Ned Flanders, Flanderism, and Respect for the Faithful

Its a great read, click on the link, its worth it and will put a smile on your face.
From The Economist:

Flanders gets off lightly compared with other celluloid evangelicals. Evangelicals may make up a third of the US population, but this is one minority that Hollywood has no time for. Ever since Elmer Gantry, the phrase “evangelical preacher” has been a shorthand for hypocrite. Most evangelicals are portrayed as murderers, rapists and sexual perverts with a consistency that, if they were black or Jewish, would get the American Civil Liberties Union into a lather. In Cape Fear, the antihero is a deranged Pentecostal who goes down to his watery death singing hymns. In O Brother, Where Art Thou?, an itinerant Bible salesman beats his kindly benefactors with a piece of wood and steals their money. Even the James Bond franchise got in on the act, casting a megapreacher as a (lecherous, of course) frontman for a cocaine cartel in The Living Daylights.

The sins of Flanders are of a much milder sort. The owner of the Leftorium store for left-handed people is occasionally ridiculed for being intolerant. He once participated in a walk “for the cure of homosexuality”; he tried to baptise Bart and Lisa without their consent, with predictable results. But for the most part he is simply ridiculed for being, well, ridiculous. What other response could we have for a man who owes his success in life to the three Cs: “Clean living, chewing thoroughly and a daily dose of vitamin Church”?

But is Ned really such a loser? Look around the world and you find that risible old Nedward - or at least the phenomenon he epitomises - has won one of the great intellectual battles of the past two centuries. And now, far from being put down, Flanderism is spreading around the world, an American export with a potency at least the equal of the very Hollywood products that mock him.

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Trust me, read the whole thing.