#but the modern role of the evangelical movement in politics more or less starts with reagan beating carter

[thebreakfastgenie]

If you want to talk about Evangelical Christianity in the United States... the Evangelical movement is entwined with the Republican Party. That's why we've been calling the GOP a white supremacist death cult since before COVID. What makes Evangelical Christians so dangerous is unlike some extreme religious groups, they are deeply involved in politics and they are not divided. They don't hesitate to vote en masse for Republican candidates, even ones who blatantly flout their espoused moral values.

The way to keep Evangelical Christianity from wielding institutional power in the United States is to vote en masse for Democrats.

[robertreich]

THE STATE OF THE DIS-UNION

An impeached president who was on trial and is up for re-election will be delivering a state of the union address to the most divided union in living memory. He will be giving his address to both his jurors and prosecutors, and most importantly, to the voters that will decide his fate in November.

It’s not unprecedented for an impeached president to give a state of the union address. Bill Clinton delivered his State of the Union in 1999 while in the middle of his Senate trial. But that’s where the similarities end. Clinton was not up for re-election when he gave his speech, so he didn’t need to employ any campaign-style rhetoric. Trump is a polarizing, divisive president who is addressing an America that has never been so divided. But this begs the question: why are we so divided? We’re not fighting a hugely unpopular war on the scale of Vietnam. We’re not in a deep economic crisis like the Great Depression. Yes, we disagree about guns, abortion, and immigration, but we’ve disagreed about them for decades. So why are we so divided now? Ferocious partisanship is not new. Newt Gingrich, the Republican Speaker of the House who led the House’s impeachment investigation into Clinton, pioneered the combative partisanship we’re used to today. But today’s divisions are far deeper than they were then. Part of the answer is Trump himself. The Great Divider knows how to pit native-born Americans against immigrants, the working class against the poor, whites against blacks and Latinos, evangelicals against secularists — keeping everyone stirred up by vilifying, disparaging, denouncing, defaming, and accusing others of the worst. Trump thrives off disruption and division. But that begs another question: Why have we been so ready to be divided by Trump? One theory is the underlying tension that an older, whiter, and less educated America, concentrated in rural areas, is losing out to a “new” America that’s younger, more diverse, more educated, and concentrated in urban areas. These trends, while much more prominent these days, have been going on since the start of the 20th century. Why are they causing so much anger now? Another hypothesis is that we are geographically sorting ourselves into Republican and Democratic regions of the country, surrounding ourselves with like-minded neighbors and friends so we no longer talk to people with opposing views. But why are we doing this? The rise of social media sensationalizing our differences in order to attract eyeballs and advertisers, plays a crucial role in exacerbating the demographic and geographic trends I just mentioned. But it alone isn’t responsible for our polarized nation. Together, all of these factors contribute to the political schism we’re experiencing today. But none of them alone point to any large, significant change in the structure of our society that can account for what’s happened. Let me have a go. In the fall of 2015, I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri, and North Carolina for a research project I was doing on the changing nature of work. I spoke with many of the same people I had met twenty years before when I was secretary of labor, as well as with some of their grown children. What I heard surprised me. Twenty years ago, many said they’d been working hard and were frustrated they weren’t doing better. Now, that frustration had been replaced by full-blown anger — anger towards their employers, the government, Wall Street. Many had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the Great Recession following the financial crisis of 2008, or knew others who had. By the time I spoke with them, most were back in jobs but the jobs paid no more than they had two decades before in terms of purchasing power. I heard the term “rigged system” so often I began asking people what they meant by it. They spoke about flat wages, shrinking benefits, and growing job insecurity. They talked about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, soaring CEO pay, and “crony capitalism.” These complaints came from people who identified as Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. A few had joined the Tea Party, while a few others had been involved in the Occupy movement. With the 2016 political primaries looming, I asked them which candidates they found most attractive. At the time, Democratic Party insiders favored Hillary Clinton and Republican insiders favored Jeb Bush. Yet no one I spoke with mentioned Clinton or Bush. They talked instead about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. When I asked why, they said Sanders or Trump would “shake things up” or “make the system work again” or “stop the corruption” or “end the rigging.” In the following year, Sanders – a seventy-four-year old Jew from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and wasn’t a registered Democrat until the 2016 presidential primaries – came within a whisker of beating Clinton in the Iowa caucus, routed her in the New Hampshire primary, and ended up with 46 percent of the pledged delegates from Democratic primaries and caucuses. Trump – a sixty-nine-year-old ego-maniacal billionaire reality-TV star who had never held elective office or had anything to do with the Republican Party and who lied compulsively about everything – won the Republican primaries and then went on to beat Clinton, one of the most experienced and well-connected politicians in modern America (although he didn’t win the popular vote, and had some help from the Kremlin). Something very big had happened, and it wasn’t due to Sanders’s magnetism or Trump’s likeability. It was a rebellion against the establishment. That rebellion is still going on, although much of the establishment still denies it. They have come up with myriad explanations for Trump’s ascendance, some with validity; some without: It was hatred of Obama, it was hatred of Hillary, it was people voting third party, it was racism and xenophobia. It’s important to note that although racism and xenophobia in America date to before the founding of the Republic, they have never before been so central to a candidate’s appeal and message as they’ve been with Trump. Aided by Fox News and an army of right-wing outlets, Trump used the underlying frustrations of the working class and channeled them into bigotry, but this was hardly the first time in history a demagogue has used this cynical ploy. Trump convinced many blue-collar workers feeling ignored by the powers that be that he was their champion. Hillary Clinton did not convince them that she was. Her decades of public service ended up being a negative, not a positive: She was indubitably part of the establishment, the epitome of decades of policies that had left these blue-collar workers in the dust. (It’s notable that during the primaries, Bernie Sanders did far better than Clinton with blue-collar voters.) A direct line connects the four-decade stagnation of wages with the bailout of Wall Street, the rise of the Tea Party (and, briefly, Occupy), and the successes of Sanders and Trump in 2016. By 2016, Americans understood that wealth and power had moved to the top. Big money had rigged our politics. This was the premise of Sanders’s 2016 campaign. It was also central to Trump’s appeal (“I’m so rich I can’t be bought off”), which he quickly reneged on once elected, delivering everything big money could have imagined. The most powerful force in American politics today continues to be anti-establishment fury at a rigged system. Vicious partisanship, record-breaking economic inequality, and the resurgence of white supremacy are all byproducts of this rigged system. The biggest political battle today isn’t between left, right, or center: it’s between Trump’s authoritarian populism  and democratic (small “d”) populism. Democrats cannot defeat authoritarian populism without an agenda of radical democratic reform, an anti-establishment movement that tackles runaway inequality and heals the racial wounds Trump has inflicted. Even though he’s a Trojan Horse for big corporations and the rich – giving them all the  tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks they’ve ever wanted – he still has large swaths of the working class convinced  he’s on their side. Democrats must stand squarely on the side of democracy against oligarchy. We must form a unified coalition of people of all races, genders, sexualities, and classes, and band together to unrig the system. Trump is not the cause of our divided nation; he is the symptom of a rigged system that was already dividing us. It’s not enough to defeat him. We must reform the system that got us here in the first place to ensure that no future politician will ever again imitate Trump’s authoritarian demagoguery. For now, let’s boycott the State of the Union and show the ratings-obsessed demagogue that the American people refuse to watch an impeached president continue to divide us.

[jewish-privilege]

...There are two related, yet distinct, kinds of anti-Semitism that have snuck into mainstream politics. One is associated with the left and twists legitimate criticisms of Israel into anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. On the mainstream right, meanwhile, political leaders and media figures blame a cabal of wealthy Jews for mass immigration and left-wing cultural politics in classic anti-Semitic fashion.

[Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN)] tweet was a pretty clear example of the first kind of anti-Semitism. Plenty of Jews who are critical of the Israeli government, including me, found her comments offensive...

But it’s also clear that a lot of Omar’s critics don’t have much of a leg to stand on. Conservatives have been trying to label Omar an anti-Semite since she was elected in November, on the basis of fairly flimsy evidence. (...) Trump once told a room full of Jewish Republicans that “you’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money,” adding that “you want to control your politicians, that’s fine.”

The fact that Omar apologized under pressure, and that Trump and McCarthy have never faced real consequences for their use of anti-Semitic tropes, tells you everything you need know about the politics of anti-Semitism in modern America.

...There are two core truths about this incident. First, Omar’s statement was unacceptable. Second, Republicans going after her — including the president — should spend less time on Democrats and more time dealing with the far worse anti-Semitism problem on the right.

...In the day and a half since Omar’s initial comments, a number of left-wing writers have emerged to defend her. They argue that Omar was attempting to point out the financial clout of the pro-Israel lobby — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC — and not to make generalizations about Jews. The pushback against Omar, they say, is part of a broader campaign to smear a young Muslim congresswoman and silence criticism of Israel.

...It’s true that in some cases, all criticism of Israel or AIPAC, even if it’s legitimate, is labeled anti-Semitic — and that’s a real problem. Omar’s faith has made her a particular target, and it’s fair to want to defend her against these smears in the abstract.

But the specifics of Omar’s tweet make things quite different. In the original context — where she was quote-tweeting [Glenn Greenwald]— she says that US lawmakers’ support for Israel is “all” about money. Yes, it’s a Puff Daddy reference, but she’s a member of Congress and maybe should be a little more careful about the implications of what she says...

There are two problems here: First, the tweet isn’t true. The US-Israel alliance has deeper and more fundamental roots than just cash, including the legacy of Cold War geopolitics, evangelical theology, and shared strategic interests in counterterrorism. Lobbying certainly plays a role, but to say that “US political leaders” defending Israel is “all” about money is to radically misstate how America’s Israel politics work (and discount the findings of the scholars who study it).

Second, and more important, totalizing statements like this play into the most troubling anti-Semitic stereotypes. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an infamous early-20th-century Russian forgery, describes a plot by Jewish moneyed interests to subvert and destroy Christian societies through their finances. This in turn draws on longstanding European anti-Semitic traditions that portray Jews as greedy and conniving.

After World War II and the creation of the state of Israel, the conspiracy theory shifted. Anti-Semites started using “Zionist” or “Zio” as a stand-in for “Jewish,” using Jewish activism in favor of the Jewish state as proof that they were right all along about the Jewish conspiracy. David Duke, the former Louisiana state representative and Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, released a YouTube video in 2014 that bills itself as an “illustrated” update of the Protocols. The video features footage of leading Democratic and Republican politicians speaking to pro-Israel groups, with the caption “both are in the grips of Zio money, Zio media, and Zio bankers.”

...Omar is, of course, not coming from the same hateful place as Duke is. But by using too-similar language, she unintentionally provides mainstream cover for these conspiracy theories. After her comments, Duke repeatedly defended her, even tweeting a meme that said “it took a Muslim congresswoman to actually stand up & tell the truth that we ALL know” (he rescinded the praise after her apology).

This is not to equate Duke and Omar — which, to be clear, would be absurd — but rather to point out how if you’re not careful when talking about pro-Israel lobbying, you can provide ammunition to some awful people. By saying that US support for Israel is “all” about money, Omar was essentially mainstreaming ideas that have their roots in anti-Semitism, helping make them more acceptable to voice on the left.

...There’s a real dilemma here. Pro-Palestinian activists, writers, and politicians have every right to point out what they see as the pernicious influence of groups like AIPAC. The group is undeniably powerful, and it’s worth mentioning in our conversations about both Israel policy and money in politics. You can and should be able to say, “AIPAC’s lobbying pushes America’s Israel policy in a hawkish pro-Israel direction,” without saying that it is literally only about dollars from (disproportionately) Jewish donors.

At the same time side, there is a special need on the left — where most pro-Palestinian sentiment resides — to be careful about just how you discuss those things. It’s not just a matter of providing ammunition to the David Dukes of the world; it’s about the moral corruption of the left and pro-Palestinian movement. If references to the baleful influence of Jews on Israel policy become too flip, too easy, things can go really wrong.

...When left-wing insurgent Jeremy Corbyn won the center-left Labour Party’s leadership [in Britain] in 2015, the people who inhabited these spaces seized control of the party power centers.

Corbyn, who had once referred to members of Hamas and Hezbollah as his “friends,” opened the floodgates for the language of Labour’s left flank to go mainstream. The result is a three-year roiling scandal surrounding anti-Semitism inside the party.

Dozens of Labour elected officials, candidates, and party members have been caught giving voice to anti-Semitic comments. One Labour official called Hitler “the greatest man in history,” and added that “it’s disgusting how much power the Jews have in the US.” Another Labour candidate for office said “it’s the super rich families of the Zionist lobby that control the world.” The party has received 673 complaints about anti-Semitism in its ranks in the last 10 months alone, an average of over two complaints per day.

...This is why Omar’s tweet was so troubling, and why the pushback from leadership really was merited. If the line isn’t drawn somewhere, the results for Jews — who still remain a tiny, vulnerable minority — can be devastating.

...The way Omar handled the controversy is interesting. Her apology was certainly given under immense pressure, but it reads (at least to me) as quite sincere[, and] this kind of sincere willingness to reconsider past comments is characteristic of Omar. She had previously gotten flak for a tweet about Israel “hypnotizing” the world, and recently gave a lengthy and thoughtful apology for the connection to anti-Semitic tropes during an appearance on The Daily Show.

“I had to take a deep breath and understand where people were coming from and what point they were trying to make, which is what I expect people to do when I’m talking to them, right, about things that impact me or offend me,” she told host Trevor Noah.

This is not the kind of behavior you see from deeply committed anti-Semites. Yair Rosenberg, a journalist at the Jewish magazine Tablet who frequently writes about anti-Semitism, argued on Monday that Omar has earned the benefit of the doubt:

“I’ve covered anti-Semitism for years on multiple continents, and this level of self-reflection among those who have expressed anti-Semitism is increasingly rare. Not only did Omar apologize for the specific sentiment, but she put herself in the shoes of her Jewish interlocutors and realized that she ought to extend to them the same sensitivity to anti-Semitism as she would want others to extend to racism.” 

...This is what it looks like when the system works. A member of Congress says something offensive, most of her party explains why it’s wrong, and then she issues a sincere apology and demonstrates an interest in changing. That is a healthy party dealing with bad behavior in a healthy way.

This is not what you see on the Republican side when it comes to most forms of bigotry — up to and including anti-Semitism.

...Last summer, McCarthy sent a tweet accusing three Democratic billionaires of Jewish descent — George Soros, Tom Steyer, and Michael Bloomberg — of trying to buy the midterm election...

...Around the same time, President Trump claimed that protesters against Brett Kavanaugh were being paid by Soros...

And Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz suggested Soros was behind the so-called “migrant caravan” coming to the US through Mexico, a theory spread when Trump tweeted the video in Gaetz’s original tweet...

This all follows years of Soros demonization in the conservative press, with everyone from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to Fox News anchors blaming the Jewish billionaire for various ills in the United States.

The defense of these lines is the same as the left-wing defense of Omar: It’s not anti-Semitic to simply state facts. But many of these “facts,” like Soros masterminding immigrant caravans, are false. Moreover, creating a narrative in which Soros and other left-wing Jews are puppet masters, using their money to undermine America from within, they are engaging in the same normalization of Protocols-style anti-Semitic tropes as Omar.

What’s more, they’ve done it with virtually no official pushback. The GOP has not reacted to the Soros hate and other anti-Semitic conspiracy theories with the same fierceness with which the Democrats responded to Omar’s comment. There has been no leadership statement condemning the mainstreaming of anti-Semitism; in fact, demonizing Soros has long been part of the overall party strategy. In 2016, Trump released a campaign ad that played a quote from one of his speeches over footage of Soros and former Fed Chair Janet Yellen (also Jewish) that comes across as an anti-Semitic dog whistle...

...“Don’t kid yourself that the most violent forms of hate have been aimed at others — blacks, Muslims, Latino immigrants. Don’t ever think that your government’s pro-Israel policies reflect a tolerance of Jews,” Jonathan Weisman, the New York Times’s deputy Washington editor and author of the new book (((Semitism))), writes. “We have to consider where power is rising, and the Nationalist Right is a global movement.”

...While the Democratic Party handled an offensive comment quickly, Republicans have never shown a willingness to do the same when it comes to right-wing anti-Semitism. There’s a reason most Jews in the United States are Democrats, and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future.

[Read Zack Beauchamp’s full piece at Vox.]

[thefeministherald]

A quorum of about 30 male trustees and three female trustees of the 1,200-student Texas seminary were present for a meeting that began Tuesday afternoon to discuss the fate of Patterson, a past president of the Southern Baptist Convention who has been revered as a giant for standing guard for decades against liberalizing changes. In recent weeks, Patterson, 75,  has come under fire for taped comments he made between 2000 and 2014 about women, including remarking on a teenage girl’s figure and saying female seminarians need to work harder to look attractive. He also said women who are abused almost always should stay with their husbands. After thousands of Southern Baptist women signed a petition calling for the seminary’s board of trustees to oust him from his position, he apologized for making comments about the teenager, but he did not apologize for his comments about abused women. The comments had resurfaced on a blog this year. The Washington Post also reported Tuesday that Patterson allegedly told a woman who said she had been raped that she should not report her allegations to the police and encouraged her to forgive her alleged assailant. The story was published as the seminary’s board was meeting. “The board also affirmed a motion stating evidence exists that Dr. Patterson has complied with reporting laws regarding assault and abuse,” Ueckert said in his statement to the press. “The seminary stands against all forms of abuse.” Ueckert also addressed the seminary’s firing of a PhD student from his $40,000-a-year job as the catering kitchen manager and the revoking of his scholarship for tweeting about the Patterson debate, telling him that he was “indiscreet” and that his decision to speak publicly about the dispute “does not exhibit conduct becoming a follower of Jesus.” Patterson had told The Post that Nathan Montgomery had “a long history,” but Ueckert disputed this, saying stated that the board has found no evidence of misconduct in his employee file. He did not address whether the student’s job or scholarship would be reinstated. Ueckert declined to take further questions from The Post. Patterson has been widely revered for his role starting in the 1970s in a conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, which claims 15 million members. During that time, he and other leaders passed resolutions that tied Southern Baptists’ commitment to the inerrancy of the Bible directly to a ban on women pastors and the teaching that women should be submissive to their husbands. He had been scheduled to deliver a high-profile sermon at the denomination’s annual meeting in Dallas next month, prompting concerns that allowing him to speak could send a bad signal about how Southern Baptists regard women. It was unclear whether he will still deliver the sermon. Patterson and his wife had planned to retire on the grounds of the “Baptist Heritage Library,” which the seminary plans to open this summer and which will house Patterson’s collections. The board passed a motion that would allow the Pattersons to retire there. R. Marie Griffith, director of the John Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University, who writes and teaches about gender and religion, said Patterson’s exit reflects a “turning point moment,” a time when a national outside movement — #MeToo, specifically — must be addressed within the huge Southern Baptist Convention. Any other time in recent decades, she said, Patterson and his wife, Dorothy, who Griffith said is her husband’s partner in crafting his ideas on gender, could have avoided repercussions for statements like the ones recently circulated. “The tide has shifted so strongly on these issues of sexual harassment and assault, all I can think is: Enough leaders knew they’d really be condemned and look terrible if they stood up for him at this point,” she said. Griffith said Patterson leaving doesn’t reflect less commitment among the younger generation of conservative male evangelicals to women submitting — but it does show they have a limit as to what that means. “There are an awful lot of people who believe in female submission but don’t counsel people to stay with abusive husbands. His view will turn out to appear extreme. I don’t think this [Patterson leaving] questions female submission to male authority but maybe it does the extreme to which Patterson and others are willing to go. That’s fallen out of favor.” Related: [‘We are shocked’: Thousands of Southern Baptist women denounce leader’s ‘objectifying’ comments, advice to abused women] Younger male evangelical leaders, she said, “are ready to say: Enough with excusing these critical issues.” They feel, she said: “If the denomination is going to thrive it really needs to start afresh.” Barry Hankins, a history professor at Baylor University, which is part of a separate Baptist convention, agreed that there has been a generational shift, with Patterson’s departure representing a turning point in Southern Baptist circles and in evangelicalism more broadly. Gradually, an older guard of leaders like Patterson and Richard Land, who led the SBC’s lobbying arm, are giving way to a younger generation of leaders, like Russell Moore, who now leads the convention’s lobbying arm, and Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. The younger generation tends to take a more modern approach to issues like gender and race and its leaders are less likely to find themselves in Patterson’s shoes, he said. Younger leaders are also less likely to adopt an attitude that conservative Christians represent a “moral majority” that should be a dominant force in politics, Hankins said. Instead, he said, they talk about a “prophetic minority,” an attitude that Christians can still find their voice as they are becoming a smaller slice of America. “The movement has passed onto a different view of how conservative evangelicalism relates to the culture,” he said. The impact of Patterson’s leaving  can not be underestimated, he said. “There is no bigger name in a Southern Baptist conservative movement that could be pressured out [of a job] than Paige Patterson,” said Hankins. Except for the board meeting, the campus seemed mostly quiet Tuesday with most students away for summer break. Most female students approached by The Post declined to be interviewed, but Sarah Reiter, 20, a sophomore music major from Cross Plains, Tex., said she was happy to talk. Reiter’s father, Kenneth, is a Southwestern Baptist graduate and the senior pastor of the First Baptist Church in her hometown. Reiter said she is torn over what Patterson said. On the one hand, she was in an emotionally abusive relationship that ended about a year ago, she said. On the other hand, her current boyfriend’s father was “doing awful things” at one time, such as using drugs, but his story wound up having a happy ending, she said. “His mother stuck around and loved his father through that,” said Reiter. “He became a Christian and was saved, and now their relationship is wonderful.” Reiter, who said she hadn’t heard much discussion among her seminary friends about the controversy, said she was willing to give Patterson the benefit of the doubt. “I don’t feel like he’s promoting abuse,” she said. “He’s not saying, ‘Men, beat your wives so they know how to trust God.’ That’s not what he’s saying.” Related: [Southern Baptist leader who advised abused women not to divorce doubles down, says he has nothing to apologize for] Another student, Sharayah Colter, who is pursuing a master’s degree in theological studies, came to the meeting — part of which was open before the closed-session began — to show support for Patterson. Her husband, Scott, a fellow student and assistant pastor at Birchman Baptist Church in Fort Worth, serves as chief of staff for Patterson. “I think people have mischaracterized him and misconstrued what he has said in the past,” Colter said. “And he’s clarified comments. So just like anybody likes to be taken at their word when they clarify what they really mean, I take him at his word when he explains what he means.” “I’m just very grateful for Dr. Patterson,” she added. “He would be one of my faith heroes, I would say.” It was hard to get a clear overall sense of sentiment within the Convention community. While some supported Patterson, others were unusually outspoken in their criticism. More than 3,200 women — most conservative evangelicals — signed a petition, a rare public display against a man in power, calling for Patterson’s ouster. Since his comments first came out, several Southern Baptist leaders tweeted that they opposed Patterson’s beliefs on abuse and divorce, but few mentioned his name. However, Thom Rainer, the president of LifeWay, the publishing division of the SBC, called Patterson out by name and said, “There is no type or level of abuse of women that is acceptable.” And Ed Stetzer, a Southern Baptist who is executive director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, said in a blog post that Patterson should retire. “If Paige Patterson preaches at the SBC, he will, because of his past work, get a standing ovation,” Stetzer said. “Every news story will point to that moment … and say that Southern Baptists don’t take abuse seriously. … It’s a message to women that we must not send.”

[glittergummicandypeach]

In the Name of the Father, Son, and Q: Why It’s Important to See QAnon as a ‘Hyper-Real’ Religion | Religion Dispatches

In a May 13th article published in The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance offers her readers a deep dive into the QAnon movement. The article argues that when surveying QAnon, we’re not only examining a conspiracy theory, we’re observing the birth of a new religion. LaFrance underscores this argument by highlighting the apocalypticism found in QAnon; its clear-cut dualism between the forces of good and evil; the study and analysis of Qdrops as sacred texts, and the divine mystery of Q. 

Following the mass suicide of the Peoples Temple in Jonestown in 1978, historian Jonathan Z. Smith wrote an essay locating the study and definition of religion within an academic context, where he highlights that “almost no attempt was made to gain any interpretative framework” of what occurred at Jonestown by academics. Adrienne LaFrance’s article on QAnon makes clear that the movement and its believers demand to be taken seriously. Her piece acts as a springboard to ask the question: Can QAnon be considered a religion? 

Though many enjoy mocking the QAnon conspiracy theories and those who profit from them, it’s important to note that the movement’s adherents firmly believe in the theories—even to the detriment of their families and communities. Therefore, in an effort to avoid the mistakes of the past and to better understand the movement as it continues to grow and evolve, I suggest that we view QAnon as a “hyper-real religion.” Sociologist Adam Possamai, who coined the term, defines it as “a simulacrum of a religion created out of, or in symbiosis with, commodified popular culture which provides inspiration at a metaphorical level and/or is a source of beliefs for everyday life.” Or, to put it more simply, a religion with a strong connection to pop culture. Based on Jean Baudrillard’s work on hyper-reality and simulations, hyper-real religion is based on the premise that pop culture shapes and creates our actual reality, with examples including, but not limited to: Heaven’s Gate, Church of All Worlds, Jediism, etc. As a movement in a constant state of mutation, QAnon clearly blurs the boundaries between popular culture and everyday life.

What this means is that technology and the marketplace of ideas have inverted the traditional relationship between the purveyors of religion and the consumers of religion. Thus, we see religious doctrinal authority (that is, those who can contribute to the religion’s teaching) being created by popular culture. 

For example, the QAnon cosmology (how the world/universe appears; what it looks like; its characteristics, and types of creatures that populate it) and anthropology (ideas about human beings, their origin and destiny) are rooted in conspiracy theories, historical facts, and mythical history from film and popular culture. As such, Terry Gilliam’ Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is recommended by QAnon followers as evidence of the effects of Adrenochrome; The Matrix’s blue pill/red pill scene is used to frame the choice to either be a part of the Great Awakening or to remain “asleep”; and the slogan “Where We Go One, We Go All” is from the film White Squall, whose official YouTube trailer’s comments section is filled with QAnon followers (the top-rated comment, with over 5,000 up-votes, reads “Thumbs up if Q sent you here”). The prophetic figure of the movement, known only as ‘Q’ , also regularly references movies in their QDrops, as demonstrated from the screenshots below:

The QAnon theology (conceptions of the sacred, gods, spirits, demons, the ancestors, culture heroes and/or other superhuman agents) is rooted in American evangelicalism and neo-charismatic movements developed in the 1970s and 1980s—specifically theology involving a worldwide cabal that controlled governments and aimed to control the freedoms of people through technology, medicine, and liberalism. For example, QAnon reworked elements of the Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) panic (aka “satanic panic”)that originated in the U.S. in the 80s. SRA was the belief that a global network of elites was breeding and kidnapping children for the purposes of pornography, sex trafficking, and Satanic ritual sacrifice. 

Furthermore, QAnon adopts the language of spiritual warfare found in many neo-charismatic movements. Based on some of the data analytics work I’ve done, Ephesians 6:11-18 is the most shared verse among QAnon adherents. Given the verse’s apparent condemnation of governments, the reaction of QAnon to the pandemic is rooted in the language of spiritual warfare, especially when addressing conspiracy theories surrounding 5G, ID2020, Bill Gates and vaccines, HR 6666, etc. Since the start of the pandemic, QAnon have spread a false racist theory that Asians were more susceptible to the coronavirus and that white people were immune to COVID-19; they’ve promoted drinking bleach to cure the virus; that COVID-19 is a Chinese bioweapon and that the virus release was a joint venture between China and the Democrats to stop Trump’s re-election by destroying the economy. If that weren’t enough, they also played a key role in promoting the Plandemic video and the ObamaGate and #FilmYourHospital hashtag; and forced Oprah Winfrey and Hilary Duff to come out with statements declaring that they are not pedophiles.

When taking into account how much neo-charismatics, American evangelicalism, theological conspiracy theories, and spiritual warfare is influenced by the distrust of the everyday reality as being false (with their reality being ‘true’), one could make the argument that QAnon theology is not only influenced by pop culture, but is in fact, deeply rooted in the conception of the sacred within a hyper-real world.  

Some might argue that a hyper-real religion isn’t a “real” religion because it’s invented, but scholars of religion don’t validate or discredit claims of what constitutes ‘true’ religion, because it’s true to the people we study. As a scholar of religion I study what people do when dealing with the sacred, rather than try to validate the religious message or experience. What people do when dealing with the sacred is routinized over time as believers construct their religion. All religions, hyper-real ones included, are socially constructed and are thus invented. QAnon is blatantly invented as it openly uses works of popular culture, media, entertainment, American evangelicalism and conspiracy theories at its basis, that have been organically developed across time and space by a community of believers. Belief in QAnon reflects a created hyper-real world based on such theories. 

This is unsurprising, as Travis View stated on PBS’s The Open Mind “we’re living in an age where conspiracy theories are promoted at the highest levels of power, when it wasn’t that long ago conspiracy theories were the pastime of the powerless.” Similarly in 2018, Joseph Uscinski stated that QAnon is different from normal conspiracy theories. “Conspiracy theories are for losers,” he told the Daily Beast’s Will Sommer, “you don’t expect the winning party to use them.” 

By framing QAnon as a hyper-real religion, it can offer insight into the confusion that people feel when discussing the movement, which is critical for observers, scholars, and decision-makers who need to take QAnon seriously. The past months have highlighted how QAnon is a public health threat, a threat to national security, and a threat to democratic institutions.

The essence of conspiracy beliefs like QAnon lies in the attempts to delineate and explain evil; it’s about theodicy, not secular evidence. QAnon offers comfort in an uncertain—and unprecedented—age as the movement crowdsources answers to the inexplicable. QAnon becomes the master narrative capable of simply explaining various complex events and providing solace for modern problems: a pandemic, economic uncertainty, political polarization, war, child abuse, etc. 

The result is a worldview characterized by a sharp distinction between the realms of good and evil. The movement accomplishes this by purporting to be empirically relevant. That is, they claim that QDrops are testable by the accumulation of evidence about the observable world in fighting evil. Those who subscribe to QDrops are presented with elaborate productions of evidence in order to substantiate QAnon’s claims, including source citation and other academic techniques. 

However, their quest for decoding QDrops masks a deeper concern: the more sweeping a conspiracy theory’s claims, the less relevant evidence becomes—notwithstanding the insistence that QAnon is empirically sound. At its heart, QAnon is non-falsifiable. No matter how much evidence journalists, academics, and civil society offer as a counter to the claims promoted by the movement, belief in QAnon as the source of truth is a matter of faith rather than proof.

Therefore, rather than ask questions like, How can people believe in QAnon when so many of its claims fly in the face of facts?, we should instead ask What are QAnoners doing with their belief system? QAnon believers have committed acts of violence in response to QAnon conspiracy theories. Elected officials or those campaigning for elected office have campaigned on QAnon. Those studying and combating the movement need to move beyond viewing it as a mere conspiracy theory; QAnon has grown beyond that. We are, as Adrienne LaFrance asserted, witnessing the birth of a religious movement. QAnon as a belief system only appears to be dependent on Donald Trump’s presidency and his ability to remain in power. Whether we will be speaking of future or former President Trump, the person known as Q will likely fuel the movement for a long time to come. Q will continue to claim special insights, knowledge, and frame things for their followers in terms of their enemies’ alleged ambitions. 

If Donald Trump wins in November, QAnon will be vindicated in their beliefs and say this is what God has mandated, reinforcing the belief that they are right. If Trump loses, it will be attributed to the Deep State Luciferian cabal and they will have a role to play in fighting against the fake government that’s replaced Donald Trump. 

QAnon has become a hermeneutical lens through which to interpret the world. Already we’ve seen a formalized QAnon religion at Omega Kingdom Ministries (OKM). OKM is part of a network of independent congregations (or ekklesia) called Home Congregations Worldwide (HCW). The organization’s spiritual adviser is Mark Taylor, a self-proclaimed “Trump Prophet” and QAnon influencer with a large social media following on Twitter and YouTube. At OKM, QAnon is a hermeneutic by which the Bible is interpreted; and the Bible, in turn, serves as an interpretive lens for QAnon. Furthermore, QAnon is built into their evangelical Christian rituals. OKM may be a sign for what’s to come in terms of QAnon’s proximity to evangelical and neo-charismatic movements in the U.S.

In categorizing QAnon as a hyper-real religion rather than a decentralized grouping of conspiracy theorists, it provides an analytical framework to quantify and qualify QAnon-inspired acts of violence as ideologically motivated violent extremism. Furthermore, there’s an increasing overlap between QAnon and the far-right/Patriot movements on Telegram, a messaging app that has attracted extremists because due to its privacy protections. From the perspective of national security, we need to be prepared for more acts of violence by QAnon believers as it’s proven to be a catalyst for radicalization to violence, terrorism and murder.

By considering QAnon as a hyper-real religion, it becomes possible to frame how QAnon has found resonance not only within the American electoral system, but with populists around the globe. This is especially important not only in the context of elections, but also when framing the global response to the pandemic and public health. Policy makers at all levels need to take the QAnon ideology seriously when planning strategies to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus.

QAnon may not be a recognized religion, a tax exempt 501c3 institution, or the kind of traditional brick-and-mortar religion most are familiar with. However, by framing QAnon as a religion—in particular, a hyper-real religion—we create a framework that helps us better study, report and understand QAnon. More importantly, it demonstrates that the movement needs to be taken seriously and has the socio-political and behavioral impacts that other religions have. In doing so, it provides a pathway to protecting our societies and institutions from the public health, democratic, and national security threat that QAnon potentially poses.

This content was originally published here.

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John MacArthur - The Modern Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit (Psalm 69) Jun/12

Well, now that I don’t have to preach on anything but what I want to preach on, since I finished the New Testament, I find myself all over the place, trying to decide what to preach on in sequence.

It’s a new kind of experience for me & I’m working on some kind of sequence that makes sense over the future.  But I am sort of at the liberty point of my life where whatever is on my heart is where I can go, & this is a wonderful opportunity for me.

And there is a subject that has concerned me for a long time, & I have wanted to address this subject, but it hasn’t been a part of the preaching through the gospels in the way that it can be now & that is the subject of the Holy Spirit – the Holy Spirit.

After all the emphasis of so many years, 25 years of preaching through the four gospels, & much emphasis, of course, on the person of Christ, as it should be, much emphasis on the character of God & the nature of God as manifest in Christ & is seen elsewhere in Scripture.

It is time now to give honor to the third member of the Trinity; namely, the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is the most forgotten, the most misrepresented, the most dishonored, the most grieved, the most abused, & I might even say the most blasphemed of the members of the Trinity.  That’s a sad thing.

When our Lord cleansed the temple in John 2, He said that He was, in a sense, fulfilling the attitude of David from Psalm 69:

“Zeal for Your house has eaten Me up, the reproaches that fall on you are fallen on Me.”

And what our Lord was saying was, “When God is dishonored, I feel the pain.”

“You have taken My Father’s house, which is to be a house of prayer, & turned it into a den of robbers. You’ve corrupted My Father’s house.  You’ve blasphemed My Father’s name. You’ve dishonored My Father.”

And I can say that I have long felt that same thing with regard to the Holy Spirit. Yes, I grieve when God is dishonored.  It is a constant grief to me.

>> I grieve when Christ is dishonored.

But in this contemporary sort of Christian evangelical church world, people are a little less reluctant to bring dishonor on the name of God & name of Christ, but they think they have a free run at dishonoring & abusing the Holy Spirit, apparently, because so much of that goes on.

I’m not here to defend the Holy Spirit; He can defend Himself.

But I am here to say that reproaches that are falling on His holy name are falling on me as well, & mostly this comes in the professing church from Pentecostals & Charismatics who feel they have free license to abuse the Holy Spirit & even blaspheme His holy name – & they do it constantly.

1.] How do they do it?

By attributing to the Holy Spirit words that He didn’t say, deeds that He didn’t do, & experiences that He didn’t produce, attributing to the Holy Spirit that which is not the work of the Holy Spirit.

Endless human experiences, emotional experiences, bizarre experiences, & demonic experiences are said to come from the Holy Spirit.

Visions, revelations, voices from heaven, messages from the Spirit through transcendental means, dreams, speaking in tongues, prophecies, out-of-body experiences, trip to heaven, anointings, miracles – all false, all lies, all deceptions – attributed falsely to the Holy Spirit.

You know enough to know that God does not want to be worshiped in illegitimate ways.

God wants to be worshiped for who He is, for what He has done in the way He has declared.

It is open season on abusing the Holy Spirit, outrageous dishonor of the Holy Spirit, claiming He is saying things & doing things & generating things that have nothing to do with the Holy Spirit at all.

It is a reckless kind of movement.

It is a shameful & dangerous sin to heap such abuse on the Holy Spirit.

In fact, the idea of bringing dishonor on the Holy Spirit ought to make any thinking person tremble.

People seem less interested, I think, in claiming that God is doing certain things or saying certain things or that Christ is doing things or saying certain things than they are at saying the Holy Spirit did this, the Holy Spirit said this, the Holy Spirit is producing & generating this, that there just seems to be no restraint on the things that are blamed on the Holy Spirit.

2.] A way to perceive this would be to see it as a contrast to what we see in Matthew 12, for example.

The leaders of Israel committed the unpardonable sin, & what was that unpardonable sin?

It was attributing to Satan the work of the Holy Spirit.

Remember that?

It was attributing to Satan the work of the Holy Spirit, Matthew 12:31-32.

What’s going on today is the opposite. Attributing to the Holy Spirit the work of Satan.

That’s what’s going on. Attributing to the Holy Spirit the work of Satan. Satan is alive & at work in deception, false miracles, bad theology, lying visions, lying dreams, lying revelations, deceptive teachers who are in it for the money & power & influence.

Satan is alive & well, & the work of Satan is being attributed to the Holy Spirit. That is a serious blasphemy, just as attributing to Satan the work of the Holy Spirit is a serious blasphemy.

I couldn’t even begin to give you all the illustrations.

You have enough of them in your own mind. You can turn on your television & see any litany of them that you would choose.

And in order to give credibility to all these things, all these lies, they attach them to the Holy Spirit as if it’s a freebie, as if there’s no price to pay for that kind of blasphemy.

3.] The latest wave of this – I’ll just give you one illustration.

The latest wave of this that is gaining traction & has entered into sort of national news is a new form of Charismania, bringing reproach on the Holy Spirit called the New Apostolic Reformation, NAR, the New Apostolic Reformation.

It is not new, it is not apostolic, & it is not a reformation, by the way.

It is like Grape Nuts – it’s not grapes & it’s not nuts.

It’s like Christian Science – it’s not Christian & it’s not scientific.

Well, the New Apostolic Reformation isn’t new, it isn’t apostolic, & it isn’t a reformation.

But it is a rapidly expanding movement being generated by some of the same old troubling false teachers & false leaders that have been around in Charismania for decades.

Always dishonoring the Holy Spirit, always dishonoring the Scripture, always claiming miracle signs, wonders, visions, dreams.

Peter Wagner, the Kansas City “Prophets,” Mike Bickle, Cindy Jacobs, Lou Engle, & on & on & on it goes.

In fact, this is exploding so fast that they have a 50-state network that are now involved in this. This is a new kind of Charismania, it’s sort of on steroids.

One writer said it’s Charismania with shots of adrenalin.

And here’s what their basic claim is: that the Holy Spirit has revealed to them that in the year 2001, we entered into the 2nd apostolic age.

What does that mean?

It means the long-lost offices of NT prophet & NT apostle have been restored, the Holy Spirit has given the power of prophecy & power & authority of an apostle to certain people in this generation of the church since 2001.

It seems very odd to me that the Holy Spirit would give that to people whose theology is unbiblical & totally aberrant.

I’m pretty sure the Holy Spirit wouldn’t authenticate false teachers, so we know it’s not the Holy Spirit, but that’s what they claim.

But the Holy Spirit gets blamed for everything; this is just the newest one.

For example, they have authority equal to the apostles,

they have the same power the apostles & through the Holy Spirit to do miracles & to exercise that power, ^ they’ve had it since 2001.

Some of them fall into the prophet category, or the apostle category.

They speak what the Holy Spirit reveals to them with the same authority the apostles have.

This authority & this power has been demonstrated in the world because one of the apostles stopped mad cow disease in Germany – so he claims.

The movement is marked by super-excess ecstatic, bizarre behavior.

Emotionalism ran amok, all kinds of crazy revelations, behaviors.

Peter Wagner is the father of this, as he has been involved in all kinds of other aberrations through the years, including starting the Church Growth Movement, which gave life to the Pragmatism movement, which we know, is so ubiquitous.

4.] Their influence has been growing & recently jumped into the political realm, & I’ll tell you how.

There was a couple of weeks ago, a few weeks ago now, a prayer breakfast in the city of Houston that you may have read about.

It was an event sponsored by the New Apostolic Reformation & their leaders & the guests, & the main speaker there was Rick Perry, who is a candidate for the Republican Party for President.

At this event, sponsored by the NAR, two pastors were leading in this event. They are apostles.  They have been given apostleship by the Holy Spirit.

They called Rick Perry’s office, as governor of the state of Texas, & told him that the Lord had revealed to them through the Holy Spirit that Texas is the state that God has chosen to lead the United States into revival & godly government & Rick Perry is to play a key role.

And at that event, these two apostles of the NAR Movement laid hands on Rick Perry & prayed over him. They claim that God speaks directly to them specific instruction – specific instruction.

And if people fail to listen to this divine revelation that comes through them, there will be more earthquakes, more terrorist attacks, & worse economic conditions.

However, if we listen, good things will happen because they gave us an illustration of that because they were the ones who gave a little bit of rain to Texas after the draught.

I mean if you didn’t know better, you’d think somebody opened the back door of the nut house.

One of these apostles says the Democratic Party is controlled by Jezebel and three lesser demons.

They see demons in public places.

They engage in confrontation of these demons & they do it with elaborate rituals, branding irons, stakes, & plumb lines.

They’ve gone all over the state of Texas pounding stakes into the ground, branding certain things & claiming every county in Texas for God.

One of them says, & I quote, “We are called to world dominion.” They have gone to every Masonic Lodge in Texas to cast out the demon Baal because the demon Baal controls Free Masonry.

They had a meeting in 2009 in Houston. Under the anointing of the Holy Spirit, Jezebel was visible.

They saw Jezebel.  Actually, a woman named Alice Patterson, one of these apostles who has written a book called Bridging The Racial & Political Divide, which sounds like a political book, published in 2010, she said that she saw Jezebel, & Jezebel lifted up her skirt, & when Jezebel lifted up her skirt – this is a quote – “She exposed little Baal, Asherah, & a few other demons who were small, cowering, trembling little spirits only ankle high on Jezebel’s skinny legs,” end quote.

This is in a book called Bridging the Racial & Political Divide, & this is all attributed to the work of the Holy Spirit who is revealing all these things.

Now, you know where this all comes from.

This is again attributing to the Holy Spirit the work of Satan.

I don’t know what Rick Perry knows or doesn’t know about all of this.

You know, in a campaign year, you take prayers from anybody, especially if you’re not sure what this is all about.

But this is just one illustration of the aberrations that continue to be placed on the back of the Holy Spirit as if these are things that He is doing.

It is such a frightening form of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. There are other forms of it, but that’s just the latest one that’s in the media.

I remember in the early years of ministry when I came out of seminary, for many years I traveled around when I graduated, even when I was in seminary.

Graduated from college & during my seminary years & for a number of years afterwards, I traveled around & I spoke to young people’s groups & college groups & all kinds of different groups & student ministries & ministries in churches.

Inevitably, one of the themes that everybody wanted me to talk about was the ministry of the Holy Spirit.

It was constant. I was constantly talking about the ministry of the Holy Spirit.  Everybody was asking about sanctification.

How do I get rid of sin in my life?

How do I progress spiritually?

How do I grow more to be like Jesus Christ?

How do I separate from the world?

How do I gain victory over temptation?

What is the path?

How can I manifest the fruit of the Spirit?

How can I walk in the Spirit & not fulfill the lust of the flesh?

I mean they were – that’s just plain old New Testament sanctification, & young people were asking those questions.  It was constant.

I would be in conference after conference on campuses & in various places, talking to students, & inevitably the subject would be:

How can I be sanctified?

How can I become more like Christ?

How can I beat sin in my life?

How can I grow in grace & in the knowledge of Christ?

What does it mean to be Spirit-filled?

What does it mean to be baptized by the Spirit?

Sealed by the Spirit?  Indwelt by the Spirit?

What is the role the Spirit plays in my life?

I’m not asked to do that anymore.

That doesn’t seem to ever be a topic of conversation.

That doesn’t seem to be a subject anybody cares about.

The Charismatic movement has stolen the Holy Spirit & created a golden calf, & they’re dancing around the golden calf as if it were the Holy Spirit.

5.] It is a false form of the Holy Spirit.

They’ve exploited the Holy Spirit & demanded to be able to do that in an uncriticized manner. Nobody can say anything against them.

That’s divisive, unloving, cantankerous.

That’s why Benny Hinn said about me, “If I had my way, I’d take my Holy Ghost machine gun & blow his brains out.”

You’re not allowed to question anything they say about the Holy Spirit.

They have coopted the Holy Spirit & demanded to do that without being criticized, without being confronted.

They go on with their exploitation & so proved testimony concerning the Holy Spirit is pushed & repressed underground because it’s going to be divisive, they’re not going to like it, it’ll offend somebody.

So the Charismatic version of the Holy Spirit is: golden calf who is not God.

Not God, the Holy Spirit, but a false creation, an idol around which they dance in their dishonoring exercises.

And here we are in this, you know, interest in Reformed theology, in this kind of new evangelical wave that’s going, & there’s very little talk about the Holy Spirit, very little discussion about the Holy Spirit.

No strong doctrine of sanctification, no consuming desire for holiness, separation from the world.

In fact, it seems to me that much of this new evangelical movement looks more worldly all the time.

It seems to be indifferent to the work of the Holy Spirit.

You know, if you get the gospel right, you get a free pass on everything else. Very little interest in talking about what is the baptism of the Spirit, what is the filling of the Spirit, the sealing of the Spirit?

What does it mean to walk in the Spirit and not fulfill the lust of the flesh?

What does biblical separation mean?

Personal holiness?  Sanctification?

There just doesn’t seem to be a lot of interest in that.

6.] Wherever the Holy Spirit is, there’s humility.

Wherever you see the exaltation of a man, that’s not the work of the Holy Spirit.

When you can look at a movement that claims to be evangelical, & you can see the exploitation, the exaltation of men, that is not the work of the Holy Spirit.

Where the work of the Holy Spirit is, there’s the exaltation of Jesus Christ & everybody else fades.

Of all the ages in the history of the church, this is the one most capable of feeding pride.

Why? Because there are so many ways to stick yourself in front of people’s faces across the planet.

This is an easy time for proud people to make the most of themselves. There just doesn’t seem to be interest in the work & ministry of the Holy Spirit.

There is even a view of the Holy Spirit that’s downright heretical & that is what I guess you could call modalism.  I know that’s a technical term but that’s simply to say that there’s only one God, He’s not three persons, He’s one God who appears in three modes, not at the same time but separately.

Sometimes He’s the Father, sometimes He’s the Son, sometimes He’s the Spirit, He’s never three in one.

That’s the view, for example, of T.D. Jakes.

Sabellianism, Modalism.  Doesn’t seem to bother lots of folks that he has a God who’s not the God of the Bible, that his view of the Holy Spirit is a heresy, his view of the Son & the Father equally heretical

We have to get the Trinity right, & we have to give due worship to the Holy Spirit, equal to the Son, equal to the Father.

So these things have been on my mind & a lot of things in addition, but I think you get the picture.

 And we haven’t really looked down hard at the ministry of the Holy Spirit to see what it is that we need to worship Him for & what we need to be focused on in terms of giving Him the praise & the honor that He is due.

7.] Disinterest in the Holy Spirit gives rise to Pragmatism.

We have replaced supernaturalism, the ministry of the Holy Spirit, with Pragmatism. We’ve committed the sin of the Galatians.

Galatians 3, Paul says, “Having begun in the Spirit, are you made perfect by the flesh?”

In other words, there’s no way to get saved except by the work of the Holy Spirit. Now that you’re saved, are you now taken over with the flesh?

You’re going to accomplish everything through the flesh.

Pride has defeated humility, & that’s always an affront to the Holy Spirit.

Where are the meek & where are the humble & where are the lowly?

Where the Holy Spirit is, Christ will be exalted.

It will be Christ & it will be Christ & it will be Christ again who receives all the praise & all the honor and all the glory.

The Holy Spirit is grieved if Christ is not exalted. His work is quenched when the flesh is elevated.

So we could have done this, perhaps, through the years & we have touched on, of course, all the NT teaches about the Holy Spirit.

Eventually we would have covered it all over the last 40 years or so. But I want to take a look at the ministry of the Holy Spirit in the next few weeks.

I don’t know how long it’s going to take me. I have no idea. And that’s okay.

But we’re going to go to one chapter instead of running all over the place because I don’t want to lead you everywhere.

We’re going to look at Romans 8, so you can just kind of keep that in your mind. 

If you turn there now, you’re going to be a little frustrated.

But go ahead – it’ll make you feel more comfortable to have your Bible open. I’m not going to get there, but just have your Bible open, it’s good.

8.] And I’ll make a couple of references to Romans 8.

But that’s going to be our chapter.

And why don’t we look at it for just a second?

And let me just point out why I’m picking this chapter to learn about the Holy Spirit – pretty obvious.

Verse 2 talks about the Spirit, you see it there, Romans 8:2, referring to the Spirit.  And you come down, verse 4 refers to the Spirit.

Verse 5 refers to the Spirit.  Verse 6 refers to the Spirit. Verse 9 refers to the Spirit.  Verse 11 refers to the Spirit. Verse 13 – and so it goes.  Verse 14, verse 16 – this is the Spirit’s chapter, all the way down into verse 26, the Spirit helps our weakness, He’s mentioned again, interceding for us.

So the Holy Spirit is the main player in this 8th chapter of Romans, & so it gives us the opportunity to sort of build a sound theology of the ministry & the work of the Holy Spirit.

We could call this chapter “Life in the Spirit.”

Life in the Spirit.

We’re going to have a great time working through this chapter, as you will see.  But before we do that, I just want to kind of give you an overview.

Before we go down to the worm’s-eye view, give you kind of a bird’s-eye view.

A.] The Holy Spirit is not an impersonal force.

  The Holy Spirit is not an influence, not an “it.”

  The Holy Spirit is not some kind of energy emanating from God.   The Holy Spirit is God, a member of the Trinity, a person completely the   essence of God with an entity & a personality of His own.

  Scripture is clear about this.

  He is equal in nature & attributes – let me say that again –   He’s equal in nature & attributes to the Father & the Son.   He is not diminished in any sense.   He is fully God in the same way the Father & the Son are.

B.] He has personality.

  Sometimes people refer to “it,” the Holy Spirit. That is inaccurate.   He possesses intellect, emotion, & will.   And evidences of that in the Scriptures are ample everywhere in Scripture.

  For instance, He knows the deep things of God, 1 Corinthians 2.   In other words, He’s plumbed the full depth of divine knowledge.   He has knowledge equal to that of the Father, equal to that of the Son.

  He loves the saints, & His love is equal to that love which is characteristic of   Christ and God, Romans 5:5.

  He makes choices, divine choices, sovereign choices.   First Corinthians 12:11, He decides what He will give to what believer with   regard to spiritual capacities & spiritual gifts.

  He speaks – He speaks.  He speaks the truth always.   He prays for us – Romans 8:26.  He teaches us all things.   He is the anointing that comes from God – John 14, 1 John 2 – so that   we don’t need a human teacher because He teaches us everything.

  John 16:13 says He guides us.  Here in Romans 8, it says He leads us, as   many as are led by the Spirit of God, they’re the children of God.

C.] He commands.

  His commands are given, for example, in Acts 16:6-7.   He fellowships with us.  2 Corinthians 13:14 talks about fellowship of the Spirit. 

  Ephesians 4:30 says He can be grieved.   All these indicate He’s a person. He can be grieved.

  Acts 5:3, He can be lied to, as Ananias & Sapphira did,   “Why have you lied to the Holy Spirit?”

  He can be tested; that’s the same passage.   “Why are you testing the Holy Spirit?”

  He can be vexed, angered, you might say, according to Isaiah 63:10.   He can be resisted.  Acts 7:51, “Why do you resist the Holy Spirit?”

  And in Mark 3 as in Matthew 12, He can be blasphemed.   1 Thessalonians 5:19, He can be quenched; that is, His efforts thwarted.

  All of these are evidences this is a person, one who thinks & feels & acts &     makes decisions in every capacity, as a person does.

D.] There also is no doubt about His deity, that He is         absolutely God.

  And I’ll show you just one illustration of that, though there are many.   Acts 5, & let’s go back to that fascinating account of Ananias & Sapphira who    lied to the Holy Spirit saying they gave everything they got from the sale of the    property when the truth is they kept back some of the money for themselves. 

  So in Acts 5:3, Peter confronts them on the Lord’s Day at the church.   “Why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit?”   Now go down to v.4, end of the verse: “You have not lied to men, but to God.”

  God is the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is God.   There you have it, the deity of the Holy Spirit, absolutely, clearly indicated.

You have Trinitarian formulas in Matthew 28:19, “Baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” all equal members of the Holy Trinity.

They cannot be separate members.

Modalism is a ridiculous idea, the idea that God is sometimes the Father & then He puts on His Son hat, then He puts on His Holy Spirit hat.

How do you explain the baptism of Christ where Christ is being baptized, the Father is saying, “He’s My beloved Son,” & the Spirit’s descending like a dove?

A little problem for the Modalists there because all three show up at the same time.

E.] He is God.

 How do we know that?  He has attributes of God.  In Hebrews 9:14, it says He is the eternal Spirit – the eternal Spirit.  He is as eternal as God is because He is eternally God.

 He is omniscient.  Again, that goes back to John 15-16, also John 14,  He’s the source of all truth, He leads you into all truth, reveals all truth.

 1 Corinthians 2:  He knows the deep things of God that are known only to  God & only to the Spirit of God. So He is eternal, omniscient, & omnipotent.

 How powerful is the Holy Spirit? He’s equally powerful to God.  How do we know that? He’s the creator of everything that exists.  That’s Genesis, right? In the beginning, creation was without form & it was  void, it was tohu and bohu, it was emptiness & nothingness, & the Spirit of God  moved upon the face of the waters & creation began.

Even more astounding to see the power of His creation is in Luke 1:35 when the Angel came to Mary & said, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you” – “the Holy Spirit will come upon you” – listen to this – “and with Him the power of the Most High.”

In other words, the power of the Most High God, El Elyon, the supreme sovereign God of the universe, the power of the supreme God resides fully in the Holy Spirit.

That’s the power of the Most High God dispensed through the Holy Spirit.

He created everything that is created in the same way that God created it & the Son created it.

F.] Omnipotence, omnipresence.

 Psalm 139:7, “Where will I go from Your Spirit?”

 Remember when the psalmist said that?  Where am I going to go from Your Spirit?  How can I find a place anywhere in the universe that’s away from Your Spirit?  There is no such place. He is everywhere all the time.

 In Romans 1:4, He’s called the Spirit of holiness.  God is holy, holy, holy.  Holy is the Father, holy is the Son, holy is the Spirit,  that’s the trihagion of Isaiah 6. He is the Spirit of holiness.

 1 Peter 4:14, He’s called the Spirit of glory.  He’s like the God of glory, like the glory of God shining gloriously in the face of  Jesus Christ, He is the Spirit of glory.

 2 Corinthians 3:6, He’s called the life-giving Spirit. He’s the source of life.  These are all attributes that belong to God, & the Holy Spirit has them.  Therefore, the Holy Spirit is God.

 As God, He is to be worshiped as God, He is to be honored as God,  He is to be revered as God, He is to be treated as God.

 In the same way you would treat God the Father & God the Son,  you would treat the Holy Spirit.  As I said, ppl seem to be more reluctant to  blaspheme the Father & the Son; yet they don’t seem to have any problem  making a joke & a mockery out of the name of the Holy Spirit.

9.] If you talk about the titles which the Holy Spirit bears, that kind of adds to your understanding a little bit.

 Many times He is called God.

 I just read you that in Acts 5:4. Many times He is called Lord.

For example, in 2 Corinthians 3:18, one of my favorite verses – those of you who know me, know that – it says, “That as we gaze into the glory of the Lord, being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord the Spirit” – “the Lord the Spirit.”

The Spirit is the Lord.  He is called God & He is called Lord, titles of deity.

10.] There are other titles that He bears.

 He is called the Spirit of God, Genesis 1:2.  “The Spirit of God moves upon the waters,” Matthew 3:16.  He’s called the Spirit of the Lord in Luke 4.

 He’s called His Spirit, that is, God’s Spirit, Numbers 11:29.  He’s called the Spirit of Yahweh in Judges 3:10.  He’s called the Spirit of the Lord God in Isaiah 61,  the Spirit of your Father in Matthew 10:20, &  the Spirit of the Living God in 2 Corinthians 3:3.

 He is given all the titles that belong to deity.  That’s the point here.  He’s called the Spirit of Jesus in Acts 16:7;  the Spirit of Christ right here in Romans 8:9, &  in Galatians 4:6, the Spirit of His Son.  Philippians 1:19, the Spirit of Jesus Christ.  This is clearly indication that He is fully God.

Now, the more I think about this & go over this as I was doing the last few days, the more my heart aches over the way the Holy Spirit is being mistreated.

And again I say, look, I’m not here to defend the Holy Spirit, He can defend Himself. But I am here to tell you that you do not want to be sucked up into this mockery of the blessed Holy Spirit.

You want to worship Him for who He is.

People sometimes say to me, “Can we pray to the Holy Spirit?” Of course – of course, He’s God.

“Don’t we have to pray to the Father only?”

No, pray to the Father, pray to the Spirit, pray to the Son, pray to all three, pray to any two.

“Can we worship the Holy Spirit?”

Absolutely, fall down & worship the Holy Spirit, the same way you would Christ & the Father.

You wouldn’t say a word against the Father, you wouldn’t say a word against the Son, don’t say a word against the Holy Spirit.

Don’t attribute anything to God that isn’t true of Him, don’t attribute anything to Christ that isn’t true of Him, & don’t attribute anything to the Holy Spirit that isn’t true of Him.

Boy, if we just got rid of that, it would change the face of the church.

When you think about the works of the Holy Spirit, you have to start with creation.  And then in the OT, you see Him convicting people.

Remember in Genesis 6, “My Spirit will not always strive with man”? He’s striving to bring conviction in the same way that I read from John 16:8:  When the Spirit comes, He’ll convict the world of sin & righteousness & judgment.

In the OT you see Him indwelling certain people for certain service. He regenerated people in the OT because you couldn’t be regenerated unless it was a divine miracle, & He’s the Spirit that gives life, the life-giving Spirit.

11.] He is that Spirit.

 So in the OT, He’s seen as the Creator,  He’s seen as the regenerator of those who believe.

He is seen as the one who convicts men of sin.

He is seen as the one who enables men to serve.

Read Exodus 31, Judges 3, Judges 6, “And the Spirit of God comes to enable people to serve.”

That’s why David in his Psalm 51 about his sin said, “Take not Your Spirit from me.”

He wasn’t talking about the fact that all of a sudden the Holy Spirit who had regenerated him & empowering him for his spiritual life would be gone.

He was speaking in the language of that special work of the Holy Spirit in which He came on people for certain ministry, enabling men to do certain things.

12.] But one thing that stands out in His ministry in the OT,         is that He’s the author of Scripture.

 No scripture is the result of any private interpretation, Peter says, right?

2 Peter 1:21, no private interpretation but holy ppl of God were moved by the Spirit of God.

 That’s how the OT was written.  The Spirit of God is the author through human instrumentation.

That’s how the NT is written as well. It’s God-breathed, the word breath is pneuma. It’s God’s Spirit that writes holy Scripture.

 And you can find places throughout Scripture that speak about the Holy Spirit.  He is the author of Scripture. Scripture is God-breathed.  It is the revelation of God through the Holy Spirit.

One illustration, Acts 1:16, “The Scripture had to be fulfilled which the Holy Spirit foretold.”

 Whenever the Scripture said something, it was the Holy Spirit saying it.  By the way, we read in John 15-16 that the primary task of the Holy Spirit is  to glorify Christ, right?

 He’s the Spirit of truth but He points to Me,  He glorifies Me, & when you read the Scripture, that’s what all Scripture does.

 Even the OT.  That’s why Luke 24 is so important, beginning at Moses, the  prophets, & all the holy writings,  He spoke to them of the things concerning Himself written in the OT.

 All through the OT, as well as the New, the Holy Spirit is pointing to Christ.

 So wherever you see a work that is really the ministry of  the Holy Spirit, ppl will be humbled & Christ exalted.

13.] In life of Christ, you see ministry of the Holy Spirit.

 He’s there giving Him life.  He’s there at His baptism, the Holy Spirit descending like a dove upon Him.  He’s there to launch His ministry.

 The Holy Spirit comes upon Him & He launches His public ministry at 30.

 The Holy Spirit is there in His temptation.  You remember that the Holy Spirit led Him into the wilderness & through that  temptation & out the other side.

 He is the anointing in Acts 10:38.  Preaching about Him & they said He was anointed with the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit came upon Him.

 That’s why He said, “If you deny the works that I do as  being of God, you blaspheme the Holy Spirit because  it’s the Holy Spirit working through Me.”

14.] That was the Holy Spirit teaching through Christ?

 That’s how much of a self-emptying there was.  He yielded up even His teaching to that which the Spirit did through Him.

John 3:34, “He whom the Father has sent speaks the words of God for He gives the Spirit without measure.”

 He speaks the words of God because He has the Spirit working through Him.  The miracles Christ did & message He preached was the ministry of the Spirit  through Him.

 He was in perfect agreement with it but it was the message from the Father  through the Spirit. It was the Spirit that was the power behind His miracles;  that’s why it was a blasphemous thing to say they were from Satan.

15.] Even His death, of Jesus Christ that we talk about so         often, was a work of the Holy Spirit.

 I don’t know if you ever thought about that but you will now.  Hebrews 9:14, “How much more will the blood of Christ” – listen to this –  “the blood of Christ who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without  blemish to God?”

 Every miracle He did was through the power of the Spirit.  And even His death was through the power of the Spirit.  His birth was through the power of the Spirit.  His life was through the power of the Spirit.

 His miracles were through the power of the Spirit.  His teaching was through the power of the Spirit.  And what about His resurrection?

Romans 8:11  “The Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead.”

When you start to get your arms around the ministry of the Holy Spirit, it’s so incredible, staggering, far-reaching, & we haven’t even gotten to the part about us.

So let’s get to that.

What does He do in the world? What does the Holy Spirit do in the world?

Well, He convicts of sin, righteousness, and judgment.

Genesis 6:3:  “He strives with sinners,” so He’s the convicting power.

According to 2 Thessalonians 2:13-14, He calls sinners – that’s an effectual call – He actually calls them.

Furthermore, He regenerates – John 3 – “You must be born of the Spirit.”

So in the world He convicts, He calls, He gives regenerating life & also witnesses to the truth of Christ, Acts 5:30-32.

So it is the ministry of the Holy Spirit that comes to the sinner, convicts the sinner, calls the sinner when the sinner understands the glories of Christ & then He regenerates the sinner.

16.] Now, what does He do in the believer?

Glorifies Christ, exalts Christ through the Word, but beyond that, He indwells the believer.

Romans 8:9, “The Spirit of God dwells in you.”

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6, “You’re the temple of the Holy Spirit.” He indwells us.  Now we’re getting personal here.

Ephesians 5:18 says, “Being kept filled with the Spirit.”

He fills us, which is a power statement, like wind filling sails & moving the ship.

That’s that analogy.

He seals us, He secures us, Ephesians 1 says, for eternity. He imparts fruit to us, the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, self-control.

Gives us love, Romans 5:5. He gives us gifts of the Spirit—Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12.

Several gifts divided equally among His people.

He teaches us.  He leads us into all truth, guides us into the understanding of Scripture, anointing that we have from God, so that we know all things.

Romans 8:26, He prays for us.

Galatians 5:17, He makes war against our flesh & sin on our behalf.

John 14:16, “He comforts us.”

Romans 8:14, I mentioned it earlier, “He leads & guides us.”

Galatians 3, He sanctifies us.

Acts 1:8, He empowers us for witness & evangelism.

CONCLUSION

All these things, the Holy Spirit does.

We need to understand all these marvelous, rich things.

There was a time when this was a very important part of Christian ministry, Christian thinking. Try to write a book on the definitive ministry of the Holy Spirit today & find a place for it in a Christian bookstore.

Might be a losing proposition if you really took on all the error that was there.

I don’t expect, except among us & whoever we can influence, to stem the tide of this terrible abuse of the Holy Spirit.

But I think we as a church & as believers need to give honor to the Holy Spirit in the way that He is worthy to be honored & to replace this frivolous, superficial, abusive approach & more than that, to get Him out of the shadows so that He’s not the forgotten member of the Trinity who never receives the worship that He is due.

The whole matter of you living your Christian life is a work of the Holy Spirit. All the ministry of spiritual gifts, everything anybody does in the kingdom in the body of Christ that has any effect or any impact or any purpose or any success is the work of the Holy Spirit.

How can we ignore that & replace that with such crazy things that dishonor Him? Well, that’ll get us to Romans 8, & next week we’ll go back to that chapter.                ________________________________________________________

PRAYER

Our Father, we thank You for the time this morning to worship You.  It’s been so refreshing.  Thank You for this blessed church, these precious people, love for You and Your Word.

Thank You, O Holy Spirit, for just this incomprehensible work that You’ve done, not just in creation but in regeneration.

You gave us life.  You gave us salvation, forgiveness, & You empowered us, now You sanctify us and You’ll bring us to glory.

We’ll be glorified by Your power.

We’ll be changed by Your power.

We’ll be fit for heaven by Your power.

In the meantime, You’re there producing fruit & energizing our gifts & empowering our witness & fighting against our flesh & praying for us & making everything work together for good, securing us & sealing us to the day of redemption.

We love You, we honor You, we worship You, we exalt You.

And we are deeply grieved, as You must be, at the way You are misrepresented. Help us, Lord, to be all that we should be as we worship You, our Trinitarian God – Father, Son, & Holy Spirit.

May we worship You in truth as You truly are & with all our might, both in praise itself and in obedience.

What can we say, O Holy Spirit, for all that You’ve done for us & You are doing even as we speak & will do until we see Jesus face-to-face & by Your power are made perfect into His image?

We give You our worship today & we ask that You would be honored, not only in our lives & in our midst but in Your church.

The church which You regenerated, to which You have given life, the church through which You work, the church in which You can do exceeding, abundantly above all we ask or think according to the power that works in us, even that power that raised Jesus from the dead, even the power of You, O blessed Holy Spirit.

Show Your power in Your church & be honored & glorified, we pray.  Amen.

[truck-fump]

THE STATE OF THE DIS-UNIONAn impeached president who was on...

New Post has been published on https://truckfump.life/2020/02/04/the-state-of-the-dis-unionan-impeached-president-who-was-on/

THE STATE OF THE DIS-UNIONAn impeached president who was on...

THE STATE OF THE DIS-UNION

An impeached president who was on trial and is up for re-election will be delivering a state of the union address to the most divided union in living memory. He will be giving his address to both his jurors and prosecutors, and most importantly, to the voters that will decide his fate in November.

It’s not unprecedented for an impeached president to give a state of the union address. Bill Clinton delivered his State of the Union in 1999 while in the middle of his Senate trial. But that’s where the similarities end.

Clinton was not up for re-election when he gave his speech, so he didn’t need to employ any campaign-style rhetoric. Trump is a polarizing, divisive president who is addressing an America that has never been so divided.

But this begs the question: why are we so divided?

We’re not fighting a hugely unpopular war on the scale of Vietnam. We’re not in a deep economic crisis like the Great Depression. Yes, we disagree about guns, abortion, and immigration, but we’ve disagreed about them for decades. So why are we so divided now?

Ferocious partisanship is not new. Newt Gingrich, the Republican Speaker of the House who led the House’s impeachment investigation into Clinton, pioneered the combative partisanship we’re used to today. But today’s divisions are far deeper than they were then.

Part of the answer is Trump himself. The Great Divider knows how to pit native-born Americans against immigrants, the working class against the poor, whites against blacks and Latinos, evangelicals against secularists — keeping everyone stirred up by vilifying, disparaging, denouncing, defaming, and accusing others of the worst. Trump thrives off disruption and division.

But that begs another question: Why have we been so ready to be divided by Trump?

One theory is the underlying tension that an older, whiter, and less educated America, concentrated in rural areas, is losing out to a “new” America that’s younger, more diverse, more educated, and concentrated in urban areas. These trends, while much more prominent these days, have been going on since the start of the 20th century. Why are they causing so much anger now?

Another hypothesis is that we are geographically sorting ourselves into Republican and Democratic regions of the country, surrounding ourselves with like-minded neighbors and friends so we no longer talk to people with opposing views. But why are we doing this?

The rise of social media sensationalizing our differences in order to attract eyeballs and advertisers, plays a crucial role in exacerbating the demographic and geographic trends I just mentioned. But it alone isn’t responsible for our polarized nation.

Together, all of these factors contribute to the political schism we’re experiencing today. But none of them alone point to any large, significant change in the structure of our society that can account for what’s happened.

Let me have a go.

In the fall of 2015, I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri, and North Carolina for a research project I was doing on the changing nature of work. I spoke with many of the same people I had met twenty years before when I was secretary of labor, as well as with some of their grown children.

What I heard surprised me. Twenty years ago, many said they’d been working hard and were frustrated they weren’t doing better. Now, that frustration had been replaced by full-blown anger — anger towards their employers, the government, Wall Street.

Many had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the Great Recession following the financial crisis of 2008, or knew others who had. By the time I spoke with them, most were back in jobs but the jobs paid no more than they had two decades before in terms of purchasing power.

I heard the term “rigged system” so often I began asking people what they meant by it. They spoke about flat wages, shrinking benefits, and growing job insecurity. They talked about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, soaring CEO pay, and “crony capitalism.”

These complaints came from people who identified as Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. A few had joined the Tea Party, while a few others had been involved in the Occupy movement.

With the 2016 political primaries looming, I asked them which candidates they found most attractive. At the time, Democratic Party insiders favored Hillary Clinton and Republican insiders favored Jeb Bush. Yet no one I spoke with mentioned Clinton or Bush.

They talked instead about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. When I asked why, they said Sanders or Trump would “shake things up” or “make the system work again” or “stop the corruption” or “end the rigging.”

In the following year, Sanders – a seventy-four-year old Jew from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and wasn’t a registered Democrat until the 2016 presidential primaries – came within a whisker of beating Clinton in the Iowa caucus, routed her in the New Hampshire primary, and ended up with 46 percent of the pledged delegates from Democratic primaries and caucuses.

Trump – a sixty-nine-year-old ego-maniacal billionaire reality-TV star who had never held elective office or had anything to do with the Republican Party and who lied compulsively about everything – won the Republican primaries and then went on to beat Clinton, one of the most experienced and well-connected politicians in modern America (although he didn’t win the popular vote, and had some help from the Kremlin).

Something very big had happened, and it wasn’t due to Sanders’s magnetism or Trump’s likeability. It was a rebellion against the establishment.

That rebellion is still going on, although much of the establishment still denies it. They have come up with myriad explanations for Trump’s ascendance, some with validity; some without: It was hatred of Obama, it was hatred of Hillary, it was people voting third party, it was racism and xenophobia.

It’s important to note that although racism and xenophobia in America date to before the founding of the Republic, they have never before been so central to a candidate’s appeal and message as they’ve been with Trump. Aided by Fox News and an army of right-wing outlets, Trump used the underlying frustrations of the working class and channeled them into bigotry, but this was hardly the first time in history a demagogue has used this cynical ploy.

Trump convinced many blue-collar workers feeling ignored by the powers that be that he was their champion. Hillary Clinton did not convince them that she was. Her decades of public service ended up being a negative, not a positive: She was indubitably part of the establishment, the epitome of decades of policies that had left these blue-collar workers in the dust. (It’s notable that during the primaries, Bernie Sanders did far better than Clinton with blue-collar voters.)

A direct line connects the four-decade stagnation of wages with the bailout of Wall Street, the rise of the Tea Party (and, briefly, Occupy), and the successes of Sanders and Trump in 2016. By 2016, Americans understood that wealth and power had moved to the top. Big money had rigged our politics. This was the premise of Sanders’s 2016 campaign. It was also central to Trump’s appeal (“I’m so rich I can’t be bought off”), which he quickly reneged on once elected, delivering everything big money could have imagined.

The most powerful force in American politics today continues to be anti-establishment fury at a rigged system. Vicious partisanship, record-breaking economic inequality, and the resurgence of white supremacy are all byproducts of this rigged system. The biggest political battle today isn’t between left, right, or center: it’s between Trump’s authoritarian populism  and democratic (small “d”) populism.

Democrats cannot defeat authoritarian populism without an agenda of radical democratic reform, an anti-establishment movement that tackles runaway inequality and heals the racial wounds Trump has inflicted. Even though he’s a Trojan Horse for big corporations and the rich – giving them all the  tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks they’ve ever wanted – he still has large swaths of the working class convinced  he’s on their side.

Democrats must stand squarely on the side of democracy against oligarchy. We must form a unified coalition of people of all races, genders, sexualities, and classes, and band together to unrig the system. Trump is not the cause of our divided nation; he is the symptom of a rigged system that was already dividing us. It’s not enough to defeat him. We must reform the system that got us here in the first place to ensure that no future politician will ever again imitate Trump’s authoritarian demagoguery.

For now, let’s boycott the State of the Union and show the ratings-obsessed demagogue that the American people refuse to watch an impeached president continue to divide us.

[joannrochaus]

Contemporary Christian Music

                                                Introduction

The topic of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) has led to a lot of discussion and confusion in our circles.

What follows is an adapted version of a report which I wrote for the consistory with the deacons of the Free Reformed Church of Kelmscott, to give direction in how to judge CCM in particular and how to deal with music in general.

For the sake of readability, I keep this article short. Much more can be written. However, for those interested in reading more about this topic, here is some more relevant literature:

Michael Horton, A Better Way, Rediscovering the Drama of Christ-Centered Worship; Baker Bookhouse Company, Grand Rapids, 2002. (Especially chapter 10: Is Style Neutral?).

Terry L. Johnson e.a., The Worship of God, Reformed Concept of Biblical Worship; Christian Focus Publications 2005.

Calvin M. Johansson, Music & Ministry, A Biblical Counterpoint; Hendrickson Publishers, Peabody, Massachusetts, 1984. (Especially Chapter Five: The Gospel and Contemporary Culture).

Dan Lucarni, Why I left the Contemporary Christian Movement, Confessions of a former worship leader; Evangelical Press, Webster, NY, 2002.

What is Contemporary Christian Music?

What has led to a lot of confusion in the discussion about CCM in our churches, is the use of different definitions of CCM, or the use of no definition at all. We are talking about something, but we don’t understand each other because we don’t really know what we are talking about. For the one, CCM is something completely different than for the other. Therefore, the one will completely condemn every form of CCM and the other will believe that there are some good elements in CCM which can be used. Others distinguish between CCM with a backbeat and without a backbeat, of which the first is rejected categorically and of the second not necessarily all music is wrong.

About the back beat: we should not forget that the back beat in itself is something that is used in our Genevan tunes as well. Several psalm tunes make use of a back beat, psalm 47 for instance in every line. A back beat in music doesn’t make it wrong yet. What, according to some, makes CCM with a back beat wrong is the excessive use of it. However, who determines what is excessive and what not? This shows that also here, it is hard to come with a categorical rejections of music with a back beat.

Even if we read through the literature written about CCM we can see this confusion. It is not only in our circles that people don’t agree on CCM. If you check Wikipedia (a much used source for our information nowadays, however with questionable authority) at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_Christian_music, you will be led to believe that CCM started in the sixties and seventies as a response of Christians to the Rock ‘n Roll music of the fifties and is a result of the Jesus Movement revival.  CCM was originally called ‘Jesus Music’. Wikipedia reports that “About that time, many young people from the sixties’ counterculture professed to believe in Jesus. Convinced of the bareness of a lifestyle based on drugs, free sex, and radical politics, ‘hippies’ became ‘Jesus people'”.[6] However, there were people who felt that Jesus was another “trip”.[6] It was during the 1970s Jesus movement that Christian music started to become an industry within itself.[7] “Jesus Music” started by playing instruments and singing songs about love and peace, which then translated into love of God.

However, W. Robert Godfrey tells us something different. He sees it as a new stage in the evolution of revivalist hymnody. ‘Revivalist hymnody, that came to be more and more prevalent in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, was music that was more upbeat, more lively, and more enthusiastic. It also often had a declining level of theological content in the texts of the hymns’”

Later, Godfrey mentions, Pentecostalism became an important catalyzer in the development of revivalist music: “The Pentecostal movement in its drive for religious experience and religious energy and religious excitement did indeed think in new ways about music and sought to take the revivalist tradition of hymnody and make it even more exciting, even more engaging.”

Others will have other definitions and may see other origins of CCM. From discussions I had, I got the impression that for some CCM is more or less equivalent to all modern Christian music.

Generally, there are some characteristics of CCM. One of those is the repetitiveness of the words, combined with a low level of theological content. Just being repetitive doesn’t make a song yet part of CCM. If we look at the hymn ‘Great is Thy Faithfulness’ (which is in our Book of Praise), it is also very repetitive especially in the refrain, even though the content is Biblical. An even more compelling example of repetitiveness and still being Biblical is Psalm 136: ‘For His mercy endures forever’ is being repeated there 25 times! Repetition can be very powerful if it supports a strong message. However, repetition combined with a low level of theological content is very much emotionally based and needs the music to make the song interesting. If emotion trumps contents, then we get into dangerous territory.

That brings us to another characteristic of CCM: the kind of music which is often used, and which is intended to create a strong emotion, rather than the emotion being carried by a combination of word and music. We cannot and should not deny that Christian songs can create strong emotions in Christians. However, CCM is more focused on those emotions being created by the music than by the words, while the psalms, for instance, can create those emotions by the strength of their contents, supported by the music as we have it in the Genevan tunes.

Often, CCM can be recognized by the loudness of the music, although that cannot be mentioned as a general characteristic of all CCM. Also here, the loudness of music is not necessarily wrong. Psalm 150 speaks about the loud cymbals. However, when the loudness of the music is no longer supportive of the words, or if a microphone is needed to make the words be heard over the music, then there is an imbalance.

Some reject CCM because it is connected with the sex culture of the Rock music. However, it is disputable whether the CCM movement finds its origin in the musical culture of the fifties and sixties, and therefore this argument is very weak. If certain elements of CCM make use of Rock music, we can reject those for that reason. However, saying that CCM uses Rock music and therefore all CCM is to be rejected, is a bridge too far and this argument will not convince many. Using the argument that some Rock musicians call the back beat ‘sexy’ doesn’t fly either. In the language of the world, the word ‘sexy’ often means just ‘interesting’, ‘attractive’, or ‘exciting’.

This diversity of description of CCM makes it difficult to come with a judgment about the usefulness of CCM within our Reformed circles. Therefore, I don’t believe we will ever be able to come with a unified point of view about whether CCM should be allowed or not. It is much better to judge the songs individually and not condemn something for the only reason that it is considered to be CCM.

Christian Music

What is Christian music, will be determined by what the Bible teaches us about music.

The Bible speaks positively about music. Many of the Psalms encourage God’s people to praise God with song and instruments. Psalm 150 is a very well-known psalm: the last one of the Psalms, in which the Book of Psalms concludes with a glorious exhortation to all that has breath to praise the LORD with every possible instrument. The loudness of music is being mentioned there as something positive. This must be seen in combination with the words. Psalm 150 is part of the Book of Psalms, in which we are exhorted to praise God in our songs, accompanied by the instruments mentioned.

We should also take to heart the words written by the apostle Paul: Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.’ Here we are told that it should be the Word of Christ that dwells in us richly when we make music. The word ‘richly’ tells us something different than the repetitiveness of some ‘Christian’ music. It is not the music that should lead our emotions and our thoughts, but the Word of Christ. The music must play a supporting role when we make music for the LORD. If it does so, it can be very powerful. However, music can also be very powerful in its support for ideas that go against the Word of Christ.

The Bible gives us examples of both, in the Old Testament.

Exodus 15 tells us about the song of Moses, and then, v.20, Miriam the prophetess took the timbrel and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances. This music is clearly connected with the words of the song of Miriam and also the song of Moses.

In Exodus 32:6, 18 we read however, that the people of Israel danced and made music before the golden calf. ‘The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play’ (verse 6). The words translated with ‘rose up to play’ have a connotation of sexual immorality.

1 Samuel 30:16 tells us about David, pursuing the Amalekites after they raided Ziklag. And David found them there in the desert, eating and drinking and dancing. This dancing, undoubtedly accompanied and helped by the music, brought them in such a state of mind, that it was easy for David to catch them by surprise and destroy almost all of them.

From other parts of the Bible we learn that the feasting which was not to the honour of God was often accompanied by sexual immorality. From archeological literature we know that in the temple feasts for the heathen gods the temple prostitutes often played an important role as well. Heathen feasts and music were often connected with sexual immorality. Therefore, it is important that the Word of Christ dwells in us richly while we make music. If that is not the case, music can so easily lead us to immoral thoughts and deeds. Paul warns in Ephesians 5:3-4 and Romans 12:2 that that should not be the case with us.

Christian Music and Church Music

Should any good Christian music be used in the worship service as well? I have heard this argument being made in our circles, recently. This was used to argue that we should allow more music in the worship services. But it is also being used in a different direction: we should only use and listen to music which we use in the church as well.

Both ways of thinking have never been the norm in the Reformed churches.

In the Reformed tradition there has always been a clear distinction between these two. One of the Reformed principles about liturgy is, that the whole people of God is involved in the worship service and that therefore the singing of the congregation should not be replaced by choirs or orchestras. Calvin was even against the use of the organ in the worship service because it would have a negative influence on the singing of the congregation.

The tunes must be suitable for the singing of the congregation. Not every music can be sung by large groups of participants. Not every music is suitable to be sung by untrained participants. Music like ‘The Messiah’ or Bach’s cantatas and oratorios can certainly be considered good Christian music, but they are not suitable yet to be sung in the worship services by the congregation. Often choirs spend a lot of time on rehearsals before they can perform this music in a way that does justice to the music. This is not how it should be in the Sunday worship services. The songs the congregation sings must be of such a (musical) nature that it can easily be sung by the whole congregation. The Canadian Reformed Churches have adopted a number of guidelines, in their discussions with the United Reformed Churches about the development of a new hymn book. I quote a few of those guidelines, especially those pertaining to the music, as published in the ‘Book of Praise, Augment to Hymnary, 2007’:

8. The music of the song should suit the text.

10. The music of the Church should not be borrowed from music that suggests places and occasions other than the Church and the worship of God.

11. The melodies and harmonies of church music must be suitable for congregational singing, avoiding complicated rhythms, excessive syncopation, and a wide range of pitch.

It is for this reason that Calvin introduced the Genevan tunes for the worship service. The Genevan tunes have very much the character of what is called ‘folk music’. Folk music is music which develops over time, is such that it is easy for people to learn and is used as a vehicle to carry over stories of the past to a larger audience. It must by definition therefore, be music that is not complicated. This does not mean that the Genevan tunes come from folk music. However, the character of the Genevan tunes can be compared to folk music, because it has more or less the same goal: the great deeds of God as told to us in the Psalms have to be taught to and sung by the congregation.

This makes it clear that we should make a distinction between Church music and Christian music. Church Music is Christian music but not all Christian music is church music.

Christian music and worldly music

Throughout the course of history a lot of different music styles and genres have been developed, and also different areas and different cultures created each their own styles and genres. Even the genre ‘Rock Music’ has a huge variety of sub-genres. It is impossible to make a rule which styles and genres can be seen as suitable to be used by Christians and which not. Generally, we can say that certain styles of music used in times and areas where Christianity was/is influential in shaping society, are more likely to be suitable than others. We can say that music from certain composers (like J.S. Bach, G.F. Handel, F. Mendelssohn) can considered to be good Christian music. Generally, we can also say that loud music which damages our hearing cannot be pleasing to God. Rock music, for instance, is known to be loud: during a usual rock concert a level of 110 dB is quite normal and by times it goes up to 150 dB, while medical science warns that you are at risk of hearing loss when you are exposed to sounds at 85 dB or more. Rock music is on many lists as an example of a dangerous sound.

However, this does not mean that certain styles or genres are specifically ‘Christian’ and that there is no good Christian music in other genres, or that all music in the same style as the before mentioned Christian composers is good Christian music. Just like the Pharisees, we often have the inclination to make a set of rules which make it easy for us to determine what is good and what is wrong. This takes away or diminishes our own responsibility. There is no need to give an account, if we can say that we followed certain rules which we were taught as being good. However, this is not the way the Bible teaches us to live as Christians. God has given each of us a responsibility for all our actions and we will be held to account, according to the talents which we have received. The way we use our responsibility will show how much we love God and Christ.

As explained under 2 (Christian Music), the Bible teaches that music can be used in different ways. It can be used to support the words with which we praise and glorify God, and this can be pleasing to God. Music can also be used without words, to bring us into a certain mood. Also this music can be glorifying to God if it helps us to live a life of thankfulness and joy before the LORD.

However, music can also be used to bring us into a state of mind in which our ability to judge the words is being diminished, or to bring us into a kind of trance in which we have a decreased awareness of our own actions or in which we lose the ability to discern between good and evil, between what is pleasing to God and what offends Him.

Music is not neutral. Music does something with you. The way in which we make music or choose to listen to music, shows our love for God and for Christ. Music does not necessarily have to be explicitly ‘Christians’ music to be enjoyed by Christians. However, mindlessly listening to music or using it as background music without knowing what we are listening to, is something that we as Christians cannot do in this world in which we live. We know that our enemies never cease to attack us. Satan knows the power of music. Therefore, we should know it too and be on guard, so that we do not give him the opportunity to influence us through music.

The main word here, as well as in everything in this life, is: discernment.  While determining whether music is good or not, we must look at both words and music.

Conclusion

It is hard to come with a general judgment about Christian Contemporary Music. It isn’t helpful either. Every piece of music must be judged based on the Biblical criteria. Not everything that is considered to be CCM is wrong either. As long as we are not able to define CCM as going against Biblical principles, we cannot use the mere fact of ‘being CCM’ as a reason to reject a song or a musical piece.

We must realise that music is never neutral. Music is powerful and does something with us. Even if the words can be biblical, the music can still be unchristian. In listening to music, whether it is CCM or worldly music, we must always be aware of the danger of music being used by the Enemy to lead us to sin. We need discernment in our use of any form of music.

An important lesson which we can learn from this is, that we should get into contact with each other, especially with those with whom we disagree, so that through searching we can discover what the will of the LORD is. While the Word of Christ dwells in us richly, we will be able and must teach and admonish one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in our hearts to the Lord. And whatever we do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him.

Based on the above, I therefore come to some conclusions:

that it is not possible to either reject or approve CCM as a genre of Christian Music, but that we must judge every song as well as musical performance on its own merits, based on the Biblical principles.

that the singing of certain songs (either CCM or not) at events in our (or other) church buildings does not necessarily lead to introduction of new songs for the worship service. There are different criteria for the selection of songs for our Book of Praise than for what is suitable to be sung at all kinds of events in our circles.

that it is important for our church leaders to educate the congregation, in preaching, teaching, home visits and other ways about the dangers of music in general as well as of some music that presents itself as Christian music but is not Biblical.

that we must encourage each other to be discerning in our listening to and use of music, not only CCM but any kind of music. Let our words and our music be pleasing to God, so that we will teach and admonish one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in our hearts to the Lord.

from The Christian https://www.reformednews.info/2019/04/20/contemporary-christian-music/

[newstfionline]

Luther’s reformation

The Economist, Nov 4th 2017

ALMOLONGA, GUATEMALA--In the summer of 1974, a 26-year-old Mayan villager lay drunk in a town square in the Guatemalan highlands. Suddenly he heard a voice that was to change the course of his life and that of his home town, Almolonga. “I was lying there and I saw Jesus saying, ‘I love you and I want you to serve me’,” says the man, Mariano Riscajche. He dusted himself down, sobered up and soon started preaching, establishing a small Protestant congregation in a room not far from the town’s ancient Catholic church.

Half a millennium earlier, a 33-year-old German monk experienced something similar. At some point between 1513 and 1517, Martin Luther had a direct encounter with God and felt himself “to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise”. His moment of being born again was private. The day on which he is said to have nailed a list of 95 complaints about ecclesiastical corruption to the church door in Wittenberg, Saxony--widely thought to have been October 31st 1517--made the private public and, soon, political. A mixture of princely patronage, personal stubbornness and chance led what could have ended up as just another minor protest in a remote corner of Europe to become a global movement.

At the heart of this Protestant faith were, and are, three beliefs resting on the Latin word for “alone”: sola fide (that people are saved by faith in Jesus alone, not by anything they do); sola gratia (that this faith is given by grace alone, and cannot be earned); and sola scriptura (that it is based on the authority of the Bible alone, and not on tradition or the church). In a way that complemented the broader themes of the Renaissance, Luther wanted Christianity to go back to the “pristine Gospel”: the teachings of Jesus and the apostles. This return offered a new sort of freedom, one centred on the individual, which helped pave the way for modernity. “The separation of powers, toleration, freedom of conscience, they are all Protestant ideas,” says Jacques Berlinerblau, a sociologist at Georgetown University.

Protestantism continues to change lives today; indeed, over the recent decades the number of its adherents has grown substantially. Since the 1970s, about three-quarters of Almolonga’s 14,000 residents have converted; more than 40% of Guatemala’s population is now Protestant. Its story is a microcosm of a broader “Protestant awakening” across Latin America and the developing world. According to the Pew Research Centre Protestants currently make up slightly less than 40% of the world’s 2.3bn Christians; almost all the rest are Roman Catholics. The United States is home to some 150m Protestants, the largest number in any country.

In Luther’s native Germany roughly half the Christians follow his denomination. But today Europe accounts for only 13% of the world’s Protestants. The faith’s home is the developing world. Nigeria has more than twice as many Protestants as Germany. More than 80m Chinese have embraced the faith in the past 40 years.

There are many ways to be a Protestant, from the quietist to the ecstatic. The fastest-growing varieties tend to be the evangelical ones, which emphasise the need for spiritual rebirth and Biblical authority. Among developing-world evangelicals, Pentecostals are dominant; their version of the faith is charismatic, in that it emphasises the “gifts” of the Holy Spirit, held to be a universally accessible and sustaining aspect of God. These gifts include healing, prophecy and glossolalia. According to the World Christian Database at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, Pentecostals and other evangelicals and charismatics account for 35% of Europe’s Protestants, 74% of America’s and 88% of those in developing countries. They make up more than half of the developing world’s Christians, and 10% of all people on Earth.

Changed lives change places. Almolonga’s Pentecostal believers have brought new energy to their town. Where once the prison was full and drunks slumped in the streets, there is now a buzz of activity. A secondary school opened in 2003; it sends some of its graduates, all members of the indigenous K’iché people, to national universities. “We want one of our students to work at NASA,” says Mr Riscajche’s son, Oscar, who chairs the school board.

Scholars have been surprised by the developing world’s Protestant boom. K.M. Panikkar, an Indian journalist, spoke for many when he predicted in the 1950s that Christianity would struggle in a post-colonial world. What might survive, he suggested, in both Protestant and Catholic forms, would be a more modern, liberal form of the faith. The Pentecostal expansion proved him quite wrong.

To some extent, this growth of Pentecostalism among the global poor marks a loss of faith in political and secular creeds. As Mike Davies, an American writer and activist, put it in 2004, “Marx has yielded the historical stage to Mohammed and the Holy Ghost.” But it is worth noting that between 2000 and 2017 the 1.9% annual growth in the number of Muslims was mostly due to an expanding population, whereas a significant part of Pentecostalism’s expansion of 2.2% a year was due to conversion. Half of Latin America’s Protestants did not grow up in the faith.

Their emphasis on personal experience makes Pentecostalism and similar beliefs culturally malleable; their simplicity and ability to dispense with clergy gives them a nimbleness that suits people on the move. They tend to erode distinctions of faith based on ethnicity or birthplace. To Berger, that made this sort of Protestantism a modernising force. It is, he argued, “the only major religion which, at the core of its piety, insists on an act of personal decision.” Its mixture of distinctive individualism and strong, supportive communities, he wrote, makes it “a very powerful package indeed”.

It is a bootstrapping faith. Anyone pulling himself up in the world can join. Many of those who do are from the margins of society. Churches provide migrants in their congregations with employment, support and the possibility of advancement. Where the faith is not part of the establishment, as in Latin America or China, it carries the potential for disruption.

“In Guatemala the Pentecostal church is just about the only functioning organisation of civil society,” says Kevin O’Neill of the University of Toronto. Almost all the drug-rehabilitation centres in Guatemala City, of which there are more than 200, are run by Pentecostal volunteers. Throughout Latin America, there are hints of the faith’s socioeconomic impact. A recent study of Brazilian men by Joseph Potter of the University of Texas and others found that Protestant faith was associated with an increase in the earnings of male workers over a 30-year period, especially among less educated people of colour.

In Almolonga itself, in the first decade of this century, farmers on average earned twice as much as those in the next village, where Protestantism had not taken off. Sceptics attribute this to the more fertile soil or new methods of farming. But according to Berger, “Max Weber is alive and well and living in Guatemala.”

When searching for Mr Riscajche’s church in Almolonga, the Evangelical Church of Calvary, your confused correspondent thought he had arrived when he discovered the Mount Calvary Church. Not at all the same thing, it turned out. Almolonga, small though it is, has at least a dozen Pentecostal churches. But if the individual congregations for each are small, their cumulative effect is not.

Until the 1970s Guatemala was a staunchly Catholic country. When Protestant aid agencies rushed in after a massive earthquake in 1976, the faith gained a substantial foothold. After the country’s bloody civil war ended in 1996 it spread as if unshackled. With a low bar to entry and almost no hierarchy, new Pentecostal churches matched the entrepreneurial spirit of the times.

The message has resonated elsewhere. In China, a modernising population is looking for a moral framework to go with its new mobility. Yang Fenggang of Purdue University predicts that there could be at least 160m Protestants in China by 2025. He expects the country will soon be home to more Protestants than America.

As in early modern Europe, women in developing countries have often been especially affected by Protestantism. Having studied churches in Colombia, Elizabeth Brusco, author of “The Reformation of Machismo”, was surprised to find that evangelicalism was a women’s movement “like Western feminism”, explaining that “it serves to reform gender roles in a way that enhances female status.” Male Colombian converts had previously spent up to 40% of their pay in bars and brothels; that money was redirected to the family, raising the living standards of women and children. Temperance helped employment, too. Scholars also argue that the voice this has given women helps consolidate democracy; Mr Martin sees parallels with England’s 19th-century Methodists.

That does not mean the faith is egalitarian. Pentecostalism reforms traditional gender roles rather than abolishing them; it tends to be robustly patriarchal. But a sober patriarch committed to a moral code that, crucially, treats domestic violence as sinful can provide stability.

More stable, economically active households and well-knit communities have undoubtedly made places like Almolonga more agreeable for most who live there. But what effect do they have on a grander scale? Can they remake not just villages but whole countries and their economies?

Pentecostals have traditionally been suspicious of politics as too “worldly” and of development work as too long-term. But in Guatemala and elsewhere some are now mobilising for social change. Witness a rap battle in a community hall in one of the areas of Guatemala City known as “red zones”. Teenagers take it in turns to get up on stage and rap against each other, with judges deciding who goes through to the next round. The event has been organised by Angel, a local man who joined one of the city’s notorious gangs when he was 14. By the age of 22, he had shot “a lot of people”, he says. When he found himself about to be executed by a rival gang, he called out to God for help; he escaped death and was born again. For the past ten years, in a typically Pentecostal bottom-up initiative, he has been saving kids from gangs.

As yet, it is hard to see a broader impact from these individual transformations. Guatemala remains poor and desperate. Many people do not vote or pay tax; only a tiny fraction of murder investigations lead to convictions. The country lags behind the rest of Latin America on many development indicators. “Guatemala tests the limits of religion as an agent of change,” says Kevin O’Neill of Toronto University. “It’s not that the religion is ineffectual. It has changed a lot in society. It’s just that it has not changed things measurable by the metrics we use, such as security, democracy and economy.”

Perhaps the sort of change that can be measured will arrive in due course. Guatemala’s history has left it poor and oligarchic. “Five percent of the population controls 85% of the wealth,” says Mr O’Neill. More than three-quarters of the cocaine from South America heading for the United States now passes through it; many gang members have been deported from Los Angeles. Any society, never mind one recovering from a 36-year civil war, would struggle. “Guatemala is like a 400lb man who has lost 100lb in weight. He is getting better, but he is still in a bad state,” says Ms Garrard, who first visited in 1979. She ascribes much of the progress to the churches.

Unlike Catholics, Pentecostals have no unified theology of the state, nor any well-formulated programme for sociopolitical reform. To the extent that they are political at all, they merely think that their co-religionists should be elected and that their countries should be Christian.

In some places Protestantism may settle down, with Pentecostals perhaps shifting to more staid denominations--or, indeed, fading into secularism. Some Protestants have understood that when they become the dominant religion, their faith’s power--its here-I-stand refusal to accept orders from any source but God or conscience--tends to seep away.

The places where Protestantism is most alive and seems politically most salient--where its churches continue to argue about who is right and what the Bible means, issuing statements and counterstatements just as Luther did--are often those where it has retained its outsider status. The growth of evangelical faith in China, for example, is taking place in a context of disapproval from which it seems to draw strength. In 2015 Wang Yi, a leading pastor, issued his own 95 theses on “Reaffirming our Stance on the House Churches”--the congregations outside the control of the government. It reiterated the need for freedom of conscience and for house churches to be allowed their independence, while protesting against the distortion of scripture and attacking state-approved churches for collusion with the Communist Party authorities. Wherever overweening rulers clash with people demanding their right to religious freedom, Luther’s divisive, dynamic spirit will remain an inspiration for a long time to come.