Carrie Prejean Boller and Tucker Carlson

 I watched a couple of extended clips today from Tucker Carlson in his conversation with Carrie Prejean Boller. While I know of Mrs. Boller, I haven’t generally made a habit of keeping up with her, or any of the more well-known conservative commentators over the past few years.

In addition, I’m not entirely sure what to make of Tucker these days. He seems to have become an enemy of the President and his administration. And I honestly have neither the time nor the energy to keep up with the “he said, she said” of it all. What all he may be guilty of, if anything, is beyond me to judge.

Nonetheless, I did resonate with Mrs. Boller’s experience with being called an anti-Semite for not unquestioningly supporting Israel in every move they make. And the use of Scripture to defend such accusations is familiar.

For those in Dispensationalist circles, this is all standard stuff. I have friends and acquaintances who would consider me a heretic, or at the very least won’t hear anything I have to say about Scripture, because the big issue in Scripture is supporting Israel. To not support Israel, they erroneously believe, is to be a liberal, theologically speaking. There’s a whole history of how Postmillennialism came to be associated with theological liberalism through the late 19th and early 20th century in America, which John Jefferson Davis covered in his book on Postmillennialism. I had an acquaintance, now deceased, who once referred to Postmillennialism specifically as liberalism, in a conversation at my old Dispie church before I left it in 1999. Essentially, Postmillennialism became attached to the Social Gospel in the mainline churches’ departure from historic Christianity. And Fundamentalism, in its anti-intellectualism, still is lost in that milieu, is ignorant in many ways of the world of the Church outside of its own circles, and ignorant of what theological liberalism is and why non-Dispie theology became branded as such to begin with. Spend all your time letting the world go to pot waiting on the Rapture and inside your bubble, and you become unqualified to speak about the culture.

Scholarship is chronologically-bound, and you can only live off of older scholarship for so long. The world moves on, even if we don’t.