Category: Political Matters
Warlock Hunts (and lesser voices)
In the space of about 24 hours I encountered three contributions, not necessarily toward a “solution,” but at least toward perspective, on the sexual harassment tsunami.
The most prominent and lengthiest was Claire Berlinski’s The Warlock Hunt at The American Interest (metered paywall; one freebie per month).
As the title foreshadows, she thinks things have gone too far. Excerpts:
Mass hysteria has set in. It has become a classic moral panic, one that is ultimately as dangerous to women as to men.
…
It now takes only one accusation to destroy a man’s life.Just one for him to be tried and sentenced in the court of public opinion, overnight costing him his livelihood and social respectability. We are on a frenzied extrajudicial warlock hunt that does not pause to parse the difference between rape and stupidity. The punishment for sexual harassment is so grave that clearly this crime—like any other serious crime—requires an unambiguous definition. We have nothing of the sort.
In recent weeks, one after another prominent voice, many of them political voices, have been silenced by sexual harassment charges … Some of the charges sound deadly serious. But others—as reported anyway—make no sense. I can’t say whether the charges against these men are true; I wasn’t under the bed. But even if true, some have been accused of offenses that aren’t offensive, or offenses that are only mildly so—and do not warrant total professional and personal destruction.
The things men and women naturally do—flirt, play, lewdly joke, desire, seduce, tease—now become harassment only by virtue of the words that follow the description of the act, one of the generic form: “I froze. I was terrified.” It doesn’t matter how the man felt about it. The onus to understand the interaction and its emotional subtleties falls entirely on him. But why? Perhaps she should have understood his behavior to be harmless—clumsy, sweet but misdirected, maladroit, or tacky—but lacking in malice sufficient to cost him such arduous punishment?
In recent weeks, I’ve acquired new powers. I have cast my mind over the ways I could use them. I could now, on a whim, destroy the career of an Oxford don who at a drunken Christmas party danced with me, grabbed a handful of my bum, and slurred, “I’ve been dying to do this to Berlinski all term!” That is precisely what happened. I am telling the truth. I will be believed—as I should be.
But here is the thing. I did not freeze, nor was I terrified. I was amused and flattered and thought little of it. I knew full well he’d been dying to do that. Our tutorials—which took place one-on-one, with no chaperones—were livelier intellectually for that sublimated undercurrent. He was an Oxford don and so had power over me, sensu stricto. I was a 20-year-old undergraduate. But I also had power over him—power sufficient to cause a venerable don to make a perfect fool of himself at a Christmas party. Unsurprisingly, I loved having that power. But now I have too much power. I have the power to destroy someone whose tutorials were invaluable to me and shaped my entire intellectual life much for the better. This is a power I do not want and should not have.
…
Revolutions against real injustice have a tendency, however, to descend into paroxysms of vengeance that descend upon guilty and innocent alike … This revolution risks going the way revolutions so often do, and the consequences will not just be awful for men. They will be awful for women.
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Not long ago we firmly convinced ourselves that our children were being ritually raped by Satanists. In recent years, especially, we have become prone to replacing complex thought with shallow slogans …
Given the events of recent weeks, we can be certain of this: From now on, men with any instinct for self-preservation will cease to speak of anything personal, anything sexual, in our presence. They will make no bawdy jokes when we are listening. They will adopt in our presence great deference to our exquisite sensitivity and frailty. Many women seem positively joyful at this prospect. The Revolution has at last been achieved! But how could this be the world we want? Isn’t this the world we escaped?
Who could blame a man who does not enjoy the company of women under these circumstances, who would just rather not have women in the workplace at all? This is a world in which the Mike Pence rule—“Never be alone with a woman”—seems eminently sensible. Such a world is not good for women, however—as many women were quick to point out when we learned of the Mike Pence rule. Our success and advancement relies upon the personal and informal relationships we have with our colleagues and supervisors. But who, in this climate, could blame a venerable Oxford don for refusing to take the risk of teaching a young woman, one-on-one, with no witnesses? Mine was the first generation of women allowed the privilege of unchaperoned tutorials with Balliol’s dons. Will mine also be the last? Like so many revolutions, the sexual revolution risks coming full circle, returning us right where we started—fainting at bawdy jokes, demanding the return of ancient standards of chivalry, so delicate and virginal that a man’s hand on our knee causes us trauma.
So for Berlinski, a little sexiness in the workplace, and even (or especially) in one-on-one sessions is fun, and energizing, and only objectionable when it goes too far, the boundary of “too far” being about as clear as the famous “I know it when I see it” definition of obscenity. She is on the right track, though, when she writes of the tendencies of this kind of panic being bad for both men and women, albeit in different ways. The article is worth a full reading.
I included Berlinski on the “Mike Pence rule” (more properly the Billy Graham rule) specifically for the contrast to Tish Harrison Warren‘s An Open Letter to Men Who Broke the Billy Graham Rule, at The Well back in April, when the hot topic was not toxic lewdness but toxic prudery:
In light of the Vice President’s revelation that he does not eat meals alone with women (besides his wife) and the widespread discussion of the “Billy Graham Rule,” I wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for meeting with me — some of you years ago, some of you last week — to disciple me, befriend me, love me, and honor me as a fellow follower of Christ and as a human being.
So thank you.
…
You, men-who’ve-met-with-me-one-on-one, who’ve eaten with me, had coffee with me, mentored me, encouraged me, and befriended me — you have changed my life. I am a Christian because you poured into me. I am a pastor because you pastored me. I am, I hope, a better wife and mother because you are in my life.
You did not see me as a sexual threat to be avoided, but as a human being, even a sister. And you were safe. You never hit on me. You never made me feel weird or uneasy. If you ever struggled with sexual temptation, you’ve dealt with that by talking with your wife, male friends, or a counselor so that you could be a friend, brother, and pastor to women around you. Because of that, I have the gift of having men in my life who are trustworthy and who are true, dear friends.
So for Warren, who is pretty conservative if graded on a curve, there’s no perceptible sexiness in these one-on-ones, because there’s nobody here but us sincere Christians, who know how to sublimate any unwanted sexual feelings.
I don’t know what Warren would say today, in the midst of this alleged moral panic. I dare say her opportunities for one-on-ones would be reduced significantly at the moment. I don’t recall any Evangelical figures being nationally exposed in the current round of scandals, but there’s a regional offender (albeit of less exalted religious tradition than Warren), and Ravi Zacharias, who travels in somewhat the same Christianity Today circles as Warren, is pretty rueful about letting his guard down:
Today, Zacharias and his eponymous Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM) released their first statements specifically addressing a personal lawsuit involving a married woman who sent nude photos to the popular author and speaker …
“I have learned a difficult and painful lesson through this ordeal,” Zacharias said. “I failed to exercise wise caution and to protect myself from even the appearance of impropriety, and for that I am profoundly sorry. I have acknowledged this to my Lord, my wife, my children, our ministry board, and my colleagues.”
…
Last month, Zacharias settled a lawsuit with a Canadian couple he claimed had attempted to extort him over messages he had exchanged with the wife.
The federal lawsuit—which was filed by Zacharias, not the couple—alleged that his “friendly correspondence” with the wife evolved over the course of 2016 to her sending him “unwanted, offensive, sexually explicit language and photographs.” In April 2017, the couple sent a letter through their attorney demanding millions of dollars in exchange for keeping the messages a secret.
“In the alternative of protracted and public litigation, [the couple] will sign a release of you and your church and ministry in exchange for a certified check in the amount of $5 million,” stated the letter from the Bryant Law Firm ….
That seemingly extortionate demand would get my attention.
Finally, at Public Discourse, Mark Regnerus:
Recent revelations about sexual harassment, assault, and abuse underscore certain blunt realities about men, women, and sex. How can we confront those realities in a way that leads to less sexual violence?
He states and briefly elaborates “three blunt but essential truths:”
- First, men’s sex drives are, on average, stronger and less discriminating than women’s.
- Second, men have the upper hand in the contemporary mating market, even as—and partly because—women are flourishing economically and educationally. These are not criticisms; they are observations.
- Third, women are usually physically smaller and weaker than men, and—as already noted—more discriminating in their sexual choices. Hence women are more prone to find themselves in situations of sexual risk with regard to men.
Regnerus then critically engages an early-2017 scholarly article that deals with male sexuality in terms of “fly zones” and “no-fly zones, concluding:
These are liminal times in male-female relationships. Treating men as if only threats of shaming, expulsion, and litigation will beat back their urges is not only an erroneous theory, Fleming asserts, “it’s downright dysfunctional for everyone, because it distorts the rules in such a way as to disorient men and women alike.”
Women should not silently put up with men’s boorish and aggressive expressions of sexual interest. But as we combat that we must ensure that men and women do not come to fear and suspect (and then avoid) each other, where we lean on law and regulation over convention. Now is the time for men to exhibit—and women to reinforce—norms of interaction that respect women’s dignity, bodily integrity, and security, while preserving the capacity to express (when appropriate) romantic interest and handle rejection. It is not rocket science. We know how to do this.
I also thought the “fly zone” versus “no-fly zone” model was interesting, but couldn’t help but notice the ambiguous areas:
Fleming argues that it’s the border between “fly” and “no fly” zones—a party, for example—that is most apt to foster confusion and tempt risk, not the classroom or the bus. This is the social space in which most problems, ranging from sexual badgering to diminished consent to downright rape, are apt to occur. Comparable dynamics can occur at after-work gatherings, professional conferences, on a first date, or after texting to “hang out.”
Cf. Claire Berlinski’s “drunken Christmas party” in Oxford.
Considering some of the points Regnerus made as he moved toward his conclusion, his confidence that “We know how to do this” seems a nonsequitur. I’m not at all sure we do know how to do this any more, unless he means that all married men should accumulate a year of rust on their courting skills every calendar year, which might be a good place to start.
Pre-Publication Update: An NPR poll featured at the top of Thursday’s All Things Consider reports 86% Americans support “zero tolerance for sexual harassment.” I trust that these lemmings feel virtuous for having no tolerance whatever for something they almost certainly cannot define. NPR made no effort to define it, either.
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I would a thousand times rather have dinner with secular liberals of a certain temperament than with a group of religious conservatives who agreed with me about most things, but who have no sense of humor or irony.
Thursday 12/14/17
Wednesday, 12/13/17
Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise. For we are sick at heart. Our hearts give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children and for thinking of that other Child of whom the poet Luke speaks. The infant was taken up in the arms of an old man whose tongue grew resonant and vatic at the touch of that beauty.
Fr. Daniel Berrigan, writing of the destruction of draft records as part of the Catonsville Nine. Quoted by Jim Forest, a friend and now biographer and memoirist of the late Priest. Be it remembered that Fr. Berrigan was a published poet.
More:
Is our morality in any sense superior to that of those ancient peoples who commonly exposed the newborn to death, as unwelcome aspirants to the sweet air of life? Can we help everyone walk into the full spectrum and rainbow of life, from womb to old age, so that no one is expendable? Especially in the religious pacifist community, we who believe no political idolatry can excuse the taking of life, can we help remind and symbolize the splendid range of nonviolence, from before birth to the aged? What is a human vocation anyway? Was not our first political act just getting born?
The good news, from Brad Wilcox‘s perspective, is that “churchgoing evangelical Protestant husbands were the least likely to be engaged in abusive behavior.”
His bad news, congruent with a surmise I published Sunday:
Although the empirical story of religion and domestic violence looks good for practicing believers, it’s much less rosy for others. My research suggests that the most violent husbands in America are nominal evangelical Protestants who attend church infrequently or not at all. The reasons are not entirely clear. It’s possible they believe Christian teaching about male headship gives them a hitting license. Or perhaps their class or culture—many of these men hail from parts of the South and Appalachia populated by working-class Scots-Irish descendants with a greater propensity for violent behavior —explains these results. Religiously mixed couples may also have a greater risk for domestic violence, especially theologically conservative men married to women who do not share their religious views. In these cases, religion is not protective against abuse.
David Brooks reflects on What’s Wrong with Radicalism of both left and right.
Most of our actual social and economic problems are the bad byproducts of fundamentally good trends.
Technological innovation has created wonders but displaced millions of workers. The meritocracy has unleashed talent but widened inequality. Immigration has made America more dynamic but weakened national cohesion. Globalization has lifted billions out of poverty but pummeled the working classes in advanced nations.
What’s needed is reform of our core institutions to address the bad byproducts, not fundamental dismantling.
That sort of renewal means doing the opposite of everything the left/right radicals do. It means believing that life can be more like a conversation than a war if you open by starting a conversation. It means collectively focusing on problems and not divisively destroying people. It means believing that love is a genuine force in human affairs and that you can be effective by appealing to the better angels of human nature.
Jake Meador at Mere Orthodoxy published Five Theses on Voting and the Alabama Senate Election early on Tuesday, but it’s really intended for political thought in days and years to come, not to influence the Alabama vote.
Meador admits that he’s relatively unfriendly to the American Right—a bias he offsets by publishing friends who don’t share it. That said, here’s some of his indictments of the American Right as instantiated in the GOP:
2. The GOP as a party is not actually interested in governing.
There are any number of examples you could furnish here to make the point . We might begin by the years of cynical obstruction the party engaged in under President Obama, to the point of torpedoing a healthcare agenda whose signature element was an idea taken from the Heritage Foundation! … Since the late 80s or early 90s, the GOP has been hardening and hardening, such that today the party’s agenda is divorced almost entirely from coherent governing policy.
The most recent example is the tax reform bill. First, they took steps with the tax reform bill that will, according to almost all third party organizations, increase the deficit …
That said, almost immediately after they passed this bill, … Paul Ryan turned around and said that the House agenda in 2018 is going to be cutting Medicaid and Medicare, specifically citing fear about the deficit as a reason for that agenda. … You either care about the deficit… or you don’t.
…
The GOP, as others have noted, has become a drunken caricatured version of Zombie Reaganism. And whatever else we might say about it, it does not have a coherent approach to governing.
3. We should not glide easily over the substantive problems with the GOP’s policies.
…
One of the unfortunate side effects of the Democratic support for abortion has been that many evangelicals essentially give the GOP a pass on policy issues. For many evangelicals in the past 30 years, voting Republican is a kind of natural default that is often done without taking the time to soberly reckon with the consequences of Republican policy. But because the GOP is, increasingly, unconcerned with character and unconcerned with actually governing, it is more important than ever that we learn again to understand and care about policy and factor it into our political choices.
I cannot find anything to disagree with in that because I excised what I didn’t necessarily believe.
The widely expected passage of the tax reform bill will almost undoubtedly cause significant harm to Medicare. And provocative statements by President Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan declaring that “entitlement reform” will be next threatens Medicaid. Put these two together and, I think, one thing is clear: big Medicare and Medicaid cuts are coming.
“We’re going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit, Ryan said in a radio interview last week. And, he said, “I think the president is understanding choice and competition works everywhere, especially in Medicare.” Last month, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said: “We have to do two things. We have to generate economic growth which generates revenue, while reducing spending. That will mean instituting structural changes to Social Security and Medicare for the future.”
(Bob Blancato, Why Big Medicare and Medicaid Cuts Are Likely)
But for an orthodox Evangelical like Meador, that’s not the whole story:
4. We should not pass over the abortion question as “a policy issue.”
…
That said, the larger moral emergency amongst the Democrats is their increasingly strident support for abortion. The Jones candidacy is, in fact, the perfect symbol of that emergency: According to Pew, 58% of Alabamians think that abortion should be illegal in all or most situations. Mississippi and Arkansas are the only states that top them on that metric. If there is any state where the Democrats would be incentivized to tolerate a pro-life candidate, it’d be Alabama. Yet even there, the Democrats have nominated an unapologetically pro-choice candidate of the sort that you simply did not see regularly in the mainstream Democratic party until Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy in 2008. Now this view is normal in the party, even in a state as staunchly pro-life as Alabama.
…
Abortion in America is a national plague and one that, alone, would be sufficient to merit severe divine judgment. Indeed, for Christians it should not seem intuitively crazy to suggest that the decline we are experiencing now may well be a product of God’s judgment on our country for the death of nearly 60 million people since 1973. To support abortion as dogmatically as the contemporary Democratic party has is not simply taking a stand on “a policy issue.”
Again, no dissent from me.
I’ve said that I think a epochal political shakeup is in the works. Beyond the possibility of the GOP becoming dominated by populist bomb-throwers and Democrats becoming a bit tent for everyone who benefits somewhat from the status quo, the I cannot imagine its contours. But my car now sports a bumper sticker for the American Solidarity Party, with some of whose policies I’m not thrilled but which avoids the abortion extremism of the Democrats and the Zombie Reaganism of the Republicans.
If you are one of those people in a big city who is feeling lonely or disconnected, I’ve got a nearly sure-fire way to change things. Go look for someone who is even lonelier and more hurting than you, and go be that person’s friend.
I’m always astonished that there could be so many lonely people in the city. This would seem to be an easy problem to solve; just go be each other’s friends. But it doesn’t seem to work that way. I think in part that’s because we’re always looking for relationships that are going to deliver value to us, instead of us looking for how we’re going to deliver value to others. We always want to network up. We seldom want to network down. (Though we often stay in our lanes on social media, as I noted above).
This is an area where I part ways with a lot of the secular self-help gurus. Most of those guys tend to recommend pruning the deadweight relationships out of your life, and purging the losers, energy drainers, etc. There’s a place for that if you’re in unhealthy relationships. But Christians simply can’t apply that as a rule for life. We are called to be there for those who have nothing to offer us (or at least that we think don’t have anything to offer).
(Aaron Renn in The Masculinist #16) I greatly admire Renn’s work as the Urbanophile and now on urban issues with the Manhattan Institute. I’m taking his The Masculinist newsletter with several grains of salt, but that third paragraph is right on (first two are there mostly for context).
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As I schedule this for publication, the Alabama vote outcome is unknown, but there’s a margin that I, sitting many states to the north, have trouble imagining Jones closing. Let the festivities begin as the Senate GOP says “the 2016 vote is the verdict on Trump but the Alabama vote is not the verdict on Moore.”
Tuesday, 12/12/17
Saturday 12/9/17
Shorts
Shorts:
- Bella DePaulo, I study liars. I’ve never seen one like President Trump. He tells far more lies, and far more cruel ones, than ordinary people do. GOP spin, I suppose: “Scholar confirms our President is extraordinary.”
- Brandon McGinley, Saying ‘Merry Christmas’ isn’t an affront. But Trump is trying to make it one. Cruelty and vulgar divisiveness is Trump’s default mode, leaving Democrats speechless because they used up all their outrage-words on supposed “dog whistles” over the past decades. (Like I’ve said: What do you call Hustler after calling Playboy “hard-core pornography”?)
- Is it just me, or does the “God Bless the Whole World. No Exceptions” bumper sticker come off as the Progressive version of weaponizing “Merry Christmas”?
- “When I find I’m wrong, I change my mind. What do you do?” Attributed to John Maynard Keynes; quoted by Mitch Daniels, Is Anyone Ever Wrong Any More? As a result of Daniels’ column, I’ve added To America to my book wish list.
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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.
Liars can figure
When the latest jobs report comes out Friday, look beyond the top-line number. For months now economists have suggested that the low unemployment rate—4.1% as of last month’s report—implies that America is at or near full employment. Yet the labor market is still below its prerecession peak, with about two million jobs missing. Many of those workers have joined the disability rolls. Others have simply dropped out of the workforce in favor of leisure time.
…
An[] indicator is the employment rate, defined as the proportion of Americans 16 and older who are working. It is always less than 100% because some people of working age are retired, in school, or in other nonmarket activity. Just before the 2007 recession, the employment rate peaked at 63.4%, meaning in that boom time over one-third of the working-age population wasn’t working. The rate reached a low of 58.2% in November 2010, and it has now recovered to 60.2%. Still, that’s more than 3 percentage points shy of the prerecession peak.
(Edward Lazear in the Wall Street Journal)
I have come to take “unemployment” rates not with a grain of salt, but with outright derision, because they don’t count those whose spirits got so crushed by a down economy that they stopped looking for work or hyped a minor disability (something they perhaps had been working through for years) into a successful disability benefits claim.
When the economy is strong, people work through their disabilities. When the economy weakens, people rationally decide to accommodate their disabilities, rather than continuing to work or to seek low-paying jobs.
(Lazear)
All Presidents manipulate numbers to make themselves look good. People dropping out of the job market during the recession Obama inherited made the recovery, through the lens of unemployment rates, look stronger than it really was. Trump is riding stock market indices, which may indicate something much more sinister than his mastery of the economic beast.
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I would a thousand times rather have dinner with secular liberals of a certain temperament than with a group of religious conservatives who agreed with me about most things, but who have no sense of humor or irony.
FrankenMoore
Mr. Franken is being run out of town by fellow Democrats in large part for their own political purposes. They want him banished so they can claim to have cleaned their own stables so they can attack Republicans who support Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore and Donald Trump. Mr. Franken is political ballast who had to go.
We’d even have a little sympathy for him had he not chosen the disingenuous exit of claiming innocence but resigning anyway.
(Wall Street Journal) I’d say “it’s expedient that one should die,” but that would conjure up typology of which guilty Franken isn’t worthy.
People speak of mixed motives and say it’s all brute politics. The Democrats are positioning themselves for the high ground should Republican Roy Moore be elected. They’re aligning themselves with the passions of their base, while clearing the way for a probe into sexual-harassment accusations against the president. New York’s Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who led the charge that forced Mr. Franken’s departure, hopes to run for president in 2020 as a champion of women, so the move was happily on-brand. I don’t doubt all of this is true. Little in politics comes from wholly clean hands.
(Peggy Noonan, Al Franken Departs Without Grace) Noonan goes on to sound yet another call for Alabama Republicans to think twice, or thrice, about voting for Roy Moore.
“ ‘All this will I give you,’ he said, ‘if you will bow down and worship me.’ ”
The prospect of Sen. Roy Moore has been both horrifying and clarifying. It would be difficult to design a more controlled, precise test of the moral gag reflex in politics.
(Michael Gerson) For someone who is Biblically literate, that’s a really potent epigram, isn’t it? More:
In this political lifeboat dilemma, Republicans are being asked what principles they are willing to throw overboard in the interest of power. A belief that character matters in politics? Splash. A commitment to religious and ethnic inclusion? Splash. Moral outrage at credible charges of sexual predation against teen girls? Splash.
Those remaining in this lightened boat display a kind of shocking clarity. They value certain political ends — tax cuts, a conservative judiciary — more than ethical considerations. When it comes to confirming judges who oppose Roe v. Wade, the vote of a statesman is no better than the vote of a sexual predator — or, presumably, of a drug dealer or a murderer. This type of calculation admits no limiting principle.
So, in this view, it does not really matter that there is (as Ivanka Trump put it) “no reason to doubt the victims’ accounts” in Moore’s case. It does not matter that Moore’s explanations have been shifting and slippery. It does not matter that Moore has said that homosexual behavior should be illegal, or that he compared resisting gay marriage to resisting the Holocaust, or that he referred to Asians as “yellows,” or that he doesn’t believe former president Barack Obama is a natural born citizen, or that he believes there are communities living under shariah law in Illinois and Indiana.
Those willing to swallow all this — all the ignorance, cruelty, creepiness and malice — have truly shown the strength of their partisan commitment. A purity indistinguishable from mania …
The basic argument here — that ethics can be ignored in the process of doing great work in the world — is precisely what brings institutions into disrepute. The Catholic Church covered up sexual predation on the justification that it was otherwise doing great work in the world. Some evangelical Christians are now publicly playing down credible charges of sexual predation for the same reason. And they are doing tremendous damage to the reputation of the Christian church in the process ….
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I would a thousand times rather have dinner with secular liberals of a certain temperament than with a group of religious conservatives who agreed with me about most things, but who have no sense of humor or irony.
Evangelicals and Jerusalem
I had a bunch of good items stacked up 8-high in a draft blog. I’m going to break them up today.
Critics of evangelicals’ advocacy on Jerusalem say that they aren’t interested in the welfare of Jews, but rather believe that the Book of Revelations says Jewish control of Jerusalem is necessary for Jesus to return.
“The last battle is going to be over Jerusalem…that is the holy city,” Pat Robertson, the famed televangelist, said on his TV show Tuesday. “You go in favor of breaking up Jerusalem, you’re going against the direct word of Jesus, and this is a prophecy that has stood for hundreds of years.”
(Ian Lovett in a Wall Street Journal news item)
I’m sympathetic with the critics, though I don’t think it’s as simple as Evangelicals faking concern for the welfare of Jews to cover up efforts to hasten Christ’s return (at Jews’ short-term expense).
Rather, if I believed, as many or most evangelicals seem to, in the novel eschatological view of dispensational premillennialism, as popularized by prophecy porn like Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind franchise, it would be virtually impossible to keep those views from coloring my politics.
I personally abandoned those views, which I’d held half-heartedly, for saner and more historic eschatology about forty years ago. Because I was half-hearted about them, I don’t think they tainted my politics (remember: “It doesn’t matter what you ‘believe’ so long as you’re insincere”), but I can empathize with the True Believers.
However, as my footer in each blog said until recently, there is no epistemological Switzerland. Everybody has a worldview. And as a person of serious Christian faith, I would not for a moment try to exclude Evangelical voices from the Public Square. I just wish the sincere dispensationalists weren’t so loud out there.
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I would a thousand times rather have dinner with secular liberals of a certain temperament than with a group of religious conservatives who agreed with me about most things, but who have no sense of humor or irony.
Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.
