OF A GOLDEN AGE

One of Andrew Sullivan’s substitute bloggers posted an excerpt from Mark Oppenheimer’s excellent feature on two prominent Holocaust deniers.

Oppenheimer’s final paragraph is the most provocative moment in what is otherwise a triumphant, thoughtful piece. The money thought (emphasis mine):

I remember what the theologian Stanley Hauerwas once told me about premillennial dispensationalists, those fundamentalist Christians who extrapolate from the Bible extremely complicated, unbelievably detailed, scenarios about the end times, like those in the Left Behind novels. “They’re very smart,” Hauerwas said. “You can’t be stupid and come up with that. God gave them minds, and they need to use them.” In other words, forbidden by their religion from developing real intellectual curiosity, they turn their brainpower toward half-baked biblical exegesis that makes sense according to its own hermetic logic. Weber and Smith are trapped like that. Holocaust denial is, like more benign species of fundamentalism, a well-furnished playground for immature and sometimes deranged intellects. It isn’t necessarily about Jews, or even about the Holocaust; it’s about finding something to do with one’s mind.

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