From millionaire televangelists preaching hurricanes as punishment for gays, Creationism, Prosperity Gospel, military & gun worship and widespread support for Trump, American evangelical Christianity looks like particularly nasty Know Nothingism. What’s wrong(er) about that particular flavor of religion? What does that twistedness stem from?
My theory: are you gay? No? Okay, so we say gay sex is a sin. If you’ll agree with us, then we’ll wag our fingers at those sinners and hold you up as an example of virtue; all you need to do is resist the temptation to do gay stuff. You’re not “tempted” to do gay stuff, so that should be easy for you; effortless, even.
Watch me now say that God created life on this planet: does it cost you anything to nod in agreement? Well, probably not, no. If you’ll now rail with me against the godless corruptors who preach the opposite – well, they’ll be sinners, and you’ll get the ‘virtuous’ tag: again, by dint of you doing no real work. Easy? Effortless!
How about we agree that lots of folks who have money earned it and deserve it? You just have to mouth the slogan, instead of giving anything to charity. So, again, it costs you nothing to ‘be on the right side’ as we cast the folks who are out there putting in effort to give the poor more stuff as being ‘on the wrong side’. You get the praise by doing, well, nothing, really. Easy! Effortless!
It costs you nothing to not criticize the military, or guns, or Trump; and if folks out there take the opposite position – well, again, they’re sinners, because they’re advocating for the wrong stuff; just like you’re a model of virtue, because you champion all the right stuff. Er, in the sense that you can “champion” it without, like, getting up from your seat; “they” are evil, and you’re good by just – refraining.
Now, imagine you’ve been told that since you were a toddler.
The modern Christian Right was born in the 1960s and 1970s. It was largely a reaction to school desegregation.
Cite?
Much of the same Biblical arguments against gay rights and gay marriage were used against desegregation and mixed marriage.
One of the classics.
Leviticus 19:19
A number of denominations split up into Southern and Northern variants in the run-up to the Civil War, with the distinguishing feature being justification v. condemnation of slavery. Many of these splits continued through a century’s worth of Jim Crow as well, with one of those Southern denominations, the Southern Baptist Convention, still quite prominent and numerous today.
Southern white evangelicalism wasn’t so nationally prominent in the past century until its resurgence in the 1970s because of its deep association with a position on race that the rest of the nation wanted nothing to do with; it had to abandon that stance to become more salable. But it’s still the same hard-hearted institution that justified treating blacks like shit; it’s just moved on to a different set of political issues.
Religion and tribalism end up mixing a lot. I’ve heard that a lot of what we see in modern Muslim practice that we don’t like isn’t “real Islam”, it’s tribal traditions that somehow became religious practice. Likewise, a lot of what evangelicals preach just isn’t biblical. It’s just them believing in a personification of God that matches their own personalities. The old Catholics that burned people for heresy were the same way. They were burning heretics as pagans so they kept doing it as Christians. Only the definition of heresy had changed. That’s also why pagan holidays just became Christian holidays.
Man makes religion in his own image. That’s how it’s always been.
Thank you: this sentence is a very succinct and apt way of putting it.
The sects were refugees from Britain and it’s rather mild suppression of more excitable puritan beliefs.
These were people who believed the End was coming sooner than later, and their ultimate resting-place for eternity would be the Lake of Burning Fire.
Once in America they had revivals and burnt-over districts at intervals.
A man can start to think mighty strange things sitting in a cabin on the grasslands with only the Good Book for relaxation, and imagining the little prairie dogs outside are miniature devils waiting to snatch his soul as with Herr Dr. Faustus.
One needs to share the Good News.
I’m just someone who was alive and observing during the timeframe and forming my own impressions, and not someone who studied the phenomenon in great & organized detail, but I think you’re looking in the right direction but too narrowly and too specifically.
I saw it as a reaction to an American change away from a fairly unified set of cultural axioms and values to a cultural landscape in which everything was subject to questioning and possible rejection. Not just white racial hegemony but American righteousness and male supremacy and yes of course the unquestionable correctness of being Christian, and conventional sexual morality, the imperative to be law-abiding, the faith in one’s leaders and celebrities and social leading lights, and central to it all, perhaps, the respect for Authority, all that was being held up to increasingly cynical and dubious scrutiny.
And there was a reactionary response to it, a backlash of “Is nothing sacred?!?” that took the form of enshrining an imaginary (or at least significantly airbrushed) 1950s and trying frantically to get back to it, a political-cultural nostalgia for a time before these worrisome questions, a time when we all thought that knowing what’s right was as easy as learning your times tables.
The evangelical Christians were partially sincere folks who wanted simple but rock-solid unquestionable answers they could have absolute faith in. They craved certainty in an uncertain world. The other component was the armada of cynical opportunists who built little empires around the exploitation of the folks in the first category, gaining a shitload of money and political power from doing so.
However ugly you thought the hypocrisy and inanity of the evangelicals has become , it’s getting worse.
If “God raises up and places all people in places of authority” did he also raise up heathens like Hussein Obama?
School segregation was a hugely important issue; much right-wing babbling that pretended to be about something else was really “dog-whistling” about the evils of racial integration.
One county in Virginia shut down its entire public school system for five years rather than comply with federal law. White kids were still educated at taxpayer expense at private white schools. Black kids were out of luck.
the initial observation is not a bad one, but this is a just-so story…
There is no sign in the classical history that the classical religions punished religious heresy by burning. Indeed it is a bit foreign to them.
What was punished by burning under the roman law was treason among other forms.
There is a great deal of revulsion against the Prosperity Gospel within evangelical Christianity itself; indeed, oftentimes the harshest critics of that false teaching are evangelicals.
Most evangelicals don’t like Trump; they voted for him because they felt he would better help enact their agenda than Hillary. Pence is far more preferred than Trump. A candidate like Ted Cruz would have fit the billing even better.
There’s also cherry-picking involved. The tens of millions of evangelicals who live ordinary do-good lives don’t get any attention; the few televangelists who are scammers, get lots of media coverage, because what’s the point of covering the 99% boring good folks when you can focus on the 1% bad apples?
Finally, the OP sounds like right-wing critics of Islam:* “9/11, ISIS, fatwas, bombings, burqas, killings - my, isn’t Islam a particularly nasty religion?”*
Note that I didn’t speak in terms of Christianity as a whole. The Islamic equivalent of my OP would more properly be: “Isn’t Salafist Islam a particularly nasty religion” which it is.
Yeah, but they’re still considered to be part of the evangelical community, despite their sins. But 84 year old Eugene Peterson almost got himself kicked out of the tent for saying he’d officiate a gay wedding, and would have been out if he hadn’t retracted it, despite 30 years as a widely-read evangelical author. Larycia Hawkins got kicked out, for the sin of wearing a hijab. So sure, they’re criticized, but they’re still part of the family, though you see how little it can take to get you kicked out.
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Bullshit. They’ve felt that way about every Republican for decades, but they voted for Trump in much greater numbers than for any of the others.
Why do you think it’s 1% bad apples? While there are very few outright scammers, just about all of the preachers are preaching the same evil crap that would make Jesus vomit. And the people in the pews are lapping it all up.
Despite most religions putting the emphasis on love, humans by nature are more motivated by what they hate. Almost all religion and politics is based on mobilizing against what is hated, although actual constructive change only comes from having most positive goals. That’s why evangelical Christianity has been impotent as a political force. Hating modern morality gives them a sense of unity, but what are they fighting for? Has electing Donald Trump made what they actually want more or less likely? Would a Jimmy Carter have served those purposes better?
And how are things in Earth-googolplex these days?
They are good at getting people they want elected, but how have those anti-abortion and anti-gay crusades been going?
Actually, I should modify my first sentence. They are good at defeating the godless heathens who draw their most intense hatred, but not very good at getting Christian policies enacted.
An almost fanatical devotion to [del]The Pope[/del] Jesus?
They are very good at limiting access to abortion rights, by making it hard for clinics to remain open, so that many women have to travel considerable distances to get an abortion. Couple that with the waiting periods and ultrasounds and other hoops they force women to go through, and it really becomes quite problematic. So I’d say their antiabortion crusade is doing all too well.
Plus their ability to get Dubya and Trump into the White House have put Roberts, Alito, and Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, and many extremely conservative jurists on the lower Federal courts.
They are also quite successful at the state and local levels on a variety of fronts.