Aug 26, 2022·edited Aug 26, 2022Liked by Kristin Du Mez
DeYoung and others saying similar things sound a lot like the white evangelical critique of MLK ( one of the very few people in living memory who deserves the label 'prophet') back during the civil rights era. On the surface their message is: "Can't we all just get along?" but the subtext is: "Can't we all just accept the status quo?"
Aug 25, 2022·edited Sep 2, 2022Liked by Kristin Du Mez
I'm still thankful for that sub-title. Today, I've read so many Christians who are remarking about how forgiving student debt is a horrible thing... I sigh and remind myself that being a Christian and taking Jesus, along with the biblical text seriously, are two very different things.
Thank you Kristen I’m 84 and have a lot to unlearn. I’m CRC and have given at least 10 copies to my friends of A Church Called Tov by Scott McKnight and nis daughter Laura Barringer. I didn’t believe that women could be in leadership and in submission to a fault. That lead to verbal abuse in my marriage. And then I became friends with a women who was at Calvin university studying to become a pastor. A lot has changed for me.
“ Perhaps what’s really going on is that those who chide prophets/“prophets” for their incessant “harping,” their “failure to love,” for being too negative or just not nice enough, are taking issue not so much with the tone, but with the criticism itself.”
And more specifically, to “take issue with” the criticism without actually addressing its substance, or even acknowledging it has substance. It is maddening to see that from whatever one calls such people over and over and over again.
Aug 26, 2022·edited Aug 26, 2022Liked by Kristin Du Mez
I am not sure whether the usual meaning of “nicer” would make a difference since part of the tribal reaction instinct is to distinguish friends from foes. This binary thinking is part and partial to blame for other issues as well. I also liked what you had to say with “…. here is that white evangelicals have worked hard to control their own narrative”. When researching material, for example, on Billy Graham there were few sources that were critical in the historical sense besides a great exposition by Marshal Frady in “Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness”. ( not to leave out works by Martin Marty and George Marsden ). Now may I add that Martin Marty implied we were lucky to have Graham since other fundamentalist were far more objectionable. Anyway, great article and keep writing.
BTW: Seth Andrews, The Thinking Atheist, has referenced you several times, in glowing terms, in his podcast of late.
" ... Then to side with truth is noble, when we share her wretched crust,
'Ere her cause bring fame and profit and 'tis prosperous to be just,
Then it is the brave man chooses while the coward stands aside
Doubting in his abject spirit 'til his Lord is crucified,
And the multitudes make virtue of the faith they once denied ..."
Just one of 18 stanzas of James Russell Lowell's 1848 poem The Present Crisis that I've found so prescient for our current reality, especially as regards prophets.
As you said - “I think it’s worth noting ... that I didn’t set out to write a book saying bad things about white evangelicals. I started the research more than 15 years ago, for the ... purpose of trying to understand what I was seeing in the proliferation of literature on Christian manhood that elevated aggression and a warrior ideal. I wanted to understand what that vision of masculinity had to do with evangelical views on foreign policy, and then I expanded that to domestic politics, and then I looked back across the decades to understand where this came from, and then I traced it up to the present to see what it had led to. When I started the research, I’d had no idea it would draw me into harrowing accounts of abuse in evangelical communities .... In the end, though, a book centering militant expressions of white evangelical masculinity is going to have a critical edge to it, particularly for anyone upset by rampant abuse and coverups, or concerned about the resiliency of American democracy and the rule of law.”
Thank you - Thank you.
For me this captures a good bit of the power & value of your book’s compelling & revealing message. I appreciate your book’s historical compilation of the social-political-economic information regarding the evolution (& maybe the devolution) of the evangelical movement.
It’s neither nice nor mean nor unChristian.
It’s the story told by the historical data.
This whole “not nice” silencing message immediately flashes me back to childhood. If you said something validly critical about someone especially an authority figure you got some version of “Hush child. That’s not nice. No back talk.”
Thanks for talking back by looking at the historical data.
I guess some people are having a hard time refuting that data as a significant part of the evolution of the evangelical movement.
Accusing you of not being nice seems like another way of trying to shut you down.
In fact, I think your writing is consistently quite measured, restrained & data driven (w/an occasional burst of spicy snark).
Thank you for writing about that KDY article, wouldn’t have noticed it otherwise. Helpful to keep track of pieces like that because it is an accurate sample of how the royal tribe in my denom (PCA) is representing dissenting voices. I don’t know that I’d call it a “beautiful” representation, but it certainly does represent the royal consciousness (a la Brueggeman) that bristles at any hint of criticism. I find KDY’s closing questions quite interesting. Based on a few of his articles this year, here’s my guess as to how he would answer some of those frank questions if he was really honest:
What am I quick to celebrate? White men in power.
What sort of people am I quick to criticize? Abuse advocates and abuse survivors, and anyone who criticizes my royal tribe.
What would I publicly defend? My power and position, patriarchy, royal consciousness
What things someone won’t dare to utter? I was wrong.
What things they won’t stop talking about? My right to make and police the rules of discourse that would question the royal consciousness.
I'm amazed at how many white evangliecals appear to have a near idolatrous adulation for Jordan Peterson who is hugley influenced by a missapropriation of Nietzche - the prophet of Doinysus against the Crucified. I find this as astonshing but as inevitable as the kow towing to Trump. It's all part of the cult of male disagreeableness.
Please spare me niceness. Tens of millions of white evangelical American men are not nice, and labelling them is important. I want my grandkids to know who the good guys are. In the 1930s, Germany was the most educated and most Christian nation in Europe, as not-nice Christians put millions of innocent people into the gas chambers. The DuMez subtitle is right on. Of course, not all evangelicals are not-nice. However, the nicenes or not-niceness of authors and reporters is not the issue. The real and present danger is the not-niceness of millions of white evangelical men and the not-nice white evangelical ministers who enable them. Maybe Jesus can say some nice things about them, as he would say nice things about people like Alex Jones. It's hard to imagine.
"Even more striking is that the focus here appears to be less on truth than on power."
These kinds of critiques of prophets are red herrings, distractions from the crimes revealed. Reminds me a bit of the tone policing that happens to people of color: Let's criticize the way you say things so we don't have to deal with what you said. --Kim
“Can’t you just be a little nicer?” is the parceled ‘reasonable’ operative response to a tribe’s prophet when the systemic injustice and corruption of its leaders has been laid bare – the status quo – in order to maintain its existing positions of power, with no intent for a more just and transparent redistribution of power.
The whole critique has a "can't you just smile more?" vibe!
DeYoung and others saying similar things sound a lot like the white evangelical critique of MLK ( one of the very few people in living memory who deserves the label 'prophet') back during the civil rights era. On the surface their message is: "Can't we all just get along?" but the subtext is: "Can't we all just accept the status quo?"
I'm still thankful for that sub-title. Today, I've read so many Christians who are remarking about how forgiving student debt is a horrible thing... I sigh and remind myself that being a Christian and taking Jesus, along with the biblical text seriously, are two very different things.
Thank you Kristen I’m 84 and have a lot to unlearn. I’m CRC and have given at least 10 copies to my friends of A Church Called Tov by Scott McKnight and nis daughter Laura Barringer. I didn’t believe that women could be in leadership and in submission to a fault. That lead to verbal abuse in my marriage. And then I became friends with a women who was at Calvin university studying to become a pastor. A lot has changed for me.
“ Perhaps what’s really going on is that those who chide prophets/“prophets” for their incessant “harping,” their “failure to love,” for being too negative or just not nice enough, are taking issue not so much with the tone, but with the criticism itself.”
And more specifically, to “take issue with” the criticism without actually addressing its substance, or even acknowledging it has substance. It is maddening to see that from whatever one calls such people over and over and over again.
I am not sure whether the usual meaning of “nicer” would make a difference since part of the tribal reaction instinct is to distinguish friends from foes. This binary thinking is part and partial to blame for other issues as well. I also liked what you had to say with “…. here is that white evangelicals have worked hard to control their own narrative”. When researching material, for example, on Billy Graham there were few sources that were critical in the historical sense besides a great exposition by Marshal Frady in “Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness”. ( not to leave out works by Martin Marty and George Marsden ). Now may I add that Martin Marty implied we were lucky to have Graham since other fundamentalist were far more objectionable. Anyway, great article and keep writing.
BTW: Seth Andrews, The Thinking Atheist, has referenced you several times, in glowing terms, in his podcast of late.
" ... Then to side with truth is noble, when we share her wretched crust,
'Ere her cause bring fame and profit and 'tis prosperous to be just,
Then it is the brave man chooses while the coward stands aside
Doubting in his abject spirit 'til his Lord is crucified,
And the multitudes make virtue of the faith they once denied ..."
Just one of 18 stanzas of James Russell Lowell's 1848 poem The Present Crisis that I've found so prescient for our current reality, especially as regards prophets.
As you said - “I think it’s worth noting ... that I didn’t set out to write a book saying bad things about white evangelicals. I started the research more than 15 years ago, for the ... purpose of trying to understand what I was seeing in the proliferation of literature on Christian manhood that elevated aggression and a warrior ideal. I wanted to understand what that vision of masculinity had to do with evangelical views on foreign policy, and then I expanded that to domestic politics, and then I looked back across the decades to understand where this came from, and then I traced it up to the present to see what it had led to. When I started the research, I’d had no idea it would draw me into harrowing accounts of abuse in evangelical communities .... In the end, though, a book centering militant expressions of white evangelical masculinity is going to have a critical edge to it, particularly for anyone upset by rampant abuse and coverups, or concerned about the resiliency of American democracy and the rule of law.”
Thank you - Thank you.
For me this captures a good bit of the power & value of your book’s compelling & revealing message. I appreciate your book’s historical compilation of the social-political-economic information regarding the evolution (& maybe the devolution) of the evangelical movement.
It’s neither nice nor mean nor unChristian.
It’s the story told by the historical data.
This whole “not nice” silencing message immediately flashes me back to childhood. If you said something validly critical about someone especially an authority figure you got some version of “Hush child. That’s not nice. No back talk.”
Thanks for talking back by looking at the historical data.
I guess some people are having a hard time refuting that data as a significant part of the evolution of the evangelical movement.
Accusing you of not being nice seems like another way of trying to shut you down.
In fact, I think your writing is consistently quite measured, restrained & data driven (w/an occasional burst of spicy snark).
Thank you. Looking forward to more.
Thank you for writing about that KDY article, wouldn’t have noticed it otherwise. Helpful to keep track of pieces like that because it is an accurate sample of how the royal tribe in my denom (PCA) is representing dissenting voices. I don’t know that I’d call it a “beautiful” representation, but it certainly does represent the royal consciousness (a la Brueggeman) that bristles at any hint of criticism. I find KDY’s closing questions quite interesting. Based on a few of his articles this year, here’s my guess as to how he would answer some of those frank questions if he was really honest:
What am I quick to celebrate? White men in power.
What sort of people am I quick to criticize? Abuse advocates and abuse survivors, and anyone who criticizes my royal tribe.
What would I publicly defend? My power and position, patriarchy, royal consciousness
What things someone won’t dare to utter? I was wrong.
What things they won’t stop talking about? My right to make and police the rules of discourse that would question the royal consciousness.
I really struggle to make sense out of DeYoung's writings... Vaugue and strong opinions and strange
attempts to weave Liz Cheney's loss with those who chronicle actions of the white Evangelical church?
Well written well said thank you
I'm amazed at how many white evangliecals appear to have a near idolatrous adulation for Jordan Peterson who is hugley influenced by a missapropriation of Nietzche - the prophet of Doinysus against the Crucified. I find this as astonshing but as inevitable as the kow towing to Trump. It's all part of the cult of male disagreeableness.
Please spare me niceness. Tens of millions of white evangelical American men are not nice, and labelling them is important. I want my grandkids to know who the good guys are. In the 1930s, Germany was the most educated and most Christian nation in Europe, as not-nice Christians put millions of innocent people into the gas chambers. The DuMez subtitle is right on. Of course, not all evangelicals are not-nice. However, the nicenes or not-niceness of authors and reporters is not the issue. The real and present danger is the not-niceness of millions of white evangelical men and the not-nice white evangelical ministers who enable them. Maybe Jesus can say some nice things about them, as he would say nice things about people like Alex Jones. It's hard to imagine.
"Even more striking is that the focus here appears to be less on truth than on power."
These kinds of critiques of prophets are red herrings, distractions from the crimes revealed. Reminds me a bit of the tone policing that happens to people of color: Let's criticize the way you say things so we don't have to deal with what you said. --Kim
“Can’t you just be a little nicer?” is the parceled ‘reasonable’ operative response to a tribe’s prophet when the systemic injustice and corruption of its leaders has been laid bare – the status quo – in order to maintain its existing positions of power, with no intent for a more just and transparent redistribution of power.