Category: Religion

Bad Christianity, Worse Atheism

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“Especially important is the warning to avoid conversations with the demon. . . . He is a liar. The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien, and powerful. So don’t listen to him. Remember that — do not listen.”
— The Exorcist (1973)

“Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.”
— Romans 1:29-32 (KJV)

It bothers me only a little to admit that a lot of modern Christian writing is wretched and unhelpful when it comes to relationships. The Gospel of Niceness, as I call it, tends to produce a saccharine G-rated rhetoric that isn’t much help to people dealing with the unmitigated horrors of modern life. There are people out there traumatized by what they’ve lived through and terrified by the world around them, and the saccharine G-rated Gospel of Niceness does not speak in a language that all these hopelessly broken people can understand.

What happens, not surprisingly, is that these broken people reject Christianity because (a) the church isn’t talking to them in a language that helps, and (b) the sin-filled world talks to them in a language they understand, even if it doesn’t actually help. All of this is preamble to one of the most Satanic tales I’ve encountered during my research into radical feminism. (You have bought a copy of my book, right?) What happened was that I was searching for “heteronormativity” and found “When heteronormativity means there are no other options”:

When you’re growing up in conservative Christian purity culture, your relationship options are limited. True, there are a variety of beliefs on the rules for relationships; some communities reinforce courtship, others have very stringent rules about what is acceptable behavior at different stages of relationships. But within those muddy waters of relationship rules, purity culture has the same constant: save sex for your heterosexual marriage, and marry for life.
The ideal relationship is something you’re supposed to strive for. The image of a beautiful heterosexual couple, smiling and in love, telling their story of first romance, first kisses till death do they part, is a powerful one. That’s the success story. If you can find romance once, only “give your heart away” once, and for a lifetime, you have won the game.
And while this idealized image doesn’t have the same high standards in the rest of American culture, it still exists: heterosexual marriage, for life, is one of the marks of adulthood, of success and maturity. …
When I was a Christian, I was the kind of repressed queer person that didn’t allow myself any other options. . . .

Hmmm. Check the sidebar profile:

This blog has a generalized trigger warning for discussions of sexual, physical, mental, and spiritual abuse.
Tor is a queer apostate survivor of abuse.
Pronouns are “they/them”
They live in Oregon, and are currently working on a book about their experiences with abuse, Christianity, and their dealings with trauma.

“They” is actually a she, but this is a minor quibble, because up there on the top bar of her blog is “My Story,” and a thoroughly horrifying story it is. “Generalized trigger warning,” indeed. There is just no way the G-rated saccharine Gospel of Niceness can address Tor’s life experience.

She describes being raped at age 9 by her brother who was then 15. This brother subsequently was prosecuted for another sex crime (he is a registered sex offender) and, because of the hostility between Tor and her brother, Tor is alienated from her family, to say nothing of Tor’s queer apostasy. Here, go read this part of Tor’s story. (“Generalized trigger warning.”) You’re going to need something a whole lot stronger than the Gospel of Niceness to help somebody like Tor.

The passage from Paul’s epistle to the Romans quoted at the top of this post is part of a longer sequence that is most famous for verses 26-27, but I like the way it concludes in verses 29-32 because there, tucked away amid that grocery list of heinous evil is “disobedient to parents.” Sometimes I point that out to my kids, when I need to remind them that they are also Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.

The Gospel of Niceness too seldom reminds kids of that, as if kids are too stupid to look around them and notice the evil that other kids do. Or to look in the mirror and recognize that, yes, they are sinners, too. Because I was a notoriously bad kid — in the old days, before “self-esteem,” teachers didn’t mince words about bad kids like me — I was never under any illusion about my sinful condition. I was a natural-born “behavior problem” if ever there was one. Thank God they hadn’t come up with the diagnosis ADHD back then, or I’d have been doped up on Ritalin by age 4. As it was, paddling was the main form of “therapy” administered by the education system, and I know I thoroughly deserved every one.

Anyway, I was reading another post of Tor’s called “The demon of demon paranoia,” in which she scornfully dismisses a pastor:

I define my childhood religion as a bit of Baptist legalism, mixed with Penecostal Holy Spiritism, a smattering of evangelical culture, all under the belief that God is some kind of magical genie who directs and takes care of every little thing we do.
When we moved up to the area we live now, we started attending a nearby Foursquare church. The pastor was an arrogant, hard preacher . . .
His biggest hang up was demons. I first heard of Frank Peretti’s book This Present Darkness from him, and he considered the book Biblical. He had pamphlets on the demonic in the church office; he spoke out against the evils of Halloween and trick-or-treating. My mom already had some fear of demons being everywhere, had already stopped letting my brothers go trick-or-treating the year I was two, and she very easily was sucked into this pastor’s paranoia.

Evil is real, Tor. You might not like the way this “arrogant, hard preacher” dwelled on the subject of demons, but certainly you cannot deny that evil is real. And ask yourself this: Considering what you went through in your childhood, was your mother’s “fear of demons being everywhere” irrational? Was it not the case that there was evil in your home? And isn’t it possible that, providentially, God sent this preacher to your community to warn about demons that were actually there?

People laugh at me for believing in the reality of evil, but I’ve seen evil with my own eyes. Sure, maybe you don’t believe that evil is supernatural. Maybe you can explain all the evil in the world according to “science so called,” but am I the only one who notices that certain biblical prophecies about the proliferation of evil seem to be coming true in the 21st century? There are no accidents, Tor. It wasn’t an accident that I found your blog, and read your description of your condition:

You know what? I am a sexual abuse victim. Of course things suck. Of course everything is hard, and nothing is right.  . . .
But you know what? I don’t owe the world my healing. I don’t owe it to anyone to make them feel better about what happened to me. . . .
I’m fucked up. I’m self-destructive, I’m fearful . . .On the days when God still gets back into my head I look at how perfectly everything lined up for my destruction and think God wants me to die. I’m fucked up to a level I don’t even talk about. I have coping mechanisms I have never heard anyone ever talk about. And maybe they’re like me; too shameful to talk about. Or maybe it’s me; alone in this sea of oh my god how fucked up am I.

No, you’re not alone, but God doesn’t want you to die, either. While it would be presumptuous for me to claim to know what God wants for your life, the fact that you wrote that in 2011 and are still alive today tells me that you are alive for a reason. There are no accidents, Tor. Whom God would destroy, no man can save; whom God would save, no man can destroy. Therefore, your existence — even as a self-declared “queer apostate” — must serve some purpose in the divine plan, if only to wake up those Christians who think the Gospel of Niceness is sufficient to help someone who is “fucked up to a level I don’t even talk about.”

When you notice the trackback to your blog and read what I’ve written, you’ll probably hate me, Tor, and that’s OK. But let me ask you, what do you think the odds were that (a) I’d be crazy enough to write a book on radical feminism, (b) that this research would lead me to your blog by searching for “heteronormativity” and (c) rather than dismissing you as just another crazy feminist, I’d actually take time to read your story and recognize your unique value? The odds against this sequence of events have got to be a million-to-one, but it happened.

There are no accidents, God exists and, yes, evil is very real. Here’s the end of your post about demons:

I still am afraid of mirrors (mostly when it’s dark), I still see silhouettes when my sleep schedule gets too erratic. I still have nights where I’m awake for hours with the most horrible sense of my own guilt, afraid that demons have taken hold of me, and God hates me, and I am the worst sinner in the world. Fear pervades my life, I live under the weight of nightmares, flashbacks, and body memories, and a constant sense of foreboding, all because of this. Those are my “demons” now.

Let me repeat something I wrote in January:

Satan is the Father of Lies (John 8:43-45). Satan is the false accuser (Revelation 12:9-11). Satan constantly tells us lies about ourselves and lies about God. If you listen to that satanic voice, you will drive yourself crazy, because the lies are contradictory. Satan will tell you whatever you want to believe, whatever it takes to destroy you. Satan will tell you that your sins are so wicked that God cannot possibly love you. Then Satan will tell you there is no such thing as sin. Satan will tell you that good is evil, and evil is good, and that you should do evil because that will make you happier than doing good. Most of all, Satan tells us to reject God’s law, to instead make our own judgment of right and wrong.
This was the original lie of history: “Ye shall be as gods!”

Satan hasn’t changed at all. It’s still the same old lies — the demonic voice of the false accuser who wants to destroy us.

You survived, Tor. You survived for a reason. The voice in your head telling you that God hates you? Don’t listen to that voice.

 

Not Making This Up

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Child killer Polly Chowdhury (left) and her lesbian lover Kiki Muddar (right)

A crime story that has everything:

A Muslim lesbian was today found guilty of torturing her eight-year-old daughter to death with the help of her vampire-obsessed lover.
Polly Chowdhury, 35, became convinced Ayesha Ali was ‘possessed’ and that she needed to be ‘punished’ because of a fantasy world created on Facebook by her twisted girlfriend.
Chowdhury was ‘groomed’ by 43-year-old Kiki Muddar, who invented 15 fictional characters, including a Muslim spirit called Skyman and a paranormal lover called ‘Jimmy’, to control her partner.
She had seduced neighbour Chowdhury and split up her marriage, before sending thousands of messages from alter egos to convince her lover to play out sexual fantasies and torture Ayesha.
Muddar was also obsessed with vampires and Ayesha’s mother agreed to bite her daughter’s back as part of the depraved attacks that led to her death in Chadwell Heath, Essex, in August 2013. . . .
Afsal Ali described his former spouse as ‘the perfect mother’ who had a ‘good heart’ and ‘put other people before herself’.
Muddar would cause arguments in the family home and his wife became ‘completely unrecognisable.’
Soon no family decisions could be made without Chowdury consulting Muddar, who had become her love.
‘It was like she was possessed,’ her husband said.

Somewhere, a Women’s Studies major is trying to figure out how to blame this crime on the heteronormative patriarchy.

 

The Motives of Moody Loners

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Last month’s shooting in Chapel Hill, N.C., sparked a raging online argument over whether it was (a) an anti-Muslim hate crime or (b) a dispute over a parking space. The insistence that the motive for the crime was either one or the other omits the possibility that it was (c) both or (d) neither. The victims — Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19, her sister Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, 21, and the older sister’s husband Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23 — were all Muslims. The shooter, Craig Stephen Hicks, 46, expressed his enthusiasms online:

On his Facebook page, Craig Hicks had a huge and revealing list of “Likes” that shows him much more preoccupied with Christianity than with Islam. He does post a chart likening “Radical Christians” to “Radical Muslims,” but that is about the extent of his mentioning of Islam at all. He likes the atheists Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Bill Maher, all of whom have criticized Islam, but his page includes none of their statements about Islam. He likes many anti-Christian groups but no groups that are critical of Islam, and he even likes a group praising Obama for supporting the Ground Zero Mosque.

On Facebook, Hicks criticized Rick Santorum and supported the Southern Poverty Law Center so that, as Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch said, “Hicks is hardly the right-wing anti-Muslim Islamophobic redneck” liberals imagined. Jonathan Katz of the New York Times has commendably done more reporting:

A motive for the shooting may never be known. But interviews with more than a dozen of the victims’ friends and family members, lawyers, police officers and others make two central points: Before the shootings, the students took concerted steps to appease a menacing neighbor, and none were parked that day in a way that would have set off an incident involving their cars.
If those accounts do not prove what kind of malice was in Mr. Hicks’s heart, the details that emerge indicate that whatever happened almost certainly was not a simple dispute over parking. . . .
The contrast between the paunchy, balding Mr. Hicks and the rest of the [condominium] complex’s residents was stark. Many were aspiring professionals and academics at a premier public university. Mr. Hicks was unemployed, taking night classes at a community college in hopes of becoming a paralegal. He spent long hours in his apartment with a collection of at least a dozen guns, including four pistols and a Bushmaster AR-15. Mrs. Hicks told her lawyer that Mr. Hicks would stare out the second-floor window, obsessing over neighbors’ parties, patterns and parking. . . .
The neighbors’ relationship became testier when Ms. Abu-Salha started spending time at the apartment after the engagement, said Mr. Barakat’s former roommate, Imad Ahmad. In October, Mr. Hicks came knocking while they were cleaning up from a dinner party where they had played the board game Risk. He growled that they had woken up his wife, lifting his shirt to reveal a holstered gun. The students did not call the police, but there was little the authorities could have done if they had. Mr. Hicks had a concealed-carry permit. . . .
On Feb. 5, Mr. Hicks got more bad news: A judge had ordered a March 19 hearing over $14,189.54 in unpaid child support to his first wife, according to court records. . . .
He was undeniably obsessed with parking. Each unit got permits for up to two cars, but only one assigned spot. Building 20 had 13 spaces. Mr. Barakat and Ms. Abu-Salha were assigned space 20B. The next, 20C, belonged to Mrs. Hicks. Five spaces in the middle were unassigned and could be used for extra cars. Drivers also regularly parked on the side street.
The housing association allowed residents to have improperly parked cars towed. But Mr. Hicks abused this power until the housing association asked him to stop, his wife’s lawyer said. According to a police search warrant, he kept “pictures and detailed notes on parking activity” on his computer. . . .

You can read the whole thing, but it seems to me the conclusion is obvious: No, this “was not a simple dispute over parking,” but neither was it what we usually think of as a “hate crime.”

This was a classic Moody Loner crime. Every so often in a nation of more than 300 million people, these things happen. There are lots of disgruntled kooks out there, and it is usually not easy to predict when of them is about to commit a heinous act of violence.

About 10% of Americans are afflicted with mood disorders (depression or bipolar disorder), 18% have anxiety disorder, 10% have personality disorders and 7% have substance abuse problems. There’s some overlap between these categories, so that about 25% of Americans suffer some form of mental illness, and we can’t afford to lock all of them into lunatic asylums. It’s only after one of these Moody Loner types commits an atrocity that people (many of whom are themselves not entirely sane) jump to conclusions about the killer’s motives. In the Internet Age, tribal instinct expresses itself in a mob mentality where liberals try to pin the blame on right-wingers and vice-versa, but as the case of Craig Hicks shows, craziness is not so neatly partisan.

Have we seen this before? Sure, lots of times.

Elliot Rodger’s Isla Vista murder spree became a cultural Rashomon last year, with feminists insisting that the Creepy Little Weirdo proved something about violent misogyny. Perhaps so, but it mainly proved something about Creepy Little Weirdos. Last June, I quoted  Daphne Patai’s 1998 book Heterophobia:

The sociologist Joel Best, in explaining how a social problem comes to prominence through the work of individuals who expand its definition and find ever more instances of it, labels this procedure the “just another example of X strategy” — where  “X” is the problem that is being dramatized. Thus, he contends, the “domain” of the identified problem “expands,” as greater and greater claims are made for the problem’s pervasiveness.

In other words, when academics or journalists develop a sensitivity to something identified as a social problem — whether it’s “Islamophobia” or “rape culture” — they are always looking for examples of that problem. And this is where the overwhelming liberal bias of academia and media becomes a social problem of its own. Studies have shown that Democrats outnumber Republican at least 4-to-1 in newsrooms and university faculties, and this lopsided partisanship (which is certainly not accidental) yields compound interest over time.

Liberal hegemony in these influential institutions discourages conservatives from pursuing careers in academia or journalism, so that liberals within those institutions usually come to believe that All The Smart People agree with them.

If every textbook is edited by a liberal, if all newspapers are edited by liberals, if every major TV network news broadcast is produced by liberals, there is no reason for any liberal ever to doubt the correctness of his worldview. Therefore, the pet obsessions of liberals — e.g., the concern that Muslims are at risk of “Islamophobia” — take on the air of reality, so that liberal beliefs seem justified, no matter what the data actually show. Yet however great the harms produced by Islamophobia, the grand total of deaths in anti-Muslim hate crimes is much less than the death toll from Islamic terrorism. Americans’ fear of Islamic terrorism is far more rational than liberals’ fear of “Islamophobia.”

It is only because of liberal bias that people become so obsessed with the motives of crimes committed by Moody Loners like Craig Hicks or Creepy Little Weirdos like Elliot Rodger.

Dangerous kooks are usually just dangerous kooks whose “political” beliefs do not intersect with the political categories of non-kooks. Conservatives know, however, that,if any crime seems to confirm the liberal worldview, the media will rush to publicize the “right-wing” motive of the criminal — and will then mysteriously lose interest in the motive if evidence proves otherwise, as it so often does.

Remember the Tucson Massacre of 2011: Because the shooting targeted a Democrat congresswoman, it was instantly assumed by the media that Jared Loughner must be a right-winger. It turned out, however, that Loughner was a psychotic who had become obsessed with a left-wing 9/11 “Truther” video called Zeitgeist. Because I spent several days researching the Zeitgeist phenomenon in the wake of the Tucson Massacre, I can assure you that this would have been a fascinating subject for the New York Times or one of the major networks to do an in-depth report about. However, once it became clear that Loughner was not a right-winger, liberals instantly lost interest in his motive and there was never any real media follow-up on Loughner’s Zeitgeist obsession.

It is good that Jonathan Katz has devoted time to reporting on Craig Hicks’ motives, but a careful reader will notice that Katz isn’t very curious about the possible connection between Hicks’ avowed atheism and Hicks’ general anti-social attitude. Of course, this connection may be entirely random, and I don’t mean to suggest that we could be facing a wave of mass murders committed by deranged atheists. Yet when Matthew Shepard was murdered in 1998, the media wasted no time in generalizing that crime into a crusade against “homophobia,” despite the lack of evidence that Shepard’s killers were homophobes.

There are many fascinating phenomena in our society that are ignored by the media because these phenomena contradict the liberal worldview, fake rape accusations and fake “hate” incidents, for example. Liberals are often eager to jump on certain stories — e.g., the University of Virginia “gang rape” hoax — but lose interest in the story once the fakery is exposed, never bothering to explore what motivates such hoaxes.

In-depth reporting on lesbian sex offenders? No, the New York Times will never study their motives. All criminals are created equal, but some criminals are more equal than others.

 

400 Men Castrated by Cult?

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Surprisingly, this has nothing to do with feminism:

A man has been accused of encouraging hundreds of followers to be castrated in a promise for them to become closer to God.
Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, an Indian pop-star and telepreacher with a reported wealth of more than $50 million, is being investigated after he allegedly manipulated around 400 men to get their testicles removed — according to India Today.
One of his former followers who underwent castration seven years ago — named Hans Raj Chauhan — is one of the few to break the silence to speak out against him and the group.
“[The victims] were told that only those who get castrated will be able to meet God,” said Chauhan’s lawyer, Navkiran Singh, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Amanda Marcotte could not be reached for comment.

 

ISIS Killer Identified as Computer Science Major Mohammed Emwazi

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Don’t tell @MarieHarf this, but middle-class Muslims from England with university degrees become radical Islamic terrorists:

The world knows him as “Jihadi John,” the masked man with a British accent who has beheaded several hostages held by the Islamic State and who taunts audiences in videos circulated widely online.
But his real name, according to friends and others familiar with his case, is Mohammed Emwazi, a Briton from a well-to-do family who grew up in West London and graduated from college with a degree in computer programming. He is believed to have traveled to Syria around 2012 and to have later joined the Islamic State, the group whose barbarity he has come to symbolize. . . .
A representative of a British human rights group who had been in contact with Emwazi before he left for Syria also said he believed Emwazi was Jihadi John, a moniker given to him by some of the hostages he once held. . . .
The Kuwaiti-born Emwazi, in his mid-20s, appears to have left little trail on social media or elsewhere online. Those who knew him say he was polite and had a penchant for wearing stylish clothes while adhering to the tenets of his Islamic faith. He had a beard and was mindful of making eye contact with women, friends said. . . .
He was raised in a middle-class neighborhood in London and on occasion prayed at a mosque in Greenwich.
The friends, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation, believe that Emwazi started to radicalize after a planned safari in Tanzania following his graduation from the University of Westminster.
Emwazi and two friends — a German convert to Islam named Omar and another man, Abu Talib — never made it on the trip. Once they landed in Dar es Salaam, in May 2009, they were detained by police and held overnight. It’s unclear whether the reason for the detention was made clear to the three, but they were eventually deported.
Emwazi flew to Amsterdam, where he claimed that an officer from MI5, Britain’s domestic security agency, accused him of trying to reach Somalia, where the militant group al-Shabab operates in the southern part of the country, according to e-mails that he sent to [Asim Qureshi, research director at the rights group, CAGE] and that were provided to The Post.
Emwazi denied the accusation and claimed that MI5 representatives had tried to recruit him. But a former hostage said Jihadi John was obsessed with Somalia and made his captives watch videos about al-Shabab, which is allied with al-Qaeda. . . .
Shortly afterward, Emwazi decided to move to his birthplace, Kuwait, where he landed a job working for a computer company, according to the e-mails he wrote to Qureshi. He came back to London twice, the second time to finalize his wedding plans to a woman in Kuwait. . . .
In June 2010, however, counterterrorism officials in Britain detained him again — this time fingerprinting him and searching his belongings. When he tried to fly back to Kuwait the next day, he was prevented from doing so.
“I had a job waiting for me and marriage to get started,” he wrote in a June 2010 e-mail to Qureshi. But now “I feel like a prisoner, only not in a cage, in London. A person imprisoned & controlled by security service men, stopping me from living my new life in my birthplace & country, Kuwait.”
Nearly four months later, when a court in New York sentenced Aafia Siddiqui, an al-Qaeda operative convicted for the attempted murder of U.S. personnel in Afghanistan, Emwazi expressed sympathy for her, saying he had “heard the upsetting news regarding our sister. .?.?. This should only keep us firmer towards fighting for freedom and justice!!!”

You can read the whole thing. Basically, Emwazi was suspected of terrorist sympathies as early as 2009. Contrary to anything claimed by the idiot Marie Harf, Emwazi’s grievance (like the grievances of jihadis in general) has nothing to do with economics and everything to do with Islam and hatred of the West. It may be true that many ISIS fighters come from impoverished backgrounds, but if poverty caused terrorism, then why aren’t the many millions of impoverished Hindus in India joining Hindu terrorist groups? Why don’t impoverished Buddhists join Buddhist terrorist groups? Why don’t impoverished Baptists join Baptist terrorist groups?

No, it’s not Hindus or Buddists or Baptists or Lutherans or Zorastrians who hate us and want to kill us. It’s Muslims.

Why do they hate us? BECAUSE THEY HATE!

 

‘The True Peaceful Nature of Islam’

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That phrase appears in an op-ed column President Obama published in the Los Angeles Times. Perhaps our president hasn’t been paying close attention for the past 30 or 40 years, but it seems to me that the Muslims who want to kill or enslave us all might disagree about the “true peaceful nature” of their religion. More wisdom from our president:

Governments that deny human rights play into the hands of extremists who claim that violence is the only way to achieve change. Efforts to counter violent extremism will only succeed if citizens can address legitimate grievances through the democratic process and express themselves through strong civil societies.

Katie Pavlich:

What, exactly, does Obama mean when he says “legitimate grievances”? The grievances Al Qaeda and ISIS hold are against infidels and Muslims who don’t go far enough to wage jihad on the West.

Muslims want to kill or enslave us all. This is the “true nature” of Islam. It’s in the Koran. That’s their “grievance.” Period.

 

Two Sex Scandals You Missed

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The liberal media generally ignore sex scandals unless they involve a Republican politician or a Catholic priest, so maybe you didn’t hear about Mohammad Abdullah Saleem, the Illinois imam who allegedly perpetrated “decades of assault and child sex abuse . . . within the community of Indian and Pakistani Muslim immigrants.”

Does this reveal a “war on women”? Is there a “rape culture” among Muslims? Of course not! Saleem is not a Catholic priest or a Republican politician — he’s not even a college fraternity member — and therefore his alleged perversion is entirely random.

The same is true of Tony Jones, a leader of the “Emergent Church” movement that embraces postmodern progressivism: “In 2010 Jones encouraged Minnesota clergy to stop performing legal marriages, as a show of solidarity with LGBT people who could not be legally married in the state at that time.” This heretical theology appears to be a sort of hipster universalism, salt that has lost its savor (Matthew 5:13) and has become “conformed to this world” (Romans 12:2).

Tony Jones became a progressive religious celebrity, touring like a rock star on the “emergent” speaking circuit while his marriage was falling apart. If we are to believe the allegations of his ex-wife, Julie McMahon, Tony Jones developed a pornography habit and “starting in 2007, Mr. Jones began asking her repeatedly for sexual behaviors she found repellent, including anal sex.” Of course, this is the progressive gospel of “emergent” theology: “Thou shalt watch porn and do it in the butt.”

Documents relating to the Jones-McMahon divorce depict Jones as a manipulative narcissist who, in order to justify his own behavior, resorted to “gaslighting” his wife, accusing her of mental illness. He threatened to sue her for defamation if she went public about his affair with his mistress, whom he subsequently married. You can call that whatever you want, but you can’t call it Christian leadership.

As with the Chicago imam, however, the misbehavior of a progressive pastor is just random. Such scandals are never part of a “pattern of abuse” that journalists can use to indict entire institutions like the Catholic church or the Republican Party. It’s like sexual harassment by atheist men — nothing to see here, move along.