A global cabal kidnaps children & teens to have sex w/power-hungry men in secret locations, men who are also involved in a traitorous plot to undermine democracy.
It isn't QAnon. It is the plot of a book published in 1836: The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed.
In the book, the "cabal" was the Catholic Church & claimed this happened in a Montreal convent.
The book stirred outrage. The Canadians investigated it (Monk was Canadian) & found it to be a hoax. Even Protestants who wanted to believe it dismissed Monk as a fraud.
Americans didn't think it was a hoax. They thought it was real. To Monk's lurid tale, they added all sorts of gruesome details including rumors of cannibalism and international sex trafficking.
That's bad enough - but the anti-Protestant gangs coalesced into a political movement: the American Party. In the early 1850s, they sent 70 adherents to Congress.
Their platform? Only native-born Protestants should be able to vote.
I’m not entirely convinced that history repeats itself. But here we are: Joe Biden is a Catholic, one of the few Catholic candidates for president in American history. And what do we have?
With all due respect & gratitude to the ELCA, y'all gotta take "evangelical" out of your formal name in the US. It is the source of endless confusion. Sorry sorry sorry but you can't redefine it here apart from American evangelicalism. (I know what it means in Greek, German, yes)
I wish I've had $1 for how many times I've explained your name to a group of 1) Lutherans who can't understand American evangelicalism; and 2) Evangelicals who can't figure out why mainline Lutherans would call themselves "evangelical."
And even after explaining, no one gets it.
Two entire questions after my conversation w/Sarah McCammon today on her fine new book, Exvangelicals, were wasted on this ridiculous confusion.
30 yrs ago, I knew a librarian at a prominent evangelical seminary whose sole job was going thru personal papers of ministers donated after they died. Her responsibility? Removing all the porn from such collections BEFORE they reached the cataloger.
In the 80s, there was a very famous, anonymous article in Leadership magazine (a CT publication) on porn and sexual addiction among evangelical clergy & leaders. It was rampant. That article was secretly passed among male evangelical seminary students & clergy like a banned book.
I'm hearing anecdotally that a number of progressive mainline churches are seeing a post-pandemic steady influx of ex-evangelicals looking for new spiritual homes.
This doesn't mean that all ex-evangelicals are making this shift, but it suggests that at least some are.
In the 1990s and early aughts, the progressive mainline attracted mostly disaffected Catholics - a trend that strengthened congregations & attendance.
That the next disaffiliation wave might come from disgruntled & deconstructing evangelicals isn't surprising.
Mainline types: Don't expect this is a trend where folks will knock down your doors. You're going to have to prove yourselves trustworthy, open, loving - and you'll need to overcome years of stereotypes these folks learned in evangelicalism - you'll need to earn their respect.