Ohh, those christians...

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend has a piece at the Atlantic that tries to critique Rick Perry's christianity with recourse to some fairly simple bible reading. The comments are terrible. It has immediately degenerated into reasonable atheists vs absurd christians apparently hoping to establish forever which is the one true faith.

Her point, which would be my point, is that their are ample resources from within the Christian tradition to critique attempts to identify with Christ to win votes.

For a very long time in parts of the US, the church teacher has had the biggest opportunity to educate regular christian people, but they themselves don't have to know tooo much or be too intelligent. Their higher education is conducted at seminaries and specialised education institutes - of widely varying quality. The great universities of the world started out to train people for ministry, so its not essentially undignified.

Somewhere, I feel the theological colleges confused politics and theology. Theological liberals don't stand on the bible text and may give very little credit to the articles of the traditional faith. Theological conservatives stick to what the bible texts say and the traditional way they have been understood. Fundamentalism started as a reaction to 19th century theological liberalism, which has now been so far improved upon as to show the 19th century biblical criticism as invalid. These days though, fundamentalists are crazy people who insist on the King James Version and the Schofield bible, neither of which are good scholarship any more. So the reasonable rage of an internal schism among christians has somehow been powering a debate between economic conservatives and social liberals, and committing christians to interpretations of the bible that don't stand up.

Finally, i will just note that the cheerful demolition of God by rationalists is quite different from the abdicating God Zizek would prefer. The absence of God, his nothingness, still leaves all humans equal. Without that absence, the same self-comparing narcissim will have to attach to other people, or social superstructures. I seriously think Neitzsche called it and Nazism and Stalinism bore him out.

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