A seeming deliberate wrongness on James Talarico's belief system within larger America

Fresh off throwing secularists at least halfway under the bus and not looking very deeply at the roots of Hanukkah in a piece at the Observer last December, which I eviscerated, Texas Christian University professor David Brockman now writes that Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico is firmly within Presbyterian tradition.

And, let's get to the headline now in this expanded and sharpened version of my piece from my main site.

I can only, in terms of personal honesty, assume that Brockman's misframings, in making that above statement, are deliberate and willful, given his professional background. If not, and he's actually uninformed on the information I'm about to present, he has no business teaching at TCU. 

The first big fail is pretending that the Presbyterian Church USA is the only Presbyterian denomination in the United States, or such is how he leaves himself open to being seen as. Wrong. The PCUSA is the biggest, but even with setting aside splinter groups, it's far from the only one. Wiki has the details. It list the PCUSA at 1,045,000 members. The conservative Presbyterian Church in America, which split off from the southern half of the predecessor to the PCUSA, is at 400,000, or 40 percent of its size. Yet another split off the PCUSA, the ECO, has 125,000 members. The Evangelical Presbyterian Church split off the Northern Presbyterian predecessor to the PCUSA back in the 1980s and also is at 125K.

OK, adding up the three main conservative groups and you're at 650,000, or 65 percent of the PCUSA. So, we've got a fail by Brockman right there. Or a lie by hand-waving. That's right, Prof. Brockman.

Now, the big differences, per this site which does not list the ECO, but does have a 1930s splitoff from the northern Presbyterians, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

PCA is men-only pastors; ECO and EPC, that's an adiaphoron. All three non-PCUSA at the link believe in an inerrant bible. Homosexual acts are a sin. I'll presume the ECO has the same stances. Again, this is held by assorted Presbyterian groups 65 percent the size of Talarico's PCUSA.

Brockman claims Talarico is also within the mainline Protestant tradition. Wrong. While conservative Lutherans may not add up to 65 percent of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, they break 50 percent. Actually, they break 75 percent; I didn't realize, per Wiki, that ELCA membership has cratered in the last decade or so. (It's 55 percent, per Pew, if you talk about people who "affiliate with" the different wings.) The United Methodist Church, now entering the schism world, lost 25 percent of its US churches after its 2024 general conference.

It remains an open question as to whether the fundagelical or the librul branches of traditional mainline Protestant denominations are losing members faster, but neither one is making new adherents, whether formal members or even "affiliated with." That would be a modern version of "God-fearers" or something.

Brockman also is lying by omission in another way.

He nowhere discusses Talarico's claim that the Annunciation in Luke is about being pro-choice, which I have noted elsewhere is bullshit. Beyond political pandering, since abortion is not really discussed in either the Tanakh or the He Kaine Diatheke, it's theological pandering to boot.

Speaking of? 

The three non-PCUSA churches in my link, and I will venture the ECO as well, all consider abortion wrong.

Finally, near the top, Brockman talks about "MAGA Christians." Not all conservative Christians, Protestant or Catholic (strangely missing from Brockman's piece) are enamored of Donald Trump. Within Christianity, both political liberals and conservatives at times politicize their beliefs. 

Indeed, Brockman himself wrote a piece in 2018 about two North Texas evangelical pastors who are part of a movement breaking with MAGAts on immigration. 

Interestingly, per the "mush god" stereotype of librul Protestantism, he's a very easy grader and prof in general, per Rate MyProfessors. 

Look, Prof. Brockman, if you want to just say you're "chill" with Talarico from your personal religious perspective (he was at SMU before TCU, and says in one piece that he's "high church Episcopalian"), say so. Because Episcopal church property rules are largely similar to Catholic ones, Episcopalian splinter denominations don't really exist; you have splinter movements within, or people leaving the denomination.

But, don't think you can bamboozle all readers out in the wild like freshman college students in a 100-level class. 

In 2018, for the Observer, he wrote about Southern Baptists facing up to a denominational history of sexual abuse. Actually, the denouement on that was sweeping it under rug and forcing dissenters out of the denomination, as much as possible. The reality is that at this year's SBC convention, both of the candidates for president say the SBC does not have an abuse crisis.

We can't have an honest discussion of the role of religion in American life, and certainly not of the role of Christianity in American life, political and larger sociological life, if both duopoly parties are going to have intellectuals going tribalist. 

Otherwise, in all the non-Episcopal mainline Protestant denominations with both conservative and liberal wings, both wings are losing membership at about the same rate. So far, I think that the "nones" who are "spiritual but not religious" are mainly upset about conservative tribalism, but that could change. Among the agnostic and non-metaphysical, I will bet that, even outside of Gnu Atheism, there are others who, like me, call a pox on both tribalist houses already. 

No "book of Leviticus" eh?

Here's an interesting post from "The Amateur Exegete". about the The SBL (Society for Biblical Literature) Study Bible's Leviticus volume, noting that the Torah was put into five scrolls as is because of scroll length and that Leviticus, at least, doesn't stand out as a separate book.

I pull quote what Ben the Amateur has: 

Despite having its own title, there is really no “book” of Leviticus in any meaningful sense. Leviticus never existed as an independent literary or textual unit at any stage of its development or incorporation into biblical canon. The Pentateuch is not five independent books cobbled together but rather a single literary work presented in five volumes, the division having been based on the material limits of scroll technology. The essential continuity of Leviticus with what comes before and after is apparent from both a broad perspective and from a close reading. The very first words of the book, literally “He called to Moses,” lack an explicit subject in Hebrew; the English addition of “the LORD” is assumed from preceding verses at the end of Exodus. Who Moses is, where and when the events of Leviticus take place, what the nature and historical background of the relationship between Israel and its deity is – none of these are explained in Leviticus itself but are dependent on the story that has been told from the beginning of the Pentateuch to this point.

Interesting, per the author, no translation of Leviticus puts "The LORD" in square brackets at the start of Leviticus 1:1, not even the new RSV.

That said? Here's the end of Exodus 40:

34 Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. 35 Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting because the cloud settled upon it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. 36 Whenever the cloud was taken up from the tabernacle, the Israelites would set out on each stage of their journey, 37 but if the cloud was not taken up, then they did not set out until the day that it was taken up. 38 For the cloud of the Lord was on the tabernacle by day, and fire was in the cloud[a] by night, before the eyes of all the house of Israel at each stage of their journey.

And, the start of Leviticus 1:

1 The Lord summoned Moses and spoke to him from the tent of meeting, saying, 2 “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: When any of you bring an offering of livestock to the Lord, you shall bring your offering from the herd or from the flock.

There you are. It is a "flow" of sorts. 

I do think Baden overstates his case, though.

Genesis as seen today was presumably a separate unit. It stands separately, being pre-Egypt times except for the tail end. Only the Tesserateuch, to riff on Tatian, is really a single unit. (On biblical criticism, I still believe in some version of the old documentary hypothesis. I believe that there is a separate E source, and that it and J were written, revised, edited and updated in response to each other in a sort of scriptio continua, to riff on the Catholic, Orthodox and mainline Protestant lectionary term. There is of course no D material until Deuteronomy, and there, there's multiple D layers, with perhaps the earliest being what Moses Wilhelm Shapira found, per Idan Dershowitz. Or, Genesis, a "Triteuch" then Deuteronomy. See also Dershowitz and my take on the documentary hypothesis in general. And, per a 2009 book by him that's a revision of his PhD thesis, he appears to broadly agree with me.

On the matter at hand, I don't know if Baden addresses this, but the issue is WHY the Exodus-Leviticus division is where it is on modern scrolls. Exodus 35, after the second giving of the tablets of the Ten Divarim, gets to Yahweh's instructions for the tabernacle, the ark of the covenant and such. Breaking Exodus after chapter 34 and attaching the rest to Leviticus makes much more sense.  

Of nonexistent "womenpriests" and Christian Scientists

 Re the Amateur Exegete's May 24 piece, and as I commented at YouTube on the actual video, there IS no such thing as a "Roman Catholic womanpriest." There's women who want to be priests in the Roman Catholic church, but having wanting in one hand is like having shit in the other.

Yes, there is an organization that ordains such women, but such women are automatically excommunicated, like a dead man's switch, upon ordination. So, they're no longer Catholic.

And, of course, the interviewer, Shirley Paulson, asks the woman-not-priest about gnosis. AND? Beyond New Agey, which was my first guess? Shirley Paulson is a Christian Scientist.

And, this is yet another reason why, although I keep Ben on my blogroll to be reminded of, and cash in on, free ebooks, he's otherwise not very useful and not very critically minded.