Thread by @mcjulie

I'm sick today so I'm feeling grumpy and my concentration levels are low, but just about right to shred this article here.

religionnews.com/2019/02/01/why…

I'll start with the headline. "Why freaking out about Christian schools proves evangelicals’ irrational fears"
The first thing that jumped out at me: you can't prove something irrational. EITHER their fears are irrational, OR they have been proven -- what?

True? Even more ridiculous than we thought? Full of cheese?
There's something missing here. Missing on purpose I think. It's supposed to imply the answer is "true" without committing to that.

There's something else missing too. WHO is "freaking out"? Everybody? Twitter? One person? The implied you?

And finally, "freaking out" is such a dismissive, disrespectful, and misleading way to describe what's happening with #ExposeChristianSchools "Freaking out" is what I do when I see a spider. People sharing their own stories aren't "freaking out"

Now the article: "Everyone needs to stop freaking out about Christian schools." Well, at least that establishes who is doing the "freaking out" but "everyone" still isn't a super helpful category. And again, "freaking out"?

"Though they made headlines in the past few weeks thanks to Karen Pence, wife of Vice President Mike Pence, these institutions are not nearly as interesting and exotic as the mainstream media supposes."

Um, the controversy wasn't about them being "interesting" and "exotic" it was about them being "bigoted" and "harmful"

And the controversy was also about a specific Pence tweet in which he demanded that people not criticize Christian schools anymore, which raised a lot of hackles, including mine -- and I'm only Christian-school-adjacent (spouse), I never even went to one myself.

But the idea that ~any~ Christian institution should be specially protected from criticism is deeply offensive to me and OUGHT to be offensive to everyone.

But also, notice the invocation of the "mainstream media" -- evangelicals love to strawman their critics as perfectly secular heathen with literally no idea what goes on over in evangelical-land and whoa, something just hit me --

There's a stereotypical "mainstream media" journalist that evangelicals always imagine themselves talking to or about, you know the one, who has literally never heard of Jesus and doesn't have the faintest clue about evangelicals (& therefore no right to criticize them) --

I think that imaginary journalist is Jewish. I think there's always been subtle (or maybe not so subtle, I just missed it before) anti-semitism in the way evangelicals think of the "mainstream media"

"Neither should they be controversial."
Shouldn't be controversial? SHOULDN'T BE ***CONTROVERSIAL***?!?!? PINEAPPLE ON PIZZA is forking controversial, where do you get off claiming that kind of privilege for Christian schools?

"Some people want a religious education for their children. The ones who can afford it will have it."

Don't be disingenuous. You know full well that if that were truly ALL there was to it, there wouldn't BE a controversy.

"Beyond that, most of what you’ve heard is bluster, and neither the subjects of news stories nor readers are better off for the brouhaha"

First of all, could he possibly be more condescending?

And second, who is this "you" he's addressing? His statement only makes sense if he's addressing somebody who has literally never heard of the existence of Christian schools before --

Which is the same way evangelicals share the "news" of the Bible & Jesus, so I guess it's on brand, but it's still pretty weird. Even as a trusting baby evangelical it didn't make any sense to me.

Like, on the one hand evangelicals will brag about the Bible being the greatest bestseller of all time, or claim the US is a "Christian" nation, but then assume a random person trying to study in the coffee shop has literally never heard of either one before.

Now there's some blah-blah about Karen Pence, and "The New York Times [..] headline that read, “Karen Pence Is Teaching at Christian School that Bars L.G.B.T. Students and Teachers.”"

He doesn't deny the NYT headline is accurate, only moves on to decry "A spate of articles and commentary [..] portraying the school and its constituents as alternatively alien and sinister, a mostly hidden but very dark force that journalists and activists would have to expose."

Except, is the original NYT headline accurate? *Does* the school ban L.G.B.T. students and teachers? Because if it is, what's your objection? People who support LGBTQ rights DO see threats to them as bad things in need of exposure.

Is your objection that the school isn't being portrayed accurately, or is your objection that an ~accurate~ portrayal is seen by many people as horrifying?

Next: "The truth, as anyone with even basic religious and cultural literacy knows, is that these types of private evangelical Protestant schools gather around faith commitments that include

"among beliefs about God, Jesus, the Bible, etc., the view that marriage is between a man and a woman and that sexual relations outside such unions are sinful." So the headline IS accurate. Okay. And your objection to the controversy is?

"This belief may not poll well in elite media newsrooms. But if reporters or columnists find this shocking, I would respectfully submit that they need to get out more."

"Elite media newsrooms" there's that anti-semitic dog-whistle blowing again.

But also, "Look, you already knew we were bigots, don't make such a fuss" isn't exactly an exoneration, is it?

"The story about Karen Pence was engulfed by a much larger story involving an encounter between some students from Covington Catholic High School and a group of protesters at the Lincoln Memorial."

"Reporters descended on Covington to figure out just what kind of place this was. Other journalists solicited stories from people who attended Christian schools, and the hash tag #ExposeChristianSchools exploded across social media."

Okay, none of that was technically inaccurate, but it implies #ExposeChristianSchools was inspired primarily by the Covington boys incident, which isn't true.

"There are, to be sure, valid criticisms to be made of Christian schools.
Many of them were established in the 1960s and 1970s in response to cultural changes that included racial integration of public schools."

The tone shift here is weird. After being very condescending and dismissive toward critics of Christian schools, now he's admitting that many of them have a racist founding & there are valid criticisms to be made.

Wait, I get it. Evangelicals still shy away from OPEN racism and try to make out like their anti-LGBTQ prejudices are strictly about "sexual purity" & aren't related to racism at all.

"Christian schools do tend to fixate on policing gay sexual infractions more than straight ones."

YOU DON'T SAY

"But in policy and (mostly) in practice, their view is that young people should exercise discipline and sublimate their urges because sex outside of marriage is a sin."

"Sublimate their urges"

Uh huh.

He completely fails to mention the way, in practice, girls and LGBTQ young people are expected to sublimate their urges (really?) while straight dudes get endlessly let off the hook.

This reflects the biases of the larger culture, so you will find it in public schools -- however, in public schools, 1. You have some recourse and 2. Nobody is telling you God requires things to be this way.

"The difference, of course, is that straight students will presumably have a legitimate outlet (marriage), while gay people have to be celibate in order to be faithful."

Except. No.
That's not actually how it works.

Raise your hand if you were ~actually~ taught that being gay was super okay, really, nothing shameful at all, you just had to be celibate, no big.

Evangelical institutions -- churches and schools and books and seminars and summer camps and vacation Bible school and any other thing you want to name -- teach that being gay is inherently shameful, that if you are gay you are bad, broken, damned, cursed.

Not damned to a life of celibacy, which is bad enough, but just plain DAMNED. That's the message I got. That's the message I hear other #exvangelicals sharing. That's the message in #ExposeChristianSchools.

"Conversion therapy" doesn't exist because gay evangelical kids are just super horny and don't want to be celibate forever, it exists because PARENTS THINK BEING GAY IS BAD.

The anti-LGBTQ stance of Christian schools like the one Ms. Pence teaches at hurts kids not because it tells them not to have sex, but because it teaches them to hate themselves.

Christian purity culture, which is completely institutionalized at most Christian schools, weaponizes shame and uses it to destroy not only LGBTQ students but also cishet girls.

It's completely disingenuous to pretend that evangelical sexual taboos are merely an expectation or a policy, when in practice they're a system of psychological abuse and torture.

"My own criticism is that these evangelical schools claim the adjective “Christian” in a way that deceptively implies that anyone who does not share their views is, in fact, not a Christian. This is familiar evangelical sleight of hand"

Wait, is this guy ~not~ an evangelical?

"Though smaller in number, most liberal Protestant schools accept and affirm LGBT people as part of their mission."

Um -- okay? And your point is?

"The Roman Catholic Church, by contrast, operates more than 6,400 schools that share, at least officially, Karen Pence’s employer’s sexual traditionalism."

And some #ExposeChristianSchools stories are about Catholic schools. Again, your point?

"So do many schools run by and for Orthodox Jews and Muslims, but we don’t see breathless articles in the media about how they should be shamed, shunned or hounded out of existence."

Shreeeeee that anti-semitic dog whistle is going off again.

Why is it so hard to accept that the people talking about the sins of evangelical schools under the #ExposeChristianSchools hashtag are telling their OWN STORIES?

"Objectionable moral views are disdained by the elite chiefly when held by white evangelicals."

"Elite."
Uh huh.

Who's the "elite" of this country if NOT white evangelicals?

I mean, this whole thing kicked off because of the actions of THE WIFE OF THE VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, a nation which has freedom of religion guaranteed by our constitution, I might add.

The reason white evangelicals might seem to come under criticism more than other religious groups is BECAUSE they have more power. It's not hard to fathom.

"A poignant but sad proof of the imperative to single out evangelicals for scorn [..] Sheridan School [..] would not compete against Immanuel Christian in athletics. [..] the Sheridan athletes first considered wearing rainbow socks and warmup jerseys

"But Immanuel was deemed an “unsafe” environment, as the coddled children of the Washington elite should not endure playing basketball with evangelical kids"

Oh, for the love of... [fumes] THE RAINBOW SOCKS TELL YOU WHY THEY THOUGHT IT WAS UNSAFE, CHUCKLEHEAD

I realize this may come as a terrible shock, but many athletes are not straight! Are you really trying to claim it's not reasonable for an LGBTQ student to feel unsafe in an explicitly anti-LGBTQ environment?

I mean, would you expect the Immanuel kids to be comfortable playing at a Satanist school?

"Sheridan decided to cancel all athletic competitions against Immanuel.
The Sheridan School’s decision unwittingly gave the evangelicals, already primed to think of themselves as persecuted, a feather in their cap."

So what? Evangelicals are really ~good~ at feeling persecuted.

This is the same argument the Magas are always making, that you can't say anything mean about Magas or you're making them HAVE to vote for DJT, which they already did, so...

"They recall the words of Jesus, who warned that they would face revulsion, saying, “Rejoice, and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven.”"

Right, I know, you can't ever criticize evangelicals for anything because they just get really smug about it. It's not a virtue, though. It means their capacity for self-reflection is nil and their tendency to act like assholes is high.

"Journalists and “woke” elites’ grandstanding overreaction will look silly in retrospect. Worse, it will be difficult for people with different religious beliefs to coexist in the public square if we cannot even let our kids play basketball together."

Q: What's even more annoying than yet another instance of "journalistic elites" as a dog whistle?
A: A really awkward and tone-deaf use of "woke"!

Anyway, once again, the problem isn't playing basketball with people of "different religious beliefs" it's playing basketball with people who hold religious beliefs that entail bigotry and intolerance.

Or, to be more precise, playing basketball ~at an institution~ that has, as an official policy, a bigoted anti-LGBTQ stance.

"The Sheridan School sports teams may forfeit a ballgame. But unless we treat our neighbors who believe differently with grace and tolerance, we risk forfeiting our heritage and future as a pluralistic society."

AND OUR LGBTQ NEIGHBORS? WHAT ABOUT THEM?

This is basically the "you have to tolerate my intolerance or YOU'RE the bigot" gambit.

He claims it's fine for Immanuel to have an anti-LGBTQ stance because that's just their faith, man, but it's TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE for anybody else to judge them harshly for that faith.

Built into this double standard is the idea that certain ~kinds~ of beliefs are more "real" and need to be more respected. You know, MY beliefs come from a sincere and faithful belief in the word of God, while YOUR beliefs come from a superficial, performative "wokeness"

I guess that's the end.

Thanks for reading along!