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I would laugh, but...
It's really just too sad.
Gingrich pretty much sums up why I believe most social conservatives--at least, the ones I hear and the ones I'm unfortunate enough to deal with-- are people who embrace not history, but a dangerously misguided nostalgia for "traditional religion." Historic Christianity had a great time burning Jews and heretics, traveling to the Holy Land to kill Muslims, and once the Reformation came around, killing other Christians. The vast majority of Christianity's history has been concerned with its overwhelming fear not of secularists (or gays, which was not even a term recognized until the twentieth century), but of other religions, its own inability to develop and sustain a cohesive and contiguous theology, and its power struggles with political institutions it wanted to control.
I hate it when people treat history like this. I really, sincerely hate it, and I hate it almost as much as the fact that people like Gingrich consistently get away it.
A couple of quotations to sum up my thoughts, because I'm too tired to do it properly:
The misuse of language induces evil in the soul. Socrates
To be innocent of the variety of ways in which humans have mythologized or proscribed what they do with their genitals is to be unfit for being a moralist, much less a scholar of morals. Mark Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy (which book I very highly recommend)
*hits Gingrich over the head with this*
(It's also worth noting Mark Jordan is a gay man of faith (Catholic) and taught at the University of Notre Dame. The conclusion to his book, from which this excerpt is taken, is a plea to other Christians to reconsider tradition and history, and the relationships they hold.)
I think that it [the evil secular gay fascists] is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion. And I think if you believe in historic Christianity, you have to confront the fact.
Gingrich pretty much sums up why I believe most social conservatives--at least, the ones I hear and the ones I'm unfortunate enough to deal with-- are people who embrace not history, but a dangerously misguided nostalgia for "traditional religion." Historic Christianity had a great time burning Jews and heretics, traveling to the Holy Land to kill Muslims, and once the Reformation came around, killing other Christians. The vast majority of Christianity's history has been concerned with its overwhelming fear not of secularists (or gays, which was not even a term recognized until the twentieth century), but of other religions, its own inability to develop and sustain a cohesive and contiguous theology, and its power struggles with political institutions it wanted to control.
I hate it when people treat history like this. I really, sincerely hate it, and I hate it almost as much as the fact that people like Gingrich consistently get away it.
A couple of quotations to sum up my thoughts, because I'm too tired to do it properly:
The misuse of language induces evil in the soul. Socrates
To be innocent of the variety of ways in which humans have mythologized or proscribed what they do with their genitals is to be unfit for being a moralist, much less a scholar of morals. Mark Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy (which book I very highly recommend)
Many Christians have come to believe that the official teachings on same-sex pleasure are inadequate both to their own experience and to the Gospel... This is not the first time that the body of believers has reached an impasse in moral reflection. Something very similar happened with the question of chattel slavery just over a century ago--as it happened with the doctrine of justifiable war in the 1960s. In every case the question has been the same: How does one honor the tradition while being faithful to the Gospel and to the impulses of God in the present? In ever case, the beginning of an answer was the same. Believers had to free themselves from fundamental misunderstandings about the character of Christian moral tradition. Part of freedom is to remember how fragile our relation to that tradition is, so far as it is a relation dependent on the reading of inherited texts. (Jordan, Invention 170)
*hits Gingrich over the head with this*
(It's also worth noting Mark Jordan is a gay man of faith (Catholic) and taught at the University of Notre Dame. The conclusion to his book, from which this excerpt is taken, is a plea to other Christians to reconsider tradition and history, and the relationships they hold.)
no subject
They've forgotten the whole message - "This is the great and first commandment; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind. And the second is like it - you shall love your neighbor as yourself; on these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets."
But I am a considered a very bad Christian.
no subject
The trouble is with the Conservative Christians is the horrible fact they are encouraged to be ignorant of the Bible and Biblical scholorly commentary.
Yes. Yes. YES. And yes again, I say.
Last year it fell to me to teach a few days of Uncle Tom's Cabin to a collection of sophomores, and I had a very hard time containing my overwhelming antipathy for the sort of ignorance that Stowe and mid-century evangelicals promoted. I had to tell them I didn't like the book much (which understated my position considerably), and then try to explain the theology without going off into virulent tangents.
It's just... Yeah, it may be holy, but it's socially irresponsible. That's why, in the middle ages when people felt they really needed to adhere closely to the tenets of their faith, they joined monasteries.