Captain Cassidy

Josh Harris is one of the scions of the homeschooling and courtship fringes of the Christian Patriarchy movement. He wrote one of the single most destructive books ever published on the topic of evangelical Christian relationships. And he’s got an announcement.

In his book People to Be Loved, Preston Sprinkle presents two-and-a-half options for gay people. Today we’ll be talking about one of those options. Well, half of one, anyway. And we’ll be debunking it hopefully well enough for even die-hard fundagelicals to understand why people outside their bubble condemn it so unequivocally.

We’ve been talking lately about how, when Christians write about non-Christians, they often end up with a picture that doesn’t look terribly familiar to us–but which looks remarkably like the image of us that Christian culture paints. Today I want to dissect that picture.

Using very positive language to describe a very negative situation or feeling is a tactic at least as old as Christianity itself. People who have power use this sort of language to make the powerless folks they (want to) control more comfortable with being controlled–and to sell a product that nobody in their right mind would ever want to buy if its nature were accurately described. It is at its heart a very, very Christian form of dishonesty.

I’m not sure it’s ever a great week to be a fundagelical bigot-for-Jesus lately, but this has been a particularly bad week for that crowd.

We’ve been talking for a while now about right-wing Christians’ culture war against LGBTQ people, using Preston Sprinkle’s new advice book People to be Loved as a starting-off point. I’ve alluded a few times to the life script options that Dr. Sprinkle has generously allocated for gay people in order for them to be acceptable to him–er, to his god–and today I want to touch on one of them.