Mortal Remains
Alas, Average at Best
by S. M. Hutchens
Once again, this time in a story covering the pending liberal/traditionalist division over homosexuality in the United Methodist Church, I have encountered a journalist's assurance that religious conservatives are less educated, accomplished, and culturally sophisticated than their liberal antagonists. The implication is that those in the churches who oppose what used to be universally acknowledged in them as sexual sin are, on the whole, inferior human beings by the most meaningful indices of personal worth—they are, as Michael Weisskopf alleged in his infamous 1993 Washington Post story, "largely poor, uneducated and easy to command."
This observation, now more often insinuated than so flatly stated, is not uncommon. Fear not—the journalistic mandarins assure readers who may hesitate before the idea that religious traditionalists might be right about perversion and all that—superior people like us agree against the inferior sort that this is progress, and not "going
bad."
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more on sex from the online archives
31.1—January/February 2018
Getting Sex Wrong Is a Foundational Error by James M. Kushiner
32.4—July/August 2019
Does Biblical Language for Man Matter? by Stephen F. Noll
more from the online archives
31.4—July/August 2018
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26.5—Sept/Oct 2013
The Perils of Pragmatism in Christian Attitudes Toward the Liberal Arts by Robin Phillips
32.4—July/August 2019
on Single-Mindedness in Durer's Ritter, Tod, und Teufel by Anthony Costello
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