Douglas Wilson, of Credenda/Agenda and Christ Church of Moscow, Idaho, is at his best when he can let his snark ascend and just turn it loose. He’s also at his best when he has something deep and profoundly important to set his teeth into and be snarky about. (This is, I think, why he was the perfect person to debate Christopher Hitchens.) As such, it’s no surprise that his recent guest piece at the Washington Post‘s “On Faith” blog, titled “Foxy News,” is Wilson at his best.
Preaching against porn while consuming it avidly is certainly inconsistent, and is what theologians in another old-timey era used to call “a sin”—a theological category that perhaps needs to be rehabilitated. But I want to consider this issue at another level—we need to start thinking about the politics of porn. . . .
A number of evangelicals are up in arms about President Obama himself, and Obamacare, and Obama-other-things, and Obama-anything-else, and are warning us in dire tones about the impending slavery that is involved in all this “socialism.” And—full disclosure here—I am economically pretty conservative myself, just slightly to the left of King Arthur, so I am not pointing out this part of it to differ with any of it. But what I am noticing in this discussion is a striking public tolerance for right-wing skankyness. When I am cruising around for my Internet news, I am far more likely to run into Moabite women at Fox News than anywhere else. . . .
Surely it should be possible to access fair and balanced news without running into women who think they are supposed to be a sale at Macy’s—with 40 percent off.
What then? On the assumption that what we are willing to associate with in public is just a fraction of what we are willing to associate with in private, one of my basic concerns about evangelical involvement in politics in the age of Obama (measured in this discussion by their general friendliness to Foxy News) is that they are not nearly as hostile to “slavery” as some of the rhetoric might seem to indicate. I know that politics is supposed to make strange bedfellows, but “strange bedfellows” was always supposed to be a metaphor, wasn’t it?
A man cannot sell himself into slavery in his private life, and then turn around and successfully take a stand as a free man in the public square. At least, that is how the thinking used to go among conservatives. If sexual indulgence is one of the more obvious bribes that can be offered to a slave, how does it change anything if a person takes the bribe in private? And if that bribe is taken in private, over time, indications of that reality will start to show up in public, in the sorts of ways I have been discussing.
Be sure to read the whole thing—it’s truly priceless. I remember when Fox was a favorite target for ire of conservatives, because of shows like “Married . . . with Children” and, yes, “The Simpsons.” (It seems a little strange now to think of that.) People would occasionally point out, as a mitigating factor, that Rupert Murdoch was pretty conservative in a lot of ways, but that was usually dismissed with the comment that the sleaze he peddled disqualified him. Until he launched Fox News, and before too long, political expediency took over . . .