Matt Sutton Strikes Again; and More on Religion Dispatches and Texas History Textbook Shenanigans

Paul Harvey

Our contributing editors are busy at work in the blogosphere. At Religion Dispatches, Matt Sutton is having too much fun in his amusing and insightful post Is Obama the AntiChrist: Why Armageddon Stands between the President and the Evangelical Vote, based in part on research for his book American Evangelicals and the Politics of Apocalypse. Matt's conclusion:

So what can we do? Pray for the rapture. If evangelicals vanish, the rest of us might finally get better medical care, a healthier environment, a more just international community, and full civil rights for gays and lesbians. But short of this miracle, we can at least begin to understand that before Obama is able to penetrate the evangelical heart, evangelicals themselves will need to do some serious soul-searching. Rick Warren and Joel Osteen’s shallow, positive-thinking, feel-good sermonizing is not going to help them do this. Instead, it is up to the younger evangelicals to engage in serious intellectual debate and a rigorous rethinking of the theology at the root of their politics. Anything less and the doomsayers will turn fears of Obama-as-Antichrist into big business. But hell, maybe that’s just the spark the economy needs.

Jesse Lava takes some issue with Matt's views here.

And speaking of those evangelicals in D.C., see the group free-for-all on Jeff Sharlet's The Family also at Religion Dispatches -- an online group conversation betweeen Sharlet and Randall Balmer, Anthea Butler, and Diane Winston. Sharlet had the great good fortune of having his book come out just as the Mark Sanford and Jon Ensign scandals broke -- both conservative Republicans associated with The Family while in D.C.

Finally, our contributor John Fea is going through the Texas history school text controversy line by line, analyzing David Barton's views and countering those with his own, in a multipart series on his blog -- start here and follow down from there. I still have no idea why Barton (and even more so Peter Marshall) would be on any state textbook committee for any state for any reason. But they are, so good to have some more detailed analysis from someone who has more patience and less snark than I do. Next time, maybe Texans will think to ask John or some other thoughtful and knowledgeable Christian scholar to work through their history standards; that would be a change for the better.