Sunday morning sermon.
As an evangelical apostate, I should be cheering for Franky Shaeffer, but his latest article really rubs me the wrong way. The whole thing amounts to...
"How dare those backwards hicks call me elitist!"
Over and over he speaks of religious conservatives as being not part of America. Even anti-American.
The kindly liberal reasonable bubble of an open free culture in which reason, argument in fact prevails is far removed from the other America, one of militia training camps, fundamentalist churches, parents who follow Dobson's "parenting" advice by "breaking" their children and whipping them (as Dobson tells them to do in his books) and thus raising the damaged and dangerous automatons of biblical vengeance and sadism.
If you live in a bubble, if you're not even aware of what's going on in the other half of your country, how can you claim to be the "real" America? And how "kindly" is it when you describe the other side as "serial killers"?
To understand the Religious Right today and how dangerous they are don't think politics -- think serial killers who "win" by "getting even" with the society they perceive as having disrespected them. It isn't about facts. It isn't about election results. It isn't about truth. It's about victimhood and revenge on the "elite" in other words on everyone not like you.
Gee, Franky, I wonder where they'd get the idea they were being disrespected? I don't see much reason and argument here, just insults and stereotyping. Sure, the extreme right wing has its share of nutcases, but there are also plenty of legitimate objections. Ones even this atheist finds compelling. In case you hadn't noticed, we're in the middle of an economic collapse. We've spent hundreds of billions on taxpayer bailouts, primarily for the benefit of the richest Americans. We were warned for years, and the warnings didn't come from the left. They wouldn't even discuss it. They still won't discuss the many remaining problems we face. Just a willingness to not only bail out bankers time after time, but to change the basic accounting rules for their convenience. Only on the right do we see any concern for fiscal responsibility or fair play at all.
And it's not just economic elitism I see coming from the left.
We are now several generations into this experiment of holier-than-thou withdrawal from our American mainstream culture. If you wonder who it is that's both running and underwriting organizations such as the Family Research Council, Focus On The Family, Freedom Works and other organizers of the 9/12 March and who are the most faithful followers the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh or viewers of Fox News your answer is: it's the home school/Christian school generation of men and women now hitting their thirties and even forties who might as well have been raised on a different planet.
Silly conservatives! Don't you know that only the liberal elite are allowed to send their children to exclusive private schools to be inculcated with the unique values of their class? You lower class sorts should be satisfied-grateful!-to send your kids to public schools where we set the curriculum and the standards.
Don't get me wrong, I think fundamentalist Christians are a threat to education. Creationists not only attack the basic facts of biology, but attempt to undermine the epistemological foundation of science itself. But at worst, kids in Christian schools fail to learn one subject. Kids in public schools guided by liberal education theories and lack of standards fail to learn every subject.
Give me a literate kid from a fundamentalist Christian background, and I can show him convincing evidences for evolution. I was one of those kids, after all. Give me an illiterate from a public school, and even if he believes in evolution, what's he going to do with it? Become a scientist when he can't even read?
I believe in picking sides. If you don't pick, you get a side picked for you. As an atheist fiscal conservative, there is no side I'm completely at home in, but I believe the left is a more immediate threat to America at this moment in history, and that Franky Schaeffer's nasty brand of elitism is far more representative of his side as a whole than the religious fundamentalists are of the right as a whole.