Hunter Baker blogs at First Things that he is not entirely happy with the way his email interview with Sarah Harland-Logan of Harvard Political Review was excerpted in the final article, “Is Godless Good?” Baker is author of the 2009 book The End of Secularism (“The provocative assertion of the book is that secularism is of little value as a public philosophy and should be discarded as a failed experiment.”) and a professor at Houston Baptist University. So he’s decided to publish the entire interview himself.
Yet, he rather sets up the same old secular v. religious argument that many secularists do: The other guys are the bad guys set on dominating the public square (whatever that really is); we Christians just want to avoid totalitarianism (the secularists say theocracy and have a few more examples to cite than Hitler, Stalin and Mao). The entire interview is a fun read but hardly provocative; until you reach the last paragraph:
I do wish, though, that secularists would differentiate better between religions. There are a number of critical differences. When Paul spoke to the men of Athens (the philosophers) at the Areopagus, he defended Christianity on the basis of the resurrection of Christ as a public event in time, space, and history. He said God furnished evidence. That’s a different [sic] from pure revelation. So, there’s the issue of different levels of credibility between religions. And secondly, of course, they have different track records. I am often shocked that many American secularists resort to the type of hyperbole where they compare conservative Christians to members of the Taliban. How can I take someone who says something like that seriously?
2 comments
Hunter Baker says:
May 13, 2010
Thanks for taking an interest. Just as a side note, I, too, could cite a few more examples than Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. We could try Robespierre, Lenin, Pol Pot, Kim Jong Il, Castro . . .
Gregory Peterson says:
May 15, 2010
Was Hitler really a secularist? I don’t quite see it. Stalin was once a seminary student…Christianity had its chance with him, didn’t it? Not to mention that someone cleverer than I am, pointed out that Communism is secular Calvinism, though Karl Marx was raised a Lutheran, from age six.
If conservative Christians don’t like being compared with the Taliban, and who could blame them, perhaps they would like to be compared with…conservative American Christians. Want me to find what conservative Christians were preaching on Civil Rights in the 1950s? Slavery in the 1850s? Gay people now? They’re all remarkably similar. I don’t have the time tonight to put a lot of links together, but I do have this link handy. http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/string/string.html
From John Colyn Jope in 1619, to 2001 when Rousas John Rushdoony died, many conservative American Calvinists, and, in general, many conservative Evangelicals, as well as a few other religious conservatives, were just fine with slavery. They’re not people with which I would want to be compared. But, I’m not a conservative Christian. Perhaps if I were, I would be happy to be compared with these highly esteemed, in their day, professional religious.
http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/string/string.html
Then there is history of inexplicably respected Christianity Today. It’s much less disgusting than Stringfellow, but…not what I would want to be compared with. One of the co founders. Dr. Bell, Billy Graham’s brother in law, was an advocate of “voluntary segregation.” He also founded the Southern Presbyterian Journal…which demanded that its staff take a vow of voluntary segregation…(?). CT was infamous for it’s “petulant hostility” towards Martin Luther King Jr. while he lived, and fretted about the erosion of states’ rights during the Ole Miss anti-integration riots. Since John C. Calhoun, states’ rights was, is, pretty much the political theory of privilege…mostly, but not always, Protestant, white, male privilege. Wish I could remember who wrote “petulant hostilely,” which fits CT so well, then and now. See “White Evangelical Protestant responses to the civil rights movement” by Curtis J. Evans, Harvard Theological Review, April 2009, for starters.