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I like this

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Premontre Monastery Church, Zsámbék, 1929. From the Budapest Municipal Photography Company archive.

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patrickjoust | flickr | tumblr | IG | prints for sale

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Fujica GW690

Kodak Portra 160

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I sure as hell don't agree with this Adrian Vermeule article! So I'm posting it only FYI.

Vermeule is a "very important man" in the current New Right, specifically it's "illiberal right", of the theocratic subtype, and is oriented Roman Catholic. He has ties to Catholic Integralism, and is perhaps (?) the guy who came up the term and concept "common good constitutionalism". He's a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School.

Reading through even part of this is Quite A RIde! This isn't the calm, sedate stuff you'd expect from someone so generally characterized as in intellectual heavyweight. It's got a lot of wild, bizarre, even irrational stuff in it that shows the weirdness lurking behind the respectable facade. This article shows that Vermeule's reputation as an impressive mind is a bit overblown.

But he's smart enough to be dangerous.

It's my humble opinion that people on the Left need to gain greater acquaintance with him and his cohort. For what it's worth, he is a good writer, so his writing pulls you right along. (Meaning it's not hard to read -- except maybe in regard to how one might feel about its subject matter, so fair warning there.)

(Edited and added to since first posted.)

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The Somnambulant by Jonathan May

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This is the story of how Julie Rodgers, an out LGBTQ+ blogger, was recruited by prestigious evangelical Wheaton College as a chaplain to support its LGBTQ+ students. Then they gradually worked to silence her and then force her out.

Here is was I wanted to specifically talk about here:

Wheaton College is a model for Evangelicals in many ways. Often considered “the Harvard of the Christian schools,” faculty have a range of beliefs on every debatable issue and the students are some of the brightest and most earnest I’ve ever encountered. Wheaton’s administration knows that in order to be a rigorous liberal arts college, they have to engage critical issues with cognitive complexity and charity. They know they need to welcome diversity in order to be relevant. More than that, they want to welcome diversity because our world is diverse and every human matters. Wheaton showed extraordinary courage when they hired me. At a time when Evangelicals are supremely anxious about all things LGBT, they hired an openly gay writer to work in their Chaplain’s office as a spiritual leader. Even though I could sign the Community Covenant at that time, I was a risk—a risk they took because they care about their gay students and know they need an advocate. They’re not alone in their desire to show support: Evangelical leaders approach me often with whispers to say they love gay people. They say they’re grieved by the way the church has treated sexual minorities and they long to see us move past this—they long to love without qualification. Then they unload their fears about how much they would lose.

I'm old. I remember the gay liberation movement from my teenage years, and the advent of AIDS entirely as an adult. My foundational memories of cis straight anti-LGBT bigotry come from the 1960s and '70s, and evangelical bigotry from the 1970s and '80s. And there are things evangelicals just didn't do then. They were NEVER compassionate toward us or ever sorry for anything "the church" had done to us. We were almost always "the enemy" in their eyes, and always foreign. It was Catholics who stepped up to provide hospice services for people with AIDS in those early years. It sure as fuck wasn't the born agains.

There have been great changes and subtle changes between those years and now. More than a few snuck up on and surprised me in the last ten years.

In the latter two paragraphs in the excerpts above, Julie Rodgers talks about evangelical educators who "care[d] about their gay students" and hoped to provide them an advocate to help them deal with the large number of bigots among evangelicals.

Based on all the statements of practicing evangelicals I've seen online over the past few years decrying evangelical LGBTQphobia, I can believe that there may have been officials at Wheaton who sincerely wanted to help their LGBTQ+ students against the hostility, but also that they folded when they discovered how bigoted the school's donor base was.

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It's a(n intentionally) false concept and talking point of the fundie Religious Right. "Therapeutic" this and that is a new, lowbrow pop psychological way of demeaning the thinking of the large number of culturally liberal people in the U.S. And "moralistic deism" is a way to put down the tendency toward (non-fundie) Christian religiousness in most people in the U.S. It's a way of dealing with the fact that a landslide majority of USAmericans identify as Christian, but not the Right kind of Christian.

It's also part of their attempt to try to understand the majority that are Christian-ish and who therefore may have an enhanced vulnerability to fundamentalist proselytizing.

It's a classic example of their contemptuous view of so much of the population that they'd also like to "save".

This contemptuousness toward others is omnipresent in these people and has been at least since the beginning of the Religious Right in the U.S. (1970s), but they STILL haven't accepted it as one of the reasons so many people DESPISE them.

"Moralistic therapeutic deism" sounds like nothing but rightwing garbage.

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Look at this bullshit from far right very publicly Christian Eric Metaxas about the Proud Boys, Nazism and how Hitler came to be Germany's dictator. So much falsehood and just weirdness. It seems like Metaxas through his bad Dietrich Bonhoeffer book is saying having a fuhrer was both 'the will of the German people' (my paraphrase) and primarily due to its young people, if I'm not reading from the excerpt from his book wrong (it's a little way down in this X/Twitter thread).

The Nazis were an antidemocratic movement that ultimately came to power in Germany by undemocratic means. No majority ever voted for them or wanted them in power.

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I'm considering putting link posts to Tweets on this blog.

I've so far been unwilling to do that on my main, but a bunch of interesting things are being said on evangelical Twitter these days that might fit here.

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I've so far seen any number of problems described by various evangelical critics of Daily Wire denizen and Trumper Megan Basham's new book Shepherds for Sale, but recently I read a new one in a single post in a Twitter thread, saying that central to the book is a claim that "secular money" is being pumped into the evangelical milieu to turn it left.

This is inane. Non-religious liberals and leftists don't care about evangelicalism/fundamentalism in that way. They *mostly* just dislike/hate it and leave it alone, treating its adherents as not worth trying to talk to, let alone influence. With the except of LGBTQ+ liberal and left people, who keep an eye on it in order to defend themselves against it. No LGBTQ+ person I've ever heard of has ever talked about trying to influence it in any way. If we want to see a change within that milieu -- other than it ceasing to exist -- we want to see LGBTQ+ people leave it. I'm not sure I've ever heard of anyone wanting to put money into making that happen though.

I don't know if that tweet accurately describes what the book is about, but am just passing this along FYI.

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What Vance and Butker have in common: lots of bad, politically and theogically far right people and ideas. This article names many names and goes into some far right theology.

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More stuff about the theologically and politically rightist attack on Tim Walz via attacks on his church denomination, but also other specifics about the different denominations and the election.

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This is about how the evangelical/fundamentalist right is attempting to smear Tim Walz by smearing his church's denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA), as a fringe, ultra-left excrescence rather than the mainline Lutheran denomination that it is.

It's inane and bizarre to try to make this fly in the face of the millions of grassroots USians who are familiar with ELCA, some of whom have been reminding righties on social media that non-evangelical ELCA is bigger than the two most well known evangelical Lutheran denominations* put together.

The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (LCMS) and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS).

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The Religious Right (Evangelicals, Catholics (and Mormons)) have higher birth rates but have low "retention" rates of faithfulness to those religions among people "raised in them", while there is a high "conversion" rate from other religious or spiritual ways of being to atheism and agnosticism. So the Religious Right can't expect to win the Population War unless they Try Harder to be "better" evangelicals (this in the last paragraph of the article).