re: #339 freetoken

Those following my critique of the Paige Patterson affair, SWBTS, and the SBC, will not be surprised at who is showing up at their gathering this week:

Pence to visit Dallas for speech at Southern Baptist Convention meeting

And this is why I keep harping about SBC issues (from Patterson to Mohler to creationism, etc.)

Trump is not the cause, but the symptom.

The cause is atavistic religious activism.

I’m not sure if I ever posted a link here to this essay before. When I first found this, I thot it explained alot about the craziness of the Trump campaign, but that it might be too crazy to be true. I no longer think that.
The Calvinist Roots of American Anti-Intellectualism By EJ Spode
Excerpts (bolding is mine):

‘People sometimes say that they like Trump because he speaks his mind and because he talks and thinks like they do, and this is often read as code for people liking his racism. But it is more than that. Trump sounds familiar because he is doing on a grand stage what they are told to do every day from pulpits across America. They are told to stick to their guns and to reject the evolution crap and the carbon dating crap and more generally the logic and inductive science crap, and they know that it is HARD. But here is Trump, a man who can proudly, unashamedly, stand up to Renaissance and Enlightenment-forged principles of rational inquiry and rational discourse.’

…

At the beginning of this essay, I promised to say something about Donald Trump. Throughout this election cycle, pundits and academics have marveled at the acceptance of Trump by some (if not all) conservative Christian leaders and their flocks, even while Catholics have wanted nothing to do with Trump. On the face of it, this acceptance by Evangelicals is a head-scratcher. Why would people that value piety and modesty and turning the other cheek and being kind and forgiving, etc. be in league with Trump of all people?

The answer, of course, is that they don’t support Trump because of his lack of piety or any other aspect of human character that they particularly value and which he inevitably lacks (modesty, kindness, forgiveness, you can name them all). Trump’s function is that he is their field general in their most important battle - the battle against the autonomous human reason.

I’m serious. This is the battle that matters above all others to the Evangelical right. You can fight against abortion, taxes, gun laws, no prayer and the teaching of evolution in schools, all day long. The problem is that if secular reason is still a thing, well then it is going to be an obstruction to all of those goals. Thus the real battle begins nearly 750 years ago, with Aquinas carving out a role for nature and ultimately the ideas of the Renaissance and Enlightenment and everything since.