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Academic Evangelicals
Accuracy in Academia ^ | July 5, 2006 | Malcolm A. Kline

Posted on 07/06/2006 12:38:50 PM PDT by JSedreporter

When academics relay their understanding of religion to the rest of us, they offer interpretations that the religiously observant may find a tad bizarre.

“Religion has a certain kind of legitimacy among many people and in many parts of the world that secular life simply doesn’t have,” philosophy professor Roger S. Gottlieb explained in an interview with Jennifer Howard that appeared in the June 23rd issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. “In Madagascar, where the fishermen were dynamiting to get fish and destroying the coral reef and fish stock, when the government said, ‘Don’t do it,’ they kept doing it, and when ecologists said, ‘Don’t do it,’ they kept doing it.”

“But when the local sheik, the religious leader, said this was against the Koran, they stopped.” Perhaps, but the local religious leader of those who view the Koran as the sacred text is usually called the Imam, the local royalty is called the sheik and, according to the CIA Fact Book, Muslims make up 7 percent of the population in Madagascar.

Professor Gottlieb hangs his hat at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. Professor Randall Balmer is the author of the forthcoming Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical’s Lament. Dr. Balmer teaches American Religious History at Barnard College in Manhattan.

Maybe the geographic remove from the Bible Belt has clouded his scholarly vision. “No wonder the religious right wants to renege on the First Amendment,” Professor Balmer writes in the June 23rd Chronicle of Higher Education supplement, The Chronicle Review. “No wonder the religious right seeks to encode its version of morality into civil and criminal law.”

“No wonder the religious right wants to emblazon it religious creeds and symbols on public property.”

Actually, evangelicals have been going to court a lot lately to lift gag orders on their first amendment rights. Some of the groups busily doing so include the Liberty Counsel, the Alliance Defense Fund and the Rutherford Institute.

That “version of morality” was encoded into civil and criminal law a long time ago. “No purpose of action against religion can be imputed to any legislation, state or national, because this is a religious people,” the U. S. Supreme Court noted in 1892. “This is historically true.”

“From the discovery of this continent to the present hour, there is a single voice making this affirmation.” This citation comes from Phyllis Schlafly, who has arguably been on the religious right for a very long time. She was born in 1924.

Those “religious creeds and symbols were emblazoned on public property long before any of the religious right leaders were born, as demonstrated in a Human Events pictorial showing same. For example:

· The U. S. Supreme Court, which as the Ten Commandments on its doors, opened for business in its present location in 1935.

· Judge Roy Moore, whose placement of the Ten Commandments in his Alabama courthouse Professor Balmer may be referring to, was born in 1947.

· Ralph Reed, who Professor Balmer does name as a right-wing religious activist, was born in 1961.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.


TOPICS: Culture/Society
KEYWORDS: 10commandments; academia; adf; barnardcollege; churchandstate; highereducation; libertycounsel; ralphreed; religion; religiousprofs; rogergottlieb; roymoore; wpi

1 posted on 07/06/2006 12:38:52 PM PDT by JSedreporter
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To: JSedreporter
I always love how the liberals like to equate the Christians of America to islamic nuts around the world. The basic freedoms of America are a direct result of Christ - you can't have one without the other and these freedoms are found in no other religion (especially islam).
2 posted on 07/06/2006 12:43:24 PM PDT by 2banana (My common ground with terrorists - They want to die for Islam, and we want to kill them.)
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To: 2banana
I always love how the liberals like to equate the Christians of America to islamic nuts around the world.

It ain't just liberals. You ought to watch what the darwinists say about Christians on the evolution threads.
3 posted on 07/06/2006 12:45:20 PM PDT by JamesP81 ("Never let your schooling interfere with your education" --Mark Twain)
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To: JSedreporter

Good points.


4 posted on 07/06/2006 12:46:26 PM PDT by The Ghost of FReepers Past (Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light..... Isaiah 5:20)
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To: JamesP81
<"You ought to watch what the darwinists say about Christians on the evolution threads."



Why argue with someone who can't even tell you where their inalienable rights come from????
5 posted on 07/06/2006 12:51:45 PM PDT by PetroniusMaximus
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To: 2banana

They'll be after religious Jews next. Today Christmas, tomorrow Passover.

Stop the ACLU before its too late!


6 posted on 07/06/2006 12:56:47 PM PDT by Alexander Rubin (Octavius - You make my heart glad building thus, as if Rome is to be eternal.)
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To: JSedreporter
Ironic that the Professor would stop Christians from doing this if he could but is prevented by the First Amendment for doing so.

“No wonder the religious right seeks to encode its version of morality into civil and criminal law.”

7 posted on 07/06/2006 1:10:54 PM PDT by DManA
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