Dead Mackerel By Moonlight

Introduction

Welcome to NQN VII. Kind of like Super Bowl VII, but without the Redskins or Dolphins. You know the rules.

It is generally accepted among Christians that sin is bad. There appears to be some consensus on the point. Sin really is bad. But this take is sort of a “big E on the eye chart” insight. Of course the fastidious give all such sins a wide berth, and all in the name of what they like to call virtue.

However, the thing we seem unable to get through our heads is the (to us) complicated notion that all the respectable sins are bad also. Respectable sins can be identified through the mere fact that we see them spending so much energy plumping for respect. Since maintaining the respect of man is the consuming goal, you can always look for these people to seek out a position that is not currently drawing any fire. The respect of man is the wind beneath their wings.

This is the allure of the perennial Third Way. Its promoters and advocates call it the Third Way, but others know it by its name on the street, which would be something more like Useful Tool. For example, if you click on the After Party here, what you will find is a number of people hiding behind Jesus, and not in the good way either. It is the Jesus Juke writ large. It really is an amazing ability—being able to have the name of Jesus, front and center, in that font size, on your web site, and not get called a fundamentalist by the cool kids.

So back to the main point. Tawdry sins are certainly bad, and whoever said they weren’t? But splendid sins are actually far worse. I don’t remember who it was, probably someone like Randolph or Calhoun, someone like that, who backhanded a political enemy once, giving me a phrase that pretty much sums up the whole thing. He said that the man was like a dead mackerel by moonlight—he both shines and stinks.

So let us not pick on whores, IRS men, or centurions. Everybody knows about them, and the Bible even talks about them a lot . . . and mostly with compassion. The ones manhandled as full-tilt wretches in Scripture are the ones who spent a lot of their energy at first-century red-carpet events, giving one another religiosity awards, like “Most Shiny by Moonlight.”

Highly Esteemed Among Men

I would urge everyone to meditate on what that phrase “highly esteemed among men” might mean. It refers to those things that religious people believe to be good but which are actually bad. I know that by introducing terms like good and bad I am striking a discordant note, but there it is.

It does not really matter how many times we are told not to, we still gravitate to the idea that God is somehow pleased by our lengthy prayers down at the synagogue. We compare God to a low-level teacher of English comp at a land grant cow college, whose sole concern is to make sure the students hit their word count.

As a result of this check-the-boxes mentality, the people of God wind up being represented by men who won’t ever do what’s not done, and who feel quite free to do whatever is being done. But what is being done, if looked at under some Pauline lighting, would make a cardinal’s mistress blush. They pay a great deal of attention catering to that which is “highly esteemed among men,” and the thought never occurs to them that such respectable doings could be detestable in the sight of God. Might there be a possibility that the evangelical world at its shiniest . . . is detestable? There is a certain kind of religious mind that cannot grasp this, not even as a possibility.

At the time of Christ, there were about 6,000 Pharisees in Israel. They were, until Jesus got done with them, a highly respected religious movement. They did what they did for applause because it would in fact get that applause.

Where did they come from? They were generally a class of merchants who had made a tidy sum for themselves, and who were therefore in a position to devote themselves to a most scrupulous pursuit of what they called pious activities. The general thrust of their project was to get Israelites to live at the same level of devotion that the priests did. Of course, in order to be able to do this, you needed money. You needed the wherewithal to hire someone to make the sandwiches for lunch while you were busy throughout the morning being pious. This is what lies behind the disciples’ astonishment when Jesus said the outrageous thing that He did about the camel and the eye of the needle. If a rich man can’t make it through, then who can? What hope is there for the ordinary schlubs (Matt. 19:25)? The proles need to cut down on their necessary prayer times in order to make their own sandwiches, and hence would always fall short of the Truest Devotion.

Now what happened is that Jesus thoroughly trashed the respected name of Pharisee. When He was done, the Pharisaical brand as a brand was in shambles. A careful perusal of Matthew 23 will enable you to detect Pharisaical fragments flying in pretty much every direction. A finer demolition job has never been seen.

However this did not kill the deep Pharisaical impulses that always seethe just below the sternum of every unctuous and dissembling jive-monger. If you just look around, you may see that the thing itself is alive and kicking. But under pressure from the Lord’s beat down, and from the rest of Scripture, they were more or less forced to change the signage. The name Pharisee had to go. So from fifty yards away, it now looks like a quaint little pond in the countryside, and the cattails are nice, and the sunlight glints off the water. From fifty yards away you can’t tell that it is a sewage lagoon. A gospel-centered sewage lagoon, but a sewage lagoon nonetheless.

What Money Always Does

I am fond of saying that you cannot keep money from doing what money always does. Now one of the things that money “always does” is make seedy things seem way more upscale than they are—like decorating your double-wide in the style of Versailles. The thing that makes it look all shiny and respectable, from the middle distance anyway, is the money. You can spend a lot of money, even on a double-wide.

The Pharisees had their flowing robes and wide phylacteries. The medieval monks had their hair shirts and scapulars. The first generation of televangelist hucksters had Elmer Gantry haircuts and pressed velvet couches on set. Our current generation of video schmoozers have torn jeans and those casual fit tee-shirts. And one of the things that keeps coming true for such religious movements is that they tend to fulfill Hawthorne’s gibe against the Puritans, who came to Massachusetts to do good, and ended up doing well. The Pharisees were wealthy. The monasteries got rich. More than one hedge preacher ran off with the offering, and maybe a comely parishioner. And as recent events have demonstrated, the comely parishioners have not gone away. Neither has the money. Correct that. Sometimes the comely parishioners have gone away, with the preacher.

Take note of that. “Unlike so many . . .” Notice that Paul did not say “Unlike so many, at least until the 21st century, when everything will naturally be quite aboveboard and self-leveling . . .” For the huckster and the hustler, there are certain human traits and impulses that are a perennial gold mine. They will always be present. When it comes to sex, or patent medicine, or trinkets of devotion, we will always have chumps enough. This is how we get PornHub, and Essential Oils, and . . . stories like the one below.

Another thing that money knows how to do is how to defend the feathered nest. Money knows how to protect the money, and one of the ways it does this is by training the laser beam of disdain on anyone who is insufficiently respectful of the Shine that Money produces. Once Respectable Sins start getting heckled and disrespected, what will the result be? They do not want to dig, and are ashamed to beg. Time for some quick thinking (Luke 16:3).

Put bluntly, the monied interests of the evangelical establishment know very well how to defend themselves. They know which side of the bread the butter is on, and so they have developed true expertise on how to keep that buttered side up, which means keeping the satiric eye of close butter observers at bay. But however good they are at this, there comes a point when the whole thing breaks down—and everybody sees. It doesn’t matter how many big names you get to come on your podcast to fret, and worry, and furrow the brow, and denounce. When you are all done, the sons of patriarchy can still say . . .”That’s a lot of butter, man.”

When someone in jacket and tie comes out to the lectern in order to solemnly intone his “commitment to inerrancy” when his college, or publishing house, or magazine, or coalition of churches has just hired a couple of poofters to run their social media account, it is clear that they don’t know what time it is. What do I mean? It is plainly time for the raspberry, for the Bronx cheer, for the ol’ razz, for the epistemologically self-conscious catcall.

And of course, one always wants to do one’s part.

Our Pecksniffian Evangelical Firmament

One of the things that the Moscow Mood is known for is—let us be frank—all the horsing around. But I would not be misunderstood . . . it is deadly serious horsing around. We really do mean it. If hypocrisy came in two-ton limestone blocks, the evangelical establishment in North America would be the great pyramid at Giza.

The small number of good guys that can be found scattered throughout their fiefdoms and realms does not in any way refute the charge. Such folks are chiefly identifiable by the fact that they would acknowledge the justice of the charge. And the fact that I reference such people is not a qualification here in November (“they are not all bad”), but is rather an argument for the central thesis. The evangelical establishment is diseased and corrupt, and everyone knows it. These witnesses know the kinds of things that go down better than anyone, and they do whatever they can, like Seneca trying keep his foot on the Neronian brake pedal.

In the meantime, as the saying goes, our luminaries are like the gargoyles up around the eaves of the evangelical cathedral—way up there, really ugly, and hard to knock off.

Our Book Giveaways

The good folks at Canon Press are beginning their extravaganza of largess by giving away Leon Podles’ fine book The Church Impotent. This book is free from Nov. 1-5. Check it out here.

And here in my quaint little Mablog shoppe, I am giving away, for the entire month, 21 Prayers for Pastors on the Lord’s Day. Get ’em while the getting is good. And every time there is a new NQN post, there will be an additional book that is freed from its attachment to mammon, and will remain so for the rest of the month.