Contempt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  An imagined object, however complex, is at any one moment thought in one idea, which is aware of all its qualities together. If I slip into the ordinary way of talking, and speak of various ideas 'combining,' the reader will understand that this is only for popularity and convenience, and he will not construe it into a concession to the atomistic theory in psychology. Hume was the hero of the atomistic theory. Not only were ideas copies of original impressions made on the sense-organs, but they were, according to him, completely adequate copies, and were all so separate from each other as to possess no manner of connection. Hume proves ideas m the imagination to be completely adequate copies, not y appeal to observation, but by a priori reasoning, as follows: "The mind cannot form any notion of quantity or quality, without forming a precise notion of the degrees of each," for " 'tis confessed that no object can appear to the senses, or in other words, that no impression [53] can become present to the mind, without being determined in its degrees both of quantity and quality. The confusion in which impressions are sometimes involved proceeds only from their faintness and unsteadiness, not from any capacity in the mind to receive any impression, which in its real existence has no particular degree nor proportion. That is a contradiction in terms; and even implies the flattest of all contradictions, viz., that 'tis possible for the same thing both to be and not to be. Now since all ideas are derived from impressions, and are nothing but copies and representations of them, whatever is true of the one must be acknowledged concerning the other. Impressions and ideas differ only in their strength and vivacity. The foregoing conclusion is not founded on any particular degree of vivacity. It cannot therefore be affected by any variation in that particular. An idea is a weaker impression; and as a strong impression must necessarily have a determinate quantity and quality, the case must be the same with its copy or representative." [54] The slightest introspective glance will show to anyone the falsity of this opinion. Hume surely had images of his own works without seeing distinctly every word and letter upon the pages which floated before his mind's eye. His dictum is therefore an exquisite example of the way in which a man will be blinded by a priori theories to the most flagrant facts. It is a rather remarkable thing, too, that the psychologists of Hume's own empiricist school have, as a rule, been more guilty of this blindness than their opponents. The fundamental facts of consciousness have been, on the whole, more accurately reported by the spiritualistic writers.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  … if he has always taken as much of me as he needed and as much as he chose to take… what am I to do with the surplus? Throw it to the dogs? Is it not far better that I should present it to a gentleman who loves me more dearly than himself, rather than allow it to turn bad or go to waste?42 The logic of her novel argument is unanswerable, Madonna Filippa is freed, and the statute is amended so that it applies in future only to those wives who commit adultery for monetary gain, a class of women for whom the author registers his profound contempt in the story of Gulfardo and Guasparruolo (VIII, 1), where, as in Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale, a wife’s ill-gotten gains turn out to have been borrowed in advance from her husband, in whose presence she is later forced to acknowledge that the debt has been fully settled. Madonna Filippa’s outrageous but ostensibly rational defence of her wayward behaviour has been used to illustrate the thesis that for Boccaccio love consists in the gratification of instinctive sexual desires, whether within marriage or outside it. Such a view draws some support from several other stories in the Decameron, for instance the tales of Paganino of Monaco (II, 10), of the anonymous lady who uses a priest as her unwitting go-between (III, 3), of Zima and the wife of Francesco Vergellesi (III, 5), of Ricciardo Minutolo and Catella Sighinolfo (III, 6), of Teodoro and Violante (V, 7), and of the wife of Pietro di Vinciolo (V, 10). Other stories that are relevant in this connection are the tales of the Seventh Day in general, the tale of the three beds (IX, 6), and the prolix account of the remarkable friendship of Titus and Gisippus (X, 8). In several of these stories, the Christian view of marriage is questioned just as vigorously and outrageously as in Madonna Filippa’s spirited defence of her adultery. In the tale of Paganino, the Monegasque pirate, for instance, the beautiful young wife of a senile Pisan judge, who with the aid of a calendar of Saints has accustomed her to a frugal sexual regime matching his own limited physical powers, is seized by a dashing young pirate who wastes no time in supplying her with a more wholesome diet. The judge discovers where she is living, and goes to fetch her home, but she refuses to return with him, treating him to a torrent of vulgar abuse for his failure to satisfy her natural needs. When he appeals to her sense of honour, she replies that she will defend what remains of her honour as jealously as anyone, adding that she wishes that her parents had shown an equal regard for her honour when they bestowed her in marriage on an impotent and elderly husband.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  the theme of romantic love, which in the West would begin to affect thoughts about love and sex once more in the twelfth century (Chapters 12 and 13). Marriage in northern Orthodoxy therefore had nothing to do with love – nor indeed had sexual desire much to do with marriage. There is a grim realism in an anecdote about the celebrated thirteenth-century royal couple of the Kyivan principality of Murom, David and Euphrosyne; in later years they both entered the religious life and took monastic names as Peter and Fevronia, after which they showed their mutual devotion by dying on the same Easter day, 1228. Fevronia once contemptuously rejected the adulterous sexual advances of a married nobleman by ordering him to draw two buckets of water and taste samples of both: was there any difference, she asked? When he admitted that there was not, she commented that, in the same way, all women are sexually alike, so a husband should stick to the wife he had married. [47] Northern Orthodoxy’s view of sexuality and marriage drew on the Greek Orthodox tradition stemming from Basil the Great and pursued through the most authoritative Eastern theologians up to and beyond Maximos the Confessor (above, Chapters 8 and 9): sexual reproduction, even sexual difference, was the product of humanity’s Fall engineered by Satan. Within the bounds of the fallen world, marriage was more unequivocally than elsewhere something for families to agree on, rather than an individual’s choice to make. In that respect, it reflected the assumption that sexual misbehaviour, like behaviour in general, was the business of all society, not simply of the individuals involved. The Church’s task was to keep sex as tightly controlled as possible within the ecclesiastical regulations of canon law. The system had its own logic. It could not have worked if the laity had not accepted it and come to see it as a badge of their own identity. Just as the Church of the East had with eventual success made a particular form of marriage the token of being a Christian in the face of Islamic acceptance of polygyny, so northern Orthodoxy survived amid the devastating invasions of animist and Muslim Mongols from the 1220s by preserving an identity built up over three previous centuries of Christian society, much of which was structured around the Church’s regulation of sex. Popular Slavic culture might seize on a feature of that regulation and internalize it to an alarming extent. Thus, despite cautionary words from theologians and pastors about the continuing goodness of marriage after the Fall of Adam and Eve, Slavic laypeople could view even marital sex as sinful, to the extent that epic literature in Serbian might use the phrase ‘by sin’ ( po grehu ) to identify a parent or child by birth, while the child’s godparent was its ‘parent without sin’ ( roditelj bezgrešni ).

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Doerr has a degree in electrical engineering from Rice University and an MBA from Harvard. My theory is that when investing in start-ups required the ability to understand technology, he was without peer, but when the Valley turned its attention to social networks, photo filters, and games for teenagers, Doerr was out of his element, and so he started chasing fads. In 2008, when the iPhone became the cool new thing, he announced the iFund, to invest in app makers. In 2010, when Facebook got hot, he announced the sFund, to invest in social media companies. Doerr even started wearing a T-shirt and hoodie, just like Mark Zuckerberg. Forming the Glass Collective in 2013 was just another attempt to latch on to something trendy. In the end Doerr got nothing out of Google Glass except some publicity, but maybe that was the point all along. In the old days, Silicon Valley venture capitalists embraced a California version of clubby East Coast white-shoe culture. All of the top VC firms literally sit beside one another on the same street, a big boulevard called Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. For decades these firms resembled snooty private gentlemen’s clubs—in the British upper class sense of the word. They were almost exclusively male and were run by former engineers who shunned publicity and quietly voted Republican. Today generating hype has become a central part of the venture capital business. There are so many new firms and so much new money floating around that VC firms feel pressure to raise their profile. They make kooky videos, just like start-ups. They hire publicists. They launch blogs and podcasts, and hire former journalists to run them. Every year only a handful of Silicon Valley companies deliver big paydays. If you’re a VC, you must have money parked in those companies. But getting into those deals is not so easy. Investors actually have to compete to get into hot deals. How do you get that entrepreneur to take your money? How do you stand out? You generate publicity. You have your picture taken wearing Google Glass and call yourself a visionary, someone who can “see around corners,” as they say in Silicon Valley. Even as valuations climb to record levels, you insist that you are not overpaying. “It’s not a bubble; it’s an unprecedented, long boom,” Doerr told Bloomberg in June 2015. Then again, Doerr is in the business of selling companies to the public markets. What do you expect him to say? Asking a venture capitalist if private companies are overvalued is like asking a car salesman if he thinks you’re paying too much for the new Mercedes he’s selling you.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  In his 1997 book on “biblical courtship,” he had expounded on the common view that immodest women were responsible for men’s actions. As he put it, girls should “cover up” and not dress in a way that “a godly man has to duck down alleys or climb trees to get away from her.” Wilson didn’t believe men should go to lunch with a female coworker; though he hated “to belabor the obvious,” he felt it necessary to point out that “under the clothes, their bodies are different, and hers looks like it would be a lot more fun than some male co-worker’s body.” Moreover, Wilson suggested that women who rejected submissive femininity were “unprotected”; women who refused masculine protection were “really women who tacitly agree on the propriety of rape.” Wilson also liked to draw attention to false accusers, real or imagined. Earlier, in his defense of Driscoll, he had pointed out that prominent figures like Driscoll were “regularly toppled,” whereas false accusers rarely were. His award-winning 2012 novel Evangellyfish , a book filled with sexual escapades recounted with apparent relish, turned on not one but two women who faked sexual assault.22 Like many conservative pastors, Wilson believed that “civil disputes” like Phillips’s should be settled among Christians, not in courts “run by unbelievers.” Failing that, he thought it prudent that society find “wise and godly men” to serve as judges, so that they could determine, in cases of alleged statutory rape, if “the one raped is almost of age.” It turns out Wilson had some experience with the court system. In 2011, he had performed the marriage of Steven Sitler to a young woman in his congregation. Sitler had been convicted in 2005 of child molestation, and at the time Wilson had advocated for leniency in sentencing. (Sitler had been a student at Wilson’s New Saint Andrews College and had attended Wilson’s church.) Sitler received a life sentence, but was released on probation after only twenty months; three years later, an elder at Wilson’s church arranged a meeting with the young woman who would soon become his wife. The couple eventually had a son, but in 2015 the court ordered that Sitler be restricted to chaperoned visits due to inappropriate sexual contact with his own child. When Wilson’s wisdom in marrying Sitler to a young woman in his church was questioned, Wilson hit back: the Sitler case was just “an easy way for enemies of our ministry to attack us.” He denied that his church was “protecting, covering, or advocating molestation of children.” The church existed to minister to broken people. Yet Wilson rejoiced in the “slander”; he and his wife celebrated with a bottle of single-malt scotch, and he used the attention to promote his latest book—which took up the subject of justice.23 As Wilson readily admitted, this wasn’t the first time he had been embroiled in scandal. The Sitler case brought to mind an earlier incident, that of Jamin Wight.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The splendidly offensive behaviour of the vagrant Diogenes of Sinope in the late fifth and fourth centuries BCE was an enacted reminder that, although human beings were rational animals, they were still animals – he was nicknamed ‘the dog’, from which his school of admirers took the name Cynics (‘those like dogs’). His lifestyle later provided one model for Christian ascetics and ‘holy fools’ who likewise wished to demonstrate their rejection of worldly values (below, Chapter 7). [4] At the other extreme from Diogenes, philosophers might enter practical politics. During the late sixth and the fifth centuries, followers of the mystical mathematician Pythagoras seized power in various Greek cities in south Italy, but generally Pythagoreans do not seem to have made a great success of their activism, which included an alarming tendency to live by intricate, binding rules – fellow citizens who did not share their obsessions briskly ended Pythagorean ambitions. [5] Most philosophers instead restricted themselves to commenting on the society around them. In the fifth and fourth centuries, three philosophers successively taught in Athens: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. This trio are foundational to the Western philosophical tradition, Christian as much as Greek or Roman. As Socrates wrote nothing himself, we hear his voice mediated through writings of his pupil and admirer Plato, mostly in dialogue form: insisting on the necessity of constant questioning in human affairs. In Athens, Socrates’ questions included searching criticism of the democracy which was then only a few decades old. In the midst of a dire political crisis for the city, his teaching goaded the Athenians into putting him on public trial and executing him for what was termed impiety and corrupting the young; Plato portrays Socrates as insisting in his speech of defence that ‘[t]he unexamined life is not worth living.’ [6] Western religion and philosophy have remained in the shadow of these events and their consequences. Successor-cultures have repeatedly turned to the insistence of Socrates that priority should be given to logical argument and rational procession of thought, over received wisdom. The Western version of the Christian tradition is especially prone to this Socratic principle, which is one aspect of how Western Christians approach the sexual revolution of our own time. The injustice of Socrates’ fate shaped Plato’s own contempt for the results of Athenian democracy when he explored for himself how human society should be shaped, and how politics links to justice and divine purpose: all in a very different style from the parallel discussions that were accumulating in the Judaic tradition. His dialogue on the character of the polis (known in Anglicized Latin as The Republic) presents an elite-dominated, authoritarian society. He directly confronts, indeed subverts, the Athenian democracy which he had contemptuously observed authorizing the execution of Socrates. No one sane has sought to replicate Plato’s picture of government in the real world; one hopes that Plato did not intend it to be more than a mirror for earthly societies, including his own, to contemplate.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  “In truth, they are unique in every cell of their bodies.” He portrayed the distinction in stark terms: Men liked to “hunt and fish and hike in the wilderness” while women preferred to “stay at home and wait for them.” Men played sports as women watched, “yawning on the sidelines.” But perhaps the most profound difference between men and women, according to Dobson, was their source of self-esteem: “Men derive self-esteem by being respected ; women feel worthy when they are loved .” Five years later, in his book Straight Talk to Men and Their Wives , he expanded on this theme. Echoing Marabel Morgan, he explained that because of a man’s fragile ego and “enormous need to be respected,” together with a woman’s vulnerability and need to be loved, it was “a mistake to tamper with the time-honored relationship of husband as loving protector and wife as recipient of that protection.”16 Dobson championed distinct gender roles and identities for the sake of marriages, but also for the sake of the nation. “We must not abandon the Biblical concept of masculinity and femininity at this delicate stage of our national history,” Dobson implored. Writing in 1975, he had asserted that the future of the nation depended without question on “how it sees its women.” He denounced the “feminist propaganda” behind media depictions of women as tough (albeit gorgeous) figures who “could dismantle any man alive with her karate chops and flying kicks to the teeth,” who could shoot with deadly accuracy and play tennis, or even football, like a pro. “Oh, yeah! This baby has come a long, long way, no doubt about that,” he wrote with thinly veiled revulsion. But by the end of the 1970s, Dobson had turned his attention to men. He blamed feminists for calling into question “everything traditionally masculine” and for tampering with the “time-honored roles of protector and protected.” Most perniciously, they had denigrated masculine leadership as “macho,” leaving men in confusion and the nation in peril. The media, too, had colluded with feminists to portray “the macho man” as an anachronism. The demeaning portrayal of men in popular sitcoms was part of a “concerted attack on ‘maleness.’” All this left men in a state of confusion over their role: “Will he march off to defend his homeland in times of war, or will his wife be the one to fight on foreign soil? Should he wear jewelry and satin shoes or carry a purse? Alas, is there anything that marks him as different from his female counterpart?”17 Drawing on the work of the economist George Gilder, Dobson described what was at stake when society abandoned “the beauty of the divine plan.” A man was supposed to fall in love with a woman and then protect and support her. When millions of families followed this plan, the nation remained strong and stable. If men failed to follow this course, “ruination” was inevitable.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Raised Catholic, Driscoll converted to evangelicalism as a college student and quickly made a name for himself as a “theologically hard-line but culturally hip” pastor on the conservative periphery of the “emerging church” movement. Driscoll preached a verse-by-verse literal reading of the Bible and promoted conservative social teachings, but there was nothing stodgy about his style. Mars Hill had the feel of a nightclub, filled with predominantly white twenty-and thirty-somethings with a penchant for tattoos, piercings, beer, and the local indie music scene. Driscoll himself, sporting dark jeans and T-shirts, had the look of a wannabe rock star. Like celebrity evangelists before him, Driscoll mastered cutting-edge communication technologies. “The Internet is the Greek Marketplace of Acts 17,” proclaimed the church’s visitor guide. “Film and Theology Nights” featured prominently, and for those raised in conservative Baptist, fundamentalist, or Pentecostal churches, Mars Hill offered a refreshing model of cultural engagement. But Driscoll’s message wasn’t just the old-time religion communicated in a hip new way; his gospel message was infused with militant masculinity.10 In language that would have been familiar to many among his flock, Driscoll insisted that real men avoided church because they had no interest in a “Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ.” But Jesus was no “long-haired . . . effeminate-looking dude”—he was a man like Driscoll’s own working-class dad, “a construction worker who swung a hammer for a living,” a man with “calluses on his hands and muscles on his frame.” Jesus bore no resemblance to “the drag-queen Jesus images that portray him with long, flowing, feathered hair, perfect teeth, and soft skin, draped in a comfortable dress accessorized by matching open-toed sandals and handbag.” He was an aggressive, anger-filled leader who picked fights with religious authorities, slaughtered thousands of pigs, ordered his disciples around, and didn’t mind causing offense. Jesus was a hero, not a loser, “an Ultimate Fighter warrior king with a tattoo down his leg who rides into battle against Satan, sin, and death on a trusty horse,” just like in the Westerns.11 Driscoll was indebted to evangelical writers on masculinity who preceded him, but his ideas and rhetoric went far beyond theirs, in many respects. Gone was any language of friendship, tenderness, and personal enrichment; Driscoll wanted nothing to do with the softer side of the men’s movement. Instead he made a name for himself as “Mark the cussing pastor.” Like Doug Wilson, Driscoll enjoyed shocking his audiences. No one could accuse either man of succumbing to political correctness. Also like Wilson, Driscoll positioned himself as a critic of mainstream evangelicalism. He berated “flaccid church guys” who preferred a fake smile to righteous anger. The Bible spoke of God’s anger, wrath, and fury far more than of his love, grace, and mercy, Driscoll insisted. Jesus, too, got angry, even enraged. And Jesus used military terminology when speaking of his church: the church was “an offensive force on the move,” storming the gates of hell. In Revelation, Jesus was a conquering warrior.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  [29] Yet a far greater target than the Magdalen was the Virgin Mary, whose cult had so mushroomed in the previous centuries. Marian devotion could be seen as the flagship of the cult of saints and their shrines and associated pilgrimages; Protestants now dismantled all that, alongside the monastic life in which it was entangled.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  Each side needs to recognize that it threatens its opponents at a profound and almost visceral level. In the biblical book of Leviticus, the priestly authors quote an early law code: “If a stranger lives with you in your land do not molest him. You must count him as one of your own countrymen and love him as yourself—for you were once strangers yourselves in Egypt.” 4 Israelites must recall their own suffering as despised aliens in Egypt and ensure that the strangers currently in their midst do not endure this pain. Many immigrants to the West come from former European colonies and protectorates; those who resent their presence should consider that their distress is minimal compared with the massive disruption that occurred when the colonialists arrived and changed these countries forever. By the same token, immigrants should remember this pain and try to develop an empathy with those who fear that their own values will be eroded. With the global situation in mind, consider the arguments Mozi developed against warfare, showing that it was of no benefit to anybody. How could these be adapted to the twenty-first century? We need to ask ourselves some hard questions to which there are no easy answers. You may want to debate them—compassionately and Socratically, of course!—in your reading discussion group. Think carefully about the concept of a just war. Find some examples of a just war in the past and then ask yourself how many of our current conflicts fit the just-war criteria. Can you detect the tribal spirit in any of them? Is military action improving the situation or is it increasing hostility? Given the shattering power of modern weaponry, do you think that warfare can ever be just or beneficial today? Can you apply some of Gandhi’s ideas to a modern conflict? How would a nonviolent campaign work, and what qualities of mind and heart would it require? During this step, as part of your mindfulness practice, take careful note of the way that you and your friends and colleagues speak about foreigners. Apply some of the insights you gained during the eighth step to these discussions. Listen critically to the voices in your own society that preach hatred or disdain of other national, religious, and cultural traditions. Is there not something disturbingly familiar about it? Do you hear the hauteur of the colonialist or the bigotry of the fascist in some of their arguments? A dehumanizing discourse that seeks to dominate a group often uses the language of disgust and contempt: this kind of thinking led to the enslavement and oppression of African and Native Americans, the Armenian genocide, the Shoah, apartheid in South Africa, the tribal wars in Rwanda, and the mass killings in Bosnia. When you read the newspaper or watch the news, take note of the way the Four Fs, often cloaked in high-minded, patriotic, or religious rhetoric, still dominate public affairs and human behavior.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Characteristically it has re- emerged in Christian tradition whenever Christians want to challenge existing power structures – as has a linked possibility, inadvisably dismissed as remote by one Victorian Church historian: ‘If Montanism had triumphed, Christian doctrine would have been developed, not under the superintendence of the church teachers most esteemed for wisdom, but usually of wild and excitable women.’ [42] Amid stirrings of great change in Western Christianity some seven decades later, Monsignor Ronald Knox could still opine in his polemical but learned and entertaining study of Christian ‘enthusiasm’ that ‘[f]rom the Montanist movement onwards, the history of enthusiasm is largely a history of female emancipation, and it is not a reassuring one.’ [43] Such comments seem risible now, but there is a serious historical point to them in looking at the directions taken by the developing Christian Church during the second century. This was the age of the impressively competent and generally sane Antonine emperors. It witnessed a growing moral seriousness among the Graeco-Roman elite, exemplified by their fascinated disapproval of supposed sexual excesses among Roman rulers in the previous century; we may follow their prurience in Suetonius’ lurid and still entertaining second-century account of the Twelve Caesars from Julius Caesar to Domitian. [44] So little did most outsiders know about this obscure, small-scale and often deliberately secretive religious organization that it was easy for them to project prurient sexual fantasies on to what they did know about unconventional Christian behaviour. What did the Eucharist signify, with its talk of eating flesh and drinking blood? Cannibalism? What happened in ceremonies of Baptism, when adults went nude into water? Was there incest involved?

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  CONVERSATIONS : ATHENS , ROME , JERUSALEM One great likeness between Hellenistic, Roman and Jewish society is hardly surprising, since it was the shared characteristic of their Mediterranean world. Public power was organized for the benefit of free adult males: Greek, Roman and Jewish women, whatever the realities of their everyday lives in which they might exercise informal power, could not fully represent the common cultural identity of their societies as could men. [7] Israelite identity was socially recognized by genital mutilation: male (and never female) circumcision, particularly remarkable in a society which otherwise fiercely condemned bodily modification, including tattoos. [8] Circumcision was an ancient attribute of some among the male gods in Mesopotamia who preceded Israel’s recognition of its God: Judaeans probably originally intended the practice as a symbol of purity for priests alone, but during the Second Temple period they extended the obligation to all males, as contemporary commentators outside Judaism testify. By that time, circumcision had become inextricably linked to the concept of covenant now so prominent in Hebrew Scripture, and the practice was backdated to God’s promises to the patriarch Abraham. [9] When Judaeans brooded on the two creation accounts in the opening of Genesis (regarding them of course as a single unit, without considering any internal contradictions), they generally concluded that women could not be considered as in the ‘likeness’ of God; after all, the first woman Eve had encouraged the first man Adam into his fatal rebellion against God’s command – the ‘Fall’ that resulted in their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. That was reflected in the architecture and ritual life of the Temple in Jerusalem. The hierarchy of six sacred spaces in the developed Temple complex only allowed women access to the sixth and outermost, the ‘court of the women’. The gender of the animals sacrificed in Temple rituals (cattle, sheep and goats) was overwhelmingly male: the option of a female animal was only available in the cases of what were called sin-offerings and shared-offerings. [10] Temple liturgy was here expressing theological prejudice. Women from Eve onwards were catalysts for male faithlessness and spiritual impurity: worse still if they were women from outside the nation. [11] The evident Judaic anxiety about women and purity was particularly concentrated on menstruation, that aspect of female physiology that has always puzzled and intimidated men, and which is treated with considerable care in the Book of Leviticus. The Jewish historian Josephus, writing about the Temple of his own times as rebuilt by Herod, observed that menstruant women were not even allowed in the outermost space; a prejudice which has long lingered in Christianity as well. [12] Classical Greece formalized the same inequality in identity by making adult males the only people who were entitled to take part in government: the polis has been aptly described as ‘a men’s club’. [13] There was a distinct mismatch between everyday life and the mythology and literary portrayal of Greek or Roman goddesses.

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  107 have begun to create problems for the congregations. The communities are suffering from internal problems of disorganization. The letters urge the pastors to take charge, to run a tight ship, to keep everyone in line, and above all, to silence those who promote ideas that conÀ ict with the ideas of the author and his pastoral friends. One of the prominent instructions involves the heretical teachings of the author’s opponents, whom he describes in harsh tones. He calls them “lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, inhuman...proÀ igates, brutes, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure,” and so on (2 Tim. 3:2–5). Indeed, they may have been all these things and more, but he never indicates what they teach that he found so offensive. Nor does he indicate why what they teach is wrong. In fact, the pastors are not to have serious discussions with these teachers to work out their differences; they are to bring them into submission (1 Tim. 1:3–5). This seems unlike Paul, who usually marshals his arguments against wrong teaching. There may be some indications that the teachers were Gnostics. They appear to subscribe to what the author refers to as “the contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge” (= gnosis) (1 Tim. 6:20) and, like Gnostics, they seem to be particularly enthralled with “myths” and “endless genealogies” of the gods (1 Tim. 1:4). If so, this might indicate that the author is writing in a later period than Paul was, because Gnosticism had probably not taken root in Paul’s day. The author is concerned that these churches appoint proper leaders. In both 1 Timothy and Titus, he gives detailed instructions concerning the quali¿ cations of the bishops and deacons who have charge of the churches’ physical and spiritual well being. They are to be seasoned Christians with upright moral lives who know how to control their own households and have good reputations on the outside (e.g., 1 Tim. 3:1–13). These leaders are all to be men. Women are to have no leadership roles in the church; in fact, they are not even to speak in church. In one of the most infamous passages of the New Testament, the author explains that women are descended from Eve, who was deceived by the serpent in the garden of Eden, ate the forbidden fruit to bring sin into the world, then duped her husband into doing likewise (1 Tim. 2:11–15). His conclusion is that if

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  activists in Britain or America. They placed their own construction on an approach to genetics that fitted neatly with their concern to promote Christian families with standards set by white Protestantism; in the USA the movement was suffused with the idea of America’s special place in a divine Providence of Protestant flavour. [22] The norms of the American heterosexual family entered the twentieth century further reinforced by work on genetics by an American enthusiast for racial segregation who, like Galton, came from a devout Quaker family: H. H. Goddard. His bestseller of 1912, The Kallikak Family, advocated preventing some families from breeding, to cut short their hereditary degeneracy and feeble-mindedness. The family tree of the ‘Kallikaks’ at the heart of the book was actually Goddard’s own invention. [23] Later, Goddard did adjust his findings to deal with criticism even from some enthusiasts for eugenics, but that gave little pause to those favouring selective sterilization on eugenic grounds for humans classed as ‘feeble-minded’. Early Christian proponents of scientific contraception did not distance themselves. Mrs Margaret Sanger (an Episcopalian convert from Roman Catholicism) was the founder in 1921 of what became Planned Parenthood, and she was also an advocate of ‘birth control’ targeting the American poor, among whom she discerned the socially ‘unfit’: ‘human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization’. British legislation on ‘Mental Deficiency’, enthusiastically sponsored by Winston Churchill from within the government in 1912, was in the end modified to avoid legalizing sterilization, concentrating instead on physically isolating in institutions those caught within its definitions. [24] By contrast, various programmes in states of the USA have, overall, resulted in around 80,000 sterilizations. The example of the United States inspired Nazi legislation in imitation during the 1930s, and although that tainted association might be considered to have thoroughly discredited the whole eugenics programme, officially sponsored sterilization programmes persisted in the USA and Canada into the twenty-first century. [25] The broad spectrum within the Protestant alliance that composed Social Purity did not map onto future Christian cultural divisions across the world. By the end of the nineteenth century, the female Social Purity movement in the USA and its expanding efforts to provide moral education for an entire society was dominated by the liberal or low-temperature Protestant mainstream of American religion: Presbyterian, Congregationalist or Unitarian, Methodist, Episcopalian. The rhetoric of Social Purity nevertheless still united it with the shaggier parts of the American Protestant ecclesiastical family such as the Southern Baptists, or the new manifestation of Protestant revivalist energy that emerged around 1900 in the form of Pentecostalism (below, Chapter 18). The rhetoric has subsequently survived much longer within conservative forms of Protestantism than among liberals.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Charting a course between an unhealthy repression of sexuality on the one hand, and the excesses of the sexual revolution on the other, the LaHayes offered a vision of sexuality securely confined within the structures of patriarchal authority. Men could have unrestrained libidos—they simply needed to satisfy themselves within marriage. Women needed to restrain themselves until marriage, at which point it was their duty to satisfy their husbands’ demands.7 For the LaHayes, women’s subordination was theological, social, and sexual: “The very nature of the act of marriage involves feminine surrender.” In language that would resurface in countless subsequent books on evangelical masculinity, the LaHayes assured men that women desired their heroic masculine leadership, in the bedroom and beyond: “Lurking in the heart of every girl (even when she is grown up) is the image of prince charming on his white horse coming to wake up the beautiful princess with her first kiss of love.”8 Beverly and Tim would each play strategic roles in the emerging Christian Right. The two had met as students at Bob Jones University in the 1940s, a school that would be at the center of debates over segregation and private Christian education throughout the 1970s and 1980s. (BJU did not admit African American students until 1971, and then only with strict rules against interracial dating and marriage that remained on the books until 2000.) Tim had served as a machine gunner on a bomber in the Second World War, and after college he earned a doctorate in literature from Liberty University. In the 1950s, the LaHayes joined in the evangelical migration to southern California, and there they would knit together the new set of issues that would come to define modern American evangelicalism. Deeply influenced by Phyllis Schlafly, Beverly emerged as an influential leader in her own right. In 1976 she published The Spirit-Controlled Woman , a book that would sell over 800,000 copies, and in 1979 she founded Concerned Women for America (CWA), an evangelical organization devoted to carrying forward the pro-family, anti-feminist cause. Within only a few years, CWA surpassed Schlafly’s Eagle Forum in terms of membership and influence within American evangelicalism. Even more than Dobson, Beverly LaHaye motivated her followers to engage with politics; 98 percent of CWA members voted in the 1988 presidential election, 93 percent had signed or circulated a petition, 77 percent had boycotted a company or product, 74 percent had contacted a public official, and nearly half had written a letter to the editor.9 Tim LaHaye was a pastor and speaker (including for the John Birch Society in the 1960s and 1970s), and the author of more than 85 books. A sampling of his nonfiction titles reveals the contours of his worldview: The Unhappy Gays: What Everyone Should Know about Homosexuality (1978), The Battle for the Mind (1980), The Battle for the Family (1981), The Battle for the Public Schools (1982), Faith in Our Founding Fathers (1987), and Raising Sexually Pure Kids (1993).

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Rumsfeld had two key deputies in this effort: Stephen Cambone, a neoconservative defense intellectual known for his dictatorial style, and Jerry Boykin.19 Cambone set out to circumvent both the CIA and the State Department, and with his special-ops experience, Boykin “was the action hero” at Cambone’s side. The partnership was, according to one military intelligence source, “a melding of ‘ignorance and recklessness.’” This sort of workaround wasn’t unprecedented. A secret counter-insurgency program called the Phoenix Program had been instituted during the Vietnam War, and in the 1980s a covert unit had been created after the failed attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran; deployed against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, it helped lay the groundwork for the Iran-Contra connection. In the twenty-first century, under Rumsfeld’s leadership, the Pentagon was ready to fight fire with fire. “The only way we can win is to go unconventional,” explained an American advisor to the civilian authority in Baghdad. “We’re going to have to play their game. Guerrilla versus guerrilla. Terrorism versus terrorism. We’ve got to scare the Iraqis into submission.” Another official concurred: “It’s not the way we usually play ball, but if you see a couple of your guys get blown away it changes things. We did the American things—and we’ve been the nice guy. Now we’re going to be the bad guy, and being the bad guy works.” Not everyone agreed. As one Pentagon advisor put it, “I’m as tough as anybody, but we’re also a democratic society, and we don’t fight terror with terror.” Rumsfeld, however, had been given the power to effectively establish “a global free-fire zone.”20 A devout evangelical, Boykin pursued his assignment zealously. And he wasn’t afraid to talk about it. He was a frequent speaker at conservative Christian events, especially at Baptist and Pentecostal churches, and he nearly always appeared in uniform. A “circuit rider for the religious right,” he worked in tandem with the Faith Force Multiplier, a group whose manifesto advocated applying military principles to evangelism. Boykin depicted the War on Terror as “an enduring battle against Satan” and assured fellow Christians that God had placed President Bush in power, “that radical Muslims hate America,” and that the military was “recruiting a spiritual army” to defeat its enemy. Part of Boykin’s mission involved evading the Geneva Conventions, and he appeared to be working to replace international law with his own notion of biblical law. He understood himself to be in God’s direct chain of command. President Bush, too, was “appointed by God” to root out evildoers. Clearly, they answered only to the highest power.21 When word of Boykin’s speeches came out, Arab and Muslim groups accused him of bigotry and demanded his removal. Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee called for an inquiry and for Boykin to step down until cleared of wrongdoing, but Rumsfeld backed Boykin, and he retained his position.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Yet some insist that such a multidisciplinary approach is unnecessary and improper, in that the natural sciences can answer every significant question with a unique rational and cultural authority. This position is often known as ‘scientism’, which can be described as ‘a totalizing attitude that regards science as the ultimate standard and arbiter of all interesting questions.’39 I used to think this myself, so I can easily understand its appeal to anyone longing for certainty. For the philosopher of science Alex Rosenberg, science offers ‘irrefutably correct answers’ (hence eliminating any need for belief or any anxiety about uncertainty) to ‘persistent questions’ such as ‘What is the nature of reality?’ (his answer: what physics says it is), or ‘What is the purpose of the universe?’ (his answer: there is none). Rosenberg graciously concedes that ‘knowing the truth makes it hard not to sound patronizing of the benighted souls still under religion’s spell.’ But if you have discovered what you believe to be ‘irrefutably correct answers’, I suppose it’s irritating when others suggest you may have got things wrong. In the light of his unassailable certainties about life, Rosenberg declares that it is pointless to try and find ‘a good reason to go on living, because there isn’t any.’ Happily, Rosenberg has a therapeutic solution for those who might be troubled by the absence of morality or meaning from their worlds: if this ‘makes it impossible to get out of bed in the morning,’ you should try Prozac (other neuro-pharmacological fixes are, of course, available). Rosenberg presents himself as a lofty, rational observer of other people’s madness. Yet I am unpersuaded by his line of argument. Let me invite you to join me in a mental experiment that might be helpful in exploring this question. During the COVID lockdown of 2020–21, I regularly used a thermometer to determine my temperature. A raised temperature would not necessarily mean that I had COVID, but it was certainly an indication that I needed to check things out. Suppose I were to argue like this. My thermometer proved to be a reliable tool for checking my temperature. Since it worked so well in that role, why not use it for everything? Like working out what is right or wrong? Or whether I have free will? Or determining the meaning of life? Now this will strike most of my readers as a ridiculous argument. I suspect (and hope) many will respond to my suggestion like this: a thermometer has been designed to check temperatures! It doesn’t do anything else! It’s not meant to be used for ethical or existential issues! But that’s my point. Intellectual disciplines devise their own research methods to engage specific aspects of reality. A research method that works for one domain will be useless or misleading if used in another. Rosenberg is simply universalising a tool that was designed with other specific (and limited) purposes in mind.

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  115 more horri¿ c, because Melito considers Jesus to be God, he accuses Israel of deicide: they have murdered the creator of the universe, God himself. (Melito Easter Homily, chapters. 95–96). This is the ¿ rst of many charges that the Jewish people killed God. Such animosity, as it emerged in the 2 nd and 3rd centuries, did not have a huge impact on society at large. Most people were neither Jew nor Christian, so the squabbles were ultimately of little moment outside the small circles of Christianity. All that changed, of course, with the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine to Christianity in the 4 th century A.D. Thereafter, it become quite popular to be Christian, and Christianity, as a result, eventually had the power of the entire empire behind it. At that point, Christian animosity toward Judaism took on a fevered pitch and Christians had the wherewithal, at last, to act out their animosity. Synagogues were burned, property was con¿ scated, Jews were killed. This was the beginning of one of the most heinous chapters in the history of Christianity, from the anti-Semitism dominant among Christian countries throughout the Middle Ages to the climax in our own time with the unspeakable crimes of the Holocaust. The Book of Hebrews, of course, does not urge acts of anti-Semitism. It stands only at the beginning of a trajectory of thought that leads to anti- Semitism. In fact, it’s clear from the book that it is the Christians at the time who have been experiencing persecution—possibly at the hands of Jews, who near the end of the 1 st century were far more numerous and powerful than the Christians, but more likely at the hands of local governmental authorities (cf., 10:32–34). This author is urging his hearers not to fall away from the faith in the midst of their suffering, not to turn away into a more protected religion, such as Judaism. Those who neglect the salvation provided by Christ, who return to the outside world after joining the Church, will receive a fearful and eternal punishment (2:1–4; 3:7–18; 10:27–29). Ŷ

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Graeco-Roman household, latterly presiding over her own monastic female community. Gregory’s account is a major pioneering text in the fourth- and fifth-century enterprise of picturing upper-class women to be as much of a model for holiness as any of the Desert Fathers or Mothers: a flagship in a growing literature which admiringly described women of particularly outstanding holiness in everyday (generally prosperous) society. The accounts were written by men, but at least took seriously the possibility of female holiness. [28] That was an encouragement for various wives, widows and heiresses who now sought to combine often staggering personal wealth with Christian seriousness. Most notable representatives were in the elite senatorial families of Rome, who with the arrival of Theodosius I in the 390s realized that the game was up for traditional religion and briskly embraced Christian practice. Clergy were on hand to offer a rigorously controlled version of Christian life for the outstandingly rich. One such mentor was the tetchy but brilliant scholar Jerome of Stridon, though he was incommoded by his hasty departure from Rome in 385, in the wake of some intensive direction in asceticism to a young noble lady called Blesilla. She died aged twenty after indulging in an excess of fasting and general spiritual rigour, which would no doubt now be diagnosed as anorexia; and there was talk. Moreover, the unkind gossip extended to Jerome’s close relations with Blesilla’s mother, Paula, a situation that has remained a constant problem for celebrity spiritual advisors. Jerome’s subsequent defensiveness, which included angry criticism of Paula, is not much more edifying. [29] He has already appeared in our story and will do so again in Chapter 9. What united these varied forms of asceticism? It may seem a statement of the obvious that their shared characteristic was the renunciation of sexual activity. That did not mean banishing sex from the consciousness of the ascetic: temptation needed to be confronted. Athanasios’s classic life of Antony set the pattern by detailing the various alluring guises by which Satan sought to distract the holy man: principally two standard objects of sexual recreation in the Classical world, a seductive young woman and then a black boy (the Devil’s second try when the woman had proved unsuccessful – see Plates 17 and 18). Stories of hermits over the generations chronicle Satan’s continuing and largely futile efforts along these lines – for Egyptian hermits, the black boy (or sometimes girl) often became specifically Ethiopian, a familiar but still exotic other, who might even be won over to the right side given particular holiness on the part of a prayerful ascetic. [30] The increasingly rich corpus of devotional stories about ascetics furnished how-to manuals in resisting what were very real psychological dangers in the celibate’s life. Resistance needed careful thought, and indeed prayer.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  It wasn’t just the family that was under attack, but something even more fundamental: “the very notion of what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman.” What Americans were seeing was the result of confusion sowed by militant feminists, and since God was “not the author of confusion,” something diabolical must be at work.23 Phyllis Schlafly scoffed at the very idea that Hill could be a victim of sexual harassment, or, as she put it, “some bad words in the workplace.” Hill was an EEOC lawyer, after all, and would know how to deal with sexual harassment if any such thing had occurred. Schlafly slandered Hill as the epitome of the “phony pose” feminists adopted when they wanted to grab power: “‘poor little me,’ the injured ingenue, the damsel in distress who cries for Big Brother Federal Government to defend her from the wolves in the workplace—not merely from what they might do, but even from what they might say.” Schlafly wasn’t buying it. Hill was smart, tough, and “perfectly capable of telling a man to button his lip, keep his hands off, get lost, bug off or just plain ‘no.’” To Schlafly, the whole thing was just a “last-minute smear” orchestrated by a “feminist mob” trying to lynch Thomas.24 Though few matched Schlafly’s expressiveness, other leading figures of the Christian Right, including Paul Weyrich, Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, and Gary Bauer, came to Thomas’s defense as well. This can be explained in part by the greater good evangelicals hoped to accomplish with the ascension of another conservative justice to the Supreme Court. Yet long after Thomas was safely ensconced on the highest court, conservatives continued to mobilize against measures to address sexual harassment and abuse. They opposed the Violence Against Women Act, signed into law by President Clinton in 1994, on many counts. As Schlafly explained, the VAWA was just one more example of “the federal government’s insatiable demand for more power.” Schlafly also accused feminists of inflating rates of harassment and abuse, and she suggested that most of the exceedingly rare instances of actual harassment could be blamed on feminists themselves. Before the feminists burst on the scene in the 1970s, there had been all sorts of laws protecting and advantaging women, Schlafly contended, but feminists had dismantled these protections in their quest for equality. Now, playing the victim, they busied themselves with inventing new infractions. Adding to the absurdity, feminists wanted to criminalize “all heterosexual sex” as rape “unless an affirmative, sober, explicit verbal consent can be proved.” Apparently jokes, too, were no longer allowed, because feminists didn’t have a sense of humor. Finally, concerns about domestic violence could be linked to a global feminist agenda; when Hillary Clinton represented the United States at the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing, giving her highly lauded speech “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights,” it only confirmed the nefarious link between globalism, feminism, and the Clinton administration.