David Sessions follows Alex Pareene's lead and gives us the ten hackiest religious pundits. It's hilarious. Here's his takedown of Al Mohler:
The constantly blogging, tweeting president of the SBTS tries his best to make Baptists cool, and he does a decent job of it. He seems like a nice enough guy. It’s sort of backwardly admirable the way he defends really odious views while managing to barely sound like a fundamentalist. He’s even taken some nuanced stances on his signature issues, like writing that gay marriage isn’t nearly as big a threat to Christian marriage as divorce. But ultimately, Mohler’s use of his formidable brain power defending fundamentalist Christianity is too egregious to let slide. He was almost singlehandedly responsible for turning the Southern Baptist Convention into a reactionary conservative institution. And what is wrong with a world where the man Time calls “the leading intellectual of the evangelical movement” is defending young-earth creationism, calling gay marriage “a direct threat [to the] central institution of human civilization,” warning Christian parents against university education, opposing yoga on spiritual grounds, and defending complementarian gender roles? Mohler will fight for his Biblical inerrancy if it kills him, and he holds to it consistently in every issue it touches. But consistently doesn’t absolve hima seminary president, a man capable of quality scholarly workof devoting his intellect to the service of the anti-intellectual.
Repeat offenses: Anti-intellectualism; fundamentalism; Christianism.
“For too long, those who hold to traditional understandings of manhood and womanhood, deeply rooted in both Scripture and tradition, have allowed themselves to be pushed into a defensive posture. Given the prevailing spirit of the age and the enormous cultural pressure toward conformity, traditionalists are now accused of being woefully out of step and hopelessly out of date. Now is a good time to reconsider the issues basic to this debate and to reassert the arguments for biblical manhood and womanhood.”
Can't wait for the top five.