[Vision2020] Crusaders vs. Infidels: Moscow's Muscular Christianity

[nickgier at roadrunner.com]

Greetings:

Despite Darrell Keim's belief that enough has been said about Christ Church and NSA, their recruiting blurb is simply beyond the pale.

This is my radio commentary/column for the week and the full version is attached as a PDF file.  I direct you to my Logos School revision of West Side Story at the end.

Read everything that I've written about Pastor Wilson at www.home.roadrunner.com/~nickgier/Wilson.htm.

Nick

THE CRUSADERS VS. THE INFIDELS:MOSCOW’S MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY

A long war is a small price to pay for eternal peace.

--found on a toilet stall wall

I don’t often cruise the website of New St. Andrews College (www.nsa.edu), Moscow’s small Christian college, so the new recruiting campaign gave me quite a jolt.  The headline is “Yo, Secularism, Why Don’t We Step into the Alley?” 

The blurb describes the NSA faculty as “not timid in a rumble,” and they want to make the students “dangerous” so that they can “throw the lies of this age up against the wall, lifting wallets and the occasional gift card.” It ends with “an invitation to a brawl.”

Is NSA a Christ-centered liberal arts college or a fighting club?  If it is the latter, then its conditional use permit should be reviewed.

After the initial shock receded, my first thought was “How can they possibly recruit young women with this raw machismo”? Out of seven images (two with real tough guys) only one includes female students. 

Silly me, I forgot that some females might want to go to a college where they can meet “real” Christian men to whom they can be properly submissive. These religious brawlers would defend their honor in an alley or anywhere for that matter.  

NSA men, however, would not defend their ladies’ right to vote.  According to NSA’s founder, Douglas Wilson, misguided women might decide to cancel out their husband’s wise choices in church and political matters.  
Wilson also believes that only propertied males should vote. Deliciously ironic, however, is the fact that Wilson encourages all of this congregates at Christ Church to vote for conservative candidates.

The phrase “muscular Christianity” came out of the Victorian Age, where Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes encouraged young men to combine Christian ideals with physical conditioning. Thanks to muscular Christianity, I built up some pretty nice biceps at the local gym of the Young Men’s Christian Association, but I still ended up with the Unitarians, who of course can't fight their way out of a wet paper bag. 

NSA does have sports teams, but “pumpkin” rugby has replaced lacrosse (too feminine?), and there is a “girls” volleyball team.  Some of the senior faculty, however, look like they have not been to a gym in ages. 

In 1964 Douglas’ father Jim Wilson wrote a small book entitled "Principles of War: A Handbook on Strategic Evangelism." I once told Wilson Pere that I thought that upraised sword on the front cover of the book was rather provocative, but he just shrugged his shoulders and said that he only meant spiritual warfare. Being thrown up against a wall sounds pretty physical to me.

Has Douglas Wilson’s “Trinitarian skylarking” now turned into godly gang warfare?  An example of the former is an outrageous April Fool’s stunt. NSA students stole University of Idaho letterhead and used the English department’s FAX line to announce a feminist scholar who would lecture topless. Wilson later admitted encouraging his students to do the deed.

Douglas Wilson also established Logos School, whose K-12 students, I’m told, put on some very good plays.  I would like to propose that they do an adaptation of West Side Story.  Instead of the white working class Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks, the gangs should be renamed the Crusaders and the Infidels.  

I foresee two snags in this version of the play. Although the killing of Maria’s brother by the Jet’s Tony could go ahead, the love story between Christian Tony and non-Christian Maria would be a real stretch.  NSA men must get the permission from a potential date’s father, or from Wilson in loco parentis. Even more problematic is the fact that there can be no truce between the gangs at the end.  For Wilson and other conservative evangelicals, there will be bitter warfare until Christ comes to smite the infidels.

As a “post-millennialist” Wilson believes that there will a 1,000 year Christian theocracy with strict enforcement of biblical law until Christ deigns to appear.  I might prefer to get it over with more quickly in the “pre-millennial” Rapture.  I’ll paraphrase Milton’s Satan: I would rather fry in the Rapture and take my chances in Hell rather than serve oppressive Christian masters.

Sometime in the late 1970s, I found a saying on a toilet stall wall near my campus office.  Compared to most toilet graffiti, this one was quite sophisticated and a bit puzzling: “A long war is a small price to pay for eternal peace.” One might ask: What kind of peace is this when everyone who has not converted to your religion has been killed?

 Nick Gier taught religion and philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31 years. 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: NSARumble.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 30557 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20101130/4502fab8/attachment-0001.pdf