I’d change this to Christian has come to mean anti-gay and anti-abortion.
There’s a stark difference. I don’t believe the element of Christianity that’s usually called ‘pro-life’ is pro life at all. They’re pro-birth if they’re pro anything, as what happens after the baby is born is of absolutely no concern to them. And if that causes the parent(s) or even the child to be left in abject poverty, or other undue or horrific circumstances, sometimes dependent upon medical attention for the rest of their lives, then so be it. At least the baby was born.
Perhaps it was the people who chose willful ignorance of what the bible actually says, took the little they actually knew and them followed them in an ala carte fashion, distilled the 66 books, 27 authors, and 1600 +/- year time span into a few “main themes”, and then threw in a whole bunch of humanistic reasonings.
To be honest, yes, I believe there is some of that going on. Let me clear though. I believe Democrats can genuinely be just as religious as Republicans, but it’s not Democrats’ inclination to wear it on their sleeves and take positions influenced by religion, at least it hasn’t been until very recently.
Democrats are much more laissez-faire about religious expression than Republicans and if the Republicans hadn’t been so successful for the last 30 years in wielding the spear of religion and measuring their opponents by it, you’d hear nary a peep about Democrats’ personal religious beliefs during their campaigns for political office. However, they’ve allowed themselves to be sucked into the terrible practice of professing their religion loudly and often in an attempt prove to the hypnotized electorate that “See? I’m okay. I believe in your sky god too, in fact, you should vote for me because I believe more strongly than my opponent, even though I’m a member of the Heathen party…and, oh yeah, God bless America.”
I believe Obama believes in the Christian God. I also believe he played up that belief because he wanted to get elected. I believe Biden is religious like many Catholics in America; he goes to church on Sunday and doesn’t think about religion or God again until the following Sunday.
Nitpik, nary doesn’t mean none. Buuuuuut, you’re absolutely correct. Jimmy Carter didn’t try to hide his religiosity. However, you must agree that his religion had almost nothing to do with him being elected, or being considered viable, other than the unspoken requirement that candidates be some flavor of Christian.
I wondered on seeing the thread title what this would be about.
You know, Xtianity was hijacked by worse than bozos in its first few centuries, right? And then there were all the bozos running things for 1000 years thereafter. Maybe the bozos we have now are just what’s left after the rise of unbelief in the last 200 years.
I beg to differ with this. It’s my understanding that evangelicals and fundamentalists backed Carter because of his born-again Christianity, then were terribly disappointed when he actually governed like a Christian. So they turned to the casually agnostic divorced former actor Reagan in 1980.
And thus did the Evangelicals and Fundamentalists trade their faith for a pot o’ message…
I don’t remember it that way, and I followed Carter since he was on What’s My Line in 1973, but you may be right. My memory from that time is a little foggy. I was a little too busy trying to get through high school at the time.
You cannot and should not compromise with tyrants and bigots and sadists. And their “disagreement” with homosexuality and women’s ownership of their bodies is called hate because it is.
No. They just want to either take from society and never give back ( “Trust us, we’ll give back as much or more without it being taxed out of us !” Yeah, right ). Or, they want to use it as a tool of extortion and religious propaganda; “No baptism, no food. Listen to the preacher or you’re out on the street.”
I don’t see that happened or is happening. The thing I appreciate about Obama is that he says in discussions of faith that believers have to use a common language for their positions. If your values and principles are connected to your beliefs, when you enter a a civil discourse about issues within a diverse society you need to use language that everyone understands when discussing those values and principles.
That means “It’s in the Bible so there” isn’t useful communication.
As far as I can tell, you are the only SDMB member who is allowed to hurl those kinds of personal insults at a large group of fellow SDMB members in the forum of Great Debates. From others, it isn’t tolerated even when couched in code or hypothetical language. So, since I can’t return your rhetoric in kind, just let me say that I’m neither a tyrant nor a bigot nor a sadist, and I would appreciate it if you would name precisely which Christians who post here are people you believe to be those things.
I happened to witness the “Reagan Revolution” from the inside of a Baptist church/school.
Yes, there was preaching from the pulpit, the collection of funds during church, the overt promotion of Reagan as the “Christian” candidate, they even took us on a field trip to hear him speak (I still have the button)
It was one of the main experiences which led me to abandon organized Christianity (that and the murder of Lennon, whom our teacher and pastor said of; “he’s now burning in the hell he didn’t believe in” and refused to say a prayer for him or his family.)
I learned later that the Reagan campaign had focused strongly on the “Christian” vote, sending out the largest ever mass mailing targeted at this demographic and portraying Reagan and the Republican party as the “Christian” one. It paid off big time, despite offending many Christians who didn’t consider the platform nec. “Christian” or even the opposite of those principles. The irony was that Reagan was not, by most accounts, all that fundy in his beliefs (neither is McCain, but he allowed himself to be marketed the same way, even choosing Palin to appease that demographic)
This association has stuck. I think this was the origin of the current affiliation and the Repubs continue to attempt to exploit it and a great many fund. Christians continue to blindly support Repubs.
Note that the following is my hypothesis based on my current knowledge:
To some extent, the very beginning of Christianity caused this. It’s had a (very understandable at one point) persecution complex since day one and some factions have never really grown out of it. This influences them to paint their enemies with an apocalyptic brush and insist that they are the last bastion of civilization. This kind of thinking also feeds the growth in political power, since they must fight or die. Thereby causing the burrowing of certain Christian groups and mindsets into the structure where they can resist the foe from the ramparts.
Let me interpret the OP in a very narrow sense and answer it. I take the OP as asking when, in the view of many Americans, did it begin to seem that the only spokespeople for Christianity in the public sphere were members of the religious right. The answer to that question is about 1980. Before that point, the prominent religious figures in the U.S. who were frequently quoted in the media were spread all over the political spectrum. There were many very conservative Christian leaders before that time, but there were also a lot of liberal ones. During the Vietnam war, for instance, many of the anti-war leaders were religious figures. The Religious Right, according to Garry Wills in his recent book Head and Heart: American Christianities, ought to be considered as a historical period like three other major religious movements in American history, the First Great Awakening, the Second Great Awakening, and the creation of Fundamentalism. These four movements seem to follow about a 90-year cycle. They peaked in 1730, 1820, 1910, and 2000, approximately. Whether Christianity as a whole is a conservative force or a liberal one can’t possibly be answered in GQ. I think it’s too complicated even for GD. It’s not clear to me that one can define conservatism and liberalism consistently over the past two thousand years to make that judgment.
Too late to edit, but I wanted to add that prior to 1979-80, I don’t ever recall encountering such a widespread assumption among Christians that the Democrats were the spawn of Satan or that the Republicans were the only option for God-fearing Americans.
You could be a “good Christian” and vote Democrat. No-one even gave it a second thought. Most Christians I knew were die-hard Democrats.
All of a sudden, being a Democrat became suspect, and being a Republican became assumed in Christian circles.
It was, imo, a carefully manufactured idea…marketing at it’s best/worst.
I think part of the problem is that Jesus left a message of peace, meekness, and “love your enemies.” That’s just too passive for many people. They got frustrated and decided to become “active” in their faith. Most people feel empowered while being preachy and aggressive. A sense of righteousness serves as a catalyst for that. These are the type of people who see Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. as “wimps” for leading examples of non-violence and non-aggression.
Also, if you have someone behind a podium telling the masses to stand up and take action, especially in a boisterous crowd, people are going to charge out and act like the “warriors” they see themselves as.
Pastors have a lot of power to get a lot of people to do their own will. I think many of them don’t even know that they are stroking their own ego, and they believe that they are doing the will of God. There is a lot of power in the implication that if someone doesn’t act, they aren’t being “good Christians.” Jesus would have been seen, in the modern age, as a terrible Christian.