Exodus Ready to End the Culture War

In a press release yesterday, Exodus International continued to articulate their new direction. In the release, a brief comment is made about Charles Worley, the NC preacher who called for gay concentration camps.

Alan Chambers, president of the 36-year-old Exodus International said, “As usual, the spotlight is shining on the furthest extremes currently engaged in a public fight. I believe it’s time for all of us to focus on the people beyond the political debate.”

While a minority of people such as North Carolina pastor Charles Worley represent the outdated and homophobic fringe of Christianity and should not be taken seriously, excellent churches like National Community Church in Washington, D.C. are drawing approximately 200 people each week to Ebenezer’s Coffee House. These individuals gather to thoughtfully discuss how the church can better care for people with same-sex attractions (SSA), those inside and outside of the church.

In the midst of the chaos and tired culture war mentality, Exodus International continues to serve a fast growing population of the Church that is ready to end the war and reach out in compassion to people who come to them for answers.

Then, as if to say, here is the new message, the release adds:

“Exodus is here to provide support to individuals with SSA who want to be faithful in their pursuit of living out a biblical sexual ethic,” said Chambers. “We encourage parents who desire to be faithful to their values to also love their gay or lesbian child unconditionally despite having differing worldviews. Finally we are here to help churches looking for ways to reach out to people in their congregations or across the divide to people in their communities.”

A few ministries have left Exodus over this approach.

Possibly, Exodus tries to do too much with this release (e.g., address Worley’s hate, communicate an end to the culture war, and describe their new direction). On the other hand, repeating the mission of Exodus as a support group for gays who want to follow traditional evangelical teaching is necessary for it to stick, both internally and externally.

Gentle readers (and the rest of you, too); what do you think of Exodus’ message, assuming they follow through?

 

Southern Baptist leader condemns North Carolina preacher who called for gay concentration camps

This is disgusting. By now, you may have seen it all over the media (e.g., here). Charles Worley, “pastor” of the Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, NC called for a concentration camp for gays and lesbians.

Worley said:

I figured a way out, a way to get rid of all the lesbians and queers but I couldn’t get it past the Congress – build a great big large fence, 50 or a hundred mile long. Put all the lesbians in there, fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals. And have that fence electrified so they can’t get out. And you know what? In a few years they will die out. You know why? They can’t reproduce. If a man ever has a young’un, praise God he will be the first.

I asked Bob Stith, National Strategist for Gender Issues at the Southern Baptist Convention, for his reaction and he said Worley’s words were “a vile outburst” and said,

I think it is important to say in the strongest terms how disgusting and unchristian his comments are.

He added that the church is not in the Southern Baptist Convention.

The church website is down, but the Google cache indicates that it is an independent Baptist Church which believes the King James Version of the Bible is inspired. The “KJV only” churches are almost always in the extreme right wing of the church world. This church is a part of something called “The Only Hope” network. The church is also on this list of fundamentalist Baptist churches and this website seems to support Worley.

 

Getting Jefferson Right in Salon today

Salon today posted my article on David Barton and a brief look at the falsehoods in Barton’s book, The Jefferson Lies.

One claim I haven’t spent much time on until lately is Barton’s claim that Thomas Jefferson could not emancipate his slaves due to restrictions in VA law. Barton says in The Jefferson Lies that Jefferson could not have emancipated his slaves and blamed Virginia law. As I point out in the article and we point out in the book, that is a false claim.

Thanks to John Fea at Messiah College for the comments and blog post I cited.

UK Guardian cites Getting Jefferson Right

One the UK’s leading news sources, The Guardian, has a mention of our eBook, Getting Jefferson Right in a column yesterday on Texas’ War on History.

Columnist Katherine Stewart wrote:

Barton recently came out with another piece of propaganda, The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson. To their credit, a pair of professors who identify themselves as conservative Christians, Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter, have stepped forward to debunk Barton’s latest exercise in their book, Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims About Our Third President. But that hasn’t stopped Barton’s book from becoming a bestseller.

Got your copy yet?

What Did Thomas Jefferson Include in His Edited Gospels

Late last week, David Barton appeared on Bryan Fischer’s American Family Association radio program Focal Point. One topic of conversation was the contents of Thomas Jefferson extractions from the Gospels, aka known as the Jefferson Bible. More properly, the Jefferson Bible is considered to be the Life and Morals of Jesus which Jefferson put together sometime during or after 1820. The first time Jefferson cut and pasted portions of the Gospels was in 1804 when he did it at the White House in a few nights work.

On Fischer’s show, Barton said Jefferson included miracles of healing and feeding the multitude in the 1804 version. In his book, Barton claims that three miracles in Matthew 9 (the raising of Jairus daughter in Mt. 9:1; healing a bleeding woman in Mt. 9:18-26 and the healing two blind men in Mt. 9:27-34) were included by Jefferson in The Philosophy of Jesus. However, a review of Jefferson’s table of texts as found in Henry Randall’s 1858 biography of Jefferson and Dickinson Adams’ definitive work demonstrates that these texts were not included in either of Jefferson’s abridgments.

The fourth false text Barton uses is Matthew 11:4-6 which reads:

4Jesus answered and said unto them, Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see: 5The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them. 6And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me.

Again, a review of the table of texts comes up empty for this passage. Jefferson did not include it in either his 1804 or his 1820 versions. Continue reading “What Did Thomas Jefferson Include in His Edited Gospels”