CeilingCat
Posts: 2363
Joined: Dec. 2007
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David Gerson, George W. Bush's former head speechwriter, has written a devastating article for the current (April 2018) issue of The Atlantic.
Gerson is an Evangelical, a graduate of Wheaton College (the Harvard of Evangelicalism) and ar least ten times smarter and better educated than anybody at Uncommon Descent. His article is titled The Last Temptation and it's subtitled "How evangelicals, once culturally confident, became an anxious minority seeking political protection from the least traditionally religious president in living memory". To put it mildly, it's devastating.
"The president won four-fifths of the votes of white evangelical Christians. This was a higher level of support than either Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, an outspoken evangelical himself, ever received.
Trump’s background and beliefs could hardly be more incompatible with traditional Christian models of life and leadership. Trump’s past political stances (he once supported the right to partial-birth abortion), his character (he has bragged about sexually assaulting women), and even his language (he introduced the words pussy and shithole into presidential discourse) would more naturally lead religious conservatives toward exorcism than alliance. This is a man who has cruelly publicized his infidelities, made disturbing sexual comments about his elder daughter, and boasted about the size of his penis on the debate stage. His lawyer reportedly arranged a $130,000 payment to a porn star to dissuade her from disclosing an alleged affair. Yet religious conservatives who once blanched at PG-13 public standards now yawn at such NC-17 maneuvers. We are a long way from The Book of Virtues.
Trump supporters tend to dismiss moral scruples about his behavior as squeamishness over the president’s “style.” But the problem is the distinctly non-Christian substance of his values. Trump’s unapologetic materialism—his equation of financial and social success with human achievement and worth—is a negation of Christian teaching. His tribalism and hatred for “the other” stand in direct opposition to Jesus’s radical ethic of neighbor love. Trump’s strength-worship and contempt for “losers” smack more of Nietzsche than of Christ. Blessed are the proud. Blessed are the ruthless. Blessed are the shameless. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after fame."
It gets better from there. You absolutely want to read that article!
Worst of all, from ID and UD's perspective, Gerson traces the present day moral debasement of Evangelicalism to its century and a half long, thoroughly dishonest rejection of modernism and evolution!
Denyse has a post up about this article, But the Big Cool cannot talk about evolution as if reality mattered, where she quotes David Klinghoffer's ("a good and smart person") "response" to Gerson and then she adds her own absolutely typical "reply": | Quote | But I wish he and a bunch of other people would get this part of the story right: A Big Cool Person should not know facts.
That would imply that The Big Cool inhabit the same world as the rest of us do. We could have a serious discussion about the strength and weaknesses of current evolution theory.
Admit that and Big Cool is dead.
It always depended on an alternative version of reality.
See also: Why Hollywood is losing ground. |
A perfect Denyse-style name-calling non-answer.
I think someday we'll look back on the election of Donald Trump as the day Conservatism and especially conservative religion linked arms and collectively jumped the shark. Assuming we survive it to look back, anyway.
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