Right Wing Christianity is Un-Christian Nonsense and the Biggest Evil Cult in History

  Tea Party and the Right  

AlterNet / By CJ Werleman

The Right-Wing Is Filled with Biblical Illiterates -- They'd Be Shocked by the Teachings of Jesus if They Ever Bothered to Study Them

 

It's preposterous to suggest that Jesus wouldn't have supported food stamps -- yet many right-wingers do just that. 

 

 

 

 

December 23, 2013  |  

 

Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly defended the Republican Party’s spending cuts for SNAP by effectively declaring Jesus would not support food stamps for the poor because most them are drug addicts. If his insensitive remark is inconsistent with Scripture, which it is, then the question becomes why do talking heads on the right get away with proclaiming what Jesus would or wouldn’t support?

The answer is simple: Conservatives have not read the Bible.

The Right has successfully rebranded the brown-skinned liberal Jew, who gave away free healthcare and was pro-redistributing wealth, into a white-skinned, trickledown, union-busting conservative, for the very fact that an overwhelming number of Americans are astonishingly illiterate when it comes to understanding the Bible. On hot-button social issues, from same-sex marriage to abortion, biblical passages are invoked without any real understanding of the context or true meaning. It’s surprising how little Christians know of what is still the most popular book to ever grace the American continent.

More than 95 percent of U.S. households own at least one copy of the Bible. So how much do Americans know of the book that one-third of the country believes to be literally true? Apparently, very little, according to data from the Barna Research group. Surveys show that 60 percent can’t name more than five of the Ten Commandments; 12 percent of adults think Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife; and nearly 50 percent of high school seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were a married couple. A Gallup poll shows 50 percent of Americans can’t name the first book of the Bible, while roughly 82 percent believe “God helps those who help themselves” is a biblical verse.

So, if Americans get an F in the basic fundamentals of the Bible, what hope do they have in knowing what Jesus would say about labor unions, taxes on the rich, universal healthcare, and food stamps? It becomes easy to spread a lie when no one knows what the truth is.

The truth, whether Republicans like it or not, is not only that Jesus a meek and mild liberal Jew who spoke softly in parables and metaphors, but conservatives were the ones who had him killed. American conservatives, however, have morphed Jesus into a muscular masculine warrior, in much the same way the Nazis did, as a means of combating what they see as the modernization of society.

Author Thom Hartmann writes, “A significant impetus behind the assault on women and modernity was the feeling that women had encroached upon traditional male spheres like the workplace and colleges. Furthermore, women’s leadership in the churches had harmed Christianity by creating an effeminate clergy and a weak sense of self. All of this was associated with liberalism, feminism, women, and modernity.”

It’s almost absurd to speculate what Jesus’ positions would be on any single issue, given we know so little about who Jesus was. Knowing the New Testament is not simply a matter of reading the Bible cover to cover, or memorizing a handful of verses. Knowing the Bible requires a scholarly contextual understanding of authorship, history and interpretation.

For instance, when Republicans were justifying their cuts to the food stamp program, they quoted 2 Thessalonians: “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.” One poll showed that more than 90 percent of Christians believe this New Testament quote is attributed to Jesus. It’s not. This was taken from a letter written by Paul to his church in Thessalonica. Paul wrote to this specific congregation to remind them that if they didn't help build the church in Thessalonica, they wouldn’t be paid. The letter also happens to be a fraud. Surprise! Biblical scholars agree it’s a forgery written by someone pretending to be Paul.

What often comes as a surprise to your average Sunday wine-and-cracker Christian is the New Testament did not fall from the sky the day Jesus’ ghost is said to have ascended to Heaven. The New Testament is a collection of writings, 27 in total, of which 12 are credited to the authorship of Paul, five to the Gospels (whomever wrote Luke also wrote Acts), and the balance remain open for debate i.e. authorship unknown. Jesus himself wrote not a single word of the New Testament. Not a single poem, much less an op-ed article on why, upon reflection, killing your daughter for backchat is probably not sound parenting.

The best argument against a historical Jesus is the fact that none of his disciples left us with a single record or document regarding Jesus or his teachings. So, who were the gospel writers? The short answer is we don’t know. What we do know is that not only had none of them met Jesus, but also they never met the people who had allegedly met Jesus. All we have is a bunch of campfire stories from people who were born generations after Jesus’ supposed crucifixion. In other words, numerous unidentified authors, each with his own theological and ideological motives for writing what they wrote. Thus we have not a single independently verifiable eyewitness account of Jesus—but this doesn’t stop Republicans from speaking on his behalf.

What we do know about Jesus, at least according to the respective gospels, is that Jesus’ sentiments closely echoed the social and economic policies of the political left. The Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount read like the mission statement of the ACLU: “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is kingdom of heaven,” “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,” and “Blessed are the peacemakers.” Jesus also said, “Judge not he who shall not be judged,” and “Sell what you have and give it to the poor.”

So, when Republicans accuse Obama of being a brown-skinned socialist who wants to redistribute the wealth, they’re thinking of Jesus. Stephen Colbert joked, “Jesus was always flapping his gums about the poor but never once did he call for a tax cut for the wealthiest 2 percent of Romans.”

Biblical illiteracy is what has allowed the Republican Party to get away with shaping Jesus into their image. That's why politicians on the right can get away with saying the Lord commands that our healthcare, prisons, schools, retirement, transport, and all the rest should be run by corporations for profit. Ironically, the Republican Jesus was actually a devout atheist—Ayn Rand—who called the Christian religion “monstrous.” Rand advocated selfishness over charity, and she divided the world into makers versus takers. She also stated that followers of her philosophy had to chose between Jesus and her teachings. When the Christian Right believes it’s channeling Jesus when they say it’s immoral for government to tax billionaires to help pay for healthcare, education and the poor, they’re actually channeling Ayn Rand. When Bill O’Reilly claims the poor are immoral and lazy, that’s not Jesus, it’s Ayn Rand.

The price this country has paid for biblical illiteracy is measured by how far we’ve moved toward Ayn Rand’s utopia. In the past three decades, we’ve slashed taxes on corporations and the wealthy, destroyed labor unions, deregulated financial markets, eroded public safety nets, and committed to one globalist corporate free-trade agreement after another. Rand would be smiling down from the heaven she didn’t believe in.

With the far-right, Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Koch brothers' Citizens United, the flow of billions of dollars from anonymous donors to the most reliable voting bloc of the Republican Party—the Christian Right—will continue to perpetuate the biblically incompatible, anti-government, pro-deregulation-of-business, anti-healthcare-for-all, Tea Party American version of Christianity.

CJ Werleman is the author of Crucifying America and God Hates You, Hate Him Back. Follow him on Twitter @cjwerleman.
 

Right-Wing Group Seeks Help Rewriting the Bible Because It's Not Conservative Enough

  Belief  

AlterNet / By Richard Schiffman

Right-Wing Group Seeks Help Rewriting the Bible Because It's Not Conservative Enough

 

The King James Bible and more recent translations are veritable primers of progressive agitprop, according to the founder of Conservapedia.

 

 

 

Photo Credit: © patrimonio designs ltd/Shutterstock.com

 

 

December 20, 2013  |  

 

 

Liberal bias in the media pales in comparison to what you’ll find in your standard-issue Bibles, according to Conservapedia.com, a kind of Wikipedia for the religious right. The King James Bible, not to mention more recent translations like the New International Version (NIV), are veritable primers of progressive agitprop, complains Andy Schlafly, the founder of Conservapedia.com. (His mother, Phyllis, is an activist best known for her opposition to feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment.)

But not to worry. Andy Schlafly’s group is on the case, and they have invited you to pitch in. Well, maybe not you, exactly, but the "best of the public,” whose assistance is solicited in proposing new wording for left-leaning Bible verses.

Don’t know Aramaic, Hebrew or ancient Greek? Not a problem. What they are looking for is not exactly egghead scholarship, but a knack for using words they've read in the Wall Street Journal. They have a list of promising candidates on their website—words like capitalism, work ethic, death penalty, anticompetitive, elitism, productivity, privatize, pro-life—all of which are conspicuously missing from those socialist-inspired Bibles we’ve been reading lately. 

In the several years since their translation project was inaugurated, all of the New Testament and several books of the Old have been thoroughly revised. But lots still remains to be done. If you've got a soft spot for Leviticus, the Book of Amos, Lamentations or Numbers, they are all still available for rewrite, so get cracking!

To give a sense of how to go about your own retranslation, here are some examples of changes the editors have already made.

Take that story where the mob surrounds a woman accused of adultery and gets ready to stone her, but Jesus intervenes and says, “He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone" (John 7:53-8:11). It might have been a later addition that wasn’t in the original Gospels, according to some right-thinking, or rather right-leaning scholars. So the editors have excised this bleeding-heart favorite from the Good Book, and they've also removed Jesus’ words on the cross, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing."

“The simple fact is that some of the persecutors of Jesus did know what they were doing,” Schlafly points out, proving that, “Jesus might never had said it at all.”

Another thing Jesus might never have said at all is, “Blessed are the meek.” Change that one to, “Blessed are the God-fearing,” the translation’s editors advise, which is far less touchy-feely than the King James version.

Where Jesus teaches that, "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 19:24) our mentors at Conservapedia recommend that we scratch the word “rich” and replace it with either "fully fed and entertained" or, if you prefer, "idle miser," which have none of the Occupy Wall Street-ish sour grapes of the better-known translation.
When Jesus greets his disciples with the blessing, “Peace be with you” (John 20, 26), the editors cleverly change the wording to, "Peace of mind be with you," so that nobody gets the wrong idea and thinks Jesus was some kind of lilly-livered pacifist.

Likewise where Jesus says, “For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but to save it” (John 3, 17), they change “world” to “mankind,” so it is clear the Christian savior is not advocating environmentalism here. Hey, you can’t be too careful!

Finally, when Jesus admonishes hypocrites to, “Cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother's eye,” the conservative Bible replaces the word “hypocrite” with "deceiver," since hypocrite is often “misused politically against Christians.” Good point!

Once you start tweaking the Bible, the possibilities are endless. One smart aleck on the Internet has suggested an alternate rewrite for the one about the rich guy who wants to become a disciple: "It is easier for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than a poor camel driver." Brilliant! You know, it still kind of sounds like the original, but with a far more capitalist-friendly takeaway message.

While we’re at it, why not use verbatim Monty Python’s politically neutered mishearing of the Sermon on the Mount from Life of Brian:

"Blessed are the cheesemakers..."

But don’t stop there. The Ten Commandments could use a little judicious revision as well. Just add an asterisk after Thou Shall Not Kill*

*Except to blot out terrorists
*Fight neocolonialist wars
*Execute criminals
*Bomb abortion clinics

Be creative. Include some brand new commandments of your own such as, “Thou shalt not ... raise taxes on the rich, regulate the financial industry, permit gay marriage, take climate change seriously, feed the poor, clothe the naked, heal the sick...."

Richard Schiffman is an environmental journalist, poet and author of two books. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Reuters, NPR and the Guardian, among other outlets.

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5 Ways the Christian Right Perverts Religion to Push Inhumane, Unfettered Capitalism

  Belief  

AlterNet / By Amanda Marcotte

5 Ways the Christian Right Perverts Religion to Push Inhumane, Unfettered Capitalism

 

The Christian right works hard to craft theological arguments to support corporate policies.

 

 

 

 

 

December 18, 2013  |  

 

 

The classic understanding of the relationship between social and economic conservatives is simple: Social conservatives are often understood as dupes who let their obsession with controlling other people’s sex lives convince them to vote Republican, often against their own economic interest. This was what President Obama was getting at when he said that working-class whites who vote Republican “cling to guns or religion.”

There’s some truth to that, but if you start to dig a little deeper, it turns out that the Christian right doesn’t just bait believers into voting against their economic interests. On the contrary, the Christian right works fairly hard at trying to create theological arguments to support economic policies Republicans champion, such as slashing the social safety net or allowing unfettered capitalism to rapidly expand income inequality and environmental damage.

Here are the various ways Christian right leaders glaze over the Jesus of the Bible and push their followers to worship one who looks a little more like a Nazarene Ayn Rand.

1) Arguing that Jesus was a capitalist.By and large, the “loaves and fishes” man portrayed in the New Testament can in no honest way be reconciled with the aggressively capitalist attitude of modern Republicans, which holds that profit should never be constrained by concerns such as human rights and basic dignity for all. So conservatives are usually just elusive on the subject. However, Pope Francis’s recent comments regarding the excesses of capitalism have created some pushback on the right.

The favorite argument is that the Pope just doesn’t understand Christianity, which is totally pro-capitalist, no matter how excessive it gets. Ramesh Ponnuru blithely suggested that the Pope’s remarks show that the Pope just doesn’t understand “markets could instead enable a creative form of community” and that more “evangelizing still needs to be done” to convince the Pope that real Christians should embrace capitalism. Never mind that Pope Francis is from Argentina, where the “creative form of community” brought on by an eagerly capitalist, anti-socialist government was expressed through the creative disappearance of people whose left-wing politics were a threat to the capitalist community.  

Jonathan Moseley at WorldNetDaily joined in on the fun, claiming Jesus was a capitalist by redefining “capitalism” to basically mean some kind of imaginary tax-free governmental system. He also asserts that as long as Christians generally disapprove of “crony capitalism,” they’re free and clear of any moral responsibility for supporting the lack of laws and regulations that lead to income inequality, mass poverty, and abuses of human rights in the name of profit.

2) Labor unions are anti-Christian.While many liberal Christian churches support labor unions, on the Christian right there’s a number of leaders trying to use religion to bully believers out of standing up for worker’s rights. Many major Christian right leaders are leading the charge in the fight to destroy the right of workers to organize, including Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and James Dobson of Focus on the Family. The arguments against unions are illogical and strained—they’re often coupled with the “Jesus was a capitalist” claims, as if capitalism somehow obliterates the right of workers to demand better wages within the system—but sometimes there’s a little effort to claim theological underpinnings for an anti-union argument.

Ralph Reed argued that Christian calls for submission require workers to just take whatever their bosses dish out without pushing back. David Barton tries to stretch a Bible story about a vineyard owner hiring different employees to argue that God hates the idea of collective bargaining. Indeed, this parable comes up a lot, to the point where it’s even suggested that good Christians should never try to better their work situation after the initial hiring phase is over.

3) Jesus wanted poor people to starve. There’s a lot of stories in the Bible of Jesus being generous and prescribing that his followers give up their possessions to the poor, but the Christian right is good about ignoring those verses and digging around for one or two to argue that actually, Jesus was on their side about the importance of starving the poor out. When Republicans were trying to cut the food stamp program and Democrats pointed out how that runs against even the most basic reading of the Christianity they claim to hold so dear, Rep. Stephen Fincher petulantly quoted 2 Thessalonians: “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.”

Of course, there’s no reason whatsoever to believe that people on food stamps are unwilling to work. The growth in food stamp usage is a direct result of higher unemployment, which means people want jobs but can’t find them. Many people on food stamps actually have jobs that pay so little they have to use food stamps. But despite the fact that the verse—which was taken out of context—doesn’t even apply to the people it’s being wielded against doesn’t mean it’s not a favorite of the religious right. In fact, the way that they use it, you’d think it was the only sentence in the Bible, besides the ones condemning gay sex.

4) Religion means your employer should be all up in your business.Hobby Lobby has a case before the Supreme Court in which it's arguing that in order to preserve the company's religious freedom, its female employees should not be allowed to use their own insurance plans to purchase contraception. Even though the plans belong to the employees—they are part of their compensation package, just like their paychecks—Hobby Lobby is arguing that in order for its “religious freedom” to be preserved, it needs to be able to exert this kind of control over its employees’ private healthcare choices.

This case is a perfect example of the Christian right using its victimization complex to advance the increasingly strong hold that capitalists have over lives and our democracy. If Hobby Lobby prevails in court, it's established a scary precedent, allowing your employer to say he can control how you use the compensation that should rightfully belong to you. This ability to exert power over a worker’s home and private life is something capitalist power structures have been dying to establish for decades now, and thanks to the Christian right, they now have a legal path to try to make that happen.

5) God doesn’t want you to preserve the environment.As with relieving poverty and pushing for income equality, preserving the environment is one of those things Christian theology should cause believers to prioritize, but unfortunately, it runs directly against Republican priorities for maximizing profit regardless of the ill effects. Particularly on the issue of global warming, there is a real danger that some creeping sense of morality might actually cause conservative Christians to start thinking the planet might actually be more important than the oil companies’ quarterly profits—indeed, some of that leakage is actually happening.

Enter groups like the Cornwall Alliance, which boldly try to turn Christians to climate change denialists by arguing that if you believe climate change is real, you're not showing enough trust in God. It’s a nasty way of manipulating people by preying on their insecurities in order to get them to set aside their moral considerations. Unfortunately, it’s working. Only 7 percent of Republican-voting Christian pastors agree that climate change is real and manmade.

Most politicians who identify with the Christian right are eager to pounce on the theological arguments against protecting the planet, trying to recast their selfish desire to protect corporate profits, even at the expense of the planet and the human race’s health, as nothing but God’s work.

What all these examples show is the inherent danger of mixing politics and religion, because religion can be whatever the believer wants it to be. It might seem like an aggressive misreading of the Bible to imagine, as the Christian right does, that Jesus was a laissez faire capitalist who wasn’t bothered by poverty or pollution, but since religion is a matter of asserting belief instead of making logical arguments, in the end it doesn’t really matter.

Amanda Marcotte co-writes the blog Pandagon. She is the author of It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments.

Our sick gun fetish is destroying us: Tea Party fantasies kill kids

SALON

Saturday, Dec 14, 2013 1:15 PM UTC

Our sick gun fetish is destroying us: Tea Party fantasies kill kids

Newtown and Arapahoe shootings keep happening because there's big money in guns -- and outdated myths we must end

Richard Eskow

Topics: Newtown, Sandy Hook, School shooting, Newtown anniversary, Sandy Hook anniversary, Guns, NRA, national rifle association, Adam Lanza, Colorado school shooting, Arapahoe High School, Pete Peterson, Business News, News

 

 

Jimmy Greene, left, kisses his wife, Nelba Marquez-Greene, while holding a portrait of their daughter, Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victim Ana Marquez-Greene. (Credit: AP)

Maybe you’ve heard about the “bullet fee” that was supposedly charged to the families of prisoners executed by gunfire. The fee, which is almost certainly an urban legend, has been attributed at various times to Bolshevik revolutionaries and the governments of Iran and China.

But even if the bullet fee is mythical, there is a very real price to be paid when a society becomes intoxicated by gunplay. What price have we paid for the bullets fired at Newtown and in the year since that tragedy?

The financial estimates only scratch the surface.

The Cost

Researcher Ted Miller estimates the direct cost of intentional gun injuries at more than $8 billion per year, and the total societal cost at roughly $174 billion per year. A more focused study that concentrated on medical costs concluded that gun injuries lead to 31,000 hospitalizations each year at an annual cost of approximately $2.3 billion. More than 80 percent of that cost is borne by the government through Medicaid and other public assistance programs.

And yet, with all the talk of deficit reduction in Washington, gun control never seems to come up.

Guns are certainly big business. As we reported last year, “Firearms and ammunition sales rose 45 percent between 2009 and 2010 alone” and gun sales in some markets soared after the Newtown shooting. The Blackstone Group hedge fund, source of anti-Social Security billionaire Pete Peterson’s wealth, makes money from the gun business.

Cerberus Capital, an investment fund, created something it called the “Freedom Group” to invest in gun manufacturers. That investment became politically toxic after the Newtown shooting, especially with large institutional investors like teachers’ pension funds. But then, when you name your fund after the two-headed dog that is said to guard the gates of hell, you’re not exactly presenting yourself as a socially responsible investor.

So far they haven’t been able to sell it.

And where there’s money, there’s lobbying. As the Sunlight Foundation reports, more than half of  the new members of Congress elected last year received NRA funding. The school shooting didn’t make politicians any more reluctant to attend gun fundraisers.

People of the Gun

But that doesn’t begin to get at the heart of the matter – or to the true extent of the cost. To estimate that, we first need to understand: We are the People of the Gun. We own more guns per capita than any other nation on earth. Only Yemen comes close, and Yemenis reportedly have an ambivalence about their guns that Americans don’t seem to share.

Our love of the gun is as old as the nation itself. We needed our guns in the beginning. The long-range accuracy of the Pennsylvania Rifles used by colonists in the Revolutionary War contributed to a number of victories against the Redcoats, who carried shorter-range Brown Bess military muskets. Maybe that helped create the uniquely American algebra that says that “Guns = freedom.”

A dispersed agrarian people made up of homesteading farmers and ranchers needed guns – to protect the livestock from wild animals and themselves from marauders and thieves. Guns were a tool. We are a people who take pride in our tools, and in our ability to use them. We take our quotidian tasks and make them sport – and art, and adventure.

But then, as the railroads and industrialists and combines began to steal the American dream away from the farmers and ranchers, the cowboys and settlers, the gun became our consolation prize, our sublimated revenge, a symbolic instrument of power to distract us from the real power – the economic power – that had been taken from us.

It has been a century since the United States became an urban-majority country, according to the Census Bureau. When a healthy need or desire lingers too long or gets out of control, it becomes a fetish.

The Fantasy

The Second Amendment crowd is misreading the amendment in whose name they struggle, but they’re not wrong about everything. There is a cultural divide over guns. As one who has used guns recreationally off and on for many years (mostly off in the year since Newtown), and who has lived in the major capitals of the East and well outside them, I’ve seen that divide firsthand.

It didn’t happen by accident. Urban Americans were the first to experience the immediate and devastating impact of gun violence. And with the passage of the Sullivan Law of 1911, the “liberal elites” of New York State became the first Americans to live under some form of gun control. They’ve lived that way for generations now, and have never experienced the gun culture so common to other parts of the country.

Much of the rest of the country is still living out the pioneer fantasy forged in the 1800s – and that fantasy is still fulfilling the same economic purpose: to distract them from the true imbalances in power that rob them of agency and economic power. They may not have money or a good job. But with a well-stocked gun cabinet they can feel that personal power is, in the words of the Rolling Stones song, “just a shot away.”

We’re not here to judge them, but there is a through-line that reaches from their innermost fantasies to the deaths of children in Newtown. We’ve all been programmed with internal fantasies, with consequences we can dimly understand at best. But theirs is an especially deadly fantasy. It fuels Tea Party rage with a violent individualistic ethos that rejects collective action, even when that action is in their own interest. And it prevents the kind of legislation that could prevent future Newtowns.

The architects of this particular fantasy have been constructing it inside our psyches for generations. It was projected in the “spectacular” special effects of Buffalo Bill’s sideshow, which included simulated prairie fires, a sunset and the cyclone. It has flickered before our eyes at 64 frames per second for nearly 100 years now, from ”Birth of a Nation” to cowboy movies, from Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood to the more stylized and nerd-friendly dogfights of ”Star Wars.”

Sure there’s a solution to your problems, pardner. It’s just a shot away.

The Price

On my office wall is a framed photograph of Buffalo Bill and his troupe given to my grandfather when he was a young boy attending Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. The American strain runs in the blood.

What price have we paid for the many bullets that have been fired in the year since Newtown? To answer that we need to know: What’s the value of a human life? What’s the cost to a society for allowing itself to be distracted from decades of economic plunder? What’s the value of a child’s lost future, which lies like some subatomic phenomenon in a field of potentiality? Most of all: What does a society lose when it values its children’s lives so cheaply?

As of this writing, one year after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, they are interrupting regularly scheduled programming to report on another school shooting, at Arapahoe High School in Colorado. That’s shouldn’t surprise anyone. We are the People of the Gun.

The cost of a bullet is the price of a fantasy paid in blood. Let’s hope it isn’t also paid with the price of our souls.

More Richard Eskow.

Why the Christian Right Is Obsessed With the Collapse of Civilization

  Belief  

AlterNet / By Amanda Marcotte

Why the Christian Right Is Obsessed With the Collapse of Civilization

America's Religious Right is losing the fight.

 

 

 

 

 

December 12, 2013  |  

 

 

Most of us are so familiar with the cluster of issues that compel the religious right—opposition to gay marriage and abortion, hostility to the separation of church and state, hostility to modernity—that we don’t often think about the underlying theme holding these disparate obsessions together. It might even be tempting to believe there isn’t a unifying theme, except for the fact that conservatives themselves often allude to it: “civilization collapse.”

Over and over again, right-wingers warn that all the things they hate, from pro-gay Broadway shows to immigration to multiculturalism, are not just signs of an evolving American society, but portend the actual end of it. The Roman Empire is often darkly alluded to, and you get the impression many on the right think Rome burned up and descended into anarchy and darkness. (Not quite.) But really, what all these fantasies of cities burning down and impending war and destruction are expressing is a belief that the culture of white conservative Christians is the culture of America. So it follows that if they aren’t the dominant class in the United States, then America isn’t, in their opinion, really America anymore.

Once you key into this, understanding why certain social changes alarm the religious right becomes simple to see. Hostility to abortion, contraception and gay rights stems directly from a belief that everyone should hold their rigid views on gender roles—women are supposed to be housewives and mothers from a young age and men are supposed to be the heads of their families. School prayer, creationism and claims of a “war on Christmas” stem from a belief that government and society at large should issue constant reminders that their version of Christianity is the “official” culture and religion of America.   

It’s hard to underestimate how much of a crisis moment the election of Barack Obama for president was for the religious right because of this. And his re-election, of course, which showed that his presidency was not a fluke. Even before Obama was elected, the possibility that a black man with a “multicultural” background was such a massive confirmation of their worst fear—that they are not, actually, the dominant class in America–that the campaign against Obama became overwhelmed completely by this fear. The media frenzy over the minister in Obama’s church was about racial anxieties, but it was telling that it was his church that was the focal point of the attack. The stories were practically tailor-made to signal to conservative Christians that Obama was not one of them.

Sarah Palin’s campaign as the running mate to John McCain made right-wing fears even more explicit. On the trail, she notoriously described conservative, white, Christian-heavy America with these words: “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard-working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.” McCain’s campaign tried lamely to spin it, but the subtext was text now. The Christian right believes their culture is the only legitimate American culture, and the election of Barack Obama was a major threat to it.

Birtherism, a conspiracy theory movement that posits Obama faked his American citizenship, is easy enough to understand in this light. It’s an expression of the belief that Obama cannot be a legitimate president, because, in white Christian right eyes, they are the only legitimate Americans. So how can someone who isn’t one of them be president?

That’s why the election of Obama has triggered an all-out response from the Christian right. If they seem more enraged and active in recent years, especially with regards to attacks on abortion rights, it’s because they really are afraid they’re losing their grip on American culture and are casting around wildly for a way to regain what they perceive as lost dominance.

Of course, the belief that they ever were the dominant group in America was always an illusion. It was an illusion when Jerry Falwell started the Moral Majority in 1979. The name obviously indicates a belief that white Christian conservatives are the “majority,” but even then, it had a protest-too-much feel to it. While most Americans, then and now, are nominally Christian, most of them do not belong to one of the fundamentalist groups—including the subset of Catholics who are in bed, politically, with fundamentalist Protestants—that make up the religious right. But it was easier for the Christian right to delude themselves into thinking they spoke for the nation in an era when white men who identify as Christian were nearly all the power players in politics and when the percentage of Americans who identified as non-religious was relatively low.

Nowadays, nearly one in four Americans is not even labeled a Christian, and non-religious people are a rapidly growing minority. More importantly, it’s much harder for members of the religious right to ignore evidence that they simply aren’t the representatives of “real” America and that real America is actually quite a diverse and socially liberal place. Contraception use and premarital sex are nearly universal, the pop charts that used to be mostly white and male are sexually and racially diverse, gay people are rapidly approaching equality, and no matter how hard they try, most Americans just don’t think there’s anything offensive about greeting someone with “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas." Oh yeah, and we have a black president who doesn’t seem to be bothered that his wife used to be his mentor.

If you ever want an explanation for why some Republicans have grown downright giddy at the prospect of shutting down the federal government, this helps explain why. It’s not a coincidence that some of the biggest Bible-thumpers in Congress are those who are most supportive of finding some way to shut down the government. If you believe America isn’t really America unless the Christian right runs it, it’s not a short leap to look to destroying the system altogether. “If we can’t have it, no one can,” seems to be the guiding principle behind the push to shut down the federal government. They like to frame their claims that America will collapse if they aren’t in charge as warnings. But really, a better word for what they’re doing is “threats.” 

Amanda Marcotte co-writes the blog Pandagon. She is the author of It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments.