Why now?

In the relentless onslaught of bad news, North Korean Nukes, assaults on DACA children, one hurricane come ashore and another on its way, now is the time a group of Evangelicals (who claim that they are "Christian") have chosen to release a statement to affirm that LGBT people are icky, and to add that anyone who supports LGBT people's rights can't be "Christian".  Because apparently, this small group of Evangelicals are gatekeepers to Christianity.  And hatin' on the homos is raised to the level of doctrine in this "Nashville Statement".

There have been robust pushbacks from a variety of geographical locations, as more liberal Christians stand up to this.  OF course, the media mostly ignores them, because we all know that the <20% of Americans who identify as Evangelical Christians get to define Christianity for everyone else.  It's a bit like letting ISIS choose who is Muslim.

Writer and pastor John Pavlovitz has had enough.  He translates what the Nashville Statement is really saying.

Evangelical Christians are at the precipice of extinction—and we know it. We are a profoundly endangered species coming to grips with the urgency of the moment, of our impending disappearance, of the whole thing going sideways here in the Bible Belt—and we’re in a bit of a panic. ... we forgot that people aren’t stupid, and they see the disconnect between the President and the Jesus we’re trying to simultaneously claiming allegiance to—and we desperately need a distraction to muddy the waters; we need an easy battle to regain the credibility we’ve forfeited as we’ve sold off our souls and built our personal empires.   

...We’ve chosen to wage cheap war on innocent and vulnerable people in order to feel mighty again. We’ve done this because regardless of all our lip service about love and Grace and compassion—we really just like to pick fights that give us that intoxicating rush of superiority and a small dose of the control that we’ve grown addicted to.  ...   

We’ve made this “statement”, because those still listening to our message, aren’t interested in loving their neighbors as themselves, or caring for the least, or being the merciful Samaritan, or welcoming the outsider or washing people’s feet (or any of that annoying Jesus stuff). They just want an enemy to wage war with. 

Remember, there are pathways to roll back the hard-won progress of LGBT community.  And these people will be cheering all the way, and claim it is CHRISTIAN.  You'll know they are Christians, by their love.

Bombshell from the Vatican

So, big news is that two associates of Pope Francis have written an article in  La Civiltà Cattolica, an organ that is approved by the Vatican before publishing, and it takes down the unholy alliance between evangelical fundamentalism and conservative Catholics. THis is viewed as a slap at NearPresident Bannon--and more than a few American Catholic Bishops.  For example,

The erosion of religious liberty is clearly a grave threat within a spreading secularism. But we must avoid its defense coming in the fundamentalist terms of a “religion in total freedom,” perceived as a direct virtual challenge to the secularity of the state.

Then on the union of the Christian Right and certain Roman Catholics:

Some who profess themselves to be Catholic express themselves in ways that until recently were unknown in their tradition and using tones much closer to Evangelicals. .... the most dangerous prospect for this strange ecumenism is attributable to its xenophobic and Islamophobic vision that wants walls and purifying deportations. The word “ecumenism” transforms into a paradox, into an “ecumenism of hate.” Intolerance is a celestial mark of purism. Reductionism is the exegetical methodology. Ultra-literalism is its hermeneutical key.

And

Which feeling underlies the persuasive temptation for a spurious alliance between politics and religious fundamentalism? It is fear of the breakup of a constructed order and the fear of chaos. Indeed, it functions that way thanks to the chaos perceived. The political strategy for success becomes that of raising the tones of the conflictual, exaggerating disorder, agitating the souls of the people by painting worrying scenarios beyond any realism. 

Religion at this point becomes a guarantor of order and a political part would incarnate its needs. The appeal to the apocalypse justifies the power desired by a god or colluded in with a god. And fundamentalism thereby shows itself not to be the product of a religious experience but a poor and abusive perversion of it. 

This is why Francis is carrying forward a systematic counter-narration with respect to the narrative of fear. There is a need to fight against the manipulation of this season of anxiety and insecurity. Again, Francis is courageous here and gives no theological-political legitimacy to terrorists, avoiding any reduction of Islam to Islamic terrorism. Nor does he give it to those who postulate and want a “holy war” or to build barrier-fences crowned with barbed wire. The only crown that counts for the Christian is the one with thorns that Christ wore on high.

Social justice Roman Catholicism-- yes!

All that's left is white nationalism

As Trump's proposals turn out to be grift for the 1%,  Nancy LeTourneau points out how Trump's economic policy is bound to hurt his rural, poorly educated white supporters.  The ACA repeal will throw tens of millions out of health coverage.  The EPA retreat will leave them drinking dirty water and exposed to chemicals.  The coal jobs aren't coming back, regardless.  And don't even get us started on the effect of climate change.

The truth is that Trump’s economic populism consists of promises based on lies. But there is one arena of his populism that is actually moving forward – albeit in fits and starts. That is his appeal to xenophobia. .... 

In this country, the Trump administration’s deportation force is sending undocumented immigrants farther underground. As was predicted, victims of crime now fear reporting it to law enforcement and children are being pulled out of free lunch programs at school for fear of being deported. AG Sessions is planning to pull federal funding from so-called “sanctuary cities,” and has broadcast that he will no longer pursue police brutality investigations. 

To the extent that these kinds of activities address the concerns of Trump’s base of support among white working class Americans, his populism is solely based on what many of us assumed it would be all along…white nationalism. The only question is when and if any of his supporters who thought his presidency would be about anything else will catch on.

Will they catch on?  Will they care?  I firmly believe that as long as it is THOSE PEOPLE being targeted--the poor, the brown, the Muslims, the gays, the ones NOT LIKE US, that Trump's supporters will still make excuses. As long as THOSE PEOPLE have it worse, they will suck it up.

 The New York Times went to Iowa to see what the reaction there was to the blatantly racist comments of their representative Steve King.

His latest anti-immigrant tirade — “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” he said — once again drew wide condemnation and critical attention to Iowa’s Fourth Congressional District, whose voters overwhelmingly re-elected him to an eighth term in November.

And yes, the Times easily found people who were uncomfortable with King's comments....but he has't changed his spots, and they keep voting for him.  So frankly they seem more uncomfortable that the unspoken is out in the open:

Mr. King has survived past denunciations: Last year, he drew a rare primary challenger, who accused him of being so toxic that his name on a bill rendered it “dead on arrival.” But Mr. King won easily and went on to crush his Democratic opponent, Kim Weaver, an advocate for the elderly.

So, sure, they can look embarrassed about him. But they keep voting for him.  And then there's this :

[T]here are plenty who don’t seem to quibble much with Mr. King’s way of thinking.

Sitting at the Hardees in Orange City last week, Don Engeltjes, 76, said he agreed with Mr. King on the need to clamp down on immigration. He said he believed new arrivals were a drain on taxpayers’ money, lumping immigrants from Mexico in with those from the Muslim world. 

“It’s just handout, handout, handout,” he said. 

“But Don, your dad is an immigrant too,” another man piped up, noting that Mr. Engeltjes’s father, like many forebears of the district’s voters, had come over from Holland at age 9. 

“You bet he was,” Mr. Engeltjes replied. “But the way it’s going nowadays, man, they’re outproducing us. We’re going to be the minority in a few years.” 

Asked by a reporter who he meant by “we,” Mr. Engeltjes said: “The white people. The American people.”

I'm sure he thinks he's a God-fearing Christian. But let's remember that the Christian Right that so fervently embraces Trump has its roots deep in racism.  And they  have ripped off any pretense that they are driven otherwise.  Sarah Posner describes how Trumpism united with the Christian Right--and how the CR roots are deeply racist.

The movement was actually galvanized in the 1970s and early ’80s, when the IRS revoked the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University and other conservative Christian schools that refused to admit nonwhites. It was the government’s actions against segregated schools, not the legalization of abortion, that “enraged the Christian community,” Moral Majority co-founder Paul Weyrich has acknowledged.

... evangelicals were much more likely to support banning Muslims from the United States, creating a database of Muslim citizens, and flying the Confederate flag at the state capitol. Thirty-eight percent of evangelicals told pollsters that they wished the South had won the Civil War—more than twice the number of nonevangelicals who held that view.

Racism is alive and well in this country. The bubble we've been living in, is to think that we had made progress.  All that they offer is nihilism and destruction, and by God they are going to destroy all that they can, while waving a cross above them.

A lack of care

Yesterday I asked why the Republicans are so cruel.  Today, I want to continue that discussion.

Along with cruelty comes a lack of care.  Writing in the Guardian, Lindy West comments

I don’t know that America has ever seen a political party so divested of care. Since Trump took office, Republicans have proposed legislation to destroy unions, the healthcare system, the education system and the Environmental Protection Agency; to defund the reproductive health charity Planned Parenthood and restrict abortion; to stifle public protest and decimate arts funding; to increase the risk of violence against trans people and roll back anti-discrimination laws; and to funnel more and more wealth from the poorest to the richest. Every executive order and piece of GOP legislation is destructive, aimed at dismantling something else, never creating anything new, never in the service of improving the care of the nation.

She cites an accidental truth-telling by Paul Ryan, who said in 2013 “We’re not going to give up,” Ryan assures his audience, “on destroying the healthcare system for the American people.”

Even if we acknowledge that such a slip of the tongue is technically possible (if not likely), we don’t actually need to wonder about what Ryan secretly believes. Gaffe or no, we already know he wants to destroy the healthcare system for the American people, because he tried to pass legislation that would destroy the healthcare system for the American people. And because destruction, not life, is the foundation of Ryan’s party.

Destruction grounded in a lack of care for their fellow citizens, who are votes to be used, not people worthy of care.

The urbane, smooth judicial nominee Neil Gorsuch likewise shows a lack of care and compassion. Take, for example, his dissent in the case of the trucker who was fired for leaving his trailer.  The trucker was essentially told to freeze to death.  Lucia Graves writes

He may have empathized with Maddin but that did not lead him to change his legal opinion. What’s unusual here is not Gorsuch’s conservative philosophy or textualist tendencies. It’s not even that he sided with a company over the “little guy”, as Democrats repeatedly said. 

It’s that the fact that Maddin might have died sitting there waiting for help at 14-below, if he’d been unwise enough to follow the only option made available by Gorsuch, did not appear to enter into his calculus. He did not seem to care.... 

... the trouble with Gorsuch, we learned this week, is not ideology but humanity.

Indeed, the Supreme Court just overturned a Gorsuch decision regarding the education of a disabled child--unanimously. 

In Thompson R2-J School District v. Luke P., a case brought by an autistic student whose parents sought reimbursement for tuition at a specialized school for children with autism, Gorsuch read IDEA extraordinarily narrowly. 

Under Gorsuch’s opinion in Luke P., a school district complies with the law so long as they provide educational benefits that “must merely be ‘more than de minimis.’” 

“De minimis” is a Latin phrase meaning “so minor as to merit disregard.” So Gorsuch essentially concluded that school districts comply with their obligation to disabled students so long as they provide those students with a little more than nothing. 

All eight justices rejected Gorsuch’s approach. IDEA, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “is markedly more demanding than the ‘merely more than de minimis’ test applied by the Tenth Circuit.” Indeed, Roberts added, Gorsuch’s approach would effectively strip many disabled students of their right to an education. Roberts went on: 

When all is said and done, a student offered an educational program providing “merely more than de minimis” progress from year to year can hardly be said to have been offered an education at all. For children with disabilities, receiving instruction that aims so low would be tantamount to “sitting idly . . . awaiting the time when they were old enough to ‘drop out.’”

What appears common in both the Gorsuch examples,  and in the overall approach of the GOP, is a lack of care for people, and our common humanity.  It is a focus on the game, whether it is law or legislative, rather than realizing that law and legislation should be in service of people, not to destroy them.  It is so far from any expression of decency, let alone any religion, that I feel at times we have slipped into another dimension where all humane values are annulled.

What in hell has happened to them?

The fallacy at the heart of the "Benedict Option"

As we have discussed before, conservative columnist Rod Dreher has proposed "The Benedict Option", whereby conservative Christians withdraw as they can from society, mainly because of LGBT people. Indeed, Dreher refers to LGBT rights (and same sex marriage) as “LGBT activism [as] the tip of the spear at our throats in the culture war.”

Which apart from its appalling hyperbole, will be news to the many faithful gay Christians I know.  Further, I have got news for Rod Dreher.  When it comes to marriage and the integrity thereof, let alone sexual morals, I am pretty darned conservative.  The difference is that I recognize that others may not share my particular view of morality.  My morality does not depend upon theirs, nor do I seek to impose mine upon them.

But I digress. Dresser has now written a book about this, called The Benedict Option which is getting some attention.

Over at the NY Times, David Brooks comments,

Maybe if I shared Rod’s views on L.G.B.T. issues, I would see the level of threat and darkness he does. But I don’t see it. Over the course of history, American culture has tolerated slavery, sexual brutalism and the genocide of the Native Americans, and now we’re supposed to see 2017 as the year the Dark Ages descended?

But Dreher thinks that Brooks has missed his point.

the thrust of the book is not about persecution, but about the loss of Christianity. It’s not a book about how to resist Robespierre as much as it is a book about how to keep your kids and your church from turning into Rachel Held Evans, which would be a precursor to losing the faith entirely.

Ouch. Rachel Held Evans is a prominent former-evangelical-now-Episcopalian liberal Christian. Don't you just hear the love in Dreher's snark?  He doesn't consider liberal Christians to be Christians at all.

The site Women in Theology brings up a certain...shall we say, inconsistency in Dreher's end-times views. 

...in attempting to prove that orthodox Christians are not obsessed with LGBT people, Dreher ends up admitting that orthodox Christians are in fact obsessed with LGBT people. Dreher’s analogy would exonerate orthodox Christianity of any special anti-gay bias if it conformed to the facts. In truth, however, the legalization and cultural acceptance of divorce long preceded any substantive gains made by the LGBT rights movement. Following the logic of Dreher’s analogy, LGBT rights would seem to be the caboose on the freight train steam-rolling orthodox Christian liberty, not its engine.
Yet as Dreher’s own writing attests, orthodox Christians only recently began fearing a future in which they were treated like racists. 

To Progressives, this seems like an unfair double-standard. One wonders why orthodox Christian entrepreneurs yearn for the right to fire only LGBT employees and not also divorced and re-married ones? Why do orthodox Christians assert the right to decline service to LGBT customers but not divorced and remarried ones? Why do orthodox Christians fear that priests will be forced to preside over marriages between LGBT people but not divorced ones? ... 

This discrepancy does not reflect LGBT people’s status as the first line of attack. If traditional marriage refers to a union that is not just heterosexual, but lifelong, then orthodox Christians should have been sounding the retreat eighty years ago. But they did not."

And isn't that the crux of the issue?  The conservatives want the right to deny LGBT people not only wedding cakes, but public services, in the name of religious freedom.  Yet, somehow, these denials are uniquely applied to LGBT people, and not to others of whom the faith might disapprove.

Let us (again) consider the issue of divorce in the Roman Catholic church.  The church is opposed to remarriage following divorce in church.  It denies Holy Matrimony to second marriages of this sort if they lack an annulment (as most do).  Pope Francis is in hot water with conservatives for even suggesting some mercy in offering Communion to the remarried.  But Catholics in the civil polis do not attempt to deny civil marriage to the previously married.  They do not deny them goods and services, ranging from baking cakes to renting them hotel rooms.

Somehow, then, the LGBT folks are particularly tainted.  And therein lies their hypocrisy of religious freedom, for if it were about that, they would be consistent about all sins.  No, this is about the "ick" factor-- the revulsion against LGBT people.

Women in Theology also writes,

LGBT people perhaps understand orthodox Christians’ fears even better than they do: the reality that LGBT people have already lived in fact proves much worse than the future Dreher fears. In addition to being fired, ridiculed, and hunted by state agents, LGBT people continue to endure evils that do not appear even in Dreher’s worst nightmares such as being beaten and killed, ostracized from and even kicked out of their families of origin, denied housing, unable to visit sick partners in hospitals, and disinherited. ....

I want this same protection and acceptance for orthodox Christians like Dreher, should they become an endangered minority. I do not want orthodox Christians to experience any of the injustices inflicted upon LGBT people. ....

Will orthodox Christians like Dreher pledge to do for LGBT people of all religious backgrounds what I have pledged to do for orthodox Christians?

The knowledge divide

Shortly after the election, Nate Silver and the gang at FiveThirtyEight crunched the numbers to see what demographic characteristics separated the Trump supporter from the Clinton supporter, and they found that it wasn't income, or social class that correlated best.  Rather, the level of education was " the critical factor in predicting shifts in the vote between 2012 and 2016."

Why would this be?  They posit several reasons

• Education levels may be a proxy for cultural hegemony....Trump’s campaign may have represented a backlash against these cultural elites.
• Educational attainment may be a better indicator of long-term economic well-being than household incomes. ...
• Education levels have strong relationships with media-consumption habits,...
• Trump’s approach to the campaign — relying on emotional appeals while glossing over policy details — may have resonated more among people with lower education levels as compared with Clinton’s wonkier and more cerebral approach.

They conclude:

The education gap is carving up the American electorate and toppling political coalitions that had been in place for many years.

So, what has happened with the election of Trump to the White House?  Over at Foreign Policy, David Rothkopf invokes "The Shallow State" of ignorance that this uneducated, anti-intellectualism engenders.

Donald Trump, champion and avatar of the shallow state, has won power because his supporters are threatened by what they don’t understand, and what they don’t understand is almost everything. Indeed, from evolution to data about our economy to the science of vaccines to the threats we face in the world, they reject vast subjects rooted in fact in order to have reality conform to their worldviews. They don’t dig for truth; they skim the media for anything that makes them feel better about themselves. To many of them, knowledge is not a useful tool but a cunning barrier elites have created to keep power from the average man and woman. The same is true for experience, skills, and know-how. These things require time and work and study and often challenge our systems of belief. Truth is hard; shallowness is easy....

Trump & Co. are allergic to demonstrable, proven facts whether they be of the scientific, political, social, cultural, or economic variety. With leaders like these, the shallow state exists only on the surface, propelled only by emotion and reflex. Therefore, anything of factual weight or substance disturbs, disrupts, or obliterates it much as a rock does when dropped onto an image reflected in a pond. 

He highlights the antipathy to science and the arts expressed by the Trump administration as a further manifestation of this dumbing down of our institutions.

 This is the culmination of a long decline, that writer Thomas Nichols has highlighted as "The Death of Expertise".   He's written a book about this, but before that he wrote an article:

To reject the notion of expertise, and to replace it with a sanctimonious insistence that every person has a right to his or her own opinion, is silly.

Worse, it’s dangerous. The death of expertise is a rejection not only of knowledge, but of the ways in which we gain knowledge and learn about things. Fundamentally, it’s a rejection of science and rationality, which are the foundations of Western civilization itself....

This isn’t just about politics, which would be bad enough. No, it’s worse than that: the perverse effect of the death of expertise is that without real experts, everyone is an expert on everything. To take but one horrifying example, we live today in an advanced post-industrial country that is now fighting a resurgence of whooping cough — a scourge nearly eliminated a century ago — merely because otherwise intelligent people have been second-guessing their doctors and refusing to vaccinate their kids after reading stuff written by people who know exactly zip about medicine.

 So the real divide we see is those who are less educated and to some degree proud of their ignorance, and those who live in an empirical, fact-based world.


Is this related to Trump's immense support amongst the conservative Evangelicals?  We know they are wont to educate their children in home-schools, or religious colleges to keep them from Dangerous Ideas.   At Religion News Service, John Fea calls out his fellow evangelicals   for their deliberate anti-intellectualism.

Fear can easily be exacerbated by false information. And good information can often alleviate fear....These are facts. They are backed by statistics, data and evidence.

It is time for my fellow evangelicals to take seriously what the Founding Fathers of this nation called an “informed citizenry.” Better yet, it is time to counter fear with facts — a necessary starting point for worshiping God with our minds.

I don't know how to bridge this divide, because I live in the world of facts, science, art, and reality, and I am at a loss to explain these values to those who refuse to hear.   And meanwhile, the White House destroys data and makes up "alternative facts".

Enforcing gender norms in the bathroom

Well, as we all predicted, there have been now numerous cases of self-appointed bathroom police going after interlopers in the women's room.  However,  those "interlopers" are actual cis-gendered women.

You see, for the bathroom police,  any woman who does not match their ideal of what a woman should look like, is Not Allowed.  And apparently if you have short hair and wear boy's clothes, that's a bad thing.

Indeed, I know at least one woman with very short hair who is concerned now about using the restroom in public spaces at all.  I know a graduate student, who presents in a very androgynous way, who sparked a panic in our building last year simply by using the restroom because another student thought she was male. Even me, with my long hair and a very curvy figure-- I've occasionally been thought to be a guy, because I like to wear jeans and I have a deep voice.

Let us be clear, this is not about trans people.  It is not about predators.  It is all about enforcing gender norms.

The fear of trans people is almost entirely the fear of trans women, who have unaccountably (to some) given up the privilege of maleness to be women.  That's a broken gender norm right there.

Those androgynous women, with short hair and male clothes, they are a threat because they challenge the norms themselves.  And of course, if a guy finds them attractive, is it because he secretly thinks they are guys?

There's no accident that the really conservative sects impose a strict dress code on women:  long hair, dresses.

Does this all tie in  to the victory of marriage equality? Because nothing challenges gender norms (which really means, male privilege) like a same-sex partnership. Some same sex couples do have a gender-binary type of relationship, of course, but many do not, leading to discomfort in some straights.  "Which one of you is the man?"  is a question every lesbian couple faces, either spoken or unspoken.

A great article from the Atlantic today thinks so...

America is experiencing a period of profound gender anxiety. Mainstream understandings of “gender” are changing, which may be why Mississippi legislators felt the need to codify concepts that have always seemed culturally implicit. .... 

Non-traditional notions of gender have finally become widespread enough to foment a sustained backlash....The fact that legislators in overreach-hating, small-government-loving states like Mississippi and North Carolina have resorted to the law to protect their notions of gender shows the depth of their panic about these ambient cultural shifts.

Of course this is impossible to separate from Bible-thumping conservative Christianity, that opposes anything that doesn't fit their ideal binary men-and-women model. So, they claim that same sex marriage and transgender rights somehow affects their religious "freedom" (which is really religious privilege).

But more broadly, this is also a question about gender roles. In a recent PRRI / The Atlantic poll, 42 percent of Americans said they believe society is becoming “too soft and feminine.” Thirty-nine percent said they believe society is better off “when men and women stick to the jobs and tasks they are naturally suited for,” including 44 percent of Republicans and 58 percent of white evangelical Protestants. These numbers suggest nervousness about fluid gender identities—and that America isn’t even close to a consensus that men and women should choose the way they act.

And, again, not so much religious privilege, as MALE privilege.

If transgender people are able to use the bathroom of their choice, that suggests women are perfectly safe when former men, or women who have masculine characteristics, enter their intimate spaces. “Part of the threat here is that women are saying they do not need protection from men. That has long been a source of anger for men and women who believe in this notion of female submission to male authority,” said Griffiths. At least in part, “men who are supporting this are reasserting a protective role.”

Read that again:  men are "reasserting a protective role".  Because how DARE women think they don't need the protection, the authority, of straight cis-gendered men.  Isn't it telling that the bathroom wars are ostensibly to protect women from assault by straight cis-gendered men?

The Atlantic article isn't very hopeful that we will figure this out any time soon.  Meanwhile, I have no issue with who uses what bathroom.  There are stalls and they are private, and I'm indifferent to the plumbing details of the person in the stall next to me.

Everyone needs to be free to pee.

Persecution Complex and the Benedict Option (3)

So, is there another way for the Conservative Christians besides culture wars and withdrawal into themselves?  Nate Pyle thinks so.  Speaking of the Evangelicals and starting (again) with Wheaton College trying to purge itself of an inconvenient theology professor, he writes,

....Crossing evangelicals' traditional boundaries are perceived as a threat and met with animosity and conflict.

And he bemoans

It seems like, with recent actions, that a diversity of thought is a threat. Which makes me wonder if we could sit down with the Samaritan woman at the well and have the conversation Jesus did. Because our current actions show us more interested in making sure people know that we worship God on the right hill than understanding who they are. 

But he calls for something quite different:

As the church continues to figure out how to exist in a post-Christian society the question before us is, will our efforts to be distinct from culture come through ritual observance and strict boundary keeping, or will it come through radical concern for the other? Do we cut off relationship with those who think differently than us and make it harder for people to come into community with us, or do we change how we approach our differences? Are we willing to start with a new garment?

I believe the time has come for Christian communities to practice hospitality. Not niceness, but the radical welcoming of the other. Inviting the stranger to the table because we believe that, as human beings, they have a right to belong. The time has come to understand that the Spirit of the Living Christ, the one who touches the unclean and does not become unclean, lives in us. Jesus did not call his followers to remain within the boundaries of an ideology, but to break from and help those in need.  

Engagement, or isolation.  Which will it be?

Click here for the whole series. (once it's published) 

Persecution Complex and the Benedict Option (2)

So, what is going to happen as the conservative Christians circle the wagons, establishing a purity cult of right belief? This persecution complex has played out before, over and over.  It is in the bones of conservative Christianity.  Randall Stephans: 

The language of victimization convinced those who were fighting under the conservative banner that they were the true champions of liberty. Other causes paled by comparison. In 1960 Hargis mocked the “social crises” of racism and segregation. It was “one of the most artificial of all such crises, instigated by Communists within America to add racial hatred to class hatred, and thus betray America into communist hands through the betrayal of the American Negro.”** Several years later, as the black freedom struggle grew in strength and momentum, he would tell a reporter, “The persecuted minority in America is not the Negro, but the white folks of the South.”

Sound familiar?

What about those bastions of right thought, the evangelical colleges? Richard Flory  writes,

In reality, theology functions to set evangelicals apart from any sort of belief, ideology, cultural expression, political movement, etc., that doesn’t fit into the way that evangelical leaders and their constituents want the world to work. 

Through their many rules and guidelines, evangelical schools embody the codification of all of the fundamental fears and desires of the evangelical world. Tracking schools’ responses to what they perceive as threats—not only to their evangelical beliefs, but to their understanding of what American culture should be—reveals the history of how evangelicals view themselves and American culture.

He goes on to predict,

1) Evangelical schools will continue to find threats that provide a foil against which they can define themselves and their view of Christianity and America. .... 

2) Owing to a shrinking pool of “true believers” who can support and attend these schools, many will go out of business over the next 20 years. 

3) The reduced number of evangelical colleges and seminaries will retrench and become more aware of policing their cultural/theological boundaries, doubling down on their more restrictive impulses. 

4) Because of a general lack of hospitality and care and concern for “the other”— whether theological, gender, class or ethnic—evangelicalism overall will become even more white, straight and politically and religiously reactionary… 

5) …which will result, in turn, in even greater numbers of young people defecting from the religion they grew up in. Most will then claim no religious identity (even though they may still believe in God), while a few will move on to other Christian traditions, and fewer still will seek out other religious expressions.

Rinse and repeat.

But is there another way?  More tomorrow. 

Click here for the series

Persecution complex and the Benedict Option (1)

Columnist Rod Dreher is a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy who is particularly known for his call for conservative Christians to explore "The Benedict Option":  essentially cutting themselves off from the mainstream culture as much as possible into  intentional, inward looking religious communities embedded within modern life.   This is a reaction to cultural changes he disapproves of, like gays marrying.

He's not alone amongst conservative Christians, who feel threatened by changes, and frightened by the thought that they are no longer the "moral majority" but rather, a minority.  Just when we thought that having won marriage equality might mean we could move past LGBT issues, it appears that the right wingers are even more deeply entrenched in their reaction against us.  Teh Gayz are the final straw.

We see the reaction in the demands of the right that they be allowed to discriminate against LGBT people, in ways that we would never countenance for any other demographic, or any other sinner.

And no question, this is a persecution complex. The very fact of same sex people being allowed to marry is seen as some sort of cultural Armageddon. A gay couple marching down the aisle is viewed as shock troops destroying Christianity.  David Sessions writes, 

Persecution is historically and politically imagined; what is conceived in 2015 to be an intolerable violation of conscience may not have been considered such 20 years ago and may not in another 20 years. Even in the unlikely event non-discrimination were mandated for every bakery in America, conservative Christianity will be just fine; maybe people will discover making a wedding cake for a gay couple is not really that big a deal, not actually a violation of conscience after all. .... 

Perhaps the more interesting question is why the rhetoric from conservative Christians has become so overheated and apocalyptic, so fixated on anecdotes and worst-case scenarios, when there are plenty of alternate ways of reading the situation.  

He predicts,

Conservative Christians have very recently made sexual morality the index of the vitality of religion, and equated challenges to it with challenges to Christianity itself. As that challenge becomes legal and political, they will feel persecuted and violated for a while, and then many of them will probably get on with their lives much as before. It seems to me that certain people in their ranks greeting gay rights as apocalyptic persecution is really a measure of their own turn toward a robustly metaphysical Christianity that has never had much purchase in the United States. Religion has and will continue to persist in America precisely on account of its pragmatic adaptability, but it is this progressive character that conservative intellectuals have begun to reject. The erosion of the Puritan cultural residue has pushed them to think bigger and longer, back to a kind of religion that came before the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the kind that French liberals were still struggling with in the nineteenth century. It’s hard to call it conservatism when what it ostensibly wants to conserve in fact never existed, at least in our cultural context. It is rather, a purification movement, a return to imagined roots, that is perhaps better described by a French word: intégrisme.

We can see this purity cult in the proposals for the Benedict Option.  We see it in the wagon-circling of the Evangelicals, where Wheaton College now wants to fire a tenured professor for saying there is one God worshipped by Jew, Christian, and Muslim.  We see it in the Mormon Church, which has now doubled down on the gays, saying that gays are apostates,  the children of gays are unworthy of baptism and now claims that this is actually a revelation from God. We see it in the denial of anti-gay activists, who insist that polls are mistaken and a majority of Americans still opposes marriage equality.

Damon Linker considers this reaction and puts it in perspective,

[T]his may be the first time in American history that devout Christians have been forced by events to accept without doubt that they are a minority in a majority secular nation. 

We have entered uncharted territory.

More tomorrow.  

Click here for the whole series. (once it's published)

The resurgence of the know-nothings

Ben Carson's popularity is a symptom of a broader, deeply concerning anti-intellectualism.

Mike Lofgren:

Thanks to these overlapping and mutually reinforcing segments of the right-wing media-entertainment-“educational” complex, it is now possible for the true believer to sail on an ocean of political, historical, and scientific disinformation without ever sighting the dry land of empirical fact. This effect is fortified by the substantial overlap between conservative Republicans and fundamentalist Christians...... 

For these culture warriors, belief in demonstrably false propositions is no longer a stigma of ignorance, but a defiantly worn badge of political resistance.

And while we may laugh at them, they are more dangerous than that.

Numerous states like Louisiana now mandate that public schools teach the wholly imaginary “controversy” about evolution. A school textbook in Texas, whose state school board has long been infested with reactionary kooks, referred to chattel slaves as “workers” (the implication was obvious: neo-Confederate elements in the South have been trying to minimize slavery for a century and a half, to the point of insinuating it had nothing to do with the Civil War). 

This brings us back to Ben Carson. He now suggests that, rather than abolishing the Department of Education, a perennial Republican goal, the department should be used to investigate professors who say something he doesn’t agree with. The mechanism to bring these heretics to the government’s attention should be denunciations from students, a technique once in vogue in the old Soviet Union. 

Those seeking the Evangelical vote play to these views.  And they are scary. As is misattributed to Sinclair Lewis:

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."

Going after Progressive Christians

By now you have heard that 8 conservative Christian churches in Arizona have started an unprecedented coordinated campaign to impugn a progressive Methodist church in their vicinity.

"... when you have an effort collaborated by multiple churches in one community to try to discredit one other way of thinking, that's when it becomes alarming," said Rev. David Felten, head of The Fountains Progressive Christian Church.
....

"That lets people know there's a choice out there, they don't have to deny science, they don't have to hate their gay neighbor, they don't have to read and take the bible in a way that causes them to abandon their rational mind," he said.

So his conservative neighbors find this sufficiently threatening that they are planning a coordinated series of sermons to attack the beliefs of Progressives as "insufficiently Christian".

Jonathan Merrit puts this in the context of the Pew Survey, which shows continued decline of Christianity and a huge increase in the unaffilitated:

Triumphalist evangelicals have missed the point. The biggest threat to evangelicals is not some form of liberal faith, but rather faithlessness itself. Most people aren’t leaving evangelicalism for more liberal expressions, but rather for nothing at all.

While conservative Christians were crusading against their more liberal brothers and sisters in the mainline, the real growth has been in neither camp—the share of religiously unaffiliated individuals in America skyrocketed by a whopping 6.7 percent.

Rather than taking pot shots at more liberal strains of Christianity, evangelicals would do well to focus on the threat that all Christians are now facing: the growing number of people who are apathetic or antagonistic to the claims of Christianity.

If evangelicals continue to treat current trends as a race to the bottom, they shouldn’t be surprised if that’s exactly where they end up.

 Religion Dispatches comments,

It shows a basic flaw in Christianity in the United States: the conservatives don’t believe the liberals are actual Christians, and the liberals think the conservatives are flaming judgmental assholes.

In faith as as in politics, the nation seems to be growing ever more polarized along ideological lines. The net effect is roughly analogous to when campaign ads go negative: the base is kept strong and in line, but the majority of people say “to hell with the both of you, I’m staying home.”

The only discernible difference between the civil declension is that one takes place on a Tuesday and the other on a Sunday. It may work often enough for political campaigns, but I can’t recommend it as evangelism. 

Evangelical challenge on women's roles

Biblical conservatives are generally not happy with women's equality.  We see it in the battle over women's ordination (won in the Episcopal church, ongoing in the Roman Catholic church) but it is particularly prominent in the Evangelical conservative community.  

However, it's harder and harder in modern life to keep women pregnant at home in the kitchen or in the homeschool room, when women want legitimate careers of their own.  From Religion Dispatches

Some evangelicals’ complementarian commitments appear to be influenced more deeply by nostalgia for 1950s suburbia than by the Bible itself. The gulf between leaders’ wishes and women’s lives reveals how tone-deaf, incomprehensible, and inconsistent elite preferences have become....

Traditionalist evangelical elites may have overreached. Now, in light of the preferences and necessities that undergird evangelicals’ egalitarian family arrangements, leaders will have to concede that people can interpret scripture according to shifting cultural realities. Of course, this interpretive malleability and liberty of conscience isn’t extended to people who think differently about homosexuality.

Of course it is no coincidence that opposition to gay rights is linked to  rigid gender norms.

Conservative evangelical elites are expending a great deal of energy to keep acceptance of homosexuality out of their churches and institutions. But when it comes to enforcing patriarchy, they simply aren’t fighting as hard. As they battle on two fronts—often against their own people—evangelical leaders may have to decide whether homosexuality or egalitarianism is the greater evil.

They will struggle to argue that marriage is non-negotiable as they concede that gender roles are very much up for debate.

The re-definition of marriage, as Associate Justice Ruth Bader GInsberg reminded us yesterday, is not over same sex couples.  It's already occurred, when we acknowledged the fundamental equality of the partners in a marriage.

The history of our "Christian nation" is a lot more recent than you think

From the NY Times:

[T]he founding fathers didn’t create the ceremonies and slogans that come to mind when we consider whether this is a Christian nation. Our grandfathers did.

Back in the 1930s, business leaders found themselves on the defensive. Their public prestige had plummeted with the Great Crash; their private businesses were under attack by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal from above and labor from below. To regain the upper hand, corporate leaders fought back on all fronts. They waged a figurative war in statehouses and, occasionally, a literal one in the streets; their campaigns extended from courts of law to the court of public opinion. But nothing worked particularly well until they began an inspired public relations offensive that cast capitalism as the handmaiden of Christianity....

Accordingly, throughout the 1930s and ’40s, corporate leaders marketed a new ideology that combined elements of Christianity with an anti-federal libertarianism.

And it links strongly to Eisenhower:

Uncoupling the language of “freedom under God” from its Christian libertarian roots, Eisenhower erected a bigger revival tent, welcoming Jews and Catholics alongside Protestants, and Democrats as well as Republicans. Rallying the country, he advanced a revolutionary array of new religious ceremonies and slogans.

The first week of February 1953 set the dizzying pace: On Sunday morning, he was baptized; that night, he broadcast an Oval Office address for the American Legion’s “Back to God” campaign; on Thursday, he appeared with Mr. Vereide at the inaugural National Prayer Breakfast; on Friday, he instituted the first opening prayers at a cabinet meeting.

The rest of Washington consecrated itself, too. The Pentagon, State Department and other executive agencies quickly instituted prayer services of their own. In 1954, Congress added “under God” to the previously secular Pledge of Allegiance. It placed a similar slogan, “In God We Trust,” on postage that year and voted the following year to add it to paper money; in 1956, it became the nation’s official motto.

During these years, Americans were told, time and time again, not just that the country should be a Christian nation, but that it always had been one. They soon came to think of the United States as “one nation under God.” They’ve believed it ever since.

So rather than being white-bread and boring, it turns out that the 50s were quite radical.  

And we're still paying for it.

Why people vote the way they do (2)

An interesting view of why American conservative voters apparently vote against their own economic interests.   According to this writer, it's because their other values supersede the economic.  (My emphasis)

But are voters really voting against their self-interest when they vote for candidates who share their values? Loyalty, respect for authority and some degree of sanctification create a more binding social order that places some limits on individualism and egoism. As marriage rates plummet, and globalization and rising diversity erodes the sense of common heritage within each nation, a lot of voters in many western nations find themselves hungering for conservative moral cuisine.

....The left typically thinks of equality as being central to fairness, and leftists are extremely sensitive about gross inequalities of outcome – particularly when they correspond along racial or ethnic lines. But the broader meaning of fairness is really proportionality – are people getting rewarded in proportion to the work they put into a common project? Equality of outcomes is only seen as fair by most people in the special case in which everyone has made equal contributions. The conservative media (such as the Daily Mail, or Fox News in the US) is much more sensitive to the presence of slackers and benefit cheats. They are very effective at stirring up outrage at the government for condoning cheating.

...

In sum, the left has a tendency to place caring for the weak, sick and vulnerable above all other moral concerns. It is admirable and necessary that some political party stands up for victims of injustice, racism or bad luck. But in focusing so much on the needy, the left often fails to address – and sometimes violates – other moral needs, hopes and concerns. When working-class people vote conservative, as most do in the US, they are not voting against their self-interest; they are voting for their moral interest. They are voting for the party that serves to them a more satisfying moral cuisine. The left in the UK and USA should think hard about their recipe for success in the 21st century.

Our previous discussion on this topic here (read the comments).  More on this tomorrow, with another view.

The Immigration Debate, the Executive Order, and the Other

Charles Blow in the NY Times:

Don’t let yourself get lost in the weeds. Don’t allow yourself to believe that opposition to President Obama’s executive actions on immigration is only about that issue, the president’s tactics, or his lack of obsequiousness to his detractors. 

This hostility and animosity toward this president is, in fact, larger than this president. This is about systems of power and the power of symbols. Particularly, it is about preserving traditional power and destroying emerging symbols that threaten that power.

....

This president is simply the embodiment of the threat, as far as his detractors are concerned, whether they are willing or able to articulate it as such. There is no denying the insinuations in such language: a fear of subjugation by people like this president, an “other” person, predisposed to lawlessness. ....

From this worldview, liberalism isn’t simply an alternate political sensibility, but a rot, an irreparable ruination, a violation of the laws of the land as the founding fathers (most of whom owned slaves at some point) envisioned, but also of the laws of nature, which they see as being directed by God. There are so many examples of this: opposition to L.G.B.T. rights, to the science undergirding climate change and efforts to arrest that change, and to allowing women a full range of reproductive options. 

Make no mistake: This debate is not just about this president, this executive order or immigration. This is about the fear that makes the face flush when people stare into a future in which traditional power — their power — is eroded, and about their desperate, by-any-means determination to deny that future.

Conservatives secede, liberals endure

I recently came across a very interesting piece that argues that although they lost the war, the Confederates actually won the peace:  not a Tea party, but a Confederate Party.   First, a little history:

After the U.S. forces won on the battlefield in 1865 and shattered the organized Confederate military, the veterans of that shattered army formed a terrorist insurgency that carried on a campaign of fire and assassination throughout the South until President Hayes agreed to withdraw the occupying U. S. troops in 1877.

By the time it was all over, the planter aristocrats were back in control, and the three constitutional amendments that supposedly had codified the U.S.A’s victory over the C.S.A.– the 13th, 14th, and 15th — had been effectively nullified in every Confederate state. The Civil Rights Acts had been gutted by the Supreme Court, and were all but forgotten by the time similar proposals resurfaced in the 1960s. Blacks were once again forced into hard labor for subsistence wages, denied the right to vote, and denied the equal protection of the laws.

In other words, the South did rise again!  And its culture endures, entrenched in the Old South but also  other parts of the country, particularly Appalachia and parts of the rural west.  Not in great shape in many respects, and a net taker, but in control of our political process.  The author draws specific comparisons to the Tea Party-inspired threats of secession and nullification.

The essence of the Confederate worldview is that the democratic process cannot legitimately change the established social order, and so all forms of legal and illegal resistance are justified when it tries.

That worldview is alive and well. During last fall’s government shutdown and threatened debt-ceiling crisis, historian Garry Wills wrote about our present-day Tea Partiers: “The presiding spirit of this neo-secessionism is a resistance to majority rule.”

Here's the thing:

When in the majority, Confederates protect the established order through democracy. If they are not in the majority, but have power, they protect it through the authority of law. If the law is against them, but they have social standing, they create shams of law, which are kept in place through the power of social disapproval. If disapproval is not enough, they keep the wrong people from claiming their legal rights by the threat of ostracism and economic retribution. If that is not intimidating enough, there are physical threats, then beatings and fires, and, if that fails, murder.

Violence.  Guns.  Bombing abortion clinics.  And the attempt to render the president illegitimate (birther conspiracies, etc) because he challenges the social order.  A black man dares to be president.

This is not a universal, both-sides-do-it phenomenon. Compare, for example, the responses to the elections of our last two presidents. Like many liberals, I will go to my grave believing that if every person who went to the polls in 2000 had succeeded in casting the vote s/he intended, George W. Bush would never have been president. I supported Gore in taking his case to the Supreme Court. And, like Gore, once the Court ruled in Bush’s favor — incorrectly, in my opinion — I dropped the issue. 

For liberals, the Supreme Court was the end of the line. Any further effort to replace Bush would have been even less legitimate than his victory. ....I don’t recall anyone suggesting that military officers refuse his orders on the grounds that he was not a legitimate president. 

Barack Obama, by contrast, won a huge landslide in 2008, getting more votes than any president in history. And yet, his legitimacy has been questioned ever since. The Birther movement was created out of whole cloth, there never having been any reason to doubt the circumstances of Obama’s birth. Outrageous conspiracy theories of voter fraud — millions and millions of votes worth — have been entertained on no basis whatsoever. Immediately after Obama took office, the Oath Keeper movement prepared itself to refuse his orders. 

A black president calling for change, who owes most of his margin to black voters — he himself is a violation of the established order. His legitimacy cannot be conceded.

Fascinating concept.

This isn't limited to the Old Confederacy, of course.  It seems to be a particular type of conservatism that trends towards nullification and threats.   Consider the recent ire of conservatives in the Roman Catholic church, outraged that Pope Francis is calling for a more merciful face on doctrine.  We can't have that.  Note the hysteria, manifest in columnist Ross Douthat's recent piece threatening a schism 
 over the possibility that divorcés could be readmitted to Commuion, or gays accepted.

No change can be allowed, and if it comes, then there will be schism.  No dynamic tension is possible.  We will walk, back to the former Pope.  

Here's an interesting article in the National Catholic Reporter on the small numbers of  vocal, angry conservatives and their leader Cardinal Burke.

Well, the Episcopal Church saw this too.  The conservatives were very clearly "my way or the highway", especially over the issues of sexuality.   Democratic polity be damned.  You can't do this, or we will walk, and deny your validity.  And so there was ACNA, and attempts to replace TEC in the Anglican Communion with a band of angry conservatives defined by what they are against.

So I would put it to you that there is a disturbing trend amongst a certain type of conservative that sees a defense of a particular social order as a high calling, even if it requires the destruction of an institution.

Shut down the government.  Repeal Obamacare.  Drown the government in the bathtub.  Unpave the streets, dismiss the police.  Every man for himself, with a gun at the window.

Hot Air

I've had little to say for the last few days, because it all seems same-old same old.  I've been feeling burdened and burned out by work and by politics.

Marriage equality has had a booming month so far, with 32 states now having equal marriage rights.  Appeals are flying but the Supreme Court seems content to stay out of it unless and until there is a conflict between circuits.  Fundamentalists are throwing hissy fits and demanding the right to discriminate against LGBT people on the grounds of religious freedom. To which the answer is, if an adherent of a white-supremicist church (and there are such) demanding the "right" to discriminate against a black person in the civil realm, would we allow it?  How about a refusal to serve a Muslim woman in a head scarf?  But I've gone on about this at length elsewhere and I haven't the energy to do it again.

The Republicans (or the right-wing fanatics who have taken over the Republican party) scarcely even pretend any more to support democracy, but admit that they want to prevent Democratic constituencies from voting.  They  continue providing money and power to the Koch brothers, the fossil fuel industry, the military-industrial complex, and the big banks.  And the climate is continuing its dangerous change. It's hard to conclude anything than that we are screwed.

The Roman Catholic Synod on the family backtracked on making overtures to respect LGBT people, let alone welcome them. The conservatives are smirking at their slap-back of Pope Francis.  And yet, the transparency in the final document and the votes on each paragraph are such that it appears there is a more closely divided church, between conservatives by-the-book happy to lay crosses on other people's shoulders, and progressives of more pastoral instincts.  Polls show a surging majority of young American Catholics support gay rights and marriage equality.  At least arch-conservative Raymond Cardinal Burke, known for his love of garments liturgical, has suffered another demotion.

In the Episcopal Church, there's been the agonizing slow-motion crash at General Theological Seminary in New York.  I don't know much about seminaries, but I know a lot about secular academe, where the faculty have been demoted to a minor managerial role as the institutions become increasingly corporatized.   At GTS, it  bears all the hallmarks of heavy-handed institutional leadership, a hot-house atmosphere with a weakened faculty making dramatic ultimatums, and a board digging in its heels.  One would somehow have hoped that a seminary would do better,  both the faculty and the board.

And the Northern White Rhino species is down to 6 individuals, guaranteeing they will go extinct.

Stupid humans.

The Christian Right v the Christian Left

From the Daily Beast, describing The Religious Right’s Slow-Motion Suicide

I it’s not just same-sex marriage. The country has liberalized culturally in a range of ways in the past six or eight years, and it’s not only not going back, it’s charging relentlessly forward. .... 

[The Christian Right is] a group that is losing power, and I think the leaders and even the rank-and-filers know it. Their vehicle, the Republican Party, is going libertarian on them. Rand Paul, whether he wins the 2016 nomination or not, is clearly enough of a force within the party that he is pushing it away from the culture wars. He is joined in this pursuit by the conservative intellectual class, which knows the culture wars are a dead-bang loser for the GOP and which finds the culture warriors more than a little embarrassing, and by the establishment figures, the Karl Rove types, who stroked them back in 2004 but who now see them as a liability, at least at the presidential level. There are still, of course, many states where these voters come in quite handy in that they elect many Republican representatives and senators.

Of course, they aren't going easily.  And they have a new bogeyman, the Christian Left.

A resurgence of the Christian left may seem a distant hope, but the idea of it has certainly spooked the Christian right. Such is the impetus for Distortion: How the New Christian Left is Twisting the Gospel & Damaging the Faith. It's a curious book from accomplished evangelical author Chelsen Vicari, who aims in it to address a "crisis" in evangelicalism — namely the rise of a Christian left. 

Vicari's book is neither a principled critique of Christian leftism writ large nor a principled defense of a Christian right-wing; on the contrary, it's very narrowly focused on American Christians who align with the Democratic Party versus American Christians who align with the Republican Party. It's in favor of the latter, of course, but in so doing it visits a number of tired arguments that are only tenuously linked to Christianity, and are more thoroughly associated with secular partisan politics.

Mark Sandlin is happy to be a bogeyman.

Are we on the Christian left really the Bogeyman? Do we really have that kind of influence? 

Not yet — but we are working on it. 

And it’s working. 

And that’s what makes us so scary to Vicari and her readership. 

When we were a voice that was constantly drowned out by the megaphone that is the Christian right and their maniacal stronghold on traditional forms of communication, Vicari probably thought of us as that annoying little dust bunny under the bed that just would not go away. 

With the continued rise of new forms of communication and the way social media has given progressive Christians the ability to connect and be heard, we’ve become a threat. We’re no longer the annoying little dust bunny under the bed. We are the big bad monster that is ruining everything.
....
What conservative Christianity has become looks far too little like what the teachings of Jesus would encourage us to be. 

Causing a crisis of faith in that kind of belief system? I’m all for it.
 

How the culture wars function in opposition to the common good

From an interview with Vince Miller, the Gudorf Chair in Catholic Theology and Culture at the University of Dayton, in the National Catholic Reporter:

What are the culture wars?

Culture war politics focuses on what can divide groups, polarize them and then mobilize them against each other. Part of what defines the culture wars is rhetoric: using language that portrays the opponent as not simply wrong, but morally depraved. Politically, it seeks policies and legislation that do not appeal to the majority. It aims to mobilize the base, but not broad coalitions. It's always about getting 51 percent.....

And igniting these battles was a deliberate political decision.

the culture wars developed out of a political strategy intended to mobilize conservative evangelicals and other conservative Christians in opposition to the cultural changes of the 1960s -- the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and the women's movement. It wasn't just a grassroots backlash; it was a political strategy designed to mobilize a backlash. It turned those moral issues into political issues, and in so doing, it dissolved complex constituencies and communities. It sorted America out along the lines of the culture war.

While politically this has been successful, in the sense of empowering certain political viewpoints, it has been deeply harmful to a functioning government or any concept of the common good.  He explains that the consequences to Christianity are severe, losing an entire generation

For people whose access to Christianity is largely what they see on television or in the news or in the paper, they got to define the public face of Christianity. And study after study has shown that the millennial generation has gotten that message loud and clear, and they don't find it interesting at all. They find it repugnant.

Remember, the "nones"are a large and growing group, and ex-Catholics are also a large and growing group in the spectrum of American religious identity. The Christian right has tried to force their brand on us and damaged it perhaps irreparably.

What's lost in all this warfare is any sense of community or shared values.  "My way or the highway" is not the way to govern or get anything done, as we see in the gridlock in Congress. Compromise is not a dirty word.

I think it could turn around if we understand the dead end that this style of politics is. And that's the work of journalists, that's the work of politicians, to say how fruitless it's been and to point out what's been taken off the table in the process -- to point out that this kind of politics has not led to a more just and flourishing society, but to a society where people are more vulnerable and more on their own.

And if we don't?

My greatest fear is that the next step will reject the culture war morality but simply slide into a complete libertarianism, where there's no moral obligation of society to anybody, where government shouldn't be involved in any kind of moral question. And we'll just continue on with Republican economic politics. My fear is that we've really been set up for that move. What we have to do to avoid it is argue clearly that what we've been ignoring is the common good itself.