Christian Right antigay attitudes: revenge of the small-town gossips?

Aimai offers an intriguing observation on the cultural roots of Christian Right antigay attitudes (Wrong, so very wrong. I Spy With My Little Eye 04/04/2015):

Providing a service to another person is a commercial transaction, not an endorsement. So why do evangelicals and their supporters keep insisting that it is? Because of a specific culture of busybody engagement. When the Pizza restaurant or the Baker sells a product to a gay person they are not, contra this guy, "lending" them anything. But the word is instructive--Evangelicals see engaging with, talking to, and selling things to gay people as "lending" support or "lending" one's good name to that person. I get it, it comes from an ethnotheory of small town religiosity in which everyone is implicated in everyone else's business. We are all damned or saved together--your bad behavior may drag me down, my upright virtue could elevate you. If we are seen together, or known to be associates, your evil rubs off on me and you are probably trying to take advantage of my good name. We are both providing "examples" to the community--yours bad, mine good. In this model failure to excoriate bad behavior, and failure of the evil ones to submit to instruction and punishment, is highly destructive, truly scary. No wonder these people are so hysterical--one gay marriage with catering, one floral arrangement--indicts the entire system of goodness, pollutes the entire community.

I think she's on to something there.

Fred Phelps, antigay hatemonger (1929-2014)

Antigay Christian fundamentalist jihadist Fred Phelps has died.

This WJTV report, Mississippi Born Pastor Fred Phelps Dies at 84 03/30/2014, says straightforwardly what Phelps' professed reason was for protesting at soldiers' funerals: "Phelps believed any misfortune, most infamously the deaths of American soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, was God's punishment for society's tolerance of homosexuality."

Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian reports on Phelps' career in Fred Phelps Nears Death - Shocking Surprises In His Hate-Filled Life The Young Turks 03/17/2014:

It's been revealing but not especially surprising that conservatives have tiptoed around that motivation, since most of them agree with the sentiment if not the protesting. This piece at the conservative Christianity Today website on How Should We Respond to the Tragic Death of Fred Phelps? talks about him as a promoter of hate - without mentioning against whom that hatred was most notoriously directed.

The conservative Christian Post has a more intriguing set of article on Phelps' death. Michael Gryboski report in Fred Phelps' Estranged Son Comments on Death, 'I Will Mourn His Passing' 03/21/2014 that his son Nate Phelps is critical of his late father's antigay theology. But he also points out that Nate is an atheist, something not likely to endear him to the Christian Post's main readership:

Since leaving the Westboro Baptist cult several years ago, Nate Phelps has been a strong proponent of atheism and an LGBT advocate.

In the statement, posted on the website Recovering From Religion, Nate Phelps said that he "will mourn his (father's) passing." ...

Via the RFR post, Nate Phelps also equated the controversial rhetoric of his father with pastors who are opposed same-sex marriage and do not condone homosexuality.

"The lessons of my father were not unique to him, nor will this be the last we hear of his words, which are echoed from pulpits as close as other churches in Topeka, Kansas, where WBC headquarters remain, and as far away as Uganda," said Phelps.

It's an interesting reportorial move: stating who Fred Phelps brand of hate was directed against, including the fact that other churches besides Westboro express very similar sentiments - but putting it into the mouth of someone identified as "a strong proponent of atheism and an LGBT advocate," both sinister things to Christian fundamentalists, and someone who rebelled against his father, also a particularly suspect quality to Christian fundamentalist advocates of their version of "family values."

And check out this CP headline: Westboro Baptist Church Founder and Civil Rights Attorney Fred Phelps Dies 03/20/2014, an article by Morgan Lee.

The Christian Post is a conservative web publication that publishes articles by Christian Right honchos like Richard Land, Al Mohler and Eric Metaxas and is also Pentecostal-friendly, i.e., they publish writers who take demon-possession literally. They provide a convoluted we-don't-like-him-but-don't-think-we're-siding-with-them-thar-gays approach to Phelps' death.

For the Christian Right, "civil rights attorney" has a double-reverse meaning: "civil rights" are Good for guns and for American Christian fundamentalists being relentless persecuted (but they don't mean by Jews because they love Israel!) but Evil when being claimed by LGBT sorts or by, you know, "inner city" people (which has nothing to do with race, not at all!). So see, we're criticizing Phelps for being bad, too, so don't say we didn't criticize him!! I think of this as double-reverse thinking, because when I try to follow out rightwing logic like this, it feels like my brain is bending back on itself.

Maybe worst of all, Phelps was a Democrat who supported Al Gore: "Phelps was closely tied with Kansas' Democratic Party, helping Al Gore's 1988 presidential campaign." Being a nominal Democrat does not mean someone is taking a liberal position; hardline rightwingers even now sometimes run for office as Democrats or claim to be Democrats. Cenk and Ana discuss this briefly in the video report above.

And there's this from Cenk and Ana from 2012, Fox News: Westboro Baptist Church is Left-Wing Cult 12/30/2012:

I was struck by this line: "The [Westboro Baptist] church also sees the 9/11 terrorist attacks as proof of God's judgment on the United States for allowing homosexuality and abortion."

This kind of judgment is not at all unusual among conservative Christian fundamentalists. Remember the classic comments of the Revs. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson just after the 9/11 attacks (Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson say immorality and anti-Christian groups should share in the blame for the Terrorist Attacks on America TruthorFiction.com, n/d, accessed 03/23/2014; Austin Carty, Jerry Falwell 9/11 Remarks: A Former Liberty University Student Reflects Huffington Post 09/13/2011):

Falwell said, "The ACLU has got to take a lot of blame for this. And I know I'll hear from them for this, but throwing God...successfully with the help of the federal court system ... throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools, the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked and when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad ... I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America ... I point the finger in their face and say you helped this happen."

Robertson said, "I totally concur, and the problem is we've adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government, and so we're responsible as a free society for what the top people do, and the top people, of course, is the court system."

Falwell added, "Pat, did you notice yesterday that the ACLU and all the Christ-haters, the People for the American Way, NOW, etc., were totally disregarded by the Democrats and the Republicans in both houses of Congress, as they went out on the steps and and called out to God in prayer and sang 'God bless America' and said, let the ACLU be hanged. In other words, when the nation is on its knees, the only normal and natural and spiritual thing to do is what we ought to be doing all the time, calling on God."

Another CP article goes into some detail to recall Phelps' reported civil rights background: Napp Nazworth, Before Fred Phelps Preached Hate, He Was a Civil Rights Hero 03/20/2014. Nazworth's reporting seems to be more straightforward journalism; but then, I haven't noticed the Christian Post holding to terribly high classical journalism standards. Still, it would seem that if Phelps had a serious personal commitment to defending African-American civil rights, his conversion to a far uglier perspective calls for some explanation. But neither of the two Christian Post articles I've cited here offers any kind of explanation.

And Nazworth's piece seems to be particularly intent on demonstrating what a dedicated advocate Phelps was for Those People. He quotes Phelps' son Nathan - who we know is "a strong proponent of atheism and an LGBT advocate" - saying that Old Man Phelps was a racist. He links to this article by Alex Hannaford, My father, the hate preacher: Nate Phelps on escaping Westboro Baptist Church The Telegraph 03/13/2013. Hannaford's report says:

"... [Fred Phelps] graduated with a law degree from a university in Kansas and fought various civil rights suits in the Sixties. According to local reports, he gained a reputation as a sharp, competent attorney "whose eloquent and fiery orations mesmerised juries". Two decades later, he received awards from the Greater Kansas City Chapter of Blacks in Government and a local branch of the human rights group the NAACP.

But Nate Phelps says the perception in some circles that his father was once this champion of civil rights, railing against discrimination, is laughable. "We would all call black people 'DNs' at home. It stood for Dumb N------ and was our private language," he says. “We thought it was clever to call them that in front of them. He was deeply prejudiced, and he believed the Bible said they were cursed.”

Nate says Fred Phelps saw an opportunity with the passing of the Civil Rights Act to cash in. "There was a lot of money, and a lot of opportunity," he says. "And suddenly my father was the man to go to." At the same time, Nate says, he and his siblings were being fed a distorted version of the Bible. "We were told we were the only people left on Earth; the only ones who were going to be saved." Nate says his father became an itinerant preacher, attempting to save Mormons in Utah and Native Americans in the south west, and believing that he was never going to die.

Nazworth cites the Telegraph report for Nathan's view. But he apparently got a statement directly from Shirley Phelps-Roper, who he identifies in the piece only as Fred Phelps daughter. By an earlier Christian Post article by Morgan Lee in The Christian Post, Live from Hell, Westboro Baptist Spokesperson Sings Church's Hate Messages in NYC Musical 10/08/2013, identifies Phelps-Roper more fully as "WBC [Westboro Baptist Church] spokesperson and daughter of WBC Pastor Fred Phelps."

His estranged son's word isn't necessarily definitive. But Nathan's version does explain the seeming conversion: there was money to be made in pursuing those lawsuits. And if you've got a white attorney that has, uh, old-fashioned attitudes about race but makes effective arguments in court, it wouldn't be surprising that his civil-rights clients were more concerned about his results than his private attitudes.

Nazworth also relies heavily on this article by Joe Taschler and Steve Fry, As a lawyer, Phelps was good in court The Capital-Journal 08/03/1994. And he approvingly cites the argument by Matthew Rozsa in The Creator Of Westboro Baptist Used to Be a Die-Hard Civil Rights Fighter — What Happened? 03/16/2014. Rozsa's argument, though, is a dubious pop-psychology speculation based on Eric Hoffer's general theory of fanaticism. None of the reporting I've seen on Fred Phelps' civil-rights work on behalf of African-American clients indicates that he was a fanatical believer in the cause of civil rights.

The antigay sentiment is a crucial organizing point and fundraising tool for the Christian Right. American Christian fundamentalists, with a few individual exceptions as always, agree both with Phelps' attitude that homosexuality is sinful as such and with his view that God collectively punishes the United States for legal sins like tolerating homosexuality.

It was his tactic of staging protests at soldiers' funerals that brought him the level of attention it did. I'm not sure how influential he was on the politics of antigay hatred; there's no shortage of Christian Right fundamentalists promoting that cause. But he attracted plenty of attention to his group (which probably functions as a cult) by the protests. And conservatives were able to instrumentalize those protests by ignoring the religious-ideological reason Phelps and Westboro gave (antigay hatred) and expressing outrage only at the seeming antiwar aspect (although it's not clear to me that Westboro was antiwar, as such). Rightwingers are wedded to notion that war critics are "hostile to soldiers" and Phelps gave them a way to promote that image. Although in the end it will only fool people who want to be fooled on that score.

The Patriot Guard Riders is the motorcycle group (club? gang?) that formed to block Westboro protesters. The front page of their website doesn't mention anything at all about Westboro, much less their Christian-fundamentalist antigay position they placed at the center of those protests. Their website says their purpose it to go to funerals of soldiers at the family's invitation to: "Shield the mourning family and their friends from interruptions created by any protestor [sic] or group of protestors [sic]."

God forbid that anyone might think the Patriot Guard Riders were on the same side as LGBT advocates or antiwar activists in objecting to protests at funerals of individual soldiers! Their "Our History" page does refer to "misguided religious zealots" doing the protesting. Quakers? Buddhists? Gosh, who could those "religious zealots" be and why might they be protesting?

Christian Right activists and writers find it awkward if not completely insupportable to straightforwardly take a stance against Fred Phelps and Westboro Baptist's antigay position. Because, for one thing, many Christian fundamentalist share the basic Westboro theology that homosexuality is evil and that God collectively punishes the United States for not repressing it more actively.

For another, they don't want to divide the political cause supporting antigay legislation. And the claim that Christian Rightists make that they only oppose "special rights" being granted to LGBT people is silly. Their attitudes toward anti-bullying programs and toward gays in the military illustrated that they don't just oppose "special rights," they support active antigay discrimination, even including encouraging violence against gays and lesbians.

Here's the endorsement that evangelical prince Franklin Graham gave to that manly-man Vladimir Putin, whose manly manliness American conservatives have been drooling over (see You'll Never Guess Who Loves Putin The Young Turks 03/19/2014) from an article in the March 2014 Decision Magazine, a publication of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Putin's Olympic Controversy 02/28/2014:

I have never heard Putin quote the Bible, but during his 2012 election campaign, he met with church leaders in Moscow and vowed to protect persecuted Christians around the world. That is one justification for his support of the Assad regime in Syria.

Syria, for all its problems, at least has a constitution that guarantees equal protection of citizens. Around the world, we have seen that this is essential where Christians are a minority and are not protected. The radicals in Syria want an Islamic constitution based on sharia law.

Christians have lived in Syria since the time of Christ. The Apostle Paul was on the road to Damascus when he met Christ. Christians in Syria know that if the radicals overthrow Assad, there will be widespread persecution and wholesale slaughter of Christians.

To be clear, I am not endorsing President Putin. To survive in the KGB and rise to power in Russia, you have to be tough. His enemies say he is ruthless. To some, he is a modern version of a czar. His personal life has its own controversies.

Isn’t it sad, though, that America’s own morality has fallen so far that on this issue—protecting children from any homosexual agenda or propaganda — Russia’s standard is higher than our own?

In my opinion, Putin is right on these issues. Obviously, he may be wrong about many things, but he has taken a stand to protect his nation’s children from the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda.

Our president and his attorney general have turned their backs on God and His standards, and many in the Congress are following the administration’s lead. This is shameful. [my emphasis]

Tags: franklin graham, fred phelps, gay rights, lgbt rights, westboro baptist

"¿Si y que?": a program about a gay and a lesbian couple and their parents

The Argentine TV series "Decisiones de vida" presented an episode in 2011 called "¿Si y que?" It's about a gay couple and a lesbian couple who are close friends. One of the women just became pregnant, and her parents, who don't know she's lesbian, come to visit. The show is both funny and sad. It's also a reminder that same-sex marriage is now legal in Argentina but clearly friendly to the reality of same-sex couples. It's available on YouTube in five parts (in Spanish):

Parte 1:



Parte 2:



Parte 3:



Parte 4:



Parte 5:



The lead actresses playing the female couple are Vanesa González and Laura Azcurra. They are currently starring together as sisters in the Argentine novela Lobo as Ana Linares and Julia Linares, respectively.

Tags: laura azcurra, lgbt rights, vanesa gonzález

New York's same-sex marriage law: progress in the midst of regression

We may have a Democratic President ready to cut "entitlements" and to practice Herbert Hoover economics in the face of the current replay of the Great Depression. But progressive ideas and attitudes are making headway in some areas simultaneously:

Geraldine Baum, New York Legislature passes gay marriage bill Los Angeles Times 06/25/2011

Esmé E. Deprez, New York Becomes Sixth State to Pass Gay-Marriage Law Business Week 06/25/2011

Despite the title The Nation gives her article, Not Exactly a Profile in Courage: New York Finally Passes Gay Marriage 06/24/2011, Nancy Goldstein emphasizes the importance of New York's action:

Make no mistake: this is a Big Deal. With the exception of Iowa, New York is the first state outside of the New England region to marry queers; it’s also the most populous. What a relief to end this embarrassing episode in history, when the Sodom and Gomorrah of the world lagged behind Catholic strongholds like Portugal, Mexico City, Spain, Argentina and Brazil in supporting marriage equality.

Heather, Gov. Cuomo Praises New York as Beacon for Social Justice After Passage of Gay Marriage Bill C&L 06/25/2011

To be more specific, years of activism by LGBT advocates are moving more and more states toward more rational and decent treatment of sexual orientation: Michael Barbaro, Behind N.Y. Gay Marriage, an Unlikely Mix of Forces New York Times 06/25/2011.

Cuomo seems to be using this issue to position himself for a Blue Dog Presidential run. Unlike the DLC approach of the early 1990s to be liberal on economic issues, in favor of high military budgets, and restrained on "culture war" issues, Cuomo seems to be positioning himself as liberal on "social issues" and notably deferential to Wall Street and big business. On Cuomo's New York Blue Dog act, see (Not) Talking Taxes in New York by Monica Potts The American Prospect 06/13/2011, espeically his anti-union posturing.

Obviously, not everyone is happy with New York's decision:

Anugrah Kumar, Gay Activists to Emulate NY Win in Other States Christian Post 06/25/2011:

"Despite today's vote, the people of New York recognize that marriage provides a strong foundation for a thriving society," the Rev. Jason McGuire, executive director of evangelical Christian group New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms, said in a statement Friday.

State senators who had chosen to "pursue their own agenda or the agenda of liberal activist groups" are overlooking the fact that 62 percent of Americans still believe that marriage is "one man, one woman, nothing else," he said.

Marriage "provides a strong foundation for a thriving society," but having more of it is bad?

Tags: lgbt rights

Having Jerry Brown as California's Attorney General does make a difference

From the state Attorney General's Web site: Attorney General Brown Urges California Supreme Court to Invalidate Proposition 8, 12/19/08. Prop 8, aka, Prop Hate, being the ban on same-sex marriages that passed by a narrow majority in November on a statewide vote following a dishonest campaign by supporters like America's-pastor wannabee, Rick Warren.

The state Attorney General's position require that he or she defend any state law that has been properly enacted, unless there is a compelling legal reason not to do so. Brown argues in the brief he filed with the state Supreme Court that the law violates fundamental guarantees of personal freedom guaranteed by the state constitution. His brief against Proposition Hate is available online. See also Memorandum for more references on this story.

The brief for the Yes on 8 campaign was filed by another world-famous person, Pepperdine University Dean Kenneth Starr. Yes, that Kenneth Starr, who is to legal ethics what FOX News is to journalism. See Brown asks state high court to overturn Prop. 8 by Bob Egelko San Francisco Chronicle 12/20/08; Ken Starr Is Coming After Your Marriage by Robert in Monterey, Calitics 12/19/08.

Jerry Brown in his younger years spent several years in a Jesuit seminary studying to become a priest. If Rick Warren puts his foot in his mouth seriously enough the next few weeks so that Obama has to cut him loose the way he did Wesley Clark (for no good reason in Clark's case), he can ask Brown to come give the inaugural invocation.

Tags: jerry brown, lgbt rights, proposition 8, proposition hate

Compromising with Christianists

Rick Warren: aspires to be America's pastor - says gays and lesbians are like child-molesters and practitioners of incest - thinks Jews are going to Hail

Glenn Greenwald puts the Warren invocation flap in the larger context of continuing Democratic efforts to placate the "culture warriors", efforts that continue to fail: How new is Obama's New Politics? Salon 12/19/08. He scratches his head over the notion that Democratic efforts to conciliate hardline rightwing Republicans are hardly something new under the sun. "When have Democrats not been eager to accommodate the Right, to sacrifice their ideological beliefs and partisan goals in pursuit of post-partisan harmony, to jettison the 'Left' in order to attract the Mythical, Glorious Center?" he asks.

And he highly recommends two posts, Obama's Divisive Choice of Rick Warren by Michelle Goldberg Religion Dispatches 12/18/08 and This Will Be My Last Post On This, So Help Me Flying Spaghetti Monster by John Cole, Balloon Juice blog 12/18/08.

Michelle's article covers some of the same ground I did in my previous post, raising the question of just how it is that people make Warren out to be a "moderate" when his stated positions and his nasty rhetoric on abortion and LGBT issues make him sound like standard-issue Christian Right. If someone thinks you're working for the Devil, they're probably not eager to compromise with you or even soft pedal their attacks on you.

John's post is focused on pointing out that, whatever the problems of spotlighting Rick Warren, it has to be judged against Obama's record of support for LGBT rights. (I'm not much a language vanguardist, so "LGBT" still seems like an awkward construction to me. Especially since when it's articulated verbally as "lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender", it sounds like something out of a legal brief. But "LGBT" is becoming common, so I guess I'll adapt. "Christianists" wasn't part of my vocabulary either until a couple of years ago.)

One of Warren's weirder comments recently was saying that adherents of the Christian "social gospel" are pretty much just dirty Commies: Rick Warren: Social Gospel & "Marxism in Christian Clothing" by Steve Waldman, BeliefNet 12/15/98 (a date attached to a BeliefNet article - it's a miracle!)

This is nothing new, at least not among Fundis. Today's Christian Right can trace much of their ideology back to characters like Billy James Hargis and the John Birch Society that were notable presences on the far right in the 1950s and early 1960s. But then adherents of such notions were generally understood to be far right, not mainstream Republican Party ideology. Add in segregationist outlooks - the "hate crimes" legislation Warren so much opposes along with the rest of his bretheren and sisteren was known as "anti-lynching" legislator in the 1940s and 1950s when their spiritual ancestors also opposed it. Mix with Christian Zionism, a British import from the 19th century, and you've got today's Christian Right. And Rick Warren.

It's also nothing new for Fundis to demand that even their nastiest political stances and their kookiest theological beliefs be taken seriously when they are articulated by someone who can string two or three sentences together without obvious grammatical mistakes.

But at some basic level, respect also involves looking at how a leader like Warren describes his own beliefs and goals and not just declare him a respectable "moderate" just because he looks okay when he smiles for the camera.

Given the, uh, very generous way in which the Republicans these days use labels like "socialist", "Marxist", "pals around with terrorists", etc., it's worth asking just who rightwingers are talking about when they use one of those labels. Tom DeLay during the campaign on cable news told us that Obama was a "Marxist-Leninist".

Steve Waldman in the article linked above talks about some specific advocates of Social Gospel Christianity, which he apparently understands as including "liberation theology", which itself is quite a stretch. The Social Gospel by that name was a religiously-inspired, Protestant movement of social reform around the start of the 20th century. It was epitomized popularly by the novel What Would Jesus Do?

The Web site for Bill Moyers' NOW talks about three of the early leaders of this variety of the American Social Gospel movement:

The READER'S COMPANION TO AMERICAN HISTORY mentions three leaders of the Social Gospel movement: Washington Gladden, who "sympathized with workers and urged them to seek unity in Christianity," William Dwight Porter Bliss, who worked with the Knights of Labor and Socialist party, and Walter Rauschenbusch, a New York City Baptist minister who "called for a democratic cooperative society to be achieved by nonviolent means."

The Socialist Party? Surely that makes Bliss a Marxist, right? Not necessarily. Bliss was an adherent of "Christian socialism", which Answers.com describes as follows:

This doctrine—which grows out of the adherents' Christianity, so that the term is more specific than merely indicating those socialists who also happen to be Christian — attempts to relate the teachings of Christ (as for instance given in the Sermon on the Mount) with the political practice of socialism. In Britain Christian socialism was a mainly nineteenth-century movement, associated both with the High Church revival and its attempts to spread Christianity into the working classes and also with the growth of Nonconformism, especially Methodism, which placed importance on its social ministry. Many Labour politicians in Britain argued that their party owed more to Methodism than to Marx. Christian socialist thinking favoured alternatives to capitalism in such ideas as co-operatives, and stressed the importance of industrial reconciliation and justice between workers and owners, the moral responsibilities of the better-off towards the poor, and the importance of public education. The Christian socialist strand in the leadership of the Labour Party was boosted on Tony Blair's accession to the leadership.

Post-war Christian Democratic parties in Europe are not a variant of Christian socialism but represent a version of conservatism which accommodates (mainly Catholic) social doctrine. The Christian Social Union in Bavaria [Germany] is Christian Democrat, not Christian Socialist. [my emphasis]

In other words, if you're using "Marxist" as something other than a pejorative, we would have to say that if there were any Marxists among the Social Gospel movement in America or England, they were the exception rather than the rule.

For anyone who actually cares about history, Marxism was associated with atheism and/or hostility to church authority, including in Marx's native Germany. The Catholic Church in the 19th century was generally hostile toward the workers movement and their parties. And generally speaking, pro-democracy movements in Europe and Latin America adhered with various degrees of enthusiasm to the classical liberal goal of the separation of church and state. This meant that there was and to some extent still is in those areas an "anticlerical" strain of political thought that has really not been that significant in American politics or political ideologies. I saw someone say that it's difficult for anyone who hasn't experienced an established state church to understand "anticlercialism".

In the 20th century, Communist regimes have been officially atheist, practicing various degrees of tolerance (or lack thereof) toward Christian churches, depending on the place and time.

But for all that, Karl Marx's political, social and economic theories don't require the embrace of atheism. I don't think there have ever been a lot of people describing themselves as Christian Marxists, and certainly most adherents of the Social Gospel in the US were not among them. But Marx's own atheism came from his grounding in philosophical materialism. Ironically, one of the stock Cold War accusations that Westerners made against the Soviet Communists was that the Soviets were materialists. That was meant in the sense of "Godless Communism".

In the colloquial sense of "materialism", as in excessive consumption and greed for money and stuff, of course, the material abundance of the West was used as an argument for the virtues of democracy and capitalism. And, outside the "prosperity gospel" variant, it's a general value in American Christianity that materialism in the greed-for-stuff sense is a failing of our society, even a great problem.

Also, one problem of Warren's vague slam at the "social gospel" as "Marxist" is that in the controversy between conservative Vatican officials and the liberation theologians like Gustavo Gutierrez, Leonardo Boff and Jon Sobrino, their alleged taint from Marxist philosophical materialism was one of the Vatican's accusations against them.

But I'm guessing from his other comments in the same interview with Waldman that Warren wasn't thinking much about philosophical or theological issues. He was just tossing out a typical Fundi/Bircher type insult.

Waldman should have pressed Warren himself more on who he meant to be calling "closet Marxists". Did he have some real point? Or was he just tossing out a sleazy insult?

If our news media are going to annoint Rick Warren as "America's pastor", then people interviewing him should pin him down more specifically on Bircher-sounding comments like that.
Tags: christian right, christianism, lgbt rights, rick warren