that took control in 1979. 

It would be my guess, as a former Southern Baptists educated in two of the denomination's universities and seminaries, that there are not enough people left to get enough of a vote to keep this from eventually passing.  The professors who didn't buy literalist fundamentalism when it started its creeping attempt to control the denomination saw the handwriting on the wall, and they got out, along with many of the universities and colleges where serious theological study, rather than indoctrination, was the norm.  

The Southern Baptist Convention can't sustain the kind of loss it has experienced over the past decade and survive, and yet, it seems as ineffective at finding a way to arrest this decline and return to relevance as it has been in dealing with the sexual abuse crisis in its midst.  The revenue stream of support from churches, called the "Cooperative Program," is rapidly drying up.  The continued support it gives to corrupt secular politics, and its silence over the corruption of its own leadership speaks volumes about priorities.  That's not surprising for a denomination that took 150 years to decide slavery war wrong.  

    

Endorsing a Long-Shot: Rachel Anderson for the Senate from West Virginia

My parents grew up in West Virginia and the greater part of both of their extended families still live there.  From Weirton in the northern panhandle, to Clarksburg and Harrison County, and a few still scattered near my mother's home place in Doddridge County, down to Mingo County, Williamson and Matewan, I have a group of first and second cousins.  The younger generation on my Dad's side of the family has moved away from the coal mines and carbon plants that provided jobs for my parent's generation to being insurance agents, retail business owners, including one long-time Italian restaurant, and one West Virginia pub, quite a few nurses, nurse practitioners, one physicians assistant, and two dentists.  And I have one second cousin who is a university professor and an author.  

About half of my extended family no longer lives in West Virginia.  They've scattered to other places, one group to the Washington, DC area, mostly Maryland, and another group westward into Ohio.  The jobs just weren't there.  The half that remains, because of the transition they've made as far as their jobs go, have a decidedly more Republican outlook than my parents and grandparents generations, all of whom were union members.  

But that appears to be changing, especially among those who, like myself, are college educated and in a professional occupation.  Most of those with whom I still have contact started out by supporting Trump in 2016 and 2020, and then again in 2024, though a few of them had cooled off by the last election and I actually had some great conversations with a couple of cousins who saw the truth.  They'd basically dropped out of participation in politics, but since the indictments came down and reality set in, they have registered to vote and support Democrats.  

For months now, among the scattered social media posts and other communication in which I've been involved, there are several of us trying to talk the rest of our family into voting for Rachel Anderson for the U.S. Senate.  I won't be able to vote in West Virginia, but what I'm seeing in our conversations now is the realization that the senior Senator from there, Shelley Moore-Capito, has done nothing for the state, and has actually done nothing notable or vote-worthy for the entire time she has served in the Senate.  

Anderson, who is a member of the Morgantown City Council, and an attorney working in public interest and advocacy for 30 years, won the Democratic nomination.  In the state which Trump won by the largest margin, she is a long shot.  But maybe not as much of a long shot as might be imagined.  Moore-Capito, who is the least accomplished Senator out of a hundred, was not the overwhelming choice of her own party.  Even with Trump's endorsement, in a state he won by 40 points, turnout was underwhelming, and Moore-Capito picked up 66% of the Republican vote.  It cost her more in terms of campaign money than any of her previous primaries, and  it was the lowest vote total she has registered so far.  

I'm not seeing any support for Moore-Capito among those relatives I have in the state who actually register and vote.  Several of them have indicated support for Anderson, and have not received, in response, the normal criticism and derision from the others that would have happened in the past.  Everyone knows where I stand, and I often get the standard Republican push back from most of them, but in the recent discussions we've had, anecdotal and limited for sure, but quite different, there's been no disagreement, and there has been some acknowledgement that a change might be needed, and in order.  

I doubt there are any political pundits who'd predict this would go any way except for the Republican.  On the other hand, among Democrats in West Virginia, Anderson is well known, and one of the interesting political aspects of the state is that the only counties where there has been population growth in the last six decades are the ones where Democrats actually outnumber Republicans.  And while Democrats had a relatively high turnout in their primary, Republican turnout was low.  Don't get me wrong, it's still a long-shot.  

West Virginia is one of the poorest states in the country, it is losing jobs and population regularly, and it has been since 1950.  It is one of the most ignored areas of the country by politicians, and I cannot fathom how misinformed and ignorant the majority of the population must be, when they continuously vote against all of their own interests every election cycle, electing patrician politicians like Moore-Capito who vote for legislation that helps increase the poverty, does nothing to decrease unemployment or business development, and which continues to contribute to people leaving the state in droves. 

I've been following the saga of the only hospital and emergency room in Mingo County closing as a result of the COVID epidemic.  I have relatives who live there, and several who worked at the hospital, Williamson Memorial.  Fortunately, they were able to find jobs at the regional hospital across the river in Kentucky, but a lot of the staff just lost their jobs, and the closure left the county without a functioning emergency room.  

The local physicians group worked hard to get the hospital back open, investing large amounts of money to purchase and renovate the facility.  They got a lot of help as a result of their sitting Senator, and former Governor Joe Manchin, who, as a Democrat, had some pull with the Biden Administration.  And the federal government did come through.  The new Williamson Memorial Hospital is open again, thanks to Democrats, including former Senator Manchin and the Biden Administration.  It does not appear that Senator Moore-Capito was involved at all, except for trying to steal credit on the end result.  

And yet, this is a crisis for a number of counties in the state, especially in the southern counties.  People living in poverty without transportation are living in communities where hospitals are at risk of closing.  But this is not a priority for the Republicans.  

Remember Trump's promise to do everything in his power to bring the coal industry back?  West Virginia is now a wasteland of abandoned mines and laid off workers.  And his endorsed and favorite Senator from the state is doing absolutely nothing about it.  There's not even a hint from her that she cares about this.  

So West Virginia, it's a long shot, but if you really think it is time to send an old school, ineffective, do-nothing Republican home, then turn out and send Rachel Anderson to the Senate.  

Evangelical White Christian Nationalists Back in the Headlines with "Rededicate 250"

There was some complaining about the fact that all of the speakers at this particular event except one were Christians.  

I would disagree with that assessment.  "Christian" is not a term I would use to describe most of the speakers in that lineup.  Pseudo-Christian, yes, in that many of them are Evangelical, which is more of a political designation these days than a doctrinal or theological branch of Christianity.  But using the definition of "Christian" established by several of the Bible's New Testament writers, and the very words spoken in testimony of the faith, theology and doctrine held by the Evangelical speakers in this lineup, the conclusion must be made that they are not, by their own testimony, Christian, according to the words of the Biblical authors.  

The Apostle John, in his first church epistle, defines being Christian as acknowledging that Jesus was the Christ, sent by God to reveal him and his nature to the world in a clear and redemptive way that had not been revealed previously.  And, the gospel writers, specifically Matthew and Luke, directly quote Jesus equating the first two commandments, loving God with all your heart, soul and mind, and demonstrating that you love God that much by the way you treat others, as the very core of Christian faith practice.  

That doesn't leave room for the kind of loyalty most of these pseudo-Christians give to a worldly, and demonstrably evil politician who doesn't acknowledge God or the deity of Christ.  And the idea of "loving your neighbor as yourself," combined with the definition of "neighbor" that Jesus revealed, is not something that can be found in the faith practice of any of the Evangelicals in that "Rededicate 250 lineup."  

Left to consider who these people are, and what they've done with regard to ministry, it would be my observation that they are very much in love with money, and have figured out how to convince their constituents to part with some of theirs, hoping to stimulate their own financial windfall which is the only salvation and blessing dispensed by the god they have invented.  That's what they preach  and teach.  The redemptive message of the Christian gospel, which includes repentance, submission to Christ, restoration and a lifestyle based on the practice of a set of principles can't be found among Trump's Evangelical sycophants.  Just listen to them. Not a single one of the Beatitudes provides a blessing of money, but all of the blessings of the Trump Evangelical heretics are measured by how much of it they have.  

And what to they have to say to any of us?  None of them worries about putting a roof over their head, or where their next meal will come from as their food costs and medication costs have surged because of the Iran war, and none of them cares about what price they will pay for a gallon of gas at the pump.  Nor do they care about the millions of Americans who live on a fraction of what they do, on a social security check or a tiny pension.  And because of that, they have absolutely nothing to say to me, or to the millions of other Americans like me.  

So go peddle your phony pseudo-Christian "gospel" somewhere else.  

 

First Amendment Religious Liberty is For Christians Only, Says Jenna Ellis

 Baptist News Global: Jenna Ellis Says First Amendment is for Christians Only

Here's her quote: 

"The whole point of having a civil society that recognizes the principles of religious freedom is so that we can go and evangelize, so that we can practice our faith, so that we can train up our children in the way they should go, says Proverbs, so when they’re old they won’t depart from it. It’s so that we can preserve and protect the Christian way of life. I mean, we don’t have all these protections for our rights that our Founders recognize come from God our Creator, so that we can go out and live a pluralistic society and say, ‘Well, let’s recognize the dignity of Islam.’ I mean, that’s not the point, that’s not the purpose whatsoever. We have a civil government that protects the right of Christians to be able to live and work. And we have this whole perverted notion that somehow our Constitution demands pluralism. That just isn’t there. If you take the whole context of the Declaration, the Constitution, the founding and everything we’re celebrating in America 250, absolutely."

And ignorance really is bliss, I guess.  

There's a clear indication in the language of the first amendment that crushes Ellis' argument that the founding fathers intended to protect only the religious liberty of Christians.  For one thing, Christianity is not mentioned, referenced, or even alluded to in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution in its vague references to divine providence.  "Religion" was then, as it is now, an all inclusive term indicating an awareness of the existence of other faiths beyond Christianity, Judaeo-Christianity or Judaism.  

There is, in fact, no specific reference to Christianity in either the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution.  That's not surprising, given that there were few Christians among the founding fathers, and none who understood Christianity in the context of conservative Evangelicalism's 19th century fundamentalist and pre-millennial dispensational perspective that is Ellis' understanding.  

The freedom of conscience protected by the first amendment is all inclusive.  Conscience includes religious practice, or the absence of any religious practice.  It also includes all other ideologies and thoughts, including those that are unique to any individual.  In the absence of any kind of interpretation written by any of the founders that would support Ellis' view, there is the fact that the courts have exercised the constitutional powers they have been given to interpret the Constitution as demanding and protecting religious pluralism.  

Christian faith practice does not require exclusive Constitutional protection.  True Christian faith, based on the core principles of the gospel revealed by Jesus Christ, can easily coexist, and win converts in a religiously pluralistic culture, as it did for the first three hundred years of its existence under Roman persecution, as it has everywhere else in the world, and where it has survived, and even thrived, under the  persecution of totalitarian regimes.  Ellis' pseudo-Christian religion is inherently weak, and requires being propped up by the power of civil government, lacking any real spiritual power of its own.  If they perceive a threat to their faith under the religious liberty provided by the United States Constitution, then they are genuinely insecure adherents of a false religion. 

And it's pretty clear that the establishment clause and the separation of church and state that it created was a clear benefit to Christianity in America, more than any other religion.  As Jefferson and Madison envisioned, and predicted, setting the church free from the state to practice faith with a free conscience was the best thing that could have happened to it.  

The attitude exhibited by Ellis, aside from the sheer ignorance she shows, isn't consistent with her claims of being Christian.  Jesus made it very clear that the one way Christians have of testifying to the veracity of their faith and commitment is by the way they treat other people.  As those billboards say, "That love-thy-neighbor thing?  I meant it! --God"  Jesus was pretty clear, using the example of a Samaritan to illustrate the answer to the question, "Who is my neighbor?" in his answer.  

So why isn't Ellis treating Muslims like they are her neighbor?  But then, those kind of people always have an answer as to why they don't have to be true to the core principles of their alleged faith.

Approval Rating of Democrats in Congress Signals Major Change is Needed

It's 19%.  

The difference between the approval rating for Democrats in Congress, and the polling data which shows the formation of a blue tsunami on the way in November is sending a message to which Democrats must pay close attention if they are to continue winning elections, especially down the road toward 2028.  We're going to win the mid-term elections, and in spite of media bias that includes the overanalysis and over-reporting of insignificant changes which mean nothing, will not only gain at least 25 seats in the House (I'm thinking 45 might not be overly optimistic) but we will also get the majority in the Senate.  That's not overly optimistic, that's just looking at day to day polling data without the media spin.  We're going to pick up two or three seats that will "shock" the clueless media.  

But it's not because we laid out a great plan for doing so.  Look at the difference between the approval rating and the generic ballot.  We will win because voters, especially a huge percentage of independents, have finally realized that electing Trump as President twice was the most ignorant and stupid political move Americans have ever made in our history, and he has to be taken down before he completely destroys everything this country stands for.  

Money in Politics is Not Just a Republican Problem

It's pretty easy to look at those first two years of the Biden administration and consider them a success in terms of the legislation that got passed.  We had the strongest economy in 60 years, with low unemployment, and steady growth of our gross national product, healthy and due completely to Biden's economic policy.  He managed to fix the major damage that Trump had done to our COVID recovery, in fact, and as a party, the Democrats got some things done.  

But, did we get done those things for which Democrats have been advocating and pushing for a decade or more?  And did we enforce the law against the criminal acts of the Trump administration, bring him and his cronies to justice and save this country from the disaster we are now facing?  Did we get big money out of politics?  Did we get the health care reform that we have been pushing for more than a decade now, that single-payer health care system that will actually make medical care afforable and accessible to all Americans without robbing us blind by the profiteering that goes on?  

We got a lot of excuses, especially when it came to the incredible incompetence of the Justice Department, and we got the same excuses we have always been given about health care costs and the changes to that system that are needed.  The Affordable Care Act has sputtered along, attacked and diminished, and is hanging by a thread, as opportunities to strengthen it and prevent the other side from killing it were missed.  Excuses and apologists, yes, but real action, no. 

There is a Clrar Indication of What Democrats Want Their Leadership to Do

The reality of the situation is that we need to win this midterm election in order to stop Trump and have anything close to a chance at repairing the damage he has done to everything American, including our reputation in the world, our economy, and to the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of the American people.  So we are going to support Democratic party candidates in the midterm elections.  

But I think the indications about where the party needs to go after that are pretty clear.  Graham Plattner is one good example of the kind of challenge new leadership is bringing to the table.  It seems that candidates backed by David Hogg's Leaders We Deserve, especially in state legislative primaries, have been successful without having the kind of money behind them that some old liners have.  Julianna Stratton, another progressive who was an underdog in the Democratic primary for the Senate seat being vacated by old school, old liner Dick Durbin, and who ran against big money, old line establishment Democrats and old school endorsements, won the nomination and will easily win that seat.  So Durbin, a good ole boy, old school politician afraid of risk and bold action will be replaced by a new leadership progressive who is not afraid to kick some Republican ass. 

We are well aware that Trump will remain in the White House after the midterms, if his health doesn't collapse like his mind has done.  We want a Congressional majority that will make his life miserable in the White House from day one, that will challenge everything he has done, undo as much as it can do, shut down the appointment of judges and work to use every lever of power that it has at its disposal to force a resignation or to move on impeachment articles that will set records.  

We also want to see our agenda set in place as much as is possible, preparing for the possibility of controlling both Congress and the White House after 2028.  Hit the ground running by major Supreme Court reform, which would require breaking the filibuster, amending the Judiciary act, and putting six or seven far left wingers on that court to silence the incompetence and restore justice.  

It's a Matter of Wanting to Win Elections or Keep Playing the Old Games

Both things are not possible.  It now takes a lot of independent voters to win elections, and if the leadership has been sharp enough to observe, it's the turnout of independent voters who have made the "No Kings" marches and rallies so successful and so large.  Democratic politicians are too preoccupied with their fundraising to take much advantage of this opportunity, it seems.  Those that are involved are mostly the progressives.  A lot of the credit for Democratic party gains this spring goes to Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez whose rallies turned out tens of thousands.  

Hakeem Jeffries is experiencing some of the pushback.  He seems, at least to me, to be the kind of politician who listens before he makes a decision.  Some Democrats seem to think he's too connected to the big money and the old school.  If he were a little more visible and vocal, I think he'd earn more trust and get more people behind him as a leader.  On the other hand, a little pressure from the left and a little uncertainty about his role as minority leader before the midterms might not be a bad thing.  

Schumer has to go.  Resign, let Hochul appoint a new senator and retire.  

We want to win, and we want to restore America, leaving no opening anywhere for another fascist to challenge American democracy.  

This is the Kind of Leadership Found in the Conservative Evangelical Right

Texas Monthly: He Remade the Southern Baptist Convention in His Image. Then Came the Abuse Allegations. 

For certain intruders have stolen in among you, people who long ago were designated for this condemnation as ungodly, who pervert the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only master and Lord, Jesus Christ.  Jude, V. 4, NRSV

I grew up in a Southern Baptist church, a small congregation in a small town outside the deep South, but with a membership made up of transplanted Texans, Tennesseeans, Virginians, Mississippians and Alabamans who had relocated there as a result of their jobs.  A nearby military base brought about half the congregation there.  A Mississippi-based construction company that built high intensity, long distance power lines and the Texas-based El Paso Natural Gas company were other employers that accounted for the other half.  

My parents were transplants, too, from West Virginia, and though my Dad had been raised in a Christian Church affiliated with a denomination known as the Disciples of Christ, and my Mom had grown up in a Methodist church, they were drop-outs by the time they got married and moved to this small town in Arizona.  They were attracted to this particular church by the pastor at the time, who was a co-worker with my Dad at the military base.  So it was that through my elementary and high school years, I found myself in Sunday School and worship service most every Sunday.  As part of that experience, I made the necessary "walk down the aisle" when  I was seven years old, and, in the church vernacular, "accepted Jesus in my heart," and was baptized by immersion with two or three other children.  

By the time I got to college, I had more or less determined that what my Sunday School teachers had taught, and what the succession of bi-vocational pastors preached, was a combination of a literal, verse-by-verse interpretation of the Bible combined with a dose of Dixieland superstitions and cultural customs, and some Appalachian fold religion.  

But the university I attended was also affiliated with the state group of Southern Baptists, and the required Bible courses in Old and New Testament history that I took completely changed my impression of Christian faith.  I discovered that the Christian gospel had a very systematic theology that emphasized spiritual transformation exhibited not in some kind of nebulous intellectual assent to a set of doctrines, but in a lifestyle of principles and values intended to make a difference not only in my own life, but in the lives of those whom I was commanded to love because they were my neighbor.  

So as a result of this renewed interest, along with majors in history and English, for the purpose of teaching in secondary education, I minored in Biblical studies.  And it was while I was in graduate school, in a Southern Baptist-affiliated university, that I first heard the names Dr. Paige Patterson and Judge Paul Pressler.  

The Conservative Resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention

The Southern Baptist Convention has always been an oligarchy controlled by a small, elite group of pastors, mainly of large, influential churches.  It claims to be organized on democratic principles, but the fact of the matter is that only about 10% of its churches, in any given year, elect "messengers," which is what they call delegates to the convention.  And those who understand that involvement in denominational politics not only carries prestige, but power within the denomination, and opens a pathway to getting the necessary recommendations and influence needed to grab off the high dollar administrative jobs at the mission boards, seminaries and the Executive Committee agencies. 

Being a denomination with the majority of its churches in the South, and 80% of them being in rural areas or small to mid-sized towns, with an attendance of less than 80 people on any given Sunday means that most of the churches are going to have that folk-religion, supersition and verse by verse, word for word literal interpretation of the Bible.  There's an anti-education bias in most churches, who do not trust their seminaries and consider them to be liberal because that kind of systematic study of the Bible emerges with a different result than the hard line literalist, legalistic fundamentalism that prevails. 

The anti-education bias combined with the blending of right wing politics with conservative Evangelicalism during Reagan's campaign for President.  There were those within the Southern Baptist Convention looking for a way to influence seminary trustee boards to introduce a more fundamentalist theology and doctrine, at the same time there were those looking for ways to hook the nation's largest Evangelical denomination up with the Republican Party.  

Enter Patterson and Pressler.  Patterson was a protege of Dr. W. A. Criswell, the influential and long time Fundamentalist pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas, the SBC's largest church at the time.  He was President of the broken down Criswell College, the Bible college owned by the church.  Pressler, a member of First Baptist Church of Houston at the time, another large, influential congregation, was a Texas Appeals Court Justice and a Republican party operative.  

These two men set out to organize a political campaign within the denomination that had two purposes.  On the surface, it was to appear as an attack on liberalism in the seminaries, using the flawed Fundamentalist doctrine of the Inerrancy and Infallibility of the Bible as a means of convincing churches to send messengers to the convention meetings to elect trustees who would be willing to dismiss professors who didn't sign doctrinal statements claiming to believe this flawed doctrine.  

However, Pressler's job in this movement, was to connect the Southern Baptist Convention, through its board and executive leadership, with the Republican Party, initially to help get Reagan elected.  As a result of their political activity, both of these men secured positions in leadership in the SBC, Patterson as President of two of its six seminaries, Pressler, rotating from committee to committee, trustee board to trustee board and eventually the Executive Committee.  Over a ten year period, Patterson succeeded in pushing out the previous leadership, labelled as "moderates," but considered to be "liberals" in the classic sense of the definition of that term, in all six seminaries and on all of the trustee boards, while Pressler helped the SBC become a major influence and supporter of the GOP, and of white, Christian nationalist views.  

A Haughty Spirit

Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.  Proverbs 16:18

As can be discerned from the Texas Monthly  article referenced at the top, the allegations against Pressler involved alleged homosexual activity.   Initially, there was just one individual whose name was associated with these allegations but apparently, there are allegations involving cases that were settled out of court, involving individuals who came into contact with Pressler in at least two churches, including an independent Presbyterian church in Houston where he had been on staff as a youth pastor. 

I would suggest that every person who is concerned about the threat of white Christian nationalism, and the threat to American constitutional democracy posed by the Trump Administration and his fundamentalist, Evangelical allies, including the well-funded Heritage Foundation, read this piece in Texas Monthly.  The author of this piece, Robert Downen, worked alongside reporters at the Houston Chronicle on their expose of the sex abuse scandal in the Southern Baptist Convention, called Abuse of Faith, which came out in 2022.  

I'm one who insists that the integration of conservative Evangelicalism and Trump extremist right wing politics is a clear indication that most Evangelicalism in this country is a pseudo-Christian cult which has obviously abandoned the core principles of the Christian gospel, which is the lifestyle that is a testimony to authentic faith.  And their actions are rooted in a straight, up front, visible denial of what Jesus revealed to us as the first and greatest commandment.  And under the new covenant, which Christians believe was revealed in its fullness by Christ himself, leaders are expected to be moral examples.  

The fact that this is a heretical intrusion into the church that is leading it into complete apostasy is evidenced by the lack of moral character in its leadership.  Pressler is still revered by conservatives in the Southern Baptist Convention who once hailed him as one of the "architects of the Conservative Resurgence."  There is evidence, including a letter from the deacons of the church where he was a member, indicating that his homosexual lifestyle was known, and he was asked to resign from the positions he held in that church.  But aside from a warning that such activity could damage the cause for which he was working, they chose to keep it hidden.  The power he wielded, and the "cause" he was promoting were more important to them than the Christian gospel, or their own church and its testimony.

We Need to Know This

No one is perfect. 

But, this kind of moral bankruptcy, corruption, secrecy and hypocrisy is characteristic of both the religious right, and its Evangelical supporters, as well as the political right.  It needs to be understood, called out, properly and accurately discredited, in order to help people understand that this is not patriotic, it is un-American, and it is anti-Christian.  

This all had the effect of completely undermining my trust in almost any pastor or religious leader in the Southern Baptist Convention.  I have a few close friends who are still pastors in that denomination, and there are times when I'm not really sure that their motives are pure.  I can't trust what I hear from the pulpit, knowing the influence that had to be traded, and the favors that had to be paid in order for that pastor to get into that pulpit.  And in spite of everything that has been revealed about both of the men who are still called "the architects of the Conservative Resurgence," there has not been anything that looks like repentance or repudiation of this "intrusion of licentiousness" that has infected the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention.  

Even as its membership and attendance rapidly dwindles, there are still those who have been engaged in back slapping, glad handing, good-ole-boy influence peddling to try to get themselves into a prestigious pulpit, and a position of dwindling power on a committee, trustee board or the executive committee.  So they are silenced by their own pursuit of power.  

And in right wing extremism, it's a trademark.  

Where are the Real Christians? 

I must admit, it took me a long time to process all of this, and to try and recover some kind of trust in the practice of my Christian faith.  I realize that who they are and what they do does not have to affect who I am or what I believe.  But it is the bigger part of my own Christian experience, and coming to grips with the fact that I had to step away, leave it behind and find my way back to something I could believe in and trust was not easy.  As I look at my own values, principles and beliefs, when asked, I self-identify for others as a Quaker, though I am not able, at the present time, to fellowship with a specific Quaker meeting.  

I look with a totally different perspective upon those Christians who are part of the patchwork of denominations and fellowships that make up American Christianity, and realize that those values and principles that we hold in common is a bond that binds us together.  Churches that I was once taught were not "Bible believing" or "of like-minded faith and order" I now consider as fellow Christians.  And even in those congregations, churches and denominations there is this temptation to power, that seems to be the biggest obstacle to the practice of Christian faith regardless of the label that is worn.  

And one of the biggest blessings and gifts we have been given as Americans is Constitutional freedom of conscience in the first amendment.  Christian faith is a matter of individual conscience.  And when Jefferson and Madison determined that the only way the Christian church could be authentic and free was to be separated from the coercion of the state, they gave the Christian church the ability to be true to the gospel that was revealed by Jesus Christ.  

The bulk of Evangelicalism in this country, in its fundamentalist, Pentecostal or Charismatic form, has taken the side of politics with the expectation of using its power to enforce its beliefs, rather than on using the power of God's Holy Spirit and separating itself from the conscience of the state.  The article in Texas Monthly is a long one, but I encourage reading all the way through, because it will give those who are committed to resisting the anti-American Trump Administration, and the white, Christian nationalism of the Heritage Foundation, information they need to understand and motivate their actions.

This is Not the Christianity I Knew While Growing Up

The small Baptist church was almost at the end of the street, as far from the main drag in town as it could get.  There was a small Lutheran church on the other side of the street that dead ended in the city cemetary.  It was one of two Baptist churches in town, formed in 1954 by a group of people who had migrated there from southern states, mostly Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and a cluster of families from Virginia.  The "other" Baptist church in town had once been affiliated with the American Baptist Churches, USA, the heir to the Triennial Convention headquartered in Philadelphia, known as Northern Baptists.  This particular church was affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention because, even though they were both Baptist, that's just the way it was.  

Or so it was in my way of thinking.  

My parents had migrated here from West Virginia, where most of the Baptists were of the Northern variety.  When they first relocated to this small Arizona town, they hadn't been participating in a church.  My Dad grew up in a church affiliated with a denomination known as the Disciples of Christ, and stopped going to church about the time he enrolled in college.  My mother was the wild child of her family.  Raised in a deeply rural area of West Virginia, she abandoned the Methodist church that her parents occasionally attended when she ran away from home to elope.  So finding a local church wasn't their priority.  

But after working at a nearby military base as an air conditioning mechanic, one of the other guys in his shop invited him to church one Sunday.  As it turned out, it was the Southern Baptist church he attended, and so my parents became regulars.  I'd gone to Sunday School there on occasion, so it wasn't a big change for a six year old.  So it was that I wound up being raised in a Southern Baptist church.  

The Essence of Southern Baptist Christianity

The "theology", doctrine and Christian practice that is found in smaller Southern Baptist churches, especially in small towns or rural areas where a pastor with seminary training is a premium, is more of a combination of superstition, folk religion and a literal, "verse by verse" interpretation of the Bible.  Since the Bible wasn't divided into verses when it was written, and a literal interpretation misses the entire original meaning and historical context of the original language, I don't think what I was taught was authentic Christianity.  

And I more or less figured this out by the time I was ten or eleven years old.  I didn't really have much of a choice as to whether I went to church or not, and I spent a lot of time in Sunday School trying to make some sense of what never really made much sense.  And as I got older, I learned that asking difficult questions only antagonized my Sunday School teachers, none of whom were educated beyond high school and who perceived difficult questions as skepticism and doubt.  I was told that my questions were a sign of my lack of faith.  

I did something else that some of the members of that church didn't like.  I was admitted to the freshman class at the small university that was affiliated with the Southern Baptists in the state.  I'd have thought they would have been pleased, but within this small congregation made up mostly of people who had been born and raised in Dixieland, there was a very strong bias against college and seminary trained pastors, and they sensed that the Biblical studies department at this university was "liberal."  

Learning the Basics of Christian Faith and Practice From Educated Liberals

It turns out they were right, at least, from their own perspective.  

I went intending to major in history and minor in English with a concentration in secondary education to get a teaching certificate.  Taking survey courses in Old and New Testament studies was a first year requirement for freshmen, and the professors I had for both of those courses really caught my attention.  From them, I got a perspective of Christian faith and practice that was focused much more on being a lifestyle than a set of intellectual assertions to specific doctrinal points.  

Most Evangelicals believe that all parts of the Bible are equally inspired, which undermines the Christian gospel and leads to the kind of literalist fundamentalism that has produced the pseudo-Christian nationalism that has led Evangelical churches into apostasy.  But what they call liberal is actually the Christian gospel that was revealed in the teaching and preaching of Jesus, beginning with the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount.  It's actually a lifestyle, not merely a legalistic intellectual assent to a set of doctrines.  

The Christian gospel is the interpretive criterion for every other part of the Bible.  And there isn't even full agreement on what actually constitutes "the Bible."   Understanding it requires knowing what its 40 different authors intended to convey to their original audiences, and understanding that the circumstances to which that meaning applied are long gone and no longer exist.  In Christian doctrine, the gospel as revealed by Jesus is where the values and principles that establish the practice of the faith are found.  

Human existence is considered sacred.  In Christian theology, humans are created in the image of God, a reflection of divine existence, and supported by Jesus' stating that the greatest commandment consists of two concepts.  One is true worship of God.  The other is that the evidence of being a Christian is seen in those who love their "neighbor," their fellow human beings, as they love themselves.  

Concepts That Are Inconsistent With the Christian Gospel

What this means is that almost everything I was taught, and believe to be Christian is completely inconsistent with the rhetoric of conservative Evangelicalism into which political ideology incompatible with Christian principles has intruded.  If the Christian gospel is a system of life-enhancing values and principles, lived out as love for one's neighbor, defined by Jesus as any other human being, then it is impossible to call any war "just."  

It is also not possible to claim that God's spiritual annointing is on a leader whose lifestyle shows zero consistency with any principle of the Christian gospel.  Old Testament leadership examples do not apply, since there is no longer any nation which exists as a theocracy under the direct control of religious leadership.  And while there are historical examples of "flawed men" God appeared to use in achieving his ends in governing ancient Israel, they also demonstrated full spiritual conviction when it came to their flawed character, depending on God for forgiveness.  That's not what we see in the American political leadership misled conservative Evangelicals accord to their political idol. 

The idea that an unrepentant, morally bankrupt, narcissistic, convicted felon and adulterer would be chosen by God as a political leader would have been considered absolute heresy by the people in that small town church in which I grew up, if that idea had surfaced back in the 70's.  Now? It's hard to say.  At any rate, such an idea is inconsistent with authentic Christian faith and practice, which is built on a foundation of grace.  Old Testament examples used to justify war and violence against people whose religious beliefs and cultural practices took place before Jesus introduced the Christian gospel.  They are irrelevant and inapplicable to the church age.  

Blessed are the peacemakers, said Jesus, for they shall be called the children of God.