Religion
Related: About this forumThe Evangelical Brain Trust
The central question of the culture wars that have raged since the 1970s is not whether abortion is murder or gay marriage a civil right, but whether the Enlightenment was a good thing. Many evangelical Americans think the answer is no, according to The Anointed, a field guide to the evangelical experts you havent heard of but should.
Many evangelicals, Randall J. Stephens and Karl W. Giberson say, get their information on dinosaurs and fossils from Ken Ham, an Australian with a bachelors degree from the Queensland Institute of Technology. Ham believes human reason should confirm the Bible rather than reinterpret it, and teaches that God created the world a few thousand years ago. His ministry, Answers in Genesis, includes a radio program broadcast over more than 1,000 stations, a magazine with a circulation of 70,000 and the multimillion-dollar Creation Museum in Kentucky. While other evangelicals for example Francis Collins, the born-again Christian who runs the National Institutes of Health offer more nuanced perspectives on sciences relationship to the Bible, Ham commands a far larger audience.
When it comes to history, many evangelicals reject the world-class historians in their own fold such scholars as Mark Noll and George Marsden, who advocate a balanced account of Christianitys role in early America in favor of the amateur David Bartons evangelical makeover of Washington and Madison.
--snip--
The Anointed condemns the current state of evangelical intellectual life, but Stephens and Giberson avoid monolithic stereotypes. They are careful to note that evangelicals disagree wildly among themselves about almost everything. Their interview subjects range from a home-schooled Baptist who has never had a non-Christian friend to academics trained in the Ivy League. Still, a reader of The Anointed is likely to conclude that the average evangelical hates the academic establishment almost as much as he loves Jesus.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/books/review/the-anointed-evangelical-truth-in-a-secular-age-by-randall-j-stephens-and-karl-w-giberson-book-review.html?_r=2
MineralMan
(146,333 posts)Evangelicals are equipped with fully functional Brains.
cleanhippie
(19,705 posts)Trying to form a single, fully-functioning one?
MineralMan
(146,333 posts)Christ Consensus Chapel?
Who knows?
rrneck
(17,671 posts)MarkCharles
(2,261 posts)The secondary gain for leaders in this type of a movement are worldwide recognition, and, of course, power, influence and MONEY!