The problem I have with debating bigots is that they are, well, so
bigoted. And any attempt to do so usually ends up being a dreary waste of time, a chasing after the wind. It's like, as the proverb goes, trying to teach pigs to sing—the final outcome is that you will miserably fail and the pigs only get irritated. A bigot is like a child glued to the saddle of the hobbyhorse of his prejudices, untiredly rocking back and forth, supercharged with too much sugary food. Talking the child into dismounting is a tiresome and futile task; he wants to ride that hobbyhorse and nothing is going to stop him. Or to use another analogy, it would be like me walking across town, here in Hayden in North Idaho, to the house of that old Nazi-loving nutcase extraordinaire, Richard Butler, knocking on his door, inviting myself in, sitting down in his living room, and attempting to disabuse him of his bizarre, and hate-filled, “Aryan Nation†beliefs. As a practical matter, it would be a complete waste of my time to do so, because in his case the man has busted gears inside his soul, which are completely rusted and frozen shut. No amount of WD40 is going to unloosen them, no matter how big a wrench you use.
Now there is this particular Catholic blogger—whose name I will not mention because it really isn't important as to who this person is, but for the sake of definiteness of speech I will occasionally refer to this person by the name “Euodia.†Now it is sadly the case that Euodia takes every opportunity to malign a whole, very broad category of fellow Xtians, the Pentecostals (or charismatic Xtians). And I'm sure that it's greatly irritates Euodia that I insistently call them “fellow Xtians,†implying that they are just as much joint heirs with XP as she is. In Euodia's hobbyhorse world of conspiracy theories,
all Pentecostals are really nothing but occultic gnostics in disguise and are barely distinguishable from devil-filled demoniacs. Since I happen to go to a church that is, technically speaking, “Pentecostalâ€â€”it being affilated with the Assemblies of God—I don't take kindly to being smeared with such a broad brush, loaded up with the hot molten black tar of Euodia's bigoted imagination. However, I can in some measure empathize with Euodia, because at one time, when I was younger, I was fairly bigoted myself against Pentecostals, and Catholics as well, it so happens.
As a young child at a church camp—this was back in the summer of 1960 as I recall—and at that time the Southern Baptists were much more suspicious of the Catholic Church, a deep seated suspicion partly due to past historical experiences of persecution by state established churches, a suspicion which has since diminished considerably over the years and has become far more subdued. Anyhow, as a young impressionable child, I asked one of the church camp counselors about John Kennedy. She responded by saying that Kennedy should not be elected president. And I asked why, and was tersely told “He was a Catholic.†Oh boy. From that point on, as young child, I picked up very quickly the generally pervasive and vague feeling that Catholics were people to be dreaded and avoided, that there was something very wrong with them, though it would have been difficult for me to explain exactly what it was, although later I would get plenty of offers of help from people eager to get me to read Alexander Hislop's dusty old book
The Two Babylons. Furthermore, it would be tedious here to recount the various instances of prejudice against those “holy-rollers†Pentecostals, but yes, there was plenty of that as well. But again, things have changed much over the years, and I don't want to leave the false impression that all Baptists continue to be knuckle-draging-inbred-from-marrying-their-first-cousins sort of folks. It would be a travesty to think that, though some people take gleeful, perverse delight in thinking precisely that about Baptists.
So I can somewhat empathize—much like one recovering from alcoholism would empathize with someone still struggling with addiction to the bottle—with this particular Catholic blogger, despite the egregiously anti-Pentecostal prejudice she exhibits from time-to-time. And indeed what is exhibited can be downright vile and very offensive. My usual procedure is merely to ignore it and keep a stiff upper lip. Now many Catholic bloggers have sensitive noses for anti-Catholic prejudice and can readily sniff it out, much like blood hounds can sniff out a dead carcass of a horse bloated in the sun forty miles away over the distant hills. Indeed they ought to. Such prejudice should be opposed because much of it is based on folly and ignorance and misinformation. For example, there are plenty of anti-Catholic freaks-who-own-webservers on the Internet, and their web pages are genuine works of pure, breathtaking crackpottery, often regurgitating some variation of the usual Hislopian thesis that Catholicism is nothing more than paganism in disguise, and that the Catholic Church is really “Mystery Babylon Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.†However, whenever it comes to one of their own engaging in equally obnoxious bigotry, the noses of many Catholic bloggers suddenly become very insensitive and inured. The sort of rank stench such as coming from a crackpot like as Alexander Hislop, or the laughable Jack Chick, would horrifically offend their delicate nostrils, yet they too readily, it seems, put up with one of their own dumping smelly heaps of rotting garbage on other non-Catholic Xtians.
I would have normally ignored all of that. But I think what really “pissed me off†this time was when Euodia so matter-of-factly tried to slime
John Wesley, claiming that he had some sort of genetic connection to various bizarre heretical groups and diverse occultist wackos (none of which are of any interest to me). The context was some rather pointless discussion going on someone else's blog about some sort of forgettable radio broadcast, whose guest was someone from some weird fringe group claiming to be “Catholic,†which recently took place on that
Barnum Circus of Weirdness, the “Coast To Coast†AM radio show with host George Noory. (The “Coast To Coast†show formerly had as its regular host the dubiously famous Art Bell, the master of feigning open-mindedness while talking to schizophrenic whackos describing their sexual encounters with reptilian UFOnauts from Zeta Reticuli.)
But for me to defend someone like John Wesley is odd indeed, especially since I am not a Methodist—though years ago, I do recall I attended a Methodist church service on one occasion when my wife's a'capella group was invited to sing there. I do know that back in the 18th century John Wesley's preaching had a profound influence in converting a deeply backslidden and morally dissolute England. It's odd for me to have to defend John Wesley, considering that he probably had more genuine godliness in his little pinkie than I do in my entire body. But it was more than I could stomach to see him getting slimed so flippantly by Euodia. Truely, it can be reasonably argued that Methodism had a certain amount of influence on various Protestant charismatic groups; I know at least that much about church history. But it was really stretching it past the breaking point when Euodia started to insinuate that everything John Wesley was about was
merely derivative from the various heretical, screwball, hole-in-the-wall Catholic spinoffs (“Franciscan Spiritualsâ€, etc.) and other 18th and 17th century occultists. It shows me that Euodia was not interested in anything like truth or facts but merely in trying to find a neat little cubbyhole in which to shove John Wesley, a cubbyhole somewhere in the cupboard of her crackpot conspiracy theory universe.
But Euodia cannot be taken seriously by anyone who has any modicum of respect for
serious historical research. From following Euodia's blog, it is apparent that she is indeed diligently absorbing every sort of claptrap that occultists love to babble about, and she is trying to somehow discern therein the grand occultic conspiracy, underlying everything from President Bush's foreign policy to the Vatican's fecklessness in dealing with “Vatican II abuses.†But if someone were genuinely serious about proving anything about the why's and wherefore's of John Wesley life and his Methodist movement, then that person would have to do something resembling
genuine scholarly research and not mere dilettantism. For starters, one would first need to read a reputable biography of the life of John Wesley. And by “reputable†I mean that the biographer who wrote it had spent a good percentage of his life doing the work needed to uncover everything humanly knowable about John Wesley—such as reading every extant scrap of paper John Wesley ever wrote on, including every book Wesley ever published; every diary he ever kept; every letter he ever sent, as well as all the extant correspondence he ever received; all of John Wesley's extant sermon notes; and the notes that comtemporaries might had taken while listening to John Wesley preach. One would have to have cataloged what books were known to have been in John Wesley's library at various times in his life; what books he studied during his education; what books Wesley quoted from in his letters and sermons, taking note about what was cast by Wesley himself in a favorable light and what was not. One would have to have read everything that could be found written about John Wesley by others who personally knew him; what his contemporaries said about him; what the newspapers printed about him. And this is just for starters!
Next—if one were trying to prove what Euodia was saying—one would have to demonstrate that John Wesley was a member of some occultist group, or owned occultist books and frequently quoted from them in a manner showing that Wesley harkened to the ideas contained therein, and embraced them, promoted them, preached them. A person would have to show that Wesley carried on a correspondence with the occultists of his time, or visited with them, was friends with them, ate and drank with them. A person would have to show that quotes from occultist books turned up in John Wesley's sermon notes, that John Wesley preached about the threefold greatness of Hermes Trismegistes or how to transmute base metals into gold using “The Method.†And so it goes. Doing actual historical work is tough business; it involves real, eye-blurring grunt work in actual libraries and archives, scattered in different countries, work that can take years to do.
But what I am trying to say is that Euodia has done none of this. Nor does she have a properly formed concept of what constitutes a valid interpretation of historical facts. She has proven nothing, because there is simply nothing there to prove—other than maybe that Methodists are not Catholics. (Wow! What a shocking discovery!) She simply found another opportunity to shoot at Pentecostals, and poor John Wesley just happened to have wandered into her field of fire, a incidental casualty of her bigotry against Pentecostals. But poor John Wesley has departed this Earth and is no longer here to defend himself. Somehow I felt like I had to speak up for him however feebly that I can.
My defense of John Wesley is simply this:
He preached Jesus Christ and Him crucified. And many thousands repented of their sins, turned to the Lord, and learned to live holy lives.
But this fact, it's sad to say, has no weight whatsoever with Euodia. And it's very likely, since she's such an expert in the esoteric aspects of occult Methodist theology, that she will find yet another ingenious way to twist it around to mean something along the lines of “he was
really preaching The Method of gnostic numerology as elicted from the Necronomicon of the 17th Century arch-heretic Guido Sarducci of Bologna.†The only purpose facts have in her universe is they must be contorted somehow into conforming to her one obsessive idée fixe:
All charismatic Xtians are nothing but gnostic devil-worshippers.
This is why I gave up taking Euodia seriously. And besides thinking it a waste of time debating with bigots, I also think it's a fool's errand to try to reason with crackpots. Some folks have become so clever at reading between the lines that they have ceased altogether to be able to read the lines themselves.
