Furthermore, the US has never had an established Church to rebel against, and the kind of churches that America's freedom of religion allowed have historically been more often of the more emotion-based, anti-intellectual, and sometimes outright anti-philosophical variety. This has been especially true in the South…
Explain to me, once again, how a church holding to NT basics is “anti-intellectual” in comparison with liberal churches of the JSojourner/Nathan/Andrew variety?
Is it really logical at all to claim to be a Christian while openly disagreeing with the NT?
I could be wrong, but I believe in terms of "anti-intellectual" he's referring to the greater tendency of American Christians (in comparison to European ones) to believe in young Earth creationism and possibly to a lesser extent those who completely reject any notion of climate change for religious reasons, both positions which require rejecting a good deal of scientific knowledge in various fields. Rather than having anything to do with holding to NT basics, it's more about those that hold to a more literal view of the OT.
This phenomenon (i.e. Young Earth Creationism) is primarily restricted to Evangelical and Fundamentalist Protestants -I doubt Catholic, Orthodox, and mainline Protestant (what's left of them, that is) churches are into this kind of nonsense.
