Concerning Louie Giglio and Laminin

It was suggested to me that I check out the video of Louie Giglio's teaching on laminin. I visited the Youtube site and watched Louie Giglio's performance. I was almost at once put off by his style, but this is a personal thing. The impression I had was that of a stage performer or, even worse, one of the religious hacks who populate “Christian” TV on systems like TBN. Seeing the impressive display of drums behind him, only added to my initial impression. Clearly, the guy backs his “show” with CCM.

I decided to learn more about this “Christian” stage performer and learned enough about him to strike him off my list of people to learn from.

Giglio was born in 1958 and grew up in a Christian home in Atlanta, Georgia. One morning at 2 AM during his freshman year at Georgia State University in 1977, he decided to follow Christ instead of the party life. That conscious decision led him to become one of the architects of the modern worship style geared towards young people with its emphasis on informal attire, expressive worship and low-key, visually driven sermons – Louie Giglio, Wikipedia [My emphasis]

I read that to mean that he is a practitioner of pseudo-Christian showmanship who holds to Armenian theology – if he holds to any at all.

My impression of his “teaching” on laminin is that it is a classic example of eisegesis – putting into a message something that was not originally intended, usually based on a personal interpretation already held. In Giglio's case, I believe that he may have been searching for something to give a big bang to his arm-waving, leaning-forward, in-your-face style of performance. What I believe he stumbled upon, or was as he said provided him, was the laminin story.

What exactly is laminin? One of the first things that I learned is that there are a number of kinds of laminin, not all of which are busy holding our bodies together. Some play very destructive roles, as this brief extract from a medical abstract makes clear:

Laminin is the predominant noncollagenous glycoprotein in the basement membrane beneath epithelial surfaces. Various laminin isoforms play an important role in physiologic and pathologic processes, including cancer progression and tumor cell dissemination. The interaction of cancer cells with laminin appears to be a key event in invasion and dissemination of tumor cells - Magnus von Knebel Doeberitz, M.D., Is Progression of HPV-Infected Cells Within the Cervical Epithelium Linked to Modified Interaction with the Extracellular Matrix?: The Potential Role of the 67-kd Nonintegrin Laminin Receptor 67LR [My emphasis]

Oops! Looks like Giglio left out part of the story of laminin's role in our bodies. Clearly, mention of some forms of laminin as having pathological effects in the body would not have squared well with his arguments and would have required him to invent some means of sustaining his position. I would have loved to have had this guy on the other side of an interrogation table.

But what about the “perfect” cruciform shape of the drawing and micrographic that he displayed? How to explain them except as proofs of what Giglio was selling?

First thing to bear in mind should be that we do not know with absolute assurance the actual shape of the cross upon which Jesus was immolated. We know that Romans crucified victims on trees, upright posts and, of course, crosses. While they may have used the type cross made famous by Emperor Constantine's mother, Saint Helen and the Roman Catholic Church, I doubt that to have been what Christ was hung on. There is strong support for believing that the sacrificial cross was in the shape of the Greek capital letter tau(Capital “T”). Such a cross would have had a permanently implanted upright post with a tenon at the top that would fit into the mortised crossbar.

Pictured are three types of crosses commonly used by the Roman army in the first century A.D. Each carried an inscription stating the victim's capital offense and a seat-like projection, not designed for the victim's comfort, but to prolong their agony. Nails and ropes held the victim's legs and arms in place.

The cross on the left was called a “high tau” cross because it was shaped like the capital Greek letter tau (“T”). The middle cross was known as a “low tau” cross, shaped like the lower case tau (“t”). In both cases the central post was generally set permanently in the ground while the cross bar was carried to the site by the victim. The cross on the right was an actual tree still in the ground (dead or alive) with its limbs serving as the cross bar. Jesus was probably crucified on a “low tau” type cross. - What Kind of Cross Was Jesus Crucified On?

Since the world seems generally to have accepted Catholicism's representation of the cross on which our Savior died, the shape or shapes of laminin seem to lose some of their significance. On the other hand, that upright drawing of a type of laminin certainly looked like the type cross generally accepted as the true cross by Christians and others. I don't know how other doctors do it, but in every one of my doctors' consulting rooms there have been one or more drawings pertinent to the particular doctor's specialty. Exploded diagrams of the heart with details of coronary blood vessels in the cardiologist's office; really big detail of kidneys and their blood supply vessels in my nephrologist's office, etc. This is what Giglio's “cruciform laminin drawing looks like when seen in its original orientation.

I never believed these drawings to be anything but drawings intended to help viewers to understand what the organs look like inside and out and how they function. Molecular diagrams are generally intended to represent those structures in ways that make them easy for humans to conceptualize and work with, not to be exact reproductions of the molecules' actual visual appearances. Giglio takes his pet images a step farther and attempts to make them religious symbols.

Having mentioned doctors and the displays in their offices, it occurs to me that Giglio might also have chosen to make another “Jesus” symbol of an ancient sign used to indicate healers, the caduceus:

So what does laminin actually look like? Actually, there are a number of different types of laminin. The type mentioned in the medical abstract quoted above, EHS-laminin looks like this electron micrograph:

Having written all this, can there be any doubt about my evaluation of Louie Giglio or his laminin teaching? Just in case some may not have figured it out, I believe Giglio to be just another guy making his living as a showman disguised as a religious teacher/evangelist, and an Armenian at that. As for his laminin theology, I believe it better suited to showing on TBN than YouTube. At least were he on TBN, folks would have a clue as to the validity of his teaching.