Dave Brat's Seminary Years

Although I normally don't pay too much attention to Republican primaries, I'm having trouble ignoring Dave Brat's defeat of Eric Cantor. It just so happens that I currently live in Brat's former hometown, but what gnaws at me more is that we both studied at Princeton Theological Seminary, only a few years apart. How is it, I wonder, that a person who won an election largely on an anti-immigration platform, and who holds to the "Republican Creed," could have learned the Bible, theology, and Christian history at the same place I did?

It is not that we hold no goods in common. I share, for example, his apparent conviction that government exists to protect and represent the little people -- those on "Main Street," rather than the folks on Wall Street who threw us into a soul-crushing recession. I also share his apparent suspicion of big business, government cronies, and the unholy alliance they create together -- the "power and money party" in Washington, to whom most Democrats and Republicans (with a few exceptions) seem to be enslaved.