Christians in Academe: a Reply To a Reply

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2 Responses

  1. Crude says:

    A very nice commentary, Tom. One reply I’d make to Kotsko is regarding this:

    For instance, evangelicals need to reject the fantasy of America as a “Christian nation” and recognize that it is precisely America’s secular state and prohibition of an established church that has allowed American Christianity to be such a dynamic, grassroots-powered religion instead of the empty formality it often is in European countries.

    One problem here is that these words are so damn malleable. What “secular” means, what “a Christian nation” means, etc. If Kotsko thinks that America was a secular nation in that it was meant to utterly exclude from either law or formality any idea which someone could construe as “religious”, he’s simply wrong. God – even if construed broadly, as a merely theistic God rather than any particular faith’s God – was seen as playing an instrumental role in the founding of this country, by the founders themselves. Many Christian values were, in and of themselves, not seen as some kind of threat to the secular. This has changed.

    In fact, I think Kotsko has it backwards. The idea of America as being founded upon secularism, particularly in the sense that means nowadays, is nonsense. It is many supposed champions of “secularism” who react furiously to the smallest bit of religious symbolism in a city’s symbol, or in a court (The Ten Commandments, etc), or in any law which they suspect is favored primarily by religious, regardless of the justifications. Well, so long as it’s Christian symbolism or interests. NASA, meanwhile, is trying to build muslim self-esteem or such.

    Stanley Fish’s “Are There Secular Reasons?” is instructive here.

    Really, I understand Kotsko wanting Christians to be reasonable, not overreact or get paranoid. But frankly, sometimes there are institutional, cultural, and political threats to a person’s beliefs. And yes, re: evolution, “science” can very easily be abused, and misused, and misrepresented in the hopes of misshaping it into some kind of anti-Christian weapon. Just as it was abused and misused to support eugenics. Just as one bit of science after another has been misused and abused.

  2. Holopupenko says:

    Crude:

    Well put. We see science being abused here in the majority of DL’s personal opinions.