I suppose it’s no more than unseemly schadenfreude, but I love the sight of morons knifing each other.
In 70 A.D., following the failure of the Jewish Rebellion, the losers started pointing fingers at each other. The loudest was the faction that said God had allowed Rome to triumph because He was mad at the Jews for indulging the Christian sect; the followers of Jesus were thrown out of the Temple, and they soon turned-on their former co-religionists and invented modern anti-semitism.
In 1979, alarmed that many theologians in their very own seminaries were rumored to sometimes speak charitably about Charles Darwin, Paige Patterson et. al. launched a civil war within the Southern Baptist Convention whose after-effects are still felt, and which led to the ruin of countless careers. The fundamentalist takeover of the denomination did slow its decline for a while — but the decline has continued, and lately speeded up, and its most public face, Albert Mohler, is a figure of widespread ridicule.
Now yet another pack of idiots — this time the Nazarenes — are similarly determined to arrest the infiltration of knowledge to their student’s brains.
Evangelicals have just voted another intellectual off their island.
On the eve of April Fools’ Day, while on vacation in Hawaii with his wife, Professor Tom Oord got an email from the president of Northwest Nazarene University (NNU) notifying him that he was being terminated. NNU is one of eight schools sponsored by the evangelical denomination Church of the Nazarene.
Oord was a tenured full professor—the highest rank in academia—who had been on the NNU faculty for 13 years, after several years as my colleague at Eastern Nazarene College. Oord was the university’s leading scholar, with 20 books on his CV; by most measures he was also the denomination’s leading scholar and one of a tiny number of Nazarene theologians whose reputations reached beyond evangelicalism. Oord had won multiple teaching awards and was wildly popular with students and respected by his colleagues. He had brought over a million dollars of grant money to the university—a remarkable accomplishment for a professor at a small, unsung liberal arts college.
Oord’s offense, y’all should understand, is grievous indeed: He is a supporter of evolution.
An entire college could be staffed with the victims of fundamentalist witchhunts in the Church of the Nazarene. And, if we add the victims of witchhunts in other evangelical traditions, we could staff a major research university.
The controversy at NNU is one battle in the long war that is being waged -— and slowly won -— against thinking evangelical Christians.
Yeah, well — ho-hum. It’s not as if this couldn’t be foreseen. The incontestable certainty that there was no Adam and Eve is fatal to the Christian narrative, and so it was inevitable that conflict would break-out between the diehards and those who want to somehow accommodate Christianity to, you know … reality.
The decline and eventual failure of most Christian denominations is inevitable, for the simple reason that the underlying narrative is false; there is no educated, intellectually serious dispute about that. The thing to worry about is the resulting concentration of embittered loonies, for history tells us not only that attempts to arrest the progress of knowledge invariably fail, it tells us also that those who get left behind tend toward violence.