Tuesday, August 12, 2014

"Needing To Fend Off The Evangelicals"

Last week, I wrote a couple of posts (here and here) about a recent book on the paranormal by Patricia Pearson. I referred to Alex Tsakiris' interview with Pearson, which hadn't been posted yet. It's now available. Here are some comments she made about how people are responding to her book:

"Certainly based on my experience promoting this book over the last few weeks, I think Americans have their own particular cultural issue here, which is not the same in Canada or in England, and that has to do with kind of needing to fend off the Evangelicals. So the kind of rigidity around engaging in anything spiritual because it might feed ground to Evangelical cause….Well, [the book is] coming out in Germany and in Italy. The Italians are interesting, because they’ve kind of – they are pissed off at the church, but they secretly are deeply still interested in their saints….The other place that it resonates, where I’ve never seen, is in Louisiana. So again, there is some sort of overlay with that kind of Gothic Catholic delight in spirits. And coming out in Germany. And it’s actually become a best seller in England."

The book corroborates some Evangelical beliefs about the paranormal and the afterlife, so I can see why some opponents of Evangelicalism would be wary. But I suspect most people would take the book as an argument against Evangelicalism, since near-death experiences and other paranormal phenomena are so often seen as inconsistent with Evangelical belief. If you encountered somebody citing Pearson's book or material similar to it, how well would you be prepared to respond?

1 comment:

  1. Those comments are from the non-Evangelical author of the book Jason reviewed, not from Jason.

    But to your point Jason is not an Evangelical, he's a cyborg, and as everyone knows cyborgs have multiple layers of programming embedded that act as failsafes against the Evangelical virus.

    In fact there's so little human remaining in Jason's cybernetic exoskeleton that's it's debatable whether he still meets the qualifications necessary to be considered a cyborg. He may only qualify as being an appliance of some sort; a toaster for example.

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