The men look like everybody else
Were you wondering about Kim Davis’s fashion choices and religious affiliation? Sojourners provides some background.
Kim Davis, the Rowan County, Ky., clerk jailed for five days for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, identifies as an Apostolic Christian and attends Solid Rock Apostolic Church in Morehead, Ky.
What’s an Apostolic Christian?
Pentecostalism is a Christian movement that emphasizes a personal experience of God, including the miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues. The movement grew out of the 1906 Azusa Street Revival in California and takes its name from Pentecost, when early Christians first received the gifts of the Holy Spirit, such as the ability to heal and prophesy.
Apostolic Pentecostals then split from the rest of the movement in 1916 over a disagreement about the nature of the Trinity.
Does any of that matter? No.
Q: OK, well, what’s with the long hair and skirts?
A: Apostolic Pentecostals are the strictest of all the Pentecostal groups, according to Synan. Like most Pentecostals, they do not use alcohol or tobacco. They generally don’t watch TV or movies either. Women who are Apostolic Pentecostals also wear long dresses, and they don’t cut their hair or wear makeup. It’s called “external holiness,” he said, and it’s meant to separate its followers from the rest of the world in the way they look and act — although, he noted, men who are Apostolic Pentecostals look “like everybody else.”
That’s familiar. The men can wear jeans and T shirts, but the women have to dress like some kind of parody Pioneer Lady Trudging Through The Plains. Jesus said so.
And the same-sex marriage thing?
The general superintendent of the United Pentecostal Church International, the largest and most influential Apostolic Pentecostal denomination, issued a statement earlier this year in response to the Supreme Court decision recognizing same-sex marriages. In his statement, he defines God’s plan for marriage as “the union of one man and one woman who make a lifelong commitment,” and encourages Christians to “defend the freedoms of speech, press, association, and religion.”
In other words, it’s Some Guy. It’s not baby Jesus, it’s not the bible, it’s Some Guy.
And because Some Guy issued a statement, a county clerk thinks she gets to ignore a Supreme Court ruling. It makes me tired.
There’s a good reason why pronouncements about marriage drawn from biblical teaching are never made. Unless god changes his/her/its/xir mind about these things, here’s a quick sample of the way things were:
Exodus 21:10: “If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish the food, clothing, or marital rights of the first wife.”
Mark 12:19: (paraphrase) If your brother dies, you must marry his wife (even if you’re already married) and knock her up.
So we know that polygamy is cozy and great, according to the New Testament, no less. But what does the NT say about the notion of marriage in general?
1 Corinthians 7:8 “To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do.”
In other words, marriage was looked down upon. It’s sort of a fallen kind of existence. Indeed, marriage wasn’t even the custom of the Church until long after the fall of the Western Roman empire. To quote Stephanie Coontz: “For the first 16 centuries of its existence, the Catholic Church held that marriage was inherently tainted by what Pope Gregory the Great deemed the degrading “carnal pleasure” that took place under its auspices. In the church’s hierarchy of worthy females, the virgin ranked highest, the widow second and the wife a distant third.”
To say that these people are embracing anachronism isn’t even accurate–they are indulging in wholesale fiction.
And disgusted. It makes me tired and disgusted. Not only how they regard people with sexual orientation they disagree with, but how they regard women.
If they are embracing a fiction (in proclaiming a devotion to “biblical marriage”), they’re not alone. It’s not only on the fringes where people speak of biblical marriage and the way marriage has “always been practiced.”
Funny how their disdain for alcohol and tobacco doesn’t prevent them from granting marriages to drinkers and smokers.
“the union of one man and one woman who make a lifelong commitment,”
Not even trying to support that with any scriptural source. Ask Solomon or David, let alone Uriah the Hittite, about that defnintion.
Pentecostals are … special.
There’s one greasy haired guy on TV who speaks in tongues all the time. I swear that I once heard him intone, “Alabamadamalamramalamadingdong” and then grin at the TV camera like he had performed a wonderful magic trick.
The contributions roll in.
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