This is grossly insensitive to those of us in the Evangelical Boy Toy community.
whoops! I'll add the link when I get back to a computer.
I have come around to the view that rational people often err in their analysis of irrationality. The anthropologist in the story is quoted thusly:
"Evangelicals don't expect their leaders to be saints," she told me. The Bible, she noted, is filled with stories of God's followers falling prey to the Devil's work. "God is there, waiting for the return of the lost sheep," she said.
I don't think that's it. The actual Bible values repentance, and doesn't ask that we condone sin. Evangelicals, through their faith, often gain a blank check to do and believe whatever they want to.*
I think I prefer the Catholic spin on this because it's more direct, honest and rational: You can do whatever you want to do in life, and as long as you sincerely repent on your deathbed, you're going to heaven.
*And often, they want to do and believe decent, honest things! But they keep their options open.
There was, I thought, a good insight into the late evangelical concept of sin from a Tiktok ex-vangelical:
Sin itself is a vertical relationship. Meaning that God [pointing up] told you [pointing down] a rule. And if you break that rule, the victim is God because he told you not to do it. The horizontal doesn't really matter very much. Whether you hurt somebody, an actual person, doesn't really matter. It's wrong because God told you not to do it, not because you harmed somebody. Which means that within Christianity, sexual assault is wrong just because you broke God's rule. Which makes it no morally different than having sex outside of marriage. When your morality is vertical instead of horizontal, victims [and] harm... [don't] influence whether you weight something heavier or not. Instead, everything is treated kind of the same. Which means that really small things are taken way more seriously than they should be, and really big things are ignored."
Not mentioned by her, but implicit, but the small things tend to be follower women's sexual misdeeds, and the big things are often leaders' manifest crimes.
that is insightful.
It's also consistent with my longtime theory, that a lot of conservatives are furious about birth control, abortions, and STD prevention because they interfere with God's punishment. They are not bothered by the idea of the sex. They ate titillated by the sex plus punishment combo, and infuriated by sex without risk of punishment.
I did check that it wasn't paywalled for non-subscribers (also, people who voted for Richard Nixon) but forgot to put the link in the second email in the actual post.
I think it's not either/or, but all of the above. Some evangelicals are just con artists and just don't believe any of the stuff they're saying but know that strongly religious people are easy marks (see Trump, Donald and any number of MLMs), some fit heebie's description of getting off on the punishment from sky daddy, and some really have bought into purity culture and have bought into what they were taught about sex being bad and wrong and it ruins their marriages.
Brazilian pentecostalism is more interesting than white American evangelicalism, though. It comes from a culture where screwing around is taken completely for granted.
Me, I'm fascinated by the role that bling plays in this kind of shriekingly vulgar religion. I *think* that this is a way of saying in very stratified societies, that someone powerful [see all the bling] is on your side -- see, they're in church, preaching to you, singing with you, and caring for you, in a way that no one else that rich will ever be.
From our point of view, of course, it looks like an appalling con. But pentecostalism is very complex. And it would not have spread as it has without a payoff for believers. They operate in an atmosphere of constant cons -- do we really believe they can't see the grift? I reckon they suppose they get something out of it. Leaving healing aside* you get a support network, validation for men and (oddly) agency for women; dionysiac release without drugs; the possibility of social advancement, etc. All these are concrete benefits, irrespective of the psychological explanations, which I rather distrust, though I do think that the narrative of general forgiveness must be hugely attractive in societies where both the state and the local gangsters punish mercilessly.
* In the US health system, praying for a miracle makes as much sense as anything if you can't pay the bills.
Whether you hurt somebody, an actual person, doesn't really matter. It's wrong because God told you not to do it, not because you harmed somebody.
Huh, interesting. Judaism makes a very strong distinction between sins against God (for which you can atone through prayer and repentance) and sins against other people (for which you can only be forgiven by the victim; no amount of prayer and repentance to God is sufficient). Of course there's no punishment mechanism beyond guilt for any of it, which may be an important distinction from hellfire-and-damnation versions of Christianity.
The thing that gets me--about the prosperity gospel, or the Rapture, or in this woman's case literally casting curses on her enemies with putting their names in jars of honey--is the degree to which many evangelicals have adopted a whole extended cinematic universe of extra-Biblical belief. As a not particularly religious person, I can understand believing stuff that your parents and grandparents believed unto the Nth generation, but, like, a bunch of this stuff was cooked up by Orel Roberts in 1982 or whatever. (Kate Bowler's Blessed was very good on the origins and practice of prosperity gospel, imo.)
13: I mean, there's a whole giant apocalyptic mostly evangelical cult in the US now where the big apocalytic event coming in the near future doesn't even involved Jesus returning!
I think that much of the support for Trump is objectively blasphemous.
13. seems to me like a recipe for schism. Let the snake digest the scorpion so the rest of us can cross the meadow in peace.
I think the same as 13 pretty frequently.
There's a certain similarity to late medieval folk-Catholicism. (Recipe for schism indeed!) I wonder if any of these preachers have started selling indulgences.
20: the economic model of the charismatic televangelists, even before the music business, was selling relics. In the late Eighties I went to a Morris Cerullo rally at Earls Court, and there was this huge merchandising stall there, even before the Internet. Because they don't believe in externally mediated absolution -- instead you're saved when you realise you're saved -- the things being sold promise your "Inheritance" as a child of God -- ie money and love in this life. There are all kinds of anointed prayer tchochkes (?Spelling?) -- scarves, handerchiefs, etc, and the "teaching tapes". The real thing they have lost is any belief in hell, or in the afterlife.
The previous tenants of my immediate post-divorce flat had ben Ghanaian professionals who subscribed to the mailing list run by Sid "It's Supernatural" Roth, which kept coming after they left. My God, that man could teach Trump a thing or two about grift; and the publishers of inflight magazines something about marketing.
13: Seconding Kate Bowler. She's Wonderful,. The other really interesting person is Tanya Luhrmann -- When God talks back
They're trying to immanentize the eschaton, like the socialists but assholier.
"More assholey"? Strunk and White are useless for some points of usage that are important.
Someone here should write a useful grammar book and thank me in the acknowledgements.
56 children?! That's not a family, that's a cult.
After all, it wasn't "the Manson Cult."
21: Ireland: and a cultlike devotion to the Infant of Prague. Just saying.
Maybe I'd have better luck if I bought a lock of Elvis' hair.