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A highly dubious effort at pastoral care in

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  A Baptist blogger on bad race relations Fred Clark, a progressive Protestant blogger, as been writing his Slacktivist blog for over 20 years.  This is one committed Christian who is not a racist, or a sexist, or a homophobe.  His usual subject is the abuse of power, including persuasive power, by the conservative Christians among whom he grew up and went to school.   In this latest post, he links a  story  about the Chapel Hill Bible Church, which has lost some 200 members, substantially non-white and female, over its leadership on matters of gender, race, culture, and employment policy, including much  bullying and discriminatory treatment  of women employees.  In addition, Pastor Jay Thomas refused to acknowledge minority members concerns about the January 6th uprising and its threat to their rights in a  letter to the congregation , which sent many minority congregants heading to the exits. The church, especially the white chur...
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How We Could Manage Identity Politics Better

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  I wrote the follwing comment on another blog about two years ago; I would like to share it with the gang, with a few pertinent additions. "It's just occurred to me right now that the really important thing about marginalization isn't the victim's identity, whatever that might be, but the perpetrator's attitude and behavior.  Women get into trouble because men can't stop obsessing about various female "attributes."  People of color get into trouble because we white people can't get over the fact that some people don't look like us.  Poor people keep running into attitudes about "not pulling one's own weight;" and LGBTQ's run into cut-and-dried views on the complexities of human gender and sexuality.    The real issue isn't identity; it's manners and morals.  The finger-pointers and bigots are being nasty and abusive, in a way the Constitution, and in particular the Bill of Rights, aspires to abolish.  You don't h...
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