Midwest Smackdown

Mark Noll makes the point (In our edited volume, Religion and Public Life in the Midwest), that there’s an underlying Methodist ethos in the Midwest, and in 2006 it was on display in the Ohio gubernatorial race, where sometime Methodist pastor and congressman Ted Strickland beat the pants off Ken Blackwell, paladin of the religious […]

Mark Noll makes the point (In our edited volume, Religion and Public Life in the Midwest), that there’s an underlying Methodist ethos in the Midwest, and in 2006 it was on display in the Ohio gubernatorial race, where sometime Methodist pastor and congressman Ted Strickland beat the pants off Ken Blackwell, paladin of the religious right in the Buckeye State. This year a replay is shaping up in Minnesota’s sixth congressional district, where former Methodist pastor (and subsequent state transportation commissioner) Elwyn Tinkenberg has, according to a new SUSA poll, just pulled ahead of Christian conservative Michele Bachman, whose recent neo-McCarthyite call for a media investigation of unAmericanism in Congress on Hardball succeeded in raising $1million or so for her opponent. Come to think of it, McCarthyism has Midwestern antecedents too. El v. Michelle. Be there.

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