Children's Bibles and the Victims of the Flood

A "Noah's Ark" children's book, showing a bunch of very cute animals on the ark. Image source.

I've been reading "Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles" and it's great. One chapter is called "'The Water's Round My Shoulders, and I'm-- GLUG! GLUG! GLUG!': God's Destruction of Humanity in the Flood Story for Children" by Emma England. Wow, just take a moment to marvel at the title of this paper. I love it so much. The story of the flood and Noah's ark- which is a beloved story, a staple of children's bibles, filled with cute animals- is horrifyingly violent, and I'm glad someone is pointing that out.

This paper by England analyzes the way that children's bibles represent the destruction of humanity in the flood. (If you're unfamiliar with the story, from Genesis 6-8: God sends a flood to kill every person on earth except for Noah and his family. They are saved in the ark, along with 2 of every land animal.) England has analyzed "over three hundred English-language retellings of the flood story" and categorized them thusly (p 215):

Here I present six approaches that highlight the significance of the word/image relationship and the destruction of humanity:

1. no verbal or visual reference
2. brief verbal reference and/or allusory visual representation
3. traditional verbal description, no visual representation
4. verbal elaboration, no visual representation
5. visual representation, no or brief verbal reference
6. visual representation, and traditional verbal description or verbal elaboration

I'm obsessed with this.

For each of the six categories, there are some examples given of children's bibles which take that approach toward the part of the story where everyone died in the flood. This is great stuff. God killing everyone in the world is an important plot point in the story of Noah's ark- children's bibles have to address it somehow, but Christians are a little bit squirmy about that. As I've mentioned in previous posts, there's this weird paradox where "bible-believing" Christians believe it was right for God to kill all those people, BUT ALSO are kinda horrified at the idea of explicitly showing it to children, BUT ALSO we're telling children yeah all those people deserved to die, BUT ALSO we hope those children don't ask too many questions, and we label them as troublemakers if they push back against it and say God did wrong in this story.

Also check out this quote from page 222-223:

Retellings with a traditional verbal description but no visual representation of the destruction may appear to be more faithful to the Genesis narrative than retellings that remove or underplay it. In many ways, however, this apparent faithfulness proves problematic because of the role of God in the destruction and how that role is narrated in Genesis. Although God announces the flood (6:7, 13;17), he is silent for the duration of it (7:5-8:14). During the flood he only acts to shut the door of the ark (7:16), remember Noah (8:1), and make a wind blow (8:1). During the destruction itself, there is only one possible reference to him: "He blotted out every living thing" (7:23).

In order for a retelling to remain faithful to the biblical depiction of God's role in the flood, God has to actively state that he will destroy everything and then either physically or magically shut the ark and make a wind blow. He must "remember" Noah, thereby implying that at some point he had forgotten him. This combination of factors is clearly challenging for producers of the retellings because they are rarely all present in any one version. As a result God's role in the retellings is diminished. This is particularly the case because references to other details such as God smelling Noah's offerings, his command to breed, and his demand for a reckoning (8:20-9:7) are uncommon. Thus the narrative is essentially reduced to Noah, the ark, and the animals. God is demoted from being the primary character while Noah is promoted.

In the retellings, whether they include the destruction or not, Noah is the focalizer. The retellings make the flood story into the (abbreviated) story of Noah, a story that is different from the story of the flood (cf. J. Lewis 1968, 3; Peters 2008, 17-22; Stone, Amihay, and Hillel 2010, 1). In most retellings God is marginalized by his total or relative absence. The flood is no longer a means to an end for God; it is the tool by which the producers of children's books are able to present everything from learning the alphabet using animals to themes of environmental stewardship (Stephens and McCallum 1998, 54-56; Piehl 2005). With the rise of the centrality of Noah, the Genesis flood story is replaced in our cultural memory with "Noah's ark."

!!!!! This is such a good point!!! Children's bibles emphasize the role of Noah and the animals. Honestly, I think this story is such a popular one for children's bibles, despite how horrifying it is (everyone in the world except 8 people died, MY GOD), because there are a whole bunch of animals. Hey kids, do you like zoo animals? Look at these elephants and giraffes and bunnies entering the ark two-by-two! What a great story for kids!

Yeah, children's bibles very much emphasize the cute animals, all happily chilling on the ark together.

But what this story actually is, in the bible, is a story about a devastating flood which killed the whole population of the world- and how that flood was intentionally sent by God as a punishment for sin. Yeah, children's bibles mention those things, but mostly they want to show you the zoo animals.

And another quote I want to show you, from page 223-224:

Throughout the nineteenth century and opening decades of the twentieth century the feelings and behavior of the victims of the destruction were more dominant. One such text is from the anonymous Bible Stories in Simple Language for Little Children (ca. 1894): "Then torrents of rain began to fall; the rivers overflowed; the sea rose over the land; the tops of the highest hills were covered in water; all men, women, and children were drowned. How dreadful it must have been!" (16).

This example appears to lead the audience (whether successfully or not) into empathizing with the drowning people. ...

... Typically, readers are encouraged to identify with Noah as part of the protected internal group. However in this narrative (and those like it) the readers are being encouraged to identify themselves with the bad people who represent the wicked, violent, and corrupt of the Genesis story. ... [G]iving a voice to those destroyed highlights the absence of the drowned from the Genesis narrative. By their very absence we see that the victims as a collective unit are marginalized through their lack of focalization, a lack that is part of the process of othering, an indicator that the reader of Genesis is encouraged to identify with the in-group of Noah's family.

!!! "Typically, readers are encouraged to identify with Noah as part of the protected internal group." This is so real! The Genesis story does not say much about the victims of the flood- only that they were evil, and the only example of their evil deeds was... they intermarried with angels, or something? No other details beyond that. 

I never thought I should, ya know, care about them. As a good Christian and bible nerd, I was required to believe that all the violence that God committed in the bible was right. 

My view now is completely different: I now believe you should never believe someone if they claim an entire group of people is evil and they all deserve to die. Even if it's God who is making that claim- don't believe it. And if someone says "I killed this large group of people, but don't worry, I assure you they were all very evil and deserved to die, though conveniently none of them are here to tell their side of the story"- holy crap, you should be incredibly suspicious of that, wtf. 

It's horrifying, the stuff you have to make yourself believe, if you're a very very good Christian who believes in biblical inerrancy and actually reads the bible.

Anyway, one more little anecdote I want to talk about here: I remember one time, when I was a kid and I was reading one of these bible stories where God kills a whole population because apparently they're all evil (it might have been the flood story, or Sodom and Gomorrah, or another such bible story). The claim was that there were no good people at all in the whole society. I read that, and I thought about... sometimes at school, a lot of kids are making trouble, so the teacher tells the whole class they have to sit down and be quiet- punishing the whole class because the teacher views the situation as the entire class causing trouble. And I was always a little shy girl and I wasn't causing trouble, but did the teacher even notice me? What if there were some quiet people, in Noah's time, and they didn't do anything wrong, but they were so quiet that God didn't even notice them, and so God declared that every single person in the whole world (except Noah and his family) deserved to die?

I remember wondering about that. Wondering if God would punish me for other people's sins because he wouldn't even notice I was there. And if that happened during the flood.

Kids think about things like that. If Christians just try to gloss over the victims when telling the story of Noah's ark- well, you don't know what kind of conclusions kids will draw from that. Kids notice these things. 

Anyway, that's what I have to say about this chapter of "Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles." The story of Noah's ark is horrifying and we should not teach it to children, and I will die on this hill.

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Posts about "Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles":

"Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles" (I LOVE THIS BOOK SO MUCH)
David and Jonathan's (One-Sided) Friendship 
Who Cut Samson's Hair? (a post about reading the bible for what it is) 
The way we write children's bibles is "an act of bad faith" 
Children's Bibles and the 2 Creation Stories
Children's Bibles and "presenting mass slaughter to children" 
Children's Bibles and "turning ambiguity into clear articulations"
Children's Bibles and the Victims of the Flood

Related:

Noah's Evangelism 

If Thanos Tells You To Build An Ark, You Say No

Sodom

"Sodom and Gomorrah" is a story about living in a "bad neighborhood"

"Pure": A Book About the Aftermath of Purity Culture

Book cover for "Pure" by Linda Kay Klein.

The book Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free, by Linda Kay Klein, is about adult women who grew up in purity culture. It's about the aftermath of purity culture, how people try to move on from it as adults, how it continues to affect them. The book contains stories from the author's personal life, and interviews with many people who grew up in purity culture.

I have a few quotes and observations I want to share here:

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Ignorance about sex (p 77)

We weren't allowed to know anything about what sex actually was, but at the same time, we had to make sure we strictly followed the rules about what we weren't allowed to do. Kind of difficult to know what the rules are, though, when you're not allowed to know what sex is.

The cornerstone of the purity myth is the expectation that girls and women, in particular, will be utterly and absolutely nonsexual until the day they marry a man, at which point they will naturally and easily become his sexual satisfier, ensuring the couple will have children and never divorce: one man, one woman, in marriage, forever.

For this formula to work, my girlfriends and I knew we had to follow a slew of rules. Unfortunately, none of us knew what they were. Sex was such a shameful topic that we never got real talk on what we were and were not allowed to do. It was assumed that if no one ever talked to us about sex, it would just sort of go away until we needed it. So our "sex talks" were all generic metaphors and warnings about what would happen to us if we crossed a line, which was defined differently by so many people that we were left guessing all the same. Meanwhile, we knew we would be shamed if we asked sexual questions; shamed if we discussed sexual decisions; shamed if we shared our confusing sexual feelings and thoughts; and shamed worst of all if we admitted we had already done anything sexual. So each of us guessed at what the rules might be, hoped we were right, and didn't tell anyone about our sexual lives just in case we weren't.

This is SPOT ON.

Also, purity culture makes people so ashamed of completely normal things, it causes people to hide what they're doing rather than having healthy conversations with friends about what a healthy relationship looks like. If something is wrong in your relationship, you won't be able to get useful advice from your friends about it, because you're ashamed of the fact that you're dating someone in the first place.

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The couple who couldn't figure out how to have sex (p 135-137)

Klein interviews a woman named Muriel:

Desperate to have sex, Muriel and Dmitri's engagement was short.

"We got married at 9:30 in the morning so that we could have sex early. No lie, that's why we got married early! I was excited about sex! I thought, 'I don't want to wait all day,' because sex was this huge thing! It was what everybody talked about, in the negative. But then supposedly once it was in marriage it was supposed to be this amazing celebration. This was the flip side, right? Supposedly. But during the ceremony up there, the pastor says 'you may kiss the bride,' and we kiss. Our teeth clanked. I was like, 'What is going on?' We, like, sort of used tongue. It was the weirdest thing in the world. [Note: they 'saved their first kiss for the wedding.']

"There had been this whole promise: If you wait, then this kiss will be magical and divine. But oh my gosh, total opposite. I whispered in Dmitri's ear, 'Let's not do that again until we're alone.'

"There was a small reception and by noon we're in a hotel room. So we start stripping off. I see a naked man for the first time. I hadn't even seen naked pictures. I'd never seen any pornography or anything. So, naked man. And then I got to strip off. And now we're naked and this is weird and we start kissing or whatever and then I just bust up crying because this has all been way too much and I hadn't slept much the night before.

"So I take a nap. We take a nap. Then we wake up and we start trying it again. And I have no idea what hole or where anything is. We try that and Dmitri tries touching and he doesn't know. At this point I've read about the clitoris in The Act of Marriage. I know it exists, but I have no idea where it is, neither does Dmitri, and so he's, 'Does this feel good?' I have no idea. I've never let anything down there try to feel good before. So he keeps trying and I'm like, 'Is that an orgasm? I don't know.' So then he starts trying to stick it in. Again, I have no idea where. He's trying to direct. We don't get it in and then he's like, 'Well I'm kind of moved all the way here. Can you help me out?' So I start to do that, and then I'm just, like, left there. Not having done 'the sex.'

"We don't figure out sex for four months. We don't actually get it in. We keep trying. I mean, we're discouraged, but he does keep trying. Sometimes it hurts. We didn't get the idea about wetness or lubrication or any of that. I eventually figured out I had to stretch out beforehand, manually. I figured out where the hole was and I would stretch it out manually and then he would go in. It never felt sexy. Sex was never sexy. I never got off while he was in there, and even on his end, it was more like, if we did it, good, that's something we're supposed to do. But it was never 'this is so sexy, I want you.' It was just a check mark for us. I'm not sure when he gave up on trying as often."

"Did you ever talk about what you were experiencing with anybody?"

"No! Because it's embarrassing! I mean, that's just something you just don't talk about. We're married now. It's supposed to be a slippery, slippery, easy-to-fall-off-of slope. 'Where's the easiness? How's anybody accidentally having sex? How are teenagers accidentally getting pregnant? I don't know. How are they even getting it in?!'"

!!!!!! This! Oh my goodness, this. This is SO MUCH like my experience trying to have sex for the first time. I totally bought into this ideology that once you are no longer constantly holding yourself back from having sex, once you step over the purity guardrails and allow yourself to do whatever you want, you'll just naturally fall into this powerful vortex of the amazingness of sex, it will feel so good, it will change your whole life, you don't even have to think or do anything, it just happens and it's so amazing (but ill-advised if you're not married, because it is so powerful and life-changing).

And then... what actually happens, if you're like me and you're asexual af, is you decide "okay we are gonna have sex" and then you think, well in the movies the first step seems to be kissing, so let's do that, and then you do that and then you're not sure what's supposed to happen next, should be something about putting our genitals together, but... that's so weird...? And everything slows to a stop and you're just extremely confused instead of having this mind-blowing, life-changing experience.

Like Muriel, I also was genuinely confused about how teenagers get pregnant. Just could not make heads or tails of anything- how my experience of sex was in a different universe from the way everybody else talked about sex. I even asked doctors for help but they were useless. When I discovered asexuality, that was the first time I found people talking about sex in a way that actually felt real. Same for when I heard about vaginismus- finally people talking about what sex is really like, how difficult and confusing it is. (Based on what Muriel said, it sounds like she had vaginismus.)

I'm lucky- I did not have that experience on my wedding night, I had that experience long before we got married. I'm so glad we didn't wait till marriage. And I'm so glad I slowly broke the purity rules little-by-little, rather than trying to go from zero to PIV [penis in vagina] sex immediately, like Muriel did.

The thing about manually stretching the vagina, to prepare for PIV sex, yeah I also discovered that. That was the method I used, when I had vaginismus. (I no longer have vaginismus- let me tell you, wow it makes a world of difference not having vaginismus. It *actually is* easy to have sex now that I don't have vaginismus. Unbelievable.)

What really strikes me about this excerpt from the book is, Muriel and Dmitri had this mindset like there's some specific thing they're supposed to do, as a married couple, and they're trying as hard as they can to figure out how to do it, and feeling ashamed for having trouble with it. They weren't viewing sex as something that was for them, that they could figure out in their own way, based on what felt good for them.

Like it was a specific series of steps, which no one explains to you because it's supposedly "natural", and then when you're confused about what the steps are supposed to be, you feel like something is wrong with you.

I'm queer now- which means I view sex as something that people can choose for themselves. People can make an informed choice about which parts of it they want or don't want. Make it something that makes sense for you.

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"Freaking out" when attempting to have sex

Klein talks about how, when she tried to have sex with her boyfriend Sebastian, she would panic and "freak out." For people who are trying to leave purity culture, the psychological effects are so strong- the fear is engrained so deep- if you have sex, horrible things will happen. (I also experienced that fear- I eventually decided that I no longer believed it was a sin to have unmarried sex... but actually doing it was an entirely different thing- I was still terrified. Eventually I decided to "face my fear"- after we finally had PIV sex, and it didn't ruin my life, and didn't change me into a completely different kind of person, wow I felt so much better. No fear any more.)

Here's a quote from p 198:

Sebastian and I did eventually have sex, though it was, in his words, "a brief and bungling affair." Both virgins, neither of us wanted to call this our sexual debut. In time, Sebastian and I broke up. In the years that followed, he got a new girlfriend and says he was shocked by how easily sexual intimacy came with someone who wasn't religious. ("Thanks man," I rolled my eyes at him.)

OH my goodness, this is so real. He "was shocked by how easily sexual intimacy came with someone who wasn't religious."

SO REAL.

People who date people who grew up in purity culture are taking on a very hard task. I have "freaked out" many times about extremely mundane aspects of dating, and how I was so terrified that I was "bad" and "impure" because of what I had done. As an example, 17 years ago, I was dating a guy, and one time I called him "my wonderful dear" and then I had a whole emotional crisis about that because I didn't think I was going to marry him, and then what would my "future husband" think about the fact that I had actually said out loud that a guy who wasn't him was "wonderful"? What would my future husband think about me having expressed my feelings for another guy? Was I going to regret this forever?

(Please note, that was 17 years ago, and it has no effect on my life now. I am married, and my husband cares 0% about what I did or did not do with some other guy 17 years ago. Purity culture really had me believing that whatever silly misadventures I had in dating in college were going to haunt me for the rest of my life. I cannot express strongly enough how NOT TRUE that is.)

And on and on. Every guy I have dated, I have burdened with this emotional baggage about how I fear I'm being so bad and impure and sinful. 

"he was shocked by how easily sexual intimacy came with someone who wasn't religious." I feel that so much.

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People who want casual sex

Here's something I learned from this book: There are people who genuinely want to have casual sex without a relationship. This can include men, women, people of whatever gender. They actually legitimately want that. They look at their current life situation and think about what they want out of sex/relationships, and they feel that what they really want is to have casual sex.

I really never thought about that before.

I knew that many people are having casual sex, but I never knew that could be, like... like an intentional choice. I thought it was like, "I wish I could be in a real relationship, but I have to settle for casual sex instead" or "I met this very hot person and I don't know what came over me, everything moved so fast and we had sex." I really never knew it could be a clear-eyed rational choice that made sense with one's current priorities and life circumstances.

Some of the people interviewed in this book talk about how their vision for their sex life is to have casual sex, but they have such a hard time getting there because of all the psychological hangups they have from purity culture.

Fascinating!

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Respecting everyone's journey

Klein interviews a huge range of people, who all have difference experiences in terms of what happened to them after growing up in purity culture. Some of them got married, some didn't. Some had unmarried sex, some didn't. Some are still Christian, some aren't. Some are queer. One interviewee said something about "sometimes I wonder if I'm a lesbian." One interviewee is a trans man. 

And the book never makes any judgments about if their choices and identities are right or wrong. The book simply respects everyone and lets them tell their own stories. (Klein even says she tried to include some people who benefitted from purity ideology, but she couldn't find any who were willing to be included in the book, so MAKE OF THAT WHAT YOU WILL.)

Let me tell you, it was SO REFRESHING to read this after reading "The Great Sex Rescue." Oh MY GOODNESS. The way that "Pure" simply acknowledges the existence of queer people, because it makes sense to mention queer people in a book about the effects of purity culture- just talking about being queer like it's a normal part of the range of human experience. SO DIFFERENT from "The Great Sex Rescue", which so glaringly refused to mention anything about queer people existing. The way that "Pure" is totally fine with people being Christian or not. So different from "The Great Sex Rescue", whose main point was "conservative Christians teach that God wants us to do sex and marriage in this way, but actually, that's wrong and harmful, actually God wants us to do sex and marriage in this other way."

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Conclusion

"Pure" is a book about the practical effects of purity culture on people's adult lives. Klein interviews many people who grew up in purity culture, and they talk about how they felt about it, the choices they made since then, and the ways that purity culture still affects them.

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Related:

I’m Really Really REALLY Glad I Had Sex Before Marriage

Blogaround

Links not related to that felon:

1. Fan.tasia (2016, via) Wow, this is incredible. It's a mashup of scenes from Disney cartoons, mostly Disney Renaissance, and the way they're all cut together is extremely well-done. Amazing.

2. Will Market Shake Up Smooth the Road for Takeout Couriers? (April 30) "At the same time, JD announced plans to recruit 100,000 full-time couriers and provide them with social insurance, a potentially major shift in an industry that currently relies on a freelance, uninsured workforce."

Also from Sixth Tone: Starting Today, Rules Against Prepaid Rip-Offs Take Effect in China (May 1) I hear about this kind of thing all the time in China. People join a gym and pay for a yearlong membership, and then suddenly the gym closes, and it's impossible to get in contact with anyone to get a refund. Or people buy a package of 50 classes for their kid to do some kind of sport or extracurricular activity, and suddenly, without any notice at all, the place closes and there's no way to get your money back. So what you have to do is, first of all, DON'T prepay for things like that, and second, try to only buy classes/memberships from companies that have existed for a long time and are unlikely to suddenly disappear.

So I'm glad to see that China is making laws to protect customers in these kinds of cases.

3. Debate and Switch - The Trope That Ruins Stories (March 28, via) 33-minute video. It's about stories which set up a really interesting moral conflict, where the villain points out some problem, or presents some idea which could potentially be a good idea, and it could be a really cool story if that conflict was explored. But nope, it doesn't get explored, it gets totally ignored because then the villain randomly kills a bunch of people, or something, and so we all see that the villain is bad and must be defeated, and nobody ever comes back to the insightful points the villain had brought up in the beginning.

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Links related to that felon:

As always, you don't have to read all the news if it's too stressful. Instead, DO SOMETHING. Protest. Contact your congress people. Donate money. Check on the immigrants in your life and see if they need help.

You don't have to be up-to-date on everything! Better to find 1 issue you care about a lot, and fight for that. Better to do that than just be paralyzed and overwhelmed.

1. Mohsen Mahdawi — the Columbia student arrested at his citizenship appointment — speaks (April 29) "I see the risk, I see the opportunity, and I want the American people to see this, too. To see this level of injustice. That I am doing everything legally, that I have prepared and studied for the Constitution and that I went willingly and respected the law, did everything the way how it's supposed to be done."

2. Trump is jailing immigrant families again. A mother, father and teen tell of ‘anguish on a daily basis’ (April 24) "Gabriela and Jason struggled to find the words to help their daughter. 'Imagine seeing your child sad because they can’t go to school. And you can’t even say, ‘Let’s go to the corner. Let’s go get ice cream. Or some chips,’' Gabriela said. 'How do you explain any of this to a child? Your mom can’t do anything for you, your dad can’t do anything.'"

3. RFK Jr. to require placebo-controlled studies for new vaccines (May 1) Well this is a bad idea.

4. Education Department stops $1 billion in funding for school mental health (May 1) "To be able to provide those [mental health] services and then have it ripped away for something that is completely out of our control, it's horrible,' Fialkiewicz says. 'I feel for our students more than anything because they're not gonna get the services that they need.'"

5. Trump-appointed federal judge blocks use of Alien Enemies Act for Venezuelans in South Texas (May 1) "Other courts have sought to block the Trump administration from deporting anyone under the act. But this is the first time a judge has ruled that the act cannot be used against people who are alleged gang members invading the United States."

6. DOJ Proposes Giving Legal Advice to Immigrants in Cases It Oversees (May 1) "'[Families are] being asked to trust the government that harmed them to tell them how to move forward in the best way for them,' said Sara Van Hofwegen, managing director of legal access programs at Acacia Center for Justice, which has provided the services for the past year. 'The government hasn’t shown them that they have their interests in mind.'" Yeah this is extremely suspicious.

ICE and Hell

Sticks. Image source.

While the Israelites were in the wilderness, a man was found gathering wood on the Sabbath day. Those who found him gathering wood brought him to Moses and Aaron and the whole assembly, and they kept him in custody, because it was not clear what should be done to him. Then the Lord said to Moses, “The man must die. The whole assembly must stone him outside the camp.” So the assembly took him outside the camp and stoned him to death, as the Lord commanded Moses.

Numbers 15:32-36

What do you do with this passage, if you're a good Christian who believes in biblical inerrancy?

The first time reading it, there's a shock, your conscience jumps up and says NO, this is not fair. But you know you can't listen to your conscience, if it says the bible is wrong about something, if it says God was wrong about something. No, you are a good Christian who believes the bible. So, you have to find a way to believe that it was right that this man was executed for the "crime" of gathering wood on the Sabbath.

The apologetics arguments get trotted out. You see, God's laws were very serious, and people DID deserve to die for breaking them. You see, this man was blatantly disrespecting God, acting like he knew better than God. You see, this was around the time period when the Israelites had just come out of Egypt and were establishing themselves as a new nation, setting up their laws to say what kind of nation they would be- and so it was very important to their national identity that everyone got the message that those laws were serious.

There are 2 choices here. You could continue to assert that this was not fair- the bible is wrong about this, God was wrong about this. You would need to change your whole religion. You would need to change your whole perspective on what the bible is, and what kind of God you follow. You would need to ask uncomfortable questions about why the good Christian role models in your church believe in that kind of a God. Or, the second option, you can just make yourself believe everything is fine. That Sabbath-breaker really did deserve to die. The moral of this bible story is, don't gather sticks on the Sabbath if God said not to. Don't break any of God's laws, no matter how minor, because then you'll deserve to die too. Then it will be right for God to order your execution.

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Most Christians don't know this bible story, about the man who was executed for gathering sticks on the Sabbath. Evangelicals talk a big game about how the bible is so important and special and inerrant and we have to devote ourselves to reading it every day, memorizing it, every single verse is inspired by God and authoritative over our lives. They always talk about that, but very very few actually do it. Very very few have read the whole bible. I was one of the nerds who actually did.

You go to any Sunday school class and ask people what they think about the story of the man who was executed for gathering wood on the Sabbath, and the overwhelming majority will have no idea what you're talking about.

In a way, it's the truly devoted bible nerds who have it the hardest- the way we have to kill our consciences. Sure, churches are full of people saying "we believe the bible" but they don't even know what they're saying. The apologetics nerds know. The apologetics nerds know that we have signed on to worship a God who ordered a man to be executed for gathering wood on the Sabbath. We know. We have done the work of killing our consciences so we can continue to be good Christians who worship this God.

Especially the bible nerds who are children. Adults all around them, telling them "wow it's so great that you're reading the bible all the time." Adults who perhaps don't know what's in the bible- and the kids don't know that the adults don't know. The kids hear "it's so great that you're reading the bible" and understand it to mean "yes, we all believe it was right that this man was executed for gathering wood on the Sabbath, and you need to believe that too, to be a good kid."

But even though most evangelicals don't know this bible story, here are some things they do openly preach: Every sin is an infinite offense against a holy God. All of us deserve to go to hell, because we are all sinners. 

Yes, really. When I was a child, I was taught that since I had committed some average sins that children commit, like hitting my sister, that meant I deserved to die and go to hell. But, they said, the good news is, Jesus came and died on the cross to take our sins away- if we believe in Jesus, we can get out of the punishment we deserve, and go to heaven instead.

(Very interesting that when telling this "good news," you don't need to mention anything about the Resurrection...)

How does this make sense? How can someone deserve to be tortured forever in hell because of some little mistakes they made? Well, according to this ideology, "every sin is an infinite offense against a holy God." In other words, because God is so perfect, even if your sin is just a little bit wrong, it is magnified to be this huge, disgusting, horrific crime, when you look at it in comparison to the holiness of God. God is so perfect, and that's why we all deserve to go to hell.

We all deserve to go to hell. But, fortunately, we can believe in Jesus, to get out of it. But there was always the feeling that it was in some sense wrong that we could escape hell in this way. *We* don't deserve it- it's Jesus covering us, covering up who we really are, to sneak us into heaven. Evangelicals literally say that if you believe in Jesus, "when God looks at you, he doesn't see your sin, he sees Jesus' sinlessness covering you."

Sometimes I happen across non-Christians who seem to assume that Christianity is meant to be about helping people and making the world better, and it's always a bit jarring to me because, where did they get that idea, that is very much NOT what I was taught Christianity is about, in the evangelical church. Or I happen across Christians who were raised in progressive churches, who believe Christianity is about helping people and making the world better, and talk about it like it's the most natural thing- this also shocks me. 

(See: Nothing about the Good News Club shocks me)

Because, yes, I'm still a Christian but I'm not evangelical any more; yes, now I do believe Christianity should be about helping people and making the world better. As Jesus taught us to pray, "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." But damn, how hard I had to fight to get here. When I was evangelical, I believed that the main point of Christianity is that we're all sinners who deserve to go to hell, but Jesus died to save us, and we need to spread the good news, to help people escape hell. That stuff about helping people and making the world better, sure, that's nice, we should also do that, but not too much- we don't want it to be a distraction that takes our focus away from the main point, preaching about sin and hell and Jesus' death that saves us. 

Wouldn't it be terrible if we helped people have a better life on earth, but then they went to hell for eternity?

Actually, having compassion for "sinners"/ victims of tragedies might be a bad thing, because it might make us lose sight of how serious God's law is, how BAD sin is- any little tiny sin means that people deserve to go to hell. Kill your conscience before it deceives you into believing there's something wrong with God's justice.

---

Sometime around 2014, the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum, and revealed how common it is that unarmed Black people are killed by police. Frequently when this happens, the police and/or random people on the internet come up with all kinds of justifications for why the Black victim deserved to die. Oh, he was a suspect in a robbery. Oh, he didn't comply with the police officer's commands. Oh, he was arrested for using drugs, one time, years ago. Oh, he was wearing a hoodie. Oh, we pored over all his social media and found a photo he posted where he kinda looks like a gang member.

Your conscience jumps up and tells you NO, this is not fair, but then society's anti-black racism supplies you with all these stories you can tell yourself, to get your conscience to calm down and accept everything is okay. Just like with the man in the bible who gathered wood on the Sabbath, wouldn't it be easier to just believe he deserved it? 

Christians who believe in biblical inerrancy have been trained to accept these flimsy justifications for why someone deserved to die for some kind of minor "sin."

(And also, the reason the slogan "Black Lives Matter" is used is to very intentionally NOT make the argument "this specific victim didn't deserve to die, because they were a good person and did things right." To NOT get dragged into arguments about whatever minor things a victim may have done wrong, but instead to say that NOBODY deserves to get shot in the street.)

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When I was in college and really "on fire for God," I had it all figured out. You see, the reason that sometimes bad things happen is that we all deserve to go to hell anyway- this is God's justice. And the reason good things happen is God's mercy- God loves us and wants to give us good things, even though we don't deserve them.

This is actually a pretty Calvinist way of thinking- some evangelicals are Calvinist and some are not- and it's quite a tidy answer to the Problem of Evil. Maybe it's the only answer I've ever heard that holds together logically (besides just not believing in God at all). 

Why do tragic things happen? Why do people die in earthquakes? Why is there child abuse? Well, actually, we all deserve to have those things happen. Actually, we deserve worse- we all deserve to go to hell. So really, you can't complain about this stuff- you deserve worse. 

It's logical, but it's monstrous.

Better to not have an answer to the Problem of Evil, than to believe in this.

---

The story about the man who gathered sticks on the Sabbath comes from the Old Testament, around the time that God was giving the Law to Moses. In the New Testament, Jesus came along and did things a little differently. He treated people with kindness and love, rather than judging them for their sins. People criticized him for spending time with tax collectors and prostitutes and other "sinners."

Evangelicals believe we should follow Jesus' example. We should also show love to sinners (ie, everyone), rather than being mean to them about it. 

But there's always a sense that there was something a little bit... wrong about what Jesus did. That in reality, these people really were sinners, and they really did deserve to go to hell, and Jesus sort of offered them a temporary oasis of acceptance that wasn't really *right*, from the perspective of God's justice. And when we follow Jesus' example, and we love "sinners", we hope that this convinces them to believe in Jesus and get saved- otherwise yeah they'll go to hell, and they'll deserve it.

The message that evangelicals preach is "God loves you even though you are a sinner who deserves to go to hell." Yes, really, literally, they really say this- this isn't me rephrasing it to make it sound worse- they literally put it this way, and they think it's good news. 

I have also literally heard evangelicals say we need to "love the unlovable." Show kindness toward everyone, but always remember they don't deserve it. But that doesn't mean we're better than other people- remember, we also don't deserve anything good.

The message is not "you deserve God's love." LOL! Oh my goodness, LOLOLOLOL! Of course not! HA!

No, the message is: you deserve to go to hell, but fortunately God is doing something that's a little bit wrong, in a certain sense- to let Jesus' suffering count as payment for your sins, so you don't have to go to hell. Be thankful that Jesus lets you sneak in through this loophole, because you sure as hell don't deserve it.

(The Slacktivist has written [here's one link, but if you know of additional links from his blog, please help me out and leave a comment, I remember he has written other posts about this] about how this is sort of contradictory- how evangelicals believe that people deserve to go to hell, but at the same time, we need to warn them about hell, and tell them the good news about Jesus, so they can avoid hell- and if you're too scared to "share the gospel" with your friends, you should feel bad, it's partly your fault if your friends go to hell. So, it's right for God to send people to hell, but also, we should try to prevent it. What?)

But now, I'm not evangelical, and now, I believe people deserve God's love, simply because we are people. We deserve happiness. We all deserve the opportunity to live a good life. Damn, how hard I had to work to get here.

---

Right now, we're seeing a lot of news articles about ICE deporting undocumented immigrants in the US. And what I fear is, evangelicals will say, well, it's fine, they were here illegally, so, they deserve it, right? 

For any small sin we commit, we deserve to die and go to hell. So how can you be upset if someone commits the "sin" of being undocumented, and then they get their whole life uprooted and get deported because of it?

We all deserve to go to hell. We all deserve to go to a prison in El Salvador.

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But you may have noticed, isn't there a double standard? Isn't the president literally a felon- why does he get to be president, while other people's minor "crimes" mean they get deported?

And we see this in the bible too- there are bible characters who were killed by God for some minor "sin," while other bible characters who commit worse sins are held up as heroes and role models. King David raped Bathsheba and murdered her husband, and at the same time, King David is called "a man after God's own heart" and seen as a great follower of God, whose example we should learn from.

I would explain the logic like this: Yes, people deserve to die for their minor sins. If you read about this happening in the bible, and you are sad for the victims and you think it's unfair, well, you're challenging God. How dare you. But at the same time, yeah, God loves us and doesn't want to give us the punishment we deserve. Isn't it great, when we see people not getting the punishment they deserve? Isn't it great that David, though he was a sinner like we are, still got to be the king and was loved by God?

So basically what it shakes out to is: When bad things happen to some strangers far away, it's best if you can convince yourself to not care. Wouldn't it be easier to find some minor thing they did wrong, and to believe they deserved what happened to them? But when something bad happens to someone we can relate to, we care about them and we want to fight for them and help them. And we say, isn't it wonderful that God is merciful and forgiving?

(Hmm, this seems like it might be a little bit racist.)

(And, to clarify, I'm not saying *every* time something bad happens far away, evangelicals believe it's fine. I'm saying evangelicals believe it's fine when they have an incentive to believe that those who did it are "the good guys"- ie, God, the US government, etc.)

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As I've said before, the belief that "we all deserve to go to hell" ruins anything good about Christianity. It can be used to excuse any kind of atrocity. I worry about what's going on right now with immigrants being deported. I worry because I know that evangelicals- who believe in the bible and believe in hell- have been trained not to care.

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Related:

I Deserve God's Love 

Everyone Else's Nadab and Abihu Fanfics 

"Sodom and Gomorrah" is a story about living in a "bad neighborhood" 

"Christians Aren't Perfect" When It's Convenient

John Piper Said "There Are No Innocent Children" and I am Not the Least Bit Surprised 

Yes, I Want Justice (A post about white evangelicals and #BlackLivesMatter)

Figuring Out What I Believe About "The Prince of Egypt"

Scene of Moses leading the Israelites, from "The Prince of Egypt: The Musical." Image source.

[I guess I'll put a spoiler warning: spoilers for the biblical story of the exodus]

Did you know there is a musical version of "The Prince of Egypt"? Yes, this is amazing, I was on a plane recently looking at what movies they had, and they had "The Prince of Egypt: The Musical." !!!!!! I watched it and it was AMAZING. I love the cartoon movie "The Prince of Egypt," and this musical version was all that and more. Seriously, if you're a fan of "The Prince of Egypt," try to get your hands on this musical version, it's incredible. Here's a trailer I found on youtube.

At the end, when the Israelite people are finally free from slavery in Egypt, and they're celebrating, singing the song "When You Believe," I was so into it, thinking to myself "I believe this. I believe in a God who is powerful, who parted the Red Sea and saved people."

And then I was like, wait, what? We're talking about the bible story of the exodus here. I very much do NOT believe this is a true story. For one thing, I've read posts from bible scholars like Peter Enns which say there just isn't archaeological evidence that a huge population of people came out of Egypt and wandered through the desert, eventually settling in Israel. For another thing, the way the plagues would have DEVASTATED the Egyptian economy, if this was a true story. Egyptians would have starved to death, with plague after plague attacking various aspects of their agricultural system. And then the 10th plague, the death of the firstborn sons- every family in Egypt lost their firstborn son. That's horrible. In order to free Their people from slavery, God needs to kill all those innocent children- seriously? That's the God you wanna believe in?

(See also, the best bible fanfic I have ever read: Lament for the Slave Girl in Pharaoh’s House by Micah J. Murray.)

So what's going on with me? Why am I feeling like "I believe this"? What on earth?

So I thought about it for a while and I figured it out. It's the same feeling I had while watching "A Muppet Christmas Carol."

I don't actually care about sending plagues, or parting the Red Sea, or this drama about whose god is the most powerful. I don't believe in any of that. The part I believe in is people being freed from slavery, people celebrating, people working together. Happiness. Freedom. Love. 

When people are happy, when people love each other, when people are free from oppression, I believe God is there. But also, we shouldn't wait around for a miracle to happen. We need to help each other. We need to work to make the world better. Don't expect God to come and save us; we have to do the work to save ourselves.

I used to really want to see miracles, because it would be *evidence* and I could be sure my beliefs were *right*. But now I'm like, there are things more important than being right about whether God exists, etc. Things like helping each other. Liberation. Love. Turns out that's what I believe about "The Prince of Egypt."

---

Related:

"Muppet Christmas Carol" Is My Religion

Blogaround

Links not related to that felon:

1. The Struggles and Strengths of China’s Bereaved Youths (April 24) "The death of a parent violently shakes a bereaved young adult’s understanding of life. To integrate this disruption into their life narratives, they are forced to revise their conception of what life means."

2. Air China A350 Safety Video (2022) You know how nowadays, every airline does their safety spiel in the form of a cutesy little video? Well last time I was on an Air China flight, I got such a kick out of this, it's so cute and so over-the-top Chinese, I simply must share it.

3. Lord Of The Dance Hymn (Contemporary Worship Song) (2020) One of my favorite songs about Jesus.

And this is also one of my favorite songs about Jesus: michael card--God's own fool 

While we're on this topic, here's this one too: Rich Mullins - Sometimes by Step 

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Links related to that felon:

As always, if you're too stressed out about everything going on, find 1 tangible thing to do. Protest, donate money, get connected with local groups that support immigrants. We need everyone to do at least 1 little thing that actually makes a difference. Being stressed out about the news all the time does *not* count.

1. World War T is exhausting (April 24) "Retailers in the first months of 2025 are trying to do now what they would have done in the first months of 2020 if they had known that a pandemic was coming ahead of time."

And: Has Trump cancelled Christmas? China's decorations makers report no US orders (April 10) "'So far this year, none of my American customers have placed any orders,' said Qun Ying, who runs an artificial Christmas tree factory in the eastern city of Jinhua."

2. Trump administration reverses abrupt terminations of foreign students’ US visa registrations (April 25) This is good news- but also, it sounds like ICE is still planning to go after international students.

3. Trump Has Now Deported Multiple U.S. Citizen Children With Cancer (April 26) "One of the children is a four-year-old suffering from a rare form of metastatic cancer and was deported out of the country without medication or consultation with their treating physicians — despite ICE being notified in advance of the child’s medical needs. The civil rights organization says that the mother of the two-year-old is pregnant, and was deported without ensuring any continuity of prenatal care or proper medical care."

4. U.S. judge says 2-year-old apparently deported to Honduras 'with no meaningful process' (April 26) "'The Government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,' Doughty wrote. 'But the Court doesn't know that.'"

5. PhD Timeline (April 25)

6. The difference between the police and the secret police (April 28) "You cannot watch that video without clearly and obviously understanding that Öztürk is a victim and that she is being victimized by … well, by the Bad Guys in this story."

7. Protesters chant after arrest of judge accused of helping man evade immigration authorities (April 27) "'The judiciary acts as a check to unchecked executive power. And functioning democracies do not lock up judges,' Democratic state Rep. Ryan Clancy told the crowd before it marched around the area."

Children's Bibles and "turning ambiguity into clear articulations"

Illustration showing Cain bringing a bunch of vegetables and Abel bringing a sheep to a bonfire. Image source.

I've been reading the book "Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles" and I want to show you a quote from the chapter "Translating the Bible into Pictures" by Rubén R. Dupertuis. This chapter examines several comic-book-style adaptations of the story of Cain and Abel, from Genesis 4.

Here's a summary of the Cain and Abel story: Adam and Eve had 2 sons, Cain and Abel. Cain farmed vegetables and Abel was a shepherd. Both of them brought some of their produce/meat as an offering to God. God was pleased with Abel's offering, but not Cain's. Cain is mad about this, so he murders Abel. 

Here's what Dupertuis says on page 282:

As translations these Bibles [the comic-book bibles discussed in this chapter] are clearly on the domesticating end of the spectrum, but that is precisely the point. The stated goal of these comics is, in some way or another, to make the Bible accessible and fun for children. Several aspects about how this is done are worth noting. What is portrayed, including how it is portrayed, is filtered through contemporary beliefs about what is appropriate for children. This includes the decision to turn stories full of ambiguity into clear articulations of contemporary morals. But since what is deemed appropriate social behavior varies, it is worth noting the different reasons given for God's refusal to accept Cain's sacrifice. Both the Comic Book Bible and Picture Stories emphasize Cain's lack of appropriate attitude and jealousy, while the Manga Bible highlights Cain's laziness and, in particular, his greed-- he simply did not give enough. Particular details may differ, but that these Bibles serve to reify contemporary values and morals places them squarely within the long tradition of children's Bibles (Bottigheimer 1996).

Wow, this line- "to turn stories full of ambiguity into clear articulations of contemporary morals."

Yeah, let's talk about this: Why didn't God accept Cain's offering? The bible doesn't say. No reason is given at all. (It does say, when Cain was angry about this, the Lord tells him, "If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?" so probably this means there was *something* he had done wrong with his offering? Or maybe God was referring to how Cain was jealous of Abel.)

I remember when I read this story as a kid- I assumed the reason was that when people made a "sacrifice" in bible times, it had to involve killing an animal- if it was just vegetables, that didn't count. I remember thinking it was unfair to Cain because his work was in farming vegetables- he didn't *have* animals to sacrifice- how could God hold that against him? I don't really know where I got this fan theory from, not sure if I made it up myself or if I heard it from someone else. 

But later I heard the fan theory that the reason God didn't accept Cain's offering was that Cain's heart wasn't right- that he was just grudgingly going through this ritual, without a genuine desire to serve God. This made more sense to me than the "God thinks vegetables don't count" idea, so I then believed this was probably the reason.

The children's bibles discussed in this chapter of "Text, Image, & Otherness" make very clear statements on what exactly Cain did wrong. They show Cain saying things like, "Abel is always sacrificing to God. Maybe this old plant will do for me." The bible itself is confusing on this, but these children's bibles completely get rid of that confusion, making it obvious that Cain is lazy or selfish or greedy or resentful or whatever they've decided his sin is. Whatever fan theory these modern writers have concerning the story of Cain and Abel.

The bible is confusing sometimes- it just is, that's just a fact- but we present it to kids like it's not confusing. Like it's all perfectly clear and understandable and reasonable. If you really think about it, this is bonkers- it was written thousands of years ago, in ancient languages, in a culture completely different from ours, sometimes using literary genres we don't even have any more- and we present it like it's all very easily understandable for us. Maybe we have a study bible which has little boxes on the pages that give historical background on some aspects of the text- there, there you go, read the little boxes and the bible is totally understandable.

Cain and Abel both brought sacrifices for God. God accepted Abel's but not Cain's. Why? What did God have against Cain? And we want to embellish the story, to fill it in with fan theories about what Cain did wrong, because we're scared that someone is going to read this story and think that God rejected Cain's offering for no real reason- that someone is going to think badly of God because of that. Christians who believe in biblical inerrancy are terrified of things like that. Someone might read the bible and understand it in the "wrong" way, oh no!

Christians are especially scared of this when we tell these stories to children.

Actually, I don't necessarily have a problem with embellishing the stories- this is unavoidable, really, if you're making a bible story into a whole illustrated book. What I really want, though, is to make a clear distinction between what the bible actually says, and what's fan fiction. I think a really cool way to do this would be to tell the same story multiple times, but with these "fan fiction" details different each time. I've never seen a children's bible that did that, but it would be cool!

The way that Christians write children's bibles is based on our ideas of what moral lessons *we* think children should learn. If something in the bible is confusing, we don't want to tell kids it's confusing- we want to spin it in a way that we can understand and accept it. 

Why did God reject Cain's offering? We don't know. Really, we don't know. Obviously there are things we don't know about an ancient book.

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Posts about "Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles":

"Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles" (I LOVE THIS BOOK SO MUCH)
David and Jonathan's (One-Sided) Friendship 
Who Cut Samson's Hair? (a post about reading the bible for what it is) 
The way we write children's bibles is "an act of bad faith" 
Children's Bibles and the 2 Creation Stories
Children's Bibles and "presenting mass slaughter to children" 
Children's Bibles and "turning ambiguity into clear articulations"
Children's Bibles and the Victims of the Flood 

Related:

Reviews of Christian Children's Books 

Everyone Else's Nadab and Abihu Fanfics 

Why on Earth Did I Ever Expect the Bible to be Anything Other Than Incredibly Weird?

"Hallow" and self-centered Christianity

Logo for the Hallow app. Image source.

Apparently there's a prayer app called "Hallow." Amanda Marcotte writes about it here: An atheist's unnerving descent into Hallow, the prayer app beloved by MAGA celebrities. I want to highlight this part of her article, because it's very insightful:

Most of this material doesn't seem political, but it does encourage a form of small-minded narcissism, with the relentless focus on the self. The Jesus of the Hallow app isn't much concerned about social justice or caring for the downtrodden, but about being your good buddy who strokes your hair after a bad day at work. The "demonic" forces the believer is called upon to resist aren't grave evils like human rights abuses. Satan seems more interested in frustrating you with traffic than, say, installing a fascist leader in the White House to destroy democracy. It doesn't seem political, but the project of lulling users into not caring about anything outside their immediate self-interest suits the goals of the MAGA movement. And it's probably more persuasive to ordinary people than overt right-wing propaganda. This isn't the Christianity of the liberal Christians I know, who volunteer, donate money, and care very much about electing better leaders. This is a "don't worry your pretty head about all that stuff" kind of Christianity. 

Wow. This is really a spot-on description of the evangelicalism I was raised in. ("Hallow" was made by Catholics, actually. But this description feels familiar to me, as an ex-evangelical.)

The way this article describes the Hallow app- about how it offers encouragement for little mundane issues like disagreements with one's coworkers, etc- how it's just about you and your own little world and God's place in it- all of this feels very normal and expected, to me. It's honestly a bit jarring how Marcotte seems to have expected a Christian prayer app to be about "social justice or caring for the downtrodden." Yeah sure, in my experience evangelicals kinda care about those things, but they are way far down the list- the most important thing is your own heart, your own attitude towards God, your own personal devotion to God, your habits around praying and reading the bible. 

"don't worry your pretty head about all that stuff" is absolutely right. I really have heard evangelicals say the real-world results of our attempts to do good don't matter. The only thing that matters is that God sees that your heart is in the right place. Seriously. Evangelicals really say that the whole world belongs to God, and if God wants a thing to happen, it's going to happen- nothing we can do to change that- so the only thing we really have control over is our own attitude, and that's what God will judge us for.

Evangelicals *do* take action to help the world. Sure, yes, they do. There are evangelical charities. Plenty of churches have food pantries to help local people in need. But as I said, it's way far down the list. That's not what comes to mind, when evangelicals consider questions like "what does it mean to be a Christian?" or "what does God want us to do?" The answers to those are, read the bible more, pray more, work on your personal relationship with God.

I find I am 0% surprised that when conservative Christians made a "prayer app," it ended up being about nothing more than the little world inside your own head. The little God who closely tracks your feelings as indicators of how devoted you are, but does nothing about human rights abuses in the world.

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See also, this post from the Slacktivist: Toddlers on a treadmill: Why evangelicals can’t even take baby steps toward justice

Related:

On believing that "prayer works"

"Hey God, you and I both know..." 

Renee Bach, who had no medical training, opened a clinic in Africa. Just like missionaries are supposed to.

Blogaround

 Happy Easter!

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Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Pope Francis, voice for the poor who transformed the Catholic Church, dies on Easter Monday (April 21) 

2. How I developed a game (April 21) "If you’re just starting out as a hobbyist, your entry point is one or two tiers down from indie–a tier that you may have never played yourself."

3. Mississippi Supreme Court Allows Judge to Block Name Changes for Trans People Under 21 (April 23) "Name changes related to gender transition are singled out. Other name change requests—such as an 18-year-old woman who wants to take her husband’s last name—do not seem to be subjected to the same level of scrutiny."

4. ‘Chemistry Mahjong’ Aims to Make Science Fun (April 23) Cool!

5. Tennis Balls (April 23) From xkcd.

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Links related to the antichrist:

A lot of links today. As always, you don't have to read all of them. There's no benefit to making sure your anxiety is up-to-date on every single bad thing going on. What actually does matter is that you do something. Do something. Protest, help immigrants, check on your trans friends, donate money, contact your Congress people.

1. Judge Blocks Passport Ban For Plaintiffs, Citing Government Animus And Equal Protection (April 19) "The judge ruled the policy was “arbitrary and capricious,” likely in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, the Paperwork Reduction Act, and the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. The judge also ruled that the decision was based in animus and discrimination towards transgender people. While the injunction currently applies only to the named plaintiffs, a broader ruling protecting all transgender Americans is expected in the coming weeks." This is very good news for trans people!

2. Hitchcock for Dummies (April 21) "Here you have the premise for a dozen different Hitchcock-style thrillers. How does your protagonist get tangled up in international conspiracies and espionage? Simple: They are mistakenly included on a group-chat amongst the conspirators."

3. Mahmoud Khalil misses son's birth after ICE official denies his request to be there (April 21)

4. Hegseth 2nd Signal chat cause for 'worry' about nation's security, says Rep. Jim Himes (April 21) "No, I can't imagine why his wife, his brother and his personal lawyer would need to know particular aircraft that are to be used in an upcoming attack."

5. A Chicago man was deported to an El Salvadoran prison, his family says (April 16) "Panicked, YD frantically searched online for more information on the whereabouts of her partner. That’s when she discovered a video, shared widely on social media, of U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem touring the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, a maximum security prison in El Salvador."

6. CDC's cruise ship inspectors laid off amid bad year for outbreaks (April 10, via) "At least a dozen outbreaks have been documented so far this year on cruise ships, mostly from norovirus. Some of those outbreaks have made headlines for sickening dozens or even hundreds of people."

7. New images could change cancer diagnostics, but ICE detained the Harvard scientist who analyzes them (April 22, via) "When asked how many people in his lab could do all of that, he said simply: 'That was only her. It was only her.'"

8. Inside Trump’s Upstate NY migrant hunt: Border Patrol’s meaner tactics snare workers and families (April 17, via) "They have been charged with no crimes other than illegally entering the U.S. They are brothers, spouses and parents. They replace roofs, make tamales, mulch suburban gardens and pack apples. They work the day shift and the night shift. They buy houses, pay rent and taxes."

9. The courage to be decent (April 23) "What matters is that acts we once took for granted as virtuous, routine, and safe — telling the truth, representing those oppressed by the state, providing legal aid to the powerless, volunteering to work at a polling site, basic journalism — now carry some risk. They now require some courage. Maybe the government won’t send you to prison. At least not yet. But it can make your life really difficult."

10. Elon Musk's baby mama drama matters (April 21) "Musk has over a dozen kids, but doesn't seem to have a family."

11. Did the Supreme Court Just Grow a Spine? (April 22) "Trump was attempting to make an end run around the Supreme Court’s authority, and not only did the court tell him “no,” it told him “no” in the middle of the night, without even letting his lawyers or his Manchurian justices (Thomas and Alito) spit out their objections."

12. Funding cut for landmark study of women's health (April 23) "The study, begun in the 1990s, has produced a series of groundbreaking results and was continuing to gather valuable data about women's health."

These MAGAs claim they're "protecting women" by searching high and low, possibly inspecting everyone's genitals, to find 1 middle-school trans girl trying to play sports, so they can ban her. And at the same time, things that actually do help women, like this scientific study, are getting cancelled. 

13. NIH autism study will pull from private medical records (April 23) WTF!

14. How to find upcoming protests made EZ (April 21)

Do y'all know that conservatives think trans people don't exist?

A heart shape with the colors of the trans flag. Image source.

There's something a bit off in the way that American society has been talking about trans issues. It's the way people have wildly different opinions on the question "do trans people really exist?" and this affects their entire perspective on trans issues, and yet nobody is stating clearly their position on this question.

Conservatives believe trans people don't really exist. Seriously, they really believe this. If you don't get that, you won't be able to understand what conservatives' goals are here- and how dangerous and harmful their proposed policies would be.

On the "progressive" side, I'm really unhappy with Democrats for not putting forth a clear message that trans people exist and deserve to have rights, just like anyone else. Why is this being talked about like it's just some political "issue," that voters may have various feelings on, and Democrats are waffling about, trying to decide what "strategy" to use? Why aren't Democrats talking about the fact that trans people are people, who just want to live their lives like everyone else- they are real people, they really exist, and so they should have their rights protected.

As for the people who feel they are "in the middle" on this issue- I don't know what that even means. To try to talk to someone about their opinions on health care or sports or bathrooms or whatever, it's impossible to get an actual understanding of their position, if they don't clearly state whether or not they believe trans people exist.

When I say "trans people exist", I'm defining it like this: There really exist people who thrive when they are able to transition and live as the gender they want to be. There really exist people for whom social transition (changing name/pronouns/clothes) and/or medical transition are life-giving. There really exist people for whom transition is medically necessary- rates of depression and suicide are very high for people who want to transition but can't. For some people, transition is genuinely a good thing, and so of course they should have the right to do it; they should have the right to live a life where they can be happy and thrive. Society should recognize that this is a real thing, a normal part of the range of human diversity, rather than treating them as a threat and making overly-controlling laws about who's allowed to use what bathroom.

Conservatives do not believe this. They believe there are only two sexes, and whichever sex God made you, that's the one you are supposed to be. Staying in your gender role as God intended is how people live their best life. If somebody *thinks* they're trans, if somebody transitions, it's always a bad idea- even if they're happy in the short term, it's not really what's best for them. What's best for everyone is they stay in their "natural" gender role that God gave them.

The orange antichrist's executive order says, "It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.  These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality." These people literally believe trans people do not exist. Every law the MAGAs are making is based in this foundational belief. Sure, they start by claiming they're concerned about children being too young to transition, or whatever, but don't be fooled- they're not okay with adults being trans either. They really believe trans people do not exist.

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I know this because it's just like how they used to believe gay people didn't exist

In the early 2000's, evangelical Christians believed gay people did not really exist. *I* was an evangelical Christian and *I* believed gay people didn't really exist. When we talked about gay people, it was always about how they're pushing their "homosexual agenda" on society, to destroy marriage, to recruit kids to the "homosexual lifestyle," etc. We talked about it like it was an "issue" that we had to push back against, to get those bad gay people to knock it off and stop being gay or whatever. It was a big scary issue out there- not something that any of us could relate to, not something where we might actually know real people who were gay, and know them to be good people.

It was in 2009, when I went to Urbana (a big Christian missions conference for college students) and saw Christopher Yuan speak, that I was first truly hit with the realization that gay people really do exist. (Really? Christopher Yuan? He's one of those gay Christians who believes gay people should just repress themselves and never date or anything...) I saw the reality that there really are gay Christians, and they are doing their best to follow God, just like I was. They weren't trying to "destroy marriage" or do any of those bad things I had heard.

Around that time, in the gay Christian community, there was "side A" and "side B"- side A means you believe that God accepts same-sex relationships, side B means you believe gay people are required to be single and celibate. Sides A and B are for the Christians who believe that gay people exist- there is also another perspective, which I sometimes saw referred to as "side X", which is basically just being hateful and talking about gay people like they're this disgusting evil "issue" rather than real people. (And honestly, as a straight person I don't think I should be allowed to take a position on side A vs side B- straight people should be side not-telling-other-people-what-to-do-with-their-personal-lives.)

Back then, there were many Christians who did not use the term "gay" but instead said "same-sex attracted" or "struggling with same-sex attraction." Nobody *really was* gay- this same-sex attraction was just a temporary condition that had come over them, perhaps because of childhood sexual abuse, or maybe they didn't bond with one of their parents well enough, or whatever other trauma had happened to them- and what they really needed was to heal from that trauma. Then they would become straight.

Seriously, even side-B gay Christians- these are the gay Christians who have committed themselves to never dating, never having sex- got hate from straight Christians because they identified as gay. The idea that being gay was an actual real thing, an actual real identity- many straight Christians could not accept this.

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The "Joan or John" article from The Gospel Coalition

In 2014, conservative Christian site "The Gospel Coalition" published an article called Joan or John? by Russell Moore, which presented this hypothetical scenario: Suppose you're a pastor, and someone (Joan) comes to you and says she recently became a Christian, and she wants your advice with a hard question. See, actually she used to be "John" and she transitioned. But now that she's a Christian, she sees the error of her ways, obviously- but what should she do now, in practical terms? What does repentance look like for trans people?

This question sounds very reasonable from a conservative Christian perspective. It's completely premised on the assumption that trans people do not really exist. But WOWWW when this was published in 2014, trans Christians and allies had A LOT OF THINGS TO SAY about it.

This question could only be dreamed up by someone who has no idea how hard trans people have to work to access gender-affirming medical care. No idea how it feels to finally be able to transition- how life-giving it is, how right it feels, the joy that comes with it. Dreaming up an imaginary trans person who says "transition was just a silly thing I did because I wasn't following God, I guess now that I'm a Christian I'll just undo it." [my paraphrase, not an actual quote] This question only makes sense in a universe where no one really is trans. Where there exists NO ONE for whom transition is a good thing. And yes, of course conservative Christians believe that's the world we live in. God made you a man, so you'll only truly be happy living as a man.

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Regret

Conservatives make a big deal about transgender "regret." They're even directing the National Institutes of Health to come up with some research that shows transition is bad and causes people to regret it.

Statistics show that the number of people who regret transitioning is a very small percentage- smaller than the regret rates for other medical procedures which nobody is making into a big political issue. But still, there are a few, and conservatives make a big deal about it.

Here is how conservatives imagine this goes: When people say they "regret" transitioning, they are saying, "Oh my goodness, how did I really believe that nonsense that a man can change into a woman? How was I so brainwashed that I actually believed that? Now I finally see the truth, that the best thing for me- for everyone- is to just be the gender I was assigned." They're imagining what it would take for someone to convince *them* to transition, and how bad it would be for them.

Coming from the perspective "trans people don't really exist," this is what they imagine "regret" looks like.

But in reality, "regret" can be a lot of different things. Some people de-transition because they want to transition but they lose all support from their family- this rejection makes it feel like transition is impossible, so they make the difficult decision to go back to presenting as their assigned gender. Or, some people know that they're not cis, so they think they must be a binary trans person of the opposite gender- but later they find out that nonbinary is also a thing, and feel that fits much better. Or maybe someone identifies as a trans woman or trans man, and has the assumption that this means there's a checklist of medical procedures they need to go through in order to transition- but later they decide, actually, they don't really want to do all of those. Transition was presented to them as a one-size-fits-all thing, but then they decide that's not exactly what they want. Some people have regret because they have a bad experience with a particular doctor.

Rather than proving that trans people don't really exist, regret and detransition show how important it is that people understand their full range of options. Gender is an even bigger spectrum that we think.

But it's so hard to talk about regret at all, because people will jump right to "trans people don't really exist."

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Pretending to be trans as a "social experiment"

As another example of the vast difference in perspectives on the question "do trans people exist" and how nobody explicitly states their position but it affects everything: Here's a video from Kat Blaque, Josh Seiter's Fetish Was NOT A Social Experiment. It's about how this guy named Josh Seiter told everyone he was a trans woman, as a "social experiment" (and posted a lot of videos on social media that were kinda bizarre, like saying that trans woman should get prostate checks from gynecologists, or something along those lines, I don't remember the details) and then later revealed that he's actually not trans. And this is supposed to prove something. Like prove how wrong people are to accept trans people, or something? Fooled them, haha!

And Kat Blaque, the youtuber who is discussing this, was like, so his friends accepted him as trans, and then... lol joke's on them? Huh? 

Yeah, if somebody told me "I'm trans" and then later told me actually it was just a "social experiment" and they fooled me and I should feel bad, I too would be like "? I don't get it."

But secretly I do get it. From the perspective of the conservatives who believe trans people don't really exist, this reads like "I fooled you into thinking a man can identify as a woman, lol that's such obvious nonsense." But for those of us who believe trans people really do exist, and feel that the fact of trans people existing is just self-evidently true, it's like... "Why wouldn't I believe that you're trans, if you tell me you're trans? Some people really are trans. That's a real thing. So it's certainly plausible that *you* would be trans."

For people framing this as a "social experiment," it's not about "you believed *I* was trans, lol, joke's on you" but "you believed *people can be* trans."

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We need to take "trans people exist" as a starting point when talking about any of these issues

When debating about bathroom bans, or sports, or gender-affirming care for minors, or any of these issues, the fact that trans people really exist should be a foundational premise, explicitly stated. There really do exist people for whom transition is the right thing, it is life-giving, it is medically necessary. There really do exist people who were assigned male at birth, but find they are much happier living as a woman, or vice versa, or as a nonbinary person. This is a real thing, and of course people should be allowed to transition if it's a good thing for them- and they should be treated as normal members of society who deserve respect and have rights. 

When considering any of these questions, treating them as real people who have rights. Not some scary "issue" that can be forced to go away if we just ban enough things.

And I suppose there are some people "in the middle" of trans debates, whose position is "I want to help the people who really are trans, but now it's gone too far and kids are getting all ~confused~ about gender, and pressured into transitioning when it's not the right thing for them." I don't know what to make of this either. Are kids *really* being pressured into identifying as trans and/or transitioning? Obviously there is no shortage of right-wingers claiming this is true, but these are the same people who think trans people don't actually exist at all- obviously untrue, I have met trans people who told me how life-giving it was to transition- it is extremely easy to find trans people saying this! (If you need links- here, here, here, it's really not hard to find.) So I don't really believe any claims these right-wingers are making about this.

Perhaps there are some isolated incidents of people hearing a teenager saying "I don't get what gender is" and then deciding "You must be trans! Let's rush you off to get hormones and surgery right now!!!!!!" (Not that they could *literally* do this, because there are many hoops to jump through to actually get hormones and surgery...) In which case, don't do that! If anybody really is pressuring kids, well, stop it! But I really don't believe that's a common thing that's happening. 

I think, if you believe that no one actually is trans, then it comes across as "pressuring them" to even talk about it in front of kids like it's a real possibility.

And if someone really is questioning their gender, what they need is more resources and information. They should talk to people who have had similar experiences. There's a whole range of gender identity and gender expression- being exposed to more diversity will help people to understand what's right for them. (Of course, if you believe no one actually is trans, then talking about gender diversity just muddies the waters- people should just be pushed harder into their assigned gender role, that's what's right for everyone.)

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Conclusion

Every "trans issue" you see in the news right now has 2 completely different interpretations- if you believe trans people exist, you will view these issues in one way, and if you believe trans people do not actually exist, you will view these issues in a completely different way. In either case, the conclusions follow quite logically from the initial assumptions about whether or not trans people exist. But all the discussion and debate I see about this has people talking past each other, talking about totally different things, because almost no one is explicitly stating whether they believe trans people exist. Start with that! They obviously do exist! Trans people are trans because they actually are trans, not because they want to be creepy in women's bathrooms or anything ridiculous like that. They exist, and they should be treated fairly and have their rights protected just like anyone else. Start with that, and everything else becomes easier.

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Related:

Everyone is missing the point about these "parental notification" laws 

How to Pretend to Welcome Trans People