This article seems to equate "evangelical" with "fundamentalist."
That's interesting and ironic, since most fundamentalists do not
even like the word "evangelical." I see that they don't let that get
in the way of a good polemical argument, even if it pisses the
fundamentalists off by calling them evangelical.
David
"I am so Libertarian that I don't think lawyers
and doctors should be licensed by the government. I am so
Libertarian that I make some Libertarians cringe."--Neal
Boortz
On 3/14/2012 3:43 PM, [email protected] wrote:
RD / Religion Dispatches
How did Rick Santorum roll over Mitt Romney in all those
primary states? Where did the energy come from? While
pundits still insist that he won’t topple the moneyed
Mitt—whose campaign still generates about as much excitement
as the winter sport of curling—Santorum is holding onto the
spotlight long enough to put religious populism front and
center.
Santorum’s red-hot religious enthusiasm is a big part of
his success. Sure, there have been enough gaffes on the
hustings to make Dan Quayle blush. But... one person’s gaffe
is another’s bold truth. And few have been as bold as the
former Pennsylvania senator. When not attacking president
Obama for his “war on religion,” Santorum likes to take on
so-called secularists, and climate scientists. “I’ve never
supported
even the hoax of global warming,” he said in February,
calling it more “ political science” than science.
DRB: With the two data dumps of FOIA data, including some
embarrassing e-mails and hard-coded programming code guaranteed to
produce a "hockey stick" no matter what data is given. one is
inclined to believe that the "science" was more a conclusion looking
for a rationale than actual science. It's amazing how much warming
you can generate if you don't include 400 Siberian stations in the
data. These guys cooked as many books as Fannie and Freddie.
Teaching the Impossible
And what about higher education; the liberal, secular
source of so much that Santorum finds disgusting?
For those select few who do get an education, rather than working on a road crew, what should be
taught in the classroom? “Darwin’s theory of evolution
should not be taught as absolute fact in the science
classroom,” he has mused. On law and history Santorum
squares off against what he sees as a
separation-of-church-and-state dogma. Earlier in his
campaign he assured voters that “God gave us laws
that we must abide by.” Since much of this runs counter to
how courses are taught in American colleges and
universities, Santorum offered a solution in an informal interview in October, 2011: “Just like
we have certifying organizations that accredit a college,
we’ll have certifying organizations that will accredit
conservative professors. If you are to be eligible for
federal funds, you’ll have to provide an equal number of
conservative professors as liberal professors.”
DRB: Well, there is something to be said about NOT teaching a
"theory" as a "fact." "Global warming" also qualifies for that
distinction. The religion thing has been brought to the forefront by
the administration's failure to keep "separation" in mind with the
birth control edict. And Santorum IS Catholic, so what the heck to
these guys think that he's going to say?? Nothing?? Hardly.
Perhaps such a university, in the name of fairness, would
include paleontology courses taught by someone who believed
that dinosaurs were contemporary with humans and that
fossils unearthed today are of animals drowned in Noah’s
flood.
DRB: Taught as a possibility or theory, of course.
Could such a university be accredited? The short answer is
yes. A handful of fundamentalist colleges and universities
across the country incorporate such views into their science
curriculum. Knowledge denial, though, can easily find other,
more subtle ways to reach willing audiences, and even creep
into the classrooms of credible universities. One strategy,
endorsed by Santorum and heavily promoted by
anti-evolutionary groups like the Seattle-based Discovery
Institute, is to falsely claim that there is a actual
scientific debate going on about evolution and urge
educators to “teach the controversy.”
There is, of course, no such controversy in the scientific
community.
DRB: Of course there isn't, the secular community has ruled the
religiously tinged possibility of creation as out of bounds, and
refuses to hire anyone with a different view.
Homeschooling parents, evangelical teachers at private
schools, and instructors at unaccredited religious colleges
and Bible institutes share a common educational paradigm (as
Julie Ingersoll has detailed here at
RD –Eds). Outside the normal conversations about what
counts as established knowledge, they are vulnerable to
messages like that of the Discovery Institute and they are
cheered that a godly candidate like Santorum is speaking for
them. What are teachers to make of a claim by a scholar with
scientific credentials who assures them that evolution is
controversial—especially if that scholar is a religious
believer who holds a PhD and shares their faith commitments?
DRB: Evolution folks need to get around the second law of
Thermodynamics (oversimplified: disorder is increasing, order is
decreasing) which would seem to indicate that things are devolving
rather than evolving.
Anti-intellectualism is deeply rooted in American
evangelicalism, reaching even into the classrooms of popular
schools, like Cedarville University and Liberty University
(the largest evangelical university in the world), where
students are taught that the earth is 10,000 years old. Millions
of evangelical youth grow up hearing that there is a
real debate when it comes to human origins. They also come
to learn that homosexuality is a sinful lifestyle choice
that can be repaired with prayer. They are taught that
secular historians are suppressing the vision of the
Founding Fathers and that America was supposed to be a
Christian nation.
DRB: OK, so they need to be taught the "mental illness" angle
instead of the "lifestyle choice" angle, but barring the discovery
of a "gay gene" or something it would seem that the cause is not
hard-wired until proven otherwise. I do believe that history texts
are at least partially the products of the prejudice of their
authors. It is going too far to say that Deists and others at the
founding really had a "Christian Nation" in mind.
Controversies that should have died decades and even
centuries ago are kept alive by organizations invested in
the answers of yesteryear, often because those old answers,
say stalwarts, came from the Bible and are believed to have
been laid down by God. These answers informed the thinking
of a long-gone society that, through the rose-tinted glasses
of those nostalgic for a better time, looks moral,
family-oriented, and respectful of God’s laws in ways that
the present age is not.
DRB: I don't believe that the Bible is a science textbook. It wasn't
meant to be.
Knowledge Denial
Ken Ham’s Answers
in Genesis project is dedicated to the proposition
that God wrote the Bible himself and that all knowledge
needs to be based on a simple literal reading of that
ancient book. As the organization’s name suggests, the book
of Genesis is filled with “answers” that God provides to
many important questions: How old is the earth? What is the
proper relationship of males and females? What is marriage?
Why were animals created? Why are there so many languages?
Where did humanity originate? Why do people behave the way
they do?
DRB: I have my own issues with Ham.
Some suggest that Ham’s alternative theories are benign.
“With regard to those evangelicals—and for that matter
those ultra-orthodox Jews—who believe that the earth is less
than 10,000 years old and either that there were no
dinosaurs or that they lived alongside human beings, my
reaction has always been: So what?” writes conservative radio host and
columnist Dennis Prager in a response to our recent NYT op-ed on the
evangelical rejection of reason. “[W]hat real-life problem
is caused by people who believe otherwise?” he asks, as if
knowledge is only relevant when it has a practical value for
everyone alike.
DRB: Yet I doubt that these folks would raise a question if the
author of the op-ed was Abdul Rashad (made up name) and it was
coming from the Islamic viewpoint. It's OK to bash Christians.
Answers in Genesis argues that starting assumptions,
rather than data and theories, determines whether a
researcher believes the earth is six thousand or
four-and-a-half billion years old. Who can be sure, anyway?
Ham encourages students to ask their teachers “Were you
there?” when those teachers suggest that the earth is very
old, or that dinosaurs predated humans. As Ham would say,
God, of course, was there and told Moses what
happened “in the beginning.” That’s the “answer.”
Professionally constructed dioramas in Ham’s Creation Museum
show dinosaurs looking over Eve’s shoulder.
Similar knowledge denial occurs on questions of gender
roles and human sexuality. Organizations like James Dobson’s
Focus on the Family claim that homosexuality is an
inherently perverse and sinful life choice that can be
reversed. Gay adolescent evangelicals consistently
experience their sexual awakening with alarm, denial, and
self-loathing—with parents and other authority figures
seemingly aligned in condemnation, and unavailable when
needed most. But the so-called “reparative therapy” such
youth are steered toward has been shown to be not only utterly ineffective but also
psychologically damaging.
The American Psychological Association has stated
definitively that “homosexuality is not an illness. It does
not require treatment and is not changeable.” The American
Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics,
along with numerous other professional organizations, have
adopted similar stances.
DRB: Surprised you did not comment on this yourself, Billy.
But still young people, including those that frequent the
clinic run by Michelle Bachmann’s husband, are encouraged to
seek deliverance from their condition. The emerging
acceptance of homosexuality and gay marriage, claim many
evangelical leaders, reflects the moral decay of society,
not an open, more accepting world. Or, as Santorum told viewers of Fox News: “There are
all sorts of studies out there that suggest just the
contrary, and there are people who were gay and lived the
gay lifestyle and aren’t anymore.”
DRB: Ever since Sowell's "The Vision of The Anointed" came out about
how the [self] anointed elites would say how great the world would
be if it weren't for those darn Christians and Conservatives, or
even worse: Christian Conservatives. See also Mona Charen's
"Do-gooders."
Amateur Hour
As conservative Christians adopt a counterview on sex and
gender, they learn alternate versions of history, too.
Populist historians within evangelicalism, like the
prominent Texas Republican, David Barton, promote the idea
that America is slouching toward Gomorrah. America is God’s
chosen republic, Barton asserts: the nation has been an
explicitly Christian country from its earliest days and
needs to reverse its sinful migration away from its biblical
roots. Professional historians, by contrast (including
leading evangelicals like Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and
George Marsden) emphasize the plurality of beliefs in early
America and highlight the distance between the past and the
present. Yet, how does the man or woman in the pew, faced
with choosing a curriculum for church or home school, know
who is presenting history more accurately?
DRB: It's also REV. David Barton, which somehow manages to escape
notice here. From Oral Roberts University, no less. He was a
Reverend before he was Texas Republican Party co-chairman. But
that's OK, the goal is to bash both Christians and Republicans, I'm
just surprised that they missed the "double whammy" here.
The amateur historians, biologists, and social scientists
who produce alternative curricula for evangelicals speak as
beleaguered culture warriors. They offer winsome personal
testimonies and refer to the Bible so often that it can
sometimes seem as though their ideas actually come straight
out of the Bible. They seem trustworthy—in contrast to their
secular and often agnostic Ivy League counterparts. We have
used the term “anointed” to reflect evangelical
experts’ remarkable ability to come across as messengers
from God.
DRB: This is why I think that social sciences are devoid of
Christian or Conservative representation. They will be called
amateurs and not professionals for failing to keep progressive
liberal agendas and positions. Most folks don't enter fields of
study to be punching bags.
These anointed leaders advance their alternative knowledge
claims by casting doubt on the relevance of “secular”
credentials, scientific consensus, and even higher education
in general. Some of them wave away the conclusions of
professionals, academics, and credentialed experts as the
mutterings of eggheads with their own egghead agendas.
DRB: Again, global warming's manufactured consensus, enforced by
denying publication to critics as documented in the Climategate
e-mails, created the consensus out of whole cloth. Demonization and
silencing of critics is hardly in the name of frank and open debate,
but rather is designed to quash the same.
Glenn Beck, one of Barton’s most enthusiastic promoters,
can hardly utter the word “professor” without sneering and
making air quotes with his fingers. Many evangelicals,
skeptical that a PhD after a name gives any reasonable
authority, have come to sympathize with and even celebrate
Fox News’ most well-known anti-intellectual Bill O’Reilly.
O’Reilly, who pitted his understanding of science against
that of Richard Dawkins in a recent show, is fond of
scoffing, “sorry, professor, not buying it,” suggesting that
expertise is really just opinion.
DRB: In many cases it is authoritatively stated opinion masquerading
as facts. Take Obama's claim that he has increased the nation's oil
production. Sorry, but the increase comes from oil under private
lands where he cannot tie the hands of producers as easily as he can
elsewhere. There is still a slowdown in Gulf of Mexico drilling,
permits for refineries, and regulations on coal powered electric
plants. As a result, if there is a real hot summer down here, we
will have rolling blackouts. Thanks, President Obama.
A number of thoughtful evangelicals are alarmed at the
surging anti-intellectualism within their ranks. And there
are many academic historians, geneticists, psychologists,
and other intellectuals within the Christian tradition who
do not deny the knowledge claims of their respective fields.
Such believers, however, are viewed with suspicion if they
do not speak the language of biblical inerrancy,
anti-evolution, and conservative politics embraced by other
Christians.
DRB: The tolerance going the other way in religious circles is just
as bad. I've been told that being a conservative or libertarian
means that I am NOT a Christian. No discussion.
Take Francis Collins, for example, one of America’s most
well-known scientists and an enthusiastic evangelical
Christian. Despite having directed the Human Genome Project
and ascended to the head of the National Institutes of
Health, Collins’ credentials mean absolutely nothing to
millions of evangelicals who prefer to get their science
from Ken Ham, who has no stature of any sort in the
scientific community.
DRB: Who? I know Ken Ham only by third party association through a
Red Cross biologist/trainer, so it's not like I've read anything by
him. And I think that in the last 30 years, I have heard maybe 1 or
2 sermons on the creation account. So yeah, it's a real popular
topic (NOT).
Many conservative evangelicals reject Collins because he
believes in evolution, and does not read the first chapters
of Genesis literally. In his bestselling The Language of God, Collins
recalls speaking at a national gathering of Christian
physicians and having some of his audience walk out “shaking
their heads in dismay” when he confessed to being an
evolutionist. People have stormed out of Southern Baptist
churches when they discovered he accepted evolution. Others
have come to the microphone after a talk and implied that,
in accepting evolution, he was “under the influence of the
devil.”
DRB: More persuasive if he had, you know, actual dates, times, and
locations. Otherwise, this is hearsay.
Collins regularly gets critical commentary from
non-believers like Jerry Coyne and Sam Harris, but, as he has said, the “nastiest”
messages come from fellow Christians, “infuriated that
someone who claims to be a believer could say these things
about the truth of the evolutionary process.”
DRB: So evolution is no longer a theory?? They need to go back and
correct that line in this article where they say that it is.
Highly publicized comments made by recent GOP candidates
suggest that the stakes are incredibly high. Rick Perry made
it clear during his short run that he was not on Collins’
side. At a campaign stop in New Hampshire in August he told
a child that Texas teaches creationism along with evolution.
(Though that, in fact, is not true.) Perry’s Texas has long
drawn the spotlight in these faith-driven culture war
battles. Conflicts over what kind of history should be
taught in public schools, recently waged in Texas and
Virginia, are no longer secular struggles. These skirmishes
pit good against evil.
The Bible as Measuring Rod
Conflict between generally accepted ideas and
“insider-approved” evangelical alternatives has roiled the
evangelical world for decades. Thirty years ago the pop
philosopher and culture warrior Francis Schaeffer (in the
news most recently as an influence on Michele Bachmann) went
head to head with several evangelical historians within the
academy. It started when Schaeffer wrote an anti-secularist
battle plan, A Christian Manifesto (1981),
intended to get Christians engaged in politics. Evangelicals
must “own” America’s Christian heritage said Schaeffer. The
nation was founded on the principles of the Bible and the
Reformation, he argued, and the founders “understood that
they were founding the country upon the concept that goes
back into the Judeo-Christian thinking that there is Someone
there who gave inalienable rights.” Those principles had
vanished in the 20th century and the government now rested
in the hands of materialists and humanists.
Within a year A Christian Manifesto had sold
approximately 300,000 copies, winning the enthusiastic
endorsement of Jerry Falwell, who distributed it to viewers
of his television program.
Evangelical historians dismissed Schaeffer as a
propagandist. He was clearly not a scholar, Mark Noll told Newsweek.
Writing in Christian Century, one historian called
Schaeffer to task for reading contemporary politics back
into the 18th century. The founders’ civil religion may have
drawn on the ideals of theism, but this hardly made the
country they were founding into a Christian nation.
DRB: Schaeffer was a theologian. I guess that theologians are no
longer considered scholars, never mind the Master's Thesis' and
Doctoral Dissertations that they write with all of those footnotes,
just like "true scholars" in other disciplines. This bifurcation is
a rather new phenomenon.
Unfortunately Schaeffer’s views survived and are now alive
and well in the messages of David Barton and the late Peter
Marshall—the two most popular historians for homeschooling parents, Tea Partiers,
and evangelicals in general. Barton—whose education consists
of a bachelor’s degree in Christian education from Oral
Roberts University—dismisses his critics, suggesting that
the peer review process and the heavy interpretive component
of professional history make it unreliable. He dismisses
complaints about his credentials by referring to the
unvarnished truth of the primary sources he employs, just as
fundamentalists invoke their literal reading of the Bible.
The Bible is the measuring rod.
DRB: And in most cases of morals, at the very least, it probably
should be. Most of its moral teachings are also found in other
religions.
(And as Paul Harvey discusses this week on RD, Barton has
been busy stoking the fires of culture war this season,
calling Obama America’s most “biblically-hostile”
president.)
DRB: He is certainly more concerned with the sanctity of the Koran
than Islamic burnings of Bibles and killings of Christians in
Nigeria or Egypt.
Biblicist watchdog Georgia Purdom recently summed up this Bible-centric
approach in a review (or indictment) of our book. She
explains that her organization valiantly goes “against the
grain of the secular academic establishment while we stand
on the authority and trustworthiness of God’s Word from the
very first verse (as opposed to word of finite, fallible
man).”
The intellectual trajectory of American evangelicalism is
not encouraging. High-profile evangelical scholars like Duke
Divinity professor Stanley Hauerwas, Francis Collins,
theologian N. T. Wright, psychologist David Myers, or the
historian Mark Noll often seem like guttering lamps
struggling against powerful anti-intellectual winds
determined to extinguish them.
DRB: Someone is trying to extinguish the light of N. T. Wright??
What planet is this article written on?? Haven't seen anything
against the others mentioned here either. N. T. Wright is cheered in
many quarters, yes, even evangelical ones.
The anti-evolution Discovery Institute, to take one
example, spends much of its energy attacking Collins, who
has neither the time nor the resources to respond.
Influential conservative donors pressure evangelical college
administrators to fire “liberal” faculty, creating a brain
drain that leaves their respective communities even more
intellectually impoverished.
Meanwhile, the turnstiles at Ken Ham’s creation museum turn
briskly.
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]>
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]>
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
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