Armstrongism's Favorite Control Issue Just Got Smaller: Crackpot Bob and the Case of the Missing Covenant Skin

 

Crackpot Bob, self-appointed prophet of the Continuing Church of Prophetic Recycling, and pretend professional commenter on everything from European beasts to wearables as 666-adjacent, has decided the great moral crisis of the hour is whether Europeans should be allowed to look sideways at ritual circumcision. Belgium investigates a handful of unlicensed mohels; Jewish groups (quite reasonably) defend a core religious practice; EU officials scramble to say they are not trying to ban Jewish life. And Crackpot Bob, who is neither Jewish, Belgian, nor a pediatric urologist, inserts himself like a man who just discovered a new lever for other people's bodies.

This is classic Armstrongite muscle memory. Herbert Armstrong's heirs spent decades turning optional, cultural, or ceremonial items into identity tests. Sabbath? Fine, that's actually in the New Testament conversation. Holy days? Debatable. Then came British Israelism charts, makeup bans, three tithes, and the quiet pressure to treat every Old Testament physical sign as if Jesus merely paused it instead of fulfilling it. Circumcision is the latest exhibit: officially "not required," unofficially "you're unloving and deceived if you don't."

The New Covenant is not subtle about this

Acts 15 is the Jerusalem Council's memo to the Gentile churches: no circumcision requirement. The issue was not "wait until the baby is eight days old." It was whether belonging to Christ required the Abrahamic flesh-sign. The answer was no.

Paul is even blunter:

• Circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing, but keeping the commandments of God is what matters. (1 Corinthians 7:19)"
• For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails anything, but a new creation." (Galatians 6:15)"
• If you become circumcised, Christ will profit you nothing." (Galatians 5:2) 

Romans 2:28-29 and Colossians 2:11 relocate the sign inward: circumcision of the heart, made without hands. That is the New Covenant version. The physical rite was a covenant marker for Abraham's physical descendants and for those entering that national covenant. It was never presented as a universal health ordinance that Gentile Christians must impose on infants to prove they love them.

Paul had Timothy circumcised (Acts 16:3) for missional reasons among Jews, not because the Council got it wrong. That is the opposite of turning it into a standing pastoral recommendation wrapped in CDC citations.

Early Jewish believers in Jerusalem kept many Jewish customs. Of course they did. They were Jews. That does not convert a fulfilled covenant sign into a Christian parental duty. Justin Martyr and later Gentile churches dropped it for a reason. Pretending "the first fifteen bishops of Jerusalem were circumcised, therefore you should snip your son" is like arguing that because Peter kept kosher until the sheet vision, every COG kitchen must still avoid shrimp."

Not required, but..." is how control works

Thiel's own writing admits Gentiles need not be circumcised to be Christians. Then the paragraph immediately pivots: parents who skip it are unloving; opponents are "evil men and impostors... deceiving and being deceived"; science and Moses both demand it; infants should not get to decide later. That is not "optional." That is a guilt sandwich with extra prophecy.

Health organizations do not speak with one voice the way Thiel pretends. WHO and CDC have supported voluntary medical male circumcision in high-HIV adult populations in parts of Africa-an entirely different context from routine neonatal cutting in low-HIV Western countries. Many European pediatric bodies do not recommend routine infant circumcision. U.S. rates have been falling for years. Benefits exist in some analyses (UTI reduction in infancy, some STI associations); so do costs, complications, loss of tissue, and the ethical question of permanently altering a non-consenting minor for non-therapeutic reasons. Adults can choose. Infants cannot.

Jews and Muslims have a religious claim that is their business and their covenant. Christians in the New Covenant do not inherit that claim as a command. Some families will still choose it for culture, family resemblance, or personal medical judgment. Fine. That is liberty. What is not fine is a tiny Church of God fiefdom treating foreskin policy as another loyalty test, another way to mark who is "in" and who is worldly, deceived, or insufficiently faithful to "the fathers."

Armstrongism has always been hungry for distinctive physical markers. When the big distinctive (you are the one true remnant, the rest of Christianity is deceived) starts to look thin, the smaller ones get louder. Diet. Calendar. And now, apparently, whether your son's anatomy matches a Bronze Age covenant sign that Paul said no longer avails anything.

If Bob wants to argue medical statistics, he can do it without 2 Timothy 3:13. If he wants to defend Jewish religious liberty in Belgium, he can do it without implying that Gentile Christian parents who leave their sons intact are failing Deuteronomy. The hissy fit is not really about Europe. It is about a movement that cannot stop managing other people's bodies and calling it love.