I don’t know why, but I watched Mark Finley’s recent monologue on “A Biblical View on Homosexuality”
Green screened behind him is an AI generated backdrop of tall pane glass windows overlooking rolling, wooded hills. The lighting is interesting. I was trying to discern whether the window east or west facing— is this Sabbath morning sermon or a Friday evening vespers? I do love the ambiguity.
If you look not-so-closely, the shadows aren’t parallel, as they would be if lit by a real sun. They’re arrayed as if they’re cast by an artificial light source just off screen. The windows don’t even have handles, come to think of it.
I’m not trying to play gotcha with Sam Neves and the GC’s use of AI. As you know, I love AI art, especially the obviously-AI aesthetic. But I am curious, what were they trying to communicate with this gallery up in the hills?
Serenity, clarity, apart from the world, removed from the influence of other people.
78 year-old Televangelist Finley has his finger on the pulse, stoking up the old trope of the gays coming after your children, quoting tabloid articles and decontextualizing the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus. Adventists seem absolutely incapable of perceiving tone or irony.
The video is sprinkled with stock photos of teachers holding pride flags at the front of an elementary classroom. Wild to think someone’s tithes are being used to buy the rights to gay pride stock photos.
Then he includes this quote…
I tried to find who these people are and where these quotes came from and found this article originally published in 1987. This quote is misrepresented, as if it’s recent. Genealogist Marshall Kirk and marketing executive Hunter Madsen (aka Erastas Pill) expanded their article into a book that no one really cared for except for the Christian Right who ate it up as proof of a “gay agenda”. It almost seems like propaganda published to stoke homophobia in the midst of the AIDS crisis. That’s total speculation, of course, but I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any LGBTQ+ person or ally that would feel represented by these quoted publications.
He goes onto cite different Bible verses that have been touted against any Christian asking questions. Nothing new or insightful there. Making the Bible a corkboard for a paranoid conspiracy theorist to connect pride parades to Lucifer.
No accountability for the many cases of pastors and other conference employees exploiting the children they have access to.
The only comfort this video gives me is seeing how insipid and fragile this homophobic virtue signaling is. They’ve been recycling the same rationale for decades, a threadbare theology, diaphanous as a veil, revealing their most intimate fear: the fear to feel good about themselves.
I can empathize with that. We have been subject to a millennia of propaganda to feel “inherently fallen”— that’s why we’re creating AI churches on AI mountains to listen to 78 year old men still quoting a Guide Magazine article from nearly 40 years ago and advertising Adventist commentaries to viewers.
This worldview is so fragile it can be toppled by little more than authenticity, compassion, and imagination.
I hope they continue to experiment with their AI-designed church spaces. Hopefully they’ll get a little less antisocial and a little more interesting.