See the film that turned the whole world stupid

By Dan Brooks in Church People 3 Comments

By now have you heard about the wave of asshole behavior sparked by The Innocence of Muslims, a fourteen-minute quote-unquote trailer for a movie that probably does not exist but nonetheless insults the one true religion. In Egypt, Libya and now Yemen—so all the best countries, really—the film sparked violent protests and attacks on US consulates. In the back seat of his solid gold train, it revealed a glitch in Mitt Romney’s programming that causes him to ignore the arrow of time. Then everyone went nuts, including a suspiciously large number of anonymous Republicans. Amid all this meshugas, though, the American press has forgotten to ask the one question that’s really important about The Innocence of Muslims: is it any good?

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Liberty Institute, Fox News alert us to anti-Christian prejudice

By Dan Brooks in Church People 4 Comments

Probably your neighbor or the president or something.

The Family Research Council and the Liberty Institute—which, as you can see from their names, are wonderful organizations that anyone would agree with—have released their Survey of Religious Hostility in America. The good news is that Christianity has not been stamped out entirely; a small pocket of Americans continue to profess the faith, clinging to existence at a mere 80% of the US population. They are brave, and they are threatened. As Fox News helpfully explains:

The [report] highlighted more than 600 examples illustrating what it characterized as religious animosity shown by judges, government bureaucrats, schools and secular groups. From ObamaCare mandates that force religious entities to pay for contraception, to children being punished for uttering prayers in school, the report’s findings shocked even those who commissioned it.

Props to Ben al-Fowlkes for the link and, to a lesser extent, yesterday’s hangover. Prophetic words of Tony Perkins after the jump.

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Bristol Palin willing to dance with gay man

By Dan Brooks in Church People, Uncategorized 7 Comments

Dancing With the Stars and Bristol Palin

I want to start by saying it is grotesquely wonderful that America’s least deserving national figure has a daughter who is famous, too. Bristol Palin got pregnant during her mother’s run for the vice-presidency. Now she is a spokeswoman for teen abstinence, star of a reality show about herself, and a returning contestant on Dancing With the Stars. In other words, she is utterly irrelevant to a decent person’s life in America. Don’t think for a second that Bristol Palin is important. Yet although she is insignificant herself, she is instructive as an example of her species—like a termite. On Monday, she published this terrifyingly Orwellian argument on her blog which she apparently has. I think you’ll find its central theme gross and immediately recognizable, also like a termite.

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There sure are a lot of black people in this video

By Dan Brooks in Church People 1 Comment

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHb4gs1hwck

Monster metal props to Ben Gabriel for the link. For my money, this sort of video is where the mash-up culture of the internet most closely approaches art. You’ve got your juxtaposition of disparate elements—Slayer’s “Angel of Death” and footage from a bunch of Pentecostal churches where, presumably, they would not like Slayer—that evokes how sparate those elements really are. This sudden recognition of congruence is called beauty, or maybe just humor. I think this video is funny. The kid who goes hopping across the shot at :48—maybe not with total sincerity—is funny. The open headbanging at 2:25 is funny. The inadvertent lip synch at 2:53 is funny. And as skeptical and probably anti-religious as the tone is, it’s also a celebration of raw human energy, which is funny. My praise of this video would be unqualified, were I not so relieved every time a white person appeared onscreen.

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Know your theocrats: Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba

By Dan Brooks in Church People 6 Comments

IJT student activists welcome progressive politician and former cricket star Imran Khan to Punjab University.

Those of us who attended the University of Iowa might remember the terrifyingly-named Campus Crusade for Christ, a Christian student group devoted largely to making t-shirts and organizing church retreats where, it can be presumed, absolutely no one got handjobs. In America, our campus religious groups are pretty harmless, and still we find them vaguely inappropriate. In Pakistan, their campus religious groups beat people with bicycle chains, and they are allowed to run the teacher’s union. That’s the news from this LA Times report on Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba, who slapped a male philosophy student at Punjab University for talking to a female student. After the philosophy department organized a protest, the IJT responded by attacking their dormitory in the middle of the night. Then nothing happened because, as the principal of Punjab university put it, the IJT runs “a parallel administration.”

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