Bruce Gourley magnificent on Baptists and False Narrative

[Stephen Fox]

http://pastarticles.christianethicstoda ... ArtID=1763

REad this one closely.

Thornton is correct Hillary lost in part cause a lot of women did not want to pay from 7 to ten thousand dollars in added health care premiums, so they held their nose and voted for Trump.

But Gourley has the higher ground, the prevailing picture about what ails America and the cancer at its soul.

Read in Tandem with current piece at nybooks.com "What Trump Can Do"

And the Gop Lifer Blog easy google The Myth of the southern strategy.

I'm taking this to the world of right wing Baptist talk political radio, the Tony Beam show in Upstate SC; and Rick Burgess of Rickandbubba in Alabama

[William Thornton]

Sorry, Hil didn't lose because of fake news. She lost because she was a terrible candidate who didn't connect well with people between NY and CA. Lord knows, she had plenty of money and staff to counter any news and create her own fake news.

[Stephen Fox]

And let it ferment a little.

Not suckin up and remember My and Gourley's fiasco with the Collinsville Library--may be a couple paragraphs in a piece I'm considering to submit to Oxford American Mag--but Dr. Gourley has the high ground, the bigger story here.

Sorry Dr. Thornton, If there were no Fox News, and no fundamentalist takeover of the SBC, Hillary Clinton would be president today. The links at the end of my Barnum Blog convince me of something toward which I was leaning for thirty years.

[Sandy]

With Trump now in the White House, evangelical Christians are closing ranks even more tightly around their strongman. In the estimation of some observers, so few are the evangelicals who remain committed to a world of truth that American evangelicalism may have finally destroyed itself.

I think the steady exodus that was already in place within Evangelical Christianity in the US will be accelerated by the hypocrisy and total abandonment of any semblance of values or principle that it took to support Trump. But these are people who have made heretics like Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer wealthy beyond their wildest dreams with their checkbooks. It's a segment of the population among which gullibility, and naivete' are limitless commodities.

Keeping in mind that Hillary succeeded in convincing three million more Americans that she was the better candidate, the fake news, along with the timed dumps of thousands of mostly fake Wikileaks "hacks" was unprecedented. Only one other individual in history has garnered more votes than Mrs. Clinton did, in any election of any kind. Ultimately, the difference in the three states that had the electoral votes to put the orange haired buffoon over the top was fractional, certainly within the possibility that fake news could have made a difference. That's if there wasn't tampering with machines. As the level of Russian interference becomes more clear, I'm not convinced that didn't happen on Trump's behalf.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/11/2 ... n-WI-PA-MI

[Jim]

Gourley: With Trump now in the White House, evangelical Christians are closing ranks even more tightly around their strongman. In the estimation of some observers, so few are the evangelicals who remain committed to a world of truth that American evangelicalism may have finally destroyed itself.

One supposes that the “world of truth,” since it isn’t Trump’s, must be Hillary’s, the implied alternative, according to Gourley, who obviously does not consider himself a part of American Evangelicalism. More’s the pity. Of course, it would help if G had defined the “world of truth.” As he left it, Hillary, the personification of subterfuge, is far superior to the rank-closing evangelical Christians, her basketful of deplorables, the demented and xenophobic boobs. But that doesn’t include the elites, who already know among themselves what the “world of truth” is. Perhaps it’s encrypted on Hillary’s servers, which have already been read by the world’s hackers and good for laughable dinner conversations from Tuvalu to the Crimea. Of course, the pesky, deplorable evangelicals are now the only hope of ridding the world of the Muslim “world of truth,” always requiring using the sword as the only tool of converting folks to Islam. Jesus knew this ahead of time and told his disciples to arm themselves.

[Sandy]

Sorry Dr. Thornton, If there were no Fox News, and no fundamentalist takeover of the SBC, Hillary Clinton would be president today. The links at the end of my Barnum Blog convince me of something toward which I was leaning for thirty years.

I think you missed the mark on both of these, Stephen. Fox News is pretty well pigeonholed and categorized as the conservatively biased news source, and its feud with the Trump campaign, and its personnel defections leading to drops in ratings have pretty well neutralized its effect. I'd say the impact of the fake emails and documents hacked or invented by the Russians and dropped by Wikileaks was greater than that of Fox News. And moderate or fundamentalist, the SBC has, since the Goldwater days, been a bastion of Republicanism. A lot of key CBF folks, whether they be the Baylor/Texas variety, or the Georgia/Atlanta office variety, are also garden variety Southern Republicans, with just a touch of bigotry seeping through the surface from what's boiling beneath.

[Stephen Fox]

http://christianindex.org/naaf-pres-urg ... e-critics/

Interesting development indeed.

Moore is no hero of mine. I well remember him coming to Bama to meet with the fundies in 97 or so and speak against my friend the novelist Vicki Covington when she was a visiting writer at Samford. Albert Lee Smith's Inquisition of Tom Corts centered on Covington in March of 93 when Steve Gaines and Dorsett of Central Baptist Bham was coming to Power. I was stealth monitor in the balcony but when I heard the panel come after Vicki, I came out of the balcony to sit behind Albert Lee on about the 7th row in a church packed full of fundy preachers, almost a thousand of em from across the state.

Corts said: "There is no virtue in sustained denunciation!"

Now Moore is getting a little of his own; then again that's fundamentalism at work.

And Rick Burgess is worried about Sharia Law. Have Mercy on his unwitting soul molesting soul.

[JE Pettibone]

Sorry, Hil didn't lose because of fake news. She lost because she was a terrible candidate who didn't connect well with people between NY and CA. Lord knows, she had plenty of money and staff to counter any news and create her own fake news.

Ed: Well said William.

[JE Pettibone]

And let it ferment a little.

Not suckin up and remember My and Gourley's fiasco with the Collinsville Library--may be a couple paragraphs in a piece I'm considering to submit to Oxford American Mag--but Dr. Gourley has the high ground, the bigger story here.

Sorry Dr. Thornton, If there were no Fox News, and no fundamentalist takeover of the SBC, Hillary Clinton would be president today. The links at the end of my Barnum Blog convince me of something toward which I was leaning for thirty years.

Ed" Stephen I believe you over estimate both the influence of Fox news, and the impact of the SBC takeover on American politics.

[Sandy]

Sorry, Hil didn't lose because of fake news. She lost because she was a terrible candidate who didn't connect well with people between NY and CA. Lord knows, she had plenty of money and staff to counter any news and create her own fake news.

She connected with three million more Americans than the orange haired buffoon did, with more Americans than any other candidate ever has, except Barack Hussein Obama.

[Stephen Fox]

I posted Gourley's link on the CI facebook wall. Here is one response from a Jeff Jones who I do not know

Baloney. The author misrepresents the facts of that time to support a false, predetermined thesis. The inexcusable defense of slavery was a symptom, not a cause.

Consider that the vast majority of those who fought for the South never owned slaves. Why, then, would they endanger their homes, family, and their own lives if slavery were the cause?

Consider that the 1863 New York City riots were a response to the Emancipation Proclamation, where Northerners violently asserted their young men would not die to free slaves.

A more complete history shows that while ending slavery was paramount to abolitionists, for the South the main causes were 1) burdensome taxes taken from the minority South to be spent in the majority North; and 2) the ignoring of the 10th amendment by a federal government imposing laws on the States without Constitutional authority.

Slavery was abolished in Great Britain by compensating slave owners for the loss of slaves, so they could transition to hired labor. Freed slaves were fully assimilated into British cultures.

Because of the hatred by the violence prone abolitionists, Congress could not reach a suitable, Constitutional compromise to avoid the looming divide. Blacks were no more seen as equals by most Northeners than they were by Southerners.

The Civil War is a direct result of ignoring the Constitution and the intransigence of the abolitionists. Like parts of New England during the War of 1812, Southern states chose the remedy of secession when reasonable compromise failed.

Contrary to politically correct thought, most of the antagonism and overt racism in the South after the war came from a combination of war crimes by Union armies and the widespread and common atrocities by carpetbaggers.

Healing began in earnest largely by the work of Booker T. Washington (if you have not read his writings, you should). By the twentieth century, huge advances in eradicating racism North and South had taken firm root because of the success of his movement and accomplishments.

Unfortunately, WEB Dubois and the NAACP undermined Washington and the successes he wrought by appealing to the greed of many blacks. That racial division sowed by Dubois and the NAACP lasts to this day.

The only hope for healing the scourge of racism today is in Christ. In Whom there is no color, and to Whom there is no race but the holy man race.

[Bruce Gourley]

Fox, I appreciate you posting a link to the Christian Ethics Today piece, and the good conversation in this thread.

The reply from Jeff Jones (?) is mere whitewashing. Baptists South and North of the antebellum Civil War era disagreed with him. Anyone can learn what Baptists actually said back then by reading my book Crucible of Faith and Freedom: Baptists and the American Civil War (now in a second, revised printing) or visiting civilwarbaptists.com.

It's high time to drop the lies that the Civil War was not about slavery.

[Stephen Fox]

Thornton will want to know his buddy Dave Miller got notice in the Atlantic piece by Molly Ball

Here is my blog on the drama of the week with reference to Gourley and the false narrative and Russ Moore's predicament.

http://foxofbama.blogspot.com/2017/03/r ... oming.html

[Stephen Fox]

Ive of two blog minds, or blog fogs on this one.

See my Proud to be a Furman Paladin in tandem with a Post this morning.

I think we know where Bruce Gourley lies, just outside Vernon Burton's camp I imagine.

I link Vernon on the Paladin blog

And my Criswell Trump musing of this morning

http://foxofbama.blogspot.com/2017/05/f ... aphic.html

[JE Pettibone]

And let it ferment a little.

Not suckin up and remember My and Gourley's fiasco with the Collinsville Library--may be a couple paragraphs in a piece I'm considering to submit to Oxford American Mag--but Dr. Gourley has the high ground, the bigger story here.

S. Fox "If there were no Fox News, and no fundamentalist takeover of the SBC, Hillary Clinton would be president today."

Ed: So perhaps not all about the take over or Fox News was/is bad ????????????

[John Sneed]

Let me lay out my own bias at the beginning. I am unashamedly a Conservative, very conservative, and a Calvinist. I also lean favorably towards the SBC. You all know me. That being said, I am up to my eyebrows in a master's thesis dealing with Southern Baptist beliefs during the Civil War. While I am still a small fish wading in the shallow end of the pool, I think I can say I am as up to date as one can be on this topic.

To the point. The cause of the Civil War was slavery. If slavery had not existed, neither would the war. True, there were other issues, for example, taxation, states rights and so on. All of these were subordinate to the issue of slavery, or they were issues because of the issue of slavery.

In the years before the Civil War, America was overwhelmingly Evangelical Protestant. These Protestants were concentrated primarily within three denominations, the Presbyterians, the Methodists and the Baptists. Each denomination experienced schism ... the Presbyterians in 1837, the Methodists in 1844 and the Baptists in 1845. The issue in all three cases was slavery. The Southern Baptist Convention came into existence to contend for the continuation of slavery as "God's providential plan for the black race." Along the way, the SBC involved itself in some interesting entanglements dealing with the separation of church and state, its place in the military and how it became a leading cheerleader for Confederate nationalism.

No one who is serious about looking at history can come to any conclusion except that slavery was THE issue of issues, both in the antebellum years and in the war itself.

I might note, even after the war. I read a quote from an author who said that segregation was the new slavery after emancipation.

I don't post much but it is nice to be allowed the occasional posting. Hello to you all. Until the next time.

John

[Sandy]

The Civil War is, and always has been for me, one of the most fascinating events in history. That slavery survived as an economic institution as long as it did, in a country and a culture that was as much under the influence of the Christian church, and the Protestant churches, as it was is one of the most interesting sociological studies of all time. America, one of the foundational successes of the idea of a democratic Republic, and one of the most influenced by the Christian faith, held on to an anti-Christian institution longer than any other industrialized country in the world, fractured, and one of the fractured governments incorporated their belief in the principle that all men are not created equal, and black men are inferior, into their constutition. How much influence did the church have on the culture, for that to be the result? How much does it have now? It is too self absorbed.

[Stephen Fox]

Do ready Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams and google Vernon Burton last week on the Monuments at Here and Now, NPR. I think the link is in my Paladin blog

I remain puzzled by Sandy who is an apologist for the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC, Trey Gowdy and Billy Graham and FBC Spartanburg, but asks the right questions about the Civil War. It's a mystery.

Back to John, Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead. The Kabbalah therein is a great history lesson for some of the resolutions you are pursuing.

[Stephen Fox]

http://englewoodreview.org/marilynne-ro ... ion-essay/

Great essay aside by the Pulitzer prize winner on Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the translation of the Bible to KJV and the rise of Western Civiliz2tion.

She takes it right up the gut of the leadership of the NRA and 2nd Amendment that goes to the guts of the false narrative of Rick Burgess and his shenanigans with Baptist fundies in Alabama.

My open letter blog to Clemson trustee chair David Wilkins and Bama Lt Gov candidate Will Ainsworth whose mother is as poisonous as Tim Tebow's Mother. My blog to follow soon.

[Stephen Fox]

I thought Bruce might like this one:

I submitted last week. Still has good chance of publication

publication

Ft Payne Alabama Times Journal




The Editors:




Monday afternoon April 9 the first caller to the Paul Finebaum show made reference to Plainview High School, their legendary alum Jeremy Pruett now with the U Tenn Vols, and Auburn legend Charles Barkley. Upshot is with Barkley's recent interview on CNN and his pledge of half million dollars toward a revisionary High School history curriculum it's way passed time for Dekalb County to come out of the 19th Century and begin to tell the whole truth and nothing but the Truth to students about the Civil War.




I am a proud graduate of Furman University in Greenville South Carolina whose class of 2018 will include Clayte Hubbard, son of former Bama Speaker of the House, Mike Hubbard. Edwin C. Bridges is an early 80s graduate of Furman and for the last 30 odd years has been director of archives for the state of Alabama in Montgomery. Right after Christmas 2017 I picked up a copy of his new (2016) history of Alabama. It is great.




He sets the proper course for the misinformation of the Daughters of the Confederacy and other groups about the the Civil War. In a great 27 page chapter on the War and Reconstruction he says in the 1890s the DOC and other groups set out to restructure the the teaching of history in Alabama to conform to views they had adopted for their own white women's group. They didn't like what they considered the insults of the North. Built on a sequence of interelated claims some of which isolated were true they concocted a story comparable to current fundamentalist views on the Bible that distort the truths of Scripture. They sought to downplay slavery as a cause of the war and modified the role of Redeemer White Groups use of violence during Reconstruction to reassert white control in the South. Because of the economy of textbook publication the false narrative of the DOC pretty much became the official view of textbooks nationwide.




At a minimum Historical associations in Dekalb County, Womens study clubs, even WMU chapters in your local Baptist church can get hold of a copy of Bridges History. For extra mustard there is a photo of my hero Judge Frank Johnson in the book, even one of downtown Collinsville. The Board of Education in Rainsville should have a copy for school board members to consult and every High school library in the system should have a copy in their libraries by the beginning of next year.




Sincerely, Stephen M. Fox

[Stephen Fox]

http://foxofbama.blogspot.com/2018/05/l ... -many.html

Is it possible

[Stephen Fox]

Groups

Although specific historical examples could be produced to support each of their claims, as a whole they amounted to a rewriting of history that distorted it in fundamental ways.

[Stephen Fox]

Great friend of Benjamin Mays, Furman grad 69
https://ageoflincoln.app.clemson.edu/Welcome.html