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Deception
The penalty of deception is to become a deception, with all sense of moral discrimination vitiated. A man who lies habitually becomes a lie, and it is increasingly impossible for him to know when he is lying and when he is not.” Howard Thurman
Spiritual Abuse
Spiritual abuse is a form of emotional and psychological abuse. It is characterized by a systematic pattern of coercive and controlling behaviour in a religious context Spiritual abuse can have a deeply damaging impact on those who experience it. This abuse may include: manipulation and exploitation, enforced accountability, censorship of decision making, requirements for secrecy and silence, coercion to conform, [inability to ask questions] control through the use of sacred texts or teaching, requirement of obedience to the abuser, the suggestion that the abuser has a ‘divine’ position, isolation as a means of punishment, and superiority and elitism.
Lisa Oakley and Justin Humphreys
Culture War
In America, we don’t discover who we are so much as we choose an identity from a set of prepackaged, audience-tested options. Since most Americans identify according to their political party first and foremost, pretty much everything else about us flows from that partisan selection. If you’re a Democrat, you’ve got a certain selection of causes, movies, public figures, musicians and organizations to root for. If you’re a Republican, you get an alternate set.
If all the opposing forces you’ve been commanded to take up arms against were to suddenly vanish, you would have little left: no actual opinions, no concrete strategy for building a better world, no idea what purpose you serve outside of owning the libs or the cons.
This is what life is like in the culture war, a draft which few Americans have successfully dodged. We are all soldiers now, and any part of our daily life can be construed as an attack. Why wouldn’t it be? This is a war. In a war, no action can be taken for granted.
This is an extraordinarily bad way to be in the world, with our lives a cobbled together mess of memes, algorithms, partisan talking points and blinding hated of total strangers based on scant information. But it’s a very easy way to be in the world. You don’t have to form any actual opinions or think deeply about what you want to build. You can just run with the package of opinions that comes with whoever you vote for and leave it at that.
The important thing to realize is that there are no winners here. There can’t be.
There is an alternative, but it’s not easy. It involves laying down arms in the culture war and taking up a fight against not each other, but the princes and principalities of this world. Instead of resisting each other, we must start resisting the forces and institutions pitting us against each other. Instead of fighting our fellow humans, we fight the ideologies that compel us towards fear and hatred.
https://relevantmagazine.com/current/nation/there-are-no-winners-in-a-culture-war/
Just to be clear. When Christians say “Jesus is Lord”, we are not celebrating love of power, but the power of love to redeem, transform and renew that which is lost, broken and hopeless.
Jim Gordon
Misconceptions
It is important to read and listen carefully. I found this commentary about New York City subway systems to be a good example.
New York City’s subway system has been in the news a lot lately, and not in a good way. There have been several cases of violent assault, including people being pushed onto the tracks, and the number of murders in the system has been far higher this year than in past years. This is even as the overall murder rate in New York City finally seems to be declining from its pandemic high. These incidents have been terrible, and officials are right to see them as a reason to step up police presence and video surveillance.
After reading that factual report, as an outsider, I would be very reluctant to use the subway in NYC. Reading further, I gained a much different perspective.
Attacks in subway cars or on subway platforms during rush hour are an extreme example. When I say that we’ve had a record number of murders this year, that number is nine so far, on a system that even postpandemic often carries more than 3.5 million passengers each workday. Overall, the subway remains far safer than other forms of transportation. Indeed, one reason New York City is much safer overall than small-town or even suburban America is that far fewer people die in traffic accidents.
It is true:
cases of violent assault, including people being pushed onto the tracks, and the number of murders in the system has been far higher this year than in past years.
But it’s not reality:
Yes there have been nine murders on NYC subways this year, a worthwhile concern, but reality is: riding the subway in NYC is safer than driving from Wilmore to Lexington.
If we obey Jesus only when the culture is neutral enough to allow us to do so and still win on our own terms, then Jesus is not Lord and we are not his disciples—he is our disciple and we are his lord. And if we must adopt anti-Christlike character to win Christian victories over a secular culture, then perhaps we should wonder what’s gone wrong. When the centurions start to look more valiant than the crucified, then maybe our culture wars have taken us away from the Cross and toward something else.
Russell Moore
STILL ON THE JOURNEY