“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” Alphonse Karr

I couldn't resist the quote for the title of this post. I was using my updated version of Stumble Upon when I came upon HyperHistory which is, in itself, an interesting site. However, being possessed of natural curiosity, I clicked one of the links on the home page, and that link took me to...well, the following excerpt from MacroHistory:

A vociferous debate was taking place among Christians, with some Christians denouncing those who no longer believed in taking the scriptures literally. Among the denouncers was Billy Sunday - born William Ashley. He had been a farm boy from Iowa and a hard drinking, woman chasing outfielder for the Chicago White Stockings. He was the country boy awed and tempted by the big city called Babylon, and he continued to describe himself as brawling with the devil. "Hitting the sawdust trail" with his revival specialists and huge choir, he liked to preach the gospel wearing a good suit and expensive shoes. He preached with emotion and a rapidity of words, mixing wisecracking, slang and baseball terms, attacking rum, prostitutes, card playing and gambling. He railed against science, Galileo, Plato, Darwin, intellectuals in general and the modern world. He admitted that he knew nothing about theology, but he felt qualified to denounce Christians who no longer believed in heaven and hell. He was quick to proclaim his patriotism, and he announced that immigrants complaining about working conditions should "go back to the land where they were kenneled."

Reading that, I could close my eyes and see some of our current Fundamentalist Christian preachers lip syncing to Sunday's preaching. It is more than a little discouraging to see that memes circulating through our culture can be this persistent. Billy Sunday could walk into a meeting of the Left Behind crowd, and feel right at home because those people would still be mouthing the ignorance he preached over 100 years ago. One of the biggest mistakes progressive folk make is to think that ignorance is easy to erase. It isn't. Which is why the great explosion of progressive, liberal thought and action from the Sixties and early Seventies has actually produced far less change than one might have thought.