I planned to write a review/reflection on the Netflix documentary The Family by today. However, it didn’t happen. Others were more diligent than me and so I will close the work week with links to three reviews and two articles.
Religion News Service – Veteran religion writer Bob Smietana interviewed author Jeff Sharlet and producer Jesse Moss. This is a good inside look at their thinking on some key questions.
Washington Post – Friend and Messiah College historian John Fea reviews and recommends (with some reservations) the documentary. Read his reasons, pros and cons.
Christian Post – Reporter Michael Gryboski cites me in a balanced report about the documentary and provides a statement from the Fellowship Foundation which I haven’t seen anywhere else. I will have more to say about some of the criticisms leveled in this report next week.
The Atlantic – Is the group as powerful as Sharlet and Moss make it out to be? This reviewer wonders if it matters.
On Wednesday, I noted that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had been booked to speak at the October Tim Clinton (aka American Association of Christian Counselors) conference in Nashville. Clinton touted Pompeo’s record on trauma in his announcement. See below.
However, the Trump administration has a rather dismal record on trauma in our own nation. In fact, yesterday a federal court had to instruct the administration on basic care for migrant children. Among other things, the Trump administration had argued that soap and dental care were not basic needs for children. An appeals court said otherwise:
“Assuring that children eat enough edible food, drink clean water, are housed in hygienic facilities with sanitary bathrooms, have soap and toothpaste, and are not sleep-deprived are without doubt essential to the children’s safety,” the appeals court panel ruled.
Why would anyone need to be ordered to do this for children?
It is no secret that Tim Clinton supports Trump and is on his evangelical advisory committee. He is the owner of AACC and can do what he wants with it. However, he markets the business as a trade organization of a diverse group of counselors, some of whom work with children and many of whom work with trauma. There are experts in trauma resolution speaking at the conference, such as Diane Langberg. Break out sessions on trauma are scheduled. In my opinion, it is an insult to have a key representative of an administration generating trauma speak to a group who every day tries to prevent and heal that trauma.
Tim Clinton (aka The American Association of Christian Counselors) is holding a conference for counselors in early October of this year. It is a huge undertaking and generally draws over 5,000 counselors. Clinton has taken heat in past years for politicizing the conference by inviting non-counselors to speak. This year he has outdone himself by scheduling Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
I will raise just one illustration on religious persecution: North Korea. No president has coddled the North Korean dictator like Donald Trump. There is religious persecution in North Korea and the U.S. has done nothing to make that an issue there.
In any case, Clinton owns the AACC and can bring in anyone he wants to. It is beyond belief that psychology or counseling CEUs could be offered for listening to a political speech but that is how Clinton runs his show. I want to remind counselors that you also have a choice.
Throughout the Netflix documentary The Family, clips of Family leader Doug Coe preaching a sermon to a Christian audience are played. The clips come from his sermon to the Navigators, a Colorado based Christian mission group, on January 16 1989. This sermon — titled Jesus Demands Total Commitment — had not been available online until 2010 when Coe sent the video to me to post on YouTube. He felt his words had been taken out of context and wanted the entire sermon posted.
The video doesn’t include Coe’s introductory remarks about George Bush and is also cut short. Bruce Wilson has the entire audio available which does have several minutes of Coe praising Bush for his Christianity and asking the audience to pray for him. One thing that is typical of Coe in those remarks is that he doesn’t ask for the audience to pray for Bush to pursue certain policy goals (e.g., end abortion, appoint judges), but instead to make godly decisions. While Coe might have had preferences, he did not seem as interested in specific policy outcomes as the current crop of evangelical leaders surrounding Trump.
I believe this is the only posted video of the event which begins just after the sermon begins. Given YouTube guidelines at the time, I had to break it up into four parts.
To me, it seems obvious that white nationalism is a problem in America. However, Tucker Carlson famously said it isn’t. Even after Charlottesville, the church shooting in South Carolina, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting and the El Paso massacre, Carlson said it ranks low on America’s problems.
I wondered who agrees with him and found, as many people quickly pointed out, that former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke cheered Carlson on.
Tucker Carlson is correct. The “Everyone who opposes my politics is a white nationalist” narrative being pushed by the media and Democrats is the latest version of the damaging and divisive Russia collusion hoax. It is both dangerous and false.
Tucker Carlson is under fire for saying something blatantly true: that American society is not facing a crisis of white supremacy.https://t.co/yoeIjUrTFi
The key issue NO ONE is apparently thinking about: How can we douse the flames of hatred being whipped up against Americans of European descent, BEFORE that hate makes white identity politics morally legitimate? Because that’s the end of our country.
But what about that liberal canard that says that no matter how well armed the citizens are, they will never be able to defeat the modern military in a toe-to-toe confrontation? First, that presumes that the US military would fire on its own people, a question whose answer we do not know. And, second, it presumes that the fight would be a conventional one. More likely, it will be Fourth Generation Warfare, which is just another way of saying guerrilla war.
In 4Gen Warfare the lines between the military and the political, economic, cultural, and social are blurred past the point of recognition. To oversimplify, the primary targets will not be enemy soldiers; instead, they will be political leaders, members of the hostile media, cultural icons, bureaucrats, and other of the managerial elite without whom the engines of tyranny don’t run.
4Gen Warfare doesn’t require that the populace be armed equal to the military and law enforcement. In fact, having such firepower, with few exceptions (such as full-auto “assault weapons,” silencers, and a handful of other esoteric toys), would be a logistical and tactical burden to the common 3- to 5-man group so common in this type of warfare.
Make no mistake about it, the League and groups like it engage in rhetoric unlike any Scientologist or evolutionist. They are dangerous with enough numbers to create terror and motivate criminal activity.
According to FBI Director Christopher Wray, white supremacist groups account for a significant number of criminal investigations. Watch:
While white supremacist* motivated crime isn’t the greatest threat, it isn’t trivial and one should question the motives of anyone who minimizes it.
Additional information: See this report on domestic terrorism 2018. Yes, the numbers are small but the potential damage is great and the threat appears to be growing.
*white supremacy and white nationalism have been distinguished by some as the difference between attitude and political objective. Supremacy is an attitude that whites are better than other races; nationalism is a political objective of make America a majority white country or favoring segregation. It is hard for me to make much of a distinction in attitude. To me, it seems to be a rationalization of racial prejudice to claim white nationalist political goals while claiming to have no bias toward people of color. For the purpose of this post, I am considering the terms synonyms.
