Academic Evangelicals

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 its 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 has 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.