"The version of Christianity that I received had this very strong, you're not supposed to commune with the dead, basically...I really asked the question, why would it be so important for these oppressors to tell us not to connect with our ancestors?" Andre Henry
<Christianity does not prohibit you from "connecting" to your ancestors in the sense of knowing who they are and what they did in their lives. It does prohibit occult rituals to directly communicate with the dead. This discussion does not clearly make the distinction.>
Oh, we're not done.
Jo Luehmann says in Christianity, "pleasure is for whiteness...pleasure is divine...but for us [POC], work is divine...It's grooming theology."
The logical conclusion of standpoint epistemology: "All reality is a hallucination, really...That's why you can have 2 people walk down the street and have 2 very, very different experiences."
"I don't believe in God. At all. But I believe in Christ, and to me Christ is just the embodiment of divinity in me, in you, in all of humanity. So for all intents and purposes, I'm a Christian atheist...I just tell people I'm a Christian to avoid all of the 'what do you mean?'"
Andre: "I stopped believing in God, as well, I think it was 2016...Someone told me that if I did mushrooms that I would believe in God again."
"There's something about that decolonizing journey that puts you...kind of in the wild again. And Genesis is my favorite book of the Bible, because that is the sense of God that I get from it, is that no one in Genesis has a Bible. They don't have churches. It's very messy."
"Ancient Jewish spirituality, which is what Christianity borrows from, is indigenous spirituality. And because it was stolen and because it was corrupted and appropriated by systems of oppression doesn't mean that I have to reject it."
"They're living under Babylonian subjugation. Of course they're gonna tell each other stories about how they've overcome oppression in the past...Most of the stuff in Joshua didn't really happen...I don't think Bob Marley actually shot the sheriff's deputy."
"The COVID vaccine...may have a distant origin story in abortion, but that past has been reworked + redeemed into something that saves life. We can point to the vaccine and say: Jesus' redemption is kind of like that."
Youth pastors, pack it up. There's no beating this one.
"Each of us has had our story reworked by Jesus into new life. That's what it ultimately means to be pro-life. To be pro-life is to be pro-redemption. And to be pro-redemption, in my view, means being pro-vaccine."
Curtis Chang, "Redeeming Babel"
This, apparently, is seen as convincing rhetoric by authors such as John Piper and David French who have shared it.
...And that foreword ends with an endorsement of Eric Mason as a "transcendent voice," "above the fray," who doesn't "unnecessarily divide or confuse" like other Christians speaking on race.
"I look forward to sitting at his feet to listen and learn."
Quick stroll through memory lane. Dr. Mason is certainly not "above the fray," as he is given to fits of rage from the pulpit (watch to the end):
"In conservative evangelical circles, often times there'll be a real concern about immigration, and especially, what? Illegal immigration...But here's the thing. What if that is God's plan to reverse secularization in the United States?"
Ligon Duncan
Thread incoming 🧵.
This clip'll probably earn some dunking in the quote-RTs, because there's a lot of perfectly innocuous things to agree with. But I'd like to unpack some of the assumptions in it that reveal a really ugly anthropology.
The point, in brief:
As @SovMichael points out, this has been a talking point from the WEF/CFR-adjacent evangelical elites for a long time. Plus the claim "immigration aids the Great Commission b/c it brings the nations to our doorstep." Duncan uses it earlier in this talk.
"I personally think the Holy Ghost evicted us. I think the Lord evicted us from our churches [with lockdowns] so that we might have a moment to breathe and...reimagine what it means to truly be just."
Tonyia Rawls / Union Presbyterian Seminary talk on "Queer Justice"
"In the Bible when the experience of the wrestling with the angel happened, the question is: What is your name? When Moses encounters the divine: Who shall I tell sent me? Naming, identifying, this is what the alphabet [LGBTQIA+], these designations are all about."
Cedric Harmon
"Where the church failed, where Noah did not, was the church began to determine who was safe to accept + who was no longer safe to accept. We did just the opposite of the example that God showed us through Noah + the ark."
<ppl outside the ark could not be reached for comment>