An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks

Source of book: I own this

 

I have enjoyed reading Oliver Sacks over the years. (See list at the bottom of the post.)

 

Sacks was a neurologist who eventually became a writer. He was that rare combination of a brilliant practicing doctor and an effective and compelling writer. 

An Anthropologist on Mars consists of seven case studies of particular people with brain issues and how they affected their lives. It was written 30 years ago, so there are some things that haven’t aged that well. Medicine has made some progress since then, and terminology has changed. This is most apparent in the two final chapters, about individuals on the autism spectrum. 

 

I mention this mostly to give some warning that Sacks’ understanding of autism at the time the book was written was less thorough than it is now. That said, because Sacks’ general approach to all the people he writes about is thoroughly empathetic and respectful, any errors are of excusable ignorance, not condescension or disrespect. 

 

As with all of Sacks’ books, he is able to include an incredible amount of science and medicine without losing the reader. His ability to explain complex neuroscience in understandable ways yet without oversimplifying, is amazing. 

 

Probably the best way to go through the book is one chapter at a time. 

 

Starting with the introduction, Sacks makes clear that this book is, more than anything, about human adaptation. 

 

For me, as a physician, nature’s richness is to be studied in the phenomena of health and disease, in the endless forms of individual adaptation by which human organisms, people, adapt and reconstruct themselves, faced with the challenges and vicissitudes of life. 

 

He also mentions G. K. Chesterton’s famous character, Father Brown, as an inspiration for his approach. Rather than looking at people from the outside as specimens, he tries to get inside them, to see life from their perspective. And that is what he does in this book. 

 

In the first chapter, Sacks looks at an artist who was in a vehicle accident that led to a stroke, and caused him to lose his color vision. Or, more accurately, the part of his brain that processes and interprets color. 

 

He retained the physical ability of his eyes to sense different wavelengths, and transmit the information to his brain. But the brain couldn’t understand color anymore, causing both a loss of all color, and significant discomfort in bright light. 

 

Sacks gets really deep into the science in each chapter, leading to a lot of fascinating passages. One that stood out in this chapter was his description of how early color film worked, and how a lot fewer colors are needed to create an entire spectrum than you would think. In fact, you can do nearly everything with just two. Why is that?

 

These demonstrations, overwhelming in their simplicity and impact, were color “illusions” in Goethe’s sense, but illusions that demonstrated a neurological truth - that colors are not “out there” in the world, nor (as classical theory held) an automatic correlate of wavelength, but, rather, are constructed by the brain.

 

We really do not know why we experience colors the way we do - it is one of the weirdest human experiences, if you think about it. Why are red, blue, and green, and the rest experienced in a vivid and, well, colored way? But many of our senses are like that. Hearing, for example - we hear frequency as pitch, and combinations as timbre and harmony. 

 

Another thing that gets mentioned is that in World War Two, people with severe red-green colorblindness were used as spotters because they saw through camouflage better than normal-sighted people. 

 

The next chapter is a truly bizarre story. “Greg,” a young man from New York City, turned hippie, embracing the Grateful Dead particularly. But he ended up rejecting the drug culture and instead joined a Krishna monastery. 

 

There, he pretty much disappeared from his family, and seemed well on his way to a particularly impressive degree of transcendendance. 

 

He was also slowly losing his vision. 

 

Eventually, his parents found him in a near catatonic state, got him medical attention, where it was discovered that a benign tumor had crushed significant parts of his brain. 

 

While the tumor was removed, much of his function never came back. 

 

A significant loss was the ability to remember things. Prior to the tumor, the memories remained intact in large part. But afterward, he couldn’t make new memories, except for his ability to learn new Grateful Dead songs, interestingly. He was perpetually stuck in the present. 

 

Sacks spent significant time with him, and details much of the experience in this chapter. 

 

One of the questions with patients with this particular damage is exactly what is there of “them” left? Is there anything deeper than the surface, the now, the moment? Sacks spent enough time to come to an interesting conclusion. 

 

Greg’s “frontal lobe” characteristics - his lightness, his quick-fire associations - were fun, but beyond this there shone through a basic decency and sensitivity and kindness. One felt that Greg, though damaged, still had a personality, an identity, a soul. 

 

This is in contrast to some other people with similar damage who became feral, unable to process normal human emotion. (The chapter discusses a number of cases, some from the previous century.) 

 

The third chapter is all about a surgeon with Tourette’s Syndrome. 

 

I am not making that up. This was a real person, living and practicing in Canada. 

 

The chapter was fascinating for many reasons, not least of which was that this man was highly skilled at surgery, which seemed to, for the duration, mask his symptoms. Similarly, he could fly his small airplane with great skill, even with certain symptoms evident. 

 

Between Sacks’ skills at communicating with people, and the highly expressive intelligence of the surgeon, there is an incredible amount of inside information in this chapter. You really do get inside the head of the surgeon - how he experiences his own brain, thought process, physical movements, and so on.

 

What I was not at all expecting was that a certain amount of this actually felt familiar. While I do not have symptoms at the level of being diagnosed with Tourette’s, some of the brain things actually resonate for me. 

 

I have always had a highly active internal conversation going on. I talk to myself, as my wife can attest. I get certain phrases that repeat in my brain. I have a few minor tics. 

 

What I don’t have is the compulsions, or the difficulty in focusing on reading. 

 

So, I am kind of curious if this is part of the nature of my own neurodivergence. 

 

I might write about that someday in another post. I have known I was neurodivergent since I was a small child, but still haven’t found any recognized description of a particular kind to fit. 

 

I know I am a divergent thinker in general. I have a highly active interior life of the mind, as I noted. I seem to see the world differently than most people. I have never cared particularly about creating an image, and don’t worry about how people see me. Thus, I don’t care about fashion, or being cool. 

 

But I don’t fit the usual categories of neurodivergence. I flirt around the edges on a few of the autism spectrum traits, such as social awkwardness, but definitely do not fit others. (In fact, reading the two chapters on autism in this book made it clear that autism does not fit me much at all. For example, I am a good multitasker, I make and keep friends normally, and I make integrated connections really well - that perhaps is one of the strengths of this blog. There are some small overlaps in traits, and I get along well with people with autism generally.) I am definitely not ADHD - I concentrate quite well, either on a single task, or on multiple tasks at once, as required. 

 

As I said, nothing really quite fits. But I am definitely some sort of neurodivergent. And some of the descriptions of experiencing one’s own brain from this chapter did resonate with me. 

 

I’ll talk a bit more about this regarding the autism chapters. 

 

Next up is another fascinating chapter, about a man whose eyesight was partially restored, but with unexpected results. 

 

Apparently, this isn’t uncommon. People who go blind at a young age often do not develop the brain connections for interpretation of what they see, and thus regaining sight can be a curse, not a blessing. 

 

I didn’t write down any quotes here, but will say that, like the first chapter, there is a remarkable amount of deep diving into the neuroscience of sight. 

 

The next chapter is about a painter, Franco Magnani, whose photographic memory of his hometown, and ability to recreate it practically stone for stone in his paintings, despite not visiting for decades, was legendary. 

 

The chapter explores the questions of memory and of obsession. Sacks theory is that Magnani experienced some form of psychic seizure, which historically has been associated with both mental illness and divine inspiration. Dostoevsky is another artist who may well have had this syndrome. 

 

Norman Geschwind spoke about the possible role of temporal lobe epilepsy in Dostoevsky’s life and writings, and by the early seventies had become convinced that a number of patients with TLE showed a peculiar intensification (but also narrowing) of emotional life, “an increased concern with philosophical, religious and cosmic matters.” 

 

That passage also triggered something in me. My mother has epilepsy, controlled by medication, but still something that affects her brain. And a certain amount of what is described above sounds a lot like the way she has changed over time. 

 

When I was young, she had a far broader intellectual life, introducing me to literature that still inspires me. Over time, however, she became intensely focused on increasingly narrow interests. Primarily “alternative medicine” pseudoscience, and the religious equivalent. I wonder if she has continued to have TLE that doesn’t manifest as physical seizures, and has been in part a cause of the changes in her. 

 

Also interesting in this regard is the way that Magnani had, as Sacks describes it, a relationship with his mother that was “a sort of pre-Oedipal, almost symbiotic intimacy and closeness.” He was her favorite child, and after her death, he seems to have transferred that to his wife Ruth. He literally couldn’t paint in the period between his mother’s death and the start of his relationship with his wife. 

 

This reminds me a bit of the thoroughly enmeshed relationship of my mother and my sister, her favorite child. They cannot function without each other. 

 

A final interesting note is this one, about the way that Magnani’s art is an idealized childhood, not the complicated reality that Magnani knows his actual childhood was.

 

But all this is edited out in his art, where a paradisiacal simplicity prevails. One finds the belief in a happy childhood “even in people who have undergone cruel experiences as children,” Schachel writes. “The myth of happy childhood takes the place of the lost memory of the actual…experience.”

 

As I have reprocessed my own childhood in light of my later rejection by my parents, I have had to look at this. After all, much of my childhood was indeed happy and good. But that doesn’t negate the bad things I experienced, the authoritarian parenting, the abusive theology, the emotional blackmail. 

 

I took a lot more notes on the final two chapters, about autism, than the others combined. One reason for this might be that autism runs strongly in my wife’s family - her dad’s side. 

 

Another might be that for some reason, I have always tended to be friends with people on the autism spectrum - in fact, I still have friends dating back to my childhood. A few years ago, I noticed that this has been a pattern my entire life. I attract people with autism somehow. And honestly, these are really good people who are a valued part of my life. (Which is one reason I am so furious at RFK Jr. and others who are dismissive and disrespectful of neurodivergent people, claiming they will never have fulfilling lives.) 

 

The two chapters explore different parts of the spectrum. The first, about prodigies, is all about people who have a singular skill and focus that goes along with deficits in other areas. The second is all about Temple Grandin, perhaps the most famous person with autism of the 1990s. And, I will say, Temple Grandin is a gas. Throughout that entire chapter, she is delightful and eccentric and fun and unexpected. Which, come to think of it, is a good description of many people with autism that I know. 

 

First, let’s start with this truth that Sacks states clearly, the truth that antivaxxers reject, the truth that far too many people who find the existence of neurodivergent people inconvenient reject. 

 

Autism, clearly, is a condition that has always existed, affecting occasional individuals in every period and culture. It has always attracted in the popular mind an amazed, fearful, or bewildered attention (and perhaps engendered mythical or archetypal figures - the alien, the changeling, the child bewitched). 

 

Yes, autism has existed since humans did. It exists in every culture, at every time in history. It is nothing new. We just understand it better. And we now understand that it is a spectrum, not a single presentation. 

 

All this talk about increasing autism rates is baloney. We previously categorized so-called “high functioning” individuals as simply eccentric, rather than understanding them to be neurodivergent, having a different brain operating system than neurotypical people. 

 

The particular focus of the chapter is on “Stephen,” a young boy with an unusual ability to draw - mostly buildings - with adult-level sophistication and detail. Stephen is also autistic. Again, Sacks shows his amazing ability to connect with people in his conversations and interaction with Stephen. It’s quite interesting to see him get into Stephen’s head effectively. 

 

Although, as I said, the book doesn’t include the last 30 years of increased knowledge, it does hint in some of the directions that things would go. For example, Sacks notes:

 

Stephen, it was clear, had a very limited ability to imagine others’ states of mind.

 

But Sacks also understands that this is not a lack of empathy at all - Stephen shows kindness, and concern for others’ pain. He just struggles to translate the full spectrum of human emotions in interactions with others. 

 

That said, Sacks also notes that individuals with autism are often impressive in their ability to learn the skills necessary. Adaptation, as he says in the introduction. The brain finds work-arounds, and things improve with age. I too have noticed this. It happens at different rates and to different degrees, and as Grandin notes, a person with autism may never feel “natural” or “comfortable” with it, but the adaptation occurs. 

 

This also raises the point that this adaptation needs to go both ways. Normies need to learn to adapt to existing with neurodivergent people as well. 

 

Another passage in this chapter is interesting. Sacks’ impressions here are based on many hours of conversation with Stephen, not just instinct. 

 

As Stephen watched all this intently, I thought of the thousands of images he must be registering, constructing - all of which he could convey in vivid pictures and vignettes, but none of them, I suspected, synthesized into any general impression in his mind. I had the feeling that the whole visible world flowed through Stephen like a river, without making sense, without being appropriated, without becoming part of him in the least. That though he might retain everything he saw, in a sense, it was retained as something external, unintegrated, never built on, connected, revised, never influencing or influenced by anything else. 

 

To be clear, this is only one way autism can manifest, and many people with autism can in fact integrate a lot better. Including Temple Grandin. But there is also a degree to which autism does sometimes seem to make sorting more difficult, or at least different. 

 

For me, the integration of everything is how I naturally think. Readers of this blog will note that I draw many associations into my posts, seeing connections where others do not. That is my particular tendency in thinking and learning, more as a connected building rather than a focused accumulation of specific facts. 

 

Finally, we reach the last chapter. The first thing I want to note is that the two early researchers on autism are mentioned quite a bit. These days, Austrian Hans Asperger has gotten most of the press, since his name was once used for “higher functioning” autism. Deservedly, his reputation has plummeted due to his collaboration with the Nazi regime during World War Two. The extent to which this collaboration went is unclear, other than that, like most people of his time and place, he went along with things rather than protest and risk his position. 

 

That said, the other guy who simultaneously came up with “autism” as the label for the syndrome, Leo Kanner, was far worse. While Asperger believed that there were positive and compensating features of autism, “a particular originality of thought and experience,” Kanner considered autism to be pure negative. 

 

Despite the negatives for both men, though, the detail of their careful work is still the gold standard for our modern understanding of autism. So, yeah, complicated. 

 

Sacks, of course, does get the causes of autism right, unlike the “alternative medicine” and antivax crowd today. 

 

It is probably mostly genetic - Sacks states that it is biological, and in many cases genetic. That’s why it can run in families. 

 

However, he does note as well that there are some rare cases of it being acquired. For example, metabolic disorders like PKU, if not treated, can lead to late development of autism. 

 

The one that I didn’t know, but that is one that really needs to be publicized is the fact that babies who are infected with Rubella (aka German Measles) are significantly more likely to develop autism. 

 

So, if that wasn’t clear enough, it is the ANTIVAXXERS themselves who will be creating preventable autism, because of their false belief that the MMR vaccine (the “R” is for Rubella) is the cause of autism. I just can’t even with people like that. And with Andrew Wakefield, who I sincerely hope will experience cosmic justice for his greedy fabrications. 

 

Next up is from a footnote, and it is one of the few areas where I have some connection to autistic traits. 

 

Authentic memories from the second (perhaps even the first) year of life, though not available to “normals,” may be recalled, with veridical detail, by autistic people.

 

While I do not have super-detailed memories from my extreme youth, I actually do have vivid, if brief, memories of specific events when I was age two, from riding in a U Haul when we moved to Montana, to a little bridge on the dirt road we lived on there, to red ants in the basement, to the installation of a wood stove and chimney. Yes, I could probably today pick out the exact sort of materials used. 

 

So I guess I am sort of like that? I definitely have earlier memories than most people I know. 

 

Here is another one that I found interesting, regarding Temple Grandin.

 

In her ingenuousness and gullibility, Temple was at first a target for all sorts of tricks and exploitations; this sort of innocence or guilelessness, arising not from moral virtue but from failure to understand dissembling and pretense (“the dirty devices of the world” in Traherne’s phrase), is almost universal among the autistic. 

 

My own experience is different - I have never been particularly gullible, and actually have a highly functional bullshit detector, something my parents do not appreciate at all. But I loathe dissembling and pretense more than anything. I despise being lied to with a boiling passion. If you want to lose me as a friend faster than anything, just lie to me. 

 

Related: I will likely never participate in organized religion again. And I will never see my parents as actual Christ-followers ever again. They lied to me about what they actually believed, and then resented me for expecting them to honor the values they taught me. I can’t forgive that. 

 

So, I guess maybe that is one reason I get on so well with friends with autism? They don’t do bullshit, which is a real positive for me. Later, Sacks describes Grandin in terms of the positives.

 

Temple’s attitudes seem similar to this: she is very aware (if only intellectually, inferentially) of what she is missing in life, but equally (and directly) aware of her strengths too - her concentration, her intensity of thought, her single-mindedness, her tenacity; her incapacity for dissembling, her directness, her honesty. She suspects - and I, too, was coming more and more to suspect - that these strengths, the positive aspects of her autism, go with the negative ones. 

 

Again, I both see myself in some of these - I think intensely, although I don’t have the single-mindedness so much. I am a lousy liar, and tend to be very direct. And these are things I appreciate in my friends with autism. 

 

I agree with Grandin very much in that she thinks that the negative traits of autism are given far too much attention, at the expense of appreciating the positive ones. I would go so far as to say that a society with autism is a far better one than that without. Which is one reason why RFK Jr. and his ilk are misguided in trying to “cure” or “eliminate” autism. Instead, all of us need to learn how to better integrate everyone into our society. 

 

She [Grandin] thinks that she and other autistic people, though they unquestionably have great problems in some areas, may have extraordinary, and socially valuable, powers in others - provided that they are allowed to be themselves, autistic.

 

I very heartily agree.

 

[Side note here: a lot of what makes it harder for people with autism to fit into our current society is that our current society rewards certain personality traits at the expense of others. For example, extroversion is rewarded, introversion is punished. And, worst of all, sociopathic liars are rewarded, while truth tellers are punished.] 

 

Another Temple Grandin trait that I can recognize in myself, although at the level she does it, is the ability to think visually. At the very basic, testable level, I am excellent at rotating objects in three dimensions in my mind. And I can visualize complex mechanical things quite well. I realize this is not the way everyone thinks or experiences life. 

 

One that I did not recognize in myself was that Grandin said that she did not experience the sense of the sublime at seeing nature. “Pretty, yes. Sublime, I don’t know.” That’s an interesting experience. I would imagine it is not a universal trait of autism, but I have known people who felt that way.

 

In contrast, Grandin does feel transcendence in matters of morality. 

 

Temple is an intensely moral creature. She has a passionate sense of right and wrong, for example, in regard to the treatment of animals; and law, for her, is clearly not just the law of the land but, in some far deeper sense, a divine or cosmic law, whose violation can have disastrous effects - seeming breakdowns in nature itself.

 

This trait too, is socially necessary, and the lack of it in certain subcultures is horrifying. I too have a strong sense of morality, something my parents have never really understood. Particularly since their view, the view that the authoritarian parenting guru charlatans instilled in them, is that morality is nothing more than unquestioning obedience to authority. That I might object to doing things their way on moral grounds, and that I might see their beliefs as immoral, remains disturbing to them. One reason we are estranged. But I was like this as a child too, having my own strong moral sense that often conflicted with their demands. I wasn’t rebellious. I just refused to subordinate my own morality to theirs. 

 

So, I guess in summary, while I don’t really fit with the traits of autism, I have some overlap in personality in ways that make me greatly appreciate the many positives of neurodivergence. 

 

The book is named after a line from Temple Grandin, who said that living among neurotypical humans felt like being an anthropologist on Mars, learning to interact with the aliens through observation and practice. 

 

Perhaps many of us, neurodivergent or not, have felt like this at one time or another. But also, like Grandin, have found our place anyway. 

 

Like all Sacks books, this one was a really fun and informative read. He really was a treasure, and his good will and thoughtfulness endure in his books. If you haven’t read him, I highly recommend it. 

***

The Oliver Sacks list:

 

Hallucinations

The Island of the Colorblind

Musicophilia

 

Heretic and False Prophet John MacArthur is Dead: Part 3 - The Curse of Ham

I plan to discuss several of John MacArthur’s heresies* in subsequent posts, but I want to start with the most obvious one:

 

His teaching of the Curse of Ham. 

 

This one alone is so egregious and obvious that it should have instantly disqualified him from the ministry, and resulted in church discipline - and excommunication if he remained unrepentant. That anyone can consider him even a Christian, let alone a credible leader after he spewed this bilge is astonishing to me. 

 

It is thoroughly unbiblical, historically ludicrous, and was a doctrine literally created to justify the enslavement and exploitation of humans based on skin color. It is literally Ku Klux Klan “theology,” unmitigatedly evil. And it has been and continues to be used to justify utter depravity. 

 

This is a line in the sand that you simply cannot cross and claim to follow Christ. 

 

***

 

I honestly am puzzled by the fact that so many consider MacArthur to have been a great Bible teacher.

 

In reality, he was not even a good Bible teacher and interpreter. In fact, he wasn’t merely not good: he was laughably bad.

 

As in embarrassingly bad.

 

No legitimate ancient literature scholar would find his work remotely convincing. 

 

I realized this over time, as I started exploring the things I was taught using sources outside of Fundamentalist Christianity. And I found that MacArthur regularly mistranslated and misdefined Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic words. He substituted his own made-up shit for actual archeological evidence.

 

And he constantly bent the text to fit his predetermined (predestined?) theological superstructure, rather than letting the text challenge the theology he was determined to fit scripture into. 

 

He took a really large hammer to put those square pegs into round holes. 

 

My theory as to his reputation is that he sounded erudite and scholarly, and he had a system that appeared to have answers to everything. I may talk about that a bit in a future post.

 

But for now, just understand that if he were on a panel with actual experts in ancient languages, ancient cultures…or even an informed Jewish rabbi, he would have been laughed off stage. He was that embarrassing. 

 

MacArthur’s teaching of the Curse of Ham is probably the most embarrassing, the most ludicrous, and the most egregious example of catastrophically bad Bible interpretation and teaching one could imagine.

 

***

 

* Heresy: 

 

I am not using the word in the sense of the “official” heresies in Christian tradition, most of which are about arcane arguments about the nature of God, and were decided by councils of dudes over a thousand years ago. 

 

Rather, I use “heresy” like we use “illogical” in real life. We rarely (if ever) mean “this violates the rules of formal syllogisms.” We mean it in the sense that it is a false argument. And I mean heresy in the sense of a false doctrine, a false teaching.

 

For purposes of this series, I will use a three-pronged test - we lawyers love those! So, I will call something a heresy if it meets all three prongs:

Unbiblical. And by this I mean that it is not supported by a historically informed, contextually reasonable interpretation of the whole of scripture. So, no proof texting, no taking stuff out of context, and no twisting something to mean what it doesn’t mean. 

 

Unhistorical. In this case, I mean that the teaching is not supported by historical church doctrine or practice. For anything Christian, this would mean that it is not in accord with early (pre-Constantine) church belief or practice.

 

For the Hebrew scriptures, this would also include interpretations which are inconsistent with the original cultural understanding and context. 

 

Harmful. If the doctrine harms people, it is suspect. Particularly if it cannot be squared with loving one’s neighbor, or caring for the marginalized. If it justifies power and abuse, well, it is probably heresy. 

 

I will add that in most of MacArthur’s heresies, the problem can also be traced directly to his view that hierarchies and injustices are God’s will; his version of religion is all about maintaining those power structures and keeping those lower down from challenging their oppression. 

 

This is 100% true in this particular case: The Curse of Ham.

 

***

 

Note: I fundamentally disagree with MacArthur and other Fundamentalists regarding a lot of things about the Bible and its interpretation. I’ll put a summary of that at the end of this post. For now, understand that I am going to mostly use MacArthur’s own assumptions in discussing the Curse of Ham, and just note where disagreements are relevant.

 

***

The Nakedness of Noah by Giovanni Bellini

Note the leering Ham in the middle, while Shem and Japheth try to cover their father.  

So what even IS the Curse of Ham? 

 

If you weren’t raised in a family or subculture where the more arcane Bible stories were taught to you, you might not even have heard of this one. It isn’t the kind of thing you tell kids in Sunday School, after all. 

 

I, for better or worse, read the bible cover to cover at a fairly young age, and have always been the sort to study and remember stuff. 

 

[Related: the worst possible thing a person can do is read the Bible in its entirety, with an open and curious mind. Doing that is what caused my deconstruction from Evangelical doctrine more than anything else.] 

 

First, let me set the context up a bit here. The story of Noah and his sons is found in the first book of the Christian version of the Hebrew Torah, Genesis. This book is the first installment of the origin myth of the ancient Kingdom of Israel. 

 

This book and the others in the Hebrew scriptures were compiled in more or less their current form in the 5th and 6th centuries BCE. Older sources were used, leaving multiple versions of some stories, factual contradictions, and other artifacts of ancient literature. 

 

Traditional belief has attributed the writing of the Torah to Moses, who, according to Jewish calculation, probably lived (if he was a real person) around 1250 BCE, or about 700 years before the Torah was compiled. 

 

This is a longer time period than from the writing of The Canterbury Tales and our own time. So even then, Moses was a really old story. This is important, so keep it in mind. 

 

But there is more than that! 

 

The story of Noah and the flood was not original. Rather, it was a retelling of a far older story. You can find a flood narrative that has a shocking number of details shared with the Noah story in The Epic of Gilgamesh. 

 

How old is that book? Well, the oldest versions date to 2400 BCE. That’s 1200 years before Moses could have existed. 

 

Those are actual established facts, not opinion. There is solid archeological evidence of everything I said above. 

 

I mention this, because this is one area I strongly disagree with MacArthur. I do not believe that Noah was a real person, or that anyone understood the story as being literally true when it was added to the Torah. The literalist approach to the story is a modern affectation - a heresy, I would argue. 

 

A good way to think about this might be to use the King Arthur stories as an example. If I were to write a version of King Arthur now, most English speakers would instantly know that I had taken a story from more than a thousand years ago that everyone was familiar with, and put my own twist on it. 

 

Literally nobody would think that I had somehow written the “real” version of the story and that mine was now definitive. 

 

I go through all of that because the importance of the story of the Curse of Ham is deeply embedded in its historical context and meaning. 

 

Okay, so let’s look at the story itself.

 

***

 

From Genesis 9 (NIV):

 

The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham and Japheth. (Ham was the father of Canaan.)  These were the three sons of Noah, and from them came the people who were scattered over the whole earth.  Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded to plant a vineyard. When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father naked and told his two brothers outside. But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father’s naked body. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father naked. When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him, he said,

“Cursed be Canaan!
    The lowest of slaves
    will he be to his brothers.”

 He also said,

“Praise be to the Lord, the God of Shem!
    May Canaan be the slave of Shem.
May God extend Japheth’s territory;
    may Japheth live in the tents of Shem,
    and may Canaan be the slave of Japheth.”

 

Okay, that’s a really weird story, right? Noah gets drunk off his ass, passes out naked. The version we get in English is a bit bowdlerized, though. It would have been understood in the original that Ham didn’t just see his dad’s dick. He did something lewd to his father, something so bad that it was a disgrace. What it was isn’t stated, and there have been plenty of arguments about it. 

 

But there are also all kinds of difficulties in the text that have been argued about for literally millennia. Why is Canaan described both as Ham’s son and as the brother of Shem and Japheth? And why was Canaan cursed for what Ham did? 

 

I will not claim to have the answers to those questions. But I can explain a bit about why this story exists. 

 

The key to that lies in who Canaan was. In the Israelite origin myth, the Children of Israel left enslavement in Egypt and returned to their promised land - the land of Canaan. 

 

The LAND OF CANAAN? 

 

Yep, it was the land the was occupied (in the myth) by the descendants of Canaan, the one who was cursed. 

 

And the Children of Israel were given the mandate to conquer, slaughter, and enslave the Canaanites. 

 

So, this story exists as a form of propaganda. 

 

Why was it okay to commit genocide and enslave people? Well, their ancestor was so bad he butt fucked his dad. 

 

See how that works?

 

That’s the story, and that’s what it meant for…thousands of years.

 

[Note: there is zero archeological evidence for the exodus, and zero evidence of the Canaanite genocide. Those stories are just myths that were used to explain the origin of Israel. In reality, it is highly probable that the Israelites and the Canaanites were the same people group. YHWH worship arose as a religious sect, and the origin myths were created to justify the religious wars that resulted.]

 

***

 

We have a story, we have an ancient meaning. There is plenty of debate around the meaning within Judaism. But none of that has anything to do with the modern teaching of the Curse of Ham. 

 

That heresy was specifically invented in modern times, no more than 500 years ago. And it was invented for a very specific purpose. 

 

John MacArthur was probably fully aware of the origin of the modern heresy and why it exists. He had every reason to know that it was not supported by the Bible itself, was not a historical teaching of the church, and was created expressly to justify evil. 

 

So why the hell did he teach it? I’ll look at that later. 

 

For now, I want to talk about the modern Curse of Ham. 

 

***

 

By the time Columbus kicked off his voyages of discovery, plunder, enslavement, and genocide, European Christianity was already running into some philosophical issues.

 

On the one hand, there was SO MUCH MONEY to be made in conquering, plundering, and enslaving people in Africa. 

 

On the other, people with consciences knew at some level that this was fully contrary to the teachings of Christ. 

 

In addition, things were rapidly changing in the broader culture. The Renaissance revived the knowledge of the Classical Era. The Protestant Reformation and the first dawning of the Enlightenment challenged authority of all kinds, and offered reason and science as alternatives.

 

This meant that a whole new set of doctrines and beliefs were needed in order to justify the greed and oppression that would prove to be lucrative beyond belief.

 

To get into all of them would be beyond the scope of this post, but I want to mention a few that came together in the Curse of Ham. 

 

First, the idea of different “races” of humans. Scientifically speaking, there is only one race: human. But if you can divide humans up into different “races,” then you can ascribe different value to each. 

 

This idea came to be widely believed, not just in religious circles, but among Europeans and their diaspora generally. Pseudoscience was enlisted to give a gloss of respectability to the idea. 

 

But make no mistake, the entire point of dividing humans into races was to justify the enslavement of one set of humans by another. 

 

The religious sorts got into the act by inventing the modern “Curse of Ham.”

 

In their telling, the story of Noah was literally true. There were only eight humans left alive after the flood (Noah, wife, sons and their wives) and these eight people populated the entire earth. 

 

Furthermore, the three sons gave birth to the three races. Shem’s descendants were the Jewish people. Ham’s descendants were black Africans. Japheth’s descendants were white Europeans.

 

And, because of the curse put on Ham (well, Canaan really, but who’s counting?), the descendants of Japheth were entitled to “extend their territory” - that is, conquer and colonize the planet - while black people were condemned to be enslaved by white people (and maybe Jewish people too?) 

 

This is, in every possible way, balderdash. 

 

Factually speaking, the idea of all humans descending from eight people less than 5000 years ago is genetically ludicrous, of course. 

 

The spread of humans is well known to have come from Africa, not the Middle East. 

 

There is zero evidence whatsoever of the three sons of Noah leading to three races of humans. 

 

And anyway, how does that account for, I don’t know, the huge proportion of humans who live in Asia and the Americas before conquest? Which son did they come from?

 

(Unsurprisingly, this has been the subject of debate among those who believe the heresy of the Curse of Ham. The most common conclusion seems to be that Shem = Jewish people, Japheth = white people, and Ham = everyone else. Because of course.)

 

So, even from a basic level of factual accuracy, this is clearly a false teaching. 

 

But let’s examine it according to my three-prong test.

 

***

 

One: Is it Biblical?

 

The Curse of Ham fails at every possible level here. 

 

In context, the story is about justifying another story, that of the Canaanite Genocide. There is nothing whatsoever in the text that indicates that it was intended by its authors to be a global permission for enslavement, let alone enslavement on the basis of skin color. 

 

Second, it is Noah who makes the curse. Literally, this is the story of a father cursing a grandson for what a son did. God isn’t even mentioned in the story - and God certainly is not the one cursing. 

 

And you know what? Who gives a flying fuck what Noah thought or said? He got drunk off his ass, and then was furious that one of his sons didn’t show respect. This is hardly the sort of stuff to make into a doctrine of human enslavement. 

 

This is the kind of misuse of scripture that MacArthur was so fond of doing. 

 

This is also an egregious example of “proof texting.” The inventors of this doctrine needed a reason to salve the consciences so they could continue to enslave and exploit other humans based on skin color, so they made this shit up to justify what they were doing. That’s straight up fucking evil. And we should say so. 

 

Two: Is it historical?

 

Again, the Curse of Ham fails at every possible level here as well. Nothing in the Jewish interpretive tradition indicates a belief that white people were entitled to enslave black people based on this story. 

 

Rather, there is a long tradition of discussion about the meaning in the context of Jewish history. I encourage the exploration of these ideas. 

 

There was also a Christian interpretive tradition, which wasn’t centered on skin color until far later. I won’t say that the use of the story to justify serfdom was a good interpretation - and identifying poor Europeans as the “sons of Ham” with the nobility as “sons of Japheth” is as genetically ludicrous as the racial interpretation. 

 

What is clear, however, is that the modern “Curse of Ham” as used to justify white skinned people enslaving black skinned people is not a traditional doctrine at all, but arose less than 500 years ago specifically as theological justification for race-based slavery. 

 

Three: Does it harm?

 

Of course it does. The very existence of the doctrine was intended to justify harm. To justify enslavement based on skin color. 

 

If you think that the enslavement of millions wasn’t harm, we clearly do not share basic beliefs about right and wrong. 

 

This doctrine continues to harm today. It is literally white supremacy, the belief that white people are better, more blessed by God, than black people. Which justifies the enslavement and oppression of black people by white people. And there is literally NO possible reason for teaching this doctrine except to justify racial inequality and injustice. 

 

I’ll also mention as a bonus here that the very history of this doctrine is evil. It is the doctrine of the Ku Klux Klan. It is the doctrine of demons. And we need to say so.

 

***

 

Teaching this doctrine should disqualify anyone from ministry. Full stop. And it should also be an inarguable proof that a person is not a follower of Christ. 

 

Let me just offer a couple of key teachings here. 

 

First, you cannot simultaneously love your neighbors and enslave and exploit them. It is completely impossible. 

 

Second, Christ clearly taught that no one can serve two masters. You cannot serve God and money. The very essence of the enslavement system was money. It was the use and exploitation of humans for profit. And it was DAMN profitable. At the start of the Civil War, the “monetary value” of enslaved humans was greater than all the non-land wealth in the United States combined. It was the single greatest “economic interest” in the entire Western Hemisphere as the Southern enslavers put it. 

 

Exploiting others for profit is wrong, and it is fully incompatible with Christ following. 

 

We need to be honest and say this. 

 

One of my frustrations, starting in childhood, with purported Christians, including my parents, was their refusal to give a satisfactory answer to whether enslavers could be good Christians or not. 

 

I have always believed - always, even as a small child - that the answer has always been no. You cannot. 

 

But because white Evangelicalism is descended from Slaveholder Theology - especially Robert Lewis Dabney’s teachings - Evangelicals struggle to get this basic moral question right. In part because that leads to the conclusion that a lot of people who claimed the name of Christ were liars and not actual Christians. 

 

There is another reason too: if we admit that slavery was always wrong and always incompatible with Christ following, then we have to consider that segregation was always wrong and always incompatible with Christ following, and even consider that our current systemic injustice and racial inequality is in fact wrong, and that Christ followers will work to bring justice and equality. 

 

And that, to people like John MacArthur, is unthinkable. (I hope to discuss that in a future installment.) 

 

Because MacArthur believed that inequality and injustice (in his favor, of course!) was God’s will, he found this heresy an easy way to justify his own evil. 

 

There is no good reason to promote the Curse of Ham. It is unbiblical, unhistorical, factually ludicrous, harmful to people of color, and deeply rooted in America’s national sin of white supremacy and exploitation of brown bodies. 

 

This alone makes MacArthur a heretic, a false prophet, and an evil man.

 

Anyone praising him should be ashamed of themselves. 

 

***

 

A quick summary of how I disagree with MacArthur and other Fundamentalists regarding the Bible:

 

One: I believe “inerrancy” is a fatal category error, that only arises out of a misconception about what the Bible is. This error is only possible if you believe that God literally wrote the Bible. 

 

MacArthur believed in “verbal plenary inspiration,” which is a fancy way of saying that he believes God wrote every single word of the Bible. Humans were mere meat widgets - flesh robots taking dictation. 

 

This belief is problematic in so many ways. 

 

If God did indeed write every word of the Bible, then he sure was a terrible author. I mean, the thing is full of contradictions, right from the start where there are two different creation myths, with disagreements about the order of creation and the days on which they happened. Maybe God needed an editor?

 

But worse than the factual contradictions are the theological contradictions. There are mutually incompatible viewpoints, which sure look like arguments between different writers, not God struggling to decide what his position is. 

 

There are also numerous factual errors in the Bible, from basic science to medicine to history to even basic math grade schoolers learn like the value of pi. 

 

Looked at objectively, what the Bible actually IS, is a collection of human-written books, written and collected over centuries, with many different writers writing in different times, places, cultures, and situations. They have different perspectives as they attempt to understand live, morality, and connection to the Divine. 

 

That’s actually quite beautiful, and understanding that is the reason I am able to love the Bible today, despite its many human flaws. 

 

(I cannot recommend enough Dr. Christine Hayes’ excellent free online Yale course on the Hebrew scriptures. I learned so much from them. And also really realized what an embarrassing hack MacArthur was by comparison.) 

 

Once you realize what the Bible actually IS, then the whole idea of “inerrancy” is revealed as a ludicrous category error, akin to claiming that a Beethoven symphony or a Rembrandt painting is “inerrant.” 

 

Two: I do not believe the Bible was ever intended to be either God’s Little Instruction Book™ or a book of systematic theology. 

 

This is related to the above. The evidence is overwhelming that there were many writers, many perspectives, and multiple theological viewpoints involved in the creation of the Bible. 

 

Even the councils that selected the books of the New Testament were clear that the criterion for inclusion was whether the book was helpful in Christian practice and experience, not a belief that a book was literally written by God or some sort of inerrant truth. 

 

As far as that goes, the proof-text for inerrancy itself doesn’t claim what Evangelicals think it claims. (And, for that matter, I Timothy, among other books, was almost certainly a forgery - written much later than Saint Paul’s life.) The claim - which applies only to the Hebrew Scriptures, because the New Testament didn’t yet exist - says the scriptures are “profitable.” That’s not the same as “inerrant” or “an instruction book.” 

 

What the Bible actually is, is a record of what devout men (and unfortunately, probably only men, not women) at particular times and places thought about God and morality and meaning. And also about the history of a particular nation in antiquity. 

 

That’s not a bad thing. But taking it as the literal words of God is a stretch. The evidence is to the contrary. It’s a deeply human book. And that’s okay! 

 

Third: I do not believe that God only spoke to a small number of people in a particular place for a limited time in history. I believe in a far bigger God than that, one who has always spoken to all people in all times and places. 

 

That old poem, The Blind Man and the Elephant is a great picture of the greater truth, which one of the writers of the Bible described as “seeing through a glass, dimly.” 

 

I also, unlike MacArthur, believe that God didn’t cease to speak to humankind once the books of the New Testament were selected. 

 

Of course, MacArthur didn’t really believe this. Because he believed that God gave white males like him the right to say what the meaning of the closed canon is. God just stopped speaking to the plebes, to say nothing of women or people of color. 

 

Fourth: I believe in a different framework for interpretation of scripture and formulation of moral and theological belief. 

 

There are some different versions of this, but I use a modified Wesleyan Quadrilateral. There are four points to this: scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. These all work together, and all are necessary. That said, as Richard Rohr pointed out in one of my favorite podcasts of all time, ultimately experience is what steers everything. If experience proves that something isn’t working, that it is causing harm, that it fails to match reality, then it is the theology that has to give. By definition, harmful theology is wrong theology. 

 

Which is why for me, the idea of approaching the question of “is slavery moral?” by reading the Bible to be silly. And certainly not by looking for a story - any story - that can be twisted to justify enslavement, which is how the modern Curse of Ham came to be. 

 

Rather, the experience of the enslaved persons is the place to start. If they are being harmed, then enslavement is wrong, full stop. 

 

This can be applied to so much else, but that is beyond the scope of this already far too long post. 

 

(For further reading, I wrote about why I believe there is no such thing as a One True Interpretation.)

 

Stay tuned for more. 

 

***

A final, personal note: one of my kids had the misfortune of taking a history class at our local community college from Daymon Johnson. I believe he is TradCath, but he is also a leader in an ultra-right-wing group of professors who have made it their business to antagonize everyone else, from other professors trying to do their jobs, to students who aren't white, male, straight, and right wing. 

 During that class, among other things, he repeatedly threw the Sieg Heil (the Hitler salute) and openly claimed white people were superior. 

 And, he used the Curse of Ham to explain why it was fine to enslave black people. Understandably, he was unable to keep black students from dropping his class. In a better world than we have, his racist ass would have been fired long ago. I can't make that happen, but I want to do my part to expose him for the evil man he is.  

Heretic and False Prophet John MacArthur is dead: Part 2 - My Childhood and Grace Community Church

My family attended Grace* Community Church in Panorama City when I was aged 3 through 10 or so. Those are my first church memories, and I can still recall sights, sounds, smells, and even textures from those days. I hope to talk about that in one of the installments. 

 

My dad in particular was heavily into MacArthur during my childhood years (my mom was more into James Dobson); and, while it took me a long time to come to an understanding of this, MacArthur and his false teachings lie at the core of how my dad went wrong. I recommend reading my post on how my parents changed for the worse over the last few decades. 

 

Not all poisons work immediately. Many accumulate over the years until they cause cancer. In this case, MacArthur’s teachings slowly poisoned my parents until they developed cancer of the soul. 

 

Let me back up just a little bit further to explain a bit about my childhood. My dad went through two crises of faith when I was a kid. The first was when I was 3 years old, and I don’t really remember much about it - I heard a lot about it later. The second was when I was in my teens. 

 

Unfortunately, both crises led my dad to embrace an increasingly toxic religion that negatively impacted me and our relationship. 

 

In the first crisis, he had been (as he describes it) running from God. Then God burned down a lumber mill, causing my dad to lose his job. And then sent a snow storm to chase us from Montana back to California, ala the Angel at the gates of Eden. Yeah, pretty dramatic story. 

 

But where did we end up? Well, in MacArthur’s church. With its emphasis on gender roles, culture wars, and barely disguised racism. And with a renewed commitment to corporal punishment and the breaking of the children’s wills. Particularly mine. 

 

(I was the oldest, so I got most of the pressure anyway. But also, my parents projected their own childhood trauma from their fathers onto me as a fellow first born male. And, I was and continue to be strongly resistant to having my will broken. Their attempts just made me angry and hurt and frustrated. That will I hope be a future post: I wasn’t rebellious, I just had a strong sense of self and justice. Still do.) 

 

For the second crisis, my parents explored some other branches of Christianity. We attended a Catholic charismatic group a few times, we tried some churches outside of the MacArthur/Master’s Seminary tree for the first time, and we explored the Charismatic expression of the faith in a few churches in my teens. 

 

But, ultimately, were my parents landed, the theology that would linger like a dead woodchuck in their lives until the present, was that of Bill Gothard. Which, guess what? Had an even greater emphasis on gender roles, culture wars, and not-even-disguised racism. And new tools for breaking the will of a teenager. Particularly mine. 

 

It’s as if the “spiritual crisis” wasn’t so much about God or faith at all, but an existential crisis of manhood. Which would, unsurprisingly but sadly, be “fixed” by finding a theology of white male supremacy, and express itself in ever more dramatic attempts to control the eldest child. 

 

So, we ended up at Grace* Community Church, not too far from where I grew up. I still have a lot of memories there. 

 

[Note: apparently, I have an unusual degree of memory of my childhood. I mean, I kind of remember being in a crib - more the taste, smell, and texture than anything. My first true full memories are from age 2, when we moved to Montana. I specifically remember riding in the U Haul, and vomiting after drinking an orange soda too fast. I still can’t drink orange soda. From that time on, I have various vivid and detailed memories, including some conversations.] 

 

My first church memories are all from this church. And, I will admit, most of them are happy. As a child, you miss a lot of the underlying drama, of course. And, as I have found in most institutions, the people are often better than their theology. As cruel as MacArthur’s Calvinism is, most people didn’t actually act on those beliefs.

 

And also, as I have come to understand as a middle-aged adult, just because there are happy memories doesn’t mean that there wasn’t abuse. Most of a marriage, and most of a childhood, can be good, happy, and loving; and yet there can be moments of fear, trauma, and abuse mixed in. This was, I realize now, the truth about my own, mostly happy childhood. Just because it was better than many kids get and had a lot of good in it doesn’t mean that the abuse I also experienced wasn’t abuse. 

 

So, back to my experiences. 

 

I’ll also mention that my only “normal” school experience was there. I attended the Grace Community private school for my kindergarten and first grade years. Well, at least some of those years. I was sick so much and missing so much school that the principal actually recommended that I be homeschooled - something that my parents had never heard of back then. I was one of the first in the movement. 

 

My kindergarten teacher - Mrs. Swedberg if I recall (I told you my memory was interesting…) pretty much didn’t know I existed. I could fake naps like a pro - I only confessed I didn’t sleep later to my parents. And anyway, I was and am fully capable of entertaining myself while lying still and quiet - I have a constant inner conversation with myself. 

 

What she also didn’t know was that I could read. I insisted my mom teach me to read at age 4. And I learned, although I frustrated her with my tendency to memorize whole words rather than stick with phonics. So, while my teacher would report that I was learning my letters nicely, I was reading the teacher instructions in the textbook. 

 

First grade was Miss Benedict, who was going to change her name when she got married the next summer. That was the year I was sick so much I left before the end of the semester. 

 

I can still point out which classrooms I was in, and I bet I could give a damn good tour of the church campus. As I mentioned, I can still recall smells there. 

 

I was in Sunday School at that church as early as I can remember. And, since this was one of the OG megachurches, classes were big. For the most part, I felt anonymous. I was a quiet, unobtrusive kid. I never misbehaved, so I didn’t draw attention. 

 

Eventually, that changed. Not the behavior, but being overlooked. I was a smart kid, and while introverted, I was pretty confident. Eventually, teachers started noticing that I knew all the right answers. 

 

Sunday School was one thing, but where I really found a place was in the evening programs. (Again, megachurch, so huge resources, slick programs for kids, seamless organization. It was quite the system.) 

 

The two programs I remember the most were Search (Sunday night) and AWANA (Wednesday night. And I really enjoyed them. They were calculated to be fun, of course. But more than that, there were a lot of really good, well-meaning people working with the kids. I think this is the case at most churches, large and small. With the exception of the pedophiles (who are attracted to churches as the perfect place to find victims), people who volunteer their time for religious causes are generally generous, well-meaning people. Yes, there are exceptions, but most have good intentions. 

 

I still remember a number of people who were positives in my life at the time. I have lost track of all of them, although some remained in contact with my family for some years afterward. And I want them to know (they will know who they are, but I also talked about them on this blog years ago) that I still value their contributions to my life. 

 

Some of them have passed on, most I haven’t seen since I was a child. A few are still part of my life, and are the same decent people I remember. Alas, a few of those names went full Trump and/or white supremacist in later years, victims of the same toxic theology that poisoned my parents. 

 

I came into my own in these programs because they rewarded kids like me. (I feel bad for the kids whose personalities and skill sets didn’t fit as well.) 

 

My ability to memorize and my self-confidence meant that I was a Bible Quiz superstar. Along with a pair of other boys my age (everything was gender segregated for AWANA at Grace), we dominated the Bible Quiz competitions with area churches for the years we were there.  

 

I mention this not to brag, but to make it clear that I was one of the “good” kids. I was all in on religion, fully committed to doing right, following Jesus, all that. And I was recognized as such. 

 

One thing I have noticed is that many of us who have deconstructed from Evangelicalism were the most committed, the most knowledgeable, the most devout. We are disproportionately represented in the exvangelical community. 

 

Why is it that the most committed, knowledgeable, and devout kids of my generation have turned into disillusioned adults at such high rates? 

 

I believe it is because we actually believed. We really thought church was all about following Jesus. That it was all about loving your neighbor. That it was all about healing and caring and love and peace and goodness. We thought the Fruit of the Spirit mattered. 

 

And we found out that it didn’t. That church to people like MacArthur was all about exerting power over other people, being mean-spirited and cruel to those outside the tribe, and ultimately bringing back White Supremacy, Misogyny, and hate in the form of their new Messiah, Donald Trump. 

 

Gag. 

 

Before I end this installment, I want to talk a bit about my parents again. 

 

My dad for years had boxes and boxes of MacArthur’s sermons on cassette tape. And he listened to them regularly. I can still hear in my head the rise and fall of MacArthur's voice - the way he built to a crescendo before hammering home his point. Up and down, up and down. For an hour a sermon. 

 

And man, even then, he sure was an arrogant son-of-a-bastard. You could tell in his voice. 

 

It was during these years that I was first introduced to the toxic doctrines. 

 

I remember crying when I first understood what Penal Substitutionary Atonement was. My parents probably thought I was crying over how awful my sin was. 

 

I wasn’t.

 

I was crying because if that brutal violence was the nature of the universe, I wasn’t sure I could bear living in it. If God was really that cruel, how could humans be any better? 

 

I was steeped in the doctrine of female subordination, and it took me years to deprogram. That process started in high school, but it really was experiencing competent women outside my family that made me realize the whole idea was horseshit on a stick. 

 

When I married my wife, I was determined to have an egalitarian relationship, not some hierarchical nonsense of “male leader because he has a penis” and “submissive female child-wife who can’t be a full adult.” 

 

I also heard about the “curse of Ham” (stay tuned) at that time, although my parents rejected the idea of race-based slavery at least back then. (I’m not entirely sure these days, given some of the things my dad has said about black people in the last decade.) 

 

But probably the most personal experience I had of MacArthur’s teaching was the use of physical violence to break the will of a child. I’m not going to get into all of what went down during my childhood other than to say that it went well beyond spanking. And also that it was directed primarily at me. (And never at my younger sister, who was the favorite child.) 

 

I have changed my mind about corporal punishment, and deeply regret I used it on my own kids. Sorry, guys, I wish I had done better. I really do. 

 

But, in my opinion and experience, it wasn’t the means of discipline that was the primary abuse. It was the whole goal: to break my will. I wrote extensively about that here.

 

This toxic teaching continues to reverberate in our family today, even as I rapidly approach age 50. There is still the expectation of obedience without backtalk, and not just from me, but from my wife and kids. 

 

Again, I will borrow and paraphrase from Mark Wingfield of Baptist News Global: 

 

MacArthur influenced [parents] across evangelical Christianity and taught them to be mean-spirited, divisive, judgmental and absolutely certain [they] alone held God’s truth. 

 

That is ultimately my experience of what MacArthur (and Dobson, and Gothard) did to my parents. He made them unshakably convinced that they alone hold God’s truth, and when they tell me and my family how to live, they are speaking the very words of Almighty God. 

 

That, combined with the mandate to use whatever means necessary - violence, psychological abuse, and eventually estrangement - to force me to believe and live the way they do - is why we have no relationship today and why I still have a lot of trauma to work through. 

 

I hope this post illuminates a bit of why I have had so many emotions regarding the death of John MacArthur.

 

So much of my childhood memories of church, religion, and community are located there. On the one hand, I had good experiences and got my start in being a spiritual and empathetic human. On the other, the betrayal was all the greater when I realized that those things didn’t matter, and that the real belief system was based on white supremacy, male supremacy, and power to be wielded at the expense of the vulnerable. 

 

I’ll get more into the specifics of that in future installments. 

 

This post also explains, I hope, just how much of a malign influence MacArthur was on my parents, and how he taught them to do abusive things that eventually led to the breakdown of our relationship.

 

***

 

* Grace: “Grace” in Christianese is an example of George Orwell’s Newspeak. As the philosopher Inigo Montoya said, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” If you see “Grace” in a church name or on their website, run like hell. It is a social signal that the church is Fundamentalist in outlook, particularly when it comes to the Culture Wars™. If the word “sovereign” is in there too, that is a signal that the church is hard-core Calvinist, with all the cruelty and hate that implies.