Tales of Righteousness

I'll admit it--some stories spread a death-like pall over your day and keep you from sleep. Yesterday, I listened in on two of them when they appeared in my in-box and I was curious enough to listen in. I shouldn't have.

One of them was a monologue--read poorly, by the way--by a man named Paul Dorr, a man who believes himself to be Christianity's last frantic gasp. He's convinced that unless his own new dispensation ("Rescue the perishing") goes to war against the secular hosts who now run everything--churches, colleges, whatever--we're doomed. To hell.

Last year, Mr. Dorr courageously burned a half-dozen of Orange City Library's children's books he thought far too cuddly with the LGBTQ community. “Orange City Library, you won’t be peddling this one anymore,” Dorr said on video, tossing those books, one at a time, into the flames. “You should all be ashamed of yourselves and repent.” He meant you and me. For his criminal act, he was fined, I think (I don't know how the court case went because generally I choose not to follow his divine interventions). 

Last year, he just as bravely flew a plane that dragged a holy banner over the public dedication of a new building at Northwestern College because the honored former president, Dr. James Bultman, he was sure supported abortion, given that he wouldn't alter a story written about an Northwestern alum, a California doctor, who does, a man Lord Dorr considers a "baby killer." 

Yesterday it was a screed against Peter Wagner, publisher of the Northwest Iowa Review, a weekly newspaper the self-appointed Old Testament prophet considers wayward because The Review featured a story about Orange City's Gay Pride celebration. There the prophet stood, just outside the building where Wagner's paper is published, railing on him. This guy. Here's the picture Dorr is running on his website. 

But Dorr was only one story. Then there was another, a radio show from another brash Christian "ministry," this one based in Des Moines. Yesterday's edition featured Jacob Hall, Sioux Center's self-appointed prophet, who is equally adept at poking sticks in people's eyes to remove the motes only he, like Dorr, can see, a man burning with hellfire just like Mr. Dorr. 

Northwestern College took another beating when the hosts of the show made it perfectly clear that if and when NWC graduates don't toe the righteous lines they've laid in sand, then isn't the truth obvious: the institution itself is corrupt--or so they said. "By their fruits," you know.

I listened. Shouldn't have. It was fifty minutes of divine judgment heavy-laden with scripture passages to demonstrate their imperial righteousness. 

Thirty years ago or so, I read Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, a dystopian novel that does its best to create a world run by true believers we might think of Puritans, people who create a repressive, sexist, nightmare world sustained by scriptures fascist rulers preach. 

Honestly, I remember not liking the novel. I thought Atwood had created a world that I couldn't imagine--Christians acting like the butchers at Buchenwald or Dachau. Interesting, but unconvincing because far-fetched. 

That was 1985. Today, I'm not so sure. Give Paul Dorr a chance and he'll create nightmares in the name of the Lord--his Lord. Let Jacob Hall have his way, and he'll do away with sin by establishing a kingdom of righteousness, Bible verses all over the walls, I'm sure. 

I shouldn't have listened to either. The thing is, today these people gather an audience, a fearful score of men and women who see legions of hell's most wretched descending Sioux County--people like this man carrying a sign, someone Pastor Dorr identifies as one of his disciples. To you, does that sign speak love or hate?

They're scary. They scare me anyway, because our own human propensity to fear what's unknown can so easily turn us all into self-appointed wise men willing to carry signs just like this--and carry more too than just signs. Besides, fear and hate would be kissin' cousins, if kissin' wasn't exactly the wrong word. Christianity has a history of repression, which it likely should, given the Ten Commandments. That history is also full of hate--and blood.

I'm sure this man thinks he is loved. I'm sure he wants to think he's loving "homos" too.

But for the record, let it be said that I no longer believe Margaret Atwood was fanciful. I'm no longer convinced she was unconvincing.