Several years ago the Washington Post stirred up controversy for describing evangelicals as “poor, undereducated and easily led.” It’s not that they didn’t believe it to be true, they just knew they shouldn’t have got caught saying it in public.
I suspect Nicole Allan, a staff editor at TheAtlantic.com, may soon feel the same about this sentence:
People are sometimes caught off guard by Huckabee’s intellectual competence because of his rural Arkansas habits (he and his wife lived in a trailer while the governor’s mansion was being renovated) and his outspoken evangelical views.
People are sometimes caught off guard by the intellectual incompetence of clueless urban journalists who write about subjects they know nothing about (like Southerners or evangelicals). But it rarely surprises me anymore. I’ve been around enough of them to know that it’s usually not malice, but rather an honest ignorance of the world outside their narrow circles, that leads them to make such dumb remarks.
This is an example of the problem with elitism in America—particularly in the elite media. The issue isn’t with elitism as a concept (like most good conservatives, I’m in favor of elitism) but with the quality of what passes for elite in this country. If you have a degree from Yale (like Allan) you can usually finagle your way into a job with a premier media outlet (like The Atlantic) despite having neither a working knowledge of religion (especially popular religious views) nor the ability to apply basic logic.
For instance, I’m not sure what “rural Arkansas habits” have to do with “intellectual competence”—and I suspect Allan doesn’t have a clue what the connection is either. (Does living in a trailer lower your IQ?) But the fact that she feels comfortable expressing such a bizarre sentiment is symptomatic of a culture that promotes incompetent thinkers because they aquired all the right “elite “credentials.
(Via Frank Lockwood, a journalist who somehow managed to graduate from Harvard despite being an evangelical from Arkansas.)
Cross-Posted at First Thoughts
June 24th, 2010 | 4:44 pm | #1
It’s one thing to say that Allan shouldn’t have said this; it’s quite another thing to say that the generalizations that Allan is drawing upon are completely false and without any factual basis.
So are there actually no correlations between “intellectual competence” and the combination of “rural Arkansas habits” with “outspoken evangelical views”?
Even before the facts come in, isn’t it somewhat plausible to suppose that there are correlations between “intellectual competence” and educational achievement, and that there are further correlations between educational achievement and the combination of “outspoken evangelical views” with “rural Arkansas habits”? Is anyone prepared to deny that there are such correlations?
We may dislike these (and similar) correlations, and it may be that we ought to be sensitive in speaking about them. It may even show a defect of character to be “caught off guard” because one’s social expectations were based on such correlations. But none of this means that such correlations are illusory.
Cross-Posted at First Thoughts
June 24th, 2010 | 5:05 pm | #2
Is Allan expressing her own surprise as to the competence of Mike Huckabee, or is she recognizing that there is a stereotype that Southerners are stoopid an’ religious, and that because of it, some people are surprised when Huckabee fits most of the profile but not all of it?
This stereotype is recognized by more than just those elitist Yankees who write for The Atlantic.
Allan writes in her very next sentence:
So the “some people” that are surprised by Mike Huckabee’s intelligence are those journalists that Mike Huckabee is annoyed by.
June 24th, 2010 | 10:21 pm | #3
It’s surprising to meet a Republican politician who is at the same time intellectually competent, ethically consistent, and genuinely Christian. It is unsurprising that those whom the Republican party considers their “elite” would reject the leadership of someone like Huckabee, who is everything they are not, in favor of an semi-competent, inconsistent pseudo-Evangelical (who attends a Southern Baptist church where he can be seen on TV, but is not a member). Neither is it surprising that the non-elite fringe of the same party is following an completely anti-intellectual, ethically challenged, lunatic fringe para-Evangelical who despite her far-Northern background exhibits many of those rural Arkansan “habits”, sans mobile home.
Intellectual competence, consistent ethics (particularly those influenced by the teachings of Jesus), and vibrant faith are a rare combination among political leaders of either party, largely because the process of getting elected to office (at least as a governor or U.S. senator, let alone at the national level) over time weeds out those who are either unprepared or unwilling to compromise their ethics in favor of the party line (or the interests that fund the party).
Huckabee was not the Republican nominee for President of the United States because his ethically consistent actions as a governor were inconsistent with the political ideology of the opinion-leading “elites” of the Republican party. McCain won the nomination because he was willing (and amazingly enough, able) to renounce (or ignore) past actions he had taken on the basis of intellectual and ethical grounds and “toe the party line”, and those opinion leaders which eight years before had nothing good to say about him were suddenly convinced that he was their best chance for defeating the intellectually competent, ethically consistent, professed follower of Christ that was bound to be the nominee of the other party.
I often wonder if the result would have been different had mainstream Evangelicals in the Republican primary paid attention to their own values, rather than the verbal diarrhea of their leaders who base their choices on the godless philosophy of Ayn Rand rather than the values in the Sermon on the Mount.
June 25th, 2010 | 1:40 am | #4
Isn’t It Surprising When You Meet a Southern Evangelical That Isn’t a Dumb Hick?
Isn’t It Surprising When You Meet a Liberal Who Admits To Being Self-Deceived?
June 26th, 2010 | 8:41 pm | #5
Isn’t it surprising when you meet a moderate?
June 26th, 2010 | 11:59 pm | #6
Janice writes: “It’s one thing to say that Allan shouldn’t have said this; it’s quite another thing to say that the generalizations that Allan is drawing upon are completely false and without any factual basis.”
And that’s precisely the sort of query made by defenders of racial profiling.
As long as the red is neck and the victim does not require a green card, the prejudice is hunky dory.
June 27th, 2010 | 12:56 am | #7
Then let these “defenders of racial profiling” also try to understand what I go on to say about sensitivity and defects of character. Even if a stereotype reflects some true generalization, there may be nothing “hunky dory” about using it to try to justify racial profiling.
And by the way, if you’re going make shallow comments, please don’t attach such a good name to them.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact