The Wrongologist

What’s
Wrong Today:

The
Wrongologist likes the Wall Street
Journal’s Weekend edition; it is one of the better newspapers in America.
Sadly, you can’t say that about the Monday-Friday edition of the WSJ, which is largely a
yellow-journalism rag.

The
Weekend edition has weaknesses that reflect its weekday roots, like this article:
Bye
to Uncle Sam? which talks about the “flight” of Americans to renounce ties
to the US for tax reasons. The headline must be 48pts and boldface. The issue
is um, tiny. Turns out the “flight” was 1800 people in the 1st half
of 2013. But for those members of the 1% thinking of moving abroad to pay fewer
taxes, the Journal included a handy
guide to help avoid the taxman.

This
weekend, they also ran an article about Russell Moore, the incoming president
of the Southern Baptist Conventions’ Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
He is replacing Richard Land, who told NPR
in 2010 that Mormonism was “not a Christian faith”.  

Mr. Moore,
however, may be a different breed of cat. In the article,
Moore says he is decidedly not a
fan of the “values voter checklists” of the Moral Majority:
“There is no Christian position on the line-item veto,” Mr. Moore
says. “There is no Christian position on the balanced-budget
amendment.” Mr. Moore wants to refocus the movement on serving as a
religious example battling in the public square on “three core
issues”—life, marriage and religious liberty.

Why? Because “we
are no longer the moral majority. We are a prophetic minority.” Naomi
Schaefer Riley, WSJ’s religion writer:

Let’s unpack whether
Mr. Moore is a different breed of cat.

By “prophetic
minority,” he means that Christians must return to the days when they were
a moral example and vanguard—defenders of belief in a larger unbelieving
culture. He views this less as a defeat than as an opportunity.

As a “prophetic
minority,” Mr. Moore thinks his most profound political task will be defending religious liberty from the
assaults of a secular government. This cause is at the heart of his
plan to fight the contraception mandate in ObamaCare. Mr. Moore sees this as a
chance to unite believers of many faiths, and last month he joined Archbishop
William Lori of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and other religious
leaders in writing to Mr. Obama: “HHS (The Housing and Human Services
Administration) policy is coercive and puts the administration in the position
of defining—or casting aside—religious doctrine. This should trouble every
American.”

Mr.
Moore says he hopes to make the ObamaCare mandate a major issue in the 2016
election. By then, it will have become clear how intrusive the health-care law
has become, he says, and the American people will side with religious groups
that protest having to act against their beliefs. “The separation of
church and state,” Mr. Moore says, “is not a liberal issue.”

So, over the past decade, Southern
Baptists have gone from “We’re the moral majority because this will always
be a Christian nation” to “If you are a true Christian, you will
fight this battle with us because America has lost its way”.

If it seems odd that the Christian majority in the
US is suddenly acting like an aggrieved minority, you’ve not been paying
attention to the Religious Right’s shell game in the age of Obama.

It’s also worth remembering that
the Southern Baptists are the same group that fought against the Civil Rights
movement in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

With the Supreme
Court’s decisions on gay marriage in June, Mr. Moore sent a message to pastors
to help them talk with their congregants about the Southern Baptist opposition
to the law. “We don’t hate our gay and lesbian neighbors,” he says,
but redefining marriage on their behalf is another matter.

From the article: (emphasis
by the Wrongologist)

Moore is calling evangelicals to arms against the
rest of us. His prophetic minority strategy offers Christians a moral high
ground since they are being “persecuted” for their beliefs by a
country that increasingly doesn’t buy into their intolerance towards LGBT
Americans, women, other religions, secular Americans, and even more liberal,
inclusive Christians. 

From Mr. Moore’s viewpoint,
Southern Baptists and the larger evangelical Christian community are a minority.
That is how they plan to play it, and here’s their political strategy: 

• Everything
  that the Obama administration is doing is an “assault on the religious
  liberty” of those who say they are unfairly being persecuted for their
  proud intolerance
  

• The
  government cannot tell them to do anything that they don’t believe they should
  have to do

• Decades
  of jurisprudence would say otherwise, but the basic plan is everything they don’t like now
  violates the First Amendment’s freedom of religion clause, and
  they will act accordingly.

Evangelical Christians have a management problem. As a management consultant
might put it: Few barriers to entry creates problems of credibility. No
Evangelical Executive Committee exists to review opinions, discipline or
excommunicate a franchise holder. With no institutional regulatory framework,
preachers can tell teens to pray over used clothing to get out the demons,
refuse to have faith healing claims evaluated by neutral observers, blame
natural disasters on human behavior, continue to insist the world is 4,000
years old, fleece the faithful by selling prosperity shawls that claim to bring
vast wealth, and call for foreign leaders to be killed.

Until a structure is put in place to define and
oversee an acceptable theology and world view that is part of the modern age, evangelical
Christians will continue to look more and more like a cult, one step above Scientology.

Christianity was a quality product, then came
organization, then institutionalization, then, worship of the institution,
then, blindness to faults.

So stand
tall, all of you Christian anti-choicers, homobigots, and Teavangelicals. 

Your
right to shame, persecute, and harass those outside of your beliefs will be
fought tooth and nail by Mr. Moore,
who believes it is the duty of the State to protect you from (his definition)
of sin.

He really isn’t
a different breed of cat.