blatham wrote:
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I think thomas' question points us in the wrong direction. It's probably more helpful to think of American schools not as causal in American religiosity and polarization but rather that American schools simply reflect that particular national religiosity and polarization. There are historical reasons for this (and for differences with Canada) and you might turn to Hofstadter for thorough explication, but I'm betting you won't. Protestant evangelical activism (of a relatively poorly educated and theologically unsophisticated sort) has played a role in US history of far greater significance and consequence than in Canada (or England or Europe).
So I guess that your answer to the question posed by Thomas and elaborated by me is that you will not answer it. Instead, you will answer another question. OK, but I believe the original question still has merit - it involves the absence of a correct intellectual grounding of science in philosophy in school curricula; it appears to be a potential central element in the ongoing public debate; and it involves the resistance of a significant segment of the American population to the intrusive demands placed on it by government authorities.
Thomas has noted that it was those same Protestant Evangelicals who founded Harvard, Princeton, Yale and the largest fraction of our original University system. While many (or most) of their visible spokesmen in the current political debate may appear (and, in some cases, be) unsophisticated and poorly educated, it is demonstrably false to imply that they either resist intellectual inquiry or are unintelligent themselves. Indeed if they truly have developed and operated this vast insidious conspiracy that poses such a threat to the established secular order and the apparatus of public agencies, they cannot be mere fools.
Quote:A proponent of some theistic element in the universe does NOT have to be stupid, unthoughtful, or unlettered. There's a lot of sophisticated thought on this question going back even further than christian history. But very little of it has emerged from out of the American protestant tradition. Who here can even name an American protestant theologian of any stature? And if someone names, say, Plantinga, then what following can one point to? The reality of American religious thought sits us down in the company of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and others of the same sort, some better, such as Grapham, but many even less agreeable than those named.
The tradition has been anti-school/education in the main. The cliches and dichotomies we see in modern rhetoric (universities are elitist, feminine, non-practical, and probably destructive to the social good; the simple man is closer to god; etc) are found in American religious writing, ubiquitously, from the very beginning of the nation's history. Can any of us see a phenomenon like the "End Days" theology as popular or ascendant as it is in modern America happening in any other western country?
I don't deny the foolish excess you correctly cite. However you shouldn't ignore the central historical role these same Evangelicals played in the American Revolution and he creation of our democracy. The chief resulting difference between Americans and Anglo Canadians in those days was that the Americans preferred freedom over order and the Canadians order over freedom. Not a bad choice in my view. (I suspect the Tories who fled to Canada regarded their oppressors as an unsophisticated, unlettered mob. History has revealed the opposite was true.) We later got beneficial infusions of Irish, Polish, and Italian Catholics, German & Scandanavian Lutherans, and Jews from Eastern Europe, but that did not fully displace the original culture.
I can't think of any particularly prominent Episcopal or Anglican theologians either, and note that the most prominent of them, John Henry Newman was a convert to Catholicism.
The cliches which you ascribe to these Evangelicals are fully mached by those you and other of their critics cast (with much complacent confidence) on them. Frankly I don't see much difference in the cant of the polar extremes of "Blue State" and "Red State" America today. Both involve roughly equal measures of oversimplification and unthinking accceptance of doctrine. Only the doctrinal details are different - Biblical & fundamentalist on the one hand and secular materialist on the other. Not a particularly attractive menu in my view.
By the way - I have made a commitment to read Hofstadter's book - but only after Lola confirms certain conditions have been met. I mean to do it promptly when that happy outcome occurs.
