Pulitzers Marilynne Robinson does grand job explaining Biblical Truths from the Get Go

You're gonna have to do some background reading for this blog to make much sense. Begin with Sunday School for the last twenty years at a minimum then James Wood Review in the New Yorker. He does a spectacular job I think the March 14 print issue. And it's online.

     Ive met both of them, Wood at a Sewanee writers conference and Marilynne Robinson, professing Christian, Pulitzer prize winner and author of the new book on Genesis.

     Here are two salient quotes I will dance around later, one on page 126 and the other page 132. In addition to something to think about the rest of the year and taunt other thinkers, I think in my 8th decade I finally got the characters right in the story of Laman , Leah and Rachel, Jacob the father and his sons Benjamin and Joseph after he fathered many by Leah to get a shot at Rachel.

     Rachel dies giving birth to Benjamin. The writer Ron Rash does  Biblical justice to his fictional Rachel in his novel Serena. She loses a father in a knife fight but lives through the birth of her son and does not have a second child. 

   On page 126 Robinson says: " Modern anthropology has tended to build upward or downward and outward from reductionists defintions, humankind as naked ape, as phenotype of the selfish gene. Biblical anthropology begins with an exalted conception of humanity, then ponders our errors and deficiencies and our capacities for grace and truth, within the world of meaningful freedom created for them by an omnipotent God. This seems paradoxical, but sustaining paradox is the genius of the text."

    And page 138 : "Jacob is sometimes seen as a picaresque figure, the kind of prankster found in folktales....But writers understand and use the methods of storytellers. These ancient writers would surely have listened to the lore of their culture with intense interest, and reverence as well, and have found it authenticated by signs of ancient origins. Our Popular culture is the product of capital and technology and marketing. It is a best guess at interests and tastes that it also instills and exploits. It has only accidental points of contact with collective identity or memory. At the same time, a modern prejudice to associate theologically important narrative with folktale is often to diminish its capacity for meaning."

   Genesis moves quickly from Creation to the intimate Stories of Jacob and Laman, Rachel and Leah. the fact that we have love and grief in the deepest reaches of our soul "only make them more astonishing, over against the roaring cosmos.That they exist at all can only be proof of a tender solicitude".

Criswell Redux, His trombone and John Phillip Sousa

 This is a followup on Criswell and the Hagiography of his suck up, patronizing disciple O S Hawkins.  Come back to this as I am posting the rough draft but plan to refine and do some add ons and perspective

    I have read the bio since my first take. Got the book on Friday and pretty much devoured it over the weekend. History will record Criswell as a demagogue bastard Baptist in the big scheme of things, but Hawkins hagiography embellishes the humanity of the rascal and some of those tales are charming.

    Its like one of my Dad's Stories of My Grandmother's oldest brother Bill Helton born in the 1890s outside Pigeon Forge Tennessee where he lived all his life, the oldest of nine brother and another sister. He Told my Dad that in the thirties a visiting preacher came through the hollers for a ten day revival and stayed with a family. The wife was devout but the husband a well known moonshiner. The preacher spent one day making shine with the husband. The preacher left the steal early for the services and the shiner on the way home stopped by the open window church during mid service. He later told Uncle Bill " knowing what that rascal had been up to all day making shine with me, he was preaching in such a way, it brought tears to my eyes."

      Such was the gift of W A Criswell. I was charmed by the story last night of his mother taking him from Tex Line Texas over to Amarillo in the Panhandle because the accreditation of the public school in  TEXLINE was in Question where as Amarillo High had strong credibility.

      Criswell as incoming Junior soon was first chair in the trombone section of the High School and city wide civic band. John Phillips Sousa himself came to town circa 1915 and directed the band in Stars and Stripes forever which evoked a five minute standing ovation.

    It was just a few months before that George W. Truett, likely the greatest Baptist of the first half of the 20th Century visited the FBC of Amarillo one Sunday morning and shook hands with a sixteen year old Criswell and said God Bless You.

    I was baptized in Truett Memorial BC in Hayesville NC, birthplace of Truett where he lived his first 20 years before the family went to Texas So I have skin, at least water, in the game.

    In Baptist circles that was as big as the famous handshake of JFK and Bill Clinton when Clinton was 17

     More later 

W A Criswell and the "Nigger Nigger Nigger" strategy

I got the book today April 12. Will write a Criswell Redux soon. Hawkins does address Criswell 1956 race baiting speech and says it was one of WA top three regrets. Talks about Criswell sermon the Sunday after the JKF assassination, Nov 24 1963 where he dismissed it as result of atheistic communism. Cursory reading does not talk about Criswell and Bill Moyers. It does turn up some interesting stories about predecessor George W. Truett where the Truett legacy is diminished somewhat on the race issue.

O S Hawkins has written a biography of the mid 20th Century demagogue and influential Southern Baptist Preacher WA Criswell. An in house effort there is an exhaustive  review at Baptist News Global

    Criswell gave a scorching address at the 1956 statewide Baptist preacher's conference in Columbia SC where he said among other things "I wouldnt let my daughter within two city blocks of a big Black Buck"; and "You wouldnt call a chigger a chiggerow, now would ya." 

    He got hoots and howls on both counts and the next day at the invitation of Strom Thurmond addressed a joint session of the SC Legislature.

     My Dad's seminary proff at SEBTS at Wake Forest NC followed and said "WA Criswell doesnt speak for me."

    This episode has been thoroughly written up by Curtis Freeman of the house of Baptist studies at Duke University. You can google it up for the title Dead from the Neck Up.

     I have not read Hawkins book yet, just the review. But I will be surprised if I find reference to Criswell the race baiter in the hagiography, nor any imagination from an honest look at Wuthnow's Rough Country on how Texas Southern Baptists shaped the modern day Republican Party.

     I am convinced Robert Jones has Criswell's number in his piece of a couple years ago Shutting Down CRT Debate, Religion News. There he quotes the Lee Atwater memo where he famously said you can't say nigger nigger nigger anymore so the GOP has to come up with new issues and strategies to get in the head of the white working class vote. Abortion and Guns and Critical Race Theory put the sheen on the politics Criswell mastered at FBC Dallas and in the Southern Baptist Convention.

     There is a lesser version a twin sister of FBC Dallas and the Criswell strategy at FBC Spartanburg SC. There the Heritage foundation shows every sign of replacing the John Birch Society of Criswell's FBC Dallas and Trey Gowdy is the poster child. It is not insignificant that Billy Graham was a member of two Baptist churches: Dallas and FBC Spartanburg.

     Likely also missing from Hawkins account is reference to the book Dallas 1963 where the strong case is made Dallas Loaded the Gun, but Oswald pulled the trigger. The Sunday before the assassination Criswell preached a demagogic anti Catholic sermon. And criswell could be counted on in the shadows in all kinds of slime ball politics now championed by super Trumper Bobby Jeffress now in the Dallas pulpit.

    In the early nineties a British tv station came over to do a documentary on FBC Dallas, Criswell and Paige Patterson. I hope the bio explores that significant moment.

     What I would like to see is a biography that explores his relationship with Jesse Helms. Also widen to other leading SBC Churches beside Spartanburg to include Bellevue in Memphis and FBC Jacksonville Florida, home of the Eagle Forum Woman of the year for 2018 Tim Tebow's Momma Pam. Jerry Vines a pastor there came from West Rome Ga also infested with the Birch Society who congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is thick in the Criswell legacy.

     Hawkins makes a big do of Criswell torn between J Frank Norris and WA Criswell. Jill Lepore who's stellar recent history of America, These Truths, mentions Norris and how his fundamentalism shaped a voting block, and gives even greater attention to the sisters in the Cause, Phyliss Schlafly's Eagle Forum also entangled in Baptist Politics and the plowing of the SBC to make it fertile for MAGA land.

    So all the colorful stories aside including his challenge to young preachers to get em a good conservative woman cause the sex will be so good when they die they will have to haul em off in a wheelbarrow; the famous Wheelbarrow sermon.

     I was in the audience in San Antonio when he called preachers who didnt toe his literal interpretation of the KJV, He called em skunks. All them preachers about ten thousand of em who didnt know their ass from a Hole in the ground, they loved it.

      So Criswell could bring you tears while he dangled your soul over the bottom pits of Hell, but his preparation for Reagan and a more disastrous Donald Trump cannot be forgive. The Old Testament would define him as a Bastard for the best of the Baptist tradition, and Judge Frank Johnson and Abraham Lincoln would see him the same For America and any version of a more perfect Union.

MAGA Underbelly, guest blog

David Strain teaches college in Arkansas. He goes by the Family Dollar Fuhrer. Some of this is a little strong but written with affection and frustration with many dear to us all who got caught up in MAGA. But God Damn the venal folks who are playing them in Jesus name, like Fox at Five, Yellowhammer News in Bama, Jeffress at FBC Dallas and the staff at FBC Spartanburg who ought to know better. And their theologian in residence at NGU Tony Beam  . And the Heritage Foundation  

AT THE PIFFLE HOUR . . . .

For what it’s worth, it’s not true that I exult in the ongoing humiliation of white evangelicals at the slimy paws of one Donald J. Trump.  Most white evangelicals I know are good people—and good Christians.  For forty-five years, though, they’ve been the frog in the stove pot.  As the despicable reprobates who’ve led them have slowly raised the temperature on the burner, they’ve just kept adjusting, sensing that something is wrong but not being able to identify just what.  And since virtually all of their friends are in the same pot, they don’t have a very easy means of figuring out their dilemma.  They look on with consternation as America becomes a post-Christian nation.  And it causes them deep pain to see that, for the most part, their children—and especially their grandchildren—want nothing to do with their faith (and often aren’t even polite about it).  And they can’t begin to fathom that they’re the reason.

So why am I so deliriously happy that one Donald J. Trump celebrated Holy Week by hawking his very own GodBlesstheKlan Bible?  Because the political and religious leaders who have hitched their star to Christian nationalism are some of the vilest scum mothers in the history of the world.  Most have proved time and again they’d peddle their asses at the mall—and give a group discount.  Still, even though they’re the Anti-Christ’s evil little elves, most still possess a vestigial sense of decency—even if the impulse is faint in most.  They feel the humiliation.  Yet every time their Family Dollar Fuhrer humiliates them, I see the hand of God.  She’s doing Her very best to make them see how utterly reprehensible they’ve become, how absolutely they pollute the church, how unforgivably they impede the Beloved Community.  Sure, I enjoy watching them writhe—I’ll admit it.  (Those bastards are lower than the Yankees—and I mean by a lot!)  But I’d also like to see them saved from the wrath to come.  (There but for the grace . . . .)  Plus, I’d like to see what would happen if they started feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, taking in the stranger, loving the unloveable—instead of just hating and nursing perceived grievances.  Many are quite talented.  Until now, they’ve whored their talents for dog shit.  This poor, sad old world would be so much better if they started using them as directed (see Mount, Sermon on the).