Mark Tooley calls out “emerging church maestro” Brian Mclaren in a piece today in The American Spectator titled “A Real ‘Economic’ Recovery.” I was introduced to Brian McLaren in seminary when new students were required to read his books in introductory classes. Unfortunately, I was one of only a handful not impressed. He also lectured in person to a class I took, but honestly I don’t remember much about the lecture, except conservatives were generally denounced and “big oil” was of course bad.

I can also relate to the beginning of Tooley’s piece where he highlights some of the stereotypes heaped upon religious conservatives. A few years ago, I attended a religious left conference as a reporter for Tooley’s Institute on Religion and Democracy in Cambridge, Mass. At the conference, one of the participants accused the Bush administration and a collection of evangelicals at the Pentagon of using the book of Revelation as a blueprint for implementing official U.S. foreign policy. It was bizarre to say the least, and the lady making this accusation was actually mildly rebuked by a somewhat more rational professor from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Back to McLaren. Tooley responds to McLaren’s idea of an economic recovery with wit and humor, all along making serious points. Tooley concludes the piece by noting:

McLaren is hoping to “sabotage” these addictions to “stuff” by redefining “recovery” to mean waking up from a drug-induced “comfortable, dreamy, half-awareness” into a new world of solar panels and Fair Trade coffee. But this post-industrial fantasy is itself hallucinatory, portraying the Religious Left as even loopier and more archaic than the worst stereotypes about the Religious Right.