Up until this weekend “experience” has been the primary narrative of McCain 2008. The Republican party had selected a war hero who had served in Congress for as many years as his opponent, Barack Obama, had been post-pubescent. Although McCain’s campaign brandishes his lengthy resume, he likes to be seen as a maverick, willing to buck his own party for what he believes is right.

The Democratic Party countered attacks on Obama’s inexperience by transforming it from a liability into a strength. They present a young, fresh visionary who has not been tied down to special interests. Obama is a new kind of politician who will reform Washington.

Since politicians are elected largely on image, McCain needs to burnish his own maverick identity while simultaneously poking holes in Obama’s reputation as the rebirth of JFK. The experience debate has served McCain well, but over time it may have lost its bite. Voters who find experience a compelling argument have already been won over. No point in beating a dead horse. Experience could even be a liability if the opposition can paint McCain as a professional politician whose values are divorced from those of ordinary Americans. McCain is old enough to remember the 1960 Nixon v Kennedy campaign. In an environment more congenial to Republicans than today, Nixon ran on his superior experience, but still lost to the youthful and exciting Kennedy.

Palin provides the McCain campaign with the opportunity to switch the dialogue from experience to reform. Obama has dominated this conversation so far with talk of change and a different style of politics. Yet McCain and Palin could subsume Obama’s message. (Subsume is a debate term for taking your opponent’s premise, or primary issue, and arguing that you can do a better job with it than they can.) 

McCain has been something of a political outsider for the last decade in Congress. The conservative base has distrusted McCain since his centrist campaign against George W Bush. McCain has not been afraid to buck the party line on immigration and other issues. He even cosponsored legislation with conservative archenemy Ted Kennedy. It seems that Palin has managed to annoy nearly the entire Republican establishment in Alaska. She publicly supported investigations into the infamous pair Don Young and Ted Stevens. She resigned from an energy commission in protest at a Republican commisioner’s corruption. How’s that for bipartisanship and reform?

The McCain campaign should push this reformist image on the news shows and in their campaign analysis. Republican operatives should then highlight Obama’s thin record on bipartisanship and perilous connections with shady politics back in Chicago.

Obama likes to tell the story of how he couldn’t even gain admission to the 2000 Democratic National Convention. What explains his meteoric rise through the state legislature and into Congress? Obama made several connections to the notorious Chicago Democratic political machine. Ever since Obama began making waves in the Democratic primary, there has been an undercurrent of articles, and a book, written about his relationships to shady Chicago political operatives.

One story that has gotten some play in the national media is his relationship with Tony Rezko, a man who was a major fundraiser for Obama’s Senate campaign. Rezko was also found guilty of federal fraud this May and is currently under indictment for several more fraud charges. Obama was understandably embarassed after Rezko’s indictment and said that he had never done Rezko any “favors.” However Obama had written a series of letters to Illinois government officials on Rezko’s behalf in a bid to get taxpayer money ($14 million) to build apartments for the elderly, $855,000 of which went in fees to Rezko and Obama’s former boss, Allison Davis. Whether or not Obama thought he was doing Rezko a favor, it seems that Rezko was grateful enough to sell the Obama’s a strip of land next to the family’s new house for over $500,000 less than what the political fixer had paid for it six months earlier. Keep in mind, this land deal came after the feds investigation into Rezko was already public knowledge.

Furthermore, Obama began his Congressional campaign under the patronage of Emil Jones, then the Democratic leader of the Illinois Senate.

“You have the power to elect a US senator,” Obama told Emil Jones, Democratic leader of the Illinois state senate. Jones looked at the ambitious young man smiling before him and asked, teasingly: “Do you know anybody I could make a US senator?”

According to Jones, Obama replied: “Me.” It was his first, audacious step in a spectacular rise from the murky political backwaters of Springfield, the Illinois capital.

Jones used his leadership in the Senate to block anti-corruption legislation from becoming law even though the bill had already unanimously passed through the lower chamber. Jones also recently announced his retirement and filed to have his inexperienced son take his position, nepotism worthy of Richard J. Daley himself in the 1970s.

Finally, Obama’s campaign manager, David Axelrod, ran Richard M. Daley’s mayoral election in 1989 and is still one of Daley’s advisers. He surprised liberal Chicago reformers by running the campaigns of several other distasteful Cook County politicians. In his defense Axelrod may have just done it for the money and to gain influence. But when comparing clients, Axelrod makes Karl Rove look like a boy scout.

So Obama’s campaign manager, political patron, and a major fundraiser are all connected to a sordid Chicago political machine. Sure, Obama himself has not been directly accused of corruption, but when a man runs a campaign about change and reform, surely he should be held to a higher standard of association than Rezko, Jones, and Axelrod, Inc.

While the Republicans’ experience argument was based upon how much we know about McCain’s impressive resume, it left Obama’s record in the dark (which was the point). But if the McCain campaign switches the dialogue to reform, highlighting McCain’s support for campaign finance reform and his pledge to abide by public financing limits (unlike Obama who welshed on his promise), the burden of proof shifts to Obama and focuses on his past. If Republicans can focus the public’s attention on Obama’s seedy Chicago connections, than Obama’s image will suffer severely, especially among Independent voters.

Who is Sarah Palin and how does she benefit John McCain’s presidential campaign? These questions are intertwined and so I’ll discuss them in tandem.

1) Sarah Palin is a woman. Voters tend to pull the lever for the candidate with whom they most identify and more than half of those voters are women. Palin’s selection is a transparent bid for female voters who supported Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary. The political buzz during the Democratic National Convention centered on the unknown numbers of Hillary fans who had yet to succumb to Obamamania. Sarah Palin gave a shoutout to those undecided voters by honoring Geraldine Ferraro and Hillary Clinton during her acceptance speech. Even if you don’t end up voting for her, how can you help but respect a woman who rides snowmobiles, hunts moose, shoots assault rifles, marries a semi-professional snowmobile racer, raises five children, oh and governs Alaska in her spare time?

2) Sarah Palin’s candidacy was designed to upstage Barack Obama. The news cycle is king in politics (read George Stephanopoulos’s All Too Human sometime). Barack Obama gave an excellent speech in Denver Friday night and the Saturday morning news gave him full coverage. But after only 12 hours of headlines, “Barack Obama Gives Historic Acceptance Speech” gave way to “John McCain Surprises With Alaskan Hockey Mom.” The political wonks have enough new material for discussion to carry them into the Republican National Convention next week. If McCain had chosen a safe candidate like Pawlenty or Romney no one would have been surprised and most of the upstage value would have been lost.

The Obama campaign wanted Americans to connect Obama’s speech at the DNC with Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech 45 years before. Obama had received the Civil Rights mantle. So the McCain campaign calls the opening bid and ups the ante by presenting Sarah Palin close to the anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Adding insult to injury, Palin ended her speech co-opting Obama’s slogan: 

If you want change in Washington, if you hope for a better America, then we’re asking for your vote on the 4th of November.

3) Sarah Palin reinforces John McCain’s maverick image. McCain is famous, or infamous depending on your perspective, for bucking the Republican establishment on everything from immigration to campaign finance reform. Palin has caused great consternation among the incumbent Republican legislators in Alaska. She pushed ethics reform and turned whistle-blower on Republican colleagues. She draws a favorable contrast to Obama who ascended the political ladder under the auspices of the Chicago Democratic political machine.

4) Palin’s selection energizes the conservative base. Many leading conservative lights had backed Mitt Romney in the Republican primary and have nursed sore feelings and misgivings ever since McCain’s victory. But the some of the same Republicans who actively opposed McCain, and even proposed voting for Hillary Clinton instead, have found themselves newly excited by a McCain-Palin ticket. She is a social conservative and an evangelical (she used Biblical phraseology during her speech when talking about “blessings” and having “a servant’s heart.”). Conservatives who had been concerned that McCain would choose a pro-choice Tom Ridge or Joe Lieberman are relieved. Now James Dobson is on board and even Rush Limbaugh exults over having a conservative “babe on the ticket.”

5) Sarah Palin could energize independent voters. She mentioned in her speech that she took on big oil and special interests in Alaska, populist rhetoric that plays well among independents. She is a former union member herself and is married to a current United Steelworker, perhaps another appeal to working class Reagan Democrats. 

The buzz about Palin is not all positive. Democrats were quick to pounce on her inexperience. The argument goes like this: “You accuse Barack of being inexperienced because he has only served in the Senate for four years, but then you nominate a candidate who was the mayor of Nowhere, Alaska just two years ago!” I’m sure the McCain campaign is hedging on his surplus of experience to make up for her lack. Still it is worth noting that Palin is the only one of the four campaigners to have any executive experience since McCain, Biden, and Obama are all legislators!

There is also an ongoing investigation of Palin possibly misusing her powers as Governor to fire someone for not firing her brother-in-law. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens, but I’m sure Democratic operatives will make this a talking point on the Sunday morning news shows.

Now that McCain has already made his choice for VP this weekend how will he be able to keep people interested in the upcoming Republican National Convention? On the first night of the convention former Democratic senator Joe Lieberman will mount the platform and warmly endorse John McCain for President. Three nights later John McCain should stand before his supporters and declare an end to partisan politics by announcing that Joe Lieberman will be the next Secretary of State.

The guide proposed that having an “Established Church” [my words, not hers] strengthened PCC. Since all Pensacola students hear the same message on any given Sunday, they have more in common to discuss afterwards. They can share their excitement with one another in a way that would not be possible if the students attended a plurality of churches. Several of the parents of prospective students in our tour group nodded sagely in agreement. I was tempted to ask another question, but with one ankle already hobbled I couldn’t take another blow from my wife.

Pensacola’s methodological strength stems from the way they market their school’s product to concerned parents. If you want your son or daughter to be a pre-Trib, pre-Mill, independent Fundamental Baptist (by immersion of course), who is not influenced by Calvinism or Charismaticism, then send them to PCC. The school offers homogeneity among their graduates. I have no idea whether they are successful, but that is the vision proffered. This is the aspect of Pensacola that changed my understanding of how Bob Jones University should present itself.

BJU also offers a product by telling parents that their kids will one day be graduates defined by ideals like “excellence” and “balance.” Parents are assured that Bob Jones is committed to the Fundamentals of the Faith, hence the oft-repeated request for the school’s alumni to shut down the school if it compromises, but the ideal graduate is not typically defined by one particular theological position.

From its inception Bob Jones was non-denominational, an approach which encouraged theological diversity. Faculty, staff, and students during the Bob Jones College era came from a wide range of denominations. The resulting diversity mandated a big tent approach to Fundamental orthodoxy. During a time when most Fundamentalists were dispensationalists and many attended new schools being founded in the Baptist tradition, Bob Jones embraced an inclusive creed; there is no mention of eschatology or mode of baptism, just a basic list of orthodox doctrines.

Today the faculty and student body at BJ are more monolithic than they were a generation or two ago; the large majority of students come from independent Baptist churches and most probably attend Baptist churches after they graduate. Still, Bob Jones alumni are as likely to end up Presbyterian as Baptist. (One of my father’s undergraduate roommates, and a groomsman at his wedding, came to Bob Jones University from a rural eastern North Carolina home with Free Will Baptist influences but is today a BJU professor attending a Presbyterian church.)

Bob Jones is a marketplace of orthodox ideas. I know that many Bob Jones students feel stifled, but issues like mode of Baptism, polity, and church structure are open to discussion. Interaction with peers who hold to different orthodox interpretations of Scripture is valuable. Diversity may promote understanding and soften radicalism. The marketplace encourages students to evaluate their own beliefs rather than blindly following tradition. Relative diversity of opinion is the strength of Bob Jones University.

So what could Bob Jones learn by comparison to Pensacola? Rather than promoting itself as the enforcer of homogeneity, BJU could portray itself as a marketplace of orthodoxy, aiming for unity, but not uniformity. There is a concrete change that would signal such a shift. Currently, Bob Jones University requires most students, faculty, and staff to attend the morning service on Sundays in the FMA on campus. There are interesting, and tangential, historical reasons for the current system, but suffice it to say that times have changed from when Bob Jones first moved to Greenville. Today there is a robust network of several dozen Fundamentalist churches that faculty, staff, and students are encouraged to join. On any given Sunday evening thousands of students are listening to preaching in dozens of different local churches. Also, these churches often sponsor outreach ministries that give students opportunities for evangelism.

Unfortunately the current mandatory Sunday service works at cross purposes to the stated goal of vital involvement in local churches. The administration realized this at some point in the past and relaxed the requirements for faculty and staff attendance. BJU’s own promotional material says Bob Jones is “local church” minded. They could make that statement even more accurate by dropping the required attendance at the on campus Sunday morning service. A hybrid system could be adopted that continues to mandate church attendance, but does not stipulate attendance at the BJ morning service. Each Sunday morning the dorms would be cleared, students with access to transportation could go to their chosen local church, and students without transportation could attend a smaller morning service in Rodeheaver Auditorium or Stratton Hall.

Abolishing mandatory Sunday morning services at BJU would send a positive message to Greenville area churches: “We want our students to treat your church just like they treated their church back home.” Students might even find more accountability in a local church context when attending 33 to 50 percent more often. At a minimum, abolishing the half established, half local system would make the distinction between Bob Jones and Pensacola even clearer. One school is aiming for uniformity of belief, the other embraces unity in diversity.

When we drove off the campus of Pensacola after our tour, I thanked God for the ways in which He has used Pensacola Christian College, to my chagrin the first time I had ever thought to do so. The Hortons’ business acumen has allowed Pensacola to offer very affordable tuition rates, thus enabling kids to go to college who might otherwise have been unable to afford it. The school has very good relations with the community and uses its extensive recreational facilities for outreach during the summers. There are many aspects of PCC that I disagree with, and even cringe at, but God has used Pensacola to serve a segment of the body of Christ for His glory.

Growing up as a faculty/staff child at BJU, Pensacola was equal parts bogeyman and comic relief, the bastion of all things King James Only (capitalization not optional). I was a teenager when PCC distributed a video attacking Bob Jones as “the leaven of Fundamentalism” because the BJ Bible faculty promoted versions of the Bible not based exclusively on the same manuscripts as the King James Version. Indeed, my childhood pastor, Dr. Stewart Custer, was the epicenter of that woe-begotten lump. PCC did prove useful for a typical conversational gambit: “Sure, Bob Jones is strict/hard/etc…, but compared to PCC…[meaningful pause accompanied by weighty glance].”

As we drove on to the campus, Jes sternly forbade me from asking any provocative questions. I obeyed, kinda. I’ll provide several general impressions of the school and finish at a later date with my conclusion about what Bob Jones could learn from PCC.

The tour took several hours and highlighted all the major facilities, including the library, gym, classroom buildings, dormitories, fine arts center, and church. Of course the tour guide, a former PCC ministry team leader, took pains to show us the nicest dorm rooms and finest classrooms on campus. Frankly, the facilities were awesome; all the money that poured in from selling home-schooling curriculum was well spent. In thirty years the school’s facilities went from almost nothing to a campus infrastructure that often surpasses the “World’s Most Unusual University.”

From historical plaques around campus I gather that Pensacola initially received cues from Bob Jones, not surprising considering the ties between the Hortons, who founded PCC, and BJU. PCC had an annual Turkey Bowl, a Mission Prayer Band, and Greek letter societies. But today it seems that the situation is reversed with Bob Jones playing catch up. Pensacola builds a new gym in the mid 90s and Bob Jones does the same a decade later. Pensacola cashes in on paperback textbooks, so Bob Jones bets on HomeSat. I don’t find this unhealthy; competition encourages innovation.

Pensacola and Bob Jones do have cultural differences. Compare and contrast the Pensacola and Bob Jones promotional videos. Bob Jones spends far more time highlighting the fine arts, such as opera productions and Shakespearian plays, than does Pensacola. The music produced at PCC has much in common with good ol’ Southern Gospel, while Bob Jones prefers high-church compositions. Bob Jones just built a downtown satellite for their art gallery, the largest collection of Baroque religious art in the Western Hemisphere. Pensacola is spending millions constructing Fundamentalism’s largest wave pool.

[Allow me to take a moment to say that I do not believe that God distinguishes between high and low culture when deciding what pleases Him.]

The historical displays in both schools’ libraries symbolize the contrast between high and low culture. On one of the upper floors at Pensacola is a sentimental mockup of a one-room schoolhouse, complete with bell and 19th century books. On the first floor of Mack Library at Bob Jones is a replica of the room inside Westminster Abbey where translators worked on an updated English version of the Bible in 1611.

The multi-image presentation was interesting because a large portion (if memory serves me it was about a third) of the film was dedicated to the recitation of the central beliefs of Pensacola Christian College. In contrast to the creed of Bob Jones University, the Pensacola affirmation is more specific and includes a number of denominational distinctives. Significantly, any talk of the King James Version was omitted in the presentation. Actually at no point in the tour was the KJV mentioned. The website does say “it is our practice to use only the Authorized Version (KJV) in the pulpit and in classroom instruction. We believe the Textus Receptus is a superior text, and it is used for Greek instruction.” But this is a far cry from denouncing fellow Fundamentalists for heresy.

This post is long enough already, so I’ll hold my conclusions for part two.

Those within the Anglican church who are sympathetic to Gene Robinson’s cause tend to be theological liberals who disbelieve in the inerrancy of Scripture. These Anglican liberals tend also to be from wealthier portions of the developed world, sometimes referred to as the Global North. They are typically Caucasian.

Those within Anglicanism who are uncomfortable with homosexual clergy tend to be theological conservatives who ascribe to the inerrancy of Scripture. These Anglican conservatives are mostly from the developing world, often called the Global South. They are mostly African, Indian, and Asian. There are exceptions among both groups, but the generalization is viable.

A group of around 250 conservative bishops held an alternative conference in June called GAFCON.
Both sides have been lobbing grenades at one another. The conservatives accuse the liberals of heresy and the liberals attack the conservatives as being out of touch.

But contemporary liberals have had to soft-peddle their criticism, unlike in the grand old days of the 1910s and 1920s when the kid gloves came off. Guys like H.L. Mencken had a field day with Billy Sunday and the like; Fundamentalists were simply uneducated hicks in the South and Midwestern United States.

Anglican liberals today have to toe a careful line. They dislike Fundamentalism and would normally blast the Fundamentalists in question, native African conservatives. But like most liberals they have a strong sense of “White Guilt.” They believe that Western imperialism is largely responsible for Third World woes like poverty, corruption, and war. It is politically incorrect and frankly uncouth to accuse Africans of being the source of any problem (i.e. the support Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe received from Western liberals until very recently), so they have to find someone else to blame.

Aha! The Economist [July 26th 2008] discovered that blame can be assigned to “missionary work in Africa [that] was carried out by evangelicals who reflect a rather fundamentalist strain of British Christianity.” It wasn’t the poor Africans’ fault at all, but those evil British Fundamentalists!

Some African conservatives have cried foul. It is insulting for liberals to insinuate that Africans just believe what they were taught. No one likes to be accused of being passive, gullible, and simple. Men like Archbishop Henry Orombi of Uganda prefer to trace their heritage to native African revivals. Others decry attempts by the “western press” to villify African prelates. Indeed it can be argued that liberals are practicing a modern version of cultural imperialization. If Africans want to be taken seriously in liberal circles than they must make sure that their theology conforms to Western liberal ideals. Not particularly multicultural, eh?

Asimov was a great author not because of the excellence of his prose but because of the breadth of his vision. His Foundation series and invention of “psycho-history” is the ultimate historian’s fantasy. Asimov was a man of many gifts, a renaissance modernist; he was a biochemist, a signer of the Humanist Manifesto, as well as the author of over 400 books (including science texts, popular histories, and a guide to the Bible).

The collection of Asimov’s stories that I first came across was his I, Robot series (the plots of which are not to be confused with the Will Smith extravaganza that bears only occasional resemblance to the original stories). I enjoyed the “Three Laws of Robotics” and robo-psychologist Susan Calvin as a kid, but most of Asimov’s social commentary was way over my head. I just reread one of the stories titled Evidence when I stopped dead in my metaphorical tracks. Asimov provides a definition of Fundamentalism in this story that dates to 1946!

This inadvertent discovery amazed me. Let me give you some background. My advisor at Temple University, David Harrington Watt, has taken a leave from teaching this year to write a new academic work examining how Fundamentalism became defined as a “dangerous other.” His central thesis argues that the term Fundamentalism was defined not by self-described fundamentalists, nor even by their modernist foes.

Watt believes that our modern conception of Fundamentalism was shaped by secular intellectuals who describe Fundamentalism as a reaction against modernity. These intellectuals, including sociologist Talcott Parsons and historian Richard Hofstadter, defined modernity as progression towards a improved society as measured by the ideals of the European Enlightenment. Thus anyone opposed to scientific or social progress must be a Fundamentalist. Over time this definition turned Fundamentalism from a specific description of militantly orthodox American Protestantism into an ambiguous phrase used to describe global reactionary groups whether they be Islamic, Jewish, or even essentially areligious.

The interesting thing about Asimov’s story is that it was written before many of the works by intellectuals Watt was researching, a fact which could support his argument. So what does Asimov say?

Evidence uses robots as a metaphor for the improvement of mankind. The story describes a candidate for mayor who is accused of being an android, or life-like robot. When rumors are spread among the populace to that effect, the people begin to worry. Asimov describes it with these words

It was what the Fundamentalists were waiting for. They were not a political party; they made pretense to no formal religion. Essentially they were those who had not adapted themselves to what had once been called the Atomic Age, in the days when atoms were a novelty. Actually, they were the Simple-Lifers, hungering after a life, which to those who lived it had probably appeared not so Simple, and who had been, therefore, Simple-Lifers themselves.

Later the accused robot is advised that he is in danger: “Is there a threat of violence? The Fundamentalists threaten it, so I suppose there is, in a theoretical sense. But I really don’t expect it. The Fundies have no real power. They’re just the continuous irritant factor that might stir up a riot after a while.”

When the protagonist proposes giving a speech, he is told not to by his campaign staff: “Look, that mob has been organized by the Fundies. You won’t get a hearing. You’ll be stoned more likely.” Sure enough, a couple paragraphs later: “From the start the speech was not successful. It competed against the inchoate mob howl and the rhythmic cries of the Fundie claques that formed mob-islands within the mob.” At the end the mayor is revealed to the reader, though not the the people, as a robot by a robo-psychologist who makes the point that it is impossible to tell a robot from a really decent person.

As should be expected from a secular intellectual, Asimov’s Fundamentalists are reacting against Modernity, which is symbolized by opposition to progress, both scientific and social. His Fundamentalists are not American Protestants, indeed they aren’t particularly religious at all. Yet the Fundies form mobs that threaten to stone the opposition, a deft use of Biblical imagery by Asimov.

PS - I find it intensely ironic that Asimov may have coined the use of the slang “Fundies.” It is a logical shortening of the mouthful “Fundamentalism” and serves the double purpose of auditory trivialization. “Fundamentalist” sounds a whole lot more intimidating than “Fundie.” It amuses me that when I grew up at Bob Jones University, a bastion of Fundamentalism, the malcontents liked to use “Fundies” as a term of derision. Little did they know that they were imitating a famous atheist!

“it is extremely seldom that one has the opportunity to think a new thought about a familiar subject, let alone an original thought on a contested subject.”

Unfortunately for Hitchens’ ego, he is a bit late in his discovery. On October 5th, 1847 Louis Agassiz, a “founding father of the modern American scientific tradition,” proposed an investigation of the “blind-fish” of Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Although Agassiz never found the time to carry out his experiments, possibly because of his new professorship at Harvard, some of his students later performed groundbreaking research into subterranean blind animals. It has been a bit awkward for evolutionists to embrace Agassiz and his research since he was a vocal opponent of Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution as well as a proto-creationist.

Christopher Hitchens has been called “the reincarnation of H.L. Mencken,” famous American journalist and social satirist (the man responsible for the modern stereotype of Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”). Hitchens cum Mencken considers the majority of Americans, particularly the ones who believe in God, to be boobs. Ironically, a frequent target of Mencken’s ire in the 1910s was fundamentalist evangelist Billy Sunday.

Sunday had some knowledge of Louis Agassiz and recommended to William Jennings Bryan that the retired Senator should use some of the late scientist’s arguments in his defense of creationism at the Scopes Trial. Sunday even used the blind-fish of Mammoth Cave as a sermon illustration. It gives me great pleasure when a modern day skeptic, who is evangelistic in his atheism, “discovers” an idea once used by a fire-breathing fundamentalist to win souls to Jesus ninety years ago.

Hitchens appears unfamiliar with the term “regressive evolution,” which describes the loss of function over time. Most hardcore evolutionists are also hardcore modernists. Except for some who suffer from varying degrees of cognitive dissonance, modernists believe in the gradual progression of mankind toward a better state of being, as defined by ideals of the European Enlightenment. In other words, things be gettin’ better and better. Sure, evolution is often defined as simple “change over time” denotatively, but words like “upwards,” “better,” and “toward greater complexity” tend to creep in connotatively. Since regressive evolution describes a type of devolution, it has not been a very popular subject for study until recently.

Hitchens contacted his buddy Richard Dawkins, who agreed that Hitchens had hit upon a great argument against creationism. The problem is that regressive evolution should no more bother creationists today than it did in the 1910s and 1840s. Creationists believe in change within species and would typically embrace the idea that species can lose genetic information, even to the point of whole organs. The aspect of macro-evolution with which creationists contend is the addition of new and unique genetic information.

Actually regressive evolution is as much of a challenge to evolutionists as to creationists. When faced with a dark environment generation after generation why would salamanders and fish all over the world lose their eyesight rather than gain new ability? Why didn’t the salamanders’ visual spectrum increase to include infrared or ultraviolet light similar to what some snakes use? Indeed, the loss of function could be expected by creationism, whereas natural selection would seem to dictate not the loss of eyesight, but it’s perfection.

Hitchens’ epiphany about blind salamanders is no more original, nor in my opinion more accurate, than his attacks upon theism.

Jes and I are getting married tomorrow. We had little kitchenware, dishes, or other home furnishings. People better established than us contributed crockpots and silverware to give us a hand. This is nice, especially since I am the beneficiary. The expectation is that we will return the favor to those in our formerly less advantaged position.

But wedding showers and gift-giving serves another purpose; it encourages adherence to cultural norms. If a couple follows the culturally dictated path, they reap economic benefits along with the goodwill of their friends and family. If the couple strays from the accepted tradition, they often lose those incentives.

If Jes and I had chosen to elope, have a child out of wedlock, or spurned our cultural tradition in some other way, we would have lost out on the gifts and goodwill. Though people probably don’t think about these incentives on a conscious level, I wonder what affect this system has on cultural traditions.

A study might examine adherence to cultural norms in families/communities located close geographically versus those who have less contact on a regular basis. Perhaps another look could be taken at couples on the basis of gifts given in proportion to annual income.

The use of economics to enforce cultural traditions is morally neutral. Morality is contingent upon the traditions being upheld. Not all traditions are created equal.

PS - I am getting married tomorrow and I promise that socio-economics and cultural mores will not be on my mind for the next week!(-;

After singing It Is Well with My Soul, I shared what I thought was an accurate version of that hymn’s dramatic history. In lurid detail I recounted how Philip Bliss wrote the lyrics to the song after watching his wife and daughter drown before his eyes when their ship was sunk in a violent storm. What better way to contrast external confusion with the inner peace found in resting in Christ?

Unfortunately, my poetic recounting was nearly completely inaccurate. The author did not witness the sinking, it was his four daughters who drowned, and his wife survived. The ship was not sunk by a storm, but by a collision with another boat. All of these errors are somewhat understandable; it is true that close family members drowned at sea and sorrow inspired the author to write a masterpiece. But all hope for forgiveness is lost when I substituted the hymnist for the lyricist. It was Horatio Spafford who wrote those moving lines, not Philip Bliss!

If forced to offer a defense I can only claim to have told the “dynamic equivalent” of the story. After all, the original autograph was laden with distracting details and was woodenly literal. My goal was to convey the emotions of the author rather than just his original “meaning.” By spicing up the story somewhat I attempted to bridge the gap between 19th century author and 21st century audience. Besides, if Eugene Peterson can do it with the Apostles than who’s to say I can’t do it with the Spaffords?

Maybe I can release a new exciting brand of hymn histories for worship leaders. I call it The Message: Hymn Stories in Contemporary Language, on sale wherever mass marketed pop-Christian books are available.

A complaint might begin with, “Well, his baby momma gonna beat him,” or, “No he dinnint call you fat!” Why is a “pimp daddy” or rude customer so insensitive? It certainly has nothing to do with the depravity of his heart, his incapibility of doing what is right because his will is corrupted by sin. No, it is because he is Ignorant.

My roommate, Michael Gembola, confirms that Ignorance is in the vernacular of his inner city kids. They may not know how to find the US on a globe or do basic algebra, but they know that the fundamental reason why people hurt one another is Ignorance.

I call it the Doctrine of Absolute Ignorance. If people understood the consequences of their actions they would be better people. The implied solution is education. If you teach people what their actions mean, than they will no longer offend others by word or deed.

I admit that I’m of two minds on the Biblicism of this idea. On the one hand you have the apostle Paul telling us that the good he knows to do, he never gets done, while on the other hand you can train up a child in the way he should go and that child will remain faithful to the truth he has been taught.

The idea is not original. Plato and Socrates discussed ignorance as the root of evil. Even Augustine can be interpreted in support. Still, it is interesting that this idea has permeated all the way down to the lower ranks of society.

Note on Pronunciation: Ignorant is normally pronounced “Ig-nur-rint” in Philadelphia.