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AR 29:34 - Evangelical misinformation or Leftist Agenda?

In this issue:

AMERICAN RELIGION - "all the familiar Satanic stories ended up in the QAnon mythology"

CULTURE - Can you wrap your head around Luxury Belief Studies?

EVANGELICALISM - What's the problem here? Two book reviews that may help open our eyes (but not in ways that one might expect).

Apologia Report 29:34 (1,675)
September 12, 2024

AMERICAN RELIGION

"Social Nightmares and the History of American Religion" by Philip Jenkins (Patheos, May 30 '24) -- Is there any relationship between the "Satanism Scare" of the late 20th century and the decline of Christianity in the 2020s? Jenkins' thinking may inform this question.

   Do you remember "the so-called 'Lauren Stratford,' who told literally insane tales of her history in Satanic movements"? Baylor religion historian Jenkins <www.tinyurl.com/AR-on-P-Jenkins> recommends the "substantial" Wikipedia entry <www.tinyurl.com/2s3zfpu4> which is listed under her real name: Laurel Rose Willson. Jenkins describes the entry as "really well worth reading [for, again] the literally insane stories" she is known for telling during the "Satanism Scare," which "peaked" during the decade from 1985 to 1995.

   Another source that Jenkins recommends on the general subject is "the wonderful first season of True Detective [(2014), which] did a spectacular job of recapturing the paranoia of that era." <www.tinyurl.com/u4nurpuj>

   We're surprised that he somehow missed one of the central players in those "Satanic panic" years: Mike Warnke, author of wildly popular - and thoroughly debunked - 1972 autobiography The Satan Seller <www.tinyurl.com/4xuv2r32>

   What group in this brief, but strongly-worded Patheos commentary is the most representative source behind these nightmares? His conclusion reads, in part: "If white evangelicals are not the only consumers of QAnon and Pizzagate, they are very well represented in the ranks of true believers."

   Evangelicals are first mentioned earlier in a bit of net-casting with regard to "profound" concerns about "the role of the Satanism Scare in shaping how we study evangelical and Pentecostal history."

   How prominently were they involved? "If you walked into an evangelical bookstore back in the day (and they were very common), you encountered whole walls of titles about ritual abuse, Satanism, cult menaces, the evils of Halloween, Satanic rock and roll, Satanic serial killers and ritual murder … All in a strip mall near you." He also says that "much of the rhetoric at that time ... strongly tracked back to evangelical and Pentecostal activism."

   How balanced is Jenkins' perspective in this feature? He finds that "one influential strand in modern American religion has been the New Apostolic Reformation, which is thoroughly immersed in ideas of spiritual warfare, territorial spirits, exorcism, spiritual mapping, and many other themes that seemed to be utterly validated by all those Satanic stories that were circulating so widely. N.A.R. churches have been essential to the subsequent expansion and efflorescence of Christian Nationalist politics. <www.tinyurl.com/AR-on-NAR> Closely intertwined with that phenomenon, all the familiar Satanic stories ended up in the QAnon mythology...." <www.tinyurl.com/ytumhfr3>

   His generalizations may trigger some in reference to "all the classes and training held in evangelical churches and youth camps, usually focused on 'spiritual warfare.'" And all of this is seen as representing "In every respect ... a full-fledged revival of the classic witchcraft panics of previous centuries."

   Jenkins' dire closing challenge: "Is there any possible outcome of November's presidential election that will not lead to a further upsurge and spread of such theories?" <www.tinyurl.com/3pa9k939>

---

CULTURE

We're confident the topic description above for this entry arrested your attention. No apologies. It just struck us as an ironically effective, though teasing, way to introduce Yascha Mounk's Jul 25 '24 Substack entry: "Luxury Beliefs are Real."

   Mounk employs the description "jargon-heavy political slogans calling for positions that are widely unpopular among the general population" to suggest why luxury beliefs "have substituted for luxury goods. ...

   "The concept of luxury beliefs achieved a feat shared by few neologisms: it entered 'the discourse.' It is now frequently invoked on social media. It has been used in a key speech by a British Home Secretary. It has its own Wikipedia page.

   "But 'luxury beliefs' have also become a victim of their own success. As a series of critics from Noah Smith to W. David Marx have argued, the concept's popularity has made the charge that something is a 'luxury belief' morph into an all-purpose epithet, with social media users applying it to all kinds of views they happen to dislike. ...

   There are two primary problems seen in its creator <www.tinyurl.com/AR-on-R-Henderson> Rob Henderson's definition of the term, "particularly its emphasis on social status. First, it is unclear how effective these beliefs actually are as a way to signal superior social status." The term "is a bit more subtle" than its users often seem to assume.

   "Second, the emphasis on social status implicitly ascribes nefarious motivations to people who embrace luxury beliefs. ...

   "There is a good reason why the concept of luxury beliefs has become so popular so quickly, one that goes beyond the fact that Henderson <wwwtinyurl.com/na3by49k> is a compelling writer: It really does capture something important about politics. ...

   "A big part of what makes [such criticisms] so enraging is that they share a strong whiff of hypocrisy. ...

   "Luxury beliefs are ideas professed by people who would be much less likely to hold them if they were not insulated from, and had therefore failed seriously to consider, their negative effects. 

   "When trying to define a concept in a rigorous way, it's important to distinguish between what makes up its essence and what is merely typical of it. ...

   "Luxury beliefs are a characteristic feature of the contemporary American elite, or at least a certain segment of it. But this does not mean that somebody needs to be elite in order to embrace a luxury belief. ...

   "Rightly understood, the concept of luxury beliefs remains agnostic about the underlying motivations of those who hold them. Some may indeed be nefarious; but, ... I suspect that most are merely naive or morally unserious....

   "Some concepts, like liberty or democracy, are 'essentially contested.' Because they have a positive connotation, people with a particular vision of politics will always try to make it serve their own ends. And since we won't ever agree on our ultimate vision for politics, we're also likely to keep disagreeing about how to define those terms.

   "The concept of luxury beliefs falls into a similar, but subtly distinct, category. We can, I think, arrive at a coherent definition of the concept that should be acceptable to people of widely varying ideological predilections; I've made my best attempt at doing so in this essay. But even once we agree on the most coherent definition of the term, we will, because of its inherently evaluative nature, likely continue to disagree about the best way to apply it. ...

   "The concept of luxury beliefs, in other words, isn't essentially contested. But, to coin a new phrase, its applications are likely to be persistently contested. And that, it seems to me, is a feature rather than a bug: to call an idea a luxury belief is to raise a certain kind of suspicion about its nature, one that should deepen - rather than end - the debate about it.

   "Ruxandra Teslo and other critics are right that the concept is used in too broad a way on social media; but that, of course, is a feature of social media much more than it is a feature of this particular concept. ...

   "The same goes for definitions of more complex social phenomena. A lot of populists, for example, enjoy disproportionate support among lower middle-class voters; but while strong electoral performance among that segment of the population is characteristic of populism, it should not be seen as part of its definition. ...

   "This, along with their relative paucity of life experience, helps to explain why luxury beliefs play such a large role among undergraduate as well as graduate students. Since, relative to peers at the same school, they have few external markers of achievement to point to, their need for demonstrating their social status in less tangible ways is especially high." <www.tinyurl.com/3pj93tyb>

 ---

EVANGELICALISM

Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda <www.tinyurl.com/56wht2ma> is a new book by Megan Basham, a writer for The Daily Wire. Complaints over the book's accuracy may have attracted more attention than the significance of her argument. Two lengthy reviews criticize her method far more than they discuss her message.

   Warren Cole Smith and Samuel D. James have each reviewed Basham's book, and they both say she has not done her homework. They also dispute the book's claim that multiple evangelical leaders have a "Leftist Agenda." 

   Smith, who leads Ministry Watch, <ministrywatch.com> is concerned about various people Basham has accused in the book. He describes her conclusions as seriously flawed, if not completely wrong, noting: "None of the people I spoke with who were mentioned in the book (nearly a dozen for this article) had been contacted either by Basham or by fact checkers from HarperCollins or its imprint Broadside Books, the book's publisher. Such fact checking is a common practice to avoid legal liability, but it's particularly puzzling considering several of the people Basham criticizes have themselves published books with HarperCollins or its subsidiaries." Further, he is persuaded that "Shepherds for Sale has many villains, but it has only one true hero: Donald J. Trump," and concludes: "Shepherds For Sale is not journalism - it is propaganda. It is not part of the solution, but part of the problem.". <www.tinyurl.com/24zbdc36>

   James, who produces the Digital Liturgies newsletter, <digitalliturgies.net> is as an editor for Crossway and has written for The Wall Street Journal, National Review, Time, First Things, and The Gospel Coalition among others. Up front he predicts that "readers may be surprised at how much of Shepherds for Sale I found true and important." However, given the book's subtitle, it's surprising how little he (or Smith) have to say about any Leftist Agenda. 

   Nevertheless, Smith is clear that "Basham is right that many 'shepherds' are, in fact, 'for sale.' But the unintended irony - and fundamental flaw - of her book is that the corrupting money is not on the evangelical left, as she claims, but on the populist right. The rise of such organizations as Turning Point USA (and its subsidiary Turning Point Faith), the Epoch Times, and The Daily Wire itself - organizations that combined bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue - bear witness to the financial benefits of pandering to populists."

   James decries the book as "too often" a "speculative jeremiad that substitutes insistence for proof and score-settling for reflection. ... What the book wants to be is a devastating exposure of evangelical corruption and fraud. But there are too many factual errors, logical inconsistencies, unwarranted assumptions, and bad-faith interpretations for it to be that. Its usefulness is buried underneath a basic failure to be worthy of its own title. ...

   "I am simply offering a fact check to some, at best, highly questionable 'facts.' But second, I want to point out that, of the many names criticized in Basham's book, [Tim] Keller seems to be the one depicted most inaccurately." <www.tinyurl.com/2s3rjkdw>

   Also up: "We Can't Come Down" by Patrick Miller in Mere Orthodoxy (Aug 6 '24). He summarizes: "Remember that Basham's book won’t be the last of its kind, though it's one of the first of its kind from the right. Read it if you must. Chew the meat and spit out the bones. If God uses it to convict you, then praise him. But if you find yourself irritated by misinformation or frustrated by speculative takes… then set it down before it distracts you from eternal labors." <www.tinyurl.com/33tsh8uf> (registration required)

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