In her April 4 column (“Notes on the etiquette of scholarly dialogue and debate”), Professor Susanne Johnson of SMU’s Perkins School of Theology once again denounced the proposed Bush Institute. She warned that my organization, the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), would be one of the institute’s sinister partners. Even more extensively in her April 2 letter to SMU faculty, she detailed how ostensibly extreme IRD is by citing the outrageousness of our supposed Web site’s headlines.
According to Johnson’s letter, IRD’s Web site headlines refer to feminist theologians as “witches,” condemn church conferences as “homo-fests,” and describe the United Methodist Church’s advertising slogan as “Open Minds, Open Hearts, and Open Legs.” Johnson recounted that she had conducted an exhaustive analysis of the 2,500 article headlines she found on the purported IRD Web site, and discovered that 850 of them, or one-third, have provocative sexual overtones.
This is all very important, according to Johnson, because the IRD will “hand-pick and position scholars in the Bush institute in efforts to shape the ethos and direction of its work.” And the IRD-influenced Bush Institute will “put at risk the credibility of our school of theology.”
Well, we at IRD are not yet packing our bags for a move to Dallas. And I would regret the over-the-top headlines that Johnson listed. But none of these headlines in fact came from IRD’s Web site. In her column, Johnson urged readers to “see first-hand what the IRD passes off as ‘news'” by checking out www.ucmpage.org. She did the same in her letter to SMU faculty.
Despite Johnson’s purportedly “scholarly” investigation of the supposed IRD Web site, she failed to discover that www.ucmpage.org has no affiliation at all with IRD, whose website for many years has been www.ird-renew.org. The site that Johnson imagined was IRD’s is clearly marked as the personal blog of an ex-Methodist minister in Georgia who has no organizational affiliation, who writes his own flamboyant headlines and who links to a variety of sources, most of which are not IRD, and which includes the official news service of the United Methodist Church.
A quick Google search would have taken Johnson immediately to IRD’s actual site. But apparently that would not have given her the headline ammunition she needed to make her case against the Bush Institute and its supposed partner.
In her column and in her letter, Johnson wrote about “publicly verifiable, documented evidence,” “recognized, authoritative experts” and “scholarly expertise.” But she rested almost her entire case against the IRD on her own misidentification of someone else’s website. How sad!
About the writer:
Mark Tooley is a representative of the Institute of Religion and Democracy. He can be reached at mtooley@ird-renew.org.
