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

  Accordingly, eunuchs featured in Byzantine society not merely as generals or court officials, but increasingly as time went on also as senior Churchmen, despite official ecclesiastical bans on castrated men taking clerical office dating back to the landmark Council of Nicaea in 325. Nicaea had actually left convenient legal loopholes when it ordered all eunuch clergy to be deposed. Not only did it exempt those who had been castrated against their will, but also eunuchs who had undergone the operation for medical reasons (not the last time that this would be a provision in ecclesiastical legislation on various moral issues). Because of this, eunuchs regularly appeared among the Church hierarchy, right up to the Patriarchate of Constantinople: there were five eunuch patriarchs between the ninth and the eleventh centuries, and maybe others. Certain monasteries in the eastern Mediterranean from Greece to Judaea were established exclusively for eunuch monks, but eunuchs were also commonly to be found in ‘mixed’ communities of male monks. It therefore made sense for families, perhaps in some poverty-stricken village in the Balkans, to arrange castration for a promising son, which would set him up for high imperial or ecclesiastical office as much as did a decent education. [50] Since eunuchs often wielded significant political power, it is not surprising that helpful theologians might draw attention to their resemblance to genderless angels. Moreover, Jesus had bequeathed posterity a comment distinguishing three categories of eunuchs that was certainly not negative about them, albeit a little puzzling (Matt. 19.12; above, Chapter 4). One might even regard a decision for castration as a lesser imitation of an emperor’s liturgical inauguration for public service; by comparison, the eunuch’s bearded colleagues among Court attendants lacked any such formal ceremony anticipating their future career. The doyenne of Byzantine scholars Judith Herrin directs our gaze to the famous mosaics flanking the altar in San Vitale, Justinian I’s great church in Ravenna, where, in defiance of normal Byzantine iconographical convention, secular courtiers accompany the imperial couple in procession to the altar. Contrasting with Justinian’s largely bearded entourage, the Empress Theodora is accompanied to the altar (a space officially forbidden to women) by two beardless attendants who assist in making her gift of a chalice (see Plate 12). Probably we are viewing eunuchs at the very heart of imperial liturgy, helping to mediate between earth and heaven alongside the angelic host. [51] The very success of this association of eunuchs with genderless angels rendered the analogy problematic for late imperial ascetics, despite its continuing place in the thought of ascetic theologians like Maximos the Confessor. Not everyone in Byzantium bought into the angelic image of eunuchs, and there were plenty of scandalous stories – either genuine or efforts to discredit them – not to mention some pointed and disapproving theological reflections from major authorities such as the fourth-century writer Basil, Bishop of Ancyra: ‘the removal of parts denounces the adultery of the one who mutilates himself’, he commented acerbically.

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

  Another of his tactics is to tell me that someone else in our department is furious with me and that he has fielded yet another complaint about me. Oddly enough, when I apologize to those people, they have no idea what I’m talking about. One person I’ve allegedly offended is Roberta, Cranium’s administrative assistant. Trotsky says she’s boiling mad because she booked a hotel room for me during the Inbound conference and I never used it, which wasted money and deprived someone else of a room. I can’t imagine why the company would book me a hotel room in Boston, since I live here. But I tell Roberta that I’m really sorry that she booked me a room and I didn’t use it. She looks at me as if I’m nuts. “It’s no big deal,” she says. “Nobody gave it a second thought.” I tell her I’ve heard she is really upset. “That’s ridiculous,” she says. The same goes for Monica and Eileen, the women who handle logistics for the conference. Supposedly they were so angry with me that I could never repair the breach, no matter how many times I apologized. This, too, turns out to be complete bullshit. “Neither of us was upset with you,” Monica will tell me, months after I leave HubSpot. I tell her I was told that she was furious with me. “That,” she says, “is complete news to me.” A public relations guy in Boston writes to me and says Trotsky has been getting into vehement arguments on Facebook, posting angry screeds and ad hominem attacks on people. “Is this guy really your boss?” the PR guy asks, having noticed that Trotsky works at HubSpot, where I also work. “How do you tolerate him? He seems to have a psycho streak in him. He comments on posts in a manner that I would classify as almost nuts. He comes off as insufferable. A first-class douchebag.” I’ve never had an abusive boss before. I’ve worked for a few colorful characters, including an editor at Forbes whom I once called a “fucking asshole” and who laughed and told me that this was why he loved working with me. I always found a way to get along with my colleagues. No one in my adult life, at work or elsewhere, has ever spoken to me the way Trotsky does. No one has ever berated me and insulted me, or expressed such hostility and contempt for me. Maybe I’ve just been lucky. Maybe this kind of treatment is what most people experience at work.

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

  They would “live the life of maximized manhood.” Cole believed men had three purposes: to guide, guard, and govern, and to fulfill these roles men needed to be “both tender and tough.” Jesus was a perfect balance of the two; the same man who drew little children to himself “gripped that scourge of cords and drove the money-changers out of the temple.” Cole had no use for “sissified” portraits of Jesus that failed to reveal his true character. “Christlikeness and manhood are synonymous ,” he insisted, and to be Christlike, to be a man, required “a certain ruthlessness.”16 When Cole appeared on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club to argue that masculine leadership in the home required toughness, the female cohost balked. But Cole didn’t back down, and he couldn’t resist noting that his interlocutor seemed to be usurping properly masculine leadership on the program. He assured his readers that women were in fact begging for men to lead, and when men did lead, women loved them more. Cole took pains to distinguish “toughness” from a “macho” conception of manhood, which to him connoted a childlike immaturity, lack of character, and promiscuous sexuality, but even as Cole’s understanding of masculinity retained a place for tenderness, measured tenderness should never be confused with effeminacy. “I like a man’s man,” Cole made plain. “I don’t like the pussyfooting pipsqueaks who tippy toe through the tulips.” At one time people might have overemphasized toughness, Cole acknowledged, “but today it is the softness that is killing us.” Women, children, churches, and nations all needed masculine decision makers; America was great only when its men were great. Tragically, however, a pernicious anti-hero syndrome plagued the nation.17 This syndrome was evident in television dramas that had created and destroyed images of manhood, “with dangerous results.” A generation traumatized by foolish male authority figures like Archie Bunker had stamped on their minds an image of manhood that invited “resentment, derision, anarchy, and mockery.” These children then rejected authority figures in their own lives, and the effects extended to the nation as a whole. In recent decades, “a philosophical and emotional sickness” had been allowed to fester in the life of the nation, all because the idea of America “as a ‘virtuous’ nation, a benefactor to the entire world, a savior from enslaving dictatorships,” had been undercut by a malignant media.18 For Cole, the cure for the anti-hero syndrome could be found in Christian broadcasting. Christian media could offer godly heroes for popular consumption. “Sick and tired of the world system creating the ungodly as heroes, making the bad good, and the good bad,” Cole created and chaired a Committee for International Good Will with the purpose of making “the godly of the land our heroes.” The group offered annual awards to exemplary men such as Pat Robertson. However, if Christian broadcasting offered means of instilling the heroic masculine ideal in the hearts and minds of Americans, evangelicals had cause for concern.

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

  Sure, God was a pacifist, but only at the end of the age, only after he kills all his enemies. In the meantime, God created men for war.12 Driscoll also wasn’t afraid to talk about sex. Song of Solomon was his favorite part of the Bible, and it was no allegory. To interpret it allegorically would mean that Jesus was trying to “put his hand up your shirt,” and he, for one, didn’t love Jesus like that. No, Song of Solomon was a book about erotic love between a man and a woman. In 2007, Driscoll preached a sermon called “Sex: A Study of the Good Bits of Song of Solomon,” which he followed up with a sermon series and an e-book, Porn-again Christian (2008). For Driscoll, the “good bits” amounted to a veritable sex manual. Translating from the Hebrew, he discovered that the woman in the passage was asking for manual stimulation of her clitoris. He assured women that if they thought they were “being dirty,” chances are their husbands were pretty happy. He issued the pronouncement that “all men are breast men. . . . It’s biblical,” as was a wife performing oral sex on her husband. Hearing an “Amen” from the men in his audience, he urged the ladies present to serve their husbands, to “love them well,” with oral sex. He advised one woman to go home and perform oral sex on her husband in Jesus’ name to get him to come to church. Handing out religious tracts was one thing, but there was a better way to bring about Christian revival.13 Driscoll reveled in his ability to shock people, but it was a series of anonymous blog posts on his church’s online discussion board that laid bare the extent of his misogyny. In 2006, inspired by Braveheart , Driscoll adopted the pseudonym “William Wallace II” to express his unfiltered views. “I love to fight. It’s good to fight. Fighting is what we used to do before we all became pussified,” before America became a “pussified nation.” In that vein, he offered a scathing critique of the earlier iteration of the evangelical men’s movement, of the “pussified James Dobson knock-off crying Promise Keeping homoerotic worship . . .” where men hugged and cried “like damn junior high girls watching Dawson’s Creek.” Real men should steer clear.14 For Driscoll, the problem went all the way back to the biblical Adam, a man who plunged humanity headlong into “hell/feminism” by listening to his wife, “who thought Satan was a good theologian.” Failing to exercise “his delegated authority as king of the planet,” Adam was cursed, and “every man since has been pussified.” The result was a nation of men raised “by bitter penis envying burned feministed single mothers who make sure that Johnny grows up to be a very nice woman who sits down to pee.” Women served certain purposes, and not others.

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

  When it came to defeating terrorism or the Iran nuclear deal, Jeffress “couldn’t care less about that president’s tone or his language.” It was Jeffress who so memorably quipped that he wanted “the meanest, toughest, son-of-a-you-know-what” in that role.17 Writing in the Baptist News , Alan Bean later reflected that Jeffress embraced a “Jesus/John Wayne dualism.” Trump’s biblical ignorance was boundless, but Jeffress wasn’t interested in a president who would govern according to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Nor did he think that the Bible had anything to say about governments needing to forgive or “turn the other cheek.” The role of government was “to be a strongman to protect its citizens against evildoers.” Sure, Trump was a notorious womanizer, married three times. So was John Wayne. Wayne was “an unapologetic racist,” Bean added, “and Trump stands proudly in that tradition.” Both men represented white manhood “in all its swaggering glory.” Trump was “the John Wayne stand-in” his evangelical supporters were looking for.18 Bean wasn’t the only one to see Trump as in the mold of John Wayne. Wayne’s own daughter agreed. Days after his Liberty appearance, and just days before Jeffress (unofficially) and Falwell (officially) endorsed him, Trump accepted Aissa Wayne’s endorsement. Standing in front of a fake desert background and a wax statue of the gun-toting Wayne at the John Wayne Museum in Winterset, Iowa, Trump intoned: “When you think about it, John Wayne represented strength, he represented power, he represented what the people are looking [for] today because we have exactly the opposite of John Wayne right now in this country.”19 [image "image" file=Image00015.jpg] Donald Trump kisses John Wayne’s daughter Aissa during a news conference at the John Wayne Museum in Winterset, Iowa, January 19, 2016. AP PHOTO / JAE C. HONG . EVANGELICALS OPPOSED TO TRUMP tried in vain to redirect their coreligionists. Even before Trump secured the nomination, Russell Moore likened Trump’s attitude toward women to “that of a Bronze Age warlord.” Moore had a hard time believing that fellow evangelicals could support this man. When polls said otherwise, he cried foul. Just after Trump handily won the South Carolina primary, besting Ted Cruz by six percentage points among white evangelicals and Marco Rubio by nearly twice that much, Moore offered his own spin: Many people telling pollsters they were evangelical “may well be drunk right now, and haven’t been into a church since someone invited them to Vacation Bible School sometime back when Seinfeld was in first-run episodes.” The word “evangelical” had been “co-opted by heretics and lunatics” and diluted by evangelicals-in-name-only, and none of this should be confused with true evangelicalism.

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

  In 2015 Thomas Nelson published Jep and Jessica’s book on faith and family, and seventeen-year-old Sadie’s book on the same. The Robertsons’ books were available at LifeWay books and at retailers like Walmart. Already in the 1990s, Thomas Nelson had recognized that they shared a “family values” base with Walmart, and they entered into a partnership; within ten years the big-box retailer had become the nation’s largest supplier of Christian merchandise, selling over a billion dollars annually. Christianbook.com also carried an array of Duck Commander titles, plus DVD collections, hoodies, cookbooks, greeting cards, lunch napkins, and dessert plates.25 Some evangelicals worried about the “cultural Christianity” these Louisiana good ol’ boys portrayed, but the Robertsons weren’t just “cultural Christians.” They were devout, practicing evangelicals who, in good evangelical fashion, saw their celebrity as a means of spreading their faith. But the very distinction requires scrutiny. By the early 2000s, was it even possible to separate “cultural Christianity” from a purer, more authentic form of American evangelicalism? What did it mean to be an evangelical? Did it mean upholding a set of doctrinal truths, or did it mean embracing a culture-wars application of those truths—a God-and-country religiosity that championed white rural and working-class values, one that spilled over into a denigration of outsiders and elites, and that was organized around a deep attachment to militarism and patriarchal masculinity?26 WHILE METAXAS PONTIFICATED on the virtues of heroic masculinity from his Manhattan perch, and the Robertsons reached large swaths of Red State America with their own brand of the same, dozens of other evangelical men (and they were overwhelmingly men) continued to churn out large quantities of indisputably middlebrow literature on Christian masculinity. The warrior as a model of Christian manhood remained ubiquitous, and a militaristic view of Christian masculinity went largely unchallenged in conservative evangelical circles. Within this genre, real-life military warriors continued to bring an aura of authenticity that mere pastors couldn’t match. In 2015 John McDougall, an army chaplain, West Point graduate, and veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, published Jesus Was an Airborne Ranger: Find Your Purpose Following the Warrior Christ . Stu Weber, a fellow Ranger who first met McDougall at West Point, contributed the book’s foreword. Setting aside the pretty-boy Sunday-school Jesus no real man could relate to, McDougall made clear that his savior was no Mister Rogers. He was a warrior who knew how to channel aggression when he needed to. “In Ranger vernacular, Jesus was a badass,” a “forceful man” who called other men to “vigorously advance his kingdom”—as “spiritual badasses”—in their homes, communities, and world. There was nothing prim and proper about this Jesus. He was “a wild-at-heart Ranger on a mission,” a rural laborer who knew how to work hard and play hard. To sum up, “You can’t spell Ranger without the word anger .”27 That same year, Weber teamed up with fellow real-life warrior Jerry Boykin to write The Warrior Soul .

• 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)

  [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 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 The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  4 Lecture 1: The Early Christians and Their Literature The Early Christians and Their Literature Lecture 1 There can be no question that the Christian church since the 4 th century has been the most signi¿ cant social, economic, political, and cultural force in Western civilization. And the foundation of the church was and is the New Testament. T he New Testament continues to be a ¿ eld of ongoing fascination, not just for Christian theologians, pastors, and believers, but also for professional historians and lay people interested in classics, history, and literature. Virtually all modern historians would agree that the New Testament has been the most signi¿ cant book, or group of books, in the history of Western civilization. It continues to be an object of reverence and inspiration for millions of Christians today, a book that governs peoples’ personal lives, shapes their religious views, and gives them a sense of hope. The New Testament also plays an enormous role in our political and social lives. The meaning of the book is not self-evident. The differenced interpretation are not just related to geography, culture, and history—they are also related to different understandings of the New Testament. There are a number of ways we could approach the New Testament in this course. We could approach it from the perspective of the faithful believer. This is how most people who read the New Testament approach the subject. There are other equally valid ways of approaching the New Testament that do not require either that we all should agree about religion or even that we should agree to believe or disbelieve in the New Testament itself. It is possible to study the book from this cultural perspective of one interested in the development of Western civilization. There can be little question that this book stands at the foundation of Western civilization as we know it. Whatever you happen to think about the New Testament, there can be no question that the Christian church has, since the 4 th century, been the most signi¿ cant social, economic, political, and cultural force in Western civilization. And the foundation of the Church was and is the New Testament. We could study how it has played such a huge role in Western art or English literature.

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

  It would be a war filled with “murder, rape, and mayhem,” and it wouldn’t be won “by parlor games in board rooms” or holy hugs or singing “Kum Ba Ya.” Jesus, the Warrior Leader, would lead the assault against “Satan’s terrorists.” Along with Jesus, Welch looked to figures like Robert E. Lee and KKK Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest as models of warrior leadership.14 [image "image" file=Image00013.jpg] Air Force cadets walking past the Academy’s Chapel in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in August 2003. AP PHOTO / ED ANDRIESKI . It was precisely this evangelical warrior rhetoric that made Antoon’s skin crawl. He found this attitude “diametrically opposed” to the values instilled in him decades earlier. Then, fighting and killing had been spoken of “soberly and with humility”—killing was accepted as a fact of war, not exalted. But “somehow that had all been transformed into a kind of holy bloodlust.” Antoon identified a source of this infiltration. He’d seen cadets and families at the Cadet Chapel welcomed by “a phalanx of enthusiastic pastors” and recruited to Monday night Bible studies taught by members of New Life Church and Focus on the Family staff bused in for that purpose. The academy, Antoon realized, had become “a giant Trojan horse for evangelicals to get inside the military.”15 Efforts to address evangelical overreach were met with staunch resistance from evangelicals themselves, inside and outside the military. Under pressure from critics, the academy put together an interfaith team to promote religious diversity, but evangelicals up the chain of command rebuffed these efforts. When reviewing materials the team had compiled, Major General Charles Baldwin, air force chief of chaplains, repeatedly wanted to know why “Christians don’t ever win.” Baldwin, who had a master of divinity degree from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and had served at the academy’s Cadet Chapel before taking up duties in Washington, also objected to a clip from Schindler’s List “because it made ‘Christians look like Nazis.’” (The scene was replaced with one from Mel Gibson’s We Were Soldiers .) With support from Focus on the Family’s Alliance Defense Fund, evangelical chaplain James Glass brought a legal motion claiming that any effort to curb prayer or proselytizing was a violation of his freedom of speech. Focus on the Family denounced all criticism as unjustified, and “fervently hope[d] that this ridiculous bias of a few against the religion of a majority—Christianity—will now cease.”16 Increasingly, evangelicalism was the religion of the majority within the armed forces. In 2005, 40 percent of active duty personnel identified as evangelical, and 60 percent of military chaplains did. As in other branches of the military, the presence of evangelical chaplains in the air force had increased significantly from 1994 to 2005, and evangelical chaplains brought with them a commitment to evangelism; Brig. Gen.

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

  120 Lecture 22: First Peter and the Persecution of the Early Christians Christians were themselves persecuted and prosecuted—not because their religion was against some kind of Roman law—but because they were perceived as public nuisances. Authorities took care of problems on an ad hoc basis. From both Paul and the Book of Acts, we see that Christian missionary activity sometimes led to public disturbances. Christians would often abandon their own families to join the new community. These splits in the family were often painful to those who were left behind (cf ., Matt. 10:34–37). Because the Christians were known to be a closed community, they sometimes came under suspicion as a secret society. In particular, widely believed slanders were leveled against the Christians. Because they met at night, called one another brother and sister, engaged in “love feasts” (that is, communal meals), practiced a ritual kiss, and actually ate the body and drank the blood of the son of God, they were widely believed to engage in nocturnal orgies involving incest and cannibalism (cf., the words of Fronto, the teacher of the 2 nd-century emperor Marcus Aurelius). Altogether, the early Christians had a considerable “image problem.” Consider the two pagan authors who were the ¿ rst to mention Jesus, whom we discussed earlier. The Roman historian Tacitus labeled the Christians a “pernicious superstition” and says they were the “hatred of the human race.” This, he claims, is why Nero could easily make them scapegoats for the burning of Rome for which he was responsible ( Annals 15). Pliny the Younger, governor of part of the region that 1 Peter itself addresses, called them “obstinate” and “mad” adherents of a “depraved superstition.” He was responsible for their persecution when they refused to abandon their Christian ways. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that Christians refused to participate in the public ceremonies honoring the state and local gods. Because the Christians believed there was only one true God, they couldn’t very well participate in the worship of others. This made no sense, though, to pagans. As polytheists, they found the idea that if you worshipped one god you couldn’t worship another to be nonsense (it would be the same as saying that you couldn’t like one friend if you happened to like another). In addition, it was widely believed that the only thing the gods required was that people perform occasional acts of reverence to them—for example, through public sacri¿ ces—and that any calamities that happened in life were the result of

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

  Female divinities were notably active in initiating events, breaking every gender stereotype in the normal range of classical clichés about women; evidently, they were not regarded as offering useful role models in the terrestrial world. At no stage in Greek or Roman history up to the time of the Roman emperors is there anything like the same level of direct political engagement by real women. In general, the only appearance of women in a public role was as priestesses in a variety of temples, though there are some signs that, as the political significance of the polis waned in the Hellenistic period, women gained small footholds in public office and greater property rights in public law. [14] The philosophers and physicians of the ancient world provided what passed for intellectual justification in these commonplaces. Aristotle led the pack through his discussion of animal and human biology, discussion that later Christians came to see as authoritative. He spoke bluntly of a woman as a deficient male; five centuries later, the widely revered medical authority Galen of Pergamon could still echo him in speaking of the imperfection of women. Galen was also influential in choosing to emphasize one particular analysis of human bodies that he found in much older Hippocratic medical literature. [15] They were constituted by four fluids or ‘humours’ – phlegm, blood, yellow bile/choler and black bile: a notion that, thanks to Galen’s continuing prestige in medical discussion, remained prominent in Christian discussions of sex and gender down to the seventeenth century. The four humours were associated with the four elements (earth was associated with black bile, fire with yellow bile, water with phlegm and blood with air) and determined a variety of personal temperaments via an amalgamation of the complex combinations derivable to decide the ‘properties’ of any individual. Since most of the writing on humoral theory was done by men, it is not surprising that most of the outcomes did not favour femininity. Thus, a major polarity within the system was between dryness and moisture, the general and observable moistness of women being another perennial male fear. Dryness (male) reflected fire and therefore heat; moisture (female) reflected water and coolness. Heat good, coolness not so good. Perfection versus imperfection. [16] One key battleground concerned sexual intercourse, an occasion on which men do have intimate contact with women, and which often results in children. The experts did not agree here. Aristotle considered the production of children from intercourse to be primarily a male achievement: a man provides the seed; a woman is merely an inert incubator for the foetus. The extensive group of Greek medical writers whose collective literary efforts eventually passed down under the name of Hippocrates saw things differently. Many subsequent commentators (Galen included) followed this Hippocratic tradition rather than Aristotle: women did also produce seed, but their natural moisture made it weaker than that of a man.