Chicago Church ‘Fasting from Whiteness’ During Lent by Ditching Hymns Written by White People

Chicago Church ‘Fasting from Whiteness’ During Lent by Ditching Hymns Written by White People

The following news story is an example in how far left liberals, Democrats, progressives (Christian and non) have ramped up the Culture Wars in the last few years.

It’s not just mainstream evangelicals, conservative Christians, or Republicans who are fighting the Culture Wars now – those groups, the conservatives, evangelicals, Republicans, etc, are now reacting to the Culture War issues STARTED BY, and maintained by, liberals and progressives.

Nothing says love and tolerance like shaming White people for being White – which is what progressives do constantly. (I’m being sarcastic. It’s odious and gross to shame White people for being White.)

If you want to build up Black people or (Link): Black culture by incorporating more Black-written hymns at your church, that is fine by me, but do not so so at the expense of other groups, such as Whites.

That anti-Racism garbage, where CRT promoters believe that being “anti-racism” (Link): means discriminating against White people (and doing so indefinitely!), is wrong.

Progressives keep wanting to shame White people for being White, until they then veer into their weird habit of depicting Black people as being White.

I refer to the progressive tendency to skip back and forth between defining “White” to mean “light skinned person” to defining “White” or “Whiteness” as being “Western culture and ideals,” or “disagreeing with Marxism and other far left views and far left hobby horses.”

This means, if a person with dark skin disagrees with far left politics, the far left deems that person “White adjacent.”

This is how we end up with some (Link): very bizarre news headlines where Black conservative or Black libertarian men and women are referred to by far left liberals as being “White.”

The following is shameful and antithetical to the Christian faith – but this is a relatively small to moderate problem of a much-larger problem with far left views about racism:

(Link): Chicago church ‘fasting from whiteness’ during Lent by ditching hymns written by White people

The church also reportedly erected a sign promoting the fast

by Andrew Mark Miller
April 2022

A church in suburban Chicago has told parishioners it will abstain from performing any music that is associated with White people during the season of Lent.

“In our worship services throughout Lent, we will not be using any music or liturgy written or composed by white people,” the website for the First United Church of Oak Park reads. “Our music will be drawn from the African American spirituals tradition, from South African freedom songs, from Native American traditions, and many, many more.”

The statement continues, “For Lent, it is our prayer that in our spiritual disciplines we may grow as Christians, united in the body of Christ with people of all ages, nations, races, and origins.”

The Nuclear Family Was A Mistake – by David Brooks – and Related Links

The Nuclear Family Was A Mistake – by David Brooks – and Related Links

If you want to get right to it, here’s the main link:

(Link): The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake by David Brooks  – via The Atlantic (off site link)

Before I paste in excerpts from that editorial by David Brooks below, I wanted to say a few words, and I will be pasting in any relevant links about the Brooks piece even farther below that.

I’ve been saying on this blog FOR YEARS many of the same things that Brooks has outlined in his essay.

Some of what I’ve been saying on this blog for years now includes:
that Christians and conservatives have turned Marriage and The Nuclear Family into idols,
that they have placed weight upon both that the Bible never did, and in the process of advocating marriage, these conservatives and Christians have marginalized the never-married, the divorced, the widowed and the childless or childfree among them, and this is wrong.

The Bible does not teach that marriage – or parenting – are going to “fix” society, or that being married or becoming a parent is necessary to make a person into a moral, upstanding, responsible individual.

If you’re a conservative or a Christian who keeps sounding the alarm about falling marriage rates, you need to accept reality for what it is: most people now are either single and childless by choice or by circumstance.

The United States is simply never going back to the June and Ward Cleaver family structures in mass droves that existed in the 1950s; (Link): so get over it already, and stop trying to punish or guilt trip anyone and everyone who doesn’t marry or have children.

Teacher Fired By Catholic School For Getting Pregnant Out of Wedlock (2018)

Teacher Fired By Catholic School For Getting Pregnant Out of Wedlock (2018)

I don’t understand these supposed Christian employers who fire women who get pregnant out of wedlock – I have other examples on this blog of this very thing.

First of all, I’ve never heard of a scenario where they fire the pregnant woman but do nothing to the man she slept with, which makes this a pretty one-sided, sexist action to take.

Secondly, most Christians claim to be pro-life. Would they prefer is women in these situations go to an abortion clinic and abort the baby?

I can a situation where a single woman, who needs her job to pay her bills, gets pregnant, but then panics, knowing her Christian employer may fire her for fornication, so keeping it a secret, she runs out and gets an abortion.

That is a possible scenario some of these Christian groups are putting women in. Is that really what they want?

(Link): Teacher Fired By Catholic School For Getting Pregnant Out of Wedlock

Dec 5, 2018
by Kristine Solomon

A respected English and creative writing teacher in Pennsylvania was fired on Friday from her job at the Catholic high school where she’s been employed for four years. Her transgression? Becoming pregnant while unmarried.

Naiad Reich was ready to start a family, and she planned the pregnancy to coincide with a June birth so she wouldn’t have to take maternity leave from her post at Our Lady of Lourdes Regional School in Coal Township, Pa., (Link): according to the Daily Item.

When she announced her happy news — and the clever timing — to Sister Mary Anne Bednar, though, the principal and administrator was less than impressed.

“Her response, honestly, is one that will sit with me for a very long time, because she was very displeased,” (Link): Reich told PennLive. “She said it would be a problem and she had to contact the diocese.”

By Friday, the Roman Catholic Harrisburg Diocese officials had reached a decision: Reich’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy was a violation of a morality clause in her contract. If Reich and her partner, Matt Graboski, had no plans to get married in the near future, (Link): according to ABC affiliate WNEP, she’d have to be let go.

The Biggest Loser in the Alabama Election – Christian Witness by M Galli

The Biggest Loser in the Alabama Election – Christian Witness by M Galli

I thought this was a pretty good editorial – not that I’m on board with 100% of it, but with maybe 98% or 99%. I’ve written a few similar to it on this blog, such as (Link): this one.

Both the right wing and the left wing get stuff wrong, but both sides are usually pretty loathe to admit it. The left and right wing (the extremes on both sides) are flip sides of the same exact coin, another fact they don’t like to admit.

FWIW, I was a Republican for many, many years, and I’m conservative to this day, though no longer a Republican, and I was really put off by the number of gung-ho Republicans on my Twitter who were stumping for this Moore guy (though I said nothing to them about it; I scrolled by their pro-Moore tweets without saying a thing to them about any of this).

They don’t care that he was possibly a child-predator, they’d rather have a sexual pervert in Congress than a Democrat.

I’m not a Democrat fan myself, but as for me, I’d take the Democrat politician over the kid-diddling Republican any day of the week, thank you. I find Democratic politics ten times less objectionable and odious than I do a 32 year old man preying on 13 year old girls.

If I remember right, Moore lost to the Democrat and refused to concede defeat for a day or so after the election results were announced. I still believe the women who stepped forward to say Moore tried to fondle or date them when they were teens.

I have no idea how some of the Trump-bots I follow on Twitter – though they may be nice people in other ways – were able to so vehemently support a guy who was so obviously guilty of being a cradle-robber. But day after day, I saw them tweet content in support of Moore and content questioning the women victims who stepped forward to tell their stories.

But your average liberal Democrat can be just as blind to defects in their own perverted, sexist political candidates as well.

(Link): The Biggest Loser in the Alabama Election – Christian Witness by M Galli

Excerpts:

No matter the outcome of today’s special election in Alabama for a coveted US Senate seat, there is already one loser: Christian faith. When it comes to either matters of life and death or personal commitments of the human heart, no one will believe a word we say, perhaps for a generation. Christianity’s integrity is severely tarnished.

The race between Republican candidate Roy Moore and Democratic candidate Doug Jones has only put an exclamation point on a problem that has been festering for a year and a half—ever since a core of strident conservative Christians began to cheer for Donald Trump without qualification and a chorus of other believers decried that support as immoral.

The Christian leaders who have excused, ignored, or justified his unscrupulous behavior and his indecent rhetoric have only given credence to their critics who accuse them of hypocrisy.

The Left Can Be Just as Bad as the Right – The SCCL Pence Post

The Left Can Be Just as Bad as the Right – The SCCL Pence Post

(June 7, 2017 edit farther below –
Drury posted a link to this at her SCCL group. Most of her readers have missed the point of the post. Some of them incorrectly assume I am an evangelical, that I voted for Trump, or am a member of the GOP – I am not.

This post has been modified several times to add new information

Some of the more frequent criticisms I’ve received in regards to this post I have addressed in edits below)

January 2021 update: 

In light of this (Hill news story right below), I wonder if the clowns at “Stuff Christian Culture Likes” would like to walk back any of their harsh rhetoric of Pence?

(Link): Fox’s Chris Wallace: Pence “chose the Constitution” over helping Trump

More (January 2021 updates):

(Link):  Mike Pence reportedly stunned and incensed at Trump for inciting Capitol riots

(Link): A Reuters photographer says he overheard pro-Trump insurrectionists saying they wanted to hang Mike Pence at the Capitol

---

Over at Liberal- to Ex- Christian (and sometimes atheist) SCCL Facebook group, Stephanie Drury linked to an editorial (her link),

“I Was Trained for the Culture Wars in Home School, Awaiting Someone Like Mike Pence as a Messiah”

“”Christofascists have been wanting someone like Pence in the White House and, until now, didn’t have a way to get one in.”

Posted by Kieryn Darkwater on January 26, 2017
–end quote–

My main point is that groups such as Drury’s, many left wingers, many Ex Christians, are just as bad as those they criticize.

Depending on the topic, they can be just as hateful, rude, or harbor as many blind spots and double standards as those they criticize, whether we’re talking about Republicans, conservative Christians, and Donald Trump (or V.P. Pence) or LGBT causes, or abortion, or whatever the issue.

By the way – Drury’s SCCL Facebook group has largely nose-dived into being an anti-Trump type group over the last few months.

She used to cover spiritual abuse by churches and the like, but politics seem to be over-taking her group a bit.

It seems like every 4th to 5th post at the SCCL group pertains to criticizing Trump.

Is American Evangelical Christianity Sinking On The GOP Ship? by C. Redfern

Is American Evangelical Christianity Sinking On The GOP Ship? by C. Redfern

I am not, nor have I ever, been a left winger, but I am not happy with the right wing at times, and I stare on in horror at what has become of the GOP.

(Just stating that up front in case anyone new comes to my blog and assumes I must be a liberal Democrat because I occasionally post content that is critical of the Republicans. The Democrats don’t thrill me, but I think I may be more disappointed by the GOP, considering I was a Republican since I was a teenager.)

The following editorial contains this comment:

She said Grudem erected an arbitrary “hierarchy of morals” in which traditional family values outrank racism, justice, and poverty.

Yes indeed. What have I been saying on this blog for years now, one thing among a few: some Christians have made any and all things Nuclear Family (including “Family Values”) into a false god. Many Christians kneel at the god of “Family” and “Family Values.” Nothing else matters, not even when it means pushing the divorced, the never married, the childless, or widowed aside.

I’m not saying I necessarily agree with everything in this blog post by this guy, but there are parts of it that do resonate with me:

(Link): Is American Evangelical Christianity Sinking On The GOP Ship? by C. Redfern

Excerpts:

Hear the rumble beneath the great collapse. The pretense of evangelical cohesion in America is disintegrating even as the Republican Party implodes, with rubble surrounding the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump.

Long-hidden fissures have surfaced, making the obvious painfully clear: The term “evangelical” has become so thinned and adulterated it’s worse than meaningless.

A question hovers over “traditional” evangelicals such as me, wistful for the pre-1980 era when the term defined a solid theological position divorced from politics: What to do? Should we hunt for a different label?

Maybe so.

The Myth of the Good Ole Days by A. Bevere

The Myth of the Good Ole Days by A. Bevere

Here are just a few excerpts from this other blog. Please click the link to visit the other blog if you’d like to see the entire article:

(Link): The Myth of the Good Ole Days 

Excerpts:

There is no such thing as the good ole’ days. It is a myth constructed by people with amnesia who have forgotten or have chosen not to remember the problems and perils of earlier days. Allow me to offer some evidence:

-An estimated 20% of American children live in poverty today. More lived in poverty in 1900 and an estimated 20% lived in orphanages because their parents couldn’t afford them.

NFL Star Benjamin Watson: America Is Not a Christian Country

NFL Star Benjamin Watson: America Is Not a Christian Country

I skimmed this page over last night, and I think I pretty much agree with this guy. Again, I only skimmed, I didn’t stop to read each and every line, but from what I skimmed, I agreed with his views.

(Link): NFL Star Benjamin Watson: America Is Not a Christian Country

Excerpts:

• Outspoken Christian NFL player Benjamin Watson took to his Facebook over the Independence Day weekend to assert that America is clearly not a Christian nation and urged Christians to be less concerned about returning the country to a “Christian past” and more concerned about making disciples.
• Watson, a 12-season veteran tight end who signed with the Baltimore Ravens this offseason and is a frequent social commentator on his social media accounts, issued a Facebook post on Saturday to tell his followers that he is getting “frustrated” with the morality of the nation.

• “From my youth I have subconsciously and rather naively believed the narrative that America was a Christian nation without truly unpacking this claim,” Watson wrote. “As I’ve entered my adult life, becoming more aware and emotionally invested in the trajectory of my homeland, this faulty view has led to my current internal disillusionment with the moral decline of this so called Christian country.”

  “With each wayward step I find myself getting frustrated, and at times baffled at what it claims to be right. And wrong,” Watson continued. “I’ve come to realize that my problem is not with America though. It is with my flawed expectations of America.”

  Although most Americans today (Link): self-identify as Christian, that fact does not make it a Christian nation, Watson contended.

Conservative Christians Anxious Over Declining Clout (news article)

Conservative Christians Anxious Over Declining Clout

I first saw this article Tweeted out by Janet Mefferd, who happens to be a conservative Christian. I happen to like her and respect her, although I don’t always see eye to eye with her on every single topic.

She Tweeted a link to this article (hosted on a Fox news site) and didn’t care for it, because she feels that the author is trying to make conservative Christians look like nuts, loons, or alarmists.

I differ with her a little bit here. I think the main point of the article is right on the money.

I was a conservative Christian since youth, I’m in my 40s now. I’m only very barely holding on to the Christian faith anymore (I am strongly questioning it lately), and I am now more moderate than a hard-right winger as I used to be (not that I was ever a total wing nut, though).

Anyway, my point is, I grew up in this culture.

And yes, conservative Christians do in fact become scared, unsettled, or angry when they see culture shifting away from Judeo-Christian values and beliefs to a more secular stance. The article is quite correct in that.

I have seen conservative Christians on various news shows, Christian shows, and social media screaming, worrying, complaining, or crying about how the nation is going after Christians now, how they are upset that the nation is turning its back on God, how church membership is declining, yada yada yada.

James Dobson’s Flawed Take on Population Decline (no.1: We’re Not in Decline) by T. Grant

James Dobson’s Flawed Take on Population Decline (no.1: We’re Not in Decline) by T. Grant

As this report notes (link is much farther down this blog page), more pressure is placed on WOMEN to marry and have children than is placed on MEN.

I know that culture and Christians can treat single / celibate / childless men like trash, but they are TEN TIMES worse on Christian WOMEN in these regards.

Women get far more pressured to marry and have kids than men do or ever will.

Women get more shamed and insulted by Christians (and at times, secular culture) for staying single, celibate, and childless than males ever are.

Just because most women are capable of carrying a baby inside them, society and churches think it’s their DUTY to have a baby (as though women serve no other purpose in life), and if they choose to opt out (or cannot have a kid), they are still marginalized or insulted for it.

Men don’t face nearly as much insult or pressure to have kids as women do.

I am right of center – but I agree with this left wing (liberal) guy that other right wingers such as Dobson’s real goal is to be against what he perceives as liberal threats to the church or culture. That is one very real motivator some right wingers have, in why they do things like harass women to have children.

I also want to say how utterly moronic I find this approach by Dobson.

The Single American Woman via NY Magazine

The Single American Woman via NY Magazine

Pretty long article, but very interesting.

Please use this link I’m giving you if you’d like to read the entire page (it’s a little bit farther below).

I am a right winger, have been a Republican my whole life (though the GOP has been annoying me more and more the last few years, but no, I am not fine with the Democrats), and I am a single woman who was raised in a Christian home.

My parents were Christians who had very traditional values.

The one thing I dread when reading articles like this one I am linking to in this post is imagining how my fellow right wingers will react to what it discusses.

Typically, rather than help single women where they are (which is what they should be doing), they will more likely, instead, complain and yell about singleness, about what a shame it is people aren’t marrying as much or not as young as they did decades ago, and yell at single women to run right out and get married immediately.

(One thing these types of idiots overlook is that marrying is not that easy. I’ve always wanted to be married, but I never met the right guy. I am not going to marry just any guy with a pulse just for the sake of being married.)

Anyway, following that initial reaction of my fellow right wingers, they will then, at that point – by “they,” I refer more specifically to the conservative marriage concern trolls among the secular right wingers and the conservative Christians – will write fear-mongering articles (like (Link): this one) to scare single women into marrying the first man they meet who has a pulse.

The fear mongering and pressure by conservatives to scare or cajole women to marry has gotten so bad with right wing marriage concern trolls, that some of them are even directing Christian women to marry (Link): known pornography addicts.

The majority of my fellow conservatives don’t give a rat’s ass about doing anything to assist single women so long as those women are single.

Many conservatives would prefer to sit back in their rocking chair on the front porch, sipping on lemonade, smoking on their pipes, complaining about how times have changed for the worst, and how the nation was so much better back in 1952. They would rather pine away for the so-called “good old days” than to help people in practical ways in 2016 where ever they find themselves in life.

Though I am right wing, I think this author makes a few good arguments against conservative views about singleness and marriage and the roles of women.

(Link): The Single American Woman via NY Magazine

Excerpts:

• The most powerful voter this year, who in her rapidly increasing numbers has become an entirely new category of citizen, is THE SingleAmerican Woman
• By REBECCA TRAISTER
• ….In 2009, the proportion of American women who were married dropped below 50 percent. In other words, for the first time in American history, single women (including those who were never married, widowed, divorced, or separated) outnumbered married women.
• Perhaps even more strikingly, the number of adults younger than 34 who had never married was up to 46 percent, rising 12 percentage points in less than a decade. For women under 30, the likelihood of being married has become astonishingly small: Today, only around 20 percent of Americans ages 18–29 are wed, compared to nearly 60 percent in 1960.
• It is a radical upheaval, a national reckoning with massive social and political implications. Across classes, and races, we are seeing a wholesale revision of what female life might entail.
• We are living through the invention of independent female adulthood as a norm, not an aberration, and the creation of an entirely new population: adult women who are no longer economically, socially, sexually, or reproductively dependent on or defined by the men they marry.
• This reorganization of our citizenry, unlike the social movements that preceded it and made it possible — from abolition and suffrage and labor fights of the 19th and early-20th centuries to the civil-rights, women’s, and gay-rights movements of the mid-20th century — is not a self-consciously politicized event. Today’s women are, for the most part, not abstaining from or delaying marriage to prove a point about equality.
• They are doing it because they have internalized assumptions that just a half-century ago would have seemed radical: that it’s okay for them not to be married; that they are whole people able to live full professional, economic, social, sexual, and parental lives on their own if they don’t happen to meet a person to whom they want to legally bind themselves.
• The most radical of feminist ideas—the disestablishment of marriage — has been so widely embraced as to have become habit, drained of its political intent but ever-more potent insofar as it has refashioned the course of average female life.

Why “Family Values” Defined Conservative Christianity (and Why “Religious Liberty” has Replaced It) – by E C Miller

Why “Family Values” Defined Conservative Christianity (and Why “Religious Liberty” has Replaced It) – by E C Miller

I am right wing, somewhat Christian, and believe that many Christians and secular conservatives have made the nuclear family and marriage into idols, which is wrong.

I am not opposed out-right to the traditional family, marriage, or to motherhood, and so forth, in and of themselves, but I am in disagreement at how so many right wingers and Christians elevate all those things to the point that they end up marginalizing anyone who does not fit the mould of “married with children.”

Anyone who is infertile, child free, divorced, never married, widowed, and what have you, is excluded or treated shabbily by the majority of “family values” obsessed right wingers and Christians, which again, in my view, is terribly wrong and unfair.

Here is an article explaining how and why the religious right elevated “the family” in their rhetoric:

(Link): Why “Family Values” Defined Conservative Christianity (and Why Religious Liberty has Replaced It) by E C Miller

Excerpts:

• From about 1970 until about 2000, American politics was largely driven by concern about the nuclear family. As established social hierarchies came under fire from the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, second-wave feminism, and others, conservative advocacy groups and their political allies demanded a return to the idealized family of the past. “Family values” became the rallying cry of a countermovement bent on holding the traditional line.
• Seth Dowland is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Pacific Lutheran University. His book, Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right, charts the influence of Christian “family values” advocacy across three decades and a variety of issues.
• RD’s Eric C. Miller spoke with Dowland about the project, the politics, and the significance of family in the United States.
• You introduce “family values” as the key term of the Christian Right in the late twentieth-century United States. Why was this term so influential for this group in this place and time? 
• Many of the political reforms enacted from the 1930s through the 1960s—particularly the expansion of the welfare state and the passage of civil rights legislation—attempted to expand equal rights to all people.
• Political liberals celebrated these developments, while conservatives looked around the nation at the beginning of the 1970s and saw economic stagnation, riots, sexual revolution, a decline in patriotism, and an increase in crime and drug use. Ministers and political conservatives argued that America was in decline. They believed that decline happened because of the demise of the “traditional family.”