Lughnasa                                                                            Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

I’ve found major points of agreement between myself and my congresswoman, she-who-would-be-president Michelle Bachmann.  She considers the Renaissance a major problem for Christianity.  The Enlightenment, too.  I see it that way myself.  Of course, we do disagree on the significance of these facts.

Yep.  Michelle and the Calvinist theologian Franklin Schaeffer along with a Schaefer acolyte “Nancy Pearcey, a prominent creationist whose recent book is “Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning” have found each other and God is good.”  But the rest of the modern era, unfortunately, isn’t.

Having attended a liberal Protestant seminary and worked as an ordained Presbyterian for 15 years (a church founded by the Calvin, John), these are waters with which I am very familiar.  Schaeffer and Pearcey (maybe the problem is in the way they spell their last names?) have discovered a dark secret in Western history.  The Renaissance, taking its cue in part from the Copernican revolution which put paid to the Ptolemaic universe with the earth–and therefore man (no gender weasling allowed here) and therefore God–at its center, went on to place increasing emphasis on humans, hence humanists and humanism, and on this world not the next.

This showed up in art which began to veer away from the medieval dominance of the church as patron and in so doing began to look backwards to the ancient Greeks and Romans, too, focusing on the human body and the natural world.  These evangelical fundamentalists are not wrong in their history of ideas.  This was the point where Western culture began to turn away from medieval scholasticism.  It is, too, the field from which the Enlightenment grew, perhaps, from Bachmann’s point of view, much like the Thebans, a warrior line of thought sprung from the dragon’s teeth of Renaissance humanists.

The Enlightenment in its turn closed the door for good on the ancien regime, that hold over of papal theocracy, divine right of kings and the Great Chain of Being.  Or at least I hope it did.

The rise and rise of those who would return us to the dark days of Scholastic reasoning (an oxymoron in some ways) and a theocratic view of government with the Bible as the basis for our very own version of the Sharia portends a possible governmental assault on the last 500 years.  This is, in its own way, the Christian version of the return to the Caliphate so dear to the hearts of Islamic extremists like Bin Laden.