My engineering career began in 1979, the same year that Jerry Falwell launched the Moral Majority, the same year that the so-called Conservative Resurgence began in the Southern Baptist Convention. My professional life has been exactly coincident with the Evangelical Right’s successful, malign, and toxic attack upon modernity, upon expertise, upon knowledge itself.
Now, as I idly contemplate purchasing a summer home on the shores of Lake Superior in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, I can hardly say what pleasure it gives me to see them in disarray, reeling from …
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Steady growth of the ‘nones’ …
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Declining church attendance …
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Declining receipts …
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Closing churches …
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Growing public disdain for Holy Men on documentation of tens of thousands of instances of predatory sexual behavior…
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Scientific and Biblical research which establish dispositively that the Inerrant Bible is shot-through with grotesque errors …
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Coronavirus — I mean, where’s Our Invisible Friend when you need him? And how it must gall the Pious to see scientists — Scientists! Educated experts! Mostly atheists! — standing front and center as a skittish public looks for guidance.
Seriously: But for a dwindling handful of emotionally-disturbed eccentrics, who cares a hoot what Pastor Bubba thinks about anything nowadays?
The coronavirus pandemic represents a perfect storm for the far right, for intellectually corrupt evangelicals, for their darling First Felon — and the facts in plain sight make undeniable that they aren’t up to the challenge. Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch.