Religious Illiteracy

I've been reading Dear Abby's advice columns for at least sixty years, and I can't remember any as weirdly off as one she published last week, on March 24.

The question she answered came from a Christian woman who'd raised her children to be Christians, and they in turn had raised their children to be Christians.  One of her grandchildren, however, had joined a very strict church and cut off his family.  "He and his wife have decided that no one outside of his church can see his child."  The grandmother is heartbroken: will she ever see her great-grandchild?  What advice could Abby give?  Signed, PRINCIPLED IN FLORIDA.  Abby replied:

I always thought Christianity was a welcoming religion. This is the first time I have heard of a denomination that decides other Christians are not Christian enough. The church your grandson has joined sounds more like a cult than a religion. Before making any decisions about how, what or whether to gift anything to the new baby, ask your grandson whether accepting a gift from an "outsider" is even allowed. 

I could hardly believe my eyes as I read it. Abby has never "heard of a denomination that decides other Christians are not Christian enough"?  That decision is the historical Christian norm. It begins in the New Testament with the apostle Paul denouncing competing Christian teachers for proclaiming what he considers a false gospel: "As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone preaches any other gospel to you than what you have received, let him be accursed" (Galatians 1:9, NKJV).  In the gospels Jesus repeatedly warned against "false" teachers, threatening them and their followers with condemnation.  And -- my favorite - in the second letter of John, the Elder warns "the Elect Lady": "If anyone comes to you but does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your home or even greet him. / Whoever greets such a person shares in his evil deeds" (2 John vv. 10-11). In the third letter of John, the Elder complains to Gaius that

I wrote to the church, but Diotrephes, who loves to have the preeminence among them, does not receive us. Therefore, if I come, I will call to mind his deeds which he does, prating against us with malicious words. And not content with that, he himself does not receive the brethren, and forbids those who wish to, putting them out of the church [vv. 9-10, NKJV]. 

Since those glorious days, Christians have fought not only with outsiders but with each other, often over tiny matters of doctrine that were nonetheless held to be vital for salvation.  After a millennium and centuries of religious wars, some Christians decided that toleration was the better part of valor; as the composer Hector Berlioz said of the Roman Catholic Church in the 1800s, "Since she has ceased to inculcate the burning of heretics, her creeds are charming."

As for "cult," all religions are cults, dedicated to the care and feeding of their gods. Of course Abby was using the word in the twentieth-century sense of "any sect, usually fairly new, whose teachings I disapprove of."  But by every criterion I've ever seen, New Testament Christianity was a cult in this sense: a new, militant, embattled sect that maintained its boundaries by building walls to keep outsiders out and new converts in, teaching them to regard their former religion as demonic and their families as enemies. As Jesus put it in Luke 14:26, "If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple" (NKJV). It's a recurring theme in the gospels. 

Christian intolerance is so notorious that it's hard to believe that Abby was serious.  Maybe she was being snarky or sarcastic; I don't know.  But serious or not, her reply was unhelpful.

But He's So Articulate!

 

I don't get excited over politicians as orators; they're usually overrated anyway. (Remember when Ronald Reagan was promoted as "the Great Communicator"?) I usually prefer to read transcripts so I can concentrate on the content instead of the packaging. It's how I got through the Obama years. When I did listen to him, I was put off by his scolding tone, his fake folksiness, etc.; his dishonesty was just the icing on the cake. I never agreed that he was a good speaker. (Yeah, Dubya was worse - that's supposed to be a recommendation?) 

But I was impressed by this short video from Zohran Mamdani. I watched it all the way through without wanting to bang my head on the table. For one thing, he doesn't talk down, doesn't hide that he's bright, but without being professorial. The content is good too, which is why it infuriated so many of the usual suspects. Which doesn't mean I'm uncritical of him; I reserve the right to be as harsh about him as I am about Obama, Trump, Dubya, Clinton, Harris, and the rest. This clip is just refreshing, that's all. 

You don't have to agree with me, either: whether a pol is a good speaker is a subjective aesthetic judgment, which takes me back to my original point: that it's unimportant compared to the pol's words and actions, which loyalists prefer to downplay if not ignore. In Mamdani's case, it's often difficult to sort out reality from the flood of hydrophobic propaganda directed against him, but as far as I can tell, he's doing pretty well. Compared to his centrist-Dem attackers, he's wonderful.