The Danger from Christian Fundamentalists, part five.

Elicka Peterson Sparks, in her book The Devil You Know, draws links between conservative Christianity and crime. As a criminologist, she knows what she is talking about. The first link was that violence is part of Who God is, according to a long, long list of Bible passages. A Bible-based society, therefore, is one in which violence is one of the possible options in social interactions. The second is that fundamentalists like to pretend that the Bible demands harsh punishment, usually death, for a long list of perceived offenses, something that results in high incarceration rates and higher crime rates. The third is that the Bible calls for the oppression of women, which facilitates criminal violence toward women.

All of Sparks’s claims rest upon one assumption: that Christian fundamentalists have a significant effect on the way our nation and government operate. The news, every day, gives evidence of this. But Sparks refers specifically to Christian nationalism, the Christians who believe that the United States is God’s special nation today. But is this view reflected in the general opinion of Americans today?

Apparently, the answer is, yes. A generalized poll asked people from several countries if they thought their culture was superior to others. Forty-nine (49) percent of Americans agreed, much higher than the 27 percent of French who thought French culture to be superior to others. We believe in our national superiority more than any other country does about theirs.

Christian nationalists also believe that, without God—indeed without their particular version of God—you cannot have morality. The poll results including the following, in agreement with the claim that you have to be religious to be moral:

            United States: 49 percent

            Germany: 47 percent

            U.K.: 33 percent

            Spain: 19 percent

            France: 15 percent

Is this correlation or causation? If causation, then it means that Americans think themselves superior to others, and think that religion is necessary for morality, and that these patterns are caused by our overwhelming percentage of Christian citizens. While we cannot know if it is causation, it is very clear that Christian fundamentalists are trying their best to make it causation.

The fact that the Bible Belt states have high levels of crime and poverty may also be an example of correlation without causation. It would be difficult to prove that fundamentalist Christianity makes such states as Oklahoma, where I live, so poor and crime-ridden. Is it possible, instead, that people in depressed southern states turn to religion as a solace for their problems? But one thing is clear: fundamentalism has not made these states richer or better places to live.

And within America, it is the most religious presidents, based on church attendance and professed belief, that have been the most socially immoral. Sparks identifies Nixon, Johnson, and George W. Bush as very religious. All three of them used false information to justify American military action. An exception is Jimmy Carter, who is very devout. As commentators have pointed out, he is 200 years old and still building houses for poor people. But Carter is the one president that Christian fundamentalists hate the most.

This is nothing new. Andrew Jackson read his Bible daily, attended church, but as any Native American can tell you, he was an evil man. He defied the Constitution to drive away natives from their homelands. His religious views made him very happy to be a slaveholder, unlike the agonized Jefferson who wished he could free his slaves.

Sparks could not have guessed how bad it would get. Christian fundamentalists virtually worship Donald Trump, who put a painting of Andrew Jackson up in the Oval Office.

Sparks presented numerous specific hypotheses regarding the Christianity-crime connection. I was expecting her to present figures and tables to test those hypotheses. She presented numerous references, but I would like to have seen numbers to back up the hypotheses.

Sparks concludes that there is no point in arguing with fundamentalists. They believe that the process of reasoning is ungodly. And, especially in the Trump era, their power is increasing. They are polarizing themselves from all the rest of us deliberately and strongly. They present themselves as being a persecuted minority. They are doing this specifically to destroy any possibility of dialog: you cannot reason with or show compassion to your persecutor. This means, I believe, that under the right circumstances fundamentalists will burst forth in violence.

I hope Elicka Peterson Sparks and I are wrong, but fear that we are not.

The Danger from Christian Fundamentalists, part four.

Elicka Peterson Sparks, in her book The Devil You Know, draws links between conservative Christianity and crime. As a criminologist, she knows what she is talking about. The first link was that violence is part of Who God is, according to a long, long list of Bible passages. A Bible-based society, therefore, is one in which violence is one of the possible options in social interactions. The second is that fundamentalists like to pretend that the Bible demands harsh punishment, usually death, for a long list of perceived offenses, something that results in high incarceration rates and higher crime rates.

The third link is through Biblical oppression of women. Most crimes are committed by men, many of them against women, as with rape and domestic violence. The relatively small number of domestic violence cases of women against men are often, as in the infamous Lorena Bobbitt case, women taking revenge for abuse by men.

All of ancient society, in which the Bible was written, was misogynistic. The question of whether the Bible is more, or less, misogynistic than its social context is irrelevant. Fundamentalists pick out the passages that oppress women and hold them up as the will of God. In the Bible, as in the world at large, a woman has to marry whomever her father orders her to marry. Women are property.

The general attitude, enhanced by fundamentalism, that women are lesser creatures contributes to an atmosphere that contains rape and domestic violence. In the Old Testament, rape is a property offense. If a man rapes a woman, the rapist has to pay the woman’s father, then she is required to marry the rapist. Happy ending! Deuteronomy 21:11 permits conquering Israelite men to take captive women as their wives, plural. They are spoils of war.

My old fundamentalist self, like many modern Christians, tried to deny this. We emphasized the passage in which the Apostle Paul told husbands to love their wives. Clearly, according to conservative Christianity, a man is not supposed to viciously harm his wife; he is supposed to treat her nicely even while treating her as property.

Even though the Bible does not say it, many fundamentalist Christians believe that women want to be molested. President Trump said that women enjoy having their pussies grabbed by rich men. Many Christians believe everything Trump says as if it were in the Bible. Maybe they think it is. Most of them haven’t read the Bible.

In the next essay, I will present some final thoughts that came to me as I ready Sparks’s book.

The Danger from Christian Fundamentalists, part three.

Elicka Peterson Sparks, in her book The Devil You Know, draws links between conservative Christianity and crime. As a criminologist, she knows what she is talking about. The first link was that violence is part of Who God is, according to a long, long list of Bible passages. A Bible-based society, therefore, is one in which violence is one of the possible options in social interactions.

The second link is that the Bible, especially the Old Testament, prescribes punishment, often death, for a very, very, very long list of offenses.

A Biblical society, such as the one that Christian fundamentalists want to create, is one that punishes every perceived infraction. Sparks claims, with reason, that Christian fundamentalism is largely responsible for the harsh sentences for a long list of crimes—e.g., mandatory jail time for minor marijuana possession. It seems that, to a fundamentalist, the solution to any problem is, throw somebody in jail, unless it is a white supremacist. Any candidate who does not adopt a position of severe punishment will quickly have his or her reputation destroyed by Christian fundamentalists, who will not hesitate to resort to lies to accomplish this.

As a result of our harsh sentences, the United States, with five percent of the world population, has twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners.

Despite our outlandishly huge prison population, our crime rate is not lower than that of most other countries. Our prison as the first and only option approach is expensive and it doesn’t work.

As a matter of fact, so many people are in prison that prison has begun to lose its stigma. Of course, prison does not prevent a criminal from going back to a life of crime, if that criminal has millions of fellow ex-cons who constitute his or her set of peers. Our prisoner and ex-prisoner population is so large that they have their own society.

Another reason that prison does not work to prevent crime is that, if you have a criminal record, you cannot get public housing assistance. If you want to rent an apartment, you have to get the money from somewhere, and often the easiest place to get it is through the prisoner’s old criminal connections.

Today, bloodthirsty fundamentalists cannot force the death penalty for as long a list of crimes as they would like. But they can do the next best thing. They can make it nearly impossible for the criminal to ever change his or her life.

The way to force this interpretation out of the Bible is to studiously ignore all the passages, Old Testament and New, about forgiveness.

I will investigate yet another of Sparks’s links between fundamentalist religion and crime in the next essay.

The Danger from Christian Fundamentalists, part two.

I continue to explain some of my responses to Elicka Sparks’s book The Devil You Know.

Sparks claims there is a link between fundamentalism and a violent, crime-ridden society. What, exactly, is that link? Sparks points out components of the link. I will describe one of them here, and others in later essays.

The first link is this. From a fundamentalist viewpoint, Violence is frequently the godly thing to do. This principle contributes to a violent society in which crime is common.

The Bible, revered by fundamentalists, contains many very violent passages. Especially in the Old Testament, but also in the New, God commands violence, sometimes extreme forms of it. Sparks has page after page of Biblical quotes. When God led the Israelites to the Promised Land, as fundamentalists would say, or when the Israelites conquered it, as history would say, the Bible indicates that God commanded the Israelites to kill every man, woman, and child in the Canaanite cities, with a special emphasis on stabbing pregnant women to kill their fetuses. Except when, once in a while, God told the Israelites to take the young women for themselves, that is, the virgins who cannot possibly have evil fetuses in them. But there are also violent passages in the New Testament.

Some of these passages can be deeply disturbing. The prophet Isaiah (that is, one of the prophets by that name) predicted that God’s Army would utterly extinguish the Babylonians. One of the ways this would happen, according to chapter 13, verse 16: “Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses will be looted and their wives violated.”

It is not just during war that the Bible claims God commanded violence. The Old Testament also commands violence as part of normal jurisprudence. In Numbers chapter 5, a jealous husband can, without evidence, demand that his wife be subjected to a trial by ordeal to establish her guilt or innocence. She has to consume water containing dust from before the sacrificial altar—dust that may contain lots of bacteria, though they did not know this. It is referred to as “bitter water,” which may or may not refer to water that contains an abortifacient herbal extract. If the woman’s abdomen swells, and she has a miscarriage, then she was guilty. The intention was not to kill the woman, but of course this was a very great possibility. The main point, though, is that the woman may get sick or even die regardless of whether she had committed adultery or not: there is no connection between the outcome of the ordeal and the truth of the charge.

It is, as no one reading this essay will find surprising, extremely hypocritical for modern conservatives to claim that every embryo and fetus is precious when their Old Testament God commands a trial by ordeal in which an unborn baby is killed for the supposed sins of the mother or of the pagan society into which it might otherwise have been born.

The first link between conservative Christianity and crime, then, is this. Christians may say that God is love, but the Bible depicts a God who is at least sometimes very bloodthirsty. To the extent that Christianity influences our culture, then, it opens the collective national mind to violence as an option. Criminals know that violence is part of a Christian society, and as a result they feel free to embrace the option of violence. Violence is quickly and easily thinkable as a mode of social interaction, because violence is part of Who God Is.

Today, Trump Christians want us to go back to a frontier mentality of solving conflict through guns. And they can cite book, chapter, and verse to support this.

In the next essay, I will explore another link that Sparks makes between conservative Christianity and crime.

The Danger from Christian Fundamentalists, part one

The Devil You Know: The Surprising Link between Conservative Christianity and Crime was published in 2016 by Prometheus Books, which is also the publisher of two of my books. The author, Elicka Peterson Sparks, is a criminologist.

Her main point, as I interpret it, is that our American society is more violent and crime-ridden as a result of the influence of Christian fundamentalism than it would be under the influence of a more generalized humanitarian philosophy, whether founded in religion or not. She said that this significant negative influence of fundamentalism on society was occurring despite eight years of a progressive presidential administration. She could not have imagined that, with the election of Donald Trump, Christian fundamentalism would become the ruling force in America, which means that everything she said has become dangerously urgent.

I did not consider the link to be surprising. My own personal experiences with fundamentalism have long convinced me that Christian fundamentalists pick and choose the parts of the Bible they want to believe in order to oppress and destroy anyone who disagrees with them. I dared to teach about the science of evolution, from a Christian viewpoint, at a conservative church in 1982, only to have the fundamentalist members rise up and demand that I be silenced. They simply lied about what I said. The first two colleges at which I worked as a young faculty member were fundamentalist colleges—The King’s College in New York and Huntington College in Indiana—and in both places, quite literally, the Republican Party was God’s Presence on the Earth and God’s Work consisted of supporting the Republican Party. I never had the slightest doubt that Christian fundamentalists were powerful and dangerous. Eventually, I left conservative Christianity, largely because it was overwhelmingly populated by these negative, untruthful people. Fundamentalism, which has become more powerful over recent decades, picks and chooses the violent parts of the Bible and ignores the more positive parts.

Fundamentalists love, love, love the passages that prescribe violence and punishment. Atheists hate, hate, hate them and dismiss all religion as evil. Most of us, in between these extremes, see that the Bible was written during ancient times when slaughter was considered normal foreign policy, and when trial by ordeal was considered normal jurisprudence; and that we should dismiss those passages as outdated. We choose to focus on the positive and loving passages. In the Old Testament, we prefer to focus on passages such as Beat Your Swords into Plowshares and ignore the violent ones. In the New Testament, we prefer to dismiss the blood and gore of Revelation and focus on the Sermon on the Mount.

That is, in fact, what I do today. I am free to pick and choose the passages of the Bible I like because I consider the Bible to be a historical accumulation of mutually-contradictory writings, rather than a coherent Word of God. But here is what shocked me. I had been picking and choosing which parts of the Bible to believe even back when I was a fundamentalist. A true Bible Christian must believe that, at least in the past, God wanted His People to kill everyone who disagreed with them, and to subject women to trials by ordeal. I wasted years of my life trying to fit my humanist views into a fundamentalism that rejected them. I am now a Christian agnostic; but it appears that I have been for decades, without realizing it. It was something of a shock for me to discover that I have never really been a Bible Christian.

Maybe a generalized Christian humanism, one that is based on God Is Love, would make a society better. But this generalized Christianity is not fundamentalist Christianity.

A large part of Sparks’s book consists of long lists of Bible verses—not just references, but quotations—that condone violence. They are conveniently and alphabetically organized. It is difficult to plow through the Bible verses that Sparks assembles in her pages. But I did it, because these verses are, in fact, part of the Bible that I once revered as the Word of God.

Are Republicans the Only Legitimate American Citizens?

Republicans would not openly claim that they are the only American citizens. But this thought is lurking underneath the surface in their minds.

After the recent school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, a reporter interviewed a man, who claimed that “You can’t do anything about guns around here, because everyone has guns.”

Maybe every Republican has a gun, or lots of guns, but not every American has a gun. As a matter of fact, only about one in four Americans has a gun. This figure is based on dividing the number of guns by the number of people. Of course, there are a lot of children who do not own guns. So, it remains possible that all adult Republicans own guns. And some Democrats too.

“Everyone has guns” means that people who do not own guns are not part of “everyone,” that is, are not legitimate citizens of the United States.