Posted by John at Verum Serum on January 24, 2010
Interesting post by Mike Potemra in the Corner:
Scott Brown, it turns out, is a symbol not just of public dissatisfaction with the direction of President Obama’s economic policies, but also of the centuries-long religious development of the United States toward greater religious tolerance and open-mindedness. And not just because he is a Protestant elected by Catholics in Massachusetts.
Brown is a member of a church affiliated with the Calvinist-rooted Christian Reformed Church in North America. If you go on the website of his congregation, New England Chapel in Franklin, Mass., you will read the following testimony from an attendee: “I have found a home, a family, friends, and most importantly, begun the journey to a REAL relationship with God. It is not one based on guilt or fear, but rather love, hope, and mercy.” The rest of the website has a similar tone. This is clearly not the Calvinism that lives on today chiefly in anti-Calvinist apologetics: the Calvinism of Salem and Hawthorne, that continues to haunt America’s dreams with a God who is best understood as a cruel despot. This new Calvinism is a development of the post-Great Awakening era, a religion that’s not afraid of sentimentality — yet it remains recognizably Calvinism, in its stress on the Bible and on the sovereignty of God.
And then one reads that Mr. Brown helped raise $5.5 million for the Cistercian nuns of Wrentham, who pray for him daily. (Brown himself is quoted: “When you have nuns praying for you three times a day and you’re not Catholic, anything that anybody can do or say about me, it’s Teflon. . . . It bounces right off.”)
So he’s a man of faith who raises money for nuns and married an 80s MTV video babe. Now that’s what I call the complete package.
