THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Another traditional Christian bumps up against Leftist attempts to "modernize" his church's teachings

Another traditional Christian bumps up against Leftist attempts to "modernize" his church's teachings

And gets falsely called a Nazi for his pains. The fact that suppression of dissent really is Nazi is an irony that seems lost on his critics. Their authority is current Leftism, not the Bible. As Jesus said of the Pharisees, they are "whited sepulchres"

Note that when Turnipseed wrote "Here I stand", he was quoting "Hier stehe ich", a famous saying by Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms in 1521

Earlier this year, Ryan Turnipseed, a college student and devout Lutheran in Oklahoma with a modest following on Twitter, found himself on the brink of excommunication by his church.

In response to his stern criticisms of the church, Turnipseed was first denounced as a fascist by an outside party, then lumped in with a call to excommunicate fascists led by his church, and finally summoned for a meeting with church leaders where they informed him and his father that he was associating with evil. The scene was simultaneously old-fashioned, with its back-and-forth accusations of heresy and bitter struggles over the soul, and “very online,” very 2023.

The specter of Christian nationalism and other supposedly extremist right-wing ideologies festering inside middle American churches has become a focal point within the political culture as well as the national security establishment. In February, in the same period when Turnipseed was clashing with his church, a leaked document from the FBI showed that the agency’s Richmond, Virginia, office was using funds earmarked for domestic violent extremism to monitor “radical traditionalist Catholics.” The FBI retracted the memo after it was exposed by a whistleblower, but not before it revealed that the agency’s criteria for designating people as extremists was that they preferred to worship at the traditional Latin Mass. To critics, it seemed to show the federal government taking steps to criminalize religious traditionalism.

Yet rather than simply being an attack by the government on Christians, the case mirrored a conflict that is playing out within churches as well. Last February, in an interview with the progressive Center for American Progress, Amanda Tyler, a lawyer and the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, declared: “the single biggest threat to religious freedom in the United States today is Christian nationalism.”

On Jan. 21, Ryan Turnipseed stepped into this larger debate and made his stand—as one does in the age of online religious wars—by authoring a Twitter thread about the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod’s (LCMS) new edition of Luther’s Large Catechism.

Luther’s Large Catechism is the Lutheran doctrine outside of the Bible. Originally authored by Martin Luther, each section is broken down into explanations designed to help clergymen teach the Lutheran faith. It is foundational to Lutheranism—as vital to the faith as the catechism of the Catholic Church is to Catholicism. Turnipseed’s thread went softly viral, receiving just under 1,000 likes on a platform where the most viral tweets regularly reach tens or even hundreds of thousands of engagements.

Turnipseed’s central claims were that the LCMS’s new edition had gone so far in accommodating the dogmas of American political progressivism that the book undermined the faith entirely. In his thread, some of his complaints about the updated text were that it equivocated “homosexuality, pornography, sodomy, pedophilia, whorishness, and transgenderism with heterosexual fornication outside of sex”; “affirm[ed] the reality of transgenderism”; and contradicted scripture by “saying that Genesis is entirely separate from any ‘scientific’ theories.”

While there are a few places in Turnipseed’s thread where his judgments seem motivated by his own ideological concerns, his tone remains levelheaded. He’s stern, certainly, but there is no extremist language, no incitement to violence, and no name-calling. One gets the impression that he’s simply a conservative churchgoer who disagrees with changes being made and is deeply concerned. It’s the type of disagreement that is–or should be–par for the course whenever major changes are being made to a foundational religious document.

According to Turnipseed–and to LCMS President Matthew Harrison–he wasn’t the only person who raised objections about these changes. In a short piece published in a small publication called Christianity Today, other critics, like pastor and blogger Larry Beane and pastor David Ramirez, were also concerned that “some of the essays, which are not Lutheran doctrine, mishandled current issues like racial justice, human sexuality, and gun rights.”

On Jan. 23, two weeks after the updated Large Catechism’s release, President Harrison announced on Twitter that the LCMS would pause publication and distribution of the new catechism so he could evaluate the criticism they had received about the changes. Nine days later, the LCMS concluded that the changes would stay, and they would continue to distribute the updated version.

But here’s where the story takes a turn and enters the stage of national political drama. Harrison didn’t frame the controversy as a disagreement within the faith. Instead, Harrison presented it as something far more sinister. In a letter to the LCMS, he singled out the alt-right—an umbrella label used to describe various strands of neofascist and white nationalist ideology—for fomenting criticism against the new catechism and called for their excommunication.

In his letter, he wrote:

These “alt-right” individuals were at the genesis of a recent controversy surrounding essays accompanying a new publication of Luther’s Large Catechism. This group used that opportunity to produce not only scandalous attacks and widespread falsehoods but also to promote their own absolutist ideologies.

He called for a complete rejection of the alt-right, characterizing their views as “white supremacy, Nazism, pro-slavery, anti-interracial marriage, women as property, fascism, death for homosexuals, even genocide.”

Blaming the “alt-right” for the pushback against the church’s new directive didn’t sit well with Turnipseed. “Alt-right” is a very specific label, and a dated one at that. It’s not that no such movement has existed, but it’s often applied in a way that is deliberately vague and overly broad. In reality, “alt-right” describes a particular group of people that rose to national prominence during a particular moment in time that peaked in or around 2017. At worst, the label is a lazy smear against right-wingers. To evoke “alt-right,” in many situations, is to immediately shut down difficult conversations by associating conservatism with racially motivated violence.

Turnipseed discovered a week later that it wasn’t just that Harrison was condemning the “alt-right,” he was also condemning him personally. Shortly after Harrison’s letter was published, Turnipseed’s father received an email from a pastor stating that the church was concerned for his son’s physical and spiritual safety.....

Turnipseed defended his criticisms of the new catechism and summarized his problems with the condemnation of the alt-right in a blog post on the website Gab, a Twitter alternative that spun up during the 2016 elections after a particularly aggressive wave of suspensions that targeted users on the right and far right. In a post titled “Here I Stand,” Turnipseed laid out his views. Much of what Turnipseed describes in “Here I Stand” is unsurprising for a conservative Christian, and much of it would be sympathetic to moderate or progressive Christians as well.

But his coolly logical approach also reveals his commitment to a close reading of the Bible and of Lutheranism that places the historical foundations of the faith above the evolving moral concerns of the present.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-to-get-excommunicated-in-2023

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Another traditional Christian bumps up against Leftist attempts to "modernize" his church's teachings

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