Is the "Christian Right" Going Extinct

For years this blog has argued that the so-called "Christian Right" and "conservative Christians" by and large pose a clear and present danger to constitutional government in America. Over the last few decades as these elements have become more politically active and obsessed with gaining power - power to allow them to trample on the rights of others and discriminate at will -  any hint of true Christian values has largely disappeared and the entire agenda has become one of harming one's enemies, namely anyone who looks different or holds differing beliefs, and imposing a perverted form of religion on the nation.  With Project 2025, a white "Christian" nationalist manifesto to subvert the U.C. Constitution and take the nation backwards in time, mainstream white racism, and harm those labeled as "other." The Felon's regime is actively implementing the white supremacist agenda of Project 2025, striving to bring back the worse of the 1950's, and putting on display that cruelty towards others is the true hallmark of today's "Christian Right" which has become merged with today's Republican Party.  Indeed, the teachings of Christ's sermon on the mount and the parable of the good Samaritan have been totally purged from the values and agenda of these false Christians.  A column in the New York Times by one who for too long was an apologist for these "conservative Christians" admits that the Republican Party and its hate and cruelty have become the religion of this demographic.  Here are highlights:

There have been two competing narratives about the rise of the Christian right in the United States.

The first story is the one we conservative evangelicals told ourselves: Religious conservatism arose as a force in the United States in response to the hedonism of the sexual revolution, the cultural intolerance of the New Left and the threat of the Soviet Union, an explicitly atheistic, Marxist empire.

According to this narrative, the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973 was the seminal domestic event of Christian conservatism. It represented a deadly corruption of our Constitution in service of a culture of sexual convenience in which human life was subordinate to sexual pleasure.

The response of the Christian right was both political and personal. That approach could be boiled down to a single sentence: Elect people of good personal character who will defend human life and religious liberty.

The movement placed a heavy emphasis on constitutional fidelity, seeing the Constitution as a bulwark against authoritarian overreach.

The competing narrative is substantially different. It placed the rise of the Christian right in a much darker context — as a last-ditch, racist effort to maintain segregation in the South.

As Randall Balmer, a historian at Dartmouth, argued in 2014, “Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a ‘Catholic issue.’”

Instead, what really motivated the early leaders of the Christian right was a 1971 Federal District Court case, Green v. Connally, which stripped tax exemptions from so-called segregation academies, the term that critics applied to racially discriminatory private religious schools that sprang up all over the South in the decades after the Supreme Court decided that separate was not equal in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

In other words, was the Christian right a virtuous — however imperfect — movement born out of deep regard for the life and liberty of human beings created in the image of God? Or was it a corrupt movement born out of fear and spite that used religion to deceive the masses (including countless good and faithful Christians) and conceal its true nature?

If it’s the former, then it should have strong antibodies against cruelty and corruption. If it’s the latter, then cruelty and corruption are no impediment to success. What matters is power, and power is the measure of that success.

Trump has watered down the Republican plank on abortion. The party no longer endorses a human life constitutional amendment that would protect unborn life, and its platform left abortion policy up to the states, its most pro-choice stance in more than 30 years.

The Trump administration has defunded evangelical ministries that focus on helping the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. Trump’s allies have attacked the religious liberty of dissenting Christian institutions.

And is there any remaining commitment to character in leaders at all?

“It is becoming increasingly clear,” Meador writes, “that evangelical Trump voters are, by and large, not abandoning Trump’s G.O.P. for any reason.” Evangelical “views and policy priorities simply can be ignored by the real leaders of the current G.O.P. because there is no reason to concede anything to people whose vote you will have no matter what.”

[A]s Meador observes, “sure, Vice President Vance will make an appearance at the March for Life. President Trump will show up to the National Prayer Breakfast. But even when he does acknowledge a Christian event, it often will come loaded with hatred and vile self-aggrandizement.”

The Christian right is dead, but the religious right is stronger than it’s ever been. Another way of putting it is that the religious right has divorced itself from historical Christian theology but still holds its partisan beliefs with religious intensity. The religious fervor is there. Christian virtues are not.

There is data to support this thesis. In a fascinating 2019 article, Ryan Burge — one of the nation’s foremost statisticians of American religion — took a close look at the political beliefs of evangelical and nonevangelical Republicans and made a sobering observation: “Looked at broadly, we see from this data there is essentially no difference between a Republican who is white and born-again and a Republican in general.”

In addition, there’s evidence that white evangelicals are unusually loyal to the Republican Party. . . . Among Christians, only white evangelicals precisely overlapped with their party. For the past decade, there has been no daylight between white evangelicals and the G.O.P.

There are many, many Christian conservatives who approach the public square with sincerity and good will, but the political actors and institutions of the religious right are far more Machiavellian than I ever wanted to believe.

How could I have been so wrong? . . . . The Christian right always had a commitment to political power. After all, why engage in politics if you don’t want to win elections and change policies? But that commitment to secular power was supposed to be secondary to its commitment to Christian principle. I had confidence that when the will to power collided with our principles, our principles would prevail.

Yet it turns out that the Christian right’s outside critics could see its true nature more clearly than many people inside the movement, including me.

It is no coincidence that as the religious right becomes less distinctively Christian, it is also becoming more intolerant of political dissent. If politics is the religion, then political disagreement is proof of apostasy.

Whenever I write about religion and politics, my inbox is flooded with poignant, emotional messages from people who once were both proudly evangelical and Republican yet now find themselves unwelcome in their churches and sometimes even in their Christian families — all because they broke with the party. . . . . if they’re not part of Donald Trump’s Republican Party, they’re deemed a heretic or a wolf — a biblical reference to an evil person who preys on the sheep, the people of God.

It’s hard to find anything distinctively Christian about Trump’s first 100 days. In fact, there’s been far more cruelty than Christianity on view over his first three months back in office. But white evangelicals still stand with him. As an April Pew Research Center poll found, they support him more than any other Christian group, by far.

On Tuesday, I participated in a columnist round table reflecting on the key moments of Trump’s first 100 days. To me, the Jan. 6 pardons set the tone:

America learned everything it needed to know about Donald Trump’s second presidency hours after it began. He pardoned or granted clemency to the men and women who violently stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. And he ostentatiously removed the security detail for John Bolton, his former national security adviser, who had criticized Trump after an acrimonious departure from the White House.

The combination of these two orders sent the clearest possible message. His friends and personal allies will enjoy protection, favors and perhaps even immunity from the law. His critics and foes, on the other hand, should live in fear.