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beneaththetangles · 3 years

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Is it Okay for a Christian to Watch Yaoi and Yuri Anime?

Why do you post about yaoi on a Christian blog?

We receive this question from time to time across our various platforms when we post, say, fan art from Given on Tumblr or a first impression piece on a yuri series here on the website. And it is a good question, one I want to more fully address here today instead of piecemeal when we receive it, and in advance of my review of Sweet Blue Flowers (Aoi Hana) later this week.

Much of the Christian culture in the west has an aversion to all things homosexual. While the phrase “love the sinner, hate the sin” has gripped an entire generation of mostly evangelicals, the functional form of doing life with this in mind isn’t as easy as speaking it. Loving someone is a complex, dynamic action, and when someone’s entire identity is something your faith deems as sin, it’s all the more challenging.

I wonder also if, as it often does, the culture adds a layer to the issue that hinders us from expressing a godly love to the LGBT community—not “wordly” culture, but the church’s. Homosexuality is treated as a “special sin” in church, perhaps representative of both a complete rejection of Christian values and conservative American values. It’s uncomfortable and dangerous territory for many. And yet, we’re here to make disciples of people across the entire spectrum of humankind, and with otaku Christian reading this, and you connected to probably dozens of otaku who identify as LGBTQ, you’re in a unique space to love these folks, though you may struggle with it.

But you know what we struggle with less—and again, likely because of the acceptance within our culture? Hyper violence and fanservice. The latter, especially in ecchi series, may make us uncomfortable, and we might not watch anime featuring a ton of fanservice with others, but we’ll still often tune in. And violence? Well, we may watch a series with gore with even family members. Perhaps most telling, though, is that we’ll watch an entire series in which the worldview being presented, and sometimes promoted, is Shinto or otherwise one that would never fit within the Christian framework. Sometimes these series affirm those religions, thus negating a belief in the Christian God. We’ve become okay with Weathering with You, but not with Wandering Son.

We need to strip away the trappings of culture and look at how actions, lifestyles, and beliefs are presented in anime through a biblical lens. So Let’s ask the question in that framework: Can we or should we be watching yaoi and yuri? The answer, as is usual, isn’t clear-cut, though I do believe it’s clear that we should at least entertain the thought. I’ve heard theologians, and one in particular whom I respect terribly, state that we as Christians probably shouldn’t watch any media. I understand his perspective, and in truth, if we were perfect, we would be able to find this immense satisfaction and enjoyment in God alone that wouldn’t find in even the latest episode of Dr. Stone or The Promised Neverland. But stuck here on earth, we’re going to stream video. We’re going to watch anime. And more than that, being part of the culture allows us to understand people in a way that we wouldn’t if we lived apart from it. This is, after all, what we do here on Beneath the Tangles—our passion for anime and love for people collide as we chat about both anime and faith. I imagine Paul was much the same. Such a learned man, he must have doubly enjoyed studying the Greek philosophers—both as a way to exercise his mind and as a path into the hearts of the Greeks.

But as I’ve mentioned in the past, each person must decide for themselves where the line is, at what point he or she should stop watching a certain series. And as we mature in our faith and in all other ways, that line may shift and it may become zig-zagged and complicated itself. Returning to yaoi, we might find that series like Given expresses fundamental truths about love and care within a framework that isn’t scriptural, and that it could help us draw nearer to God. On the other hand, some show relatively devoid of violence, fanservice, or other aspects we might consider sinful has an incredibly desolate and nihilistic worldview that leads us to a dark place, away from the love of Christ. Which should we leave behind, and which should we embrace?

And so, as you continue your otaku journey, I hope you won’t exclude yaoi and yuri just because it’s yaoi and yuri. Think about all your media choices, how you approach anime and what impact it has on you. And if that one yaoi show leads you to sin, cut it off! And if that yuri show leads you ponder on the sacrificial nature of love, go give it a try! And the same for all anime—shounen, seinen, slice-of-life, coming-of-age, sci-fi, mecha, and on down the line.

As for us as a ministry? It is a little more complicated. We have to consider also that we’re a model, that what we do can be taken as “acceptance” or even reveling in sin. And we are certainly prone to error, as well. However, I want to assure our readers that we do think about these things as we develop and post content. For instance, after considerable discussion, we decided not to discuss a certain series currently airing because we did not find it likely to be spiritually uplifting in any manner, and very likely, instead, to lead our audience to sin.

Ultimately, though, we put much trust in you to develop godly viewing habits as you watch anime. And likewise, we do our best not to “promote” sin. That’s a blurry line itself, for is posting an image for said series promoting it? It could be. But returning to Weathering with You, about which we recorded a podcast episode and also developed much additional content, were we promoting a Shintoist approach to the world? I would say not, and I would think that you’d agree if you saw our posts. We were instead celebrating the goodness in the series, things reflective of God’s character—creativity, wonder, sacrifice, music, and love.

And if you can find the same in yaoi or yuri, even a glimmer of God, maybe you should be watching. I know we will be.

#Articles #Author: TWWK

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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 4 years

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CAUSA and the Catholic Church in the 1980s

“Moon’s Law: God Is Phasing Out Democracy” By Fred Clarkson

extract:

While best known for its growing relationship with Protestant fundamentalism, the Moon organization has actively sought close links with the Catholic Church, particularly in Latin America.60 Their success has been decidedly mixed. The Bishops of Honduras, El Salvador, Panama, and Japan have all denounced the Unification Church in pastoral letters. While this has put a crimp in their operations, Moonism is not without allies. The Archbishop of La Plata, Argentina, sponsored the first CAUSA seminar in that country, and later awarded an honorary doctorate to Moon from the Catholic University, while he was in jail.

According to an internal strategy document dated January 1985, CAUSA views its relationship with the Catholic Church as “extremely important…. One [pastoral] letter of the Bishops in any country will considerably damage our activities. If it happens in a Third World country, all the faithful Catholics will go away, leaving us with ‘non-faithful’ ones, making our situation even more miserable.”61

▲ Pope John Paul II with Moonies Tom Ward (circled) and Bo Hi Pak (standing behind the Pope) at the 2nd AULA conference – Rome, December 1985.

Indeed, the Honduran Bishops denounced CAUSA as “anti-Christian” and declared that the Unification Church “creates a species of material and spiritual slavery” that poses “serious dangers to the psychological, religious, and civic integrity of anyone who yields to its influence.”62 The Japanese Bishops, noting major theological differences with the Unification Church, also “discourage all Catholics from any collaboration with it. While the Holy See is contrary to any participation by the faithful, it is even more opposed to whatsoever [sic] attendance and collaboration on the part of Catholic priests.”63

The principal Moon advocate within the Church appears to be Father Sebastian Matczak, a Polish priest who has spoken frequently at CAUSA conferences, and who teaches philosophy at the Unification Seminary in Barrytown, New York. The CAUSA paper notes that “Dr. Matczak, in his latest visit to Rome the past January [1984] could verify that the bad reputation of our movement is mainly coming from Latin America, while there they say that official documents from the Vatican prevent them from any relation with us.”64

Despite serious obstacles to Moonist advances on the Catholic Church, the organization claims that CAUSA has a “strong connecting point” with the Church in most Latin countries. The internal report notes, however, that the strategy of seeking relationships with the hierarchy, and inviting priests to CAUSA conferences, has generally failed. As a result, “it seems that we have to open two fronts, one in Rome, one in Latin America.” The latter option emphasized secret and highly selective CAUSA conferences with priests as a way to build a core of supporters, whose favorable reports would percolate up to the Vatican. Dr. Matczak reportedly “finds this strategy...the only way and an absolute necessity.” The twin goals of this plan were to “STOP THE NEGATIVITY FROM WITHIN” (the Catholic Church) and to “Declare war to the Liberation theology.”65

It is possible that the Rome option is still viable. A new Moon unit called AULA (Association for the Unification of Latin America) was formed in Rome in December 1984.66 AULA’s second annual conference, in December 1985 in Rome, was attended by a dozen former presidents of Latin American countries and was received by the Pope. The Moon organization is skilled at using the prestige of out-of-power politicians. Two weeks later three former presidents of Colombia, and two of Costa Rica represented AULA at Moon’s welcome home rally in Seoul, South Korea.67

______________________________________

Notes 60. Louis Wolf, “Accuracy in Media Rewrites the News and History,” in CAIB, Number 21 (Spring 1984), n. 57. LINK to PDF 61. Internal CAUSA document. January 1985. 62. Interchange Report, Fall 1984. 63. Arlington [Virginia] Catholic Herald, August 8, 1985. 64. Internal CAUSA document, January 1985. The Report is a confidential 3-year review of CAUSA/Catholic relations. Written by Roger Johnstone and Liliana Karlson, and submitted to CAUSA’s Bo Hi Pak, Tom Ward, and Antonio Betancourt, the Report makes clear that their intentions are more than ecumenical in spirit: “The goal is: the CATHOLIC WORLD (80% of all Christianity). The time is: NOW! Tomorrow might be too late!” 65. Ibid. 66. AULA is headed by Jose Maria Chaves, a longtime Moon operative. A native of Colombia, Chaves is now based in New York. He is a director of the Committee to Defend the U.S. Constitution, a Moon front group which placed full page ads in major American newspapers claiming Moon was a “Victim of a Government Conspiracy.” Warren Richardson, the first director of CAUSA North America and former general counsel to the Liberty Lobby was a director at one time as was David Finzer of the Conservative Action Foundation. In 1985, Finzer took over the youth arm of WACL, and in 1986 was elevated to the executive board. See “Christian Voice,” in this issue [of CovertAction]. 67. Times [London], December 17, 1985.

“Japanese Warned about Moon's Unification Church” National Catholic Register 61, July 28, 1985

LINK to PDF: CovertAction No 27, Spring 1987

___________________________________________

“Moon’s Law: God Is Phasing Out Democracy”

Missing Pieces of the Story of Sun Myung Moon by Frederick Clarkson

NPR: Church and State: ‘Eternal Hostility’ with Frederick Clarkson

Money and Power and Moon’s Washington Times by Rory O’Connor

Sun Myung Moon was found guilty of US tax fraud and sent to Danbury prison in 1984

Pope Francis meets Moonies at the Vatican – he was asked to support the UPF in Seoul 2020

In Bolivia, Moon disciple Tom Ward and the former Hitler SS Officer, Klaus Barbie were often seen together

The CAUSA Kingdom

“Through CAUSA… people will eventually be drawn to the root, which is Rev. Moon.”

CAUSA and Three South American Terror Generals

#CAUSA #Roman Catholic Church #Sun Myung Moon #Unification Church #Family Federation for World Peace and Unification #Tom Ward

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musicgoon · 3 years

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Book Review: 1 Corinthians For You, by Andrew Wilson

Does God’s grace really change people? What does it do for the church community? In 1 Corinthians For You, Andrew Wilson studies Paul’s letter and thrills you with how God’s grace changes lives.

Pride and Division

Pride and division were taking over, devastating the Corinthian church. Wilson shares how the same might be said about evangelicalism today. For instance, we seem to be a culture absorbed with church growth and elevating human leaders. Wilson encourages us by saying that we must seek the Spirit as He guides us to humility and unity.

This book, while similar to a commentary, reads more like a devotional. Wilson is sharp and clear, with pastoral insight to share. He compares the Corinthians with the way we sin today, looking at incest, sexual immortality and drunkeness, greed and slander. We must not tolerate unrepentant sin. We must challenge it. Christ crucified might not shape our culture today, but it shapes our church communities.

Sex and Singleness

Paul spoke about sex, and Wilson explains how sex connects to the doctrine of the church. Ultimately, sex is about the gospel. Sex is a signpost. “It is but a glimpse of a relationship, a union and a happiness that are grander and deeper than our wildest imagining."

I was reminded that remaining unmarried can be good, right, and beautiful. Do we idolize marriage in our churches? I also saw how self-discipline, self-denial, and laying down our rights for the love of others and are important as we press on to win the prize.

Conservatives and Charismatics

Wilson sees “a message of wisdom” and “a message of knowledge” in 1 Corinthians 12 to mean a God-given ability to read a situation and speak wisely into it. In regards to Ch. 13, he understands Paul to mean that “completeness” comes when Jesus comes – when we see him face to face.

“Conservatives need to hear that prophecy should be pursued and that languages should not be forbidden. Charismatics need to hear that everything should be done in a fitting and orderly way, with a focus on comprehensibility, edification, and the lordship of Christ.”

Love Never Fails

Paul urges us to pursue prophecy, and Wilson describes it as being directed towards people, as it strengthens, encourages, and comforts us. He elaborates that Paul sees the Corinthians as speaking a language (as opposed to a sequence of nonsensical noises). He concludes that love trumps our right to express ourselves.

Interestingly, Paul concludes with a mention of Christ’s resurrection, and Wilson sees it as a fitting way to end a letter talking about unity and grace. This book helped me better understand 1 Corinthians, and I see how the message of pursuing purity and peace in Christ is essential. Love never fails.

I received a media copy of 1 Corinthians For You and this is my honest review. Find more of my book reviews and follow Dive In, Dig Deep on Instagram - my account dedicated to Bibles and books to see the beauty of the Bible and the role of reading in the Christian life. To read all of my book reviews and to receive all of the free eBooks I find on the web, subscribe to my free newsletter.

#book #book review #review #1 corinthians #bible

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drawingconclusions · 3 years

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OBSERVATIONS ON RECENT CURRENT EVENTS

I haven't been following too much news since the Capitol Building riots last week, as I've been disgusted with what politics has become in present-day America (and I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way). These truly are strange times we're living in.

However, at the end of the day yesterday I did hear that the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Trump, and I also finally had time to read most of Trump's "Save America" speech from that January 6th rally, as I wasn't there to hear it in person that day. (Despite what some of you may think, I'm not an exclusively politically-minded person, and I'm really not into attending political rallies.) As I've touched on before, there are considerable aspects of Trump's behavior that I, and others, find just slightly repulsive. He can be coarse, rude, arrogant, & demeaning. And you'll find some of those same aspects of his persona in that speech he gave that day. It also wasn't helpful that at this late stage of the game he was still claiming he won the election by a landslide. And when he placed so much public pressure on Vice President Pence, urging him to overturn the certification of the election results & send it back to the states - that was very uncool. Yet with all this being said, as I read the speech, I didn't see blatant calls of insurrection from Trump in that speech that many in the media claim existed. At one point he said to the crowd, "I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol Building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard". Yes, Trump used the 3rd person once in a way that could be very easily misconstrued, and he used various figures of speech, such as fight, strength, & weakness, that in retrospect were highly ill-advised. He also referred to Congressional Republicans who were questioning election certification results as "warriors" and he referred to them as "fighting" & then studying, working hard to verify the issues at hand. He claimed that those Republicans in the house who wouldn't "fight" for this cause would be primaried in their forthcoming elections. Again, while this use of figurative language is really not a good idea, especially when there are fringe elements of the political party in the crowd, I didn't find explicit calls for violence against anyone in the parts of the speech that I read.

A brief interlude: I realize that many will read this and consider me an apologist for Trump. Whatever. I know some people will hate me & suspect me of wrongdoing irregardless of what I write or don't write, of what I do or don't do. I'm not excusing Trump's behavior. I still believe he should have moved to publicly calm things down so much earlier than he did. And I was still so disappointed in his behavior in the days leading up to January 6th. Also, rioters & anarchists should be held legally accountable for their crimes. But I'm just writing today to express my observations on what has taken place since the anarchy at the Capitol.

I heard that some Democrats want to conclude the impeachment process of Trump in the Senate well after Trump has already officially left office. While I'm not a constitutional scholar & I can't comment on the legality of that, I do think it would open up an unwelcome can of worms, in terms of impeaching officials who have already left office. I'm sure there are people who would like to impeach former President Bush in this manner for invading Iraq way back when even though there were no weapons of mass destruction to be found there. I gather others would like to impeach former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for failing to provide security for our ambassador & personnel in Benghazi, or others who would move to impeach former President Obama for weaponizing the branches of federal government against his political enemies or for giving an untold fortune in funds to Iran, one of the world's foremost sponsors of terrorism. So perhaps our elected officials should seriously consider the steps they plan to take in this regard, as others may seek to imitate your actions in the future.

Since the rioting that occurred at the Capitol Building, many on the left have attempted to portray Republicans as criminals with "guilt by association" type of accusations. Businesses, social media networks, and elected representatives have all joined in to engage in "canceling" or censoring conservatives. While I'll again repeat myself that I denounce the violence that occurred on January 6th (as I've denounced previous violence from both the right & the left), these blacklisting & censorship efforts are the beginning of the rise of fascism here in America from the left that I warned about in months past. Some are recommending that media now be scrutinied for "misinformation" (and make no mistake about it, that type of scrutiny will only be applied to conservative news outlets). Some have proposed the idea of "deprogramming" Trump supporters or sending them to "re-education" camps, I suppose so they can be taught (or forced) to think & believe the "correct" way, according to the left. When many of America's businesses, media establishment, & elected officials embrace socialism & China's communist methods, it shouldn't be surprising when they attempt to recast our country according to those methods. It's strange. There were none of these types of recommendations when anarchists were looting & destroying businesses, attacking federal courts & federal buildings, and tearing down state property such as statues in 2020. Instead, certain legislators lauded these people & some even stood side by side with them. Many local police departments stood back and let the mayhem continue. City councils & mayors waxed poetic about the so-called "justice" of their cause. And celebrities bailed out several of the criminals who had been imprisoned for their part in that. You don't see this occurring now, however. There truly is not equal justice in America.

When the Christmas bombing occurred in Nashville just a few weeks ago, I had truly intended to comment on that when the holidays & New Year had passed. However political & current events changed, so I put it off. But now I'm still wondering about the FBI's ability to protect the American population. In the Nashville case, the FBI had been warned that the man who committed the crime was in the process of making bombs and yet it seems there wasn't sufficient follow-thru on the FBI's part in order to prevent the detonation. (Yes, the Nashville police were also warned of the suspect's activities, but I'm not familiar with their track record on such incidences. And bravo to the police there who gave warning to citizens when the bomb was about to go off.) And in this case of the Capitol Building anarchy, it appears an FBI office saw a threat of violence on a message board, and yet again, direct warning was not provided to the appropriate corresponding authorities in order to fortify the Capitol Building on January 6th. And lives were lost as a result. I know there are lives that have been saved & crimes that have been averted by the FBI in the past, but I'm extremely concerned that the opposite is becoming a recurring issue with this agency. I'm also concerned that one of the incoming Congress' first acts was to recently pass a bill on gender pronouns, of all things. Perhaps the first act of any incoming Congress in a post 9/11 world is to make a thorough review of security procedures & systems in the Capitol Building. For some time now I've been warning about my concerns regarding those who are in charge of local & national security, and I hope my concerns don't continue to be confirmed. Please focus on the right things & make the necessary changes in your agencies in order to be able to respond immediately and effectively to any potential & legitimate threats.

There are reports of threats of violence in all 50 state capitals for the upcoming inauguration of Biden, and while I've already stated that I don't believe my core audience here consists of fringe elements from the left or the right, I'll state this again: Do not use violence to express your beliefs, political or otherwise. Let there be a peaceful transition of power in the upcoming days and weeks.

Truly, America is no longer a Christian nation. Yes, there are many Christians in this country, but it's clear that as a nation we no longer espouse values of faith, self-control, and love for our neighbors. Our "look-to-God-as-a-last-resort" response to the coronavirus is a classic example of this. Our violent political & rioting behavior in the past year also shows we don't really trust God with our lives & problems anymore. Maybe that's why God pre-ordained the rare celestial sign that occurred in late December 2020, that merging of the planets that takes place only every several hundred years. Maybe God was trying to get our attention in the midst of all our self-absorbed behovior. Or maybe God is about to do all sorts of wonders in our time, wonders unseen in generations. I don't know. I just pray that we find God and turn to Him before we destroy ourselves from within.

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theragamuffininitiative · 7 years

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Christian Films and Misc Rambling Thoughts on the Subject that Might or Might Not be Actually Connected

@cogentranting At some point, years from now, when all else is turned to dust and the sun has set for the last time, a post for this reply, stating I will reply in a longer fashion later (which would actually be now) shall appear. I will likely delete it out of pure spite. Stupid mobile app uploads.

I haven’t seen God’s Not Dead. Or God’s Not Dead 2. I should. Not because I just want to, or because It Is The Inspired Word Of Our Lord™ (hahahah it’s not guys, ok), but because of my overall interest an involvement in the world of film. I should be informed.

Also, I appreciate the sarcasm. XD I hope that was sarcasm or now I look really stupid but you’re going to get an earful either way, so it works out.

So let’s get to it:

I hate the Christian Film Industry™

Whew. There. I said it. Pray for my salvation.

Why? So, soooo many reasons.

1. The Sacrifice of Art in the Name of ‘Message.’

I, for one, want to know why the Christian church is constantly smashing down on the creative outputs of their members for not being enough about God, or published by Thomas Nelson, or advocated by Willie Roberts. Why. We would rather squelch the heartfelt, beautiful, God-given art produced by our brothers and sisters for not showing a clear Conversion Experience rather than be amazed at the ability God has allowed us to have to make such fantastic, whimsical, thought-provoking, emotionally-resonant things.

This is point number one because it. is. my. biggest. issue.

“Message films are rarely exciting. So by their very nature, most Christian films aren’t going to be very good because they have to fall within certain message-based parameters. And because the Christian audience is so glad to get a “safe, redeeming, faith-based message,” even at the expense of great art, they don’t demand higher artistic standards.” ~ Dallas Jenkins, movie reviewer and director of The Resurrection of Gavin Stone??? (Imma have to check back with you later on this, but the quote still stands on its own.)

“We have the makings of a movement that can change this culture. I honestly believe this. But I also believe the first step toward establishing the groundwork for a vibrant, relevant cultural movement based on scriptural thought is to stop producing “Christian films” or “Christian music” or “Christian art” and simply have Christ-followers who create great Art.” ~ Scott Nehring, in his book You Are What You See: Watching Movies Through a Christian Lens.

“If we are trying to evangelize, the fact that most Christian-themed movies are torn to shreds by non-Christian critics becomes an issue. If, however, we just really want to see our fantasies validated on screen, then we will write-off these poor reviews as “persecution.”” ~ Andrew Barber, in his article “The Problem with Christian Films.”

On a similar note, I want to know what the Mormon church is doing that the Christian church is not. Every time I turn around, I discover that another of my favorite artists, whether it be in film or elsewhere, is a professing Mormon:

musicians Imagine Dragons, the Killers, and Lindsey Stirling

authors Brandon Sanderson, Shannon Hale, Heather Dixon, and Brandon Mull

animator Don Bluth

actress Amy Adams and actor Will Swenson (both formerly)

etc, the list goes on

Hi, my Mormon friends. What is your secret. What ways of encouraging art and artists do you employ that my Baptist upbringing, and the Conservative Christian community in general, is so sorely lacking in?

2. The Christian Culture’s Subsequent Villainization of Hollywood.

This past Christmas, my sister gifted me a book titled Behind the Screen, “Hollywood Insiders on Faith, Film, and Culture.”

I sat down after all the gift-giving was done and read the first three sections before the holiday meal was served. But let me quote from the introduction which had me “Amen!”-ing and punching my fist to the sky every third word:

“We obsess about “the culture” endlessly; we analyze and criticize. But we can’t figure out anything to do but point an accusatory finger at Hollywood... Blaming Hollywood for our cultural woes has become a habit... Casting Hollywood as the enemy has only pushed Hollywood farther away. And the farther Hollywood is from us, the less influence we have on our culture. We’ve left the business of defining human experience via the mass media to people with a secular worldview.... In pushing away secular Hollywood, haven’t we turned our backs on the very people Christ called us to minister to - the searching and the desperate, those without the gospel’s saving grace and truth?”

Btw, if this subject is something you are interested in, I highly recommend this book. Written by creatives and executives in the film world (including one of the writers from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the producer of Home Improvement, and even the multi-credited Ralph Winters, among others), it’s a frank, beautiful, and challenging read for artists, Christians, and film buffs.

The point here is that the church culture says if it doesn’t come from Sherwood, or have Kirk Cameron or Ducky Dynasty in it, or have a conversion sequence, it isn’t Christian and therefore Christians should not view or encourage it in any way. This. Is. Crap. Pardon my French.

Beauty can come from imperfection. Even unregenerate hearts still bear the image of the Divine and are capable of producing so much worthwhile and significant art. Which leads to...

3. Guess What? Secular Film Companies Make Quality Faith Films Too??!

Idk what I should even say here, but I’m just going to go with the one shining example I always think of: Dreamworks’ Prince of Egypt. It is purely a work of art from any standard, and that is the epitome of what Christians should be looking for in their endeavors to create good film. PoE is gorgeously animated, seamlessly directed, well-scripted, morally driven, more Biblically and historically accurate than you would believe (and where it falls down on direct representation, it remains true to theme and character), etc. etc. etc.

I could go on for ages about how much I adore this film. (Joseph, King of Dreams, is also noteworthy, but nearly up to par with the craftsmanship of its predecessor.

I mean

just look at

the art

4. I Do Like Some Films Made By ‘Christian’ Companies

Idk, I might step on people’s toes or surprise you by which of these I actually approve of, but here we go:

I like Fireproof. I have many issues with it, but overall it is a fairly well-made, Hallmark-style emotional flick. The acting leaves much to be desired, but it’s a decent bit of showmanship, story, and truth.

I do not like Facing the Giants. Give me Blind Side any day of the week, except don’t because... sports.

However, both Courageous (some actual real life dialogue and not a completely happily ever after, whaaaat???! Oh, but token conversion experience, of course), and the early-and-forgotten Flywheel (which, although low in camera quality and acting, is actually an enjoyable story), come in as films I would sit down and watch at least a second time.

Risen is well-made and acted and has some establishment of genuine Craft. However, as far as story plots go, a lot was sacrificed. The mountain-top encounter with Christ was, while perhaps the most generally cliche piece of story, to me the most heartfelt and provocative. After that...the film kind of ended in mediocrity. Like...what did the characters do after the credits rolled.

I actually really enjoy Mom’s Night Out. The manic theme almost kills me, but the quiet and the reveal at the end is worth sitting through to see.

And I appreciate Luther. I don’t watch it often, because I personally can’t stomach the more violent aspects (the reason I haven’t/don’t watch The Passion or End of the Spear.) But Luther is a great biographical film, and I would encourage anyone studying Catholic and/or Protestant history, especially Martin Luther, to watch it. This is a Film in both art, message, and class.

Tbh, I’ve been avoiding most of the other Christian films, which is why I won’t talk about them there.

5. You Don’t Have To Slap A Jesus Fish Bumper Sticker On It To Be Christ-Honoring

Walden Media is a prime example, I believe, of what Christians in the film industry should be doing. I mean, they’re not perfect at all, but they are not sacrificing art for message - or vice versa for that matter. While not strictly a Christian Film group, Walden is founded and run by a majority of Christian Conservatives who are actively seeking to make quality and wholesome films for people of all diversities. They’ve had a few flops and several more that just didn’t quite live up to their potential, but they also brought us

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, as well as

Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, and the one I will never stop talking about:

Amazing Grace.

Well-crafted films, put out by *gasp* an assortment of believers and non-believers. Art. Good films. Not Messages dressed up in makeup with a classy Instagram filter and a 30-day challange booklet to get your revival outfit on.

In looking through this stuff, I just found this article, which is a superb read and really gets at the heart of what I feel, and am very badly trying to communicate:

Why Faith-Based Films Hurt Religion

So.

When Christian Films start being an actual representation of creative community and the artistic talents God has given to us as personal and spiritual gifts, rather than a cheap way to try to force morality on Hollywood and on our neighbors without ever leaving the confines of our Bible Boxes in case we might get soiled, I may start appreciating the Christian Film Industry™. Until then??? I’ll stand behind my fellow creatives and my fellow believers and hope and work for the best.

Lastly, two things:

Christians Can Enjoy Secular Film Productions.

I would even argue that they should. We were created by a Creator God, who takes pride and joy in making beautiful things, in making each of us. And we are made in His image. We are creators as well, we make art all the time. Scripture tells us to worship God in everything we do. The movement of making “Christian Films for Christian Audiences because of Christian Reasons” is missing the point entirely. We as creatives are not here to make God Art, we are here to make art that glorifies God

Christ Does Not Need Hollywood. However, Hollywood Does Need Christ.

“While many missionaries travel to remote villages in Africa or South America to spread Christianity, [Karen] Covell believes her calling—her mission field, if you will—is right here in Los Angeles, in an industry that many of her fellow Christians find immoral or even downright sinful, both for its on-screen depictions of sex and drugs and the real-life sex, drugs, and other temptations that exist behind the scenes. Covell, who was a film producer in the early 1980s, says "the church did not get how I could justify being a Christian in Hollywood, and Hollywood did not get how I would follow God. It was a divide." It was nearly impossible to meet other Christians working in the industry, let alone ones who would express their faith openly. "I said, 'The church hates Hollywood, Hollywood hates the church. There's got to be some way to bridge that divide.'" - in an article by Jennifer Swan.

As I said in my original little “about me” tag response, I have felt called to ministry in this world. Whether it be film or live theater, that world is calling to me, both in its creative endeavors, and in its desperate need for the hope, truth, life, and light of Christ. Actors and directors in Hollywood and on Broadway are in as much need of the grace of our Lord as the starving orphans in the unreached people groups on the other side of the planet - same as your next door neighbor.

If Christians continue to tie themselves down, and group themselves together, cutting themselves off from the culture and the culture off from them, then we are doing absolutely no heavenly or earthly good to anyone.

So, you see, it’s not just the artistry (or, so often, lack thereof) in the Christian Film Industry™ that gets to me.

It’s the fact that the film media culture is a people group that the church as a whole is ignoring. We are ignoring the impact Hollywood has on the world around us and still trying to be relevant to that world, which is counter-productive and just plain silly.

It’s the fact that I see actors, actresses, producers, writers, who are obviously searching for the Something that will fill the void in their souls, and their primary exposure to Christianity and Christ - the only One who can satisfy them - is the Christian Film Industry™, which is largely full of broad and meaningless substance because heaven help us we should talk about something real, and then just plain bad art.

I believe God has called us to higher things than this.

Higher art, loving to create as he lovingly created us.

High impact, going deeper into the issues of our culture and our nature to address and satisfy problems and needs felt be every human, not just the church-goers who will show up for Sherwood’s next big thing.

So, yes, my pet peeve cracked from its proverbial nutshell:

I have issues with the Christian Film Industry

#end rant #i used the trademark symbol way too many times #long post #rags has opinions #christian films #movie making #i feel like i did not even touch on so many things #this is such a ramble #ragamusings #for certain

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hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff · 5 years

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INTELLECTUAL MOVEMENTS advance on multiple levels — through academic and popular books and journals, via mass and social media, and in the populist grassroots imagination. At present, the world of Midwestern studies is advancing on all these fronts, although at different speeds.

On the level of popular but serious books, the forerunner is J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016), much of which transpires in southern Ohio, though the story is mostly concerned with the culture of Appalachia. A few years on, Vance has been overtaken by writers of greater intricacy who are specifically focused on the Midwest. The literary world also needs to move on. While entertaining pitches from agents about “the next Hillbilly Elegy,” publishers searched for something new, something less conservative, something more nuanced. The results include three new books about the Midwest by three young authors (two first-timers), all released by major publishers, and each garnering a New York Times review. Collectively, they signal a new moment, a time of rejuvenation for a neglected American region, a springtime for the Midwest.

The most magnetic of these authors — and surely a voice to be reckoned with for many decades to come — is Meghan O’Gieblyn. After growing up in Michigan, O’Gieblyn went to college in Chicago and then landed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she earned an MFA. While a student there, she penned most of the essays woven into Interior States. All of O’Gieblyn’s work is deeply pondered and researched, infused with a Midwestern pragmatism, and elevated by the author’s innate curiosity and intellectual acuity. Her prevailing method is logic, not passion; her style is persuasion, not badgering.

O’Gieblyn’s father sold industrial lubricant, so her family moved around the Midwest “to the kinds of cities that had been built for manufacturing.” In short, she knows the territory well. She is bonded to Lake Michigan, especially the beautiful shores around Muskegon, and can nimbly read the scenes of Chicago’s south side, its traces of industrialism and its bawdy bars. She recalls visits to Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village, a monument to the remembrance of things past, especially the Midwest’s old agrarian order. She drives down to the large Creation Museum in Indiana, in the midst of her own confusion over her diminishing Christian faith. The fading industrial remnants of Southern Chicago and Northern Indiana, and the ebbing of the old Christian order in the Midwest, conjure a “profound loss of telos, the realization that the industries and systems that built the region are no longer tenable.” If the old core of the Midwest has lost its vibrancy, its “bucolic peripheries” persist, undergirding the “autumnal sentimentalism” of the “Pure Michigan” campaign, but also the calming, woodsy, cabin culture that draws so many to the northern half of the Midwest.

As an emerging writer and intellectual, O’Gieblyn expected to leave the Midwest, to join the preponderant pattern of out-migration, to follow the interstates, the “sound of transit, or things passing through.” Instead, she stayed in her home region, becoming part of its stable rhythms while still feeling an “existential dizziness, a sense that the rest of the world is moving while you remain still.” As an intellectual, an analyst, a quiet observer with a monkish reserve, O’Gieblyn appreciates the Midwest’s “stoicism, a resistance to excitement that is native to this region” and its habit of “tuning out the fashions and revelations of the coastal cities, which have nothing to do with you.”

The trendy bakeries and co-ops and fair trade coffees and Orange You Glad It’s Vegan? cakes of Madison and the drone of NPR do not impress O’Gieblyn. She thinks Madisonians have “suffered from the fundamental delusion that we had elevated ourselves above the rubble of hinterland ignorance.” O’Gieblyn’s métier throughout her essays is intelligence and nuance and gratitude. The highlight of the book might be the chapters “On Subtlety,” which was first published last year in Tin House, and “American Niceness,” which ran in The New Yorker in 2017. Wisconsin, she says, “is a place where niceness is so ubiquitous that it seems practically constitutional”; in her work, and in her travels and speeches, she shows no sign of breaching these constitutional norms.

O’Gieblyn’s particular concern is faith, her internal beliefs, her journey within the Midwest toward a new state of mind — thus, the dual meaning of the smartly titled Interior States. O’Gieblyn grew up in a family that attended a shrinking Baptist church in southeast Michigan. She was homeschooled until the 10th grade and then attended Moody’s Bible Institute in Chicago. She left Moody’s after her sophomore year, and her dwindling faith and search for a new purpose form large chunks of the book. She dials up the pills and drinking and hard-living for a while, to contend with the “overwhelming despair at the absence of God.” But she also reads and thinks and begins to write, launching what we can confidently predict will be a triumphant career.

O’Gieblyn’s voice is consistently generous and inquiring. She still finds Christianity beautiful, though unconvincing, certainly not worthy of scorn. She takes a telescopic view, always considering ancestry and posterity and the world ahead — surely a flickering vestige of her biblical training — and rightly remains annoyed with electronic devices and the digital world’s “hypnotic […] assurance that nothing lies beyond the day’s serving of novel minutiae.” Instead of a fashionably snarky dismissal of John Updike, she attempts to understand his moment and his appeal, a rare maneuver indeed.

Soon after the appearance of O’Gieblyn’s Interior States came Sarah Smarsh’s memoir Heartland, an account of her life growing up in Kansas. The book has been reviewed in all the right places, and Smarsh has talked to all the key gatekeepers, large and small, orchestrating the literary equivalent of the “full Ginsburg.” She even became the master of ceremonies at the Topeka inauguration of the new Kansas governor, Laura Kelly, who last fall defeated Trump’s choice, Kris Kobach, a result widely cheered by The Resistance.

Smarsh’s coming-of-age experiences are not easy to summarize. Her grandmother, Betty, and her mother, Jeannie, grew up primarily in Wichita and other nearby places; both were teenage mothers. Due to fizzled marriages, protracted poverty, and various failed ventures, Jeannie had moved 48 times by the time she started high school. Smarsh’s greatest source of love and stability did not come from the maternal side of her family, urban-oriented and transitory as it was, but from Smarsh’s father, a genuinely kind and decent man who was descended from a long line of Kansas wheat farmers. Smarsh’s step-grandfather, Arnie, who married Betty (her seventh marriage), operated a small wheat farm west of Wichita, which provided a refuge for Smarsh, with a piano and a pool and a rural room to breathe when she needed to live away from her mother. Grandma Betty “found her happiest home in the country,” as did Smarsh. Smarsh’s encomium to rural life is reminiscent of Debra Marquart’s ruminations on the northern plains in The Horizontal World (2006).

In a sad breach of the Midwestern code described by O’Gieblyn, Smarsh’s mother was not nice to her daughter. As a result, Smarsh was left “emotionally impoverished,” a sharper source of agony, she implies, than her family’s financial constraints. Her frustrations with her mother are laced throughout the book, her swelling disgust palpable. When her mother leaves her father, Smarsh gives no explanation. When her mother leaves her new and likable and stable newspaper-columnist husband with the nice house, who subscribes to The New Yorker and reads art books and collects Beat poetry and watches Woody Allen movies and listens to NPR, Smarsh gives no explanation. Maybe none was given to her at the time. But Smarsh’s abrupt announcements of these splits leave the clear impression that she disapproved, that these decisions only brought more instability and financial pain. She hints that her mother was partying too much, stepping out, enjoying a nightlife she was deprived of as a young mother, but few details are provided. One feels Smarsh inching toward a full ventilation of her feelings but pulling back, seeking to protect her mother, not wanting to reignite simmering animosities.

By contrast, her treatment of Betty, her heroic grandmother, steals the show. After settling into her seventh marriage, on the wheat farm with Arnie, Betty finds some normalcy and success. She begins work at the Sedgwick County (Wichita) courthouse, working her way up to subpoena officer and even joining the Wichita Police Reserve. Smarsh bonds with Betty, along with an African-American county judge dubbed “Hang ’em High Watson,” over case files; she admires the young female district attorney, and contemplates the miseries of the parolees and prisoners. Betty brings a salty cynicism to the parade of excuses she hears from her wards about spotty childhoods: “Don’t give me that dysfunctional childhood bullshit. My family invented dysfunction.”

The difficulty of overcoming this dysfunction is the burden of Smarsh’s book. She carries it well, with a few qualifications. One can simultaneously offer a hard-boiled look at the complexity and hardship of prairie poverty while also rejecting the increasingly frequent and grand but tiresome pronouncement that the American-Dream-is-Dead, another form of beating the anti–Hillbilly Elegy dead horse. The Washington Post review insisted that Heartland is a “rebuke” to the “myth” that “clean living” can promote social advancement. But, in fact, Smarsh tends to show the opposite — that the DWIs, fights, drugs, drinking, excessive gambling, broken marriages, shoplifting, random shootings, car wrecks, teenage mothers, et cetera, do indeed tend to set back the Kansans she describes.

Smarsh eschews a simple morality tale. She wants her readers to understand the various forms and levels and intricacies and traps of poverty, first and foremost, but she does not blush at highlighting self-imposed stumbles. Smarsh lends credence to the advice dispensed to young Kansans, which has hardened into a foundational piece of conventional wisdom common to the center of the country: “Don’t act like a knothead or you’ll end up in jail.” In the end, Smarsh offers a qualified version of the American Dream: “You got what you worked for, we believed. There was some truth to that. But it was not the whole truth.”

To understand the first part of that truth, it is essential to pause and admire Smarsh’s resilience and fortitude. She vowed to work hard and overcome her circumstances. In the aspect of her book most widely panned by critics, Smarsh explains to her never-born child why she tried so hard to avoid teenage pregnancy. A snide New York Times reviewer mocked how Smarsh’s “unborn child pops into the prose like Ally McBeal’s Baby Cha-Cha.” But I found this device to be touching and real and, as Smarsh says, vital to her achievements: “[Y]ou kept me away from poison and danger.” She got into gifted programs, published a story in a national children’s magazine, won public speaking contests, was a homecoming queen candidate; she made it to the University of Kansas for her undergraduate degree and to Columbia University for a graduate degree, and recently she finished a stint at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center. She barely missed winning the National Book Award. There were no bullshit dysfunction excuses from Smarsh, as grandma Betty would say.

In the end, despite the lure of its simplicity and the tug of its narrative cohesion, Smarsh’s Heartland doesn’t really fit into our conventional political boxes. She examines poverty unflinchingly, but she also shows how the “cycle had been broken” with her success. She suggests ways to make poverty less difficult, but she is neither grandiose nor annoyingly didactic. In other words, Smarsh is real — Kansas hardscrabble, no-bullshit real. Smarsh’s realism taps into an older and once-prominent literary tradition from the Midwest, the region that broke the Northeast’s domination of the proper 19th-century Victorian drawing room. She’s in the line of Midwestern realists that includes Hamlin Garland and Theodore Dreiser.

Smarsh’s realism is closely connected to place. She writes powerfully of thunderstorms and prairie winds and the tornadoes that made Kansas famous. When Kansas-born Betty visited Chicago, she was not impressed with “The Windy City”: “Shit. They never seen wind.” To better understand the appeal of agrarianism and the traditions of small farms, Smarsh reads Wendell Berry. She sees how critical rural Kansas was to her plan to succeed: “[M]ost essential to my well-being was the unobstructed freedom of a flat, wide horizon.” As someone who understands and defends Kansas as a place, she grows weary of her home being “spurned by more powerful corners of the country as a monolithic cultural wasteland,” a “flyover country” populated by “backward” “rednecks” and “white trash.” The wider nation, she comes to see, viewed places like Kansas as “unimportant, liminal places. They yawned while driving through them, slept as they flew over them.” Smarsh calls for a new way of thinking about diversity, one that also stresses class and neglected regions of the country. She seeks to counter a form of inequality seldom commented on but frequently hinted at — the regional inequality that leaves New York and California the dominant forces in our culture.

If O’Gieblyn is the cerebral analyst and Smarsh the plucky climber of this trio, then Stephen Markley is the guy in the fluorescent green vest running the jackhammer on the streets of Akron while imagining happy hour. Like O’Gieblyn and Smarsh, Markley is young and Midwestern and on the brink of a major literary career. Growing up in Mount Vernon, Ohio, about an hour north of Columbus in the center of the state, he played basketball and partied a bit but maintained his grades. His social life was bonfires, dances, and football games. His parents are professors — his mother, Laurie Finke, is Kenyon College’s first tenure-track director of women’s and gender studies, and his father, Robert Markley, is a prominent professor of English at the University of Illinois. Markley majored in creative writing and history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and then freelanced in Chicago for six years while writing two nonfiction books. For three years, he lived in Iowa City, where he earned a degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and began work on his novel, Ohio. (MGM recently bought the rights, and it will be made into a television series.) He’s now in Los Angeles writing a new book and working as a screenwriter. An ex-girlfriend has described Markley “as a Midwestern bro who happened to make it.”

Markley sees Ohio as a hopeful novel, rejecting some critics’ charges of nihilism, and he is not wrong. But it takes some readerly endurance to reach that conclusion. Ohio is the story of one day in the town of New Canaan, Ohio (population 15,000, located halfway between Columbus and Cleveland). It focuses on The Big Chill–ish re-convergence of several young lives a decade after they all graduated from high school. Some of their comrades were slain by drugs, some by war; the survivors struggle with their identities, one becoming consumed with the clichés of left-wing politics. The backdrop is the death of Rick Brinklan, whose parents were “prototypical kind, plainspoken midwesterners.” Rick was an earnest and patriotic running back at New Canaan High School, with an “electric core of decency,” who bravely defended the honor of victimized classmates, while his friend the social justice warrior (Zuccotti Park, Mexican collective farms, Cambodian NGOs) wilted under the pressure. Rick went off to Ohio State to become a math teacher and coach, but dropped out to join the Marines after 9/11, ending up dead in Iraq.

Ohio is brilliantly structured and a challenge to set aside. While executed well, the numerous flashbacks and the complex connections among the characters require close attention; the reader is advised to make a small chart inside the book’s front cover for easy reference. Markley’s descriptive powers and characterization skills shine throughout. A school is an “institutional slab of crap architecture with that sixties-era authoritarian aura to its brick Lego look.” A bar is “one of those sad dips in the dunes of the rural-industrial Midwest.” A grocery store is the “epicenter of New Canaan stop-and-chat time sucks.” As for Rick, he was the

kind of guy you’d find teeming across the country’s swollen midsection: toggling Budweiser, Camels, and dip, leaning into the bar like he was peering over the edge of a chasm, capable of near philosophy when discussing college football or shotgun gauges, neck on a swivel for any pretty lady but always loyal to his true love, most of his drinking done within a mile or two of where he was born.

Markley’s most salient descriptions are reserved for Ohio itself. Characters cross the Ohio River into the state or cross the hills around the Mahoning Valley, where the “oblate plain of Northeast Ohio came into repose.” They pass through the “flat expanse of cornfields, barns, and country homes that peppered the drive south to Ohio’s capital,” always watching closely for deer. They get sunburned up on Lake Erie and visit Cedar Point and take boats out to South Bass Island. The kids go to the country to drink: “Shit, if you can’t drive these country roads loaded on cheap whiskey what’s the point of being from Ohio?” Characters bounce between Dayton, Toledo, Mansfield, Youngstown, Akron, Marysville, Dover, Worthington, Springfield, Cincinnati, Canton, Cedar Point, Van Wert, and Lima. They take in the rural and forgotten places that Markley calls “Deep Ohio.”

The students of New Canaan learned the details of Ohio history in seventh grade from the devoted Mrs. Bingham, who was a teacher for 50 years and had thick “Buckeye blood.” Bingham taught Ohio history by way of stories of savage frontier warfare, of General “Mad” Anthony Wayne, Little Turtle, the Battle of Fallen Timbers, the Gnadenhutten massacre, and Marcus Spiegel (a German Jew who immigrated to Ohio and led the 120th Ohio Volunteer Infantry as it sliced through Mississippi and Louisiana and learned, as he said, the “horrors of slavery”). All this expertise on Midwestern history brings to mind the work of Andrew Cayton of Miami University — and, sure enough, when an Ohio character visits his former high school teacher in the nursing home, he tells her: “I’ve actually been rereading some Ohio stuff. Andrew Cayton and this historian Rob Harper.” [1] The intense focus on early Ohio recalls a comment by the novelist Dawn Powell of Mount Gilead, Ohio (30 miles from Markley’s Mount Vernon) — which, oddly enough, serves as an epigraph for O’Gieblyn’s book: “All Americans come from Ohio originally, if only briefly.”

Markley chronicles the ravages of deindustrialization — New Canaan is hurt by the loss of a steel-tube plant and two plate-glass manufacturers — and recounts the ravages of opioids and other drugs, as well as episodes of sexual abuse. Channeling the themes of the century-old “revolt from the village” genre, [2] he at times sees the town as the “poster child of middle-American angst,” finds the “raw wrath roosting in the small towns, suburbs, and exurbs of Middle America,” and detects an abiding “alienation.” And yet the town has fierce defenders — like Rick, of course, and also Dan Eaton, another New Canaanite who joined the military. Eaton tacks an Abraham Lincoln quote to his corkboard: “I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him.” After a chat with her high school teacher, one young woman “marveled at how many extremely decent people she’d known in this place. How much she’d taken them for granted.”

The book bounces between love and contempt for small-town Ohio in a manner that makes broad conclusions impossible. Momentary truths are found in the stories of individuals who struggle to stabilize their lives after going through a rough patch, an experience that is hard for them to articulate to others. In this regard, Markley resembles Sherwood Anderson, who found his muse close to Markley’s Mount Vernon in Elyria, and whose varied characters in Winesburg, Ohio (1919) contend with forces similar to those in Ohio: secrets, rumors, poverty, muted emotions.

These three new books display both odd convergences and intra-regional variations. A character’s religious de-conversion in Ohio recalls much of O’Gieblyn’s story in Interior States, and Smarsh says too that she has abandoned the pro-life Catholicism of her youth. The poverty discussed in Smarsh’s Heartland recalls the struggles of one of Markley’s young adults, working at the Walmart in Van Wert over by the Ohio-Indiana line. The drugs that trip up Smarsh’s relatives at times kill Markley’s characters.

These similar themes play out over variable Midwestern terrain. Smarsh’s flat Kansas of tornadoes and dust is distinct from Markley’s hilly and green Ohio. Smarsh’s Wichita feels, at times, like a Midwestern borderland, one that bumps into the South and witnesses some cultural cross-pollination. [3] Smarsh does not comment on Wichita’s proximity to the southern pale, but Markley is adept at distinguishing Ohio from what comes farther South. In his military scenes, he describes chip-on-the-shoulder Kentuckians who view Ohioans as “effete snobs sticking their noses up at the real salt-of-the-earth south of the river.” For their part, Ohioans mock Kentuckians for calling their towns “hollers” and make Kentucky jokes: “You know why they can’t teach driver’s ed and sex ed on the same day in Kentucky? ’Cuz that poor fucking horse gets too tired.”

This variation and texture highlights an intra-regional diversity across the Midwest, a complexity that is captured not only by O’Gieblyn, Smarsh, and Markley, but also by many other novels of the current wave. These include Peter Geye’s Wintering (2016), Keith Lesmeister’s We Could’ve Been Happy Here (2017), Nickolas Butler’s The Hearts of Men (2017), Melissa Frateriggo’s Glory Days (2017), Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere (2017), Sarah Stonich’s Laurentian Divide (2018), Steve Wingate’s Of Fathers and Fire (2019), and J. Ryan Stradal’s greatly anticipated follow-up to his Kitchens of the Great Midwest (2015), The Lager Queen of Minnesota (2019).

Similarly, in nonfiction, the wave includes Ted Genoways’s This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm (2017), Matthew Desmond’s Evicted (2017), Amy Goldstein’s Janesville: An American Story (2018), Eve Ewing’s Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side (2018), Andy Oler’s Old-Fashioned Modernism: Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature (2019), Jim Reese’s Bone Chalk (2019), and Carson Vaughan’s Zoo Nebraska: The Dismantling of an American Dream (2019). It also includes the wonderful work of Belt Publishing (as in Rust Belt), which, for the past few years, has released such titles as Edward McClelland’s How to Speak Midwestern (2016) and the anthologies Grand Rapids Grassroots (2017) and The Milwaukee Anthology (2019). And it includes recently launched journals such as Middle West Review, Studies in Midwestern History, Midwest Gothic, and The New Territory, along with the creation of the Midwestern History Association, which hosts an annual conference in Michigan in conjunction with the Hauenstein Center in Grand Rapids. [4]

The Midwestern studies wave, in other words, is building. O’Gieblyn, Smarsh, and Markley are riding it. The region, after a half-century of neglect, is having its moment. Even the coasts are starting to notice.

To have more than a moment, however, the Midwest must build some enduring institutions. It cannot depend on the periodic notice of The New York Times, an unreliable arrangement at best and a position of colonial domination at worst. The dependence on the Times and the concentrated power of Manhattan’s literary scene leave interior writers forced to produce work “warped to the market” (as Hamlin Garland once said during an earlier era of burgeoning regionalist energies) — a distant market with distinct interests, which is driven by the logic of commodification and the demand for the edgy and the novel. The Midwest must also overcome a history of failed regionalist ventures, such as Midwest Review, Mid-America, Upper Midwest History, Flyover Country Review, and The Midwesterner.

In sum, the Midwest needs a sustained cultural presence so that its cultural production does not have to be consistently revived. The Midwestern literary scholar Sara Kosiba has noted John Updike’s shrewd comment on the literary output of Ohioan Dawn Powell, which he saw as “doomed to a perpetual state of revival.” [5] The Midwest needs an archipelago of university-based regional studies institutes, such as those that the South and the West enjoy. It needs a permanent presence on Big Ten campuses in the form of Midwestern studies classes. It needs to become a strong cultural force independent of the coastal gaze. This would be a revolutionary regionalist revival, one with permanence, not a fleeting spasm from the American center destined to repeat itself in another two decades.

An adjunct professor of history at the University of South Dakota, Jon K. Lauck is the author of From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, 1920-1965(University of Iowa Press, 2017).

[1] On the early passing of Cayton and the significance of his career in Midwestern history, see Jon K. Lauck, “Remembrance: Andrew R. L. Cayton: Midwesterner, 1954-2015,” Middle West Review vol. 2, no. 2 (Spring 2016), 201–205. Harper is a graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio and earned his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He now teaches at University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and is the author of Unsettling the West: Violence and State Building in the Ohio Valley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).

[2] Jon K. Lauck, “The Myth of the Midwestern ‘Revolt from the Village,’” MidAmerica vol. 40 (2013), 39–85.

[3] See Jay Price, “Where the Midwest Meets the Bible Belt: Using Religion to Explore the Midwest’s Southwestern Edge,” in Jon K. Lauck, (ed), The Interior Borderlands: Regional Identity in the Midwest and Great Plains (Sioux Falls: Center for Western Studies, 2019), 229-42 and Price, “Dixie’s Disciples: The Southern Diaspora and Religion in Wichita, Kansas,” Kansas History vol. 40 (Winter 2017-18), 244–261.

[4] See Jon K. Lauck, “The Origins and Progress of the Midwestern History Association, 2013-2016,” Studies in Midwestern History vol. 2, no. 11 (2016), 139–149.

[5] Sara Kosiba (ed), A Scattering Time: How Modernism Met Midwestern Culture (Hastings, NE: Hastings College Press, 2018), ix.

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how2to18 · 5 years

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[2] Jon K. Lauck, “The Myth of the Midwestern ‘Revolt from the Village,’” MidAmerica vol. 40 (2013), 39–85.

[4] See Jon K. Lauck, “The Origins and Progress of the Midwestern History Association, 2013-2016,” Studies in Midwestern History vol. 2, no. 11 (2016), 139–149.

[5] Sara Kosiba (ed), A Scattering Time: How Modernism Met Midwestern Culture (Hastings, NE: Hastings College Press, 2018), ix.

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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 4 years

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Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy

by Frederick Clarkson

Frederick Clarkson is a widely published journalist, author and lecturer who specializes in the Radical Right.

Book published March 1, 1997 (Bear in mind, since this book was written things have moved swiftly to the right.)

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“I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

– Thomas Jefferson, who was attacked by the religious right in the election of 1800. These words are engraved inside the Jefferson Memorial.

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Back cover

What is behind the violence against abortion clinics, attacks on gays and lesbians and the growing power of the religious right?

Frederick Clarkson makes it clear that beyond the bombers and assassins who sometimes make news, is a growing, if not well understood, movement that encompasses Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon and the Promise Keepers—the lead agency of the so-called Christian men’s movement.

Drawing on years of rigorous research, Clarkson exposes the wild card of the “theology of vigilantism” which urges the enforcement of “God’s law” and argues for fundamentalist revolution against constitutional democracy. Contrary to popular belief, these figures are usually neither nuts nor alone.

Eternal Hostility concludes with a challenge to leading neoconservative academics who attempt to blame much of the current culture wars on the legalization of abortion while ignoring the theocratic intentions of leading “conservatives.”

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Review

Frederick Clarkson’s Eternal Hostility provides a chilling road map to a growing movement whose roots go back to the founding days of the country. Clarkson asks the reader to consider what it would be like if having an abortion was punishable by death, if gays and lesbians were thrown into jail, or if our constitutional rights were replaced by biblical law. In a stunning analysis, Clarkson debunks the “objective” bestseller Culture Wars to reveal a tract written by a rightwing church elder.

Chastising liberals and the left for failing to recognize the depth of the threat to liberty, Clarkson argues that we must develop a coherent response to a well-organized effort aimed at overthrowing democracy. When he exposes the aims and strategies of such diverse Christian zealots as the “Promise Keepers” and the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon, remember that it was Clarkson who first to exposed the Christian Coalition’s plans to take over the Republican Party, plans which have largely succeeded in several states and was actually seen as it was acted out on television in the 1996 Texas Republic Convention. Clarkson was also the first to expose how elements of the Christian Right were encouraging the formation of citizen “militias” almost five years before the Oklahoma City bombing propelled the militia movement into general public awareness. Eternal Hostility is a warning bell in the night and is essential reading for any secular humanist or freethinker needing to be aroused from a complacency that “it can’t happen here” — because it has, it is, and it may well succeed if enough good men do nothing to stop it.

— Midwest Book Review

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Contents

Introduction by Robert Meneilly vi

Acknowledgements viii

1. Eternal Hostility: The Born-Again Struggle 1

2. Neither a Juggernaut nor a Joke: 19 How Overestimating and Underestimating Helps the Christian Right

3. Americans for Theocratic Action: 45 Rev. Sun Myung Moon, “Family Values,” and the Christian Right—One Dangerous Theocrat

4. Laying Down the (Biblical) Law: 77 Christian Reconstructionism by the Book

5. Theocrats in Action: From Theory to Practice 97

6. The Devil in the Details: 125 How the Christian Right’s Vision of Political and Religious Opponents as Satanic May Lead to Religious Warfare

7. Bombings, Assassinations, and Theocratic Revolution: 139 Vigilantes Enforce “God’s Law”

8. The Fight for the Framework: 163 Resetting the Terms of Debate

9. Promise Keepers: The Death of Feminism? 187

10. Defending Democracy: Rethink the Strategy 203

Appendix: Resources 217

Notes 227

Index 264

About the Author 280

____________________________________________

Introduction

Rev. Robert H. Meneilly

As a Presbyterian (USA) clergy with a life-long zeal for both my Christian religion and our democratic country, Eternal Hostility has illuminated my mind and sensitized my heart like nothing I have read in recent times. This is exactly what is needed to help us secure the health of our democracy and preserve true religious liberty. Its honest and intelligent investigative journalism embodies some of the most in-depth research and reporting on the religious right in print. An encounter of my own with the religious right may serve to illustrate the need for this book.

In the spring of 1994, I gave a sermon to our 7,600 member congregation, introducing the personnel, theology, and goals of the radical religious right. The text was subsequently published locally and then in the Sunday New York Times. This drew the wrath of religious right leader James Dobson of Focus on the Family in the form of a full page ad in the Kansas City Star. This was just the tip of a large iceberg of stealth campaigns by the religious right to take over the Republican Party and run for public office in our area. It was then that a local grassroots Mainstream Coalition was formed to challenge the religious right.

I first met Fred Clarkson when we shared the podium at a public forum a few months later in July, 1994, titled “Exposing the Agenda of the Radical Religious Right” and sponsored by Planned Parenthood. The event turned out to be a benchmark in the growing struggle with the religious right in our suburban community outside of Kansas City.

The Planned Parenthood Forum drew extensive coverage from television, radio, and out of town newspapers. Fred spent all day before the evening forum doing interviews. So concerned had the community become that more people had to be turned away than those who packed the large auditorium. On that unforgettable evening, Fred detailed with clarity, and with good humor essential to civil discourse, the imminent threat of the radical religious right to our democratic institutions. This was especially significant in that there were many religious right activists present. It is evident that people are starved for accurate information and analysis about the radical religious right as it affects our communities.

Now Clarkson has drawn on the themes of that address and more, to create a very readable and well-documented book. In bringing out the facts, he is discerning, and not judgmental—a true investigative journalist.

From his critique of authors dealing with the so-called “culture wars,” to his first-hand observation of the founding meetings of the Christian Coalition, much of his writing comes of personal experience, not hearsay. Everything he reports is carefully documented.

Clarkson exposes the distorted use of American colonial history— as some use statistics, interpreting as they will in an attempt to prove whatever they want—and the misreading of the Constitution by the leadership of the religious right. Pat Robertson and his fellow generals in the army do the same with holy Scripture to give their narrow sectarian views the authority of “thus says the Lord.” Clarkson eliminates any confusion; he clearly demonstrates that the Constitution and Bill of Rights were purposefully designed to preserve this democracy and forever save it from being made a theocracy.

Eternal Hostility introduces many important players who receive little media attention, from the anti-democratic “reconstructionist” theologians to James Dobson, long-hailed hero of family values who has been building a prime political empire for a decade. He may well influence more people than the Christian Coalition. His “Focus On The Family” brings in annual revenues of more than $100 million. But while Clarkson issues a warning about these groups and others such as the Unification Church and the Promise Keepers, the author makes clear that apathy on the part of mainline Christians and other centrists is more to be feared. Clarkson insists that “Political participation must not be limited to the voting booth, but active participation in political and electoral life must span the calendar year.”

Too many wonderfully good citizens upon hearing the religious right stand back and say, “They certainly don’t speak for me.” But they do speak for you if you are not doing anything to keep our democracy from being converted to a theocracy!

This book is a masterpiece for God and country!

—Robert H. Meneilly

Robert H. Meneilly founded and then pastored the Village Presbyterian Church (USA) for more than 47 years in Prairie Village, Kansas. It is the second largest mainstream Presbyterian Church in the country. He is one of the founders of the Interfaith Alliance and the Mainstream Coalition, organizations of mainstream religious leaders who oppose the agenda of the religious right.

____________________________________________

“Moon’s Law: God Is Phasing Out Democracy” by Frederick Clarkson

Missing Pieces of the Story of Sun Myung Moon by Frederick Clarkson

Trivializing FFWPU mass weddings and underestimating the Christian Right

The CIG constitution is the paperwork for what Fraser and every Moon org critic has warned was the Moon org’s goal all along

Hak Ja Han’s Cheon Il Guk Constitution is troubling

Church and state: A personal and public tug of war

Sun Myung Moon: “church and the state must become one”

U.S. Presidents Endorse Sun Myung Moon From ‘Spirit World’

United States Congressional investigation of Moon’s organization

Politics and religion interwoven

The Resurrection of Rev Moon

____________________________________________

#Frederick Clarkson #Sun Myung Moon #Unification Church #Family Federation for World Peace and Unification #Hak Ja Han

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topmixtrends · 5 years

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[2] Jon K. Lauck, “The Myth of the Midwestern ‘Revolt from the Village,’” MidAmerica vol. 40 (2013), 39–85.

[4] See Jon K. Lauck, “The Origins and Progress of the Midwestern History Association, 2013-2016,” Studies in Midwestern History vol. 2, no. 11 (2016), 139–149.

[5] Sara Kosiba (ed), A Scattering Time: How Modernism Met Midwestern Culture (Hastings, NE: Hastings College Press, 2018), ix.

The post The Neo-Regionalist Moment: Hearing the Emerging Voices of the American Center appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2UWToUp

#Los Angeles Review of Books #topmixtrends

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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So what if you didn’t grow up immersed in the wizarding world of Harry Potter?

For plenty of Americans — especially millennials, who were children when the books first came to the US — that’s an almost unimaginable hypothetical. The books shaped the imagination of millions of children, who flocked to midnight release parties, dressed as Harry and Hermione and Ron for Halloween, watched the movies, and even now frame their understanding of real-world political events in terms of Hogwarts and He Who Must Not Be Named.

But a sizable chunk of the same age cohort didn’t read the books at all.

That wasn’t because they just weren’t into books, or because they didn’t know about Harry Potter. It was because in some religious communities — particularly among conservative evangelicals, but also some Catholics and Muslims — the Harry Potter series was viewed on a spectrum that ranged from suspicion to outright opposition.

To some, the reasons may be obvious; to others, that makes no sense. But the phenomenon of conservative Christian opposition to Harry Potter succinctly encapsulates many of the forces that were at play within that group two decades ago — and illuminates a whole group of young adults who felt excluded from the world around them.

I’m among the millennials who grew up not reading J.K. Rowling’s novels or watching the films for religious reasons. While writing this article, I’ve had hundreds of conversations through social media and in person with adults across the country who had the same experience.

For many of us, reading the novels wasn’t outright forbidden, at least not through some kind of household decree; it was just understood that it wasn’t something we did in our homes. (I’d fall into this category.) For others, the opposition was much more overt. Some people spoke to me about bringing home the novels and having them taken away. Others felt ashamed about times when their parents told their teachers that they wouldn’t be allowed to read the books along with the rest of the class.

A Harry Potter fan in Australia reading the last book in the series. Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images

The variety of these experiences helps illuminate the complexity of opposition to Harry Potter’s world — something that’s been bolstered as I’ve talked to parents who once opposed the books and have changed their views, and others who still prefer not to let their children read them.

Many of us non-readers found that our parents’ opposition to Harry Potter dropped away as we got older, or as the series was completed and its overt Christian influences became clearer — and then were confirmed in 2007 by Rowling herself, who told MTV in an interview that she thought the Christian symbolism had been obvious. Still, others I’ve talked to say their parents continue to oppose the novels, even removing them from their adult children’s shelves if they move home.

To those who grew up with the books, that may seem slightly baffling. The stories of Hogwarts and the young wizards seem of a piece, in many ways, with the battles of good and evil contained in other classic works of fantasy, including some explicitly Christian-influenced ones such as C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. So what accounts for this opposition?

The answer has a lot to do with some of the voices that were especially influential in conservative Christian culture, and especially evangelical culture, in the late 1990s and 2000s, when Harry Potter was growing into a literary phenomenon.

The most often cited voice of opposition among those I talked to was Focus on the Family, an immensely popular and influential evangelical parachurch operation, and in particular the organization’s leader until 2003, author and psychologist James Dobson.

Dobson rose to prominence as a proponent of conservative social positions and relatively strict child-rearing practices. He founded his flagship organization, Focus on the Family, in 1977, and produced a daily radio show by the same name that at its height was reportedly heard every day by more than 220 million people in 164 countries and in a dozen languages.

Japanese Harry Potter fans pose with their newly purchased copies of the Japanese version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at Kinokuniya Bookstore on July 23, 2008, in Tokyo. Koichi Kamoshida/Getty Images

Focus on the Family is especially influential in telling conservative evangelical parents how to navigate popular culture, which it does in two ways. It creates pop culture of its own, combining entertaining stories that teach biblical lessons with relatively high production values — the long-running fictional radio drama Adventures in Odyssey is an especially successful example — as an alternative to mainstream entertainment. And it produces a publication called Plugged In, which describes itself as “an entertainment guide full of the reviews you need to make wise personal and family-friendly decisions about movies, videos, music, TV, games and books.”

Plugged In is hardly the only publication that does this — Christianity Today, where I was chief film critic before joining Vox in 2016, has done it for years, as have far more conservative sites like MovieGuide — but it’s one of the longest-running and most popular in existence, partly due to its backing by Focus.

Plugged In reviews were a fixture of life for many children growing up in conservative evangelical churches, particularly in the 1990s. Unlike some more hardline Christian review sites, Plugged In reviewers often comment generously on the artistic and technical value of a pop artist’s debut album or the latest franchise blockbuster. But they also describe, in some detail, the moral content of the cultural object and make recommendations based on those matters, outlining everything from spiritual elements to violent content to drug and alcohol use.

The Plugged In review of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is fairly typical of the site. It mentions among its positive elements Harry and Ron’s friendship, warnings against greed, and the sacrificial love of Harry’s parents. It points out the story’s use of rule-breaking and violent content, along with Hagrid’s taste for butterbeer. And it devotes three measured paragraphs to the “stereotypical” presentation of witchcraft and wizardry in the book, and suggests the way dark magic is portrayed does not make it seem desirable — all, on balance, good things, from a Plugged In perspective.

But the review also taps into what became the biggest opposition to the world of Hogwarts.

“On a cultural level, Rowling can be commended for steering young fans away from the so-called dark side,” the review adds parenthetically. “But from a spiritual perspective” — meaning, in the real world outside the books, according to the Bible — “it’s clear that there are not dark and light sides when it comes to witchcraft; it’s all as black as sin.”

In other words, though in the world of Harry Potter, magic can be used for good, in our world, governed by the rules of God and not fictional magic, all witchcraft is evil.

“The meaningless charms found in this book may not summon occult forces, but there are real charms that do,” the review suggests, and says that because the world of magic that Rowling has created is so much brighter and more interesting than the boring realm of Muggles, the books may hold an allure that is unhealthy for children. “Biblically speaking, to participate in the world of witchcraft brings death rather than a fuller life,” the review’s uncredited author writes.

In the end, while Plugged In praised the books in some modest respects, it also concluded that parents should “think long and hard before embarking on Harry Potter’s magic carpet ride.”

And that attitude of suspicion toward the Harry Potter books’ magic — and the worry that it would attract children to the occult — is perhaps the single most influential source of opposition to the series among conservative Christians.

Harry Potter fans wait for the stars to arrive at the Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets world premiere on November 3, 2002, in London. Scott Barbour/Getty Images

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most prominent voice in this opposition was James Dobson himself. He addressed the matter on his radio program and issued a lengthy response to an erroneous assertion in a 2007 Washington Post article that characterized him as having “praised” the series. A response posted to Focus on the Family’s website stated that “this is the exact opposite of Dr. Dobson’s opinion — in fact, he said a few years ago on his daily radio broadcast that ‘We have spoken out strongly against all of the Harry Potter products,’” and that the Post reporter had not just acknowledged but “apologized for” the error.

The statement also reiterated Dobson’s opposition to the series: “Given the trend toward witchcraft and New Age ideology in the larger culture, it’s difficult to ignore the effects such stories (albeit imaginary) might have on young, impressionable minds.”

Dobson was far from the only conservative Christian leader who sounded a warning about the books. Just a quick Google search turns up articles, books, websites, and other resources warning families away from the books and movies because of their connection to witchcraft. A Jack Chick tract called “The Nervous Witch,” about Wicca and witchcraft, even features a character who says she got into “the craft” through the Harry Potter books.

In several states, parents sought to have the books removed from schools, suggesting in some cases that they were connected to Wicca and thus their inclusion in school libraries violated the separation of church and state.

Others, however, were more measured than Dobson and those who suggested Christian families shun the books.

Chuck Colson, the former Nixon administration official who became an evangelical leader, initially praised the books on his own radio broadcast in 1999. “If your kids do develop a taste for Harry Potter and his wizard friends,” Colson said, “this interest might just open them up to an appreciation for other fantasy books with a distinctly Christian worldview.”

But seven years later, he had changed his mind without going so far as to outright decry them; he said that while he didn’t personally recommend the books or movies to Christian families, they were a good opportunity to teach children to exercise discernment — that is, to examine them critically through the lens of their faith.

The conservative newsmagazine World, which regularly published reviews of the books and the movies as they were released, took a similar tone. In a piece titled “More Clay Than Potter,” published in 1999, World’s book critic Susan Olasky and Anne McCain, a director of children’s education at a Presbyterian church in Virginia, examined how the newly popular books “can give Bible-conscious parents an enjoyable opportunity to teach older children how to think critically.”

“Truths sprinkled throughout the books are ‘trail markers’ that can be used to point to God,” Olasky and McCain wrote, pointing to the books’ emphasis on wise counsel and the difference between good and evil as positive — while also noting that the books may put “a smiling mask on evil” and draw readers into the real world of witchcraft, though the Hogwarts world of wizardry bore little resemblance to the world of Wicca.

A young Harry Potter fan in July 2005. Stephen Chernin/Getty Images

World’s reviews of the books and movies continued to be mixed through the end of the series, often noting the increasingly dark tone and the ways the moral order in Harry’s world may confuse children about the moral order in our own.

When I spoke with Olasky about World’s take on the series, she pointed to the magazine’s often mixed opinions on the books and movies, saying that their main concerns had a lot to do with simply not knowing where the series was going — especially since they dealt so powerfully with good and evil.

“It was a world that kids were drawn to,” she said. “But you didn’t really know [at first] what the rules were. … A thing would appear to be this, and then it would turn into that.”

That was also of concern to the parents who read World, and to those inclined to carefully watch over what their children experienced. “I still think Christians should think about that,” she said. “Should anything capture our imaginations like that?’

To Olasky and other critics who saw the series from her perspective, the world of Harry Potter wasn’t necessarily dangerous because it was a throughput to witchcraft, Satanism, and the occult. They were more concerned with the ideas that impressionable children might absorb from the immensely popular book, ideas that might conflict with biblical ideas about good, evil, light, darkness, obedience, and other matters. And they were concerned with reminding parents not to allow their children to uncritically accept stories just because they were popular — especially without knowing where the series was headed.

That perspective, which sought to protect children’s developing imaginations from particular content, seemed obviously false to others. YA author Judy Blume, for instance, wrote a dismissive op-ed titled “Is Harry Potter Evil?” in the New York Times in 1999, linking opposition to the books to efforts to ban books ranging from Madeleine L’Engle’s overtly Christian A Wrinkle in Time series to Blume’s own novels from school libraries. Blume praised “subversive” books for the ways they developed her imagination.

But to more protective parents, it made sense. And even those who might not take a hardline view against the books might have been inclined to avoid them, hearing the voice of alarm. That’s how communities that form around shared values, like religious or other beliefs, often work: In concert, they form practices and boundaries, and then support one another in maintaining those boundaries.

Children dressed as Harry Potter characters with their just-purchased copies of the German-language edition of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on November 8, 2003, in Berlin. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

There were also plenty of conservative Christian critics and leaders who leaned positive or outright supportive of the series from the start. One such Christian writer, John Granger — who was described in Time in 2009 as the “dean of Harry Potter scholars” — has written extensively about the series’ connection to Christian teachings in books such as Hidden Key to Harry Potter (now titled How Harry Cast His Spell) and Looking for God in Harry Potter. He also maintains the “Hogwarts Professor” blog.

Granger wrote his books in response to anti-Potter books, such as Richard Abanes’s Harry Potter and the Bible: The Menace Behind the Magic and Connie Neal’s What’s a Christian to Do About Harry Potter.

“The Christian content and continuity with English literature traditions were missing from both books,” Granger wrote to me by email. “I thought … that this symbolism interweaved in the storytelling was largely responsible for the series’ success.” Granger points to links present in the very first book: “A unicorn, a phoenix, a red lion, a Philosopher’s Stone, and a hero rising from the dead after a sacrificial death are all in the first book. All are traditional symbols of Christ.”

When I asked Granger why he thought conservative Christians opposed the book, he said the series’ use of magic suggested to some that there had to be some kind of conflict between the books and faith. “I received some dismissive and patronizing criticism,” he wrote, but “Christian critics largely left me alone because, unlike Abanes and Neal, I argued from English literature and formalist analysis rather than through a biblical filter.”

“Fortunately, all my ideas and understanding were confirmed by the last three books, especially Deathly Hallows,” Granger said.

A copy of a Harry Potter book burns in a bonfire during a protest outside the Christ Community Church December 30, 2001, in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Neil Jacobs/Getty Images

Granger, and many others like him, came out in favor of the books. Christianity Today, which has often been considered the flagship publication of the American evangelical movement, published articles on both sides of the issue but generally took a more positive stance. Some saw the stories — particularly after its conclusion, in which Harry seems to be cast fairly obviously as a Christ figure — as reflecting the biblical story.

Still, the reasons for criticizing the series among those conservative Christians boiled down to two main camps. There were those who condemned the books as conduits to witchcraft, and there were those who viewed them skeptically as being influenced by secularism, potentially undermining Christian values.

There were good reasons both of those camps were so influential, even among those who didn’t read the books themselves, and they have a lot to do with the timing of The Sorcerer’s Stone’s US release, 20 years ago.

In my discussions with those who weren’t allowed to read the books, or who didn’t allow their children to read the books, the idea that the books’ use of magic was tied to the real-world occult seemed strange to many in retrospect, for one big reason: Many of those same children were allowed, even encouraged, to read C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series as well as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings series. (Some people who grew up in very fundamentalist communities said that even those were off limits, but that seems to be a minority.)

And yet there are a few cultural reasons this particular criticism caught on so powerfully. Most would require a whole book to thoroughly unpack, but two in particular are notable.

First of all, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was released in the US in 1998 — right on the heels of the Satanic panic.

A rash of false allegations of Satanic ritual abuse of children by cults, made mostly against day care centers during the 1980s, were already being debunked during the ’90s. But the memory of those accusations was still fresh in the minds of many, especially since it continued to be a pop cultural plot point in TV shows and movies.

The lingering sense that some of it could have been true stuck around for years, subconsciously lending plausibility to the idea that Harry Potter and his friends were a subtle attempt to induct children into Satan-worshipping cults or witchcraft-practicing covens. (The common conflation of Satanic worship, the Church of Satan, pagan religions, the occult, witchcraft, and other systems of practice and belief was likely part of this.) The Jack Chick tract referenced above — published in 2002! — is a good example of how the ideas behind the Satanic panic were still alive in some of Christianity’s more fundamentalist wings.

Another reason that Satanic panic-adjacent ideas still held currency by the end of the 1990s may be a pair of popular novels by Christian author Frank Peretti that sold millions of copies: This Present Darkness (1986) and Piercing the Darkness (1989). Both novels told stories of spiritual warfare in which angels and demons were literal characters struggling for the souls of ordinary Americans in a small town.

The books paid particular attention to New Age spiritual practices: Meditation was portrayed as a way for people to become possessed by demons, insidiously pushed upon people by a powerful New Age group that engaged in practices that seem drawn from accounts of Satanic groups. And their special target was children.

It would be a stretch to say that Peretti’s novels were responsible in some way for people’s suspicions of the Harry Potter books. But given their enduring popularity — I checked them out of my own church’s library and read them as a young teen in the mid- to late ’90s — their suggestion that children’s susceptible minds were targets for New Age groups covering for demonic forces certainly supported the idea that a series of fantasy novels for children had the potential to harm those children.

Church members sing as they circle a bonfire burning Harry Potter books outside the Christ Community Church on December 30, 2001, in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Neil Jacobs/Getty Images

And even setting aside the more literalist takes on the occult contained in Peretti’s novels, there’s another factor; books like This Present Darkness, Piercing the Darkness, and the 1992 follow-up Prophet (in which a TV news anchor becomes embroiled in a controversial investigation of a local abortion clinic) spiritualized the culture war that evangelicals in particular were attuned to in the 1980s and ’90s.

That culture war — a battle to shape the values of young Americans through the things they see and experience in culture — has often been a source of fear and frustration for people across the religious and ideological spectrum over the past few decades. But conservative Christians are especially attuned to it, and Peretti’s novels (and others like them) gave the sense that the things you might watch on TV may not just change minds about “hot button” topics — sexuality, gender, abortion, and so on — but also be actual, literal battlegrounds between the forces of good and evil.

Even for parents who didn’t take this quite so literally, a more metaphorical notion of spiritual warfare exerted considerable influence over their decision about what to allow into their children’s lives.

I spoke about this with Nancy Gibson, a conservative evangelical mother who began homeschooling her children in the 2000s. Gibson’s older children didn’t read the Harry Potter novels as they were coming out — the family didn’t outright ban them, she said, but the communities they were part of discouraged people from reading them, mostly under the influence of Focus on the Family. But Gibson’s daughter read the series during the summer after her first year at a Christian college, and her younger daughter, now a teenager, has been reading them, with her parents’ approval.

Gibson told me that it was often simply difficult to know, as a parent in a community that was suspicious of popular culture, what was wise to allow their children to read. Resources like those provided by Plugged In helped navigate that challenge, particularly for those parents who didn’t have time to read the books for themselves.

Gibson’s experience seems aligned with those of many other parents, for whom navigating popular culture is difficult no matter what their religious convictions are. Some parents are more permissive, or are engaged with pop culture in a way that lets them experience it alongside their own children.

But conservative Christians and evangelicals in particular have for decades tended to view mainstream popular culture with suspicion. And in the throes of the late Satanic panic, raging culture wars, and the sense that — even aside from these forces — children were likely being targeted by people opposed to their own values, warnings against Harry Potter presented themselves as a good enough reason to stay away. There was, after all, always Narnia.

I’ve been reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for the first time while working on this article. I know how the story goes, because by the time the movie series was reaching its conclusion, I was an adult and a working film critic, and I watched them all. (The third one, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, is the best of the bunch.)

But I’d never gotten around to the books, so now I’ve read the first in the series. News flash: It’s pretty delightful. I was surprised by the wit and by the clever characterizations, and I like the careful attention given to building out the world of both Muggles and wizards. I wouldn’t say I’m very invested in it, but it’s fun.

Would I have liked them if I’d read them when they first came out? Probably. In 1998 I was 15, a hopeless bookworm who didn’t watch many movies or TV shows but did read books like This Present Darkness. I had read and reread the Narnia series since I was in third or fourth grade, and I loved the movie versions that sometimes aired on PBS. I wasn’t into fantasy all that much, but Harry’s world feels enough like my own that I would have enjoyed them. And as a conservative Christian teenager, I probably would have found a lot to praise in them — just like many others did.

A customer holds Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at a bookstore after its release at 1:01 am on July 21, 2007, in Berlin. Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

But I didn’t read them. And to my recollection, I never asked my parents to let me, either. Unlike some of my peers, for whom being excluded from Harry’s world meant being excluded from our age cohort’s most important obsession, I don’t really mind. For me, my never having read Harry Potter has always been a point of curiosity more than frustration, much like the fact that, until recently, I’d never seen Titanic. (There’s nudity and a sex scene!)

Many American millennials who grew up in conservative Christian families share plenty of these touchstones, things in pop culture we knew we shouldn’t watch or read or do, or things we thought we should engage with. The Simpsons was bad. A Walk to Remember was good. We kissed dating goodbye. Dungeons & Dragons, the Smurfs, and the Care Bears were bad, as were Cabbage Patch dolls (the rumor was that they were possessed by demons), but we probably read Left Behind. Plenty of young people got rid of their secular music and replaced it with Christian versions. A lot of us spent our evenings every October 31 at a church “harvest party” instead of trick-or-treating. Rejecting a lot of mainstream pop culture was part of who we were.

That speaks strongly, in many ways, to what it meant in the ’90s and 2000s to be a Christian kid or teenager. Many of our associations with our youth — particularly for those of us who grew up evangelical — are more tightly linked to the things in mainstream pop culture we weren’t allowed to experience than to religious experience itself. In banning things like Harry Potter or “secular” music, evangelicals often tried to create alternate cultural products to fill the void.

That tendency hasn’t died off, although there seems to be a higher tolerance among evangelicals and other conservative Christians today for engagement with mainstream secular culture, less about the Plugged In style of tabulating objectionable content and more about analyzing and thinking critically about it.

Even so, a generation of conservative Christian millennials like me arrived at adulthood without having had the same pop culture experiences as many of our peers. Maybe that’s just a symptom of an increasingly niche-driven, fragmented popular culture. But for many I’ve talked to, it’s also a source of sorrow. They miss having had a basis for talking to their peers about something everyone enjoyed — and in the case of Harry Potter, for many, it seems that the thing they were barred from might have, in the end, been one of the most Christian stories produced by mainstream culture in a long time.

Original Source -> I didn’t read Harry Potter when I was growing up. And I wasn’t alone.

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lopezdorothy70-blog · 6 years

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State-funded Foster Care and The Church: Part of the Problem, NOT Part of the Solution

Comments by Brian Shilhavy Editor, Health Impact News

Lisa Wheeler of the National Review, a “magazine of conservative opinion” founded in 1955 by William F. Buckley Jr., has just published a commentary entitled “Pro-Life Should Include Foster Care, Too,” criticizing American churches for not participating more in state-sponsored foster care programs.

We beg to differ.

In our years of covering state-sponsored child kidnappings and trafficking through foster care, the modern day American corporate church is part of the problem, not the solution. In fact, much of the philosophy behind modern child welfare social services can be traced back to Christian Church-based social services.

All of the atrocities that we have documented and are happening in foster care today, from child kidnapping, to emotional and physical abuse, to using children for drug trials, to child sex trafficking – are also happening in Christian Church-sponsored foster care institutions.

The rationale we have heard far too often is that it is precisely because the system is so corrupt and harming so many children that “good” Christian parents need to become foster parents to advocate for the children.

But is this even possible? The government funds foster care, and entering into the system requires abiding by government standards in order to be a foster parent. Wherever there is government funding, there are most certainly strings attached.

What about the biblical admonition to not participate in such evil alliances?

Do not be yoked together with unbelievers.

For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols?

For we are the temple of the living God.

As God has said: “I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people.”

“Therefore come out from them and be separate, says the Lord. Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you.”

“I will be a Father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.” (2 Corinthians 6:14-18)

Lisa Wheeler, herself a foster parent, states her own selfish bias right at the beginning of her commentary:

I didn't get into foster parenting because I wanted it to be my life's work; I got into it for more-selfish reasons. I wanted to be a mother. After 15 years of infertility, foster parenting was likely my only hope because of my age…

I wanted to be a mother, now. My biological clock was done ticking.

Well, taking other parents' children is not the answer to infertility.

As I wrote last month (April, 2018) in the article The Corrupt Foster Care and Adoption System: Why Aren't More Foster and Adoptive Parents Speaking Out?, supplying a steady supply of foster parents and foster homes to allow such an evil system to continue operating is a big part of the problem:

One thing the system absolutely depends upon to keep federal and state government funds flowing is foster parents. And one of the places many foster parents are currently recruited from are American Christian churches.

If “good” foster and adoptive parents took a stand against corruption in child welfare, it could put a big dent in the system, if not take it down altogether.

Health Impact News reporter, Terri LaPoint, provides a rebuttal to the National Review's call for churches to become more involved in foster care as part of the “pro-life movement,” explaining clearly why this is misguided advice and certainly not in the best interest of families and children.

Should the Church Be Encouraging its Members to Become Foster Parents?

Commentary by Terri LaPoint Health Impact News

A recent series of articles by the National Review has focused on the topic of foster care, especially in regards to the role of the church. One article in the series is entitled, “Pro-Life Should Include Foster Care, Too,” by Lisa Wheeler.

There are issues raised by Wheeler and by others in the series that many would agree must be addressed, such as the large number of children who are, as she states, “orphaned” by the foster care system, as well as the fact that the children suffer a great deal of trauma.

However, much of the public, including the church, largely has no idea about the things that we see every day at Health Impact News/Medical Kidnap. The article reflects this fundamental naivety and crucial misunderstanding of what is really happening with the foster care and adoption industry, things that many of our readers and families in our articles have learned the hard way.

As good and noble as the solutions proposed by Wheeler and others may sound on the surface, we must look deeper. We must recognize that the proposed solutions will not only not solve the problem but will, in fact, only serve to enable a system that ultimately destroys families and devours children.

This is something that has weighed very heavily on my heart, since I began this research several years ago.

I have always known good and wonderful people who want to follow Jesus and love the orphans by taking in children through foster care and adoption. Their motives are pure, and their intentions are good.

On the other hand, there have always been some elements in the church who prey on children and are involved in pedophilia and sex trafficking of children through foster care, adoption, and group homes. We are seeing more and more reports of this in our research and in other media. It is obvious that this is much more widespread than any of us knew.

What I have come to recognize is that the good, well-meaning people in churches and in society have become pawns in a huge, wicked, corrupt system that profits by stealing children and trafficking them through the Child Welfare system.

The church ENABLES the destruction of children and families, as they believe the lies told by the propaganda of the Child Protective Services, foster care, and adoption industry.

Lisa Wheeler begins her article by stating:

Babies saved before they are born need care afterwards. Our churches can help.

It wasn't until I became a foster parent that I realized how little my pro-life church, and perhaps every church, was contributing to curbing the modern orphan crisis of our time.

The church has a role to play, certainly, but it must stop following the Pied Piper that is leading them off a cliff to destruction. The church must dig deeper into what God's heart is for the family and work to redeem families, not tear them apart.

The Modern “Orphan Crisis” is NOT About Orphans

This Christian Conference on Foster Care and Adoption in 2014 featured Elizabeth Bartholet, Professor of Family Law at Harvard Law School, as a guest speaker, who's “ideas are so extreme that they include requiring every family with a young child to open itself to mandatory government surveillance.” Article here.

While there certainly is a crisis, the nature of the crisis has been misrepresented in almost every place where it is discussed. Wheeler described her introduction to the crisis when she got into foster parenting, hoping to adopt a child:

Required training hours forced us to hear the horrific reality that over 400,000 children are “orphaned” via the foster-care system throughout the United States; over 100,000 of them are legally free for adoption.

The word “orphan” has been brutally misused by the foster care and adoption industry as well as by the church. Merriam-Webster defines “orphan” as:

a child deprived by death of one or usually both parents

However, only a very tiny fraction of the children in the system are truly orphans. Most have been taken away from their real parents.

They still have parents. Even if the parental rights are terminated by the family court system, the parents still exist. They still hold their children in their hearts, and their DNA is written in every cell of their child's body.

Wheeler cites James 1:27, a verse that is commonly quoted in regards to foster care and adoption:

Scripture is quite clear on our obligation to help the orphans (James 1:27) and that He's given us different varieties of gifts and talents with which to serve (1 Corinthians 12:4–6).

When the Bible talked about the church's responsibility to care for widows and orphans, it was never intended that they would actually cause someone to become a widow or orphan in order to care for them.

Yet, that is exactly what is happening with the foster care system.

Wheeler correctly identifies that reality. The children are not true orphans, but the system is depriving the children of their parents, not physically through death, but legally, emotionally, and geographically.

James 1:27 says:

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. (NIV)

The question arises: How can we justify participating in the system that creates orphans in the name of caring for the orphan?

Can any family that “completes their family” by enabling children to be stolen from another family truly be doing the will of God?

Kidnapping Children to Into the Foster Care Pipeline – the Numbers

The Rembis Family in Texas had their 11 homeschooled children seized and put into foster care. A judge was upset that they had 11 children in their home. Story here.

We have covered hundreds of stories of families whose children were taken from them for medical kinds of reasons, like asking for a second opinion or looking for a less invasive means of treatment.

We have seen cases where children were taken because one was “too short” (see story here), one or both parents had a learning disability (see stories here and here), or the kids were playing in their own yard (see story here).

The excuses used to take children run the gamut from utterly ridiculous to outright lies, with a small minority taken for actual allegations of abuse.

In fact, only 16% of all the children removed from their homes by Child Protective Services were removed for reasons of abuse – physical abuse (12%) and sexual abuse (4%) according to the 2017 AFCARS report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (Source.)

A similar percentage of the allegations against parents are “substantiated” or “founded” – only 17% according to the 2016 Child Maltreatment Report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (Source.)

See:

Almost 40% of American Families at Risk to Have Their Children Kidnapped by the State – Over 50% if You Are Black

When National Review and hundreds of other sources allude to the more than 400,000 children in foster care needing homes, they miss the crucial fact that most of the children should never have been taken in the first place and already have homes.

This figure also does not reflect the reality that most of the children in the system have family and loved ones who would happily take them in, but social workers routinely lie to the courts, telling judges that there are no suitable family members.

We have covered several stories where the “unsuitable” family members are actually foster parents or adopters already approved by the system to take care of other children in the system, just not their own family members.

This is due to ASFA (Adoption and Safe Families Act) provisions that have provided much more federal funding to states to finance placement with strangers rather than placement with family members.

Are Churches Who are Taking in More Children for State-sponsored Foster Care being More “Pro-life”?

A shrine erected near the mass graves of up to 800 children allegedly buried at the site of a former Irish Catholic home for unwed mothers. Image courtesy of The Guardian.

Wheeler poses the question commonly asked as the obvious solution to the foster care crisis:

As people of faith, we are called to be more pro-life, not less. And so I wondered why we had this crisis in America with foster children.

I mean, if there are nearly 20,000 Catholic parishes and over 380,000 evangelical churches, how could it be so hard to make sure that 100,000 children had a forever home and that 400,000 children had a support system around them to give them everything they needed, until they didn't?

Think about it. Among 400,000 churches, Catholic and Protestant combined, 400,000 children should be served. That's one child per church.

Kathryn Jean Lopez is an editor-at-large at National Review who recently hosted a foster care forum in Washington, D.C. This proposed solution is apparently the consensus of many of her colleagues.

In an article entitled, “Taking Foster Care Seriously,” she wrote:

If every church in America found one family willing to be a foster family, we would not have the crisis we have today. Children would have homes. This was one of the takeaways from our forum. That's something for people of faith to take as an examination of conscience, and an action item.

This was the consensus of a leading conservative think-tank group that influences policy in the United States.

See “What Must We Do About Foster Care?” by the National Review Symposium.

However, it misses the mark entirely.

Most of the children in these figures are currently in some kind of foster home or group home. Even so, that proposed solution will never solve the crisis.

On the contrary, it will extend and perpetuate it, with no end in sight.

It is simple 8th grade social studies – the law of supply and demand, with children as the commodity. The more demand that there is for children to be adopted or fostered, the more Child Protective Services will happily steal more children, even from innocent parents, in order to supply the demand.

It is not unlike Planned Parenthood, the abortion provider giant who has been exposed as selling body parts and organs to medical and cosmetic researchers and companies. Because there is a demand for fetal body parts, Planned Parenthood seems only too happy to meet that demand and profit handsomely in the process.

This is something that National Review has reported on extensively. A search on their website shows almost 3,000 articles addressing Planned Parenthood.

The connection that we must not miss is that Planned Parenthood and Child Protective Services are the same story, different chapter – the commoditization of children.

Because there are billions of federal dollars at stake in the form of Title IV-d and IV-e funding, the states will continue to take advantage of the system to bring those virtually unlimited federal dollars into their state by taking children from their parents and bringing them into the foster care system.

The mere existence of children in the system provides a demented, twisted economic benefit to the community, providing jobs for lawyers, transporters, social workers, supervisors, Guardian ad litems, psychologists, office staff, group home staff, foster parents, and more.

If the state stopped taking children from innocent parents, whole streams of funding would disappear, and tens of thousands of jobs would be lost.

But if we truly care about what is best for children, then we have to stop using them as commodities to be traded and sold. We must understand that children need their parents. This is a basic law of the universe, put in place by the Creator.

Many “Good” Foster Parents Leave the Corrupt System

National Review cites a figure by Jedd Medefind, president of the Christian Alliance for Orphans. He says that:

Nearly 50 percent of foster parents drop out in their first year. (Source).

Arizona family activist, Merissa Hamilton, told Health Impact News that Arizona, the state that takes more children by percentage than any other state, is constantly recruiting more foster parents. It is a refrain that we hear from all over the country.

Hamilton said that the problem is not that there aren't enough people willing to help; it is that many of the former foster parents that she has spoken with chose to leave the system because they were disgusted with the injustice that they saw. Many of them realized that the children they were trying to help had, in fact, been kidnapped from parents who had not actually harmed their children.

We have had former foster parents tell us the same thing. As they realized what the system was doing to the children, they recognized that they could not in good conscience stay a part of it any longer.

Back in 2015, Washington State faced a shortage of foster care parents when the state required not only foster children in their care to be vaccinated with annual flu vaccine, but their biological children were also required to be vaccinated, or face losing their foster child. Many chose to leave the foster care system rather than comply with forced vaccinations of their own biological children.

Washington: Vaccinate All Your Children with Flu Shot or We Will Take Your 2-Week Old Baby

At Health Impact News, we have noted a similar pattern among social workers who ended up quitting their jobs because they could not tolerate working in such an evil, unjust system any longer.

In interviewing families, an estimated 75% of the parents have told us about one or more social workers involved with their case who quit their job and left the field entirely because of their case, after seeing the deception within the Child Protective Services system and the injustice, cruelty, and human rights violations inflicted on the children they got involved with social work to help.

Their eyes were opened to see the corruption and devastation to innocent families, and in good conscience, they couldn't stay a part of that system. See:

Former LA County Social Worker Reveals Corruption in Child “Protection” Services

LA County DCFS Whistleblower Reveals how Parents are Losing Their Children to a Corrupt System

Whistleblower in LA County DCFS Reveals Corruption in Child Kidnapping

A Better Idea: Help Families in Crisis Instead of Kidnapping Their Children

Eric and Amy of Bend, Oregon, had their newborn child removed because CPS deemed that their IQ was too low, and that they were incapable of caring for their child. Story here.

The Bible in James 1:27 directs the church to care for the widows and orphans IN their distress or affliction. How much more Christ-like would it be if the church were to take that part seriously and care for families, helping to redeem and reunite them, instead of stealing the children and trafficking them in the name of foster care and adoption?

Much of what is termed “neglect” by Child Protective Services is actually poverty. Families with limited resources have their children taken away from them, eventually adopted out to strangers, because they lack the financial means to fight the system and get their children back.

Many of them have said that if even a fraction of the government resources given to foster families were directed toward biological families, their children would never have been taken. If churches were to provide more resources for struggling biological families, there would be less children going into foster care.

Most children in foster care should not be there in the first place. The reality is that foster care fails about 80% of the children in the system. (Source.)

Instead of tearing families apart, solutions should be geared toward keeping families together whenever possible. This is an area where those who truly love Jesus should be able to shine. The message at the heart of the Gospel is redemption through Jesus Christ. He didn't come to condemn the world but to save it.

I remember a situation years ago where a family headed by a single mom was in crisis and at risk of having CPS step in. A wise lady from my church, Renee' Yates, said:

If we can fix the mama, the child will turn out fine.

She was one of many who poured out love to the mother and child, helping in practical ways. The mom worked on her issues, and her child did indeed “turn out fine.” He will be getting married at the end of the month.

I often think of this family as an example of how it can and should work. There were real issues, but the church and the family stepped in, and things improved.

Isn't is time that the church and the pro-life movement emphasize restoration of families over adoption and foster care?

Concluding Thoughts by Brian Shilhavy:

Caring For Troubled Children Without Government Funding – Is the American Church Ready to Face Persecution if They Provide a Better, Competing System?

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In the video above, Nehemiah Flynt explains how he was a state-approved foster parent for seven years. However, he left the system after seeing how corrupt it was:

I became a foster parent with the intentions of putting a roof over the heads of orphaned children. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

By the time I completed the training process, I understood that the majority of the children that would be entering my home were not orphans. I was brainwashed into believing the children had come from abusive and neglectful homes. I was told the state had rescued them from horrible living environments and that I was somewhat of a hero for taking them in.

They were all lies. It took several years for me to truly see what I had become a part of.

Child Protective Services was stealing children from loving biological families.

See:

Former Foster Parent Exposes How CPS Kidnaps Kids Away from Good Homes – Puts them on Drugs

Nehemiah decided to start working directly with troubled youth, getting them off of drugs, enforcing biblical standards for discipline, and helping them to find jobs.

It worked. There was just one problem: Child Protective Services saw him as a threat and came after him, forcing him to shut down his self-funded, church-backed program:

A few years later, however, Child Protective Services got wind of our program. They didn't like the fact that we were teaching our youth Biblical standards, a work ethic, that they were not victims of society but were responsible for the choices they were making, and that medication was not the answer to all of life's problems. They placed a target on our heads and did everything in their power to override our constitutional rights and to stop the work we were doing.

They have an agenda to medicate as many children as they can, to label them with mental health disorders, and to stop anyone who stands in their way – at any cost.

When Nehemiah contacted me in 2015, he was in hiding and not using his real name. He took a stand against the evil foster care system and a stand FOR America's troubled youth and family, and he suffered as a result.