What this means is that while religious practitioners still enjoy their apparent majority in America, each new generational “cohort” has been less likely to practice religion than the previous generation. Among tenth and twelfth graders, almost all the drop-off in churchgoing happened in the years between 2000 and 2013.
Category: Lies
The religious right is at it again. This time, Republicans in Tennessee passed a measure allowing for the construction of a monument to the unborn “victims of abortion.”
What they should be calling it is a monument to the systematic oppression of women by a society that is still run unduly in large part by religious fanatics.
The Republican-led Tennessee House of Representatives already passed a bill, and the Tennessee State Senate added an amendment, sending the legislation back to the house before it went on to Republican Governor Bill Haslam. The proposal would raise private funds to erect what the Tennessee legislature is calling the “Tennessee Monument to Unborn Children, In Memory of the Victims of Abortion: Babies, Women and Men.”
If there are indeed multiple parallel universes all stacked on top of each other, there isn’t a single one in which support for President Trump is compatible with a modern understanding of civility.
Yet here we are, living in a country where more than 80 percent of white, self-identifying evangelicals chose Trump as the exemplar of their values and the savior of Christianity’s flagging dominance in American politics.
Among the several amazing feats of mental gymnastics Christians engage in to allow the inclusion of Trump into their ideological canon, the idea that vociferous support for him comes only from the fringes of their leadership is one of the most ridiculous. Donald Trump is as mainstream a Christian president as it’s possible to be. However, “no one upholds Trump as a moral exemplar,” wrote a breathlessly apologetic Marc Thiessen even before the Stormy Daniels interview aired.
Comedian Adam Ferrara has a very direct one-liner that he uses to define Catholicism: “Basically, if it feels good, stop.”
Depending on who you ask, Catholics may or may not qualify as Christians. The idea of preserving oneself, however, as a matter of faith, is present in both. The Bible says that “your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.” A vessel that should remain pure to carry out the Lord’s work.
But as we know, many people of Christian faith practice some form of indulgence and don’t believe it to compromise their faith. So the fact that the Christian right takes such an issue with marijuana is a bit confounding.
Sin and Perception
Religious texts are powerful rhetorical devices because they are subject to interpretation. America has no state religion, but the right wing has strongly endorsed what it preaches are a set of Christian values, making the movement more approachable to the seventy percent of Americans who identify as Christians.
You might think that for people who hold this set of values, Alabama’s Republican candidate for Senate, Roy Moore, would be stoned after five women came forward and made claims that Moore came on to them or worse when they were teenagers. The Christian right, however, seems to have taken a position of denial.
Moore’s not the only one setting a bad example for Christians in politics, either. There’s also our president.
Where Organized Religion and Politics Meet