Speaking of freakish religious nut Rick Santorum, via Ed Kilgore, this 2008 frothy outburst from little Ricky:
[O]nce the colleges fell and those who were being educated in our institutions, the next was the church. Now you’d say, ‘wait, the Catholic Church’? No. We all know that this country was founded on a Judeo-Christian ethic but the Judeo-Christian ethic was a Protestant Judeo-Christian ethic, sure the Catholics had some influence, but this was a Protestant country and the Protestant ethic, mainstream, mainline Protestantism, and of course we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is in shambles, it is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it.
With Santorum, it’s Opus Dei or the highway.
BGinCHI
Once the colleges fell?
I’m looking out the window of my office and I don’t see any signs of carnage or flames or barricades.
Does he think American universities were founded on teaching religious ideas or doctrine? Does he know how anything in this country works?
cathyx
@BGinCHI: He means fell in the sense that they are now liberal bastions of drugs, sex and rock and roll.
Comrade Mary
Frankly, Mr. Cole, you’re on a roll.
dslak
@BGinCHI:
The first few were.
Nancy
@BGinCHI: Actually, Harvard was founded for the purpose of training Congregational and Unitarian clergy.
Villago Delenda Est
OK, kill the Judeo- part. That’s post WWII guilt trip addition because of the late unpleasantness in Germany and Poland, for the most part.
Secondly, while one could argue that the tradition is culturally Protestant, you can’t argue that a bunch of deists who specifically excluded any religious test from being applied to holding any office or position of trust in the new republic was religiously Protestant.
Then again, on the other hand, Santorum is simply a, well, santorum-head.
Anoniminous
@BGinCHI:
Actually …
Some of the original US universities were founded to teach religious ideas and doctrines: Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, fer instances.
ETA: Nancy broke the tape first but I win because of the greater amount of evidence.
(So there! nyah.)
dmsilev
@BGinCHI:
Wait until your team wins $IMPORTANT_SPORTING_EVENT. That will usually do the trick.
(some years back, I interviewed for a postdoc position at the University of Minnesota. My hosts took me on a short tour of the neighborhood around campus, including “here’s where the students rioted after winning the hockey championship”. Whee….)
David Koch
To quote, Ed Koch, not one Jew will vote for Senator Man on Dog.
Ed Dane defender of Doughnuts
I seem to recall Rick Santorum giving a speech on Muslim/Arab relations once, one decried by many outside of the GOP echelon.
Check that … there’s a lot apparently. Might be something to consider repeating since he is the flavor of the month.
Svensker
If you read the whole thing, he says that Satan has taken control of academia and mainline Protestant churches. And as I said in another thread, I want a journalist to ask him specifically which mainline Protestant churches he thinks have been taken over by Satan. The Presbyterians? The Lutherans? The Methodists? I think their congregations would be interested.
Comrade Dread
Awesome. I had no idea he was a fundamentalist Catholic that rejected all that accommodation with Protestants.
Wonder how his Evangelical supporters will feel about him since he thinks all of us non-Catholic Christians are bound for hellfire, no doubt to burn on the same circle as Luther and Calvin.
JimTheNewb
I’m very much enjoying the latest crop of post titles.
Brachiator
It’s cool wordplay day.
@Svensker:
I can’t wait for the movie version of this fantasy.
Jimbo316
It is true that many early colleges were founded as religious-affiliated institutions or even as theological schools but that changed about 150-200 years ago for most of them (though not Catholic colleges), never mind the thousands of institutions that were never religiously affiliated in the first place. We are in the midst of Republican sheer madness and viciousness. It’s mark of a mortally-wounded wildebeest thrashing about wildly.
Sly
…
What?
Cotton Mather and Moses Maimonedes form the historical basis of Colonial American ethics?
Fuckin’ seriously?
lonesomerobot
Hey John, why doncha post another picture.
You handsome devil.
Benjamin Franklin
Santorum: ‘Take back that Papal Bull, you Sodomites.”
lonesomerobot
@Comrade Mary: I didn’t realize you wrote such bloody awful poetry
Martin
@Comrade Dread:
Shh. Don’t tell them until he’s nominated. More fun that way.
JPL
The debate Wednesday night should be a hoot. A Mormon and a newly converted thrice married Catholic attacking Santorum for his views on mainline Protestants. Good times!
gnomedad
Couldn’t resist.
gnomedad
@lonesomerobot:
She’s a poet and didn’t noet.
Comrade Mary
Missed that the first time. Utter fucking win.
gex
@Comrade Dread: There’s a “gentleman’s” agreement amongst the Christian denominations to pretend they have no differences as they fight off the evil feminist, gay, atheist, Muslim, secular meance. So they can bite the bullet and vote for him now, and the battle for Christian denomination supremacy can come later.
@gnomedad: No more rhyming, and I mean it…
harlana
@Comrade Dread: Evangelicals are different than what he calls “mainline” Protestants – there’s a difference there since they don’t associate themselves with mainstream Protestants (he doesn’t want to use that word so he uses “mainline” which is really fucking stupid, anyway), which is what i think he is implying, is all i’m saying. Evangelicals don’t like those people either and think they are ungodly, just like Rick does. But i thought most of them hate Catholics anyway.
scav
Now I’m seeing him on an interstate, surrounded by cartoon penguins, some of them wearing tutus. Given that I’ve been tormented by visions of the Perils of Pauline as rescued by the Keystone Kops vibe from the Repub primary today, I’m sensing a theme. Roadkill.
noodler
“but the Judeo-Christian ethic was a Protestant Judeo-Christian ethic”
Did Martin Luther nail his Theses to a synagogue door too?
Delia
See, I’ve always thought the fundie embrace of the RC’s was a bit shaky to begin with. They only all agreed to it so they could wage the culture wars on the evil secularists and the mainline Prots who are just as bad in their eyes. But the fundies have always thought that this is really their country all along and they were only being nice by letting the Catholics come along for the ride and not calling them the Whore of Babylon anymore. Now here comes Little Ricky, blowing the lid off the pot and revealing that the true RC’s have always thought that the fundies are just like all the other Prots, heretical sinners who strayed from the true path and are bound for hell.
So what does that do to this nice alliance between the various religious types that was the foundation of the social cons? Why, just yesterday we had all the rabbis, preachers, and bishops lined up and yammering to Congress about how birth control violates their religious freedom. Now Little Ricky’s told two-thirds of them to f##k off.
BGinCHI
@Anoniminous: Yeah gang, I know that, and I should have said “state schools.” By far the largest educator of people in higher ed for a long, long time.
Why do Santorum and other religious dicks hate the founding fathers? Separation of church and state, bitches.
makewi
Santorum is wrong. You guys aren’t Satan. Just devoid of any morals or ethics. There’s a difference.
Comrade Dread
@Jimbo316: I don’t know, on the one hand, it does seem like there was a lot more public general acceptance of an American Christianity back in the day.
On the other hand, it’s really hard to argue that we’ve moved away from that given that we have Christian music, Christian movies, Christian books, the National Day of Prayer, public professions of faith by politicians, athletes, and celebrities, and general embrace of at least a national form of Christianity by the American public.
But I suppose when right leaning folks talk about how we’ve moved away from our Christian heritage, they’re mostly complaining that some atheists won’t let them put up a Ten Commandments display on public property or about kids these days, so I should probably stop trying to analyze it and just accept it as political rhetoric.
Villago Delenda Est
@makewi:
Yeah, right, lying sack of santorum.
Comrade Dread
@harlana: That’s not quite true. Baptists are considered mainline Protestants and they’re almost (if not more) socially conservative than Catholics.
scav
@Villago Delenda Est: poor creatorofverbalwee is just upholding the honor of the side that has to bribed into being good by buying greenstamps into Heaven(tm) using other people’s bodies while excusing all moral failings of their own because they’re forgiven(TM) by Jesus(TM) and their wives and choirboys.
gex
@Comrade Dread: I still think there’s plenty of public acceptance of Christianity. The fight is that the public doesn’t want it imposed, and the Christians of this ilk hate that. The more they attack me, the less tolerant I get about Christianity. If they don’t like it they can back the fuck off.
kindness
I saw that post. Yea I liked the part about Sanitorum linking Protestants with Satan.
God-botherers. They suck.
makewi
@scav:
It’s easier not to have any standards other than the left is always right isn’t it? It’s just how you all roll. That’s how you end up with serial womanizers held up as standard bearers for upholding woman’s rights.
harlana
@Comrade Dread: Baptists are becoming increasingly fundie/evangelical, they break off from their mother churches all the time, is all i’m saying. i don’t think they are any more friendly towards Catholics than what ever a “mainline” Baptist is these days (that’s like trying to find a “moderate” Republican) and Ricky, he’s trying to appeal to the megachurch crowd, just imo. (he should, they have lots of $$)
scav
@makewi: stings a little, your side being unable to be good for the sake of being good but only doing it because the big daddy bribes you with holy cookies, doesn’t it?
ETA: and take those holy cookies from the hands of the serial pederasts.
Chyron HR
@makewi:
It kills you to know that you can’t accuse an uppity “knicker” of raping you and get him strung up with no questions asked anymore, doesn’t it?
jl
Is Rih confused, or what?
He is trying to appeal to founders for the supposed secatrian religious moral foundations of the country (which I think is historically false).
Then he says he does not like the direction this ‘mainline’ Prot Judeo Christian sectarian worldview has taken over the last 50 (or is it 100) years, so he says to hell with it.
Or is he saying that he knows that the founders really advocated his reactionary religious sect?
makewi
@scav:
As it happens, I’m good because I love my fellow man. I think perhaps you should take the cookies, or give them to Chryon HR who seems to think rape victims are all liars.
Davis X. Machina
How can Clement of Alexandria run for president? He’s not even a citizen.
scav
@makewi: I’ve seen no evidence whatsoever of you loving your fellow man, let alone your fellow humans from your behavior on this site. Pretty must constant bile and yes, wee. And oh yes, I will take a leftist womanizer as a champion for women’s rights as at least he’s more likely to have interacted with them as actual people rather than doormats to be left for trophy wives when convenient and dragged up on stage to assent to her forgiveness of him when he adopts a wide diapered stance in airport men’s rooms.
Svensker
@jl:
I think he’s saying the founders were an OK version of “judeo-christian protestanism” but then Satan got busy and took over the schools and then took over the “mainline Protestants” (i.e., not the fundies), so now, good God awmighty, everbody but the Catholics and the fundies have Satan cooties all over theyselves.
ETA: I don’t know whether teh Jooz have Satan cooties or not. Prolly the lefty ones do, the arch-zionists don’t.
jimmiraybob
Once burning at the stake was stolen from the Church by the liberals, the universities were doomed. Doomed I tells ya.
I blame it on the Byzantine end run of ancient knowledge into Florence and other medieval satanic ports-o-call.
PurpleGirl
@Svensker: Well, at least the members of the Evangelical Lutherna Church in America (of ELCA) are seen as heretics by the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod. (the Evangelical in ELCA’s name refers to their beliefs is spreading the good word of the Bible. They may do outreach but they aren’t crazies. Dr. Tiller was an ELCA Lutheran btw.
jl
@Svensker: Thanks. We’ve all read about how worried the Founders were about Satan? That is why they burned witches and pressed warlocks to death.
The threat of Satanic conquest was subject the famous warning of President Cotton Mather’s farewell address.
Or, did I get things confused?
Svensker
@jl:
:)
Benjamin Franklin
This is gonna leave a mark…..
http://www.aclu.org/national-security/obama-administration-asks-supreme-court-dismiss-aclu-challenge-warrantless
makewi
Your words are beautiful man.
Ken
@Villago Delenda Est: OK, kill the Judeo- part.
If you haven’t already seen it, Google “santorum hannukah”.
And who was the comedian that said “when they say Judeo-Christian they really mean Christian”? It might have been one of Jon Stewart’s regulars.
Suffern ACE
@purplegirl-they’re LCMS. The core belief is that everyone is a heretic.
Smiling Mortician
@scav:
Just wanna go on record as saying that the word “womanizer” should be stricken from . . . well, from everything. Aside from the inherent irony of coining a term that objectifies women in order to pejoratively describe a man who objectifies women, it also makes no logical sense — a rational definition of such a word would be “to turn into a woman.”
Some people are squicked out by words like “moist” or “panties.” For me, that word is “womanizer.” Ick.
Villago Delenda Est
@Ken:
The stupid. It burns!
JoyfulA
@Comrade Dread: There are multiple sorts of Baptists. American Baptists (northern) are mainstream; Southern Baptists aren’t, IMHO, at least since the nutjob takeover c. 25 years ago.
James King
@Davis X. Machina
Obscure patristics references don’t come up often enough in blog comments. I salute you.
Chuck Butcher
@Smiling Mortician:
The point of womanizer seems to be that those womans don’t like to do it, they’re somehow coerced. I guess.
Nancy
There is only one hope for the republican party. They must all take a vow of silence. A female legislator in New Hampshire says married people could practice abstinence if they don’t want to get pregnant.
HelpThe99ers
@gex: it’s inconceivable that no one has asked if anybody wants a peanut.
Chuck Butcher
I really cannot tell you how happy I am to see GOP political religious warfare breaking out. (as a doggedly non-religious sort)
I suppose one of the real benefits of being an agnostic will be to get to stand off to the side and point and laugh.
Villago Delenda Est
@Nancy:
That isn’t the same legislator who said the pill causes prostate cancer, is it?
Felinious Wench
Hate to tell Rick this, but the Episcopalians are still around, thank you…and most of us REALLY think he’s an idiot. There are fewer of us, but that doesn’t mean we’re gone. Much to the fundamentalist’s dismay, Damn Whiskeypalians, electing gay bishops and giving real Christians bad names…
Benjamin Franklin
@Chuck Butcher:
Since ‘agnostic’ basically means ‘don’t know’, it may be a joke on yourself.
Chuck Butcher
@Felinious Wench:
Hmmm, out here in the “RED” hinterlands the Episcopalian is one of the bigger churches. They even rent (for a very modest sum) space to the Democratic county party.
Amanda in the South Bay
How is he wrong though? Protestantism has profoundly shaped this country, a few years of founding father deism aside. I mean, even most American Catholics speak in terms of Protestantism. I really don’t see how that is historically inaccurate. The 13 colonies had no significant numbers of Catholics, the kind of Anglicanism practiced was very latitudinarian, and there was never a real established aristocracy (of the Loyalist/English Civil War sort) and I don’t think most Americans have ever gotten into their minds what an episcopate is.
Sure, Santorum is a nasty fucker, but still, I don’t think he’s at all inaccurate. The ethos of Protestant Christianity infects even Catholicism and Orthodoxy to large degrees in American (says the ex-Orthodox and at one time ex-Byzantine Catholic).
mdblanche
@Nancy: Harvard was founded for the purpose of training Puritan clergy. Technically a Congregationalist is a mellow Puritan and a Unitarian is a really mellow Puritan.
If they were around today, the founders of Harvard would agree their college has been subverted but they would blame the Founding Fathers. Which is why none of this is going to hurt Santorum. Potential Santorum voters either agree with him, which would include evangelicals, or they’re already staying where they’re not wanted, so why should these remarks make any difference?
Smiling Mortician
@Chuck Butcher:
Pretty sure there was a word for that already.
But yeah, I think that’s about right: they’re coerced, but not, y’know, coerced coerced. They’ve been womanized! Now I get it. A man who is a womanizer is a man who makes a woman into a woman by the sheer power of his relentless manhood.
This is not reducing my squick level . . .
Felinious Wench
We iz in ur Catholicism, messing with ur dogma.
Brachiator
@mdblanche:
Let’s see. Harvard was founded in 1636. If they were around today, the founders of Harvard would consider themselves to be loyal subjects of the British Empire. And looking for the Tardis and a certain Doctor to help them get back to their own time.
Benjamin Franklin
@Brachiator:
Dr Gonzo?
Delia
@Felinious Wench:
Whaddya mean “giving real Christians a bad name”? We ARE the real Christians. The loonies are giving us a bad name.
scav
@Smiling Mortician: I’ll find the dictionary page and strike it. Was just repeating it, don’t think it plays in my usual vocab so won’t miss it. Philanderer, how’s that one?
mdblanche
@Brachiator: Subjects of the British empire yes, but loyal? The Church of England is further from the one true faith than ever! At least attendance is no longer mandatory, but attendance should be mandatory once the church has been sufficiently purified.
And a structure that’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside? This doctor you speak of must be a WITCH!1!!
Felinious Wench
My Fundie relatives say I’m not a real Christian because I don’t believe in hell. My great aunt said I’m illegitimate because my parents didn’t marry in the Catholic church, and i’m going to hell because i wasn’t baptised into the one true church. So, hey, according to all of the people above, I’m going to burn,burn,burn.
You can see how much it’s had an effect on me…
Felinious Wench
My Fundie relatives say I’m not a real Christian because I don’t believe in hell. My great aunt said I’m illegitimate because my parents didn’t marry in the Catholic church, and i’m going to hell because i wasn’t baptised into the one true church. So, hey, according to all of the people above, I’m going to burn,burn,burn.
You can see how much it’s had an effect on me…
Jager
@Comrade Dread: Since I was around back in the day. In the 50’s and 60’s growing up in the Midwest, nobody pushed religion or wore it on their sleeves, nobody asked what church you belonged to. It never came up. Nice, friendly folks all getting along without bullshit. A pal who grew up in Tulsa lived in a completely different America than I did and he says its much worse now. Fuck them all!
Smiling Mortician
@scav:
Works for me. I’d accept libertine as well, except, you know, stupid people have trouble understanding that not all words beginning with “liber” are the same.
Gin & Tonic
@Benjamin Franklin: And here I thought after W left office that I’d save some money by cutting back on my ACLU donations. I guess I was wrong.
scav
@Smiling Mortician: YES! libertine too, like it.
Benjamin Franklin
@Gin & Tonic:
And here, I thought I’d become the invisible man… : > )
Omnes Omnibus
@Smiling Mortician: I object to libertine and philanderer being used interchangeably.
Chuck Butcher
@Smiling Mortician:
I’ll have somebody work on that… delegation of authority, you know
honus
@Comrade Dread: the whole thing about contraception is Catholic. The Protestants always used contraception. It was used by them to differentiate us catholics back in the day (early 60s) But then of course, most of the catholics were democrats.
Suffern ACE
I don’t know if Weber would be down with this judeo-Christian work ethic concept. I think he was very specific about what he meant, and it wasn’t “rah, rah this is what makes y’all so great.”
honus
@Comrade Dread: But they have always been allowed to use rubbers. And they traditionally hate catholics, because we’re, you know, dark. Italians, Greeks and Irish.
scav
@Omnes Omnibus: this is getting tricky. Clearly a lot of research my be needed to clear up all the vocabulary issues.
hamletta
@harlana: No, “mainline Protestant” is a real thing. It refers to non-evangelical Protestants, most likely belonging to the National Council of Churches (lots of Orthodox bodies there, but they’re obvs. not Protestants).
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Amanda in the South Bay:
Ahem. Maryland.
maryQ
Santorum just got me very interested in joining a mainlime Protestant church. It’s on, Dude.
TooManyJens
@maryQ: You put the mainlime in the coconut…
Amanda in the South Bay
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason:
emphasis on significant. Seriously, overall the numbers of Catholics in the colonies was pretty small, Maryland included. The ethos of colonial America wasn’t pre-reformation England or counter-reformation europe, it was purely Protestant.