Christianity Yesterday
In 2015, Christianity Today, a magazine with a readership in the hundreds of thousands, published a cover with an epithet used to denigrate military veterans. Its use was done without prior knowledge or informed consent. Furthermore, the cover applauded the efforts of a civilian theologian while erasing the work of veterans, as evidenced by the subtitle;
WAR TORN: How a Psychiatrist - and the Church - are Deploying Hope to Soul Scarred Veterans
Their blunder was so bad that the other student veterans demanded their images and names be removed from the article. As the newly minted cover boy for PTSD, the face Christians would henceforth associate with a mental disorder, I didn’t have the same luxury. As a kind of compensation prize, I was commissioned to curate a (paywalled) series on the experience of soldiers, which became “Ponder Christian Soldiers.”
When the series was named The Best Article Series of 2016 by the Evangelical Press Association, nobody at Christianity Today informed the veterans involved.
Whatever, veterans can take a lot of abuse, amiright? All that was fine until mid 2018, when I learned Christianity Today was (still) using the cover on their website’s paywall to solicit subscriptions on all articles from the same issue.
I asked them to change or remove the image, reminding them I never signed over rights to generate revenue off my likeness. They declined, behind an attorney. So I created and distributed these mock covers on social media, making clear the troubled heritage Christians have in thinking they have everything to teach the least of us and nothing to learn. The paywall was changed a few months later, as if by magic… 🤷 Enjoy!
HYSTERICAL: How a Doctor - and the Church - are Taming the Tempests
Louise Augustine Gleizes was molested at ten during a stay in a religious boarding school, and raped by her mother’s boyfriend at thirteen. She was committed to a French insane asylum a year later, where a renowned neurologist visited her to take this and other photographs.
The images were used to support his research into "hysteria,” which remained a diagnosis the US until the 1950s. The pictures were taken under hypnosis, without Louise’s informed consent, & she was moved to solitary confinement after she began to refuse. She escaped in 1880.
SAVAGE: How a Missionary - and the Church - are Civilizing the Wild Frontier
White Man Runs Him enlisted in the Army & ended up in the infamous 7th US Cavalry until briefly prior to its last stand. He & other Crow scouts spotted a large Sioux/Cheyenne force but were relieved when they removed their uniform to dress traditionally, anticipating death.
His renowned commander, whose 1874 memoir referred often to “savages," planned to take noncombatants hostage to force Sioux & Cheyenne tribes to relocate. White Man Runs Him later suffered the same fate at the hands of the country he served, a nation sure in its own Christianity.
WELFARE QUEEN: How a Social Worker - and the Church - are Raising Families Out of Poverty
A woman identifying as Linda Taylor was found guilty of welfare fraud after being deployed as a scapegoat by Republicans in the 1976 presidential election. Ronald Reagan made a habit of mentioning the “woman from Chicago” to show how social programs were being exploited.
Taylor was no saint, and welfare fraud wasn’t the only crime she was likely to have committed. Although one sinner shouldn't define a whole community, America visited the iniquities of the mother on generations that followed anyway, and “Welfare Queen” became a racial epithet.
