• “America’s Christian conservatives ponder a ‘Babylonian exile,’” reports David Gibson for Religion News Service. Several prominent Christian conservatives quickly agreed that they must learn to live as a righteous remnant. Then, even more quickly, they began fighting over which of their various strains of conservative Christianity constituted the real, true righteous remnant.
• “I can see people, but they look like trees, walking.”
• Hercules is losing his grip: Kevin Sorbo is reinventing his career as the go-to guy for religious-right cinema, following his performance in God’s Not Dead with a slew of similar projects — his IMDB page lists 23 projects for this year, with titles like Forgiven, Confessions of a Prodigal Son, The Black Rider: Revelation Road and Poison Sky (which isn’t a religious-right movie, per se, but it’s based on right-wing chemtrails conspiracy theories, so the target audience has a lot of overlap).
This isn’t like Nic Cage doing Left Behind, or poor Michael York doing those Omega Code movies. Sorbo is a true believer — a right-wing Christianist. Consider, for example, Kevin Sorbo’s recent message to Jewish people: “News flash: You did kill Jesus.” Or his recent response to the demonstrations in Ferguson, which he said showed “the losers these animals are.”
So, then, biblically illiterate, anti-Semitic, and white supremacist — this guy’s gonna be an evangelical superstar.
• It’s been over a week now since Charisma gave a big thumbs up to genocide by publishing Gary Cass’ kill-all-the-Mooslims article on charismanews.com. The article vanished without comment after two days and Charisma and publisher Steve Strang have refused to offer any comment, explanation or apology. We’re never going to get an explanation, or even an acknowledgement that anything happened at all. That’s not their style.
• “Course List for Rupert Giles, Master of Library Sciences Candidate, Michaelmas Term 1982.”
• “One of the [Sun Belt] presidents made the comment, he said, ‘Yeah, Jerry, all you have to do is show people Liberty’s not Oral Roberts; it’s Baylor.’ We’ve moved toward that goal much faster than anybody thought.” That’s Jerry Falwell Jr. describing Liberty University’s big push for respectability through athletic success.
He seems to have misunderstood — thinking that the main difference between Oral Roberts and Baylor is that Baylor has a better football team.
• On the BBC, Vicky Beeching talks about being a gay evangelical Christian:
The first half of that segment is pretty terrific, but then — weirdly — the show brings on Scott freakin’ Lively as the counterpoint. Lively is six steps to the right of the lunatic right-wing fringe. He is a vile, disingenuous hatemonger.
Maybe they were trying to find the most extreme foil they could for Beeching’s story. Or maybe they picked someone so extreme to imply that “the middle” or the “Third Way” lay somewhere equidistant between Beeching and Lively (which would put “the center” somewhere far to the right of the UK’s own anti-gay Evangelical Alliance). Either way, bad move. Scott Lively is an odious, ridiculous man who has long since surrendered any right to free air time.
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