“It’s true you have better hair than I do,” Trump said matter-of-factly. “But I get more pussy than you do.”
But just because Trump is an imperfect candidate doesn’t mean his candidacy can’t be instructive. Trump could teach Republicans in Washington a lot if only they stopped posturing long enough to watch carefully.
.. For decades, party leaders and intellectuals imagined that most Republicans were broadly libertarian on economics and basically neoconservative on foreign policy.
.. Evangelicals have given up trying to elect one of their own. What they’re looking for is a bodyguard, someone to shield them from mounting (and real) threats to their freedom of speech and worship.
Howard Stern – Donald Trump and Kate Boner
Donald talks about sending prospective dates to the doctor for checkups.
let’s talk about sexual purity and evangelical anxiety, shall we?
Most scholars trace the rise of the evangelical purity movement to the cultural shifts of the 1960s, with the purity movement originating in response to the loosened sexual mores of that time.
.. Moslener’s sense is that evangelical purity culture (as opposed to traditional Christian emphasis on the reservation of sexual expression to the marital relationship) got its start in the late 19th century, as white evangelicals began to lose their hitherto unquestioned grip on mainstream American culture.
Waves of immigration of non-white, non-Anglo Saxon, non-Protestants threatened to overturn the prior status quo, and white evangelicals responded with a range of social reform movements that privileged bourgeois (read: white, middle-class, Protestant) respectability. Temperance was one such movement; purity was another.
.. My sense is that non-evangelicals tend to be appalled by purity culture, so it’s doubtful they’re going to want to know more about it.
Springtime for Liberal Christianity
A revitalized religious left, a Christianity that doesn’t feel like the province of a single political faction, would be a sign of religious vitality writ large. And I would far rather debate politics with Cornel West or the editors of Commonweal than with a liberalism that thinks it can impose meaning on a cosmos whose sound and fury signifies nothing on its own.
.. The other is religious liberalism’s urge to follow secular liberalism in embracing the sexual revolution and all its works — a move that promises renewal but rarely delivers, because it sells out far too much of scripture and tradition along the way.
.. The second tendency, though, is one that Francis has tacitly encouraged, by empowering clerics and theologians who seem to believe that Rome’s future lies in imitating the moribund Episcopal Church’s approach to sex, marriage and divorce.