Another traditional Christian bumps up against Leftist attempts to "modernize" his church's teachings

And gets falsely called a Nazi for his pains. The fact that suppression of dissent really is Nazi is an irony that seems lost on his critics. Their authority is current Leftism, not the Bible. As Jesus said of the Pharisees, they are "whited sepulchres"

Note that when Turnipseed wrote "Here I stand", he was quoting "Hier stehe ich", a famous saying by Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms in 1521

Earlier this year, Ryan Turnipseed, a college student and devout Lutheran in Oklahoma with a modest following on Twitter, found himself on the brink of excommunication by his church.

In response to his stern criticisms of the church, Turnipseed was first denounced as a fascist by an outside party, then lumped in with a call to excommunicate fascists led by his church, and finally summoned for a meeting with church leaders where they informed him and his father that he was associating with evil. The scene was simultaneously old-fashioned, with its back-and-forth accusations of heresy and bitter struggles over the soul, and “very online,” very 2023.

The specter of Christian nationalism and other supposedly extremist right-wing ideologies festering inside middle American churches has become a focal point within the political culture as well as the national security establishment. In February, in the same period when Turnipseed was clashing with his church, a leaked document from the FBI showed that the agency’s Richmond, Virginia, office was using funds earmarked for domestic violent extremism to monitor “radical traditionalist Catholics.” The FBI retracted the memo after it was exposed by a whistleblower, but not before it revealed that the agency’s criteria for designating people as extremists was that they preferred to worship at the traditional Latin Mass. To critics, it seemed to show the federal government taking steps to criminalize religious traditionalism.

Yet rather than simply being an attack by the government on Christians, the case mirrored a conflict that is playing out within churches as well. Last February, in an interview with the progressive Center for American Progress, Amanda Tyler, a lawyer and the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, declared: “the single biggest threat to religious freedom in the United States today is Christian nationalism.”

On Jan. 21, Ryan Turnipseed stepped into this larger debate and made his stand—as one does in the age of online religious wars—by authoring a Twitter thread about the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod’s (LCMS) new edition of Luther’s Large Catechism.

Luther’s Large Catechism is the Lutheran doctrine outside of the Bible. Originally authored by Martin Luther, each section is broken down into explanations designed to help clergymen teach the Lutheran faith. It is foundational to Lutheranism—as vital to the faith as the catechism of the Catholic Church is to Catholicism. Turnipseed’s thread went softly viral, receiving just under 1,000 likes on a platform where the most viral tweets regularly reach tens or even hundreds of thousands of engagements.

Turnipseed’s central claims were that the LCMS’s new edition had gone so far in accommodating the dogmas of American political progressivism that the book undermined the faith entirely. In his thread, some of his complaints about the updated text were that it equivocated “homosexuality, pornography, sodomy, pedophilia, whorishness, and transgenderism with heterosexual fornication outside of sex”; “affirm[ed] the reality of transgenderism”; and contradicted scripture by “saying that Genesis is entirely separate from any ‘scientific’ theories.”

While there are a few places in Turnipseed’s thread where his judgments seem motivated by his own ideological concerns, his tone remains levelheaded. He’s stern, certainly, but there is no extremist language, no incitement to violence, and no name-calling. One gets the impression that he’s simply a conservative churchgoer who disagrees with changes being made and is deeply concerned. It’s the type of disagreement that is–or should be–par for the course whenever major changes are being made to a foundational religious document.

According to Turnipseed–and to LCMS President Matthew Harrison–he wasn’t the only person who raised objections about these changes. In a short piece published in a small publication called Christianity Today, other critics, like pastor and blogger Larry Beane and pastor David Ramirez, were also concerned that “some of the essays, which are not Lutheran doctrine, mishandled current issues like racial justice, human sexuality, and gun rights.”

On Jan. 23, two weeks after the updated Large Catechism’s release, President Harrison announced on Twitter that the LCMS would pause publication and distribution of the new catechism so he could evaluate the criticism they had received about the changes. Nine days later, the LCMS concluded that the changes would stay, and they would continue to distribute the updated version.

But here’s where the story takes a turn and enters the stage of national political drama. Harrison didn’t frame the controversy as a disagreement within the faith. Instead, Harrison presented it as something far more sinister. In a letter to the LCMS, he singled out the alt-right—an umbrella label used to describe various strands of neofascist and white nationalist ideology—for fomenting criticism against the new catechism and called for their excommunication.

In his letter, he wrote:

These “alt-right” individuals were at the genesis of a recent controversy surrounding essays accompanying a new publication of Luther’s Large Catechism. This group used that opportunity to produce not only scandalous attacks and widespread falsehoods but also to promote their own absolutist ideologies.

He called for a complete rejection of the alt-right, characterizing their views as “white supremacy, Nazism, pro-slavery, anti-interracial marriage, women as property, fascism, death for homosexuals, even genocide.”

Blaming the “alt-right” for the pushback against the church’s new directive didn’t sit well with Turnipseed. “Alt-right” is a very specific label, and a dated one at that. It’s not that no such movement has existed, but it’s often applied in a way that is deliberately vague and overly broad. In reality, “alt-right” describes a particular group of people that rose to national prominence during a particular moment in time that peaked in or around 2017. At worst, the label is a lazy smear against right-wingers. To evoke “alt-right,” in many situations, is to immediately shut down difficult conversations by associating conservatism with racially motivated violence.

Turnipseed discovered a week later that it wasn’t just that Harrison was condemning the “alt-right,” he was also condemning him personally. Shortly after Harrison’s letter was published, Turnipseed’s father received an email from a pastor stating that the church was concerned for his son’s physical and spiritual safety.....

Turnipseed defended his criticisms of the new catechism and summarized his problems with the condemnation of the alt-right in a blog post on the website Gab, a Twitter alternative that spun up during the 2016 elections after a particularly aggressive wave of suspensions that targeted users on the right and far right. In a post titled “Here I Stand,” Turnipseed laid out his views. Much of what Turnipseed describes in “Here I Stand” is unsurprising for a conservative Christian, and much of it would be sympathetic to moderate or progressive Christians as well.

But his coolly logical approach also reveals his commitment to a close reading of the Bible and of Lutheranism that places the historical foundations of the faith above the evolving moral concerns of the present.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-to-get-excommunicated-in-2023

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The truth about ‘affirmative action’

Lionel Shriver

I’ve never cared for the expression ‘affirmative action’, which puts a positive spin on a negative practice: naked, institutionalised racial discrimination – that is, real ‘systemic racism’, which was initiated in the United States long before the expression came into fashion. After all, following the Civil War, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the constitution were expressly added to establish equality under to law for Americans of all races, and a raft of Congressional civil rights legislation has since reinforced this colour-blind principle. Perhaps I risk sounding ungrateful. Still, now the Supreme Court has finally ruled that universities in the US are forbidden from admitting students on the basis of race, my knee-jerk response is: what took you so long?

I have a vivid memory of meeting my father at the university in Atlanta where he taught and strolling to our favourite ice cream parlour for a root-beer float. It was 1973, and I was 16. A certain two-wrongs-make-a-right administrative practice would in due course grow deep, tenacious roots in universities across the country, but this was early days for the novel initiative; it wasn’t yet writ in stone that if you were a liberal Democrat you embraced racial preferences in education, no questions asked. Not only was my Virginian father one of those liberal Democrats, but he’d been heavily involved in the civil rights movement, including marching with Martin Luther King, Jr and participating in numerous race-relations forums in North Carolina and Georgia. For a white guy, he’d got the T-shirt. Though our ideological paths would eventually diverge, as a teenager I followed closely in his political footsteps.

Our intellectual elite no longer believes in meritocracy

I remember that afternoon because it was the first time my father and I talked about ‘affirmative action’, a term I had only just learned. I knew that people like us opposed the Vietnam War and recycled our mayonnaise jars. But advocacy for this new notion that universities should lower their admissions standards for minority applicants, while rejecting white applicants with better grades and higher test scores who would otherwise have been admitted, was not yet mandatory for our kind. So my father and I were both still free to consider the policy on its merits, like people with the actual capacity for independent thought. I volunteered that I intuitively disliked the idea. It sounded like more racism to me, and it seemed fundamentally unfair. Himself having been a distinguished student, with a PhD from Harvard, my father concurred. Such a rigged system was clearly unjust, he said. It was unlikely to solve the problem of racial disparities in our country, and might make racial antagonisms even worse.

It won’t surprise you that my father soon changed his tune. One couldn’t be a card-carrying liberal in the US for the last 50 years and oppose affirmative action, especially in academia. Yet I have clung to that precious memory, because it confirms for me that my late father’s moral instincts were sound. As the chief justice put it in Thursday’s majority ruling, ‘Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.’

It won’t surprise you, either, that I have not changed my tune. Affirmative action struck me from the off as bureaucrats doing exactly what they were claiming to abolish. My feelings about this issue have grown as entrenched as the policy itself.

If American universities cared about exposing their charges to genuine diversity, they’d fill strict mathematical quotas for Republicans

No other programme has done more to perpetuate racism in the United States. Racial preferences in education have cast implicit doubt on the qualifications of minority professionals. Even black clients and patients have good reason to worry if a lawyer or doctor is black: does this person know what they’re doing? Did he or she only acquire qualifications through a kind of legalised cheating? Though that uneasiness is often unwarranted, a dubiety plagues even minority professionals who are stars in their fields. Racial preferences have internalised that same misgiving in minority students and graduates: would they have got into Harvard without help?

An institutionalised leg-up is implicitly condescending. By implication, blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans – but interestingly not ‘white adjacent’ Asians – are so educationally hopeless that they can only get into selective schools if we ask them to meet pathetic, bespoke requirements. The difference between the standardised test scores of black and Asian students admitted to Ivy League schools is hundreds of points. Once admitted, too, underqualified students are often not up to speed and can’t do the work, which doesn’t help anyone, least of all the students themselves. Poorly prepared students frequently end up dropping out of demanding programs in STEM subjects, for example, and opting instead for softball majors – or dropping out altogether.

Meanwhile, high-achieving Asian applicants, often from families who prioritise educational attainment and push their kids to sacrifice hanging out with friends for burning the midnight oil over textbooks, have been rewarded for their efforts with a slammed door. Harvard has been using insulting personal ratings on ‘positive personality’, ‘likeability’, and ‘courage’ to knock Asian applicants out of the running.

Previous mealy-mouthed rulings from the Supreme Court have disallowed the use of rigid racial quotas, while allowing universities to employ race as one of several factors in holistic analysis of individual applicants. In practice, however, race has been a clearly determinative factor. Despite varying rates of minority applications, the percentage of each race in a given freshman class in the Ivies has remained suspiciously constant. Selective US schools have been using mathematical racial quotas for decades, but desperation to disguise this fact explains why their admissions offices are notoriously secretive.

These shenanigans all genuflect to the God of ‘diversity’. Earlier SCOTUS rulings have accepted that racially rigged student bodies are a vital component of a rounded education. Supposedly, socialising with students from different backgrounds is edifying. While I don’t have any stats on campus fraternising at my fingertips, it’s unlikely that college students are any different than the rest of the American population, which still self-segregates up a storm. It’s awkward, right? But despite the prettily multicoloured friendship groups we now see on TV, most Americans gravitate socially to their own race. Chances are that college students do the same. Worse, in defiance of the hallowed diversity that justifies rejecting all those Asian applications with perfect SAT scores, some universities are establishing all-black dormitories and clubs, calling them ‘affinity groups’. So much for invigorating interactions with difference. Besides, the preponderance of minority entrants at Harvard are upper-middle-class to wealthy (meaning they conveniently pay full tuition); in a crucial economic sense, the students are largely the same.

With any luck, this is just the beginning of a jurisprudential revolution

If American universities cared about exposing their charges to genuine diversity, they’d fill strict mathematical quotas for Republicans, and applicants would get extra points for admitting on their admissions forms that they don’t believe in the ‘climate emergency’ or that they’re fans of Donald Trump. That would get sparks to fly in the classroom. Instead, administrators encourage a political monoculture, with the overwhelming majority of faculties self-identifying as left-wing.

According to the Pew Research Center, three-quarters of Americans agree with the Supreme Court and do not want race to be considered in university admissions. That includes majorities of all races. Most minority citizens want to be judged on their merits and not by the colours of their skin – hardly a radical preference, and good for them. Yet so imbedded is affirmative action in American higher education that many a cynic is certain that universities such as Harvard will continue to employ de facto racial quotas in admissions, even if the practice is now flagrantly against the law. It’s no little perplexing why the progressive educational complex has become so passionately attached to a mathematically inflexible version of virtue that has so many dreadful unintended consequences.

The direst, most long-term damage these warped, prejudicial practices have wrought is a gradual erosion of competence in the United States. Our intellectual elite no longer believes in meritocracy, and whole books are devoted to demolishing the concept. But what do we put in meritocracy’s place? Promotion through group membership, a racialised version of nepotism. Pursued for long enough, these policies encourage unearned entitlement, dishearten the hard working, and degrade a country’s capacity to do big things well.

I return to that gut impression I had back when I was 16. Affirmative action isn’t fair. It isn’t constitutional, and it isn’t American. I was unhappy about this court’s decision on abortion, so I’m greatly relieved to finally get my money’s worth from a conservative bench. With any luck, this is just the beginning of a jurisprudential revolution. Anti-meritocratic racial preferences are now rife in American corporations and in all levels of government. I want to see all racial preferences go. The better half of my much-missed father’s nature would yearn to see the back of them as well.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/the-truth-about-affirmative-action/?u

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Farage: my bank accounts closed with ‘no explanation’

Life appears pretty good for Nigel Farage right now. Winning awards for his TV show, enjoying the adoration of fans and scorning the opprobrium of Remainers everywhere. But it appears the reality isn’t so rosy for the former Ukip leader. Farage has taken to Twitter today to claim that ‘the establishment are trying to force me out of the UK by closing my bank accounts.’ In a lengthy six-minute statement, he says that his current bank account is being closed, despite no reason being given. He has since tried to open a new account at seven rival financial institutions but to no avail:

I have been with the same banking group since 1980. I’ve had my personal accounts with them since that date, and my business accounts right through the 1990s want to work in the City of London. In recent years too I’m with one of the subsidiaries of this big banking group, one with a very prestigious name, but I won’t name them just yet. I got a phone call a couple of months ago, to say ‘we are closing your accounts’, I asked why [but] no reason was given. I was told a letter would come, which would explain everything. The letter came through and simply said, we are closing your accounts, we want to finish it all by a date, which is around about now. I didn’t quite know what to make of it. I complained. I emailed the chairman, a lackey phoned me to say that it was a commercial decision, which I have to say, I don’t believe for a single moment. So I thought, well, there we are, I’ll have to go and find a different bank. I’ve been to six, no seven banks actually. Ask them all, could I have a personal and a business account? And the answer has been no.

The Brexiteer is yet to name the financial institution which has closed his existing account. However in 2019, the Times reported that Farage banked with Coutts, which has served the Queen and every member of the royal family since George IV. Mr S has asked Coutts – which is part of NatWest Group’s wealth management division – for confirmation as to whether they are the bank in question. The British government currently holds a 39 per cent stake in NatWest.

Mr S wonders if some of the more outlandish claims about Farage’s finances are to blame for his current predicament. One example is offered by Sir Chris Bryant, that purveyor of moral plaudits. He is still to apologise or retract his demonstrably false allegation that Farage received £548,573 from Russian state-funded media in one year. Luckily for Sir Chris, he made that claim on the floor of the House of Commons and therefore is immune from legal action.

Otherwise Nigel’s money claims might already be solved…

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/farage-my-bank-accounts-closed-with-no-explanation/

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Google Backs Down from 'Pride' Plans After Christian Employees Fight Back

Well, here’s the perfect end to the corporate “pride” month from hell: Even one of Silicon Valley’s wokest giants is being forced to back down in the face of backlash over an LGBT-centric event.

According to CNBC, Google is attempting to distance itself from a drag show that was supposed to cap off the rainbow-hued month of June after Christian employees claimed it discriminated against them.

The company is known to sponsor “pride” month events in its home base of San Francisco and other locales, both catering to employees and the public.

In this case, however, the final event — an official company event, originally — was a drag show at San Francisco gay bar, Beaux, this past Tuesday featuring “Peaches Christ,” described by CNBC as a “popular performer.”

You used to be able to say “only in San Francisco” to stuff like this, but this is probably Wednesday night in Idaho Falls these days.

However, a drag event at a gay bar — featuring a performer whose name is a pun on the Lord and Savior, if one is a Christian — didn’t go over swimmingly.

The outlet reported that “employees noticed the company removed the show from the internal company events page at around the same time a petition began circulating opposing the event, according to internal discussions viewed by CNBC.”

“A few hundred employees signed the petition opposing the drag performance, claiming it sexualizes and disrespects Christian co-workers and accused Google of religious discrimination, according to the petition viewed by CNBC.”

“Their provocative and inflammatory artistry is considered a direct affront to the religion beliefs and sensitivities of Christians,” the petition read.

“The petition states that organizers complained to People Operations, Google’s human resources department, and claimed the venue violates one of Google’s event guidelines, which bans sexuality explicit activity. The petition also demands an apology from organizers and promoters of the event.”

And suddenly, just like that, the drag show was sidelined in a major way.

Google spokesman Chris Pappas said in a statement to CNBC that the event had been planned by an internal team “without going through our standard events process,” because of course that’s what happened.

“While the event organizers have shifted the official team event onsite, the performance will go on at the planned venue — and it’s open to the public, so employees can still attend.”

However, Google confirmed that it would no longer recognize the event as one of the company’s official diversity, equity and inclusion events. It didn’t comment on whether or not the petition from the employees had anything to do with the action, although put two and two together here.

Naturally, CNBC noted that some of Google’s employees were critical of the company’s leadership for caving to the petitioners.

https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/google-backs-pride-plans-christian-employees-fight-back

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The diversity trap

If anyone reading this ever bought shares in the diversity racket, then I would suggest you start dumping them now. Not that I would blame you for having bought them in the first place. ‘Diversity’ has been the great mantra of our age. Like ‘equality’, it is one of those words set up to be impossible to oppose. What even is the opposite of diversity? Enforced sameness? Monotony? It is hard to say.

Nevertheless, everyone was encouraged to go along with the diversity racket. It didn’t matter who was in charge – Labour or the Conservatives. Diversity was said to be one of the defining virtues of Britain. Almost the aim of the place, in fact.

But as some of us pointed out way back, ‘diversity’ is not an unalloyed good. Not the least problem being the fact that diversity doesn’t even get along with itself. For years it has been the argument of the pro-diversity left that the more diversity you had, the more tolerance you would have – because diversity would somehow by its nature create more tolerance. But in fact not everybody in the diversity tent adores everyone else shoved in with them. The contradictions and tensions thrown up are legion.

Take just one of the tensions thrown up during this ancient and most holy month of ‘Pride’. The mayor of Keighley, Mohammed Nazam, resigned this week after being criticised for attending a Pride event. Photographs show the then mayor grinning with a bunch of other numpties holding the hideous new ‘progress’ Pride flag, with added triangles to encompass trans people.

This year’s flag is said by campaigners to be ‘the most inclusive ever’. Not for Mr Nazam it wasn’t. You might be able to guess why from Mr Nazam’s first name. Wiser readers may also know that the man after whom Mr Nazam is named was not wildly pro-gay.

There are no Hadith (the sayings of Mohammed) explaining what the original Mohammed thought of ‘non-binary’ people, but one can guess. Mohammed was in many ways a fan of binaries. He would likely not have been a fan of the Pride flag in any of its forms. And while there are interesting scholarly arguments about the exact designs of the flags that Mohammed and his armies carried into battle, scholars are in agreement that Mohammed did not smite his enemies while flying a rainbow flag of any kind.

So the mayor of Keighley came under a certain amount of pressure from the Mohammed-fanbase community, and in a Facebook post said that he should not have taken part in the ceremony. In fact he said he should have ‘respectfully declined’ the invitation to the Pride flag-raising because it ‘contradicts my religious beliefs’. He went on to describe his attendance as a ‘lapse in judgment’.

This in turn led to him being suspended by the Conservative group on Bradford Council. For Mr Nazam is in several senses a conservative. He subsequently quit as mayor, but not before issuing a second apology, this time saying that he ‘did not mean any harm to the LGBTQ community’.

Interestingly enough, similar cases on the other side of the Atlantic aren’t all leading to the same outcome. In Alberta, Muslim and Christian parents have come together to oppose the teaching of LGBTQ ideology in Canadian schools. Last week hundreds of parents gathered outside the city hall in Calgary to chant ‘Leave our kids alone’. So-called Liberal counter-protestors also gathered. One wonders if there was any cognitive dissonance as these ‘diversity’ protestors found themselves standing in a Canadian street screaming at a bunch of Muslims? Reportedly there was in fact a split in the local activist ‘queer’ community on this question. Some believed that opposing the protestors would be a defence of ‘queer’ rights, others felt it would be ‘racist’.

In Los Angeles things got a bit more heated, with parents protesting outside the largely Armenian school. Here parents were also saying that they did not want their children ‘groomed’ by the LGBTQ ideology being pushed in their school. And on this occasion some of the pro-diversity counter-protestors ended up getting into fist-fights with the diverse parents. Once again you have to wonder if the LGBTQ activists who were pummelling immigrant parents to the ground are absolutely sure that their ideas have brought them to the optimal place in life.

In one of the most Muslim-populated area of the US, in Michigan, parents are continuing a fight to withdraw their children from lessons on anything to do with sexuality or family life, while in Maryland hundreds of campaigners came out again this week demanding to remove their children from such lessons. As one Muslim commentator put it, supporting these parents: ‘As Muslims, we refuse to be coerced into believing something our faith categorically condemns. This is not a political stance. It is a moral principle.’

All of which adds up to a very fine old mess, about which there are a number of things to say. The first is that it should by now be abundantly clear that every letter after B in the LGBTQIA+ alphabet has made the argument for gay rights infinitely harder. In the hands of a new generation of activists the ‘live and let live’ argument has turned into ‘believe what I believe’ and ‘say what I say’. Meanwhile, the old argument that gays were just like anyone else has been replaced by the suggestion that LGBTQIA+ people are in fact practically a different species – people who must have their own flag and be celebrated or else.

Second, it should now be abundantly clear where part of this began going really wrong – which is the moment that gender-nonsense activists chose to target the children. To tell children that there was no such thing as biological sex. To pretend that we are made of Lego and can take parts off and put them on again at will. To replace biological reality with gender woo-woo.

One poll in the US this week showed that support for gay relationships is declining. I’m not surprised. When the shoe was put on the LGBTQIA+ foot certain people decided to indulge in a bit of good old kicking, in the name of diversity. Well, they should expect to be kicked back.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/the-diversity-trap-2/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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