Why Do We Diss Baptists?

Andrew Sullivan gets it half right:

I wouldn't be quite so blunt. But for me, the evolution issue is very hard to get past. Those who believe that the earth was created 6,000 years ago and that human life has not evolved from more primitive forms are people I cannot engage with in civil discourse. To posit faith in things unprovable and unknowable is one thing. To posit faith in something demonstrably falsifiable is another. I simply have no tolerance for creationism or for those who enable it. Creationists are as much an insult to reasonable Christians as they are to rational thought. And they perpetuate the notion that religious faith is indistinguishable from idiocy.

I wouldn't say idiocy -- I'd say willful ignorance, which is what I can't deal with. I can deal with stupidity, although it demands the most from my admittedly limited store of patience, but a refusal to acknowledge evidence just does it to me.

There's more to it, of course. Baptists have also made themselves synonymous with bigotry, spiritual meanness, and close-mindedness. No one did that to them -- they did it to themselves. The weird part of it is that in purely one-on-one interactions, they can be among the most generous and compassionate people alive (like many of my North Carlina relatives). And then you run head-on into their version of Truth, and their unwillingness to consider the possibility that another idea might have some validity.

And, frankly, I think designating the recipients of this attitude simply as "Baptists" also misses the point. It's a set of characteristics that are not limited to Baptists, but do seem to adhere to many coming from a particular group of religious traditions. It seems that a certain brand of religious authoritarianism attracts the incurious and docile.

I don't understand those people at all.