The Way of Improvement Leads Home: The Culture Wars Are Real
Anyone who thinks that the culture wars are over has not experienced what I went through today. Last night Glenn Beck’s “news” website, The blaze.com, published an article about my last Patheos column. In that column I criticized Barack Obama for not following through on the faith-based initiatives he proposed in 2008.
But this was not the part of the piece that caught the attention of the folks at The Blaze.
Rather, the “powers-that-be” at The Blaze decided to focus their article on my statement that Barack Obama was “the most explicitly Christian president in America.” Last night they decided to run a story entitled “Messiah College Professor: ‘Obama May Be the Most Explicitly Christian President in American History.’” The piece has lit a fire under the Beck faithful. When I awoke this morning I had dozens of angry e-mails. The voice-mail on my office phone was filled with nasty attacks. The Blaze currently has 800+ comments and the originally piece at Patheos has about 160. Most of them are attacks on my piece. I also heard that Beck talked about me on his radio program today.
In the last 24 hours I have been called a lot of names. I have been compared to Hitler, Louis Farrakhan, and Woodrow Wilson (yes, you read that last one correctly). Several expressed wishes that I be cast into perdition. A few demanded that the administration at the college where I teach fire me immediately. The culture wars are real.