YOU WILL BE MADE TO CARE

Reviewed 7/10/2017

You Will Be Made to Care, by Erickson & Blankschaen

Access to this book courtesy of the
San Jose, CA Public Library
YOU WILL BE MADE TO CARE
The War on Faith, Family, and your Freedom to Believe
Erick Erickson
Bill Blankschaen
Chicago: Regnery Publishing, 2016

Rating:

2.0

Fair

ISBN-13 978-1-62157-474-3
ISBN-10 1-62157-474-1 309pp. HC $27.99

This book is billed as the product of two authors, but I think Erick Erickson wrote most if not all of it. And Erick Erickson, judging by the passion with which he writes, is a bitter man — one who perceives his familiar world to be collapsing around him and doesn't like the perception one bit.

"I'm not into whining and complaining. There are a lot of those kinds of books out there, if all you want to do is make some noise. In this book I'm not only going to educate you as to the extent of the problem but also explain why progressives must insist on silencing all opposition. I'm going to reveal not only how the Left is destroying marriage, but also why marriage matters for human flourishing. And I will be challenging not only our political, cultural, and religious leaders (especially those within evangelical Christianity), but also you—as a believer, as a parent or grandparent, and as a citizen—to respond to this challenge to your faith.

– Page 18

Having said that, he proceeds to complain constantly about how the "overlords of the Left" and "secular tyrants" abuse and bully and silence Christians, and about how "the whims of five unrepresentative people on the Supreme Court" have by their decision in Obergefell v. Hodges destroyed the institution of marriage.

He leads off in Chapter 1 with the tragic tale of Chief Kelvin Cochran, who was sacked after an illustrious career in the Atlanta Fire Department "for having the audacity to write a book about his Christian beliefs." There is a bit more to the story (see sidebar.) Mr. Cochran distributed his book, that condemns homosexuality, to some of his department employees. That is why he lost his job. It is tragic, but not because a Christian is being persecuted for his beliefs, as Erickson would have us believe. Rather, it is because of a good man's tragic lapse of judgment in bringing those beliefs into the workplace.

I found a similar omission of parts of the story in other alleged outrages Erick Erickson describes. For example, regarding Kim Davis, the Rowan County, KY clerk who refused based on her Christian beliefs to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, he writes that "Kentucky officials should make arrangements for government employees such as Davis to perform the duties they were elected or hired to do while still preserving their consciences" (page 119.) There is no way for government officials to do that without violating the Constitution's prohibition of government "respecting an establishment of religion." The correct answer is that, if Kim Davis felt her Christian beliefs precluded her doing her job, she should have resigned.1

Erickson, who says "I am a conservative because I am a Christian" (p. 55), lays most of the evangelical Christian talking points on us, and a few conservative ones:

And through the book runs the constant refrain of Christian victimization — along with denials of any corresponding action on the part of right-wing Christians.

"But where are the actual examples of attacks on the rights of gays—to earn a living, to earn a business, to finish a college degree, to create and maintain organizations defined by their beliefs, or to work as a pharmacist, baker, or photographer? No sexual identity, no amount or degree of even the most "transgressive" sexual expression makes you unfit for those rights in America today. No right-wing Christian zealot is trying to take them away. The Left cries 'discrimination' against homosexuals and makes wild comparisons to Jim Crow laws—a logically incoherent comparison that insults the great civil rights leaders of the twentieth century. But no one can point to any real incident in which a person has been denied service because of his or her sexual orientation. Refusing to help celebrate a gay wedding or to provide a bed in one's own home for lesbian sex is simply not the same thing as discrimination against persons. It's simply a refusal to be drafted onto the opposing side. An objection to being made to care."

– Page 15

I do not consider the book a total loss. Erickson criticizes megachurch pastors (rather mildly, to be sure) on pages 104-5, saying they "chose to stop talking about any issues that might be deemed offensive to a secular culture." (He does not mention the prosperity gospel, or the proclivity of many megachurch pastors for luxurious living.) And in Chapters 7 and 8 he dials back the denunciation, counseling the need for approaching progressives with understanding and love. Unfortunately, it seems a thin veneer over his obdurate partisanship. Here are the headings for his analysis of the progressive mind-set in Chapter 7:

This is not an honest examination of progressive thinking; it is a celebration of progressives' purported irredeemability.

To sum up: Erickson (with Blankschaen's help?) has put considerable scholarship into this book, and while I am certain he gets the facts he presents right, his convenient omission of important aspects of the situations he describes and his constant drumbeat of condemnation (peppered with pejorative terms like "overlords of the left," "secular tyrants," and "gay mafia") makes it clear that he's an enthusiastic player in the Christian theocracy band. We don't need to dance to their tune.

1 Erickson is correct when he points out that Kim Davis was jailed for refusing to follow the law, while the San Francisco County clerks who broke the law in February-March 2004 by issuing licenses to same-sex couples were not. But the larger points are that committed same-sex couples deserve the chance to marry just as much as committed bi-racial couples — who were also denied that until Loving v. Virginia — and that the legalization of same-sex marriage no more destroys the marriages of heterosexual couples than the end of anti-miscegenation laws abolished the matrimonial unions of white folks.
Valid CSS! Valid HTML 4.01 Strict To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.
Copyright © 2017 Christopher P. Winter. All rights reserved.
This page was last modified on 10 July 2017.