Howard Fineman continues to bring old school flare to his reporting. His latest on the Huffington Post notes changes in the Republican party that move it toward a religious affiliation. This article alongside that about Santorum on Religion Dispatches provides an interesting portrait of what the Grand Old Party has become.
Rise Of Faith Within GOP Has Created America’s First Religious Party
Howard Fineman | March 3, 2012 | The Huffington Post
Whatever happens on Super Tuesday, the Republican primary season already has made history. The contest has confirmed the establishment of America’s first overtly religious major political party.
The signs are numerous, but it’s still easy to miss the big picture: that the GOP now is best understood as the American Faith Party (AFP) and its members as conservative Judeo-Christian-Mormon Republicans.
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.