Dear folks
Here is an example Quora Answer. My point in sharing it is not the language or the argument itself, but a warning in the scholarship of the American-Australian relational histories and sociology, for those scholars who think that the current historiography and sociology is ‘business as usual’:
What are some of the best examples of “American ignorance”?
It’s happening in real time. All these Americans who are behind Donald Trump, who don’t realise that he doesn’t actually give a flying fuck about them. He just wants their votes, and then everything will change. He’s being used himself, and he is too fucking stupid to realise that either.
The rest of the world is watching this, and many of us are worried for Americans. It’s all going tits up for Americans, and the freedoms they pride themselves on. This isn’t freedom. It’s dictatorship.
The very people voting for this moron are the very people whose lives, livelihood, families etc are going to be badly affected if he manages to get in office again. I can’t believe it’s actually happening. It’s like watching the Handsmaid Tale.
WAKE UP AMERICA
These people don’t give a shit about you. They never have.
VOTE THEM OUT.
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In the scholarship I have explained the political connections and engagements between the United States and Australia:
1. William Buckley’s National Review always understood their movement as embodying a Catholic world view that could inform modern America. At the same time, National Review conservatives found it possible to support more secular conservatives such as Barry Goldwater, who favoured ‘the primacy of moral initiative’ but from a more political than religious foundation.
2. I recall back in the early 1980s my teacher in Christian Thought, Ian Gillman, faced with the bubble thinking of Schaefferan apologetic students, pointed out Schaffer’s historiographical account had completely missed engaging with Kant. On the subject of historiography, Schaefferan apologetics is full of cognitive holes.
3. “Christian Apologetic” is nothing more than of a dominion theory, which is a majority thinking of American evangelical believers (i.e., right-wing and where the American left-wing evangelical positioning is the minority), BUT a small fundamentalist minority in the Christian world.
4. The basic idea in American (Fundamentalist) Christian Neo-Conservativism is Providence is not only manifest in Americanism, but rather it was providential that the ‘Church of Lord Jesus Christ’ would reign, not merely as a promise, but an active fulfilment of the postmillennial hope. Members of the Kingdom of God needed to seize what opportunity providentially prevailed, and the Church would trump the State.
5. From Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms in the American Republican Party, with what now became known as the ‘religious right’, political pieces were in place for these social movement stirrings to begin to reconfigure the American political landscape. The organizational capacity of right-wing social movements has climaxed in Trumpism.
6. The religion of American evangelicalism, outside the liberal framings of such believers, cemented in the 1970s with the Fuller Theological Seminary’s (Pasadena, California, USA) reactionary neo-conservatives, and this began as a reaction to Fuller’s liberal evangelicals from the 1960s (e.g. Dan Fuller).
7. This politicization of evangelicalism worried many non-Reformed evangelicals, especially Mennonites. But a greater number joined the fight against liberalism, convinced by Schaefer and other ‘idea men’ that they were charged with nothing less than “the survival of historic Christianity, Western culture, and America itself.”
8. Davies’ (1997) critical analysis of how the nineteenth century American Revivalist Tradition (ART) is stuck in reading of old-time historiography; an anti-modernist positioning which is not to be found in the credible history discipline today. Schaffer’s hermeneutic worked, though, on the principle that “something could be historically false and religiously true.”[footnote 51 below].
9. While there is a mass of literature in and of evangelical sociology, very little has been done on the sociology of evangelicalism which picks the significant place of Schaefferan apologetics. Lindsay (2008) is a significant example of what has been achieved.[53] Lindsay’s Figure 1. Social-Spatial Diagram of Evangelical Structural Coincidence and Cohesion in Four Sectors, 1976 to 2006 (n = 142) is important. Buch’s Figure 2. Buch’s Schaefferan Critique is a intellectual summary of Lindsay’s graph for clarity of mind.
Figure 1. Social-Spatial Diagram of Evangelical Structural Coincidence and Cohesion in Four Sectors, 1976 to 2006 (n = 142)
Figure 2: Buch’s Schaefferan Critique
In the meantime, the news this morning is that hundreds of jobs are to go at Sydney’s major universities. It seems as if universities’ management and mis-governance is intent on ‘killing’ the messengers of global bad news.
Source: Buch, Neville (2023). Why the Disciplines and No Apologetics? Part 1: The Collapse of Schaefferan Apologetics, Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, June 7, 2023.
- Footnotes: Davies, L., 1997, Covenantal Hermeneutics and the Redemption of Theory, Christianity and Literature, Issue 46, 357–397. See quotation pages 367-8; See also Miller, S. P., 2019, Review of The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, The North Carolina Historical Review, Issue 96, 449–450. Quotation page 449. FitzGerald, Frances (2017). The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, New York: Simon and Schuster.
Neville Buch
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