God Will Need Excedrin Today

By John Bloom | 12/05/2007

This morning the six televangelists are supposed to turn in their answers to a series of financial questions posed by Senator Charles Grassley, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee. Then tonight Mitt Romney goes to the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, to speak on the angel Moroni—I mean on “Faith in America.”

If you need to get up to speed on everything, check out the report by Kathy Lohr, the National Public Radio correspondent on the Iowa campaign trail this week. In her summary Senator Grassley takes the opportunity to point out that he’s just checking up on whether the Internal Revenue Service tax exemption for churches is being properly applied or not, that he’s not getting into doctrine. (Romney, on the other hand, apparently is getting into doctrine. Go figure.) We have a question: If these pastors are all of a sudden concerned about the separation of church and state (“Oh! Our nation!” exclaimed Kenneth Copeland daughter Terri Pearsons in a church service this week), where were they when a Muslim religious charity, the Holy Land Foundation of Arlington, Texas, was brought up on terrorism charges by the federal government? Even after a jury found the charity innocent on all charges, they were, in fact, silent. Because maybe they assumed it might be possible to abuse a charitable religious tax-exempt status? Hmmmmmm.

You Have Two Choices

In order to feel good today, you can either go to the long underground echoing passageway between the Times Square subway station and the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City and find the guy with the boombox who sings “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,” or you can go to Youtube and check out Straight No Chaser, the men’s a cappella chorus from Indiana University, doing its classic version of “The 12 Days of Christmas” (and every other Christmas song, plus one Jewish interruption).

I Guess That Whole Civil War Thing Is Over

Every time one of these Episcopal churches busts up and votes to join a diocese in Africa—it’s happened 55 times so far—I always wonder whether there’s any doctrinal concept of ecclesiology that says, “That bishop is just too damn far down the road.” Don’t they have trouble just, for example, scheduling conference calls? I mean, how many time zones away is Nigeria? Or, for that matter, Uganda, which is where the 300 members of Christ Church in Savannah just ended up. To be precise, 300 people ended up forming an alliance with an Anglican diocese in Uganda, and 75 are sticking with the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia, and they’re meeting in separate places and both are trying to claim the building. Here’s what I’m trying to bend my mind around, though. This is a mostly white church. It was founded in 1733 with a land grant from King George III. At the time, England controlled most of the slave trade, and the two most ridiculously pro-slavery colonies were Georgia and South Carolina, a state of affairs that would continue right up through the Civil War and beyond. Most of the freed slaves who started out in Africa and gained their liberation in Georgia shunned the Anglican Church, and rightly so, and aligned with the more color-blind Baptists (at first) until they turned nasty, which is why we had a Baptist split and there are several Baptist denominations today, including the pro-slavery Southern Baptist Convention. To this day there aren’t that many black Episcopalians, even in the more liberal (non-Anglican) wing. Furthermore, after the Revolutionary War, it was downright un-American to call anything Anglican, which is why the term Episcopal came into common usage. Are you following this? Probably not. So here’s the punch line: These are descendants of white slavers loyal to the British monarchy who are putting themselves under the authority of descendants of slaves who hated the British monarchy specifically and the west in general. And they’re doing it in the name of conservatism. These are the mint-julep drinkers who speak of lit-tra-tour. These are the people in the Big House. They’ve gone, as the local expression might have it, daft.

Know Your Monsters

Catholic schoolchildren in New York will be showing Mommy their new coloring book, “Being Friends, Being Safe, Being Catholic,” which features one page depicting an altar boy protected by a guardian angel while a priest lurks in the background. The text reads, “For safety’s sake, a child and an adult shouldn’t be alone in a closed room together.” Why didn’t we think of this years ago? The solution was always right there in front of our eyes: Simply make children terrified to be left alone with any grown-up. That anxiety will protect both the child and the tempted priest. It’s a win-win. The Catholic church took a break from million-dollar child-abuse settlements yesterday with a plain old “Go to Jail” verdict—Father Michael Jude Fay was sentenced to 37 months in prison for stealing $1.3 million from St. John Roman Catholic Church in Darien, Connecticut, in order to take a lot of vacations and buy some designer clothing. The priest was “visibly shaken,” according to the TV reporter on the scene. Later he’ll be invisibly shaken.

The Divorce Is Gonna Be Messy

Yes, I know that a man in India got formally married to a dog. No, I don’t know whether the local custom is to consummate such a marriage. No, I don’t know what to say about it. Is this an issue for Focus on the Family or an issue for PETA? I’m not sure. I know you can read about it virtually everywhere on the web, including here. I know that there are many fundamentalist churches in the Deep South that believe that any vows of marriage exchanged in any venue, even civil ceremonies, are binding forever. I wouldn’t advise this guy to attend any of those churches, even as a visitor, ever.

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