Why does the Religious Right want a Christian Nation so desperately?
I’m not being facetious or flippant when I raise that question. It is a legitimate question. Why the recent push by religious conservatives to grab more and more control over the Federal Government? In the past, the Christian Right has faced a far more inhospitable climate than it does today, and it had far less power to do anything about its situation. So why do their leaders feel the need to suddenly ramrod bills through Congress that eviscerate the 1st Amendment’s establishment clause, the one that mandates a separation of Church and State? Why the ever increasingly overheated rhetoric about activist judges, the homosexual agenda and the perils of evil Islamofascists? Why mount an openly political campaign in the media against the bogeyman of secularism?
I’ll tell you why. It’s because, frankly, they are losing. Not influence or power (which they have a firm grasp on as one of the leading factions of the Republican Party), but something far more important to them, something whose consequences fill them with dread and despair.
They are losing the Future (courtesy of today’s edition of The New York Times):
Despite their packed megachurches, their political clout and their increasing visibility on the national stage, evangelical Christian leaders are warning one another that their teenagers are abandoning the faith in droves.
(cont.)
That’s right. Apparently faith is no match for the raging hormones of adolescence. And if it’s scaring the crap out of Mommy and Daddy Fundie, it is practically sending the Pastors of their superchurches into full blown Panic Mode:
At an unusual series of leadership meetings in 44 cities this fall, more than 6,000 pastors are hearing dire forecasts from some of the biggest names in the conservative evangelical movement. […]
“I’m looking at the data,” said Ron Luce, who organized the meetings and founded Teen Mania, a 20-year-old youth ministry, “and we’ve become post-Christian America, like post-Christian Europe. We’ve been working as hard as we know how to work — everyone in youth ministry is working hard — but we’re losing.”
The board of the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group representing 60 denominations and dozens of ministries, passed a resolution this year deploring “the epidemic of young people leaving the evangelical church.”
Among the leaders speaking at the meetings are Ted Haggard, president of the evangelical association; the Rev. Jerry Falwell; and nationally known preachers like Jack Hayford and Tommy Barnett.
It’s simple, really. Lose the teenagers and they lose members to their churches. Lose members, lose both income and political power. Because no one in the Republican party would care one jot for the concerns of the Religious Right if it couldn’t deliver millions of the faithful to the polls each election to touch that Diebold screen on behalf of the GOP’s slate of candidates.
So it doesn’t surprise me that the so-called leaders of the Religious Right are pissing themselves in fear about what the teenage members of their flocks might do. These people have reached the high water mark of their political influence on American politics, and they don’t want to give that up. Despite all their rhetoric regarding the Rapture and the afterlife and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, Fundamentalist preachers are far more concerned with their lives in the here and now.
They want the money to keep rolling in. They want the fame and adulation they receive from their parishioners each week to keep washing over them. And above all, they want to continue gaining political power. All of that is threatened if the basis for all that wealth, glory and power is weakened by the youngest of their followers deserting their faith.
And they have good reason to be concerned:
Over and over in interviews, evangelical teenagers said they felt like a tiny, beleaguered minority in their schools and neighborhoods. They said they often felt alone in their struggles to live by their “Biblical values” by avoiding casual sex, risqué music and videos, Internet pornography, alcohol and drugs.
When Eric Soto, 18, transferred from a small charter school to a large public high school in Chicago, he said he was disappointed to find that an extracurricular Bible study attracted only five to eight students. “When we brought food, we thought we could get a better turnout,” he said. They got 12.
Chelsea Dunford, a 17-year old from Canton, Conn., said, “At school I don’t have a lot of friends who are Christians.”
Ms. Dunford spoke late last month as she and her small church youth group were about to join more than 3,400 teenagers in a sports arena at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst for a Christian youth extravaganza and rock concert called Acquire the Fire.
“A lot of my friends are self-proclaimed agnostics or atheists,” said Ms. Dunford, who wears a bracelet with a heart-shaped charm engraved with “tlw,” for “true love waits,” to remind herself of her pledge not to have premarital sex.
She said her friends were more prone to use profanity and party than she was, and added: “It’s scary sometimes. You get made fun of.”
Put aside for a moment the feeling of schadenfreude that many of us may be experiencing when we read of the horrid situations in which these “Christian Youth” find themselves. Much as this may inspire within you the temptation to gloat, don’t. Because any group that feels itself under attack becomes more desperate, and more dangerous. This is especially the case when the group which sees itself as under attack is one based upon a reactionary ideology which does not countenance dissent among its ranks, and which idolizes authoritarian leaders.
Whether true or not, the perception that their power is on the wane will only embolden the Religious Right to press harder to achieve the goal of remaking America into their version of a “Christian Nation.” Should Republicans lose either house of Congress this year we may begin to see this movement, which previously relied upon our traditional political process to obtain power, turn to alternative means to “complete the mission.” My fear is that some of these “Conservative Christians” may decide that violence against “secularists” should be one of those means to that end.
It’s worth pointing out that, in the section of the article not quoted above, it says that evangelicals regard these predictions as baseless scaremongering. I’d like to be wrong, but this follows the usual pattern of frightening the faithful into the pews. Whether it’s godless communists or interracial marriage or the evils of popular music, the inbuilt catastrophism of fundamentalist Christianity always seems (to them) to be on the brink of annihilation. And of course it does: people who build their entire lives around the Book of Revelation are not going to have an optimistic outlook on the future. Here’s the key:
Note that the dire forecasts aren’t coming from social scientists or any kind of independent scientific surveys. Give me that, and I’ll consider ignoring the evidence of my own experiences, but not just because some fundie pastor says the world is ending — that is, after all their primary job function.
then it gives me some hope that we may yet avoid the full institution of a theocracy.
I wouldn’t hold out too much hope that their power is on the wane. They have much better retention than Catholics or mainstream Protestants, and they have more children. No other faith is building megachurches with malls attached.
This is just a way for them to increase the sense of beseigement.
I don’t doubt these kids are drifting towards non-church based ways of expressing their faith, but they by and large are retaining the faith. The Moral Majority was declared dead over a decade ago. Look at them now.
And these kids will get married, have 4-6-8 kids, and they will warehouse those kids on Sunday in their mall/church.
That sorta dovetails with my impression of all this- that though their numbers seem to be waning, those kids that are wild-eyed True Believers are becoming more zealously passionate in the face of perceived persecution. Nothing else will matter to them as parents, and though some of their 4-6-8 kids will reject it, I’m betting that most won’t. I don’t say this out of fear but from a guess that the siren’s song of certainty will exert a powerful pull on these teens, who are after all (as all teens are) technically neurophysiologically incomplete- their brains aren’t done forming yet. Formative experiences dictate everything else, don’t they?
Interesting hypothesis.
I have one too, that I’ve explained to a few people. It’s not really an answer to why, but more why now?
The Roman Catholic church also set about to achieve a global theocracy, oh, quite a few centuries ago. But the timing of their Crusades and Inquisitions six hundred, seven hundred, one thousand years after the Roman Catholic Church gained a firm foundation around 400 AD is a similar length of time since the Reformation in the 1500’s.
I believe that the Roman Church has reached a ‘been there, done that’ detente with regards to agressively forcing Christianity upon the whole of civilization. But I also believe many Protestant faiths and uber-Christian born-again types are just begining to reach their period of such madness.
I believe that the Roman Church has reached a ‘been there, done that’ detente with regards to agressively forcing Christianity upon the whole of civilization.
There is no evidence that this is true and a great deal of evidence to the contrary. They’ve changed in style and no longer torture and burn folks they disapprove of at the stake, dictate which days of the month the citizenry is allowed to have sex or debate whether women have souls. Since they lost their iron control of Irelan they cannot sequester women and use them as slaves for their entire lives as they did with the Magdelene laundries but they’re still going strong and are far from toothless.
From the present makeup of the Supreme Court of the United States (and their successful infiltration of both political parties) to the RCC’s deeply unpleasant and cruel responses to AIDS in Africa to their alliances with the most repressive fundamentalist Protestant ideologues the RCC is still a contender, a major global power and, more often then not, a destructive one.
But I also believe many Protestant faiths and uber-Christian born-again types are just beginning to reach their period of such madness.
I agree. After Bush’s election I heard on the radio an evangelical pastor gloating about Christianity coming to power again. It was returning to our roots, he said, referring to Pilgrim and Puritan settlements.
Such harm was done by the Religious Right’s interference to foment impeaching President Clinton. It was as if the Church had gone after Parnell only yesterday.
… whom the fell gang
Of modern hypocrites laid low.
James Joyce, “Ivy Day in the Committee Room”
Turnout in 2004 was sixty percent.
Of that perhaps fifty percent voted for Bush.
One third of them were presumed, by Republicans, to be fundamentalist.
It’s not Rocket Science, do the division.
We’re cowering in fear of TEN percent of the voters. At most.
Wow! I don’t recall anyone doing the math before. And that explains a hell of a lot…
They’re also scared because, in the ongoing war between reason and religion, reason is winning. It has been for centuries. For religion, it’s a death by a thousand cuts, and it may never really end, but it happens every time somebody figures out a logical explanation that wipes away just a little more superstition.
The kids are looking at the hypocrisy, the stupidity, the utter ridiculousness of the megachurch/evangelical movement and saying no thanks.
I agree with some of the scepticism here about the purpose of this new round of faith-based whining. Marketing the dire threat to Christianity has always been one of the world’s most reliable con games. I have to think this is just more of the same ol’ same ol’.
And I must strongly disagree with your prescription, Steven. Fear of confrontation has led our side (whatever that is) to defeat and despair for many decades now. Dem presidential losses in the last two elections and beyond happened in large part due to fear of making the right mad, I believe. Similarly, the triumph of the stupid and the insane has been achieved with essentially no opposition, because any political statement that includes “God” or “Jesus” or “faith” can only be treated with timorous deference, and never frontal opposition.
The current Harper’s has an ad for a new book by Sam Harris called Letter to a Christian Nation. Haven’t gotten a copy yet, but it would appear to offer a far better approach to faith-based bullshit than reflexive assent. I have no interest in disputing beliefs about what we will never have solid answers to, until those beliefs become cover for political propaganda. At that point they become as much fair game as any other ideological claim. Our side needs to lose the kneejerk “respect” for the Jesus scammers as well as our perception that unreasoning “faith” is somehow superior and more privileged than our own beliefs, whatever they may be.
In my much improved America, the pols and the pundits would be saying things like Sam Harris says in his book —
Some of the flock will return in adulthood, but by and large you are right to say that they won’t hold power for all that long.
I think they also know that past Christian “counter-cultural” revolutions have all faded away when they became the mainstream culture, or the rulers. It’s just history repeating, so they hope to slide as much in before they lose it all.
My fear is that some of these “Conservative Christians” may decide that violence against “secularists” should be one of those means to that end.
If this does happen, then curious minds want to know if the legacy of the Bush administration, namely the new found mechanisms for fighting terrorism, will then chime in to fight this as domestic terrorism??