Category Archives: Books

The “Weaker” Brother

weakerbrotherFor when the claim of the “appearance of evil” just isn’t enough to create the required amount of fundamentalist guilt, the “weaker brother” technique is the veritable Swiss Army knife of fundamentalist arguments, ready to be whipped out in a moment to get the job of conviction done.

The argument goes something like this: “Now we know that there’s nothing wrong with doing X, but X is something that someone out there somewhere may think is wrong. And if that person by some chance happened to see you doing X, or thinking about doing X, or talking about having done X, or goes through your wallet and finds receipts for costs incurred doing X, then that person may stumble.”

The Weaker Brother claim is great for making rules against all those things that aren’t morally wrong but that fundamentalists are convinced you shouldn’t be doing anyway. He’s a handy guy to have around. The problem is that nobody really ever seems to know who the weaker brother is. Certainly nobody in a fundamentalist church claims the title for themselves. As near as one can tell he’s sort of a shadowy character who spends all of his time hanging around outside places like bowling alleys and gas stations that sell booze, looking to see if anybody else is going in so he can get offended. The weaker brother apparently has a lot of time on his hands.

Be on the lookout for him wherever you go. He may be weak but he’s a fundamentalist force to be reckoned with.

Danny Orlis

dannyorlisOn the shelf next to the Sugar Creek Gang series, you’ll likely find at least a few Danny Orlis books on any fundamentalist boy’s bookshelf. In 1954, author Bernard Palmer wrote Danny Orlis and the Charging Moose the first of fifty-two books staring Orlis as the teenage hero with the heart of gold. Unless one has read of Danny’s adventures they may never realize what a hotbed of crime and intrigue the woods of northern Minnesota can be.

Of course not every story takes place in Minnesota, our fearless hero manages to get involved in everything from being a bush pilot to playing football to having adventures on the Alaskan highway. Not bad for a young lad who is barely old enough to shave.

And it’s not just high crime and wild adventures either, by the 1970’s Danny (who was somehow still a teenager) was also tackling the tough moral issues in stories such as The Live-In Tragedy and A Teen-Age Marriage.

There are many lessons to be learned from books like these: capture the bad guys, resist peer pressure, and above all avoid the charging moose.

Chalk Talks

chalkBefore multimedia displays and PowerPoint presentations, fundamentalists had chalk. Credit where it’s due, if done well, chalk talks were a great way to keep people’s attention and make a point. If done badly, however, the presentation may end up looking vaguely like a cubist artist’s impression of a sunset at the North Pole. In short, it’s a royal mess.

In the really extravagant chalk art presentations, a black light may be used to reveal hidden images at the end of the talk. Or perhaps, the artist would draw upside down and then later reveal the real picture by flipping over the canvas. Not too many people do this anymore; it’s really a shame. Watching someone doodle on a screen in MS Paint just isn’t quite the same.

If you’ve never seen a chalk talk done, you can check out a video of none other than Peter Ruckman giving a presentation while drawing an “original autograph.”

Keeping the Sabbath Day

For fundamentalists, their “day of rest” begins promptly at 6:00 a.m. with mom and dad rousting the five children out of bed, feeding them breakfast, and hunting all over the house for various articles of children’s clothing that they could have sworn were hanging in the closet just last night. Then with everyone bathed, fed, and dressed, it’s off to the bus ministry and an hour and a half of driving around town picking up children and getting them to church.

Then it’s time to get the babies to the nursery, the children deposited at Sunday school, and making sure that there are coffee and doughnuts for the adult Sunday school class. After that it’s time for the main service where Dad watches the older kids while mom volunteers in the nursery since the youngest kid is teething and she’ll probably end up in there for half the service anyway.

Sometime later, the service concludes and it’s time to get the bus kids back to their respective homes just in time to rush to the monthly nursing home ministry which Dad happens to be speaking at this week and it turns out that the normal pianist is sick so mom fills in for that as well. After that it’s a quick lunch at a drive-through, then back to the church for children’s choir practice and Men’s meeting before the evening service. Evening service this week is followed by a lengthy business meeting which mom and dad take part in while the older kids play freeze tag in the parking lot. Finally, long after darkness has fallen, it’s time go home.

On the drive home, the eight-year-old looks out of the car window and exclaims “look, there’s a fair going on! People are riding the rides and playing games!”

“Those people should know better than that!”, says Dad piously “Sunday is a day for rest.” But in his heart he’s rather relieved that tomorrow is Monday when all he has to do is go to work. This much resting could be deadly in large doses.

The Trail of Blood

trail

You know that annoying kid in school who loved to brag about how General Lee was his great-great-great-great uncle’s second cousin twice removed? When that kid grows up to be a fundamentalist, he’ll probably be a huge fan of the the book The Trail of Blood.

Baptists as a denomination have only been around for about four hundred years — Independent Fundamental Baptists for considerably less. This short existence has created a certain amount of envy of other traditions who have been around for a lot longer and have an impressive pedigree that claims members all the way back to the Apostles. Inevitably, something had to be done to bolster up Baptist prestige, and that something was this book detailing “The History of Baptist Churches From the Time of Christ, Their Founder, to the Present Day.”

Now in order to make this impressive family tree, the author was forced to bring together some very strange bedfellows indeed. Cathari, Donatists, Novatians, and a lot of others were evidently all Baptists. Not fundamentalists, of course, because they didn’t have the KJV yet, but ancient paintings do conclusively prove that they did in fact have established bus ministries, so it’s obvious they’re related to fundamentalists today. And nobody would be more surprised than they to learn it.

So do not be dismayed by Roman Catholics who claim to have leaders reaching back to Peter. Fundamentalists have roots that go back all the way to Genesis with Diklah the son of Joktan and they’ll show you the charts to prove it.