Deconstructing David Brat's "Scholarship"

Candida Moss takes Brat's work apart:

Brat’s teaching record is surely a good indication of how he would serve in Congress. As Alice Robb noted for The New Republic, Brat’s syllabus for “The Ends of Economic Justice” lists God as the author of the Bible. (I’ll wager God’s not receiving royalties.) Sales aren’t everything though. Sadly, like Plato and Aristotle, the omnipotent deity is merely suggested reading; the required textbook is by none other than Brat himself. Well, it is an economics class.

And it’s here, where he talks about God, that Brat’s cafeteria scholarship and intellectual incoherence really emerges. Brat currently attends a Catholic church yet, in distinction to Pope Francis, he believes that capitalism and Christianity should merge. He described his victory as a miracle yet he quotes Nietzsche as a source for his vision of how Christianity should move forward. That’s right, Nietzsche, who thought that all Christianity was a “slave morality” created by the weak to restrain the strong—i.e., the atheistic, amoral Übermenschen. This isn’t scholarship; it’s cherry picking from a liberal arts reading list with no historical consciousness whatsoever.

Perhaps Brat’s genius is his ability to supply faux intellectual evidence to back up his trite, individualist, consumerist vision of the world. He’s a Catholic peddling Protestant triumphalism. I don’t know if God works through him, but he certainly has the Apostle Paul’s “all things to all people” thing down (1 Cor 9:22).