In Which Post There is No Photo of Miss California 2009

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Our discussion of this issue can now continue without anybody having to speed scroll past the picture. I would have responded sooner, but was out of town at a conference. So here I am, getting up to speed. There were a number of good comments in the previous thread, but out of all of them, Will S got what I was doing. He said, that I “was pointing out the embarrassment of mainstream evangelicalism in our eagerness to make Miss California our next spokesperson. Doug was pointing out the irony of a lady in a string bikini being our spokesperson for the religious right. And I think the Jpeg was needed to make that point.”

That was it. Everybody knows what a bikini looks like. And everybody knows that some Christians participate in contests that have swimsuit competitions as part of their mandatory parading of flesh. But to refer to these things with propositions, like I just did, does not have the effect that I wanted to have. In order to get that, I wanted to juxtapose the picture of what she was doing in that contest right alongside a statement that she is in the process of being promoted to a position of cultural leadership for good old family values. I know that seems ludicrous, which is a major part of my point.

But I know of nothing in our current cultural set up that would prevent Carrie Prejean getting a job with Fox News, or getting a book contract with a major Christian publisher, and/or starting some kind of ministry.

She kind of stood up to a flamer, and good for her. But that is a pretty low threshhold for being qualified to do what she will now be able — if she has her wits about her — to do. And if she makes the right moves, and she is interviewed in the course of making those right moves, nobody (and I mean nobody on the family values right) is going to say in that interview, “Is your faith important to you?” “Yes, Sean. It is the most important aspect of my life. It is right at the center.” “But . . . but . . . in that contest, you were practically nekkid.”

Posting that picture was not an act of approval, nor was it an invitation to sexual gawkers. It was an act of disapproval (and entirely consistent with what I have preached and taught about modesty), but I needed to disapprove in a way that revealed the central problem here which is not the immodesty. The fact that many Christians cannot see past that issue means that we have already lost on the central issue.

The central problem is that what has come to be known as “family values” has a radically skewed point of theological integration. But we don’t need no stinkin’ family values. We need biblical values. When Phineas ran that copulating couple through, he did so with his eyes open. He wasn’t blindfolded, jabbing at the ground randomly with his spear lest he fall into lust. When Ezekiel lambasted the adulterous idolatries of Israel, he did so with language that was far, far beyond this — language that has stumbled more than one Christian boy who ventured recklessly into the Old Testament. But I can see that there will have to be some more on this.

But in the meantime, some day soon, if someone offers me two cents, I am going to come uncorked at Fox News, and this kind of thing is going to be the reason for it.

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