Santorum and the South: Think Education

Why did Santorum clean up in the South yesterday when so many media pundits--who never set foot in the South until an election cycle comes around--assured us that Romney had taken the lead over Santorum in Alabama and Mississippi?  As Randall J. Stephens and Karl Gibberson, authors of The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, explain, it's all about that old-time religion.

And about the old-time, pre-modern, "biblical" answers it provides to questions regarded as disputable among right-wing religionists, if long-since settled everywhere else in the postmodern world: does evolutionary theory explain how the world developed; can gays and lesbians change their sexual orientation with therapy and prayer?

It's about education, in other words.  It's about the lack thereof in some regions of the country and some sub-groups of the nation.  And it's about the intent of those sub-groups to control the educational process everywhere, should their anointed man be elected, since those "biblical" answers need to be taught to all children in all schools: 

Anti-intellectualism is deeply rooted in American evangelicalism, reaching even into the classrooms of popular schools, like Cedarville University and Liberty University (the largest evangelical university in the world), where students are taught that the earth is 10,000 years old. Millions of evangelical youth grow up hearing that there is a real debate when it comes to human origins. They also come to learn that homosexuality is a sinful lifestyle choice that can be repaired with prayer. They are taught that secular historians are suppressing the vision of the Founding Fathers and that America was supposed to be a Christian nation. 

Controversies that should have died decades and even centuries ago are kept alive by organizations invested in the answers of yesteryear, often because those old answers, say stalwarts, came from the Bible and are believed to have been laid down by God. These answers informed the thinking of a long-gone society that, through the rose-tinted glasses of those nostalgic for a better time, looks moral, family-oriented, and respectful of God’s laws in ways that the present age is not.

It's with these folks that the U.S. Catholic bishops, whose administrative committee is meeting today, have hopped into bed in recent years.  And so do the U.S. bishops and the pope to whom they answer want us to go back to a pre-modern world, in terms of what people know and think?

In the immortal words of one of the leading lights of the right-wing political and religious movement in the U.S., You betcha.