How the Selfish Use Christianity as Their Cover Story

Paul Ryan at hate group FRC's "Values Voter Summit"

I write often about religion for a number of reasons, including but not limited to (i) it is the driving force that has made life hell for LGBT individuals for centuries, and (ii) it provides cover for some of the most hate filled and selfish individuals - and has done so for centuries.  In today's America, the most hypocritical are evangelical Christians  81% of whom voted for and continue to support, a thrice divorced, self-admitted serial sexual molester even as they throw a conniption fit over the broadcasting of a same sex kiss during the Macy's Thanksgiving parade. They share their hypocrisy with other regular churchgoers who feign piety while in the pews yet support Republican policies that seek to shred the social safety net and cut funding for children, the poor, the homeless and the hungry while they themselves clamor for additional tax breaks. And then, of course, there is the Catholic Church hierarchy that lives like princes even as they aided and abetted sexual predators so that their cushy positions would not be threatened by scandal.  A piece in The Raw Story looks at this reality:  Here are highlights: 

Anyone who has worked in the restaurant business will be happy to tell you that waiters always fight each other to avoid working Sunday lunch shift. Not because they want to sleep in, but because it’s a widespread belief that the post-church crowd is loud, demanding and unwilling to tip appropriately. In the food service industry, “Christian” is synonymous with “selfish.”

[W]aiters probably remember the bad Christian tippers more because the hypocrisy is so stunning. The image of a man piously preening about what a good Christian he is in church only to turn around and refuse the basic act of decency that is paying someone what you owe them perfectly symbolizes a lurking suspicion in American culture that the harder someone thumps the Bible, the more selfish and downright sadistic a person he is. And that perception—that showy piety generally goes hand in hand with very un-Christ-like behavior—is not an urban myth at all. On the contrary, it’s the daily reality of American culture and politics.

It’s absolutely disgusting how the politicians who make the biggest show of how much they love Jesus would be the first in line to bash him if he returned with a message of clothing the naked and feeding the poor. The Jesus of the Bible multiplied the loaves and fishes. His loudest followers these day gripe about feeding people, claiming it creates a “culture of dependency.” They may even comb through the Bible to take quotes out of context to justify their selfishness toward the poor, as Rep. Steven Fincher did when he claimed the Bible says, “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” The fact that those jobs are unavailable didn’t give him a moment’s pause when suggesting this very un-Christ-like plan to his fellow Americans.

There are plenty of progressive Christians who genuinely try to live out Jesus’ command to love your neighbor as yourself . . . . That said, statistics bear out the sense that people who are more invested in being perceived as pious also embrace the most selfish policies. Self-identified conservatives and Republicans claim go to church regularly at twice the rate of self-identified liberals. People who go to church more than once a week are far more conservative than the rest of the population.

The attempts to reconcile the correlation between displays of piety and support for selfish policies get complex on the right, with conservatives often arguing that hating your neighbor at the voting booth doesn’t count because church charities supposedly make up for it. (They don’t.) In reality, the relationship between Christian piety and support for selfish policies is fairly straightforward. It’s not that being Christian makes you conservative. It’s that being conservative makes being a loud and pious Christian extremely attractive.

Without Christianity, the underlying mean-spiritedness of conservative policies is simply easier to spot. . . . . Since Christians are “supposed” to be good people, people who really aren’t good are lining up to borrow that reputation to advance their agenda.

The fact that conservatism causes obnoxious Christian piety in American culture is most obvious when looking at some of the theological developments that have accrued since the philosophers of selfishness decided to use Christianity as their cover story. The “prosperity gospel” that has developed in recent years is a classic example.

The fact of the matter is that the purposes religion serves in America are shrinking in number. Our cultural identity is increasingly shaped by pop culture, not faith or ethnic identity. Our holidays are more about shopping and having a chance to catch up with far-flung family these days, not showing devotion to a deity. Spiritual needs are often addressed through modern means like psychotherapy and self-help. People build communities through hobbies and interests more than through faith communities bound by geography, ethnicity and family.

Increasingly, the only thing religion has left to justify itself is that it provides cover for people who want to have bigoted, selfish beliefs but want to believe they are good people anyway. As these social trends continue, we can expect the alignment between public piety and grotesquely selfish political beliefs to get worse, not better.

Meanwhile, the truly "good Christians" remain quiet and yield the field to the falsely pious and selfish.  It's little wonder that a growing number of the younger generations have walked away from religion entirely.

Scamvangelists Like Joel Osteen Are Why Americans Are Leaving Religion

Scamvangelist Joel Osteen

As noted in numerous posts, a growing number of Americans are simply walking away from religion, particularly Christianity.  Various pools and studies have shown that for the Millennials, a main motivation is the anti-LGBT animus that is a hallmark of so-called "conservative" denominations. Another principal motivation has been shown to be revulsion to the hypocrisy and Pharisee-like behavior of the Christofascist.  Now, with Hurricane Harvey having wrought heretofore unimaginable damage to Houston and  the Texas coastline, we are once again seeing who the real Christians are so to speck and who are the they equivalent of the money changers in the temple as described in the Bible.  While many small local churches are mobilizing to help (a number of churches in my former neighborhood in Houston), the obscenely wealthy televangelists - I call them scamvangelists - have been slow to help and seemingly put their own wealth ahead of aiding those in need.  A case in point is Joel Osteen whose mega church only stepped up to assisting Hurricane Harvey victims after scathing condemnation on social media. A piece in Salon looks at how Osteen and those of his ilk are accelerating the exodus from organized Christianity.  Here are excerpts:

[A]s American Protestantism has moved from focusing on humble public service to greed and naked political ambition. Some, like Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress, . . . . . In 2013, he finished construction on a $130 million church campus in Dallas, a project which he claimed was about glorifying God, instead of mammon.

“In these tough economic times, we wanted to use our gifts to build a church that provides spiritual growth and healing while seeking to reflect the splendor and majesty of God,” he said at the time. A year earlier, he had claimed that then-president Barack Obama was “paving the way for the future reign of the Antichrist.”

Jeffress made those comments during the 2012 election campaign, in the context of his support of that year’s Republican nominee, Mitt Romney. Just four years prior, the Baptist minister had claimed that Romney’s Mormon faith was a “cult” whose members were going to hell. In a 2016 move that surprised no one, Jeffress was one of Donald Trump’s earliest endorsers.

Osteen is different from some of his evangelical colleagues in that he has generally shied away from political involvement. Despite having called Trump “a friend of our ministry” and “a good man,” he has not endorsed political candidates. What Osteen has endorsed, however, is what many critics have called the “prosperity gospel,” the idea that God not only wants to bless believers spiritually but wants to bless them financially as well.

Osteen does not draw a salary from his Lakewood Church nor does he directly ask his fans for money, unlike many other ostensibly religious organizations. Last year, a Canadian religious group called Gospel for Asia was accused of absconding with more than $90 million in donations. Nonetheless, Osteen’s followers have certainly ponied up bigly. His organization reportedly has an annual budget of more than $70 million, and the church facility he originally declined to open up to flood refugees was previously the home arena of the NBA’s Houston Rockets.

Osteen’s views on wealth and his ostentatious style (he lives in a $10.5 million mansion and is estimated to be worth about $40 million) are a pronounced departure from traditional Christian teachings about “the love of money” being the root of all evil, how difficult it is for a rich person to live a life worthy of God and how the materially disadvantaged are regarded more favorably by the divine.

Osteen’s theological indifference seems to be reflected not just in his initial refusal to follow Jesus Christ’s directive to care for “the least of these my brethren” but also in his apparent lack of preaching interest in Christ himself.

A search through Osteen’s Twitter feed reveals that he almost never mentions Jesus to his digital flock. Generally speaking, he only mentions the name of his alleged savior around Easter, never around Christmas. In fact, within the past three years, he has mentioned “Jesus” or “Christ” only 14 times amid hundreds of tweets.

Rafts of political science research have demonstrated that American churches’ doctrinal views have driven away people who want their faith to be more receptive to scientific evidence on issues like homosexuality or evolution. The Religious Right’s vociferous attempts to merge evangelical Christianity with far-right political opinions have also made those with moderate or liberal views look elsewhere for moral discussion.

It’s also clearly true that some religious leaders’ attempts to cash in on their followers’ need for validation and their displays of callous indifference to suffering — both of which are exemplified by Osteen — are part of the reason why nearly 24 percent of Americans now say they have no religious affiliation, compared to just 3 percent in the 1950s.

“Hypocrisies and conflicts in church, when they (inevitably) erupt, don’t just drive people to other churches, as in the past, but sometimes take them out of Christianity altogether,” Georgia pastor David Gushee wrote last year. He’s exactly right.

As the Pew Research Center’s Michael Lipka noted in 2015, this process is only accelerating as people who say they’re not a part of any religious tradition are not only becoming more numerous, they’re also becoming even more skeptical of religion itself.

Presumably, these trends ought to bother people like Joel Osteen and Robert Jeffress. Apparently they have other things on their minds.

Sadly, what these con-artists have on their minds is money and self-enrichment. In nearby Virginia Beach we have a case study in self-enrichment combined with marketing hate and intolerance: Pat Robertson.  The Gospel message means nothing to these people. They are a case study in why one would not want to label themselves as "Christian."

Scamvangelist Joel Osteen Closes Megachurch Amid Houston Flooding Crisis

The disaster that has overtaken the City of Houston, Texas and the surrounding region is quickly becoming a testimony of which churches put the Gospel message into practice and which ones merely give the Gospel message lip service only and see preaching as a road to self-enrichment.  My former neighborhood in southwest Houston through its Facebook page has been providing updates on disaster relief as information is gathered.  Among the reports are information that Westbury Baptist church  located at 10425 Hillcroft, will be serving as a drop-off and distribution place for food, water, toiletries, blankets and clothes.   In addition, Westbury Methodist located at 5200 Willowbend opened its doors yesterday as a shelter.  Additional information will be posted as information is gathered.  Meanwhile, one very high profile church is doing seemingly nothing to aid in the disaster releif effort.  Which church, scamvangelist Joel Osteen's 16,800-seat Lakewood Church near downtown Houston.  Osteens' church as of this time remains closed.  The New York Post looks at the situation.  Here are details:

Televangelist Joel Osteen cancelled services at his Houston megachurch Sunday and has yet to reopen its doors — despite the fact that thousands of flooded-out residents are desperately seeking shelter.

The perpetually smiling pastor told followers on Twitter on Monday to lean on their faith.  “Jesus promises us peace that passes understanding,” he wrote. “That’s peace when it doesn’t make sense.”

But Osteen’s comforting words didn’t sit well with critics, who want to know why the doors to his 16,800-seat arena at his Lakewood Church near downtown Houston are closed.

“You have taken so much money away from your people to live like a king,” entertainment publicist Danny Deraney blasted. “It’s the least you could do.”

Washington DC-based writer Charles Clymer tweeted pictures of Lakewood Church, which did not appear to be damaged by floods.

“It doesn’t make sense why you’re not opening up your mega church to house Houston citizens, help me understand that. Jesus,” according to Florida-based writer Emily Timbol.

While the church and its arena have not suffered any flood damage yet, ministry spokesman Donald Iloff said their property is inaccessible because of surrounding waters.

Osteen it should be noted, lives with his family in a $10.5 million home that is treated as church property and is tax-exempt.   As of 2012, Osteen's net worth is reportedly $56,508,500.00.  Oh, and lest I forget, Osteen is not accepting of LGBT individuals who he says need to "repent of their sins." Perhaps Osteen needs to do some repenting and stop fleecing the gullible and easily misled. 

The Obamacare Scandal the Most of the Media Is Ignoring

Joel Osteen has the largest church in America. He also declined to speak about the coverage gap.

I make no secret about the fact that I hold most far right Christians - the Christofascists, if you will - and the Tea Party Neanderthals in little more than open contempt.  To me, most of these "godly folk" are falsely pious, self-righteous bigots and they make the biblical Pharisees look like very upstanding individuals.  One thing that underscores this rank hypocrisy is the GOP base opposition to the Affordable Health Care Act which they derisively call Obamacare.  These greed driven, self-centered folks don't give the slightest damn about the millions of Americans who lack access to decent healthcare .   A piece at CNN looks at the situation and the calls by a few decent Christians to not treat countless Americans (especially minorities and those of different faiths) as disposable human garbage.  Here are some highlights:

The Rev. Timothy McDonald gripped the pulpit with both hands, locked eyes with the shouting worshippers, and decided to speak the unspeakable.

The bespectacled Baptist minister was not confessing to a scandalous love affair or the theft of church funds. He brought up another taboo: the millions of poor Americans who won’t get health insurance beginning in January because their states refused to accept Obamacare.

McDonald cited a New Testament passage in which Jesus gathered the 5,000 and fed them with five loaves and two fishes. Members of his congregation bolted to their feet and yelled, “C’mon preacher” and “Yessir” as his voice rose in righteous anger.

“What I like about our God is that he doesn’t throw people away,” McDonald told First Iconium Baptist Church in Atlanta during a recent Sunday service. “There will be health care for every American. Don’t you worry when they try to cast you aside.  Just say I’m a leftover for God and leftovers just taste better the next day!”

McDonald’s congregation cheered, but his is a voice crying in the wilderness. He’s willing to condemn state leaders whose refusal to accept Obamacare has left nearly 5 million poor Americans without health coverage. But few of the most famous pastors in the Bible Belt will join him.


Joel Osteen? Bishop T.D. Jakes, and other prominent pastors throughout the South?  Like McDonald, they preach in states where crosses and church steeples dot the skyline yet the poor can’t get the health insurance they would receive if they lived elsewhere. All declined to comment.
 
The coverage gap was created when 25 states refused to accept the expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare. The people who fall into this gap make too much money to qualify for Medicaid and not enough to qualify for Obamacare subsidies in their state insurance exchanges. If they lived elsewhere, they would probably get insurance. But because they live in a state that refused the new health care law, they likely will remain among the nation’s uninsured poor after Obamacare coverage kicks in come January.

The coverage gap has been treated as a political issue, but there is a religious irony to the gap that has been ignored.

Most of the people who fall into the coverage gap live in the Bible Belt, a 14-state region in the South stretching from North Carolina to Texas and Florida. The Bible Belt is the most overtly Christian region in the country, filled with megachurches and pastors who are treated like celebrities.  All but two Bible Belt states have refused to accept the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare.

Is it anti-Christian for state leaders to turn down help for the people Jesus called “the least of these"?  

When these questions were sent to many of the most popular pastors in the Bible Belt, they hit a wall of silence. Virtually no prominent pastor wanted to talk about the uninsured poor in their midst.

Joel Osteen, pastor of the largest church in the nation, declined to be interviewed about the subject. So did Bishop T.D. Jakes. Their megachurches are both in Texas, the state with the nation’s highest number of people without health insurance.

Max Lucado, the best-selling Christian author who is a minister at a church in Texas, declined to speak; Charles Stanley, the Southern Baptist pastor in Georgia whose In Touch Ministries reaches millions around the globe, declined to speak; Ed Young Sr. and Ed Young Jr., a father and son in Texas who pastor two of the fastest-growing churches in the nation, also declined to speak.

The silence is not hard to understand. Obamacare is a polarizing political issue in the Bible Belt. A pastor who publicly weighs in on the subject could divide his or her congregation or risk their job.

[T]his position is impractical and unbiblical, says Ronald Sider, a longtime advocate for the poor and author of “The Scandal of Evangelical Politics."  Churches and charities don’t have enough resources to take care of an estimated 48 million Americans who don’t have health care. The Bible is filled with examples of God's fury over economic oppression of the poor, which Christians should regard as scandalous, he says.

There's much more to the article, some of which involves mealy mouthed excuses from pastors for why they are not speaking out.   The Gospel message calls one to be divisive at times and to call out hypocrisy and to identify wrongs being done to others.  With most of these pastors it is all ultimately about money and the bottom line.  They don't want to rock the boat because then their bigoted and selfish parishioners might stop giving money.  Nasty prostitutes are more honest and have more integrity than these foul pastors.  With every passing day I find myself wanting less and less to do with Christianity.  Or at least the version practiced by the "godly folk." They are truly horrid people. 

Joel Osteen’s Big Gay Problem

Illinois has approved gay marriage and it appears that Hawaii may not be far behind as well.  A Virginia has a newly elected governor who unabashedly campaigned supporting gay marriage.  The world is indeed changing.  With 15 states and the District of Columbia granting full gay marriage and numerous lawsuits challenging gay marriage bans across the country, the struggle against gay marriage may well be the Christofascists' Waterloo.  Hence their increasing efforts to export homophobia overseas in order to find new funding sources.  But not all of the self-enriching televangelists see their future in Russia or backward regions of Africa.  Salon looks at Joel Orteen's struggle to find a way forward without alienating aging Kool-Aid drinkers or killing the Christian brand in America.  Here are some article excerpts:

Joel Osteen has a problem, one that all Evangelicals in the U.S. are facing. The anti-gay position of mainstream Christianity has fallen out of favor with the public. Every reputable poll currently shows uncontested majority support for gay marriage. And the cultural shift happened more quickly than the churches can follow.

The Huffington Post’s Josh Zepps recently asked Osteen about this passage from his new book, “Break Out: 5 Keys to Go Beyond Your Barrier and Live an Extraordinary Life”: “It doesn’t matter who likes you or doesn’t like you, all that matters is that God likes you. He accepts you, he approves of you.”

Zepps wanted to know if this included gay folks. “Absolutely,” Osteen offered without missing a beat. Evangelicals are notoriously tricky on the subject. It’s common theology to claim that God accepts absolutely everyone because being gay is viewed as an affliction, not an identity. What makes Osteen’s statement so unusual is his claim that God “approves” of gay folks.

The Texas megachurch pastor has always been relatively soft on the issue compared to his colleagues, notably the Evangelical behemoth Southern Baptist Convention. In the past, Osteen at the very least claimed homosexuality was unacceptable.

Some Evangelical church leaders are already going the full distance and embracing change. The controversial minister Rob Bell, also a multiple New York Times bestselling author, announced full support for marriage equality earlier this year. But he didn’t end with the endorsement. He pointedly criticized  the Evangelical church for its role in anti-gay discourse: “I think we are witnessing the death of a particular subculture that doesn’t work. I think there is a very narrow, politically intertwined, culturally ghettoized, Evangelical subculture that was told, ‘We’re gonna change the thing,’ and they haven’t … And we have supported policies and ways of viewing the world that are actually destructive. And we’ve done it in the name of God and we need to repent.”

The anti-gay position is becoming increasingly problematic in churches given support for LGBT equality among young people, even including white Evangelicals. Ministers are being forced to either embrace a dying ideology or risk ejection from their churches. The “because God says so” answers derived from the Bible’s handful of homophobic passages are headed the way of biblical slavery defenses, and young Evangelicals aren’t buying. (It’s also of note that the nation’s largest Evangelical denomination, the previously mentioned SBC, was originally formed to protect the rights of slaveholders. They’re sorry now.

Complicating matters further is Catholicism’s recent tonal shift on LGBT issues, which could create a ripple effect throughout the Christian world.

It won’t be surprising when Joel Osteen, along with the rest of the Evangelical community, announces an Obama-style evolution on the issue. While some denominations will hold onto existing prejudice until the bitter end, most are likely headed the way of the Evangelical Lutherans. Until then, many Evangelicals across the nation will be forced into an uncomfortable gray area as church leaders furiously argue over an issue the rest of the country already decided.

Putting all one's future in aging anti-gay whites is not a good plan for the future.  At some point the need to change will be the difference between death of denominations and a chance to live on at least for a while in an ever more secular, gay accepting world.

Notorious Homophobes Were Advisers on History Channel's 'Bible' Mini-Series

Is it a mere coincidence that the actor playing Satan (pictured above) in History Channel's mini-series "The Bible" looks uncannily like an older Barack Obama?   Perhaps yes, perhaps no.  What is a certainty is that the panel of advisers recruited by producers Mark Burnett and Roma Downey  to ostensibly to ensure the "accuracy" of the story line is a veritable who's who of extreme homophobes.  In a puff piece in TV Guide the panel is described as follows:

"We weren't qualified to teach the Bible, but we knew plenty of people who were," says Burnett, whose interfaith panel included pastors Joel Osteen, Rick Warren and T.D. Jakes, Bishop Michael Sheridan, Focus on the Family president Jim Daly and Rev. Samuel Rodriguez.

Of course, the production is treated as if the story line of the Bible is historic fact and ignores such petty problems as the fact that the human genome project has confirmed that Adam and Eve never existed as historic individuals or that the Great Flood was likely a mythical description of the flooding of the Black Sea basin many millennium ago when the Mediterranean Sea breached the Bosporus rather than any type of divine intervention.  As for the panel of advisers, Towleroad looks at their track record on gays:

That's Osteen, who said "I don't believe homosexuality is God's best for a person's life" and called it "sin" many times, Prop 8 supporter Rick Warren who compared homosexuality to poison and compared acting on gay urges to assaulting someone, TD Jakes who has called homosexuality a "brokenness" despite his son getting arrested in a sex sting, Bishop Michael Sheridan who has called homosexuality "intrinsically evil" and told Catholics who vote for gay marriage that they can't receive communion, and Samuel Rodriguez, who teamed up with NY state senator Ruben Diaz to rally opponents of same-sex marriage, and Jim Daly, the head of virulently anti-gay Focus on the Family.

Frankly, other than including Fred Phelps, it would have been difficult to come up with a more homophobic gathering of hate merchants.  And, of course, then there's Rick Warren who looks to be the personification of the sin of gluttony.

But back to the Obama like appearance of Satan: So far neither History Channel nor Mark Burnett, The Bible series’s creator, has issued any statement on the matter.

Televangelist (And Asshole) Joel Osteen Says Homosexuality is a Choice - Even though Heterosexuality is Not

The nastiness and dishonesty of the professional Christian set - who are in my view little better than con men who shake down the ignorant and gullible for money - continues to be stunning.  A case in point is Joel Osteen who lives VERY well by convincing the simple minded to send his "ministry" money.  In an interview on CNN Osteen was pressed to admit that he never chose to be straight - it was simply who he was.  Meanwhile, however, Osteen argues that being gay is a choice either out of intellectual laziness or fear that admitting that God made some of us gay might prove the Bible wrong and, in the process, cause his house of cards faith message to collapse.  It is individuals like Osteen that maintain the pressure on gays to marry and try to be straight with the result that straight spouses and children find themselves in ultimately doomed marriages.  Think Progress looks at Osteen's dishonest and disgusting comments on homosexuality.  Here are excerpts:

Joel Osteen, the televangelist who presides over the nation’s largest congregation at Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, appeared on CNN’s morning show Starting Point this morning to discuss his latest book and ended up in a lengthy conversation about his views on the LGBT community.

Host Soledad O’Brien and panelist Richard Socarides pushed Osteen on his beliefs on homosexuality, and whether his message of lifting people up can coexist with his church’s view of homosexuality as a sin:

O’BRIEN: You make it clear that you think that homosexuality is a sin…
OSTEEN: When I read the scripture, that’s what I believe; that the scripture condemns it or says it’s a sin. But it also says that you know, lying is, and that being prideful is…
O’BRIEN: Right, so then you shouldn’t lie. But for people who are gay, you’re saying so then you shouldn’t be gay?
OSTEEN: Well, I think that’s the big debate. The scripture says you’ve got to work out your own salvation…
SOCARIDES: Do you think you can choose to be gay or not gay? You think you choose to be straight?
OSTEEN: I know I have not chosen to be straight, I feel like that’s who I am…
HOST: Well so how can I choose to be gay?

 Osteen is little better than a sleazy snake oil merchants.  And, in my opinion, he strikes me as pretty gay.  I hope that some day frauds and charlatans like Osteen find themselves out of business.