The Aeon website has had some good stuff, though I really don’t know much about it. Increasingly, however, it seems to be abjuring brain stuff for touchy-feely as well as defense-of-religion stuff. Here, for instance, is the list of current questions, posed by writers, for readers to discuss:

I presume the first question derives from the short article on the site, John Fea’s “The secular front in the US“, which is advertised on Aeon like this:

And its first sentence is not propitious:

Pay even passing attention to political society in the United States, and you will learn that secular progressives are threatening the country.

Now who, you might ask, is John Fea, and why is he writing at Aeon about the dangers of secularism? I can’t answer the second question, but I can the first, which makes the second even more perplexing:

John Fea is a professor of American history at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. His latest book, The Bible Cause: A History of the American Bible Society, will be published in 2016.

I’ve added a link to his Messiah College webpage. The college is in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania and, as you can tell by the name, hardly secular—its “identity statement” is this:

Messiah College is a Christian college of the liberal and applied arts and sciences. The College is committed to an embracing evangelical spirit rooted in the Anabaptist, Pietist and Wesleyan traditions of the Christian Church.

All students are required to sign a “Community Covenant” (see the whole thing at the link) swearing fealty to Jesus and promising good Christian behavior. One of its stipulations is that homosexuality is sinful and “destructive of community life and the body of Christ”:

Which brings us to Fea’s thesis. Why, exactly, is secularism threatening America and is such a “menace”? Well, take your pick:

Beginning in the 1970s, Christian conservatives complained that godless ideologues were exalting human reason, placing human beings above God, and worshipping unlimited freedom and individualism. They called them secular humanists.

Yes, Fea’s real argument—which, as a testimony to Jesus and a warning against anti-Jesus secularists surely doesn’t belong in the pages of a decent website—is that secularists attack all the values that evangelical Christians hold dear. And, as he admits, secularism is growing. But Fea also points out that Evangelicals are Numerous and Powerful, constituting more than 25% of Christians, and therefore “the largest religious sub-group in the country.” Fea’s beef is that Evangelicals don’t get no respect (pull at knot of your tie) given their population:

Yet for evangelicals, the secular progressive vision of the world is a threat to the institutions that they hold dear. They believe that progressives are threatening the biblical idea that God created men and women for the purpose of procreation and family life. Many evangelicals believe that human rights come from God, and thus the exercise of these rights – particularly in the area of sexuality and the protection of human life – must always be measured by the will of God as contained in the scriptures. Families who choose to have an abortion are putting their selfishness, disguised as the ‘pursuit of happiness’, over the dignity of a helpless human life. Secular progressives, who frequently brandish Ivy-league degrees, a sense of intellectual superiority, and contempt for Christian faith, often treat evangelicals like idiots. Granted, few politically minded members of the Christian Right try very hard to listen and learn from secular progressives. But the deafness and incivility go both ways.

What Fea apparently means by “civility” is not just that we should treat Evangelicals as if they have human dignity (I think most of us try to do that), but that they are forced themselves to act secular to get along in society—a bogus argument if I’ve ever heard it.

Evangelicals have managed to capture a large segment of the Republican Party, but in other areas of culture they are forced to conform to the norms of society as defined by secular progressives. Take, for example, the most elite universities in the US. The leadership and faculty, when taken as a whole, largely reject the truth claims of Christianity or, at the very least, do not see Christianity as a useful system of belief to help shape campus and intellectual life. Evangelical student groups have been asked to leave campus because of their views on a host of social issues.  [JAC: While this may be true, I know of plenty of good colleges that have evangelical Christian student organizations. I’m not sure what Fea is referring to here.] Today, I would venture to guess, it is virtually impossible for a scholar who is pro-life, believes that marriage is between a man and a woman, or does not fully embrace a progressive view of human history, to land a teaching post at one of these universities. Evangelical faculty and graduate students, in order to make it, must learn to keep quiet about the way that faith informs their understanding of the world. This kind of compartmentalising is not always a bad thing, but it is a reality.

Well, I’ll leave the readers to let me know about their acquaintance with pro-life, anti-gay-marriage, and conservative professors at “elite” universities. I could name at least half a dozen if I thought about it for five minutes, but I’ll leave their names out of this argument. What Fea wants is “Jesus diversity” at elite colleges: we should, in other words, deliberately employ people with Evangelical views. But what if those views are irrelevant to their disciplines, and people are hired on merit in their fields? Since most academics are liberals, that will give us an underrepresentation of Evangelicals. But no nonreligious college discriminates against scholars based on those scholars’ religious beliefs (professors in divinity schools may be an exception). I suspect it’s illegal to even ask them about their religious beliefs during the hiring process. And woe be to the college who fires a scholar because they’re discovered to be an Evangelical Christian. That is a one-way trip to Lawsuit City.

And these Christians, once hired, are free to promulgate their views—and many of them do. What Fea doesn’t like is that their views aren’t popular, and so some Evangelicals keep silent. Well, that’s too damn bad. If they’re so cowardly that they can’t speak up about their beliefs, they belong in nursery school, not a university.

In the end, Fea thinks secularism is destroying our country because it leads to suppression and refusal to “respect” the views of evangelicals:

Whether it be academia, popular entertainment, or some other sector of culture, secular progressivism is a real threat to evangelical Christian values. Christian culture warriors are often sloppy and usually inconsistent in the way that they apply Christian faith to public life, but not all of them are crazy. They are astute observers of modern culture who represent the values and fears of a significant portion of Americans. And, as long as secular progressives continue to remain intolerant about the deeply held religious convictions of these Christians, and refuse to understand them as part of a larger conversation about national identity and the common good, it will be difficult for US democracy to move forward.

No, Evangelicals are not all crazy, but most of them are delusional, thinking that a nonexistent being has decreed that abortion, homosexuality, and extramarital sex are sinful, and that women are, in the main, breeding stock for men. I understand those values (as Jeff Tayler would say, they’re part of Faith Derangement Syndrome, often drilled into you as a child), but I refuse to respect them. And yes, I am intolerant of those values, and will fight them tooth and nail.  As for a “conversation between secularist and Evangelicals” moving US democracy forward, that’s the wrong path. The way to move US democracy forward is to embrace Enlightenment values and battle the intolerant and authoritarian morality of right-wing Christians. In the end, the greatest “religious” threat to progress in the US is not secularism, but Evangelical Christianity. A god-given morality is a dangerous morality.

Ask yourself this: what kind of “respect” are we supposed to afford to the views of a man whose students must swear that homosexuality is a sin, destructive to the “body of Christ”?

But perhaps a more important question is this: why the bloody hell did Aeon publish such a dreadful piece of tripe in the first place?

h/t: Stephen S.