• The right-wing Coughlin-Catholic website “Church Militant” has been sowing the wind since 2008. Now they’re finally reaping the whirlwind. (“FAFO.” — Hosea 8:7)
The site is shutting down thanks to the one-two punch of a $500,000 penalty for defaming a New Hampshire priest and the recent resignation of Church Militant’s founder/president Michael Voris for “breaching the Church Militant morality clause.”
That sounds like an oxymoron, since the Church Militant is a vile cesspool of immorality and you’d think that any “morality clause” such a group would have would be some kind of Bizarro World code forbidding almsgiving, mandating the kicking of puppies, and requiring the use of ethnic slurs. But the vehemently anti-gay group apparently had rules about things like sending shirtless work-out selfies to young male staffers and donors.
It turns out the celebrity ex-gay Voris isn’t actually an ex-gay. None of them are. We’ve known this since before Burton Quim’s “relapse” more than 25 years ago.
• This is just to say that SuperMoss birdhouses are just adorable.
I suppose I should say that they seem adorable to me, with the caveat that any human evaluation of a birdhouse is going to be, at best, second-hand. But from all accounts the prospective residents seem to like them too.
• The “International House of Prayer” Pentecostal/charismatic mega-church in Kansas City, Missouri, is a cesspool: “Prominent Worship Leaders Kevin Prosch and Misty Edwards Confessed a Years-Long Affair, Sources Say.” This baroque, sordid tale involves more than just an affair and, Lordy, there are tapes.
All of this is happening at the same time as as IHOP’s founder/head guru Mike Bickle has been accused of sexual abuse by multiple women.
If the name IHOP seems familiar as anything other than a rip-off of the pancake chain then it’s not because of anything good. You may remember it as the site of Bethany Deaton’s death amid the abusive sex-and-prayer group led by her “ex-gay” husband. Or you may remember the 2013 documentary God Loves Uganda, which showed IHOP’s role in promoting that country’s vile “kill the gays” efforts.
Yeesh, that place is awful.
• The report on the latest IHOP scandal is from “The Roys Report,” an online news site started by former Moody Radio host Julie Roys. The site does actual journalism and real reporting — checking sources, sticking to verifiable facts. But I’m still a bit leery of it because I still remember the first time I became aware of Roys, which was back in early 2018 when her first forays into muckraking investigative journalism involved her attempts to expose what she seemed to view as a dangerously liberal anti-racism espoused by some professors at Moody Bible Institute. See: “Moody people” and “Moody’s Critics Lament Liberal Shift Away From Biblical White Supremacy.”
That was some vividly ugly stuff all built on the presumption that readers would share her reflexive horror that a professor would affirm the sentiment that Black lives matter, quote from Jemar Tisby, and advocate respect for women missionaries. Since that initial splash, Roys has mostly avoided that style of Fox News-driven, whitelash culture war agenda and Mohler-style purging of alleged “theological liberals.” Roys has since reinvented herself and her site as a source for investigative reporting on sexual and financial scandals in white evangelicalism. And she and her team are pretty good at that.
But I still remember how that started back in 2018, so I remain a bit wary of that site.
• Since I wrote here recently about playing the Devil in Damn Yankees, I should point out that I also once played Jesus in a production of Godspell.
That was weird. My voice is, charitably, suited for a “character song” like Applegate’s “Good Old Days” in Damn Yankees. (“If you can’t sing the song, sing the scene,” Angela Lansbury said.) Jesus in Godspell is not a character role. It’s a role for singers — and that ain’t me.
But my ex-girlfriend was directing theater productions at a local all-girls Catholic high school and the sisters who ran the place ruled that the part of Our Lord And Savior could not be played by some girl. They insisted that my friend cast some adult male who: 1) Was available to rehearse with students during the day; 2) Wasn’t a creeper around high school girls; and 3) Could sing like the angels. I was two out of three, so I got the part.
To her credit, the nun who served as principal agreed to this even after a conversation in which I argued that her insistence on casting a male Jesus was bad theology tantamount to a denial of the incarnation. She countered that by my reasoning, the church would have to abandon its commitment to male-only priesthood and I was, like, “Well, yeah. Duh.”
Anyway, the girl who played Judas/John the Baptist was amazing and so it didn’t end up mattering much whether or not “Jesus” could make those falsetto notes in “Finale” sound pretty.
Having done that show, though, I can affirm the critique of it here by Ian M. Mills, “Crucifying the Musical Christ.”
“The Jesus of Godspell is decidedly apolitical,” Mills writes. Thus its version of the Jesus story can’t really explain why this guy had to be executed by the empire. But since that’s how the story has to end, Godspell offers an execution without Rome, and thus winds up reinforcing the theologically and morally indefensible idea that Jesus was killed by “the Jews.”
The antisemitic slur that “Jews are Christ-killers” has contributed to centuries of lethally violent bigotry. But it also ensures that Christians’ understanding of “Christ” is something that is never going to threaten or discomfort the empire, turning those Christians into servile suck-ups to The Powers That Be.
• Green’s Elaine MacKenzie came out in 1987. So me recntly calling it “one of the greatest albums of the ’90s” was … well, not wrong, exactly, since I’d say it qualifies there too, but it’d be more accurate to say it’s one of the greatest albums of the ’80s.
Or at least one of the greatest albums of the ’80s that most people have never heard of, and I’m still hoping to change the second part of that.
Anyway, the title for this post comes from Green’s “I’m Not at Home.”
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