Shiny Happy People – Tipsy Teetotaler ن

Okay, that title is cheap pandering. I don’t believe in the Hallmark Holidays. This is the second Sunday after Pentecost in the Eastern Church. Speaking of cheap pandering …

Gothardist Evangelicalism

David French had a fresher experience than I of Bill Gothard (the main villain of Amazon Prime’s Shiny Happy People) by a large margin: I encountered him in 1966-67, French in 1993. Further, French was an adult, attending a Gothard seminar motivated to believe to “get the girl” he was dating, who with her family were Gothard acolytes. Finally, as an evangelical-adjacent Reformed Protestant, French has more current insight than I into Gothardism’s reach, including into the scandal-ridden Kanakuk Kamps.

Considering all that, it’s no surprise that his ‘Shiny Happy People,’ Fundamentalism and the Toxic Quest for Certainty does a markedly better job than I did at sketching the key problems with Bill Gothard’s teachings (through the Institute on Basic Life Principles), its reach deep into evangelicalism, and how the fundamental decency of most of Gothard’s followers makes “cult” an uncomfortable label. It’s good enough that I used one of my ten monthly sharable links.

But wait! There’s more!

Former Gothard follower Sara Roberts Jones tells her experience of Gothard’s “cult” in a seven-part series. While French and I have used IBLP as shorthand, Jones refers to ATI, the “Advanced Training Institute” where they get into much greater detail through a series of “Wisdom Booklets.” A few excerpts suggest her project and one teaching that tortured her particularly:

Recently I gained access to nearly all of the original Wisdom Booklets (plus several of the updated second editions). I thought I would summarize each one to show exactly what Gothard taught us. Halfway through the first few pages of Wisdom Booklet #1 (out of 54), I realized I couldn’t do it.

Gothard defies easy summarizing. He uses hundreds of words to prove a single point. His explanations and logic are twisty, working around the obvious message of Scripture to support his own claims.

So, instead of trying to summarize, I’m going to take highlights from the Basic Seminar Textbook and several Wisdom Booklets …

My purpose is to show how so many well-meaning Christians came to Gothard thinking, “I am excited to know God better,” and ended up nodding as he said, “God holds a woman guilty if she doesn’t scream when a man rapes her.”

Sara Roberts Jones.

“God holds a woman guilty if she doesn’t scream when a man rapes her” is not, so far as I can tell, the endpoint of all the Gothardist teaching, but it’s certainly got to rank as one of the most toxic ideas drummed in along the way, followed in close second by the fetish about “eye-traps” in women’s clothing that is already extremely modest. This really is double-barrelled blaming of women for men’s unbridled lust.

Here’s Jones’s whole six-part series:

I count myself fortunate that my brush with Gothard was early in his career and relatively superficial. I can’t help but imagine what might have happened if I had fallen into the deep end, but I don’t think that I should dwell on “what-ifs” like that, let alone further inflict them on you.

I will note, however, that:

If you want to know about the Gothard cult (not about the Duggars), you’ll learn more that’s meaningful, and learn it in less time, by reading David French and Sara Roberts Jones instead of watching Shiny Happy People
An explanation of God’s will that requires 54 copyrighted booklets with restricted circulation sounds more like a commercial racket or an early-stage cult than like anything one could plausibly call “Bible-only Christianity.”
I’d be shocked that evangelicalism tolerates Gothardism except that evangelicalism has no even minimally effective means for excommunication.

What’s “water”?

We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without means to measure our descent.

Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences.

As Deneen tells it, what happened when the wall fell was not the triumph of freedom over oppression so much as the defeat of one Western ideology by another. The one that came through was the oldest, subtlest and longest-lasting, one which disguised itself so well that we didn’t know it was an ideology at all: liberalism.

Paul Kingsnorth, In This Free World

Summarizing, “what the hell is water?”

“The Silicon Valley agenda”

The Silicon Valley agenda, the transhumanist agenda, is extremely utopian, and actually very religious. I think it’s like if you took the Christian religion — which they’re all sort of steeped in because they’re in America — and you take out the actual bits about God and Jesus and things, you’re left with a desire for transcendence and utopia and life after death, living forever and universal justice — all of which are sort of Christian notions — and so they’ve decided they’re going to build those themselves.

Paul Kingsnorth, interviewed by Freddie Sayers

Post-evangelicalism

And here I thought I had been too hard on Evangelicals. Jake Meador — a Reformed Protestant and therefore Evangelical-adjacent (as I was in an analogous denomination) — doesn’t “give it both barrels” but pronounces it dead and lays out the particulars. It’s really quite devastating. The End of Evangelicalism and the Possibility of Reformed Catholicism.

He has a followup post, too.

Kind of self-evident, when you stop and think for a second

The early Church had no Scripture of its own, and the Jews had no defined canon of Scripture; therefore, sola scriptura as the foundation for what Christians believed was absolutely impossible.

Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox: Understanding and Acquiring the Orthodox Christian Mind

(I know, I know: the original Reformers didn’t mean by sola scriptura what modern Evangelicals mean by it — if they even know the term.)

We need a little Auden now

One of the appeals of Christian orthodoxy for Auden, as for T. S. Eliot in the 1920s, was that it offered a more humane alternative to the ferocious ideologies of the twentieth century. Instead of blaming a class or race for the world’s evils, it insisted that we are all individually responsible and that redemption must begin by acknowledging our weakness rather than vaunting our strength.

Adam Kirsch, A Poet’s Politics.

Sadly, in the U.S. of the 2020s at least, a substantial number of Christians think it their duty to vaunt their putative strength. I used to say, “If you don’t like the Religious Right, just wait for the irreligious Right,” but I overlooked the specter of the pseudo-religious Right.

(Yeah, yeah, I know: “No true Scotsman fallacy.” Whatever.)

Canon and Tradition

The New Testament is a written form of the tradition, the gospel, the preaching, the declaration, the communion given by the Apostles to the Church, the living communion of the one gospel of Christ. But the context of that writing was the living tradition (gospel, preaching, declaration, communion) of the Church.

…

Ultimately the acceptance of writings as authoritative rests entirely on tradition (particularly tradition as context). The Church recognized the authentic voice of the Church in the writings – i.e. the writings agreed with the gospel as it had already been received. St. Paul specifically describes this manner of recognition:

But even if we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone preaches any other gospel to you than what you have received, let him be accursed. (Gal 1:8-9 NKJ)

Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Communion of Tradition

Matthew 7:1-8

Judge not, that you be not judged

What then? Ought we not to blame those who sin? Paul also says this selfsame thing: ’Why do you judge your brother? And you, why do you put your brother down? …How then does he say elsewhere ‘Reprove, rebuke, exhort,’ and ‘Those who sin rebuke before all?’ And Christ too to Peter, ‘Go and tell him his fault between you and him alone’… (Matt. 18:15-17). And how has He set over us so many to reprove, and not only to reprove, but also to punish? …And how did He also give them the keys, since if they are not to judge, they will be without authority in any matter and in vain have they received the power to bind or to loose? …For unless the master judge the servant, and the mistress the maid, and the father the son, and friends one another, there will be an increase of all wickedness ..In this place then, as it seems to me at least, He does not simply command us not to judge any of men’s sins; neither does He simply forbid the doing of such a thing. But to those who are full of innumerable ills, and are trampling upon other men for trifles .. He says also in another place, You who strain at the gnat, and swallow the camel …And the Corinthians, too, Paul did not absolutely command not to judge, but not to judge their superiors (I Cor. 4:5) … You see, we ought not to upbraid nor trample upon them, but to admonish, not to revile, but to advise, not to assail with pride, but to correct with tenderness… If you neglect yourself, it is quite evident that neither do you judge your brother with concern for him, but in hatred instead: wishing to expose him. For what if he ought to be judged? It should be by one who commits no such sin, not by you.

St. John Chrysostom. Homily XXIII on Matthew

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

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Tag: Shiny Happy People

Father’s Day 2013