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The big news is not that Mark Elrod is moving his blog from public to private so that only a hundred or so approved friends will be able to read and respond to it.

The big news is that Mark Elrod exists.

He is thoughtful, moderate, open-minded, intellectually stimulating, humorous and pop culture-absorbing.

The other day he was blogging to lament the passing of a fortune teller in Asbury Park. N.J., immortalized in an early Bruce Springsteen song.

He appears from his popular blog postings to lean Democratic. He has endorsed Barack Obama for president.

And here's the kicker: He teaches political science at Harding University in Searcy, where, to speak generally, they don't much cotton to fortune tellers, Bruce Springsteen, Barack Obama or Democrats.

Elrod is, in fact, an avowed and practicing, if nonstereotypical, member of the Church of Christ. That's the pervasively narrow-minded and fundamentalist religious group in which I was reared, not unhappily, but from which I've escaped, and with which the famously right-wing Harding is famously affiliated.

The Church of Christ doesn't permit musical instrumentation in church. It doesn't approve of dancing. In my boyhood it decried what it called mixed bathing, by which it meant going to a swimming pool where the girls were running around in what a recent Springsteen song calls their "summer clothes."

Please be advised that, when I write of this religion of my youth and the religion still of many in my family, I do so with great affection and with appreciation for the instilling of fine general values to which I always aspire if only sporadically achieve.

It's the weirdly arrogant and narrow dogma -- and politics -- that irk me.

In the '50s Harding was under the presidency of one George Benson, not the jazz guitarist. This George so hated the godless commies and socialists that he started a capitalism celebration center at Harding and went around giving talks and writing articles mixing church and state, as the original Falwell, by saying God wanted us to spend less on our central government. He was fighting the New Deal two decades after the New Deal had saved the country.

And this is the very Harding where Mark Elrod is teaching political science and from where he has been posting regularly on this most readable, thoughtful and center-leftish blog.

Months ago he was chortling on this blog about how the loud, raucous, wonderful, guitar-screaming Robert Randolph Family Band had played at Harding, and how Randolph had shouted for kids to come on stage and dance, which some of them did, in defiance of campus regulation and supposed Christian edict, at which time security personnel were escorting dancers off stage as quickly as Randoph could call them up.

But that didn't engender enough static for Elrod to move his blog from public to private. What engendered that much static was when he declared on this blog that he supported Obama for president.

As you know, Christians are commanded by Paul's letter to the Corinthians, or some such, to vote Republican.

Sadly, Elrod revealed on his blog Tuesday that he was taking his site down as a public one and rebuilding it as a private place where only approved people could read and participate. He stressed that no one at Harding was telling him to do this. He said it was simply an unfortunate case in which too many of his academic colleagues and religious brethren were making a "spiritual judgment about me based on my political views," and pestering both him and the college administration with complaints about his brazen free speech, his brazen academic freedom and his brazen independent political thought.

My plaudits go to him. My grudging respect is extended to the Harding administration, which didn't lean on him, apparently.

Contempt is what I harbor, though, for his narrow-minded harassers.

I like the way Elrod put it on his blog: "I've grown tired with dealing with [those] who seem to view the world in black and white terms and think of all discussions as zero-sum games."

By zero-sum, he means a discussion in which one guy is all right and the other all wrong. Those discussions don't much exist.

I'll close the same way Elrod signed off his public blog. It was with a quote from Aristotle: "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."

John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.