Pavement Pounding Alert!!! Gov. Phil Scott is making an appearance next week in Addison County, one of the bluest provinces in our B.L.S., on behalf of a bunch of Republican candidates for the House and Senate who, frankly, don’t have a prayer of prevailing in November. But hey, at least he’s making an effort.

The event will kick off at 5:00 p.m. on Thursday the 26th at the Middlebury Legion. It also features former governor Jim Douglas, and maybe that explains the Addison thing. Douglas lives in Middlebury. Posted run time for the shindig is three hours, which is a hell of a long time to listen to Republicans, but if it speaks to you, by all means have fun.

But I want to focus my attention on one of the seven legislative candidates scheduled to appear: Rob North (pictured above), unsuccessful candidate for House in 2022 who’s giving it another go this year. He faces two well-entrenched Democratic incumbents in Addison-3, Reps. Diane Lanpher and Matt Birong. In 2022 North drew 21.9% of the vote in a four-way race, while Lanpher and Birong each tallied around 31%. Kind of a blowout, no?

North is trying to follow his 2022 playbook of posing as a common sense fiscal conservative when, in fact, he is an Evangelical Christian at the far right end of that little spectrum. And I’ve got receipts, boy do I ever.

If you haven’t read my previous posts about North, please give them a read. In the first piece I reveal that North holds extreme anti-abortion views, believes that water pollution is more of a threat than climate change (and asserts that the solution to agricultural runoff is to unleash the farmers), and belongs to a tiny Christian denomination that prohibits women from holding leadership positions, opposes divorce, and claims that the theory of evolution is heretical.

My second post about Mr. North concerned his appointment by the governor to the District 3 Environmental Commission, a truly curious move for a “moderate” Republican who believes in climate change.

I wasn’t sure I’d find any new material for this post because North is very careful not to reveal his true colors on his campaign website or social media. But then I searched for him on YouTube, and discovered that he had delivered the sermon at the very conservative Panton Community Church on June 15, 2024. Select highlights follow.

North appeared as a representative of The Gideons, the organization best known for placing Bibles to their eternal rest in hotels and motels everywhere. But they’re much more than that, as North explained to the congregation.

The Gideons is an international association of Christian business and professional men who sharpen one another by intentionally gathering for prayer, for relationships together and boldly sharing the Gospel wherever God has placed us.

Notice the “men” there? I don’t think that’s just an old-fashioned use of the male as stand-in for “everyone.” Because North went out of his way to emphasize that The Gideons is proud to be another He-Man Woman-Haters Club.

We would love to have you join us, men. If you are a professional businessman or professional man, we would love to have you come and join us, with like-minded men strengthening your witness and your impact for the world.

In the words of the late great Martin Mull, “Throw your rubbers overboard, there’s no one here but men.”

North went on to relate some tales about how Gideon Bibles converted lost souls to the Gospel, including one where he — and I kid you not — recalled a Gideons outreach effort where he met “a colored man who came up to the booth” who “didn’t speak English very clearly,” but expressed his gratitude for a free Bible.

I’d be inclined to give North a pass on that, except his views in general are strongly retrograde. Calling someone “a colored man” doesn’t seem like a stretch for this guy.

North’s sermon centered on Mark 11:27-33, in which Jesus debated the high priests at the Temple and, of course, ran rings around them logically. North tied this to his idea of “the most prevalent” disorder of that time, as well as today: Authority Deficit Disorder, defined by him as unbelievers’ refusal to acknowledge the primacy of God and the need to accept Jesus as Lord and Savior.

Temple leaders, North said, were “not willing to concede the truth because of pride in their own position.” If they conceded, he went on, it “would have required submission and repentance… Sinners repress and suppress the clear truth of God.”

As with high priests then, so with the unbelievers of modern times. “Our world today is systemically infected by authority deficit disorder,” North said.

This is a fairly standard conservative Evangelical view. But I think it explains much about how Evangelicals behave politically. They see the rest of us, including those who accept evolution as fact, believe women deserve equal rights (and could even become President!), and don’t accept the Bible as the wholly inerrant word of God, as willfully self-deluded. We are the victims of our own pride. We’d rather wallow in our own sinfulness than submit to God’s own truth.

This allows North and his fellows to dismiss the views, beliefs, and even the evidence offered by their political foes. There is no basis for debate, for honest disagreement; North and his fellows have God on their side and the rest of us are at best fools, and at worst knaves. We refuse to accept the self-evident truth that the Rob North version of Evangelicalism is divinely inspired. We don’t simply disagree with Rob North; we are “sinners” who “repress and suppress the clear truth of God.” We are on the path to eternal damnation.

It’s hard to square this with the putative moderation of Phil Scott’s worldview. But as long as Rob North helps him sustain vetoes, I guess the rest of it is just noise.