The best observation to come out of the Hame vs. Nye debate the other evening comes from the Twitter account of Larry Hobbs. There are just so many places to go with this I don’t even know where to start.
Monthly Archives: February 2014
Demonic Possession
I would dearly love to ask Danny whether it’s only black people who get possessed. Seems to be rather an epidemic in that community.
FWOTW: vbc1611.com
Today’s website pick is the home of Victory Baptist Church in Camby, IN where I’ve heard the people sometimes tithe in bullets because they know how much their pastor loves to shoot.
I especially like the admonition to “MAKE SURE TO CHECK OUT ALL OUR SITE, OR ELSE!!!” See that you do.
Friday News Roundup
photo by Giulio Bernardi
My inbox has been flooded for the past while with various stories of scandals, crimes, and strange occurrences. Here’s a quick rundown on the latest scandals going on in Fundyland.
Bob Jones University has called a halt to the GRACE sexual abuse investigation that was just weeks away from releasing its findings. Stephen Jones wrote a rambling letter that cited among other reasons that he doesn’t have time because he’s completely booked up with trying not to be president anymore. BJU’s public statement, on the other hand, makes it pretty clear that what is as stake here is the content of the report itself which the University would really like to see stuffed into the same closet that holds all of their other skeletons.
Bill Gothard has also had troubles with the release of a new wave of testimony and allegations. Gothard’s correspondence with Recovering Grace is a fascinating study in the Confrontation Initiation diversion tactic. There is no more awful sight than seeing an abuser trying to use Scripture verses as a shield.
Meanwhile, over at West Coast Baptist College former staff member Jeremy Whitman shoots from his car and murders Erik Peter Ungerman at a stoplight. Whitman then commits suicide. The details of what motivated this shooting are too complex to completely unravel here but they include the story of an illicit affair that ended Jeremy’s career at WCBC and separated him from his family. What is clear, however, is that immediately after the shooting West Coast Baptist College attempted to at the same time claim that Jeremy was not an important figure at WCBC (insisting that he wasn’t on pastoral staff) but still wrote him a glowing eulogy. And then wrote him a second one a couple days later. No such remembrance of the man who Jeremy murdered or the family that Jeremy left is anywhere to be found.
Finally, Jack Schaap is still in jail. (Just in case anybody was wondering).
Cathy McMorris Rodgers
After a slow slip to obscurity following the demise of the Moral Majority, fundamentalism may end up back in the public eye in the coming days as the star Rep. Cathy McMorris Rogers (Wash.) continues to rise. This scrutiny will not be due to the fact that McMorris Rodgers herself still identifies as a fundamentalist (she is a member of an Evangelical Free Church) but rather because she graduated from my own alma mater, Pensacola Christian College, in 1990. If my own views have had time to change in the last decade I can only imagine that Cathy herself has had the same opportunity for review but the stigma remains.
However, now that Cathy is Chair of the House Republican Conference and recently gave the rebuttal speech to the State of the Union address, the party and the nation seem to be taking an interest in her and with the field for the 2016 Presidential race very sparsely populated it’s not a huge leap to think that we may be seeing a lot more of her in the coming days.
If Cathy McMorris Rodgers does continue dwell in the national spotlight it could lead to two basic outcomes:
1. PCC and colleges will tout this as an example of exactly how fantastic an education they provide. One of our grads made it all the way to sort of near where you can see the top! You can too (if you leave here and then go to University of Washington).
2. A whole lot of folks in the media will start asking the question “What is this movement all about anyway?” That could get interesting in a hurry.
While I am ambivalent about Cathy McMorris Rodgers’s politics in general, I will be nonetheless following her career with some interest. Where she ends up could have wide-reaching influence back to the halls of fundamentalism.