Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Sara says that higher education needs to be more rigorous and more vigorous in response to crackpot science and revisionist history from the religious right:

I've been saying for a long while now that the power to end the Intelligent Design fiasco, firmly and finally and with but a single word, rests in the manicured hands of the chancellors of America's top universities. The message is short and simple: "Teach what you like, it's all fine with us. But if you put ID in your science courses, we will not accept those courses as adequate for admission to our campus."

Making this kind of public statement would be one small step for a university chancellor; and one giant leap for American science education. Somebody, somewhere, needs to set a firm standard. If our universities -- which bear responsibility for training our professional scientists, and maintain the labs and faculties responsible for much of our best research -- won't stand up and draw that line, then we really are well and truly lost.

It turns out that we may be in better hands than I'd hoped. It turns out, in fact, that one of my own alma maters quietly drew that line in the sand way back in 2005, and has been fighting a long, slow legal battle ever since as a result. In a story that seems to have gotten almost no attention outside the local area, the University of California -- the nation's largest university system (motto: Fiat Lux, or "let there be light") -- has been engaged in a legal battle with Calvary Chapel Christian School over the question of what is an acceptable science education, and what rights a university has when it comes to drawing those lines.

The battle started back in late 2005, when UC reviewed Calvary's courses and decided that several of them -- including "Special Providence: Christianity and the American Republic and "Christianity's Influence on America," both history courses; "Christianity and Morality in American Literature," an English course; and a biology class -- did not meet their curriculum standards, and would not be counted toward the admission requirements when Calvary students apply to UC.

Jeff Sharlet  has posted the text of his December 2006 Harper's article in which he seeks to get inside the world view of Christian nationalists -- and goes on excursions with a few.

The Christian nation of which the movement dreams, a government of those chosen by God but democratically elected by a people who freely accept His will as their own, is a far country. The nation they seek does not, at the moment, exist; perhaps it could in the future. More important to fundamentalism is the belief that it did exist in the American past, not in the history we learn in public school and from PBS and in newsmagazine cover stories on the Founders but in another story, one more biblical, one more mythic and more true. Secularism hides this story, killed the Christian nation, and tried to dispose of the body. Fundamentalism wants to resurrect it, and doing so requires revision: fundamentalists, looking backward, see a different history, remade in the image of the seductive but strict logic of a prime mover that sets things in motion. The cause behind every effect, says fundamentalist science, is God. Even the inexorable facts of math are subject to His decree, as explained in homeschooling texts such as Mathematics: Is God Silent? Two plus two is four because God says so. If He chose, it could just as easily be five.

Jews on First! has an update on the story of how a New Jersey public high school teacher lectured his history class that they will go to hell if they don't accept Jesus. A student gives a recording of the lectures to school administrators -- who defended the teacher.

The Kearny Board of Education is establishing a policy requiring students to get permission from teachers before recording a class -- as Matthew LaClair did to prove that his history teacher preached fundamentalist Christian doctrine during class.... Paszkiewicz [the teacher] broke his silence earlier this month, with a letter to the Kearny Observer declaring that "there is an effort afoot to undermine the very underpinnings of our freedoms." Stating "the words 'separation of church and state' cannot be found in our Constitution," Paszkiewicz then selectively quotes the nation's founders to make the argument, often heard from the religious right, that the authors of the Constitution did not intend to bar the establishment of religion. Paskiewicz is a youth minister at a local Baptist church.

Melissa Rogers

Melissa Rogers has Senator Barack Obama's response the smear job on his religious character conducted by religious right leader Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Insight Magazine.

All of the claims about Senator Obama's faith and education raised in the Insight Magazine story and repeated on Fox News are false. Senator Obama was raised in a secular household in Indonesia by his stepfather and mother. Obama's stepfather worked for a U.S. oil company, and sent his stepson to two years of Catholic school, as well as two years of public school.... To be clear, Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ in Chicago. Furthermore, the Indonesian school Obama attended in Jakarta is a public school that is not and never has been a Madrassa.

These malicious, irresponsible charges are precisely the kind of politics the American people have grown tired of...

Wall of Separation

Jeremy Leaming reminds us to keep an eye on Capitol Hill.

If you thought that changes in Congress would mean a near cessation of attempts to weaken the principle of church-state separation, you should think again.

Since the new Congress convened earlier this month, bills have been introduced that would mandate public school prayer, allow houses of worship to endorse political candidates and stifle the federal courts' ability to resolve disputes over church and state.

Ed Brayton details the intimidation and harrassment experienced by some of  those with the courage to stand-up for separationion of church and state:

Anyone who pays any attention to lawsuits involving the establishment clause can tell you one thing for certain: the plaintiffs will be the targets of intimidation and even death threats for complaining about government endorsement of religion. It's not just common, it's virtually automatic. The young man in Kearney, New Jersey who recorded his history teacher proselytizing instead of teaching has gotten them. The Jewish family in Delaware who were hounded out of their homes has gotten them. And yes, the plaintiffs in Dover [intelligent design case] got them too.

Moiv tells us about the sketchy characters who showed up in Wichita when Bill O'Reilly called for a mob to storm the city to protest a single doctor exercising his legal and constitutional right to provide abortion services.

I don't usually include my own posts in these round-ups, but in light of the theme of harrassment and intimidation that emerges from this collection, I want to highlight a recent post Why Books Are Like Bin Laden and Hitler, which points out the escalation of the rhetoric in light of intellectual challenges to Christian nationalism and revisionist takes on separation of church and state.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, long a figure on the religious right, has a warning for his conservative Christian friends: books now on the shelves in the nation's book stores threaten them like Osama Bin Laden and Adolph Hitler. At least a little. Or maybe a lot.

Lapin says they are part of a "propaganda blitzkreig" -- one that puts TV talk show host Bill O'Reilly's claimed war on Christmas to shame: The war is on Christianity itself. Well, at least, you know, the right kinds of Christians. Lapin writes in the World Net Daily,

The war is against those who regard the Bible to be God's revelation to humanity and the Ten Commandments to be His set of rules for all time.

The PBS Frontline documentary, Hand of God, is the story of pedophilia victim Paul Cultrera. It is a disturbing illustration of an arrogant Catholic Church hierarchy that does not always practice what it preaches -- as well as a clear-cut case example of why no religious denomination should be allowed to exempt itself from equal justice under the law by pronouncing itself as its ultimate arbiter.

As I watched the horror of the film unfold, I was reminded of when I first learned of the scandal. More so, I recalled how many of the Catholic Right provide cover for a dysfunctional, but reactionary portion of the hierarchy. Instead of cauterizing the pain by taking responsibility, they tried to shift the blame upon both the violated children for whose protection they were entrusted as well as those seeking accountability within the Church.

Chip Berlet explains how fundamentalists embrace (social) Darwinism and how Calvinism and free market ideology are strange bedfellows: in part 3 of a series.

Max Weber noted the synergy between fundamentalist Calvinism and Free Market ideologies in his famous book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In the United States this created a particular frame in which the idea of personal initiative and rugged individualism was linked to a blame-the-victim narrative. Anyone who fell through the cracks of a Free Market economy had no one to blame but themselves. This frame shifts attention away from structural, institutional, and systemic causes of poverty and toward individual failure.

The idea behind "Faith-Based Initiatives" is to remove the government's communal responsibility to design an equitable economic system. This is justified by the underlying ideological claims of fundamentalist Calvinism and Free Market ideologies.

Kathyrn Joyce surfaces the religious right's ideology of faith based population growth.

...occasionally the televangelist's oversimplifications shed a populist light on the influential but media-neglected intellectuals and policy-makers of the Christian right. Last week seems like such a time, when Robertson neatly encapsulated a set of economic and demographic proposals that have been gaining popularity among conservative scholars for several years: in Robertson-speak, that "only those with strong religious faith" have children, and that therefore, countries should promote "strong religious faith"--that is, the traditionalist Judeo-Christian kind--if they want to avoid the fate of more secular, "hopeless" nations.... conservative Christian "pro-family" arguments are increasingly common in public debates about population decline, immigration and birth rates, but they usually go uncredited as such. Too often the specters of dying "native" (read: white, Christian) cultures take the emotionalism and pitch of Christian right warnings, without mentioning that many of the people building up the threat of a demographic "time-bomb," a Western "baby bust," have seriously sectarian ulterior motives. Even those purporting to come at the issue from "our" side. There's certainly room and need for a discussion of these topics, and what they mean for all countries and populations, but for now, the conversation seems limited to the people who see Europe's population decline as one thing only: a Christian/Western culture call to arms.