WHAT?!

Like a lot of people, I initially reacted with puzzlement to a line from a prayer by President Trump's spiritual advisor which a liberal critic of the Religious Right, Paula White, made the centerpiece of a viral tweet.

Here is a link to the original tweet, so that you can listen to more of Paula White's wild and woolly and crazy-sounding and quintessentially Pentecostal homiletical prayer from which Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons lifted the sentence "We command all satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now" completely out of context.

I originally posted this screenshot without comment. It seemed to me to be so strange that no comment was necessary But I try to be as fair as possible to Mr. Trump and his supporters and to admit it when I am wrong. You know. Like the President doesn't. Ever.

But the fact is that like a lot of people, I took the bait and assumed that because the line was odd when taken out of context it made no sense at the time. But as bizarre as this rant and the rhetoric it employs may seem to those of us who are not Pentecostals, White was using a metaphor here. It was an incredibly lurid but contextually coherent metaphor that was part of a sermon of a kind which typically comes off as strange to outsiders, and especially outsiders determined to make Pentecostals look crazy.

She was actually using a biblical metaphor, referring to evil plans "conceived" by bad people and praying that they miscarry. The sermon is given in what amounts to another theological "language," a highly metaphorical one indulged in on such occasions by plenty of non-crazy people who "get" what Graves-Fitzsimmons and the rest of us don't.

The fact that there are elements of the Christian Church in the United States whose preaching style seems odd to most of us doesn't change the fact that the secular media are always on the lookout for ways in which to make conservative Christians look crazy. It's not infrequent that statements that are perfectly reasonable when they are taken in context and translated into less flamboyant language seem odd when quoted in isolation for the specific purpose of mocking those who make them. If you doubt that, just look up the uncomprehending mockery to which Vice-President Pence's Pentecostal faith, which includes a belief that God often communicates with believers directly, has been put since he took office. It isn't only psychotics who believe that God talks to them. In fact, there are very few Christians who do not believe that He communicates with us through Scripture, if in no other way.

Sometimes, the religious bigotry of those who pose as champions of inclusiveness and tolerance is downright embarrassing. And sometimes people who are unfamiliar with the beliefs of others are simply taken aback by what they don't understand. On one hand, people (myself included) shouldn't be as quick as we sometimes are to assume that something we fail to comprehend is necessarily incomprehensible. That's especially true because there are so many people who understand very little about conservative Christianity of any kind, and who would be just as happy to mock the faith of Missouri Synod Lutherans or Orthodox Presbyterians if the opportunity arose as they are to make fun of Pentecostals.

So mea culpa, as our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters would say. There is plenty about Paula White's theology that should raise the eyebrows of reasonable Christians, too. But lurid metaphors are the least of her problems. She is, after all, the spiritual advisor of Donald Trump.

ADDENDUM: Here's an article from the conservative Washington Examiner (!) on the incident. White's bizarre conviction that God commands us to support Donald Trump bothers me a heck of a lot more than her lurid metaphors. But yeah. It would be nice is she- and Pentecostals generally-  would use language that makes them sound a little less nutty. It makes the work of those who want to make conservative Christians look crazy a little too easy.