I heard this sermon in 2008, and it took me weeks to recover.
It made me cry.
You can listen here.
It's awful. It's really, really awful.
And I bring it up here because in all the Christploitation media I've mentioned in these two weeks, I personally have not been the object of derision.
But in Martin's sermon, he's maligning me. He uses crass language in the name of "honesty," and in the end he only humiliates the women listening.
Sermonaudio has the transcript if you want to read it instead of listening.
But here are the moments that are chilling and humiliating and are Reefer Madness level of exploitation.
He's deliberately trying to humiliate the women listening to him. It makes him feel self-righteous and superior at the cost of the women around him.
It's exploitation.
Should God be pleased in the next hour to bring among us 20 raw 21st century pagan women dressed with mini skirts, cleavage almost down to their belly buttons or with slacks of stretch material that hug their thighs and their buttocks and their crotch….
These are like magnets in a women’s dress, magnets that draw men’s eyes to parts of their bodies that if they are to maintain purity of mind they don’t want their minds drawn to these parts of a woman’s body. Here are the 10 magnets to men’s eyes.
Number one, dresses or skirts with lengthy slits. When a man’s eye sees a slit that comes up to the knee or above, he thinks, “Oh, a few more inches and what would I see?” That is the way a man’s mind works. If your fathers have not told you this, daughters, it is true. If you husbands have not told your wives this, shame on you. You know it is true. This is a magnet to men’s eyes, dresses or skirts with lengthy slits.
Secondly, dresses or skirts which hug the buttocks. I don’t know a better word to use. I asked my brethren. What do I mean? My shirt is not hugging any part of my body except, perhaps, this is hugging my wrist. A skirt that hugs the buttocks is a skirt that not only comes down over the buttocks, but back in to the back of the thighs.
When you see pictures of hookers one of the marks of a hooker, she always has her buttocks hugged, whether it is a mini skirt, whether it is jeans, whether it is tight slacks, her butt is always hugged because that is what she is selling. And that is what she wants me to buy. It is a magnet to men’s eyes.
Thirdly, any upper garment that hugs the breast. And I don’t know a better way to describe it. It is one thing for your garment to come down over and hang loosely upon the breast, but to hug the breast, to shape and isolate your breasts becomes a magnet to men’s eyes. People should not receive an anatomy lesson in mammary glands when they look at you women. It is a magnet to men’s eyes.
Fourthly, unbuttoned blouses, low neck lines or cleavage on any upper body garment. You know what I mean by the buttons. You have got a blouse that buttons up to hear. You not only unbutton here and here and here and here, but you unbutton down to one button away from bearing your bra. And when a man sees only one button to go his mind goes, I wonder what is under that one more button.
I am looking down right now at a young woman who has everything up to the last button. It opens the collar, that’s all. And a man’s mind only sees that is an open collar. Come two buttons down and what he sees and what he thinks is an occasion of stumbling to him. . . .
Number five, another magnet to men’s eyes. Sleeveless blouses or dresses with large arm holes. You look down on your sleeveless dress and you see nothing but your shoulder. But if it is a large arm hole, a man sitting behind you looks up at the pulpit, sees through to your bra. And his mind goes where he doesn’t want it to go. It is immodest to appear in the house of God with sleeveless blouses and dresses with large arm holes. If the arm holes are tight enough that no one can see in, then that is your liberty before God.
Number six, low rise skirts or pants. This is the style made popular by Christine [?], Brittany Spears, Jennifer Lopez, these sex pots, sex pots, flaunting their bodies in their gyrations with their so called music. They have made this style popular with the skirts that barely hang on the hip bones and with the jeans that barely come up and cover the crack of the buttocks.
I have been in situations with Christian women where I have had to look at the crack of their buttocks because of the low rise jeans, skirts or pants.
Number seven, see through clothing of any kind, clothing that does not cover your under garments to the point where no one can see them. Some of you need to know the function of a camisole.
Number eight. Skirts and dresses that are just plain too short. Difficult when you are seated to adequately covered yourself. And then you get engrossed in something in a public setting and you are not keeping your knees locked together and before long the legs are spread a bit and anyone just happening to glance can see clean up to your pants. That is not modest. It is immodest. It becomes a magnet to men’s eyes.
When I started thinking about this BOJsploitation genre, the first sermon that popped into my mind was John R. Rice's 1935 pamphlet, What's Wrong with the Dance?
Have you read it? Would you like to? It's 48 pages long, and if your church had a Sword of the Lord tract rack in the lobby, you might have seen it.
Here's how he introduces it:
CHILD OF THE BROTHEL, SISTER OF DRUNKENNESS, LEWDNESS, DIVORCE AND MURDER, THE MOTHER OF LUST--A ROAD TO HELL!
Also last semester, BJU's new shiny spokesman Renton Rathbun chose the clickbaitiest headline. It's peak BOJOsploitation.
He called it "Hate More. Kill Better."
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We know he's talking about the mortification of sin. But it takes a long time for him to get to that point. And he flippantly states that "the Church is losing the skill of hating and killing."
This is the guy who started his sermon about gender binaries talking about sexual assault. And this is the guy who talked the students' neighbors as Sonderkommandos. And this is the guy who said that he's "punching them in the face." And the guy who said that men "pressure women into degrading themselves."
And he's saying it in the same pulpit that Dan Olinger "joked" about "killing" a student.
BJU loves to glorify violence. They love to exploit people from the pulpit. They love BOJOsploitation.
And fundy pastors love it too.
They are all as bad as the Reefer Madness producers.
Mark and avoid.
Here's Rathbun's whole thing. Note that he's equating pastors with holiness, and if you disagree with that, you need to learn more about "killing."
We live in a world where 62% of American pastors have a syncretistic worldview. It was pastors who enabled the success of the Revoice movement, which is responsible for grooming young men and women into embracing a gay identity within Christianity. And currently, there is a dwindling confidence in pastors’ spiritual credibility.
Now more than ever, the American church is in desperate need of pastors who are ready to address a simple fact: the Church has come to despise holiness. Yes, the Church at large seems fond of God’s love and goodness, but holiness leaves a bitter taste in her mouth.
Many fear pursuing holiness will make us unrelatable, robotic, and judgy. Yet, the most sobering statement of 1 John 2:1–6 is that the first and primary exhortation is to stop sinning. Yes, if we do sin, we have an Advocate. But John wrote his epistle principally so that his people “may not sin.”
When we do speak of practical matters of holiness, we often explain our way into retaining at least some sin. When 1 Timothy 2:12 forbids women “to exercise authority over a man” in the church, we roll out our feminists to help us see that “authority” is misunderstood by conservatives. When Romans 1:26–27 speaks of the sin of homosexuality and its “vile affections,” we roll out our same-sex-attracted pastors to help us see that only the act of sodomy is a sin, not the attraction part.
The Church is losing the skill of hating and killing. We do not hate sin as God does, so we do not kill it. We might condemn parts of it—but hating and killing it goes too far. Yet, God says He hates the work of those who sin (Ps. 101:3; 119:104). He hates abominations (Prov. 6:16–19; Jer. 44:4). He hates the planning of evil (Zach. 8:17). And God has instructed us to hate evil (Ps. 97:10), even abhor it (Rom. 12:9).
Our worldview is confused, so our compassion has become confused. In attempting to show compassion for those who are tangled up in sin, we have begun showing compassion for sin itself. As my pastor once stated, “When we forget the sinfulness of sin and God’s own hatred for it, we forget the cost of sin for the Son of God.”
How can we kill what we have become accustomed to? How can we assassinate that which we have been pining after? We need a biblical worldview of holiness. The puritan John Owen confronts us, “Do you mortify; do you make it your daily work; be always at it while you live; cease not a day from this work; be killing sin or it will be killing you!”
Pastors, do not give up. Do not give in. Do not go gently into the night. Fight for holiness in your own heart (1 Pet. 3:15) and in the hearts of your congregations (1 Pet. 1:15–16). Fight because you love God. Fight because you love your people. Turn your people into killers of sin, or it will be killing them.
Look around, Renton. There's a lot of hating. There's a lot of killing. And exploitative to say so cavalierly, "The Church is losing the skill of hating and killing."
And after the moment when he claims to talk "plainly" but he's actually exploiting the empathy of his audience, he goes on to call those outside fundamentalism, "Sonderkommandos."
He says at 4:25:
The Sonderkommandos would be those ... those Jewish people that would usher people kindly to their death, pretty gruesome death, actually.
We are surrounded -- and I think, and this is one of the disadvantages of your generation -- you are surrounded by Sonderkommandos: men and women who are church leaders that are so interested in you liking them, that they are ushering you gently and happily to hell.
And when someone comes and punches you in the face and says stop going this way, it makes us upset.
We love our Sonderkommandos who are nice and sweet to us.
Wait. What? Do you see what he's doing?!?
First of all, he's comparing BJU's neighbors and even family to those working for the Nazis who usher people into the gas chambers.
Dude! You claim you taught logic. Did you know about reductio ad Hitlerum? It's a fallacy!
And then he compares being kind and gentle to ushering people to their death. And punching people in the face -- personal violence -- is honorable.
It's so twisted. It's not biblical. It's not like Jesus at all.
This is a long thought that I'm going to break up over three weeks (at least). So make a cup of something hot and settle in.
My husband was watching Reefer Madness when I got home from school the other night. Have you seen it? It's hilariously terrible. All camp.
Its genre is an Exploitation Film. You can read about it here. They are typically B-Movies (or worse) that are the cinematic version of click bait. They pull you in with some little veneer of truth ("The Food that Your Gastroenterologist Wishes You Ate") and then string you along toward some nothing burger. The producers don't really care how long you read/watch. They just want your initial click or ticket purchase. That's all they need.
But with the Exploitation Films there's another layer of ick: there's the foregrounding of desire. It's like a blood sport but with the erotic. Something teases you into wanting to see more even while it's condemning what you're watching. That both-and -- the joining of repulsion and attraction, the self-righteousness of watching evil -- is the appeal.
The camp is why we watch it now, but at the time the camp wasn't the thing. Our great-grandparents wanted to watch the lurid even while they might relish their own self-righteousness that they weren't like those addicts.
After leaving his unaccredited church school, Naselli arrived at another unaccredited school for a Masters in Theology.
By the time Naselli would finish his Ph.D. in 2007, Bob Jones University was extra sensitive to all things "reformed." Crazily so.
His dissertation committee was Dan Olinger (chair), Layton Talbert, Mark Sidwell, and Mark Minnick. The title was “Keswick Theology: A Historical and Theological Survey and Analysis of the Doctrine of Sanctification in the Early Keswick Movement, 1875–1920." His thesis statement was as follows:
This dissertation’s thesis is that Keswick theology’s view of sanctification is theologically erroneous. The dissertation surveys the history and theology of the Keswick movement from the years 1875 to 1920 and then analyzes its theology, defending the historic Protestant view of sanctification. The supreme authority to which it appeals, however, is not a particular historical view of sanctification, but to Scripture itself. Although many godly people with honorable motives promoted Keswick theology, it is theologically incorrect primarily because it unbiblically separates Christians into two distinct categories: (1) those who have been justified but have not experienced a crisis of sanctification (i.e., consecration) and, thus, are experiencing constant defeat; and (2) those who have been justified and have experienced a crisis of sanctification and, thus, are experiencing constant victory.
The committee strung Naselli along insisting he change insignificant things. The experience was so full of dishonesty on the part of the BJU committee and Naselli left so bruised that many other students behind him in the program dropped out.
One of the things that the committee made Naselli change was every reference to "Reformed" theology. He gives a little footnote on page 6:
This view is commonly termed the Reformed view in theological literature, but this dissertation refers to it as the historic Protestant view to avoid a potentially inflammatory term that could imply an endorsement of Reformed theology as a monolithic system. One may hold a Reformed view on sanctification, however, while rejecting Reformed views on ecclesiology, eschatology, and even some aspects of soteriology. This dissertation uses the term historic Protestant to refer to the view of sanctification that the majority of Protestants have historically embraced (which excludes the Lutheran view, for example). For an overview of eight major views of sanctification with a case for the historic Protestant view, see B. A. Demarest, “‘Transformed into His Likeness’: The Doctrine of Sanctification,” chap. 10 in The Cross and Salvation: The Doctrine of Salvation, Foundations of Evangelical Theology, ed. J. S. Feinberg (Wheaton: Crossway, 1997), 385-429. See this dissertation’s “Appendix A: Charts of Five Views of Sanctification.”
So Naselli got the bum's rush from BJU, just like so many of us did. He experienced their terrible first hand.
You gotta read this one. Many Friends of the Archive in this conversation. Of course, there’s Ron Bean, a consistent fan of this archival project. There’s Dr. I’m-Gonna-Kill-You Olinger--always a pleasure. Don Johnson is a particular fan of this archivist, having personally written Darren Lawson to get me fired for not spanking my 28-month-old.
It’s the usual conversation about Calvinism, BJU’s “history,” and dress codes. For those who are insisting that BJU is now suddenly preaching expository sermons, I challenge each of them to listen to the sermons highlighted here under the tag BJUChapel. Find just one that’s expository. Any one. At all. Go look.
Of course, I find it positively hilarious that any of these people are talking about how open BJU is to “Calvinist” employees. Riiiight. I know better.
The two heroes in the conversation, however, are Mike Hager and Joe Grimmett for their stark honesty about our alma mater. I’ve pointed up their comments with red bands. Those comments deserve a second read.
