‘Of Issachar, men who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do, 200 chiefs, and all their kinsmen under their command.’ 1 Chronicles 12:32
This verse commonly serves as an anchor for Father’s Day sermons. Will you be this kind of man? Stand up now. Between (56:30-58:20) Tim implores the ‘men of Issachar’ to stand up. What is the understanding of these times? From what context is Tim asking the men to stand? At 53:30 he says that we should have the courage to stand alone. Just who exactly is standing alone?
To establish some context, Tim quotes from a verse I used in a recent post
“You shall not spread a false report. You shall not join hands with a wicked man to be a malicious witness. You shall not fall in with the many to do evil, nor shall you bear witness in a lawsuit, siding with the many, so as to pervert justice.” Exodus 23: 1-2
But then to a very different purpose, and from a different understanding than what I intended. Who are the many, and to what evil are ‘the many’ standing in support of? In what way is justice being perverted? As an example, Tim references Rick Warren’s 2013 stand against gay marriage. In response to Piers Morgan’s pressure, Warren said, ‘I fear the disapproval of God more than society’s disapproval.’ 56:00 Fair enough. The question I have is whether God approves of both our tactics and strategy in combating those things we see as evil in the world.
In that interview, Warren is expressing his religious view that marriage should not be redefined to allow gay people to marry. This is protected speech under the First Amendment. However, as I’ve listed example after example, the Christian Right now seeks to use political force, which has been radicalized and encouraged by all the power it has gained under Trump, to impose its will upon the rest of society—be they Christian or not. This is not okay. Warren’s assumption implies that he believes the nation is a Christian one—this is what he was fighting for. If Christians believed in democracy, rule by the people, we would submit to majority rule as the law of the land. Of course, there are exemptions to following the rule of the land, like standing against genocide and the oppression of a people group (as in Nazi Germany for example,) which could serve as a model. But what really are we standing against? Are the gays systematically killing and oppressing people? Their choice to marry doesn’t hurt anyone—literally. What we are talking about here is essentially about hurt feelings over imagined oppression and the fear that God will unleash His terrifying wrath, according to what we have been told by mere men. The Bible is the authority, I understand. But men cherry-pick the Bible to suit their own purposes. The Christian Right is claiming to rule everyone Deus Vult—over hurt feelings and fear for our own wellbeing. The sins of the LGBTQ community have risen to the level of genocide through the means of the annihilation of the family—so we’ve been effectively told. In this Christian mind, this is what it is.
The righteous divine mandate stated is that homosexual sin hurts the homosexuals themselves. Does it? What about the feelings which are intrinsic to the person who just doesn’t fit into the expectations? They are being essentially told that God hates them because of what they feel. And what if they don’t believe in God? What about the damage inflicted upon the ‘sinner’ by the righteous who are supposedly working to impose God’s mercy on the condition of suppression and submission? Religiosity aside, this righteous indignation is based upon a simple rejection of the democratic principle of common governance. Instead of loving unjudgementally, as fellow sinners, more and more violence are being used and threatened by adherents to the salvatory Christian Right to gain more power to impose ‘God’s Law’ upon everyone in the United States of America. This is what we’ve become.
Rick Warren’s stand against gay marriage is the context Tim provides to call us to be men of Issachar. With all that is going on, this is Tim’s issue. ‘A line must be drawn in the sand.’ Much has changed Tim, from the time of Warren’s sanguine and toothless interview to now where emboldened ‘Christian’ Patriots are ramping up the threats. A Boise Baptist pastor said the God wants to “put all queers to death. …These people know that they’re worthy of death.” Are these the men of Issachar who understand the times? Are these the ones who are standing up? You may say that you don’t mean for the use and threats of violence to achieve the goals of righteousness, but these are the times. If you mean for the peaceful acquisition of power to ‘Make America Great Again,’ by using the gay marriage issue as the context for calling us to be ‘men of Issachar,’ your lack of specificity allows ‘the times’ to dictate the terms of that calling thus demonstrating that you don’t understand the times. ‘The times’ are becoming more and more militant and violent every day—all to enforce ‘God’s’ righteousness. This is the environment the now politically dominant Christian Right has feed and fostered for decades. As a Christian leader, if you don’t speak against it, you are for it.
The use of Exodus 23:1-2 to bolster your point about standing for righteousness against the masses of worldly sinners ignores the plank in your own eye. The masses of militant Christians who have it in for the evil ‘sodomites’ are falling in line with ‘the many’ of their own brethren to pervert justice by turning a blind eye to the lies and treason of those who empower them to go after those evil LGBTQ people—people whom many of you often say God would relish afflicting great terror and suffering for their wickedness. What gives you the right? Oh yeah… Deus Vult!
Once again, Jesus did not teach us to ‘stand’ in this way to inflict threats and violence. Nor do I believe Jesus would have stand silent and complicit in a culture which now encourages threats and violent to affect ‘righteous’ change. Like a broken record I repeat, our ‘teachers’ have prepped us for war as they’ve taught us to reframe Christ has a conquering warrior who will melt the faces off his enemies with laser beams shooting out of his eyes. We worship our pastors, with all the coverups and abuse, as our dull minds shuffle on having checked the box of having a ‘good service’ thus sanctifying our complicity to lies, treason, and violence.
Just as Hitler feed upon and in turn fueled antisemitism to place Germany’s problems upon the Jews, so too often American Christians blame our problems as a curse from God for our ‘toleration’ of the LGBTQ community. It is the same kind of thing.
Thank God the Coeur d’Alene police stepped up and protected human beings as they should. I don’t see the call to protect the marginalized much from Christians—this leads to the culture of silencing, violence, and persistent threat against those Christians find abominable. What I see from Christians is the cultivated persistent myth that Christians are the ones being picked on. This claim is laughable but man’o man isn’t it comfortable and convenient. It is ‘comfortable and convenient’ because white Christians, as a group, are in fact socially at the top of the heap; and as a result, have no experiential clue as to what real, organized, physically threatening persecution is. Christians deceived themselves into believing this to feel better about themselves as they create the environments which physical threatens those groups they see as posing a threat to their way of life. Tim feeds this mentality when he speaks of ‘standing alone.’ This is an illusion cast by out religious controllers to keep you in constant fear of both ‘the others’ and of the wrath of an inscrutable, eternally angry God. How do you know that war, inflation, drought, or even our ugly divisions which plague our consciences are specifically caused by a curse from God because of, let’s say, the sin of sodomy? Oh yeah… some Adam Henry who claims to talk for God told you so. Got it.
Prove me wrong please; are there many evangelical pastors speaking against Patriot violence against queer people? Tim didn’t; he just listed them as an example of what to stand against. I guess kudos to Tim for not specifically calling for violence, right? Again: if you don’t speak against it, you are for it.
These are ‘the times’ of increasingly violent division. Historically marginalized groups just want to freely live their lives without fear, having their rights as human beings protected by a broad-based, democratically controlled, secular power. To the common Christian fighting the culture war, trained to fear the angry God whose voice of judgement is broadcast by men using mass-media technology, the desire of ‘the others’ to have equal recognition, protection, and human rights is oppression of the Christian faith—because Christians fear ‘God.’ You got it wrong. Your oppression come from your leaders who have punked you into fearing them.
‘This is not a Christian nation.’ This was the heresy I stated just over 5 years ago which earned me my position as an ‘agent of Satan.’ I’m grateful that this self-proclaimed prophet of God woke me up. This was not persecution—this was just trained words from some dumbass who feels powerless who got punked by a bunch of organized people who are using him to forward their own goals. It is highly unfortunate for him, but what he said was a major catalyst leading to my freedom from religious bullshit. I still believe in the Prince of Peace, but the evangelical church is deeply fucked up. This is why there are deep divisions Tim. Jesus’ harsh words were for the religious leaders misleading the people. This is why I speak so harshly to those who claim to have religious authority. My anger stems from the fact that I have been deeply wounded by religious bullshit, which comes from men who want power without question, ever since I was a little kid. As a middle-aged white man with a comfortable pension, I have the power to be free. I want this for everyone.
Again and again, I’ve made arguments which attempt to show the only thing that makes the gospel believable at all is the testimony of suffering. This is what Jesus showed in word and example. One small tragedy on all this mess is that in all the various traumas I’ve experienced in my life, the institutional source, the church, was the most damaging. A typical reason for this trauma which would most likely be stated by the ‘godly’ leadership was my rebellion against the Word of God. I’ve read the Bible too jackasses—many, many times. The church backed the beatings I received from my parents as they weaponized scripture to say that in God’s Law disobedient children deserve to be stoned to death. That’s fucked up. I was shamed and taught fear of God, adult authority figures, and my parents who were His hand. I was silent about being molested by a neighbor only to be shamed later as the Christian reaction to the gay rights movement characterized homosexuals as abominations deserving death. I was terrorized as a little kid about the Tribulation and the anti-Christ—that I wouldn’t make the rapture was a constant fear. I was taught all that Dobsonian nonsense about human sexuality—to be ashamed of natural feelings and desires. I could go on but, to make it short, my formative religious experiences were based in fear and shame. I still struggle with this—but finally I’m getting better as rip myself away from all the training I received from people who just want to be important and in control.
I say all this as a straight, native-born American citizen, white male. I have no way to imagine how things would have been if I were an immigrant, non-white, or homosexual. Christians had me thinking for awhile that I was homosexual even though an eight-year-old boy taught to fear adults and submit to shame had no means to consent to what was done to me. Where is the mercy in that? What made it easier I suppose is that I had no desire for homosexual contact. But what if I had?
A wise black man said, “I’m not saying white people don’t have problems, it’s just that it is more difficult to be like me.” I sometimes imagine how much my religious traumas would have been magnified if I had sexual feelings for the same sex. The guilt is present still in my desires for the opposite sex, but in the Dobsonian universe those feelings are more excusable because they stem from that aggression which is required for leadership. (How convenient.) In any case, nobody is going to scream at, beat, or kill me for those heterosexual desires because they are socially acceptable.
The church is a broken system. It claims that ‘God hates the sin but loves the sinner.’ In practice people conflate the two together—it’s just what we do. We deal with the dissonance by categorizing sin into acceptable and unacceptable columns even going so far as to claim ‘entire sanctification’ thus, by necessity, loading one column heavier than the other. ‘Holy’ people are dangerous and very destructive to others as they load the columns to suit their own perceptions of themselves. They are blind to the fact that we all sin, all the time. Mercy is reserved for themselves. Blame is assigned to the others.
Deep inside we know this is wrong, explaining why we tolerate men telling us that our problems are curses from God because of the sins of ‘the others,’ and our toleration of that sin—all under the deflecting armor of ‘God hates the sin but loves the sinner.’ It’s religious, deflecting, stratifying, bullshit. If the religious leader who may read this believes I have it all wrong, then for fuck sakes don’t just use the cliché’ and then leave to the culture to define it, as I have, as it is commonly practiced; do your job, learn you own culture’s teachings, dig deep, correct it, and teach accordingly. I’m not making a straw man, it’s what we do. I know because I have personally experienced the conflation as explained above.
Self-reflection is painful. Why do it? It’s far easier to just say it’s ‘the times.’ The pious religious language distances and disembodies the problem. The system encourages this protective mechanism even as it calls us to prayer. I know God hears me, but I have never personally heard a word from Him. I’ve reflected upon this often. Nonetheless, I place my faith in the character of Jesus and in the testimony of suffering. I want to believe that we all have a Father who loves us. I know that Tim said that to truly great one must be the servant of all. This is true. But there seems to be a major disagreement over what being a servant really means. We form up sides, each seeing the other as highly immoral. These are the ‘times.’
So here we are divided. Having lost domination over the overall culture, the Christian warriors settle for a scorched earth campaign. Burn it all. Misery for all—since that is what God wants from us. The endless ebb and flow of us in time searching for God’s will. His will for us has been shown in an accomplished liar and con man who scratches backs in exchange for unwavering support. The man, who could shoot someone in cold blood in the middle of 5th avenue and not lose his faithful, has given the Right what they wanted. These are the times for ever increasing fascism. Roe has fallen. Massive suffering will follow as the righteous will not stop until all people are under the boot.
Akin to those living under Warren Jeffs, the evangelicals now in power put forward an image of smiles and clean living. It’s just a matter of extremes, lighting up the immediate hostility and revenge of those who want freedom for all is not a concern. In biblical context, the men of Issachar were recruited to support regime change. Were these men charged to bring about a change of heart in the people? Or were they charged to employ subterfuge to smash the opposition? The biblical account is not clear hence we get to write our story to meet our own purposes.
In the end, force and deception will lose. The indomitable spark of humanism has taken hold of the collective human mind. The prophets will continue to enslave individuals to do their bidding, to submit to rape and oppression, but freedom people will continue to resist the will of these men of God. The fear of these men will continue to diminish, and finally someday, will we be rid of these men of understanding.
Amen.