I finished Blinded by Might: Why the Religious Right Can't Save America, by Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson. In my latest reading, Thomas was interviewing Jerry Falwell.
Two
aspects of that interview that interested me were Jerry's retrospective
insight that the Moral Majority was wrong to allow local chapters to
have too much autonomy, for that allowed local spokespeople to say or do
nutty things that made the Moral Majority look bad, and Jerry's lament
that professors at evangelical universities are largely liberal when it
comes to politics.
Regarding the local chapters, that stood out to
me because some left-wing critics of the Moral Majority indeed did
lambaste the entire movement because of what a couple of radicals said,
when the Christian right may very well have some reasonable people. The
question, though, is this: if the Christian right triumphs, will its
reasonable elements have a bigger say? I'm rather skeptical. What
Jerry said about the local chapters also stood out to me because I used
to think that, to be a conservative or an adherent to a political
philosophy, I had to defend everything that prominent adherents to that
philosophy said or did. No I don't. Even if people publicly do that in
order to be team players or to save face, in private or in retrospect
they are often quite honest about their mistakes.
Today, as a more
left-leaning person, I don't feel compelled to defend everything that a
Democrat or a liberal says or does. Granted, I realize that a Democrat
or a liberal who is under attack for something has his or her own side
of the story, the same way that a conservative or a Republican does, and
so the attack may not represent the whole deal, or the accused may not
be as bad as critics say. But I don't feel that I have to be
unrealistic for the sake of ideology.
Regarding evangelical
universities, while I am not a big fan of intellectual snootiness,
especially in the evangelical sphere, I do admire the evangelical
professors who take their faith in a left-leaning direction, for why
should faith in Christ have to entail a right-wing political
perspective?