Harvey Weinstein, Hugh Hefner, Donald Trump – the list of prominent men who abuse women could be added to from every walk of life: comedians, athletes, political figures, and of course prominent religious figures. Harvey’s brother describes him as an abusive bully who regularly insulted and hurt those around him. He said he is unrepentant for his actions and is incapable of remorse. The figure that came to mind with Bob Weinstein’s description of his brother was the administrator at the college where Faith and I worked. His open misogyny and abuse of power will continue, as with Harvey Weinstein, because grievance and complaint were squelched by the institution. While his forte was not private sexual assault but open cruelty and abuse, the wall of silence is the same. Continue reading “Is Christian Complementarianism Helping Fuel The Abuse Reflected In #Me Too?”
Tag: Donald Trump
The Heart of Darkness: The Appeal of Donald Trump
Organized acts of evil, such as those witnessed over the weekend in Charlottesville, demonstrate the unleashing of ethics turned on its head. Organized evil driven by an ideology endorsed (with a wink and a nod) by the Commander in Chief means evil serves in place of the good. This is not the lawless evil of a random act; rather it is “radical evil” in which a perverse moral law is officially endorsed. The drive toward a pure race, the perfect socialist revolution, or making America great again, may not overtly promote genocide, mass murder, and white supremacy, but the latter is implicit in the former. The walls must be built, the foreigners expelled, and the “inferior races” subdued in a world in which the ultimate good is a moral law constituted in the reigning ideology. The neo-Nazis and the white supremacists are at the service of an ethic that has now been voted into place and which indeed hearkens back to an earlier era. The American electorate has created the space, through the election of this administration, for these groups to do the dirty work of maintaining the very atmosphere which we breathe[1] – the implicit presumption of white supremacy which is at the foundation of the American idea. Continue reading “The Heart of Darkness: The Appeal of Donald Trump”
Donald Trump and the Hollow Truth of American Evangelicalism
Billy Graham relates, to his own shame, his low point in mixing politics and religion. After seeing President Truman for the first time, the press waiting outside the White House asked him to reenact what he had done with the President. Graham obligingly knelt on the lawn, as if in prayer, for a photo op. The tall preacher in his white suit and out sized Bible, kneeling at the behest of reporters, captures the willing eagerness of American evangelicals to gain entry into the centers of power. Graham’s biography reveals his long and close association with Richard Nixon and his near disillusionment at the revelations of Water Gate. Graham is shocked at the vulgarity of Nixon (revealed in the White House tapes) – someone he considered to be the best of Christians. Graham, in spite of his disappointment with Nixon, never quit the pursuit of power through association but modeled it throughout his lifetime. Continue reading “Donald Trump and the Hollow Truth of American Evangelicalism”