If you haven't yet seen it, check out this clip of a Fox News host interviewing history of religion and Biblical studies scholar Reza Aslan, in which the host keeps insisting that the fact of Aslan's Muslim background is more relevant to the argument of his book on Jesus of Nazareth than his scholarship and his credentials. My explanation here doesn't do justice to the magnitude of Fox host Lauren Green's dogged stupidity.
You don't need me to list any further examples of conservative bigotry against Muslims; but what I will comment on here is how this much-discussed clip fits into another history of conservative bigotry, this against scholars.
On one front of the conservative opposition to knowledge and knowledge seekers, any scientist whose findings run contrary to conservative and especially religious conservative dogma gets smeared. Climate science, for example, has and has had its share of serious skeptics. UC Berkeley physicist Richard Muller has been a serious climate science skeptic for a long time now, so much so that he put together a group specifically tasked to study all the climate science data they could get their hands on from a metacritical perspective. In other words, Muller, a capable and well funded professional scientist, set up a research group to investigate that which he was skeptical of, and has since found that we do have cause to believe that humans contribute significantly to climate change. The biggest private financial contributor to Muller's research group was the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation (i.e. of infamously conservative Koch Brothers machine).
Still, conservatives continue to allege personal bias, payoffs, corruption, and conspiracy anytime a professional scientist like Muller--even one funded by their own people--produce findings that conservatives don't like.
We see the same tactics with regard to evolutionary biologists and 'creationism.' This is a story that, again, you don't need me to rehash to understand what's going on.
The gift and the curse for scientists wading into issues like human evolution, the history of the universe, climate change, and genetic studies that suggest being gay isn't a 'choice,' is that these topics generate enough interest not just from conservatives but from the average person to garner lots of attention and, by virtue of that, lots of angry, ignorant opposition from armchair pundits.
On the other hand, humanities and social science research tends to be ignored by conservatives until it touches a 'culture wars' nerve, like findings about the viability of single or gay parents, for example. Much humanities and social science research likely would really send conservatives into apoplexy; but then again, the gift and the curse of humanities and some social science scholars is that very few bother to read the scholarship, are widely and wildly ignorant of it, and so hardly have exposure to enough publicity to launch any specific complaints about it.
Where such scholarship more prominently comes under attack is with regard to teaching, as when the David Horowitzes and Republican Governors of the world lament courses on the history of sexuality, or gender studies, or Asian American literature, because they'd rather pretend that these things aren't a significant part of the American experience, and because they think that when a course topic sounds kinda liberal, it means the professor is necessarily engaging in liberal 'indoctrination.' This kind of alleged indoctrination that study after study can never seem to locate is also, I should add, somehow different from teaching school children that humans and dinosaurs coexisted.
The conservative attack on Reza Aslan is an interesting moment because here we're not talking about the vaunted findings of science, nor the indoctrination of students by evil mastermind liberal professors, but a piece of humanities scholarship.
And what fascinates and infuriates me most about this conservative response to Aslan's scholarship is that it takes the the approach to the non-falsifiable that would earn humanities undergrads a failing grade.
Because so many of my students are miseducated in their high school literature and history classes, I make clear on day one of every semester that the stuff we're doing in class isn't just some watered down version of science where you claim knowledge that you can't prove. Rather, to take Aslan's book as an example, there are aspects of the life of a guy who lived thousands of years ago that we simply can't know with certainty today. The scholarship marshals as much evidence as it can to make an argument. The result of this scenario is that there is scholarly disagreement even among historicaly plausible arguments.
To put it another way, what I must convey to my students is: just because there is disagreement over plausible but unfalsifiable arguments in humanities scholarship doesn't mean that humanities scholarship is a free-for-all in which any idiot's opinion holds equal weight with a rigorously researched, informed argument supported with ample evidence.
This is the difference between the bullshit paper you're taught to write in high school where you 'argue' that the green tree 'represents individuality in the protagonist's quest for success,' and the evidence-based argument akin to the kinds that Aslan's book makes about Jesus of Nazareth.
As you can see in the Fox News clip, the conservative technique is not merely the bigoted, ad hominem argument that the media has given so much attention to (Aslan is a Muslim, therefore his scholarship on Christianity is bunk), but something else too. The Fox News anchor keeps invoking the fact that 'other scholars' disagree with Aslan's position in order to try to bolster her claim that Aslan's perspective on Jesus isn't duly scholarly, but instead comes from someone with a 'Muslim agenda.' The anchor uses the same elementary fallacy of mistaking the unfalsifiability of humanities scholarship for the idea that humanities scholarship is a free-for-all. She fails to understand that legitimate, informed, evidence-based arguments about an historical figure from a time long in the past absolutely can plausibly disagree without discrediting the rigor of either argument. She fails to understand, in other words, that for historians it's not as easy as looking at the results of a controlled experiment and finding 'yes' or 'no.'
In this way Aslan is doubly marginalized by conservatives as both a Muslim and a scholar. This is a serious problem of modern conservatism--the way bigotry and anti-intellectualism would seem to bolster one another in a self-perpetuating cycle of ignorance.
