Christian Hate-Pastor Steven Anderson: “The Bible Makes You Smart. College Makes You Dumb”

It’s been a while since we checked in on Christian Hate-Pastor Steven Anderson, hasn’t it? No worries. He hasn’t missed a beat.

His latest rant is against college. Because college, he says, is for stupid people.

(The sermon clip is literally titled, “College Makes Women Stupid”… even though the actual clip applies to everyone.)

You know, what makes women stupid is college. Because college makes everybody stupid. Because fools — fools — say in their heart that there is no God. And it’s an atheistic fool system — it’s not a school system, it’s a fool system — that teaches Humanism and atheism and Agnosticism and godlessness and blasphemy against the Lord Jesus Christ.

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You talk to some of the smartest people that you know, they’re people who know this book [holds up the Bible] really well…

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The Bible makes you smart. College makes you dumb… you say, “I knew a smart guy who came out of college,” he came out of college smart in spite of college. He was already smart when he went in! And he was smart when he came out because he read books while he was in college. It’s not because he was sitting in college class. It’s because he read books! Because you know what makes you smart? Reading books!…

Anderson makes an unintentionally hilarious contradiction there. I actually agree with him that reading books makes you smarter and not everyone needs to go to college. The problem is that Anderson himself only ever promotes a single book.

Even if you wanted to become a Bible scholar, reading the Bible alone wouldn’t cut it. You need to read other perspectives and interpretations to make more sense of what it says. College helps you discover and debate those perspectives so you can really understand a subject in some depth.

The Bible doesn’t make you smart. Reading one book and stopping there doesn’t make you smart. Going to college doesn’t make you smart.

But exposing yourself to new ideas and challenging your own perspectives helps. And that’s the very thing Anderson doesn’t want his congregation to do. He wants to keep them in a bubble. The best way to do that is by teaching everyone that alternative views from his own are sinful.