Author: Warren Throckmorton

Friday night at the evangelical fights.

After the NPR segment comes this New York Times article which covers much the same ground.

It cannot be any clearer; Alan Chambers is leading Exodus from the wilderness of reparative therapy to the promised land of Grace and soul liberty.

What a ride.

Conservatives in the church and elsewhere should welcome this. There is no necessary conservative attachment to reparative therapy. In fact, given the psychoanalytic roots of the model, it has surprised me that conservative Christians have bought into it for as long they have.

 

A segment on changes at Exodus is coming up on NPR sometime between 4:30 and 4:45pm. It should repeat again between 6:30-6:45pm.

I have a few lines but I am not sure who else is in on it.

Listen, learn and comment.

The audio will be posted at 7pm, but the transcript is here.

Rob Gagnon has emerged as a vocal opponent of Exodus. I am baffled by his approach, which seems to make grace conditional on one’s behavior or attitude.

I intend to write more about this next week. Gagnon says he thinks reparative therapy sometimes works. I suppose for some it can work to give them a way to think about their lives but the burden of proof is on NARTH and others who support the group to demonstrate some kind of categorical change. Nothing has come from NARTH that approaches good research strategies and as a result, NARTH is currently on the defensive. They have been fighting a defensive battle with no real offense. After awhile, if you have nothing to offer, people will look elsewhere.

I don’t think I need to add much to this New York Times article. Note who is “running strong.”

HNN is accepting nominations for history books that nobody should take seriously. Do you have a book in mind? Send an email to [email protected]. Next week readers will vote on the nominees to name the least credible history book in print!

I have some ideas. Want to share yours?

While you’re at it, check out HNN…

David Barton will be on the 700 Club today and although the video is not yet available, a summary of his appearance is on the 700 Club website. He is supposed to talk about Jefferson and says falsely that Jefferson was an active member of the Virginia Bible Society, that he financed a Bible edition in 1798, and that he demonstrated interest in bringing Christianity to Indians. He will apparently also discuss the Jefferson Bible.

Under the church and state section, the narrative refers to the 1947 Emerson v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that applied the Establishment Clause to the states. Barton has an interesting reading of the case:

In 1947 in Emerson v Board of Education (sic), the Supreme Court announced it would reverse this historic meaning and ruled that a school in Illinois had made the mistake of allowing voluntary religious activities by students, a practice that had characterized American education for the previous three centuries.

In fairness, perhaps the narrative was written by someone else who got the name of the case and the state wrong.  Everson actually upheld a New Jersey public school board’s policy of providing transportation to Catholic schools for children in their district. You can read that decision here.

Probably Illinois came  into the picture due to Barton’s criticism of McCollum vs. Board of Education decided in 1948. That case was in Illinois and related to religious instruction being offered in the public school. You can read that case here.

A prime finding of that decision was:

This utilization of the State’s tax supported public school system and its machinery for compulsory public school attendance to enable sectarian groups to give religious instruction to public school pupils in public school buildings violates the First Amendment of the Constitution, made applicable to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Even though the classes were voluntary, the school organized the religion classes to the degree that the court believed religion was being established. Barton says that these decisions reversed all prior practice. Not quite. See this case for a much earlier state case where the schools were not permitted to include mandatory Bible readings.

Rolling over in their grave, they are…

I wonder if Thomas Jefferson provides commentary on some of the books. Prior to the book of Revelation, Jefferson could enlighten readers with this little gem:

It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it [the book of Revelation] and I then considered it as merely the ravings of a maniac no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams. I was therefore well pleased to see in your first proof sheet that it was said to be not the production of St John but of Cerinthus a century after the death of that apostle. Yet the change of the author’s name does not lessen the extravagances of the composition and come they from whomsoever they may I cannot so far respect them as to consider them as an allegorical narrative of events past or subsequent. There is not coherence enough in them to countenance any suite of rational ideas. You will judge therefore from this how impossible I think it that either your explanation or that of any man in the heavens above or on the earth beneath can be a correct one. What has no meaning admits no explanation and pardon me if I say with the candor of friendship that I think your time too valuable and your understanding of too high an order to be wasted on these paralogisms. You will perceive I hope also that I do not consider them as revelations of the Supreme Being whom I would not so far blaspheme as to impute to Him a pretension of revelation couched at the same time in terms which He would know were never to be understood by those to whom they were addressed. In the candor of these observations I hope you will see proofs of the confidence esteem and which I entertain for you.