Robert Switzer

Yet another creepy, repressed, hypocritical, closeted right-wing evangelical Christian homosexual is exposed to the light of day. And this time, the person in question is the pastor of one of the largest evangelical Christian super-churches in the nation, as well as being the head (no pun intended) of an influential group of evangelical Christian pastors.

He’s been fired from his job, and of course all of his contemporaries are rapidly distancing themselves, while appearing to remain sympathetic.

Time Magazine last year called Pastor Ted one of the 25 most influential evangelicals in the country, someone who had the ear of President Bush. Someone who was in regular communication with the President via a weekly conference call.

I find it hard to suppress the contempt I feel for people like Pastor Ted, and by extension, the people who take him seriously, accept what he says, and most importantly, give him money.

Yet this very contempt feeds into and strengthens the virulent and toxic mimetic virus that fuels both the evangelical Christians and the authoritarian right.

Here is a link to a chilling excerpt from the Richard Dawkins BBC Documentary ‘The Root of all Evil’. In this excerpt Pastor Ted and Richard Dawkins square off on the Bible and on evolution.

Pastor Ted demonstrates complete ignorance about the mechanism of natural selection in evolution. Dawkins calls him on it, and Pastor Ted counters with one of the uglier and more virulent memetic weapons in the evangelical arsenal. He accuses Dawkins of being an arrogant intellectual looking to denigrate the beliefs of ordinary folks, People Of Faith.

Meanwhile, Pastor Ted also claims that the Bible contains ‘no contradictions’, a position that anyone who has actually read the Bible knows to be patently false.

Everybody’s entitled to an opinion, right? And Pastor Ted’s opinion is just as good as Richard Dawkin’s, right? So by pointing out that Pastor Ted doesn’t know shit about natural selection and evolution, and is in fact misleading his congregation about the nature of each, Richard Dawkins is exhibiting arrogance and disrespect for these just plain folks, these ‘People Of Faith’.

In my last post, I wrote indirectly about the cultural backlash that seems to be fueling both the growth of evangelical Christianity and the authoritarian right.

A large part of this backlash is fueled by what the constituents of this backlash believe to be a tyranny of false expertise that mitigates against all claims to specialized knowledge, valid or not.

So, by extension, all expertise is ‘just an opinion’, and just like assholes, we all have one. And Richard Dawkins, one of the most influential evolutionary biologists in the world, has no more authority with these people to speak on evolution than Pastor Ted.