The Christian Right's Vile PR Game

Thankfully, the younger generations are walking away from religion in record numbers and Christian denominations are shrinking over all despite the mega church phenomenon in some areas which, in fact, simply represents a reshuffling of existing believers from one church to another.  But this decline doesn't mean that the far right will get in touch with objective reality anytime soon.  Thinking for one's self and realizing that one's life has been lived based on myths and fairy tales is too terrifying for these people. Hence the continued effort by Christofascists to browbeat others - especially waffling believers - into accepting their sick and toxic religious beliefs.  A piece in Salon looks at how the effort may actually be backfiring.  Here are highlights:

[C]onservative American Christians have not learned an important childhood lesson: You can’t threaten, vilify or bully someone into liking you. In simpler times, stories of persecution and Christian supremacy were delivered in sermons and badly written books, but a recent batch of films has hit theaters with the net effect of corralling American fundamentalists into an ever-shrinking intellectual ghetto. I watched not only “Left Behind,” but also a sampling of some other recent Christian films in an attempt to understand what messages they convey to this ever-more-insular community.

By way of background, I have lived both irrational religion and right-wing politics. . . . As years passed, I grew uncomfortable with the theocratic right and became a libertarian, but even that wasn’t far enough from the religious right for me. Today it is impossible to separate religion from right-wing politics, creating a community rooted in dueling fantasies of persecution and righteousness with a pasty, white Jesus at the helm. Christianity expressed in culture and in religious movies has nothing to do with faith, decency or alleviating suffering. It’s a bizarre American offshoot best expressed by second-amendment Jesus and cutting food stamps for hungry children.

You can’t judge Christian films like other movies. Any casual examination shows them to be conventionally terrible without exception. But they are not meant to be good, but rather they are designed to deliver pointed messages, spurring audiences to promote and support established political and religious powers. They are vehicles that carry naked threats for people who believe differently and are threatening reminders to keep believers in line. For those opposed to reactionary religion and coercion, it’s important to examine these films to understand the stories this slice of America is telling itself and foisting on the rest of us.

“Left Behind” is the most ambitious and mainstream of recent Christian film offerings. The plot is simple: All “good Christians” and young children (but not teens) are whisked up to Heaven, leaving the vast majority of the planet to riot, panic and self destruct. . . . . Like so much of white America, the film comically fumbles with American diversity. There is an African American woman, a journalist, a junkie, a little person and a devout Muslim. It’s a juvenile and clumsy attempt to reflect real America that only serves to highlight the insular, monochromatic and artificial makeup of conservative America.

Christians make up 2.5 billion out of a total of just over 7 billion of the earth’s population at this moment (estimates vary). This emphasis on mass punishment of non-Christians makes “Left Behind” nothing more than a planetary-sized snuff film.  The most offensive part of the show by far is the Muslim who is “left behind” despite his faith and love for god. The character is the kind of moderate Muslim that even American Christians could accept. 

In “God’s Not Dead” released in March, the core message is that education is both evil and dangerous and that all answers are contained in the Bible. This is a common theme for fundamentalists, one that does a great deal to keep people uninformed and afraid. I found God’s Not Dead to be the most unbelievable, two-dimensional and downright offensive of all the films I reviewed . . 

Every single film I reviewed features some variation of the Christian persecution complex. No serious person can argue Christians are really persecuted in America. It is anti-factual. . . . . The “war on Christianity narrative” is a wholesale fabrication that injects religious strife into a country founded on actual religious freedom.

The danger with this recurring and false persecution narrative is that it takes away from the real suffering of actual people. An excellent (but depressing) essay by Alex Morris in Rolling Stone details the suffering of homeless gay youths who, because of their sexuality, are shunned and cast out of religious families.  . . . .  Discarding your children over sexuality is what persecution really looks like. I have never heard a case of a liberal family throwing a born-again Christian teenager into the street.

It is important to note that not all Christians believe the warped ideology or hostility expressed in Christian moviemaking.

The people who create and consume Christian film are neither mature nor reflective. They are at their core superstitious, afraid and tribal. They self-identify overwhelmingly Republican and shout about “moochers” while vilifying the poor. They violate the teachings and very essence of their own “savior” while deriving almost sexual pleasure from the fictional suffering of atheists, Muslims, Buddhists, Wiccans, Hindus, and even liberal Christians. To top it all off, the stories they tell themselves are borderline psychotic.

Christian film with its cardboard characters and heavy-handed messages will only drive an increasingly diverse and media-savvy populace away. Failing a profound change of heart, the best this community can hope for are films so bad no one will bother to watch them.

As I have continually said, conservative Christians are not nice or decent people. They suffer from what to me is a form of mental illness that mixes masochism and sadism.  They need to be shunned by decent society.