A Bit of Satire at the Expense of Stand Firm, et. al.

My friend Doug Le Blanc has posted this wicked bit of satire on Covenant. He is mocking the self-awareness (i.e. pride) of the Stand Fermented ones.

Doug writes:

I am just back from a run with my dog, Brewster, who is 63 pounds of raw animal power. As we ran these five miles, dew glinted on the grass. We heard the occasional bullfrog croak. We ran past a large steer and bade him top of the morning. Well, Brewster barked in his friendliest possible tone.

Then, naturally, my mind turned to the ideological, spiritual, theological, and sexual revolution rolling through the Episcopal Church.

At our humble blog we stand athwart this multifaceted revolution, yelling, “Stop!” For this selfless service to the Lord we are rewarded with regular mockery by other blogs, catty remarks from the apparatchiks at 815, and treacherous betrayals by those who call themselves conservatives but who are, on their best days, more like the sweaty, shifty-eyed collaborationists of Vichy France.

And no, thank you for asking, none of my fellow contributors to this blog consider this language over the top. We’ve talked this over and all four of us agree that, Godwin’s law notwithstanding, allusions to the Third Reich are entirely within the spirit of Christ and his clarity. Did our Lord not call the Pharisees whitewashed sepulchers?

My fellow bloggers and I have reached some basic conclusions — about ourselves and about the work we do as unto the Lord.

We matter immensely. We realize that thousands of you await our daily reports of the latest outrages by the church we all love so very much. We work hard to provide those reports, even when the outrages are the standard fare of life in any mainline Protestant denomination, or have no clear relation to Anglicanism. We know that outrage prompts action — action that untold previous generations of Episcopalians lacked the backbone to take.

We are the new media. We do not report so much as loudly type near-transcripts during press conferences and upload PDFs of documents leaked by courageous bishops. We also offer our brilliantly snarky commentary whenever church leaders gather to make decisions. Our crucial importance as the new media is reaffirmed every time a bishop all but threatens disciplinary action against anyone who dares to read our blog.

We are courageous. While other self-styled conservatives think only of ways to preserve their positions of comfort, we show the fortitude to speak the truth in love. If we think you’re a heretic, we will not mince words. We are in your face, and the Lord Jesus would have it no other way.

We make people mad. This is one way we know we’re serving God faithfully. Our harsh critics may protest that we lack Christian charity, or that we presume too much about what motivates other people, but we know that’s because they lack adequate experience with hearing the truth spoken in love.

We love The Lord of the Rings, in case you hadn’t noticed, because it helps us make sense of our valorous resistance to the Episcopal Church and the Archbishop of Canterbury. We think that if J.R.R. Tolkien were aware of how much his work inspires us, he would take the longest drag off his pipe, smile like a contented hobbit, and then nod sagely and create interlocking smoke rings.

We remain Episcopalians, for the most part, but we consider it a scandal that other people will not discuss the moral imperative of leaving the Episcopal Church. They may call it ecclesiology, but we call it wimpishness. We know how very much has been accomplished over so many decades by people threatening to leave.

We see things more clearly than most other Episcopalians. We have, after all, been in this conflict for five long years. With such concentrated perseverance comes a wisdom that sees past the timid misgivings of those who have worked for Episcopal renewal for decades...