Davison's Doodle

How to Ask These Questions

As we watch the Republican candidates for President attempt to out “conservative” each other it is worth considering how the media, or some other institution intent on allowing the truth to come out, asks questions about the world view, the meta narrative, from which candidates live and participate in public life.  This article from Religion Dispatches highlights the meta narrative from which, from their observation and study, candidate Santorum draws the temerity to call the sitting President, who is African American, a “snob” rather than “uppity”.  Embed into this narrative a sitting Judge forwarding an email to friends that jokes that the current President’s mother must have slept with animals and I think the evidence is clearer that some portions of “white” America is frightened by a changing narrative in these Unites States that the melting pot is, has, actually worked and is working to bring Martin Luther King Jr’s words to meaningful reality– that children are being judged based on the content of their character instead of the color of their skin, their gender, their sexuality, or economic caste.  This was threatening to a particular brand of conservatism when MLK was alive and it continues to be a threat to a particular brand of conservatism today.

Santorum’s War on Satan…er, on Higher Education
by Eric Reitan | Religion Dispatches

What we have here, as Joe Laycock notes, is a meta-narrative of cosmic conflict between the forces of good and the forces of evil. And Santorum’s views on academia are not incidental to this cosmic narrative but wholly embedded within it. Scholars in academia engage in critical and reason-based thinking on every conceivable topic of human interest—including religion and religious dogma. As such, conservative Christian teachings are not immune to the academy’s critical attention. But for those who view these teachings as identical with the revealed truth of God, such critical attention will be seen as nothing but hubris; nothing but the vaunting of human pride over God’s word.

Learning is, in this view, a spiritual vulnerability. Those who are less educated are less likely to critically assess the pronouncements of a religious authority—a critical assessment which, given Santorum’s vision of cosmic holy war, is a Satanic attack on divine truth.

P.S.
This is exactly the reason why the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) needs to claim its educational identity once again and why the change in the Order of Ministry to blessing ordination into Christian Ministry that does not include higher education from an accredited graduate school is a problem.