the thing about this is that i have literally never hard it in all of the decades i have been attending (black) churches, and have only heard it from white christians.
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It's suburban mega-church prosperity gospel, aka if we make the wealthy and upper middle class feel good about themselves as they are, we might bring in enough "tithes" to buy a jet.
Oh, I'm sure those folks love it. But I'm sure they just plumb ignored it for generations. Someone in particular must've come up with that & I'd like to know who.
I did a tutorial on the New Testament with a Christian student once, and he walked away genuinely shocked and angry how much Christians tolerate wealth given the unambiguously scriptural condemnation.
I remember reading something by Lewis Mumford eons ago, writing about some Germans in the early Protestant era giving away huge chunks of money for fear of damnation.
‘How could God deprive the main character (me) of having whatever they want’ is how many white Christian Americans seem to think about the entire structure of the whole universe. They think they are at the center of it. How they got that out of the Gospels I simply don’t know.
And you don't hear it in mainline white churches or Catholic churches, or at least didn't when I was growing up Lutheran and attending Catholic school. I remember the first time I really made contact with evangelicals/non denominational Christians when I got to high school I was baffled by them.
I literally did not believe it when I first learned about the tenants of Calvinism in an AP Lit class and had to look it up myself. All the predestination and faith alone shit seemed profoundly anti-Christian to me at the time.
and this in turn reminds of something a religion professor once said to our class:
"in black church tradition, christians worship a jesus who has been lynched. in the white church tradition, christians worship a jesus who could be forgiven for lynching"
As someone who only knows Christianity (white/Black or otherwise) from the outside, I note this discourse seems to be very much about the Anglo/American sects. Is there a similar perspective contrast in Catholicism with Liberation Theology? Are there links between Black & Liberation communities?
I'm an exvangelical who attended a multi racial church. I think the story that comes to mind is in the 80s a white man horribly, horribly murdered his girlfriend. When he got out of prison, what did he do? Became a preacher bc God forgave him. White evangelicals will absolve white men of anything.
There's a whole romance novel genre of monsters who get converted and redeemed by a Good Bible Woman, and there has been a brutal escalation of how monstrous these heroes are before they are redeemed. To the point where it has ignited controversies in the romance publishing world because YIKES.
In your experience, does that affect the tone and the way the stations of the cross are told and/or how the Romans are described? I went to Catholic school as a kid & the way that story was phrased it wanted to take as much agency away from the Romans & Pilate as possible.
It was a PWI & at the time I didn't connect it to anti-Semitism or the fact Christianity eventually became the official Roman Empire religion later and it was still very weird to me.
Not from what I can tell hearing the stuff being preached by some Black preachers at gospel events… a whole lot of “get yourself some Jesus for wealth, health, and good luck!”
With misfortunes being blamed on the Devil, who gets at people who have insufficient Jesus
The dude is literally up there on a cross, nailed up there by the cops because he was ratted out by the priests. People walk around with this Roman torture device on a chain around their neck. The irony of this is lost on them
no, sexist Islamophobic elitist reactionary atheists are "secular Christians" and how you know is because they say so explicitly ("cultural Christian" stfu)
Tom Holland is an odd duck, but this book gets better and better in the remembering every time a right-winger like Thiel or BoJo speaks, or every time a Calivinst-Leftist writes.
I guess with the web-slinging he probably avoided a lot of high-impact exercise injuries but still kept a pretty rigorous cardio routine. And that costume is probably SPF50+
the whole "mimetic desire" spark coming from a billionaire, and Vance picking that up as a Yale Law student, marrying a SCOTUS clerk, and becoming venture capitalist and a senator
it's like Willy Wonka writing a pretentious essay about how he'd learned in his 20s that chocolate makes you miserable
I’ve got a half-baked theory that church polity leads or steers church theology, and that’s why the evangelical nondenominational churches skew right. The pews are filled with angry people who voted with their feet and no hierarchy to keep preaching in line with doctrine
The right-wing folks in the Episcopal Church split off into their own denomination (ACNA) back in 2009, so we don't have to put up with their shit any more. Triggers for the break were blessing same-sex unions and the election of an openly gay bishop.
Maybe that isn't surprising, looking at Wesley.
The whole idea of the quadrangle leaves 'tradition' in place, and tradition is the seat of most of the evils in other Methodisms since antebellum times.
Wales Window created by John Petts and donated to the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL, after the 1963 bombing that murdered four young girls.
(photo: Wendy McFadden; more info: https://www.bhamwiki.com/w/Wales_Window_for_Alabama)
I finally stopped pointing out to relatives that Jesus was a victim of police violence and a corrupt justice system when it got depressing watching them sputter wordlessly while trying to process it.
Yeah, they seem to ignore that he explicitly mentioned people not of your tribe in other parables and told a rich person that he must give up all his riches if he wanted to follow him.
if one knows one's gospel, one can always find passages to counter those.
The thing's full of contradictions. That's why it's so enduring: People can find in it whatever they need to justify their prejudices.
My favorite is when you give an example to a fundy that contradicts you get told you can’t interpret it literally and only with gods guidance will you understate true meaning. I just proactively block now.
"What was God's punishment to Lot's wife?"
"Why, He turned her into a pillar of salt."
"Why doesn't God turn kiddie-fucking clergy into pillars of salt now?"
"Well, it's not that comm..."
"Let me stop you. Republicans are 16x likelier to fuck kids than Democrats. 40% of the abusers are clergy."
"What was the sin of Sodom?"
"Why, sexual promiscuity!"
"If that was the case, why weren't Lot's daughters punished for getting him drunk and riding his cock to heaven?"
"Urm. They learned their lesson?"
"No, the sin of Sodom was turning away the needy and the foreigner. Like Texas does."
i'm an exvangelical myself, part of the Pentecostal tradition -- something else where black/white church differences are noted and in. I've researched it a lot now and Pentecostalism in particular began as an integrated movement that gradually came to be very segregated, with charismatic whites...
...focusing on money, scamming folks at revivals, engaging in hateful politics & nationalism. many megachurch/TBN white pastors are Pentecostal. it's interesting bc at the turn of the 20th century they wouldn't even wear wedding rings or other jewelry bc it was viewed as an obscene display of wealth
This fits w/ my understanding of the history of the Pentecostalism my people are from. Grew up w/ a VERY strong distrust of wealth, live simply so others can live (if anything, a poverty=holiness ethic that verged on self-harm) & it was a SHOCK to meet the prosperity gospel Pentecostals. So WRONG.
of all the evangelical traditions, the white faith (esp charismatic) seems to be the most blatant farce and exists entirely for political reasons. many don't even go to church anymore. they just have terrible opinions they justify with conservative memes and articles about God -- not even the Bible
My wife's ex professes to zealous christian faith. My stepson (who lived with him for a while) told us that neither he nor his current wife ever attend church. It's all, as you say, about rationalizing his prejudices.
I found du Mez' saying that "Christian" became a marketing category instead of a theological one so helpful for explaining that. I have a lot of older relatives who are conservative and Christian but they are devout regular attenders at mainline churches and they didn't go Trumpy.
Catholicism and clericalism has its own problems, but it’s fascinating how evangelical Christianity has fundamentally changed how the religion is done - instead of reading the book and internalising the teachings, believers have a personal mystical connection, a hotline to God, installed directly.
Things like speaking in tongues, ecstatic trances etc hearken to a reinvention of much older religious traditions like shamanism. It’s anthropologically fascinating! But of course when people interpret “the urgings of my own subconscious” as “the will of god” it means the will of god can be anything
This is also why I prefer the Catholic crucifix to the clean Protestant cross. We're supposed to worship He who was tortured, not the mechanism used to torture.
I went to an Armenian church once. The images of Christ on the walls there were of him holding up his hands to show the wounds from the nails driven through them as if to say, "Didn't get me." In the Roman church, you have Christ on the cross to say, "Yeah. We did that. We killed the son of God."
This version of Christianity is like Originalism - you can use the raw materials of a text and a tradition to create a pretext for your grim, rigidly hierarchical, merciless worldview
Oh that eye of the needle thing was a regular chestnut in my Mormon ward to wiggle off the hook of the biblical condemnation of wealth. Never mind all the other stuff about forgiving debt, and the evils of usury, and caring for the stranger among you, feeding the poor, clothing the naked etc...
Me too, I'm 65 and the son of a non-evangelical American Baptist Minister (same sect as Rev. King but MLK obviously was evangelical).
I first started hearing this ridiculous twisting of scripture from weird white evangelical sects in the 80s.
I’ve been going to white churches my whole life and never heard the “eye of the needle was a gate” line although I’ve heard “the camel refers to coarse camel hair thread”, but I’ve gotten in some nasty fights with friends’ youth pastors over “love your neighbor only means others Christians” bullshit
I teach Exodus (as literature) to high school students. They read a history about how both enslaved Africans and the people who enslaved them managed to identify with the Israelites.
I've never heard this line before, but then again, I haven't been hanging around churches. So as an outside observer I will say that it is laughably unbelievable.
Did not hear it growing up in church/Catholic school. Went to Princeton undergrad and started hearing it regularly from the rich kids in Campus Crusade for Christ.
Yep. Grew up Lutheran and went to Catholic school until middle school. When I finally met some evangelicals I thought they were the weirdest Christians I'd ever encountered, and some of my Catholic school friends had parents who were anti -Vatican II schismatics!
It's 'Prosperity Gospel' bullshit designed to make rich and upper middle class people feel good and want to keep coming around and making big donations to the church. I grew up in a fundamental Baptist church and none if it was taught like this.
I'm not a big believing fellow, nor do I have untold respect for the Catholic church, but at least when they taught us the bible they didn't consider Jesus' core teachings to be allegories and god making the world in 7 days and stoning gay men to be literal truth.
The rich-man needle thing always struck me as a kid in American Catholic church. They didn't try to explain it away; prosperity gospel seems to be an evangelical deal. And it's pretty gross!
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"in black church tradition, christians worship a jesus who has been lynched. in the white church tradition, christians worship a jesus who could be forgiven for lynching"
With misfortunes being blamed on the Devil, who gets at people who have insufficient Jesus
What's the unit of measurement?
https://www.tom-holland.org/titles/tom-holland/dominion-50th-anniversary-edition/9780349145273/
https://bsky.app/profile/sababausa.bsky.social/post/3kyojpdpeja2w
it's like Willy Wonka writing a pretentious essay about how he'd learned in his 20s that chocolate makes you miserable
#Truth
The right-wing folks in the Episcopal Church split off into their own denomination (ACNA) back in 2009, so we don't have to put up with their shit any more. Triggers for the break were blessing same-sex unions and the election of an openly gay bishop.
The whole idea of the quadrangle leaves 'tradition' in place, and tradition is the seat of most of the evils in other Methodisms since antebellum times.
I figured white Christians just forgave themselves in Jesus' name because of "faith".
The cross and the lynching tree
x James H. Cone
(photo: Wendy McFadden; more info: https://www.bhamwiki.com/w/Wales_Window_for_Alabama)
The thing's full of contradictions. That's why it's so enduring: People can find in it whatever they need to justify their prejudices.
"Why, He turned her into a pillar of salt."
"Why doesn't God turn kiddie-fucking clergy into pillars of salt now?"
"Well, it's not that comm..."
"Let me stop you. Republicans are 16x likelier to fuck kids than Democrats. 40% of the abusers are clergy."
"Why, sexual promiscuity!"
"If that was the case, why weren't Lot's daughters punished for getting him drunk and riding his cock to heaven?"
"Urm. They learned their lesson?"
"No, the sin of Sodom was turning away the needy and the foreigner. Like Texas does."
I first started hearing this ridiculous twisting of scripture from weird white evangelical sects in the 80s.
Recent scholarship suggests it comes from Ansel of Canterbury (b 1033). Ansel was also doing his darnedest to help solidify the Western Church's political power, which seems related.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/new-testament-studies/article/origin-of-the-needles-eye-gate-myth-theophylact-or-anselm/51F6B1FD504C36C42D6201F6D87F83C3