By Rick Hiebert. All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission
An interesting item was just posted at The Atlantic magazine’s website.
Jonathan Merritt notes that The Moral Majority was founded 33 years ago today, and talks about his own interaction with Jerry Falwell as a potential Liberty University student wanting some more information.
He goes on to suggest that while the US church has more potical clout these days, it may have lost its way as a result of politicizing. But, I’ll just point you to what he wrote and let you consider what he has to say for yourself.
I will respond to this post here.
I was raised as a religious fundamentalist, in the “Right” and I possess the right pedigree of this faith: born and reborn and baptized as a charismatic – premillennialist, follower of Dominionism, a disciple of Francis A Schaeffer and for the longest time a hater of homosexuals. Let’s face it, I was trained to be a red neck, a bigot. The difference is that I got an education and I gradually moved away from hate and none-sense. Now I am here, a semi-deist.
I see that this form of Christian faith is dying. Young people have deserted this evangelical faith by a large exodus (biblical sense). Most of the people I know that is brought up as an evangelical fundamentalist is not practicing or church attending anymore. It is particular true if they have a regular college education. We raise our children in the Episcopal Church, there is a very high chance of them be completely lost by the age of 25-26. If you look, this faith is similar to a tropical plant being transplanted to the North Pole. It needs a greenhouse to shield it from the reality of life, and harsh modernity. People no longer walk around thinking the earth is the centre of the universe, or that human beings are the epitome of God’s creation. The earth is no longer circled by the stars or the sun. The universe that used to be three tier layer (heaven/earth/hell), is no longer so. No one has seen these places, and as it turns out, it is conceived now only and faith and theological terms. Another words, it is not real.
Young people are not stupid, once they have a modern education ( which the reactionary fundamentalists hate), they can think critically and they demand more than just a blind faith in a 6000 yo young earth, or the myth of Adam and Eve, or the mythological figure of a theological Christ that is coming imminently. None of these folklore are real, they are stories, and myths. These young people begin to attend a regular university which helps them to use their critical faculty, and they usually arrive at the conclusion that faith is not real, it is a make believe. Those who chose to shunt modernity will live in the blind world. Most people no longer see the truths of miraculous virgininal birth of Jesus, the physical resurrection of this small town peasant, or the reality of hell. None of these tales no longer keep people spell-bound. Instead, they have lives to lead, and soccer games to attend, and their lives go on. Religion that is aligned with a certain political philosophy is in the danger of being replaced once that philosophy has been deemed irrelevant. So Dr Dobson is right when he says a days is coming where his people will be in the dark for the longest time.
Let’s face it, abortion is not a political issue when the nation is facing massive unemployment, and when half of the world is closed to starvation, what good would be it be if we bring the Prayer back to school when more than 50-70 per cent of children came from unchurched background, broken homes? And the relevancy of the 10 commandments, where it teaches women as properties, where it condones polygamy and slavery. Which part of this people do not understand?
I think when a religion has served its purpose, it is time to evolve into a higher form. There was a time people know very little of the natural forces at work and the diseases they suffered, they attributed these to divine acts. We have natural explanations for these things:AIDS, earthquakes, and tsunami. We no longer deem the religious answer adequate for modernity. Teaching your kids in a home school setting only harms them because once they get out, they see the real world, they will not only desert their faith, some of their brains may be damaged for life. If the rise of global temperature is not a problem (the one home schooling parent taught this in the film ‘Jesus Camp’), and it is just our god given right to trample the poor and consume as much resources as we feel like it. We need to defend a political Israel where it has past its due date, I mean, do more people have to die to defend our right to allow young kids to smoke pot and to burn unlimited amount of natural resources?
People are not stupid, when they find that it is their faith that is responsible for the destruction of others and their way of life, they will leave this make believe world behind. The exodus has begun. I do not see Christianity disappearing. There is always a hard core, but return this peasant faith to its founding, let those people who have little or no education embrace it, let the superstition flourish, and leave the running of a world that is beautiful to its citizens. Let the human race continued to be, until the time, and perhaps another type of life will eventually replace ours, that is the will of God, and that is God.
I think that the leaders of the so called ‘moral majority’ and similar groups have manipulated many Christians in order to enhance their own personal power/fortunes. Pat Robertson is a great example of this.
I happen to hail from a place where church and politics were intertwined. Believe me when I say that it was not to the benefit of the public, it was for the benefit of political leaders and church leaders. Period.
We had a saying. When the Church and politicians get into bed together, it is the public that get ‘screwed’. I still believe this to be true. Just take a look at some of those jurisdictions or countries where church and state are intertwined. Does anyone really want to live in an environment like that???
That can work both ways; we’re seeing a new left-of-center Danish government push same-sex marriage on the Lutheran church, since it’s the state church and takes its orders from the government. The Danish Lutherans are rather liberal, but not quite that liberal as a whole.
The Merritt piece left a bit to be desired; while some of the more toxic folks on the right don’t help, a cease fire in the culture wars wouldn’t result in good PR for the church, just no PR in the news, since the good stuff the church does rarely gets any press. The largely bad PR for the church in pop culture would still be there without much to answer it.