Salon has an article on a new up-and-coming star of the evangelical movement: Stephen Baldwin. Stephen Frickin-Dumb-As-A-Lizard Baldwin!
For Dobson, Baldwin and young Americans the nation over who yearn for the certainty this brand of Christianity pitches, the personal is political. Absolutism reigns in the new evangelical youth movement, shining through the chaos of modernity, global terror, media bombardment and glorious moral relativism. Baldwin pitches the ultimate dumbed-down fundamentalism, offering reductive, brainless theology. “I sleep good at night because I am totally content in the knowledge that God is in control,” he writes, a conviction glittered up with the fact that it sprung from the mind of an honest-to-God celebrity.
Intentionally or accidentally, Baldwin has braided together what young Americans seem to crave most today: fame, cool and answers. Answers to the questions of who will look out for them, who will love them, who will tell them how to live. Answers from a man who called himself the son of God, and another one who calls himself Stevie B.
…and calls everyone “dude”, and uses the word “gnarly” non-ironically.
Jebus, but we are in trouble. When someone with as little charisma and intelligence as Stephen Baldwin can be popular and draw in thousands of kids for right-wing fundamentalism, that tells us that the bar is set very, very low. And when we then note that no one on the evolution side can rise to that level…well. This is bad news.
We need a scientist who is willing to snort cocaine for a couple of years, sleep willy-nilly with models and any half-naked starlet with no taste, and bash himself repeatedly over the head with blunt objects until his IQ descends to perilously low Stephen Baldwin levels, all so that we can enrapture the precious skateboarding teenager bloc. Any volunteers?
(Paulie Z? Oooh. <shudder>. I just don’t think I’m brave enough to sink that low. I fear we also need someone younger, with the stamina to cope with the kind of abuse and degradation needed for this job.)