What I Mean by Losing Their Minds

If you’re wondering what I mean by ‘losing their minds,’ here’s a brief video clip from Vice News that illustrates the most extreme end of the problem. While this video focuses on what is called “The New Christian Right” ( an amalgam of conservative protestants, Catholics, Mormons, Jews, and white supremacists), the thinking problem that has given oxygen to these movements penetrates the entire American Christian culture. You will hear it from church pulpits in every town. Later, I will illustrate the more mundane versions of what this video exposes.

A Word on Christian Criticism

My critiques make some Christians uncomfortable. It is taboo to say anything negative about your own subculture. Religion is worse than other subcultures. In religion, harsh, moral criticism of those outside the culture is commonplace and brutal. But inside, you’re supposed to fold your hands and keep a smile. The buzzword today is harmony.

However, having been a deacon and an elder in many churches, I know firsthand how frivolous criticisms pour in via letters or e-mails from Sunday morning smilers. Sometimes they are mean-spirited. The church is too hot, too cold, the sermon is too long, too reasonable, not reasonable enough, the project A, B, or C is too expensive, and there is the music. I have little patience for such criticism, especially the mean ones.

I also don’t care for dogma-based criticisms, especially over things which the Bible does not address except within the imagination of some Christians. I am often the target of such criticisms, and they are always moral: “You are a very bad person because you don’t believe x, y, or z, and God hates you for it.”

But there is a place for criticisms toward the big picture issues, like thinking fallacies. If the church had had more critics, then maybe it would not have joined the colonel merchants in the practice of genocide in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Maybe the church would have never dirtied its hands in the slave trade or the Jim Crow Christian world in the South. Maybe the German Lutheran Church would have never gotten in bed with the Nazis, the Russian Orthodox Church gotten in bed with the brutal murderer, Putin, the American conservative churches in bed with Trumpism, or the progressive churches in bed with the postmodernists.

My criticism is not a moral one. I am not arguing that these are bad people, going to Hell, or that I’m somehow superior. Also, as I’ve said many times, the church is full of wonderful people, people better than me. But I must point out a fact that the Christian church is dying, and it has gone further off the rails in response to its loss of power. There is a serious thinking problem, and if it is not addressed, things will only get worse. We are witnessing in our government the results of this alliance between the billionaire lying con men and Christian nationalists as I type.

The Common Version of Losing Their Minds

To illustrate the more common versions of this type of unthinking. I will give examples from conversations I had with some old friends who are part of a conservative Presbyterian church denomination. This is the “church next door.”

These are good people, well-educated and previously thoughtful. They shared these same points, many mixed with political assertions. After each statement, I asked, “Where is the evidence?” to which they replied, “Mike, everyone knows this. You live in a liberal bubble.”

1. Democrats have stolen every election they’ve won, starting with Kennedy. Conservative Christians are the vast majority in America, and the “liberals” are a small minority; that’s why they must steal elections to win.
2. Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton operate the largest pedophile organization in the country. (Liberal-pedophile myths are popular among Christian groups, while pedophilia is statistically high within Christian groups. Just Google “pastor & pedophile”)
3. Anthony Fauci created the COVID virus in China, and the liberals released it to embarrass Donald Trump.
4. There were only a few deaths from COVID, and those were very sick people to start with. Hospitals were paid 10K to falsely claim that deaths were from COVID. (Absurd!)
5. The COVID vaccine is very dangerous, created by Bill Gates to kill children, as the liberals want to depopulate the earth and give it back to the animals. Bill Gates is behind Planned Parenthood as a Satanic baby-killing mill.
6. One claimed, “A doctor in my church gave the COVID vaccine to five patients, and each of them immediately fell to the floor dead, so he quit giving it.”
7. Science is directly from Satan. Science gave us abortions. (“Science” has saved hundreds of millions of children in the past two hundred years, including making pregnancies more likely to be carried to term and the mother, fetus/baby healthier)
8. Donald Trump is the greatest Christian man that America has produced.
9. Obama was born in Kenya and is a secret Muslim who had a Mosque in the White House and worked (clandestinely) with Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations for the overthrow of America.
10. Climate Change is a lie told by the Chinese to make America poor and subservient to them.
11. The only evidence for evolution was one pig tooth, which was supposed to be the missing human link, but turned out to be a hoax.
12. The Bible says the earth is only six thousand years old (it doesn’t), and the science community has found no evidence for an old earth (profoundly false) but made up the idea of a 4 billion year old earth, to give enough time for evolution to be true.
13. The homosexual community is organized with an agenda to take over and teach children to become gay. LBGQs have all signed a pact with Satan, otherwise, they would have their desires. They deserve capital punishment.
14. Most of our diseases and drugs have been brought to the US by illegal immigrants. They should be stopped at the border, even by deadly force, because God hates immigrants and we are at war against them. After all, they are dirty thieves.

These assertions expose a serious epistemological issue. That’s the thinking problem behind it all.

I had to take this detour from looking at how we got here because some people seemed confused about what I was talking about. Hopefully, next time I will get back to the historical perspective.

In Peace,

Mike