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.

News from France!

“A 19-year-old French youth who was shot in the head after a banal road dispute over right-of-way was pronounced dead in hospital on Wednesday. A suspect has now been charged with his murder…The 19-year-old youth was left fighting for his life after being gunned down on Sunday night near the town of Giffaumont in north-eastern France.”

Wow! They have road rage shootings in France! This makes America not look so bad…

Except that this report was from 2013. This was the only case of French road rage I could find by searching online.

Meanwhile, I was searching online for more information about a road rage shooting in Dallas about which one of my botany majors had told me. A friend of her husband had cut in front of another driver in an ill-advised attempt to take an exit. The driver who got cut off followed him around through Dallas until pulling up next to him at a stoplight. The road rage driver then took out a gun and shot holes in the side of the first man’s car. My student confirmed that this incident went unreported. The only road rage incidents that were reported were those that involved bloodshed, including murder, about five of them in Dallas just in the second half of 2017.

And you wonder why the Europeans think we are crazy? Is this what a “Christian country” is supposed to look like?