Tag: Christianity

I’ve been trying to connect with Christians in my local area.  It’s always a tiresome process, when you move to a new town, and a lot of people do not manage to make the transfer.

Traditionally you made the rounds of the local churches, in a series of Sunday services; the good, the bad, the mad and the embarrassing.  If you were lucky, you found someone who you could relate to, and settled in that church.  If you weren’t — and a lot of people weren’t — you got more and more embarrassed, and gave up after church number four-to-eight (depending on your persistence level).

But the web has made quite a difference, I find.  People are setting up sites to network people.  In my own town, for instance, a search on “<town name> Christians” brings up some dubious sites and then a site which contains a calendar of events, lists of projects, and so forth.  It’s not perfect, and there are dreck “events” in there, but it gives you a bit more than you might otherwise get.  The newcomer can at least go along to some of the evidently larger events and see a cross-section of people from the area.

Facebook is also coming into its own.  You get things in Derby like the Derby Community Church on FB here, with a link to its own website; and the Derby City Mission here.  In some ways these are more useful than the standalone websites, since they get updates and can be watched for news.

It’s really hard for Christians who move town to integrate into the new community, whether they are single or married.  There seems to be practically no horizontal communication.  I wonder how many of those people who leave Christian Unions when they leave college every summer, most of whom go to new towns, actually make it through and get hooked up to the Christian community in their new town.  Few, I would guess.

Surely something could be done?

Some years ago a nasty episode of Christian-bashing took place at Exeter university, with the connivance and support of the university authorities.  I read this evening (via Dyspepsia Generation) of similar harassment in US universities.  The university headlining the article is Vanderbilt.

Is Vanderbilt University flirting with the suppression of religion? Yes, according to Carol Swain, a professor at Vanderbilt’s Law School.

Specifically, Swain is referring to four Christian student groups being placed on “provisional status” after a university review found them to be in non-compliance with the school’s nondiscrimination policy.

Vanderbilt says the student organizations cannot require that leaders share the group’s beliefs, goals and values. …

Among the groups threatened with shut down is the Christian Legal Society. It ran afoul with this language from its constitution. “Each officer is expected to lead Bible studies, prayer and worship at chapter meetings.”

What fiends these Christians are.  The article continues:

CLS’s Gunter says his group’s membership is open to anyone, but leaders have a different requirement. “CLS is a Christian organization”, he told me. “That means to preserve our integrity, we need Christian leaders.”

Carol Swain is CLS’s faculty advisor. She insists the university has gone way beyond political correctness with its actions and demands. “It seems reasonable”, she told me, “to require that leaders share the beliefs of the organizations that they seek to lead.” She sees this as part of a larger problem at liberal-leaning universities across the nation. She says, “I see it as part of a larger attack on religious freedom that’s taking place across the country – particularly when it comes to conservative groups.”

This is familiar territory for the Christian Legal Society. Last year the Supreme Court ruled against a lawsuit it filed against Hastings Law School in California. CLS had argued that Hastings’ “all-comers” policy regarding student groups infringed on its right to religious freedom.  …

The Vanderbilt group – and the national CLS organization are worried about “infiltration”, arguing that a person hostile to the group could rise to a leadership position, then attempt to tear it apart through conflict. CLS did have a problem at Washburn University Law School when a student whose religious beliefs were contrary to the group was allowed to lead a Bible study. When CLS stopped him he complained. Washburn put CLS on “provisional status”, but reinstated the group when CLS sued.

I remember, when I was a student, that leftist student activists campaigned for “general meeting sovereignity”.  They wanted the student union meetings to have the power to do everything.  What this meant, however, was something different.

Most students never go to student union meetings, having beer to drink and other things to do.  The few that do quickly get bored and leave.  So what this innocent-sounding demand really meant was the abolition of student democracy and the transference of all power to the activists.  Quel surprise, perhaps.

A similar demand was made at Exeter.  (Rather to my surprise, I can find no blog post here about that event.  An article at Catholic Action is here).  The 50-year old Christian Union allowed any student to attend, but would not allow unbelievers to be officers.  One unbelieving student demanded this, and then organised a campaign to get the CU banned.  Various evil events then occurred.

The point of the demand is simple.  All these groups allow any student to come along, and often to be members.  But once a non-believer can be the leader, all an ill-disposed person has to do, is arrange for a couple of hundred non-Christians to turn up, “as a joke”, and vote him in.  At which point he can do with the CU — and its funds — as he pleases.  Effectively the CU is disbanded.

But if the CU refuses to allow this unreasonable demand, the university can be brought in to disband the CU on grounds of “diversity”.  Whatever they do, the Christians cannot win.  In both cases, it is impossible for the Christians to operate as a recognised student society.

In the Exeter case, the UCCF — the CU parent body — outmaneouvered the haters at Exeter by doing a deal with the National Union of Students, while friends in the media brought the story to national prominence.  There have been some nasty cases of attacks on Catholic student bodies also.

But it is telling that the same tactic is being used in the US.

We need to face up to the reality, that all of this harassment indicates a shift in attitudes towards Christianity.  It indicates that the amused contempt of the last few decades is giving way to real hatred.  The establishment has adopted a path of institutional vice, as it did in the Restoration period.  Those determined to follow vice do not care to be reminded that what they are doing is wrong, and are not scrupulous about how they deal with anything they dislike.  The government of Charles II created almost all the legislation for religious discrimination that stained this country for the next two centuries, and forced half the country into “non-conformity”, i.e. exclusion from state service or participation in the nation.  I remember seeing a gloating article in The Guardian, welcoming the possibility of recreating non-conformity.  I think we may expect to see more such harassment of Christians in the next few years, both here and in the US.

These are sad times.  Let us remember, however, that “they hated Me, and they will hate you.”

A curious and rather sad article by Mark Tooley, Celebrating the Resurrection, at the American Spectator, (via Curious Presbyterian):

The Jesus Seminar, founded in 1985 to adjudicate over which Scriptures were historically accurate, and which always excluded any talk about miracles, once gained widespread attention for its routine objections to traditional Christian belief.  “Christ’s Body Actually Eaten by Wild Dogs!” was a typical headline from a Jesus Seminar gathering, where liberal scholars would vote with color marbles over which biblical verses were valid.

Eventually these self-selected academics ran out of incendiary claims, and the media mostly stopped heeding their pronouncements after founder Robert Funk died in 2005, if not well before.  Co-founder and former Roman Catholic priest John Dominic Crossan, now about 76 years old, still soldiers on.  He and other kindred academics routinely speak around the nation, gathering usually small audiences of gray-headed, mostly retired clergy.

. . . Another aging survivor of the Jesus Seminar is nearly 80 year old retired Episcopal Church Bishop John Shelby Spong, though his fame preceded his induction.  In the 1980s and 1990s, while Bishop of Newark, Spong penned books speculating that the Virgin Mary was a prostitute impregnated by a Roman soldier, and that St. Paul was a self-hating homosexual, among other saucy assertions that once gained headlines but now excite yawns.  He earned audiences with Phil Donahue and other breathless talk show hosts, most of whom are now themselves faded from view.

Spong always claimed that “fundamentalist,” i.e. orthodox Christianity, was dying, and he was its savior.  That his New Jersey diocese lost 40 percent of its members while he was providing enlightened leadership as bishop never seemed to provoke self-reflection.  One bemused observer who recently went to hear him speak at a New Jersey college campus remarked he was able to locate the event by following the trail of “old people.”

Liberal revisionism was always mainly the project of upper middle class, white Mainline Protestants, with advanced degrees and a certain disdain for the ostensibly superstitious masses who heed a more literal version of Christianity.  The evangelical mega-churches of today’s America, not to mention the surging faith of Global South Christianity, especially in Africa, usually befuddle and irritate this audience, most of whom are now long retired.

. . . These “intellectual tyrants” were long ascendant in liberal Protestant academia for over a century.  Despite their decades of turgid exertions, the fully resurrected Jesus remains as captivating as ever.  Happy Easter!

In retrospect, it was all just an exercise in self-promotion, wasn’t it?  They were a small group of people, who found themselves in jobs where their personal beliefs were at odds with what they ought to believe.  They resented those who did believe it.  Feeling inferior, they decided to make themselves superior.  They decided to make money and have fun, in baiting those they resented.  They were trolls, in truth.  Now they’re all old, and tired, and washed-up.  And now what?  The TV news has moved on.  The excitment has gone.  They sit alone at home, wondering what happened.

To say “Darkness, be thou my Light”, for whatever reason, even frivolously, becomes a choice.  It involves taking a road which proves psychologically irreversible.

Is it really possible for a man to throw away a life of mocking something; and instead embrace it, submit to it?  I do not think so.  And so a choice, made perhaps lightly, determines a life, and, of course, a death.  The wrong choice can empty that life of value.

They sold themselves for the bright lights and the flattery.  The flatterers despised them, of course, even as they interviewed them; but Crossan and co never realised that.  As with all such bargains, they found that the sale was binding, but the money they received for their souls just evaporated from their hands.  The damned get nothing for their self-betrayal.

For all of them knew what they were doing was wrong.  How could they not?  Their consciences told them that it violated, in the simplest terms, the moral golden rule.

They chose not to listen.  They told themselves and others that it was not so.  But of course it was, and such choices have consequences.

May God have mercy on them.