Village idiots

I didn't hear this exchange, my friend Janet sent it to me. The last line is classic!

MADDOW: Mr. Schaeffer, thank you so much for coming back on the show tonight. ... I do not know what possessed this polling firm to ask whether or not people think the President is the anti-Christ, but they did. Does the response rate among conservatives surprise you? More than one in three saying yes or they don‘t know.

SCHAEFFER: Well, I was a child when President Kennedy was assassinated, and my mother thought, because he died of a head wound, foretold in scripture of the anti-Christ he would be resurrected as the anti-Christ. She thought this might be a possibility. So, those of us who come from the evangelical subculture have been weaned with our mother's milk on a changing cast list of villains. It might be Kennedy to one generation, Obama to the next.

But I think the larger point this brings up is that the mainstream — not just media, but culture — doesn‘t sufficiently take stock of the fact that within our culture, we have a subculture which is literally a fifth column of insanity, that is bred from birth through home school, Christian school, evangelical college, whatever, to reject facts as a matter of faith. And so, this substitute for authentic historic Christianity, and I may add as a little caveat here, I'm a church-going Christian, really brings up the question: Can Christianity be rescued from Christians? And that's an open question.

MADDOW: The birther thing has been disproven. The anti-Christ thing is — it's all another kettle of fish. But how do you work to move people off that position? It doesn't seem like facts are relevant in trying to move people away from these beliefs.

SCHAEFFER: You don‘t work to move them off this position. You move past them. Look, a village cannot reorganize village life to suit the village idiot. It's as simple as that.