Oh gosh. We know what to blame for our current situation now. Fantasy Role-Playing Is Hurting America! I heard this same claim back in the 1970s, although usually the argument was that it was the Satanic imagery that was going to invoke occult forces. This guy takes a different tack — he’s going to invoke Steve Bannon as an authority. I prefer the occult forces.

Senior points to a 2018 documentary in which Bannon explains to a filmmaker how, when working in the internet gaming industry, he was surprised to learn just how many people are devoted to playing multiplayer online games. Bannon interprets this intensity through the grid of a hypothetical man, Dave from accounts payable, in the days after his death.

“Some preacher from a church or some guy from a funeral home who’s never met him does a 10-minute eulogy, says a few prayers. And that’s Dave,” Bannon says. He contrasts this boring, real-life Dave from accounts payable with Dave’s online gaming persona: Ajax. Ajax is tough and warlike. When he dies in the fantasy, there’s a funeral pyre and thousands of people come to mourn Ajax the Warrior.

“‘Now, who’s more real?’ Bannon asks. Dave in Accounting? Or Ajax?” Senior writes. Bannon realizes that “some people—particularly disaffected men—actively prefer and better identify with the online versions of themselves.”

OK, this isn’t very interesting or surprising. Yes, people can be inspired by stories, can identify with a cause greater than themselves. This has always been true. It’s not unique to video games, but has been the foundation of religious and political movements for millennia. It’s just that occasionally someone decides that finding identity in a cause is bad when they dislike the cause (like videogames), while simultaneously saying that finding identity is a cause is good when it’s something they like (like Christianity). This article is the same old story — video games bad, Christianity good, therefore the only problem is which fantasy you choose to follow.

I can at least credit the author for realizing he could be walking into a trap. Why isn’t his Christian fantasy also dangerously seductive and misleading people’s lives? Easy. Because Christianity is different.

Yet the way of Jesus is quite different. A Christian vision of heaven is not Valhalla with wine (or grape juice) instead of mead. Valhalla—and almost every other pagan vision of an afterlife—looks backward. It’s the echo and celebration of the warrior’s success in the life that was.

The kingdom of God doesn’t find meaning there. It brings meaning by joining our stories with an altogether different narrative—the story of Jesus. His life is our life. His glory is our glory. And Jesus redefines what wisdom and power really are—by embracing an object found most baffling by the Romans and other pagans of his day: the cross.

When we start to really understand and embody that in our churches, maybe fewer Daves will find their identities in either accounts payable or Ajax online. Maybe more of them will see that there’s glory in the ordinary, in giving your life away for the people you love.

Except…he’s still saying that believing in religion is a way to find “glory”. It’s still a tool to trick people into thinking their mundane lives can be made “glorious” by layering on a belief in a fantasy. Maybe also he should take a look at some of the Christian iconography out there — these would fit perfectly into the imagery of a fantasy role playing game.

If World of Warcraft and Dungeons & Dragons are hurting America, I think a better case could be made that the biggest role playing game of them all, evangelical Christianity, is destroying the country.

Larry Arnn, the president of a Christian bible college, Hillsdale, gave a little talk at a private reception that you weren’t supposed to record, because he felt comfortable saying the quiet part out loud.

Ed departments in colleges. If you work in a college you know, unless you work in the ed department. Ours [Hillsdale’s] is different. They are the dumbest part of every college. [Audience laughs.] You can think about why for a minute. If you study physics, there is a subject. … How does the physical world work? That’s hard to figure out. Politics is actually the study of justice. … Literature. They don’t do it much anymore, but you can read the greatest books, the most beautiful books ever written. Education is the study of how to teach. Is that a separate art? I don’t think so.

Well, I hate to break the news to you, Larry, but Christian colleges are the dumbest part of the American system of higher ed. They’re the part that expects students to adhere to dogma, instead of questioning everything, and make the myths of magical beings that didn’t exist a key part of the curriculum. I don’t think Arnn is qualified to judge what is “dumb”, since he has a history of wallowing in dumb for all of his life.

His logic is bad, too. Some fields of study have “subjects,” like physics or literature (which is just about reading books), but education…doesn’t? Except that it does, since it’s the “study of how to teach,” but he rather feebly disqualifies that as not “a separate art”. Pedagogy, psychology, communication, and competence in a subject being taught don’t count, because Larry Arnn, shill for the Heritage Foundation, says they don’t.

We’ve got a good education program here at UMM — I guess Hillsdale doesn’t — and I have education students in my classes all the time. In order to get certified to teach science in a public school, they are expected to get a degree in a science discipline. The real thing. A full degree. No shortcuts. On top of that, they have to meet all of the requirements for an education degree, and it’s often a five-year program to complete. No, it’s not the “dumbest part” of my college. That title would belong to a theology department, which we don’t have, because we don’t teach inscrutable dogma and archaic magic.

There’s not a word of truth in anything Arnn said, but he really let’s slip the theocratic agenda of the Christian right.

Here’s a key thing we are going to try to do. We’re going to try to demonstrate that you don’t have to be an expert to educate a child. Because basically anybody can do it.

That is absolutely not true. It’s a skill. It requires a solid foundation in knowledge. There’s a kind of arrogance in thinking you can just do it, or that all of education is an amorphous mass with no specialization required.

For instance, I teach college level biology, and no, I don’t think Larry Arnn could do it. He’d only miseducate his students. But I don’t think that implies that I could teach everyone and everything. My wife has a Ph.D. in child psychology, and is an expert in communicating with little kids and helping them learn. I don’t even compare with her in her domain, and she couldn’t do my job, and there ought to be some mutual respect for everyone’s unique abilities…unless you’re Larry Arnn, who thinks he could teach everything. What an ass.

It’s all part of the Republican plan to destroy public education, though. You declare that education isn’t a thing, that teachers can be easily replaced by any old yahoo (although, preferably, stay-at-home moms who aren’t permitted to work anywhere else), and you can start declaring schools superfluous.

I do wonder how Hillsdale parents are going to react to that, since many of those conservative families were howling about how the pandemic meant the kids had to stay at home, and although they didn’t say it, were probably cringing at the thought of having to teach their lovely little third-grader math every day.

Next time some Libertarian tries to convince you that the government should not be involved in charity, let the churches do it instead, tell them to read this article about the Mormon church.

Near the start of the pandemic, in a gentrifying neighborhood of Salt Lake City, Utah, visitors from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints arrived at Danielle Bellamy’s doorstep. They were there to have her read out loud from the Book of Mormon, watch LDS videos and set a date to get baptized, all of which she says the church was requiring her to do in exchange for giving her food.

Bellamy, desperate for help, had tried applying for cash assistance from the state of Utah. But she’d been denied for not being low-income enough, an outcome that has become increasingly common ever since then-President Bill Clinton signed a law, 25 years ago, that he said would end “welfare as we know it.”

State employees then explicitly recommended to Bellamy that she ask for welfare from the church instead, she and her family members said in interviews.

Get that? State employees told her to go to a church, and the church sent missionaries to her home.

She is not a Mormon.

She refused to get baptized as a Mormon.

So the church denied her the aid she needed.

It’s a shame. Utah is a beautiful state, but the Mormons have poisoned everything. I lived there for a few years, but would not go back.

We got another grand decision today. The Supreme Court decided in favor of a public school football coach who pushed Christianity in his games. After all, it was just “quiet prayer” and a “brief thanks” at his games.

Nothing wrong with that! I have no objection to anyone expressing their faith privately, or in church. The problem is leading a group in prayer, but if Coach Kennedy wasn’t doing that, no problem.

Photograph of Coach Kennedy’s “quiet”, “brief” prayer:

OK, that’s one and done. Now we await the courts decision to gut the Environmental Protection Agency. Anyone want to guess how that one will go?

But he’s right.

White nationalist Nick Fuentes rejoices that in overturning Roe, the Supreme Court has laid out a blueprint for banning gay marriage, sodomy, and contraception and imposing "Catholic Taliban rule": "We're having something like Taliban rule in America, in a good way!" pic.twitter.com/ZhSxZMBTIh

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) June 27, 2022

That’s exactly what the Supreme Court is trying to do, impose a Catholic Taliban on us…although the “Taliban” part is totally redundant. This is exactly what a purely, strictly, orthodox, traditional Catholicism wants, we don’t need to blame the Muslims for it.

You know, the Founding Fathers would have been horrified at the thought of women and Catholics on the court. It’s odd how these fanatical Originalists can ignore that.

A Christian football player from Texas (obviously, that’s all you need to be fully qualified to provide answers to everything) offers his answer to the problem of school shootings.

Two cents 🙏🏼 pic.twitter.com/PK2VH77D91

— Jonah Tuls (@JonahTulsNFL) May 28, 2022

No, you absolute numpty. It’s the guns. European countries have a higher divorce rate than the US, and don’t have anywhere near the number of mass shootings we do. Mongolia has a lower rate, and when was the last time you read about schools getting shot up there? There isn’t even a hint of a correlation.

This “marriage is a covenant” nonsense is a tool evangelicals use to trap and dominate women. It’s an ugly, manipulative tactic.

Ken Ham loves it.

Here’s an excellent summary of that exercise in patriarchal thinking, in case you never heard of John MacArthur or The Master’s University and Seminary.

See, for example, yesterday’s Houston Chronicle article, which details how for decades in the Southern Baptist Convention “survivors and others who reported [sexual] abuse were ignored, disbelieved, or met with the constant refrain that the SBC could take no action . . . even if it meant convicted molesters continued in ministry.”

And for another example, see the recent New York Times article about a conservative pastor in Fort Smith, Arkansas who was pushed out of his pulpit because he used the acronym “BLM” in his blog, and because he refused to head down the QAnon rabbit hole with his congregants.

One of the best sources on scandal-a-minute evangelicalism is the Roys Report. Established by investigative journalist Julie Roys, the Report “is a Christian media outlet, reporting the unvarnished truth about what’s happening in the Christian community so the church can be reformed and restored.” Determined to expose the seamy side of what she refers to as the “evangelical industrial complex,” the intrepid, persistent, and apparently fearless Roys has done remarkable work in exposing appalling truths about evangelical luminaries and institutions such as Mark Driscoll, Ravi Zacharias, Hillsong, Jerry Falwell Jr. and Liberty University, James MacDonald and Harvest Bible Chapel, Matt Chandler and Acts 29, and Thomas White and Cedarville University (about which we also have written a great deal – here’s one example).

But near the top of Roys’ investigative hit parade is John MacArthur, pastor of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, and chancellor emeritus of The Master’s University and Seminary (TMUS). In the past 27 months, Roys has written (I think I have the count right) 47 posts on MacArthur and his institutions (not to mention additional podcasts). In these articles she has detailed MacArthur’s claims that there is no pandemic (it’s a Satanic deception, which would be news to the families of the over 1 million Americans who have died from COVID) and his church’s and schools’ failure to report COVID cases; she has highlighted MacArthur’s huge salaries and wealth, blatant nepotism, and determination to keep financial details of his institutions a secret; and, she has reported accusations of plagiarism against the chancellor emeritus.

On top of all that corruption, MacArthur also believes “marriage is a covenant”…or, in other words, marriage is a prison for women.

This spring, Roys has focused on how MacArthur and his minions, taking a page out of the Southern Baptist Convention playbook, have a history of minimizing and covering up sexual abuse. Here a few examples:

• MacArthur shamed, excommunicated woman for refusing to stay with child abusing husband (March 08)
• MacArthur’s church actively supported convicted pedophile while shunning his wife (March 17)
• MacArthur employees defend child abuser, dismiss “screeching” from survivors (March 24)
• MacArthur covered up pastor’s sexual abuse of daughter (April 19)

And there is more. And all of this is in keeping with what John Street, chair of the graduate program in biblical counseling at TMUS, has taught his students:

• A Christian wife should endure abuse by a non-Christian husband in the same way that missionaries endure persecution.
• By enduring abuse a wife may win her husband to Christ.
• When both spouses are Christian, the wife should rely on church processes, as government authorities must be the absolute last resort.
• Domestic violence shelters are terrible places, as they teach women to be assertive.
• The only grounds for divorce are unrepentant adultery and abandonment.

I watched my grandmother suffer for years in an abusive, broken marriage, and I don’t think she ever tried to get out of it. I think the last decades of her life would have been much happier if she could have escaped, although it probably would have accelerated my grandfather’s decline.

This is Franklin Graham, evangelical leader of the Southern Baptist convention, son of Billy Graham, yesterday, the 23rd of May. He’s got his priorities.

I’M CALLING ON MCDONALD’S TO BRING BACK THE FRIED APPLE PIE IN AMERICA! I just arrived in Sheffield, UK, where I’ll be preaching this week & my 1st stop was—you can guess where—their local @McDonalds! Yes, I had my Quarter Pounder with cheese—& of course a fried apple pie. pic.twitter.com/GHvTXpJa2t

— Franklin Graham (@Franklin_Graham) May 23, 2022

What’s somewhat surprising about this is that the day before, the Washington Post broke the news of a major scandal among the Southern Baptists. You’d think this should be a 5-alarm crisis for the evangelical leadership.

Leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention on Sunday released a major third-party investigation that found that sex abuse survivors were often ignored, minimized and “even vilified” by top clergy in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

The findings of nearly 300 pages include shocking new details about specific abuse cases and shine a light on how denominational leaders for decades actively resisted calls for abuse prevention and reform. They also lied to Southern Baptists over whether they could maintain a database of offenders to prevent more abuse when top leaders were secretly keeping a private list for years.

The report — the first investigation of its kind in a massive Protestant denomination like the SBC — is expected to send shock waves into a conservative Christian community that has had intense internal battles over how to handle sex abuse. The 13 million-member denomination, along with other religious institutions in the United States, has struggled with declining membership for the past 15 years. Its leaders have long resisted comparisons between its sexual abuse crisis and that of the Catholic Church, saying the total number of abuse cases among Southern Baptists was small.

Somehow, I don’t think the campaign to bring back McDonald’s fried apple pies is going to be an adequate distraction from the bad news.

Franklin, and the rest of the world, might want to read that 300 page report. It begins…

For almost two decades, survivors of abuse and other concerned Southern Baptists have been contacting the Southern Baptist Convention (“SBC”) Executive Committee (“EC”) to report child molesters and other abusers who were in the pulpit or employed as church staff. They made phone calls, mailed letters, sent emails, appeared at SBC and EC meetings, held rallies, and contacted the press…only to be met, time and time again, with resistance, stonewalling, and even outright hostility from some within the EC.

Our investigation revealed that, for many years, a few senior EC leaders, along with outside counsel, largely controlled the EC’s response to these reports of abuse. They closely guarded information about abuse allegations and lawsuits, which were not shared with EC Trustees, and were singularly focused on avoiding liability for the SBC to the exclusion of other considerations. In service of this goal, survivors and others who reported abuse were ignored, disbelieved, or met with the constant refrain that the SBC could take no action due to its polity regarding church autonomy – even if it meant that convicted molesters continued in ministry with no notice or warning to their current church or congregation.

It’s a familiar story that we’ve seen again and again. Women are harassed, they report the problem to a designated authority, said authority buries the report, the offenders continue to offend (maybe with the advantage of being reassigned to virgin territory), and the hierarchy responds to queries with What? No, we don’t have a sexual abuse problem. My files are empty of cases!. We’ve seen it in the Catholic church, and also in smaller entities like the James Randi Educational Foundation.

Maybe the problem isn’t religion. Maybe the real root of the problem is patriarchal social structures. We should start dismantling every organization that has a mob of men at the top, where processing reports of abuse is handled by a chain of men. That seems like a reasonable starting point to fixing an issue.

Alternative explanation: maybe Franklin Graham is right and the real problem is that McDonald’s now bakes their apple pies, rather than frying them.

After all, God speaks directly to the Graham family.

Ate lunch in London today at @McDonalds! They have the best fried apple pies! #QuarterPounder #HappyPlace pic.twitter.com/t0E4pYXQOH

— Franklin Graham (@Franklin_Graham) May 19, 2022

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I did suggest that Greg Locke’s tax exempt status be revoked, as did many other people. It is now being reported that Locke has “dissolved” his status as a 501(c)(3) organization.

After being reported to the FBI and IRS (not sure who did that… 😈) — Greg Locke says he's "hired an attorney" and "dissolved Global Visions 501(c)(3) status". And continued obsessing over dirty socks… 🤢

Have the day you deserve. 🤣👋🏻 pic.twitter.com/KzmKYytr43

— The Dude (@TheDudeTrader1) May 23, 2022

However, I have to bring up two facts. (1) This is a self-assertion that has not been verified, and (2) Greg Locke is a loud-mouthed liar. I’ll believe it when I see evidence that Locke’s church has started paying taxes on his revenue.

For now, you should look at the IRS statement on tax exemptions for churches.

Churches (including integrated auxiliaries and conventions or associations of churches) that meet the requirements of section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code are automatically considered tax exempt and are not required to apply for and obtain recognition of exempt status from the IRS. Donors are allowed to claim a charitable deduction for donations to a church that meets the section 501(c)(3) requirements even though the church has neither sought nor received IRS recognition that it is tax exempt. In addition, because churches and certain other religious organizations are not required to file an annual return or notice with the IRS, they are not subject to automatic revocation of exemption for failure to file. See Annual Return Filing Exceptions for a complete list of organizations that are not required to file.

See that bit in boldface? Most churches do not have to apply for 501(c)(3) status. Just say you are a church (I presume you could have to show that you have a congregation, etc., or I could do the same), and the IRS doesn’t require you to file an application for that status. Locke very likely has never had to apply for 501c3 communism and didn’t have anything to renounce, and will probably not pay any taxes on his church by default.

Never ever take a Christian at their word, and especially don’t trust evangelical fanatics.

When will my supernatural demonic powers kick in? None of my curses ever seem to work.

If a Muslim imam in a mosque looked into the camera and said, "You ain't seen an insurrection yet and we'll take it by force, that's what the Quran says," what do you think would happen to that imam? I think we all know. – @mehdirhasan pic.twitter.com/sPjpfSRnzE

— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) May 21, 2022

I think a perfectly legitimate way to deal with ranting pastors like Greg Locke is to immediately revoke their tax exempt status. Any time a preacher gets blatantly partisan, or uses their pulpit to promote sedition, swiftly inform them that they are preaching politics rather than religion, and send them a bill for property tax and income tax.

It’s absurd that we just shrug and look away at that kind of behavior.