this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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chapotraphouse
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Strap in folks because I know the lore here.
tl;dr this article is doing fan-fiction ala CS Lewis on a hyper-calvinist, misogynist evangelical site so it's both worse than you thought and also just insider nerd shit
CW misogyny
Desiring God was founded by John Piper, a evangelical hyper Calvinist, and he was one of a few big names who really got really big in the 90s and 00s. He was first famous for "Christian Hedonism" which is his youth minister term for the tagline: "God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him." You'll not be surprised to learn this is a consequentialist ethic, influenced by Rand.
Piper and others were influential in keeping evangelicalism hyper-masculine. He helped craft an evangelical statement on "biblical manhood and womanhood" describing how wives are subordinate to husbands. This was happening, by the way, because people were fighting against the Southern Baptist Convention's fundamentalist takeover which had, at this point, married into the Moral Majority for power which itself was a reaction to the fundamentalist-modernist controversy in the early 20th century. The political power, the hyper Calvinist stance, and the hyper-masculine positions came to describe most "New Calvinists" at the time. Piper had hilarious takes such as "well, it's okay to vote for McCain/Palin because Palin is VP not Pres." He was, as all evangelicals are, obsessed with sex and purity culture and said absolutely insane things about sex and women generally: "Knowing God produces holy sex" " Down by the river the teenagers would go to make out. I watched them drive back. They never looked happy. Especially she." Link, further CW: SA, misogyny
Piper's brand is that he is the more academic of the freaks, so his company Desiring God tends to publish poorly written academic-ese. This article is one of them: "This is the second of two letters on the demonic distortion of the virtue of compassion. Read the first titled “Killing Them Softly: Compassion That Warms Satan’s Heart.” I made it past the second paragraph before getting bored. The guest author here has a book out on, you guessed it, the evils of porn. He's clearing doing The Screwtape Letters bit from CS Lewis because evangelicals love him, but it sucks
I “love” the dumbasses who act like Lewis was a theologian. Even Tolkien dunked on his ass for writing shitty/lazy allegory.
he literally yelled at Lewis for including fauns, Santa Claus, and Jesus in the same story and then kept talking shit about it in his letters lmao
I’m firmly convinced that the inklings would have been better off without Lewis. Easily the worst writer of the bunch. Which says a lot given Chesterton was a member. The OG Reddit fedora wearer.
I really wonder what that relationship was like. Even though LotR is a bit problematic w/r/t racism… there is no denying that Tolkien was a world-historic writing talent. Humans will be reading LotR 2,000 years from now.
And then you have Lewis, who at best can write some pretty prose but is dogshit at everything else. I mean, Tolkien went out of his way to say how much he hated allegory, and then Lewis writes just about the most ham-fisted allegory you can imagine.
I’ve actually been told by British Christians that they don’t think too much of Lewis, and that his following is mostly Americans, idk.
The tragedy of pre-internet days. The guy in your social circle who shares your fixations and you can finally have a conversation about the stuff you're passionate about, but also he's annoying.
I liked Narnia sure the allegory was obvious but it also was a good story with interesting characters and fun fantasy concepts like giants with regular bodies and massive legs, aristocrats who have a word that can destroy the world using it in a stupid argument, at one point there is a bell with a sign do not ring but if you don't ring won't you wonder what it did
Yeah they're fun books for sure. You don't have to reach the incredible heights of LotR to write something worth reading
interestingly enough this is almost exactly what the ranters believed