Money For Morals

Dear Evangelicals (and Family):

I’ve seen a fair share of complaints about the money consciousness of my generation – that’d be the baby boomers – on social media. Oddly enough, I sympathize.

I have never known someone with money who hasn’t used the threat of withholding it to break – with all the violence and vindictiveness that implies – some aspect of someone's character that has nothing to do with getting and spending.

If that’s what you’re going through, let me do that thing we tiresome, old blowhards are prone to do -- lay some wisdom on you:

Why let someone who’s just as human as you are, tell you who you are, where and if you belong, and why you’re here? Why let them decide if you’re acceptable?

If the price of being part of a family – whatever that means to you – is to let someone decide what role you play in the family, dump ‘em. You can make friends, a family, a living, and a life without selling out under threat.

The corollary to this is that, if you’re threatening to cut a “loved one” off financially in some twisted effort to punish them for living out their core values, you are a greedy, reprehensible pig.

You are probably also living a lie – a big one. It wounds you to the core that someone you thought you could control has the guts to be who they are, publicly and privately.

To you, I say that, if you can’t manage your own life, you have no business trying to manage someone else’s. Look in the mirror, and clean up your own mess first. Then, you can think about dispensing advice to someone else.

How do you do that? How do you climb out of the filth and live authentically?

See the fourth and fifth paragraphs of this post. Your … beneficiaries are already way ahead of you.

As the United States Declaration of Independence puts it, you have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

That means you have the right to the femme name and the pink negligee. You have the right to exercise the spiritual gifts, and rock a Bible app on your phone. You have the right to vote Republican for the first time in your family’s history. You have the right to champion astrology over the enneagram. The right to counsel the old man to tell the truth for once in his miserable life.

If you don’t think that any one of those things is as controversial as the others in certain circles, you need to get out more. If you don’t think that all these issues can be at work in one person’s life, you need to get out even more.

But I digress.

If you’ve spent your life living a lie, how do you climb out of the filth and live authentically?

Tell someone. Tell the people who mean more to you than anyone else. If they bail, you’re ahead of the game, because you’re no longer burdened by people who hate you.

See the fourth and fifth paragraphs of this post – again. And again and again, if it helps. Do your crying for as long as you need to. Then, get back up, fix your face, and find a real family.

Who Your Friends Are

Dear Evangelicals:

We know you believe you'll usher in God's kingdom in this life without consulting Him. You're so unabashedly zealous, in fact, that you're straying away from the seven mountains to conquer whatever unpleasantness clouds your path -- emphasis on your.

No, God has nothing to do with this.

There is nothing in the Bible commanding you to take responsibility for the decisions your adult children make. Ezekiel 18 says the opposite, but, what the heck? It's only God speaking.

Yet, here you are, riding herd on responsible adults as if you own them.

The latest horror story to cross my desk is that of a perpetually-angry father -- no one would dare be intimate enough with such a monster to call him "Dad" -- who has expressly forbidden his 25-year-old daughter to befriend a certain group of people.

Are they atheists? Pagans? Nazis? Gang bangers? Criminals?

Nope. They're -- dun dun dunnnnnhhh -- liberals.

Oh, the horror!

Enough sarcasm; let's explore (I know how that frightens you; hold my hand. Or don't, unless the door is open, or your wife is in the room).

The Bible has plenty to say about friendship with God, about the characteristics of a true friend, about acting like everyone is your friend, about hanging with stupid people, with liars and gossips, with those who talk behind your back.

It says nothing about avoiding those with opposite socio-political leanings. It is, however, achingly-specific about those you should avoid among Christians. The Bible also tells us exactly whose lives we're supposed to clean up.

In other words, if you haven't taken a good, long look in the mirror, don't bother looking at anyone else.

Special Rights

Dear Evangelicals:

Have you heard the latest from the A.F.A.'s syndicated hate spewer, Bryan Fischer?

It seems that Fischer and, by extension, the American Family Association, want to put an end to single-use restrooms, because such facilities give transgender people what Fischer terms "special rights".

Let's not beat around the bush: We know you put country over God, so let's see what  U.S. Constitution has to say about extending "special rights" to certain groups.

There's a bogus legal argument equating single-stall restrooms with bills of attainder, easily torpedoed by the simple fact that anyone can use a single-stall restroom. In fact, it's often necessary to use the single-stall facility when the restroom is crowded. But then, Fischer is male, and wouldn't know about such things.

So much for prescribed gender roles strengthening the fabric of society. If you Quiverfull crazies stopped insisting that a mother should be mastering the art of folding dinner napkins instead of the art of drafting legislation, we wouldn't have this problem.

But I digress.

The only other argument is the eternal chicken-or-egg debate over the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. To which I say, scream all you want; the final decision will depend on which judge you get. Deal with it.

Which brings us to that Book you don't want to obey unless you agree it.

The Bible commands Christians to defend the oppressed, the foreign and the foreigner, the persecuted, and the weak -- even if they are, as Fischer says, "a tiny little slice of the population".

Especially if they're a tiny little slice of the population.

Don't believe me? Head on over to Bible Gateway, and do a search for "weak", "oppressed", "stranger", or "alien".

There will be those of you who marshal every legalistic argument in the book -- your book, I mean -- to worm out of obeying the Almighty God. Many of you will retort that it's absurd to call transgender people aliens and strangers because you are cursed with them in your own lives.

The book of James (one of my favorites) would tell you that, if you're so insistent on following the law, you'd better follow every last bit of it, or you are guilty, and will be so judged.

One thing about that judgment: There's no rotating pool of judges who might hear your case. There's only One.

How do you like the sound of special rights now?

Pity the Poor Billionaire

Dear Evangelicals:

The first picture on the left was painted by American artist and icon, Norman Rockwell. It depicts young Ruby Bridges being escorted by federal marshals to her first day at an all-white school in Louisiana.

The second picture was tweeted by Bree Newsome, who became a national hero when she climbed the flagpole in front of the statehouse in South Carolina, and removed the Confederate flag. It is an editorial cartoon by Glenn McCoy of the Belleville News Democrat. It depicts Betsy DeVos, a white, adult billionaire, and the recently-confirmed Secretary of Education, imagining her to be the victim of persecution as terrifying as that experienced by little Ruby Bridges.

The first word that came to my mind was one you evangelicals generally apply to the American and allegedly-unbelieving Left -- "whiny".

Blacks who dared to claim rights equal to those of whites were imprisoned, beaten, tortured, and murdered. Their homes and churches were burned and bombed. To you, a mere difference of opinion and the healthy, peaceful exercise of dissenters' Constitutional rights is just as oppressive and terrifying.

Wow.

That sickening realization reminded me of the quote at left. The truth is, you, and most other political and social conservatives, don't really believe that the oppressed people of this country are all that oppressed. You call them "whiny" in the wildly-dysfunctional belief that they're exaggerating, or worse, faking altogether.

No.

It's way past time that you yanked the beam out of your own eye instead of bellowing about the speck in someone else's.

When Narcissists Ride Too High

Dear Evangelicals:

You're not going to like this, because it's about an individual you are apparently willing to defend to the death.

His name is Donald Trump.

Politics aside, the crux of Trump's problems is the pathology of narcissism. If you're still reading, it's because you know at least one narcissist who is ready, willing, and able to ruin your marriage, your family, your company, or your church.

What you can't understand, what keeps you up at night, is this: Why are things getting crazier and crazier when you and everybody else caters to this monster's every whim?

Michael Kruse doesn't exactly answer that question in The Trouble With Peak Trump, his piece for Politico. Instead, his harrowing story serves to validate what so many of us have known without knowing -- about Trump and every other narcissist in our lives: If we don't yank them off their high horse and back down to earth at the first sign of narcissistic behavior, they will destroy our sanity. Giving them what they plead for only drives them to exploit us further. As the old saying goes, "Give 'em an inch, and they'll take a mile."

There's only one guaranteed method for stopping Trump and every other narcissist in your life. It is this.

Godspeed.

Cooties and the Scales of Justice

Dear Evangelicals:

What. Is. Wrong. With. YOU?

Have you honestly never read the following passage in the Bible?

"I wrote to you in my epistle not to keep company with sexually immoral people. Yet I certainly did not mean with the sexually immoral people of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. But now I have written to you not to keep company with anyone named a brother, who is sexually immoral, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or an extortioner—not even to eat with such a person.
 
"For what have I to do with judging those also who are outside? Do you not judge those who are inside? 

"But those who are outside God judges. Therefore 'put away from yourselves the evil person.'" (1 Corinthians 5:9-13, NKJV)

Oh, it's in there, all right. Yet you persist in doing exactly the opposite. You judge non-believers like there's a reward for it, yet leave professing Christians to commit the most heinous crimes imaginable, rallying 'round when someone actually dares to call Christian sinners to account.

Another thing -- and hang on to your hats because we're about to get intellectual up in here -- the subtext of this verse damns you all the more. 

The subtext is what the apostle Paul says without saying it. You'd have to go out of the world to avoid sinners who don't profess Christianity, he says, and his implication is that we cannot and should not go out of the world. In fact, Jesus said to go into all the world (You know: Great Commission. I'll let you Google it).

So when (gasp!) an unbeliever asks you to hang out or -- heaven forfend! -- offers to help you with something, don't be the high-handed jackass who quotes John 15:19 or Romans 12:2. The former is about how the religious establishment would feel about you if you were really following Jesus. The latter is about your behavior; not the behavior of non-believers.

Non-believers don't have some sort of spiritual cooties. And you don't have the authority to either judge them or spurn them. Get right with God!

Oh (spit take), that's what non-believers are supposed to do? Well, let me send you off with a quote from Frederick Buechner to help clarify just exactly who non-believers are:

"Many an atheist is a believer without knowing it just as many a believer is an atheist without knowing it. You can sincerely believe there is no God and live as though there is. You can sincerely believe there is a God and live as though there isn't."

Which camp do you fall into?

The Virtual Dinner Table

Dear Evangelicals:

On the battlefield where id meets superego (a.k.a. Twitter), I tweet primarily on music; with the addition of nature photos on Saturdays; and mini-sermons in the form of quotes, news items, and think pieces on Sundays. I have always been candid about who I am, what I believe, and the people I stand up for. What you see is what you get.

 There's a woman who has followed me for a good while. On occasion, she retweets one of my musical tweets without comment, and I favorite those retweets when they happen.

I have never commented on a retweet of hers until last week, when she retweeted with a comment and also replied to one of my music tweets. I thought she had some worthwhile insights, and I said as much when I replied.

Her response? Nothing -- not even a favorite.

I was puzzled until I found out why: To this woman, a social conservative and evangelical Christian, it's perfectly acceptable to retweet me, but actually talking to me would expose her to the manifold sins she believes I'm committing, what with my ideas about social justice and all.

Is that how a "The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it" Christian would parse this?

Not surprisingly, Paul had something to say about that. You'll find it it 1 Corinthians 5:9-13 (NKJV):

"I wrote to you in my epistle not to keep company with sexually immoral people. Yet I certainly did not mean with the sexually immoral people of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world.  But now I have written to you not to keep company with anyone named a brother, who is sexually immoral, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or an extortioner—not even to eat with such a person.

 ^"For what have I to do with judging those also who are outside? Do you not judge those who are inside?

 "But those who are outside God judges. Therefore 'put away from yourselves the evil person.'"

By this woman's lights, I am sexually immoral because I support those whom she believes are sexually immoral. Yet, somehow, it's okay to take what I'm offering as long as she doesn't compliment me on the meal?

Nope, nope, nope. Any biblically-literate Christian who believes what this woman believes about me would block me without a second thought. This one wants to have her cake and eat it, too.

As it stands, I'm going to have to block her. As my tagline says, "Socially liberal, theologically conservative."