Christian Right Concedes Defeat?

This post headline might be premature, but one can always hope and dream. The fact that James Dobson, one of the leading hate merchants for the Christianists, apparently is coming to believe that his side in the culture wars has lost will hopefully become the seed for a self-fulfilling prophesy. Dobson has been leader in disseminating anti-gay hate and has worked diligently to maintain the "choice myth" for cynical political and financial reasons. Personally, I view him as also playing a major role in giving Christianity a bad name and causing younger Americans to stampede away from the Republican Party. Dobson has defined evangelical Christians by who they hate which is in fact almost everyone. Here are some highlights from the Telegraph that look at Dobson's whining that the Christianists have lost the battle and the movement's self-inflicted wounds:

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America's religious Right has conceded that the election of US President Barack Obama has sealed its defeat in the cultural war with permissiveness and secularism. Leading evangelicals have admitted that their association with George W. Bush has not only hurt the cause of social conservatives but contributed to the failure of the key objectives of their 30-year struggle.

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James Dobson, 72, who resigned recently as head of Focus on the Family - one of the largest Christian groups in the country - and once denounced the Harry Potter books as witchcraft, acknowledged the dramatic reverse for the religious Right in a farewell speech to staff. . . . “We tried to defend the unborn child, the dignity of the family, but it was a holding action,” he said. “We are awash in evil and the battle is still to be waged. We are right now in the most discouraging period of that long conflict. Humanly speaking, we can say we have lost all those battles.”

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[T]he number of states permitting civil partnerships between homosexuals is rising, and the campaign to restore prayer to schools after 40 years - a decision that helped create the Moral Majority - has got nowhere. Though the struggle will go on, the confession of Mr Dobson, who started his ministry from scratch in 1977, came amid growing concern that church attendance in the United States is heading the way of Britain, where no more than ten per cent worship every week.

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[A] serious rift is emerging among social conservatives in the wake of his [Obama's] election victory. A growing legion of disenchanted grassroots believers does not blame liberal opponents for the decline in faith or the failures of the religious Right. Rather, they hold responsible Republicans - particularly Mr Bush - and groups like Focus on the Family that have worked with the party, for courting Christian voters only to betray promises of pursuing the conservative agenda once in office.

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Michael Spencer, a writer who lives in a Christian community in Kentucky, said the religious Right had suffered from its identification with Mr Bush, the most unpopular president in living memory, and the extremist rhetoric of some on the religious Right.

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Mr Spencer forecast a major collapse in evangelical Christianity within ten years. “Evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and political conservatism. This will prove to be a very costly mistake,” he wrote.