Ogden, Utah
There's an outfit out in Ogden, Utah, which, incredibly enough,
refers to itself as a church. One of their internet personalities
makes a habit of referring to women as 'ho's.' Not, as in 'the paddy
wagon disgorged the ho's arrested during the night;' those, at
least, might reasonably be suspected of solicitation. No, the 'ho's'
to this crew are college-educated women. This influencer is called
by his flatterers the Christian Andrew Tate, a title he likes very
much and likes to retweet. He is a lot like Andrew Tate, except
he's much shorter. Listening to this crew is like dunkinig your head
in the septic tank.
How do they rationalize their behavior, over against God's plain
command not to do that? They are part of the eco-system revolving
around Douglas Wilson, a PaleoConfederate who operates a cult in
Moscow, Idaho. When confronted with plain scriptural commands to
knock it off, what they do, and this is very much their normal way
of operation, is to traverse scripture from one end to the other,
looking for individuals who have not, at all times, arguably kept the
cited instructions to the letter. And what does it mean if there are?
Well, it means God cannot seriously have meant the instructions in
the first place! It means there is no law, do as you please; God
cannot possibly object to what people actually do.
This way of reading the scriptures goes back to Robert Lewis
Dabney, one of their favorite Bible teachers. There were scriptures
which were, to say the least, inconvenient to him, like "If thou buy
an Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve: and in the seventh he
shall go out free for nothing." (Exodus 21:2).
He had committed himself to defending Southern slavery, so anything
that raised a question mark over slavery was an embarrassment. And
their protocol at that point is to look for loop-holes, look for
non-conforming instances, look for exclusions, even if you have no
reason to think the loop-holes might apply to your case. When the
slave traders went to Africa, they were the foreigners, not the
merchandise they were buying, so how can any exclusion of foreigners
from Moses' protective umbrella apply to
them? It certainly doesn't, but the point is that there is an
exclusion, and so God cannot seriously have meant what He said in the first
place.
How does this apply to filthy language? Some prophets sometimes
use colorful language. Therefore, anything goes. What, are you a
prophet? The logic is, anything God does, we can do, too. Obliterate
entire populations? Whee!
This approach of seeking for precedents does not work with the
Bible. Is taking a census innocent or harmful? God ordered
Israel to take a census: "Take ye the sum of all the congregation of
the children of Israel, after their families, by the house of their
fathers, with the number of their names, every male by their polls;
from twenty years old and upward, all that are able to go forth to
war in Israel: thou and Aaron shall number them by their armies."
(Numbers 1:2-3). But God punished Israel when
David took a census: "And David's heart smote him after that he had
numbered the people. And David said unto the LORD, I have sinned
greatly in that I have done: and now, I beseech thee, O LORD, take
away the iniquity of thy servant; for I have done very foolishly."
(2 Samuel 24:10). What God
commands is right, what He does not command may or may not be right.
Perhaps some things can only be done when God commands them.
This
whole notion Dabney had, that you can erase inconvenient provisions
of the Mosaic law by searching for precedents among the people who
lived prior to the law's promulgation on Mount Sinai, is simply
foolish, as appealling as it may be to people who want to defy the
law. They reify wrongness, so that it becomes an inherent property of
certain actions, untethered from God's will under the present
circumstances. Employing their rules, not only have they determined
that slavery is A-OK, but also drinking, cussing, smoking, and EZ
divorce.
Pied Piper
As mentioned above, Douglas Wilson is the great trail-blazer who
discovered that Christians can drink, curse, and raise trouble just
as well as the rest of them. He is always talking about his
experience, growing up, of not sitting at the cool kids' table. This
approach appeals, of course, not to new converts who are zealous for
the things of the Lord, but to children raised in Christian homes,
who never chose these disciplines for themselves, and frankly don't
see the point. The value propositon he is offering is antinomianism,
and it sells like hot-cakes.
There is an inexorable gravitational tug which causes religious
sects which started life full of enthusiasm, ready to bear any
burden, pay any price, to honor God, to wander closer toward the mainstream
and latitudinarianism:
"Because erstwhile monopoly religions inevitably are relatively lax, lazy, and worldly, most of their opposition will come from groups promoting a far more intense faith—from sects, that being the name given to high-intensity religious groups. Monopoly religions slide into accommodation with their social surroundings even when they were first established by those committed to an intense faith. One reason that a monopoly religion drifts toward laxity is that religious intensity is never transmitted very efficiently from one generation to the next. Inevitably, many of the sons and daughters of sect members prefer a lower-tension faith than did their parents."
(Stark, Rodney. The Triumph of Christianity:
How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest Religion (p.
44).)
This tendency produces such seemingly disparate phenomena as
Rachel Held Evans and Douglas Wilson. Are second and
third-generation evangelicals frustrated that they can't drink,
smoke and cuss like the cool kids do? How easy is it to invent a
version of Christianity where they can do these things? The market
demand is there, and he fulfills it.
The Bible is unambiguous on this point of purity of thought,
word and deed. "But now ye also put off
all these; anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out
of your mouth." (Colossians 3:8). They
just don't want to do it. And so hearing
this, they embark on one of their romps through world history to
discover whether everyone who ever lived has obeyed this rubric at
all times. If not, why then, obviously, God never meant it, not
seriously. This method of Bible-reading was invented by Robert Lewis
Dabney; the verse he found inconvenient was Exodus 21:2, "If thou
buy an Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve: and in the seventh
he shall go out free for nothing." Far better just to do what He
says and ask questions later.
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