that's dave in the spotlight / losing his religion

I gotta say, I’ve always viewed Dave Henry as a bit of a Bible thumper. For one thing there were those endless reels of Bible verses that scrolled along the bottom of the Opinion page, day after day after day. I’ve heard that Dave is responsible for those. Then there are Dave’s endless demands that the Bible be taught in school. And Dave’s fundie Creationist screeds. Dave's so righteous that I certainly hope John Kanelis keeps a spare column for that Op-Ed space under the right-wing editorial cartoon. There's always the risk that the Rapture will snatch Dave away on the day his column's due. Hell, Dave's such a saint that he might just be translated one of these days. Stop clutching at your heart over there, Virgil Van Camp, I meant translated, you know, like Enoch (Hebrews 11:5).

However, today’s column on the death penalty suggests that Dave has lost his religion. Not just because he advocates a “drive-thru” death penalty process: I’ve long since given up on convincing Christians of his stripe that their Savior—who was, of course, himself the victim of an unjustly applied death penalty—would never support such punishment. No, Dave demonstrates that he has lapsed by saying

What death penalty opponents fail to grasp is the permanency of crimes committed by murderers such as Titsworth.

Their victims never come back. Ever.

Really. Y’know, I didn’t think that death was so permanent in the evangelical Christian scheme. I always thought that was the miracle of Christ’s death-penalty, under which he suffered death so we didn’t have to. But Dave says that we godless atheistic liberals don’t understand that death is a permanent state which never ends. Ever.

The only conclusion I can come to is that Dave no longer buys into the whole evangelical Christian scheme. Did he ever? Look: I’m not crazy about passing judgment on other people’s spirituality. I certainly am not qualified to judge anyone. But Dave has written massive numbers of Bible-thumping columns from his ivory tower in the Bible Belt. He transparently doesn’t believe a word of any of those columns. It just makes me wonder: should I have titled this post “that's dave in the spotlight / using his religion”?

Yeah, I’m being a jerk about this, but I’ve spent long years in this Bible-thumping desert listening to people who insisted that you must believe X to be a Christian, that you couldn’t believe Y and still be “Saved.” And in all of those years the number-one litmus test for True Christians has been that you MUST believe that Jeeeee-zus died so that you might have eternal life. If I had a silver cross for every evangelical Christian who has told this Methodist that I was an apostate for even thinking that the Church focused on Heaven and Hell just a bit too much . . .

Hmph. That’s the litmus test that David H. Henry violated on this sunny June morning. Welcome to the ranks of the apostates, Dave. See you in Hell.

spacedark