I’m not a scholar of Thomas Jefferson, but I am a scholar of John Locke. Barton has an article about Locke on his website, so I thought I’d weigh in with my opinion on whether it matches Jay’s description of Barton’s methods. It does, and then some.
I should note for the record that I’m not only a conservative (both theologically, as an evangelical, and politically, as a Republican) but one with a track record of defending Locke against claims that he was a deist or that his philosophy is antithetical to Christianity. As providence would have it, just over a week ago I published an article on how Locke’s Reasonableness helped me come to faith in Jesus Christ.
Yet Barton’s attempt to fit Locke into his larger historical narrative forces him into numerous distortions. Moreover, the article contains a number of incidental facutal errors that don’t even advance his thesis, indicating that his inability to write reliable history stretches beyond ideological cheerleading and into outright incompetence.
religious right
If there is one thing I’m consistently irked by it’s the Persecution Envy of modern Western Christians. They live in a world where they have more religious freedom than at just about any time in history and yet you wouldn’t know that just by listening to them. Somehow this privileged group considers itself the most persecuted group in the world. They keep finding more and more ridiculous reasons to feel “persecuted.” Schools teaching evolution is not persecution. Someone calling you a bigot because you said gays were abominations that will destroy civilization as we know it is not persecuting you. Neither is someone who doesn’t agree with your view that everything will be perfect if only we got rid of democracy and got a Christian Theocracy instead. How did we come to a point where criticism = persecution? That’s an insult to everyone who has ever been actually persecuted — for instance the countless Christians who were robbed, beaten, tortured and killed for their faith through the ages. Two thousand years ago persecuted Christians had to face lions, now they just have to face facts. A Life in Juxtaposition ☀
I couldn’t find any acknowledgment of Falwell’s sordid past on Liberty’s website; his hagiography is about what you’d expect. I suppose it’s asking a lot to expect any university to voluntarily advertize the skeletons in its closet, but here’s what I can’t get past: Imagine you’re Jerry Falwell. You weren’t just ambivalent about the civil rights movement, as a lot of white people were. You were one of the “massive resisters” who used every means at your disposal, short of physical violence, to stop it. Then, let’s imagine, in later years you realize the error of your ways and repent. I don’t just mean you become embarrassed as times change and your earlier actions appear in a less favorable light. I mean, as a Christian, you realize that you were working against the kingdom of God, you realize your heart was full of hatred for your fellow man, you begin to question whether you were even a Christian at that time. And with horror and disgust and many tears, you repent. Frankly, anything less from a “Christian leader” of Falwell’s stature is not good enough. Now, if you had undergone that true repentance, can you imagine not doing everything in your power to make amends? Wouldn’t you be incredibly humbled? Wouldn’t you want to make a very public, abject apology? Wouldn’t you want the university you founded to acknowledge its institutional sin? So all I’m asking, still, is where is the evidence for this basic repentance? God, Country, and Conservatism at Liberty University ☀
Let’s be clear about what this means. In the 1950s, Jerry Falwell was a mature, fully grown man. He had had the time to think things through and develop his own opinions. He was the pastor of a megachurch. And Jerry Falwell stated explicitly that it was God’s will for black children to be treated worse than white children. It was God’s will for black children to get less education than white children. It was God’s will for black children to attend dilapidated, crowded schools while white children attended new schools. It was God’s will for black children to use outdated and worn textbooks after the white children finished with them and got their shiny new ones. It was God’s will for black children to have less opportunity in life. This is what Jerry Falwell believed in 1958. Jesse Curtis ☀
In April, Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, hired an openly gay man, Richard Grenell, to serve as his campaign’s national-security spokesman. The next day, Fischer launched a public attack on Grenell, a Republican foreign-policy expert who had previously worked as the spokesman for John Bolton, President George W. Bush’s Ambassador to the United Nations. Fischer had no argument with Grenell’s political views, which are consistently hawkish. The problem was his sex life: gay men, Fischer said, have “random, frequent, and anonymous sexual encounters—that becomes a significant issue when we talk about appointing somebody to a post as sensitive as the spokesman for national security.” After other conservative pundits took up Fischer’s cause, Grenell resigned from the Romney campaign. The resulting controversy has helped make gay rights one of the defining social issues of the 2012 campaign.
The one-story concrete building where Fischer works is indistinguishable from neighboring offices occupied by dentists, except that its front entrance features a statue of a fetus enshrined in a heart and a shoulder-high stone tablet inscribed with the Ten Commandments. Inside, plaques bearing the words “In God We Trust” underscore that this is the national headquarters of the American Family Association, a nonprofit advocacy group. A “pro-family ministry” founded in 1977, it promotes Bible-based social conservatism and criticizes what it regards as sinful popular culture.
Like much of the religious right, the A.F.A. was losing traction until Barack Obama was elected President, in 2008. His victory galvanized the group. Its leaders saw Obama as a radical proponent of godless socialism. According to a former employee, staff members at the Tupelo office passed around an image of Obama’s face blended with that of Adolf Hitler, against a backdrop of a swastika. The former employee, who found the image disrespectful, recalls, “Things really took a turn. They were no longer civil about the opposition. The goal became to defeat Obama.” In 2009, the A.F.A. hired Fischer as its director of issue analysis and as the host of “Focal Point,” which is broadcast from a studio across the street.
The American Family Association’s radio network comprises two hundred stations in thirty-five states, and Fischer’s program reaches more than a million listeners a day. That’s a fraction of Rush Limbaugh’s audience, but as large as that of Rachel Maddow or Chris Matthews, on MSNBC. Until recently, Fischer’s rising popularity escaped notice in the mainstream media, in part because his show is broadcast primarily on stations in the Southeast and the Midwest, including small cities such as Tullahoma, Tennessee, and Piggott, Arkansas. But his program is part of a parallel media universe that provides news and commentary, on everything from science to American history, from a perspective that is far to the right of Fox News.
Those Christian opponents of slavery didn’t somehow “just know” that slavery was wrong — it seemed to them a gross denial of the Golden Rule. They read the Bible in a different way than the “commonsense” literalists who defended slavery, but it didn’t require some new, innovative form of liberal Protestantism. It simply required them to stop the “commonsense” practice of pretending that the book of Exodus didn’t exist or to stop relying on the “literal” reading that pretended Jesus did not announce his ministry by proclaiming Jubilee or … Slavery and same-sex marriage (cont’d.) ☀
Two things are striking about this debate. The first is that both sides are now conducting it in religious terms. Whereas the GOP in prior culture wars was able to denounce the Democratic Party for pushing a “secular agenda,” now it is in the much more difficult position of claiming (as Rick Santorum did of Obama) that the left is preaching a “phony theology.”
Second, it is striking how closely this debate mirrors the slavery debate in antebellum America. Then, pro-slavery forces read key passages in the Bible in a “commonsense” manner and concluded that God was in favor of slavery. Meanwhile, anti-slavery activists, seeking after the “spirit” rather than the “letter” of the Biblical text, concluded that slavery flew in the face of both “love your neighbor” and the Golden Rule.
As Mark Noll argues in his book America’s God, the fact that the Bible seemed to most “commonsense” readers to support slavery brought on a crisis of authority that helped to produce what we now liberal Protestantism. Many American Christians at the time just knew slavery was wrong, so they learned to read the Bible in a different way.
We may be at a similar inflection point today. If you take a literal approach to the Biblical books and focus only at passages on sexuality, the Bible seems to support Graham. But if you focus on its broader message of love, it casts its vote for Obama.
As with slavery in the nineteenth century, public opinion in the twenty-first century is shifting rapidly on the gay marriage question, and not only among secular types. Billy Graham and other evangelicals who continue to insist that “the Bible is clear” in its opposition to gay marriage would do well to heed the lessons of America’s most costly conflagration over race.
As they preach what they see as the “clear” meaning of scripture, they are not only swimming against the tide of history. They are putting their own religious tradition at risk.
(via slacktivist)
With a friendly audience in front of him, Romney did what he had to do:
Winged words about Jerry Falwell, Sr: Check.
Hats off to evangelical fave Rick Santorum: Check.
Reminder that “marriage is a relationship between one man and one woman.”: Check.
Intimation that religious freedom is under assault: Check.
Christian triumphalism–as in “there is no greater force for good in the nation than Christian conscience in action”: Check.
Broadly speaking, of course, nearly all of contemporary western culture is rooted in Christianity and the Bible one way or the other, if you trace it back far enough. So the idea that Hollywood needs to create small subsidiaries to attend to some niche it calls “Christian” seems absurd. What Hollywood is really doing is creating small subsidiaries to attend to Christian conservatives. And why not? Conservatives like movies, too, and maybe some of these will be good. But let’s call them Christian conservative films, because everyone knows that’s what they are. Evangelicals shouldn’t get to claim one of the world’s great religions as their exclusive property. Timothy Noah ☀
One way in which things are much, much worse for women these days than 20 years ago is the sheer amount of virulent misogyny that is openly expressed, and tolerated, in our society. It feels to me that, in many ways, our culture is much more openly sexist now that it was then. Rush Limbaugh’s comments about Sandra Fluke are only the most recent and notorious example of this new misogyny. You see it online; women bloggers, for example, report they are frequently the target of vicious verbal abuse, up to and including rape threats and death threats. Female political leaders of both parties are held to a double standard and subjected to much humiliatingly sexist treatment. Many movies and TV shows,and reality shows especially, traffic in extremely sexist stereotypes; TV commercials sometimes seem to go out their way to be offensive to women. Tabloids obsessively police the bodies of female celebrities and cruelly ridicule any famous woman who dares to go out in public looking less than perfect.
Thirty years ago, the Religious Right played a significant role in U.S.-Central American relations: vigorously supporting President Ronald Reagan’s so-called low-intensity wars in the region – the contras in Nicaragua, right wing paramilitary death squads in El Salvador, and military dictators in Guatemala – a policy that was responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of people. The Religious Right’s support was in part couched in the struggle against communism, and in part tied to what they hoped would be the expansion of evangelical Protestantism in the region.
But the particular lie Colson is repeating, over and over, is a strange lie:
Secretary of State Clinton … and other officials repeatedly use the term “freedom of worship” (a private act) versus “freedom of religion,” (which the Constitution protects, which is the freedom to live out one’s faith in public).
Colson keeps saying this. It isn’t true. Colson knows it isn’t true. But he keeps saying it anyway.
It’s a weird lie in that it requires an artificial distinction of supposed great import between the common phrases “freedom of worship” and “freedom of religion.” And it’s a weird lie because it is so easily disproved. It can be disproved hundreds of times over with examples of Clinton, President Barack Obama and scores of other officials in the Obama administration using the phrase “freedom of religion.” And it can be disproved hundreds of times over with examples of previous Republican administrations using the phrase “freedom of worship” in exactly the way that Colson is now pretending is somehow nefarious.
And now American Catholics and the rest of the country know that the real agenda of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is to stop any government health care mandate. This is sad and ironic because the Catholic Church has historically been a strong advocate of health care access for those who need it. Worse, the conference is specifically demanding an exemption for any employer who would have a “conscience” problem with providing contraceptive coverage for employees. In other words, in the name of “religious liberty,” these bishops want to force their religious belief on employees who do not share their belief. Not only is this effort turning religious liberty on its head, but it ignores the reality that affordable health care, including contraception, is the most effective way to significantly reduce abortion.
(via slacktivist)
Yet the pope’s diagnosis of the condition of the Roman Catholic Church in America was actually fairly accurate. The “Church in America” would, in fact, be “different from that which is in the rest of the world.” Catholicism has undeniably made compromises in the United States—and this is precisely what has allowed it to thrive.
The Church has flourished here because it has made the same bargain all other religious organizations in the U.S. have made. In order to receive the many protections and advantages afforded to faith groups by law, it has agreed to conduct itself not as the one true faith, but as one among many. Having made this bargain, the Church has been influenced and enriched by the faiths around it, and must at times accommodate those with whom it disagrees.
Though Pope Leo XIII warned against compromise in the nineteenth century, and though as recently as last month Bishop William Lori of Connecticut declared “about religious liberty, there can be no compromise,” compromise itself is not a threat to the free exercise of religion. On the contrary, compromise is the very soul of American religious liberty.
(via slacktivist)
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