Imagined Transcript of Dwight Longenecker's Conversation With Two Nigerian Priests

Understanding the credentials of Twitter's worst priest

INT. DAY, Hotel ballroom with conference seating

[LONGENECKER sprints at full speed across the conference room, knocking over two folding chairs along the way and finally scudding to a halt in front of TWO NIGERIAN PRIESTS]

LONGENECKER: Oh, thank God! Some Blacks! I have been trying to ask you people something, can you help me settle a debate?

[the TWO NIGERIAN PRIESTS look at each other]

LONGENECKER: Like, racism isn't real, right? You never had racism?

[A beat]

LONGENECKER: [speaking slowly and loudly] RA-CI-SM. IS NO RACIST A-NY-MORE.

NIGERIAN PRIEST 1: [in English, no accent] Pardon?

LONGENECKER: [huge sigh of relief] Thank you! I've been saying this! Now come on, wouldn't you agree that the hood thugs with their gangster pants are a bigger threat to you Blacks right now?

NIGERIAN PRIEST 2: Do you have mustard on your cassock?

LONGENECKER: Honestly, if anything, it's reverse racism now that's the problem, right? Like, you're racist towards me, even, probably, right?

NIGERIAN PRIEST 1: How is there that much mustard on you? I don't think they served mustard as part of the lunch today?

LONGENECKER: Would you be willing to come to my congregation and talk about how important it is to respect the police? Crap, hang on, I need to tweet about this.

Longenecker, a pastor in South Carolina, deleted the above tweet after getting piled on and realizing that “I grabbed a dark-skinned person and asked him to agree with me" was not the Socratic coup de grace that he originally thought. He replaced the tweet with this:

Now, to some degree, Longenecker has a point: Twitter is terrible and nobody should ever use it. And when I log on and reply to his terrible tweet with “Light Dongenecker", I'm not doing anything to make anyone's lives better, least of all my own. That’s time I could have spent reading a poem. But I didn’t respond “Light Dongenecker” to the tweet I posted at the top of this piece, nor I did respond to any of these other stupid tweets:

All of these tweets, which are just from the past fifteen days, are terrible. They are poorly composed, based on appalling personal views, and driven by Longenecker’s apparent need to show everyone that he’s right, all of the time, about everything, that he’s thought about it longer, that he’s come up with a pithier way to deconstruct it, that he’s not going to explain himself, you’re either smart and moral enough to get him or you’re not. This is, perhaps, not a great temperament for a pastor to have, and a pastor desperate to show everyone that racism can’t possibly be real maybe shouldn’t be running a parish in a state that just took the Confederate flag down from their statehouse grounds a whopping six years ago in response to a racist massacre.

I didn’t respond “Light Dongenecker” to any of these tweets because they just keep coming, too fast to keep up with. They have been coming for years; Longenecker has no shortage of terrible, ignorant opinions, and he’s desperate to share them with all of you as often as he can, and he’s finally starting to get a little upset when people point out that he maybe hasn’t thought everything through.

Now, if I’m going to criticize Longenecker’s posts, it’s only fair to show you some of my posts from the same period:

None of these are good, except the last one, which is outstanding. But, as with Longenecker, my tweets help shape the kind of image of myself that I’m trying to project: I’m a stupid online dipshit who listens to shoegaze and likes typing idiotic things on my phone and seeing the screen light up. My credentials begin and end with “stupid online dipshit”; Longenecker’s credentials, according to his website, begin here:

“I was brought up in an Evangelical home in Pennsylvania. After graduating from the fundamentalist Bob Jones University with a degree in Speech and English, I went to study theology at Oxford University. Eventually I was ordained as an Anglican priest and served as a curate, a school chaplain in Cambridge and a country parson on the Isle of Wight. Realizing that the Anglican Church and I were on divergent paths, in 1995 I and my family were received into the Catholic Church…I’ve now published about twenty books and booklets across a range of topics: apologetics, the saints and Catholic culture.”

That’s where his credentials begin, but they still end at “stupid online dipshit”. Longenecker’s job, presumably, is to provide pastoral and sacramental care for the families at Our Lady of the Rosary church in Greenville. But he seems to prefer to spend his time scouting out the internet, and his own provincial assembly, for people who agree with him that he’s right about everything. And if that’s how he’s spending a large chunk of his time, it’s potentially affecting his ability to listen to his parishoners, to counsel couples preparing for marriage, to hear confessions and absolve sins, to care for the sick, to visit the imprisoned. These are things he can’t do effectively if he’s pulling out his phone every five minutes to argue that Notre Dame should keep its leprechaun mascot.

And, as we all know, the sewage can also flow the other way. If Longenecker is online all of the time, and especially if he’s tweeting to an audience of conservative Catholics, then he’s just slurping up all of that sewage in that corner of the internet. We have seen this all of the time with our clergy: I’ve looked at how it affects our bishops, and how it impedes our church’s ability to respond to reality in front of them, and hell, the first G.O.T.H.S. piece I ever wrote was about a priest swimming in right-wing memes for four years until he completely lost his grip. Longenecker doesn’t think racism is real anymore; he’s not the only Catholic clergyman who thinks this way, and he can find plenty of Twitter accounts and YouTube channels that will help him feel validated and even holy for thinking this way. And maybe Longenecker isn’t familiar with any of those Twitter accounts and YouTube channels, except that in a picture on his own website he shows himself sitting at his desk with what is clearly a copy of Sword and Serpent, anti-Pope conspiracy theorist Taylor Marshall’s terrible YA novel about dragons:

Maybe Longenecker and his fellow clergymen swallowing a bunch of right-wing talking points from the Internet is starting to affect their ability to, say, speak out about racist violence in their own cities, or voter suppression in their states, or the fact that we need to get everyone vaccinated so we can finally end our worldwide plague.

Zero Catholic clergy should be on Twitter; I’ve been a big believer in that since long before I started work on this project. When it comes to authority and credentials in Catholicism, you should treat Longenecker the same way you should treat me: as a stupid online dipshit who needs to log off. When he posts something willfully ignorant, something that extrapolates the un-reality of racism from one half-assed possibly fake conversation with a group of Nigerian priests, something that avoids any understanding of reality that any idiot could pick up by reading a single book on American history, people will make fun of him for his bad post, and he’ll get upset, and then he’ll complain that people on Twitter are too mean and quick to judge. Just like every other stupid online dipshit. Except that Longenecker chose to be a Catholic priest. As part of his ordination, he once laid on the floor of a church while the Litany of the Saints played and the Holy Spirit blew over him. Armed with that, he now chooses to be a stupid online dipshit, multiple times a day.

Now, to address Fr. Longenecker directly: I do agree with you that piling on each other on Twitter helps nobody. I agree that we shouldn’t be logging onto Twitter and foaming at the mouth every time we see a thought with which we disagree. Hell, my posts certainly aren’t good, and nobody needs to see them. I completely agree that we should all spend less time posting, less time being angry online, and more time fully present with the people around us, being Christ to them as best we can. So in conclusion, since you’re the one who’s ordained: you first, dipshit.

Grift of the Holy Spirit is a series by Tony Ginocchio detailing stories of the weirdest, dumbest, and saddest members of the Catholic church. You can subscribe via Substack to get notified of future installments.