Caveat Poeta

 Until today I hadn't heard of Valiant Scribe. I might never have heard about it at all, if a poet acquaintance of mine hadn't publicly boasted about them publishing a rather underwhelming piece of verse he'd scribbled in response to the murder of Sarah Everard. Like most of my poetry friends on Facebook, my initial concern was that this kind of self-promotion, on the back of a murdered woman, would have been distasteful if the poem had been a brilliant piece of writing - which it decidedly wasn't. It didn't occur to me to look into who Valiant Scribe were until I'd spent most of the day going back and forth with this guy and his sycophants over whether one ought to adopt the idiom of William Topaz McGonnagal in writing about a woman's murder. 

When I did finally look, something seemed a little, well, off about the enterprise. It was a little too slick, a little too bland, a little too obviously something with money behind it. So I did what I used to do back when I called myself a journalist: I started digging. 

The obvious place to start was the magazine's editor, Debra Eyis. The information about her on the Valiant Scribe website described her as the co-leader of a group called the Redeemed Writer's Group, and a contributor to a Christian site called Our Daily Bread (abbreviated to ODB - Big Baby Jesus in the muthafuckin house, yo). This made sense in terms of the Scribe's emphasis on 'faith' (helpfully parenthesised as 'Christian'), but what kind of (Christian) faith was this? I know a few Christian poets who combine their faith in God with social liberalism, but something about the Scribe's website made me suspicious. There was something they weren't quite being open about. 

There was a pattern here I was familiar with: a main organisation throwing up groupuscules like chaff, which all, when examined, seemed to consist of the same people. This was the modus operandi of the group which formed about the always suspiciously well-funded 'communist' periodical Living Marxism, which would go on to form the Institute of Ideas and Spiked magazine. And it's a pattern you also see cropping up in the ranks of organised anti-trans bigotry, where the same dozen middle class former Guardian columnists endlessly proliferate astroturf 'LGB' and 'feminist' groups to further their agenda of marginalising trans people. And sure enough, transphobia would rear its ugly head in connection with Valiant Scribe, but we'll get to that in a moment. 

Investigating the Redeemed Writers Group threw up yet another religious outfit, the Center for Faith and Work. The CFW had 'founded' the RWG, according to the 'who we are and what we do' page on the latter's website, but I was assured that the writers' group was 'now operating independently'. Not that independently though: the Resources page of the RWG website makes it clear the CFW were actively seeking pieces from group members on topics such as 'Cultural Renewal'. 

I don't know about you, but when religious types start talking about 'renewing culture' I get a little antsy. It tends to be the case that the first step in these plans for renewal usually involves at the very least curtailing the liberty of folks like me. And that unease was confirmed when I learned the parent organisation of the Redeemed Writers Group was Redeemer Presbyterian Church, a house of worship criticised by the New York Times in 1998 as 'being full of fundamentalists and zealous, newly-converted Christians pushing hard-line views'. The church pastor, Tim Keller, objected to this hardline label, though - and anyway, this was 1998. Perhaps things had changed since then?

They haven't. In keeping with the now-familiar pattern of obfuscation on the part of Redeemer and its literary satellites, it takes a bit of digging to find out their current position on The Gays. Fortunately, the website Church Clarity had done that digging for me, establishing that while no open, public statement of an LGBTQ inclusion policy can be found on the site, a 2015 'Redeemer Report' from Keller establishes their position: 'that homosexuality was not God’s original creative intention for humanity ... and therefore that homosexual practice goes against God’s express will for all human beings, especially those who trust in Christ.'. 

And ditto for trans folks. Remember I mentioned the other group Eyis is affiliated with, Our Daily Bread Ministries? Their publishing arm produced a book in 2017 called God and the Transgender Debate, by a rat-faced little fuck called Andrew T. Walker, which was described by ThinkProgress as a tract in which, despite 'the way he sugarcoats his condemnation in love and compassion', Walker, relying on the discredited research of psychologist Paul McHugh (who reckons trans people are mentally ill) produces a manual 'to help evangelical Christians reject transgender people in exactly the same way' their church has rejected gay people for decades. 

So that's the Valiant Scribe, then: a magazine associated with a homophobic church, whose editor also produces content for an evangelical ministry whose publishing arm demonizes trans people. One to avoid, I think, and a reminder to do your research before submitting your work. Caveat Poeta, one might say.