I’m not fond of FRONTLINE’s use of ominous background music. The subject of this program is scary enough without enhancements.
Michael Flynn… declaring America is a Christian nation… saying he is waging war against Democrats… who are the enemy… because they are evil.
Flynn talks about being a no-compromise tough guy, but he crumbles when challenged on a “battlefield” not of his choosing. He pleaded the Fifth under questioning from Liz Cheney, and he resorted to walking out of an interview with Michelle Smith from the Associated Press.
As stated in reply to a comment from tastewar, I am giving a listen to Dark Was the Night: A Red Hot Compilation. The album was produced in 2009 to raise money to fight AIDS.
In 1991, Prue’s friend Cynthia O’Neal founded Friends in Deed* with Mike Nichols to provide direct support for AIDS patients. The story of Friends in Deed is told in Cynthia’s memoir, Talk Softly, dedicated to her sons Max and Fitz. Prue says that Max has since passed away.
This week the PBS Newshour had a segment on the alarming rise of Christian Nationalism. Florida governor Ron DeSantis preaching like a televangelist and saying “putting on that full armor of God” unsettles me. Do I believe he Believes? Sure, as much as I believe that Trump believes in anything but himself.
The “God is White and Guns are Good” movement really scares me. Here is another discussion, with an Evangelical Christian pastor’s views.
Campus Crusade for Christ, now called Cru, is an organization that was started by former candy salesman Bill Bright. My past involvement with CCC gave me an early view into what’s been going on politically with Evangelical Christians over the past 50 years.
Campus Crusade’s growth was built upon the old multi-level marketing model. “Bring a friend who will bring a friend.” There were two adults, unaffiliated with the school, who were in charge of the campus operation — a man for the boys and a woman for the girls. The more I met with them and, especially, their boss who coordinated activities across multiple campuses, the more I began to get a sense of the organization’s conservative views.
Before attending a retreat where we would meet students from another college, who belonged to InterVarsity, we were warned against the organization’s “liberal” views. After meeting some of the other kids, I wished InterVarsity would open a chapter at my school to compete with Campus Crusade.
The more I saw of Campus Crusade for Christ, the more I realized there was more Crusade than Christ in the organization. After several years I walked away and never returned. I was deeply in love with a girl who had also come to question Cru’s messaging. She got me into Campus Crusade, and she left around the same time that I did, but for a reason that was paradoxically both the same and the opposite. She felt the organization wasn’t sufficiently committed to the Word of God. As I was letting go of my faith, she was looking for a greater religious experience and joined a Charismatic Christian group. I attended a couple of meetings with her, but they were too much for me. Kinda like this, but with a white congregation. 😉
Anne van der Bijl has died at age 94. “Anne,” as in a Dutch variation of Andrew, was better known by his alias, Brother Andrew. I learned of his passing at the library in, of all things, the print edition of The Economist.
In my “born-again” period during college, I read Brother Andrew’s book God’s Smuggler. It’s his autobiographical account of taking Bibles into what were then the Communist countries of the Soviet Union.
There was also a comic book adaptation of God’s Smuggler, by Al Hartley. Somehow I missed seeing this Spire Comic at the time.
Hartley was a former Marvel artist, who had drawn Patsy Walker for Stan Lee.
The notice in The Economist missed an opportunity to point out that it was economics, not Brother Andrew’s efforts at planting copies of the Bible à la the Gideons, that contributed to the breakup the Soviet Union. The seeds of discontent grew from the public’s awareness of the worldly benefits of 1980’s secular consumerism — plentiful food, blue jeans, CD players, VCR’s, etc. China has since embraced the advantages of Capitalism, independent of Christianity or Democracy.
It is so good to listen to an intelligent conversation about Covid with Fauci, without all of the noise and nonsense about hydroxychloroquine and injecting disinfectant.
